by AZ Kelvin
The problem was the risk of no return, either because of a problem at the destination or from being stuck forever in the quantum universe, irreversibly locked to a quantum wave particle as it went on its journey to the end of time. Reports of extended time in the quantum dimension told of the sensation of paralysis without sound or sight, alone in one’s own mind, with only one’s own thoughts for company. The minds of early long-distance quantum test pilots became so severely imbalanced over time that the Marlacuer Empire discontinued the program in favor of more militaristic avenues of research.
Cal watched while Pene and Crissi sat together in the common room during the evening hours and talked back and forth in Keect’nese. Crissi gave Pene phonology lessons in Keect’nese singspeak, but no Human could ever fully master the language. Humans were unable to create the complex pulses of light and color that carried the main syntax of any particular expression, or message.
Cal had a wild thought one night that just wouldn’t let him rest, so he enlisted Katy’s help for the engineering aspect of his idea. They spent some of what little time off they had working on his project for Pene. The two of them, with the help of some of the Keect’na technicians at Cantankerous Base, turned out something quite special.
Gina kept Pene busy every day with two hours of simulator practice and six hours of flight drills, training manuals, and exams. She gave the young girl grueling tests and made sure that Pene knew by second nature what systems and equipment had to be checked and double-checked, before each and every flight. Gina informed CJ that, in her opinion, Pene was ready to begin tandem flight training with his approval, which he gave immediately. The training with Pene helped Gina to keep her mind off Boss’ upcoming procedure.
Tad’s warning about the survival rate kept playing over and over in her mind. Ahhgg, horses, horses, horses, horses. She tried an odd mental mantra that usually helped to clear her mind for some reason. He’s gonna be fine, he’s gonna be fine, he’s gonna be fine. I’m goin’ with him, she determined. I need to find a replacement pilot, though. GABI can fly the ship just as well as I can…probably. But I can’t just leave, can I?, Ahhgg, what do I do? Horses, horses, horses, horses. Gina tried to put it all aside for the time being and concentrated on the new power systems.
In between her part-time shifts, which she picked up at the medical center, Cat studied the Keect’na spinal replacement procedure inside and out until she knew every step of the procedure, as well as any concerns during the recovery and reconditioning phases. She wanted to go with Boss and take part in the procedure herself, but if anyone was allowed to go, it should be Gina. Cat knew with Boss going already, CJ couldn’t easily lose his star pilot or his chief medical officer, let alone both. Maybe I can get him to take us all there. Who wouldn’t want a chance to see an alien home world? What are the chances of that loot still being there anyway? What’s a few more months after all this time? Cat put those thoughts on the back burner for now, and would look for a chance to speak to the captain about it later.
CJ was neck deep in the refit of the Altered Moon; it wasn’t often a Captain got to see his ship without all of its clothes on. The Altered Moon sat naked and exposed without a single hull plate in place yet. A maze of power conduits and maintenance access tubes ran everywhere throughout the web of framing holding the ship together. The rounded exterior of the habitat’s triple-walled inner fuselage, with its various bays and chambers, could be seen through the superstructure of frame members, anchor points, and bulkheads. The particle cannon power conduits and the missile magazines, along with the feed clips, had already been pulled to make room for the new weapon anchor points to be installed. The Moon looked like the fleshless skeleton of a bird with its internal organs still in place.
It was after eighteen hundred hours and Katy still wrestled with a stubborn connector module as CJ, with Cal and Cat, came over after they finished with their day.
“Why don’t you use the impact driver, hon?” CJ asked as he knelt down beside her.
“Why don’t you use the impact driver, hon,” she mimicked in a rude voice and then growled, “Because it’s on the other side of the blasted dry dock, that’s why.” There was a moment of silence before Katy stopped what she was doing and looked at him. “Sorry, Seedge, I didn’t mean it. Can you forgive me?”
“I guess,” he said in an ‘if I have to’ tone of voice, “as long as you stop taking Gina lessons.”
Cal laughed out loud at CJ’s joke.
“Hey! You two better be careful.” Katy playfully threatened them. “I am holding a sledgehammer here.”
“Would you like me to get the driver for you, my dear?” CJ asked in an overly pleasant voice.
“Would you? That would be stellar.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Cal offered.
“That’s all right, Cal, I’ll grab it,” CJ replied.
“No, I’ll get it,” Cal countered.
“Not if I get there first,” CJ challenged him.
“Boys,” Cat tried to interject.
“Give it up, Cap, the only reason you won the last time is because I was drinking,” Cal said.
“There and back again and you can’t touch the floor. Hey!” CJ called out after Cal, who had just started to run toward an access ladder to the catwalk.
CJ caught up with him and the two men pushed and shoved while they ran to the wall. Cal managed to scramble up the ladder first while CJ jumped on top of a waste bin and vaulted to the first-level walkway. Cal went up two more levels, as CJ raced along the first level until he came to the end of the walkway. CJ scrambled around a group of pipes that ran up the wall and jumped from there over to the second-level walkway on the other side. He needed to get to the fourth level in order to make it around to the other side of the dry dock.
“Shit!” he said out loud, as he saw Cal run down the level above him. CJ ran as fast as he could down the second level, climbed up the handrails of a tiered stairway, and made it to the third and then the fourth level. Cal buzzed by him, as CJ landed on the fourth-level platform.
The top-level catwalk was doublewide and crossed with pipes and braces every ten meters or so. The two of them had to negotiate at top speed. Cal ducked through a narrow opening under a mass of pipes. He reached up, grabbed onto a pipe, and shot feet first through an opening above the same group of pipes. He slid through the opening, twisted around facedown to land on his feet on the other side of the pipes, and raced on. They jostled with each other through the industrial landscape, bumped, and jumped their way around the fourth level to the far side of the dry dock. Now, it was up to who could descend and get to the impact driver first.
Cal dropped over the handrail and monkeyed his way down to the third level. CJ cleared the third-level stairway at a blistering pace as he leaped to the next landing. He spied the impact driver on a repair bench along the wall. Cal was already on the first level and closing in on the driver. CJ jumped out onto a series of cargo containers and landed hard, but managed to roll out of it and kept moving. He leaped from one container to the other, as Cal jumped onto a chain and swung out to land on the container just behind CJ. He sprinted off the end of the container, grabbed onto a group of pipes that ran horizontally along the wall, and shimmied over to the repair bench, with Cal right behind him. He dropped down lightly onto the bench and triumphantly secured the impact driver.
“You still have to beat me back without touching the floor!” Cal taunted him. Cal made a daring leap to the braces of the second-level walkway, climbed up over the handrail, and sped off.
“Shit!” CJ exclaimed for a second time in the race. He’s gonna win, CJ thought to himself a half a second before his eye caught a guywire that extended from the fourth-level catwalk to the top of the dorsal fin of the Moon. “Like hell he is
!” CJ said out loud to his own thought. He climbed as fast as he could to the fourth level and grabbed a long metal rod with a U-shaped hook at the end. CJ latched onto the guywire with the hooked end of the bar, and without a second thought stepped off the catwalk and used the guywire as a zip line to cross over to the tall dorsal fin. He hung a gut-clenching fifteen meters above the ground.
CJ looked down and saw Cat cover her mouth with one hand and reach out with the other. Katy shook her head and put her hands on her hips. Even Cal stopped for a second in anticipation of what was going to happen.
CJ underestimated the speed at which he closed in on the end of the guywire. “Oh, shit!” he said in alarm when he looked ahead for his options and saw where the guywire was tied. There was nowhere to land. “Shit twice! I guess I shoulda looked before I—” he slammed full speed into the framing of the dorsal fin. The force of the impact jarred the rod from his hands. He reached out and grabbed a frame member as he fell, but he couldn’t hold on. The momentum of the missed grab threw his body into an opening between frame members and the next I-beam down clipped him hard across the chest.
“Unnghh!” he groaned from the impact. He missed the chance to grab on and tumbled down to catch the next one on his left side just below the ribcage. “Oooff!” The air in his left lung came out with a rush. He managed to curl his body around the frame member just in time to arrest his fall. After his self-recovery, CJ moved stiffly down the rest of the dorsal fin. A scaffold had been partially erected around the ship to aid the repair teams. He was stuck about eight meters above the next frame member, so he made a daring jump over to the scaffold instead. He dropped and rolled from his shoulder to his hip to absorb the impact of the landing, then popped up and ran off again.
Cal started running again when CJ recovered and had just made it back to the other side of the dry dock to start his descent. CJ knew he was very close to the win, now that he just passed over the shuttle bay. His elation, however, was short-lived when a rail that he intended to hop over tipped to the side as he put his weight on it and he fell again. This time he landed on the fuselage and slid down into a narrow and deep channel to the underbelly of the ship, where he finally hit the deck below with a heavy thud.
“Ugh, I’m really out of practice,” CJ moaned to himself as he counted his bones to make sure they were all still there. It was dark where he landed. The only light streamed in from the opening he’d just fallen through. “I can’t see a friggin’ thing,” he said to no one. He foraged through his pockets and found a pinch light. The coin-sized light illuminated the area around him. He recognized the utility crawlspace just under the crew quarters.
“CJ?” Katy’s worried voice came over his comms unit. “Seedge, are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I think I’m in the bilge bay crawlspace under the crew quarters. Will you open the access hatch so I can get a reference point?”
“Roger that, on the way. How did you end up down in there?”
“Just lucky I guess.”
CJ held his pinch light in his teeth as he scuttled his way through the tight crawlspace under the bottom of the ship’s habitat. The light panned across something that glinted in the dark. A rectangular shape lay in the ultrafine dust that somehow always managed to escape the HVAC filter systems and settled in the uncirculated parts of spacecraft. He brushed aside the dust to find a piece of Photo-etch glass, which was used to digitally embed an image. The glass could display a realistic, three-dimensional version of the embedded image. When viewed straight on, the edge of the glass itself would become invisible, and only the subject of the image would remain visible. The frame footing that held the glass upright had been broken off and lay a short distance away. CJ cleaned the dust from the surface of the image glass and shined his light on it.
“Holy shit,” he said in stunned amazement. The image showed a woman with coffee-and-cream-colored skin. She had a smile that could only come from true happiness. Two young boys and one girl stood in front of her, two of whom bore the look of their mother, and one son had slightly darker skin and heavier features. The man who stood beside the woman was a very young looking Boss Keltzer. “Holy shit,” CJ had to say again.
He wondered how the picture glass ended up down there and the strange twist of fate that led him to discover it. He rolled over as a thought hit him to check what was directly above him, and saw the air duct had been ripped from the under panel and torn apart at the joint.
“What the hell happened here?” CJ said out loud, as he found the damage. “Hey, Chief,” CJ called into his comms unit.
“Yeah, hang tight, we’re almost there,” Katy replied.
“You’re going to want to come in and take a look at this,” he told her with a sarcastic laugh.
“What kind of trouble did you fall into now?”
“Oh, ha-ha.”
Several clunks in the distance preceded the glow of ambient light as the access hatch unlocked and hissed open. One person crawled in, followed by a second, and they both moved toward CJ’s light. A third person climbed down in with a light, but stayed at the hatch. Katy and Cal joined him where he was after a few minutes.
“You certainly picked a unique shortcut to take, Cap,” Cal said, as he crawled over.
“Yeah, I knew you’d be jealous,” CJ said with an ‘I meant to do it’ tone of voice. “And, technically speaking, the floor is just about the only thing I haven’t hit yet.” CJ handed the prized impact driver over to Katy. “I win.”
“Yeeah.” Katy obviously didn’t believe for a second any of his tumble down the framing was intentional. “Did ya break anything?”
“On me—or the ship?” CJ countered.
“Do I have to choose? I guess it would have to be you.”
“Ha, nice of ya. Look up.”
“Holy hell in a hand basket!” Cal exclaimed when he saw the damaged HVAC duct. “What would’ve done that?”
“Well, there’s a double hand’s width between the two pieces,” CJ pointed out. ”So I’m thinkin’ something had to’ve pulled on it hard enough to tear that joint apart.”
“Yes, I agree, which would mean a structural failure somewhere,” Katy said. “The ship wouldn’t settle that much over the years. I’m surprised that was never picked up as a loss of compartmental airflow. The damage is definitely not new. Whatever happened, it was a while ago.”
“More than two years?” CJ asked.
“Hard to say,” Katy said. “See where the dust has settled inside the damaged area? That means it’s been open for a while, but we’ll know more after we track down where that ductwork goes. Maybe that will lead us to the problem.”
“Maybe. Okay, let’s get out of here. We can get back to this tomorrow.” CJ already felt the ache of his bruised muscles as they began to complain about his ride down there. “Oh hey, check this out.”
Katy and Cal crawled over to check out the Photo-etch glass.
“Boss has a family?” Cal was just as surprised as CJ was.
“Or, maybe had a family,” Katy said quietly. “He’s never mentioned anyone, and he seems to truly love Gina.”
“Right, well, I’ll leave it up to Boss to decide if he wants to talk about it or not.” CJ tucked it back in his cargo pocket. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”
*~*~*
Chapter Twenty-One
By the time they got back to the common room, Boss and Gina talked softly at the table; the coffee service was out and ready while the wonderful smell of food wafted from the galley at the far end of the room.
“Oh, man, that smells great. Time to sneak a nibble or two.” Cal rubbed his hands together in anticipation. He was barely around the corner half a minute before they heard Pene holler, “Out!” Cal ran out of the galley, as he licked whatever prize he managed to get from his fingertips. What could only be a biscuit sailed out of the galley and hit him square in the back of the head, which he promptly scooped up and began to munch on. “Ooh, thank you!” he
called out to Pene.
CJ stiffly sat down at the table and groaned.
“Tough day at the office, Captain?” Gina asked as she handed him a mug of coffee.
“Ah, no, it was the walk home that did me in, actually. Thanks, a little chocolate, please,” CJ joked, as he sat back to enjoy his coffee.
“What happened?” Boss asked.
Cal, with Katy and Cat’s help, explained the parkour race and CJ’s tumble from the top of the ship to the bottom. CJ interjected here and there when he thought they embellished things a bit.
“Are you okay?” Boss asked after he heard the tale.
“Yes, I’m fine. A few bumps and bruises, though,” CJ admitted.
Boss began to smile and then broke into a full out laugh.
“Oh, what I would give to have been there to watch, as you not only lost your first parkour race, but then bounced and slid all the way from the dorsal fin to the bilge bay!” He laughed and teased CJ now it was apparent his friend had not been terribly injured.
“It was a controlled bouncing. And who said I lost?” CJ joked along with him. “Besides, I found some damage to the HVAC ducts under the habitat, which we didn’t know about. Katy and I are going to investigate that further, but I also found this.” CJ handed Boss the Photo-etch glass.
The big man immediately fell silent, as he took the glass from CJ with a shaky hand. The smile faded from his face and his lips moved silently, as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t. Tears flowed down his cheeks and dripped from his chin as he closed his eyes; he leaned forward and held the glass against his forehead.
Gina was at his side with her hand on his shoulder, “Bernie?” Sympathetic tears filled her eyes, even though the cause of Boss’ reaction was unclear.
“Boss, I’m sorry. I just found it and thought…” CJ felt bad to have caused his friend pain.
