by Bob Mauldin
Simon stared at the alien, choices flashing into his mind, possible outcomes, branching alternatives, thinking about counter-moves, trying to think several moves ahead while still maintaining a degree of adaptability to adjust to the exigencies of the moment.
To Kitty’s eyes, Simon seemed frozen, a condition she had only witnessed on rare occasions. A form of meditation that she had begged him to teach her. He said that he could sometimes see the possible futures laid out on a grid, one that changed even as he examined the individual moves that led to certain conclusions. When she asked him how he could change things merely by looking he would only say, “The observer always affects the observed.”
Now, if he was right, time was running out. She deliberately broke his train of thought with a question. “What do we do, Simon?”
Simon jerked, as if a small electric current hit him. He looked down at the alien. “How much time do we have to decide?”
“Keppa sil. Muvara se,” the alien said. The translation boomed from inside the craft. “Very little. I cease.”
She knelt down beside the alien. “Who are you and why are you dying?” She gazed into the improbably red eyes, a shiver running down her spine.
“I am Trajo kep Kuria,” the red man answered, almost brusquely. “I die because of stupidity. I was tricked into releasing a plague aboard the ship. I thought it was an explosive that would damage the ship and force it to return to Shiravi, my home-world. There were explosives, yes, but they were only small charges to release the virus. It was to have killed me as well. I would see the ones who have done this punished.” His hand shot out and grabbed Kitty’s wrist. “You are my last hope. Find my world and send this message to the Matriarch: Isolationists have a deeper hold than you realize. Beware.”
Before Kitty could do more than start to pull out of the alien’s grasp, his hand fell limply to the ground. “Virus?” Simon questioned, kneeling beside his wife. “What good will it do us to do anything after being exposed to who knows what kind of disease?”
“You are safe,” the alien said. “This disease is one that targets only those of Shiravan ancestry. Our systems are too incompatible for you to be affected. Now, you must decide.”
A thoughtful tone entered Simon’s voice. He turned to look at his wife kneeling beside him, still surprised at her acceptance of the situation. “If I was still with the Agency, I’d probably turn it in. But being married to you for fifteen years has mellowed my outlook a bit. Now, I’m not so sure that turning it over is the best idea. We can try to move it farther back into the mountains, staying below radar level. Hide it until we can figure out what to do with it. Turn it over to an international consortium or something. Whatever we do, we have to take the wristband now.”
“Trust you two to be right in the middle of something mysterious.”
The voice out of the dark made Kitty jump. “Damn it, Gayle! Don’t do that!” Simon exclaimed, lowering the pistol and putting the safety back on. Even in the dark, the waist-length blonde hair stood out. “What the hell are you doing out here with a rifle? My rifle?”
Before she could reply, Kitty said quietly, “Okay, do it.”
Gayle looked over and saw the alien move his fingers over the surface of the wristband in a complicated pattern. “Holy sh ... I mean, Jesus Chr ... I mean, God damn!”
Gayle’s last New Year’s resolution had been to quit cursing, but given the situation, Kitty felt that her friend showed remarkable restraint.
The two women had first met on the first day of first grade. Kitty had been dropped off and was making her way alone across the playground through the mass of yelling, returning, second through sixth graders, lunchbox in hand, when she heard first laughter, unpleasant laughter, and then screaming. “Let me go, you bastards! I’ll kill you, you sons of bitches!”
Kitty started to head away from the ruckus, as she had been raised that a proper young lady didn’t use that kind of language or associate with those who did, but a glimpse of the screamer changed her mind. She’s smaller than me! she thought. Six-year-old Kitty saw the little girl being held against the baseball backstop by two bigger boys while two others reached through from behind the chain-link fence and were busily tying the poor girl to the fence by her waist-length blonde hair. Kitty, victim of the O’Reilly genes that gave her unruly red hair, was also victim to a sense of outrage that knew no bounds. At the tender young age of six, she knew wrongness when it hit her in the face, and she had to do something.
She made her way around the growing crowd of yelling school children and behind the two boys industriously tying the blonde girl to the fence. She didn’t have a plan, she just ran straight at the boys, bowling one over completely, and swinging at the other, bigger boy’s head with her lunchbox. An altogether satisfying sound came from the meeting of the two hard objects, but the boy’s head began to bleed from a nasty gash above his eye. Yelling at the two to get away, she kept swinging the box until the two boys ran away.
Kitty began to try to untangle the messy knots in the now-silent girl’s hair, completely blind to the silent wall of children staring at her from the other side of the fence. Knowing that some of her actions caused more pain, she was surprised that the girl said nothing, made not a sound. Finally, there was only one knot left. “I can’t untie this one. I can cut it with my scissors or go call a grown-up. What should I do?”
“Just cut it. My mom is gonna be so pissed!” Kitty found her new school scissors in her pocket and sawed at the mass until it finally fell apart. She wound the section of hair around the scissors and slid them back into her pocket at the same time that the teachers arrived.
The ensuing brouhaha got her dad recalled to the school, before home room, even, along with the blonde girl’s mother and the parents of the injured boy. She stood beside her dad, looking at the carpet in front of the principal’s desk. “It’s abundantly clear, Mr. Cattin, that your daughter was only doing her best to defend the other little girl from a group of bullies that, quite frankly, we’ve been having trouble with for some time.” He did have the nerve to stare at the boy’s parents when he said it, “My problem is that she actually injured Danny Batten pretty badly. The cut on his forehead is going to require stitches and his parents want an apology. I believe that I can put this aside if she will just apologize to him.”
Kitty pouted. “I won’t ‘pologise! I can’t.” The principal caught the stress on the last word and asked why. “‘Cause then I would be a liar, and my daddy said I should never lie. I’m not sorry, and I won’t ‘pologise.” She glared at Danny Batten, reducing him to ashes in her mind, and then looked sullenly back down at the floor. “I’d do it again, too,” she muttered.
The principal looked as if he hated what he had to say next. “Then, I’m afraid that I will have to suspend you for a week, Miss Cattin. And just because you won’t tell him you’re sorry.” He tried to say it kindly, hoping that she would change her mind, but it was to no avail. Stubbornness was another Irish trait she had acquired from her mother.
There were two positive notes that emerged from the incident. One was that Kitty never had to fight again. Her reputation was made and it grew with each year that she went to school with the same people. The other was that it started a friendship with Gayle Miller that spanned over three decades. The downside was the anger Danny Batten carried around forever after.
The two girls, later women, were seldom seen separately. The week of Kitty’s suspension, Gayle was over every day, helping Kitty keep up with her homework and filling her in on what was going on with the bullies. It seemed that as a result of one little first-grader tackling two bigger boys, the other kids saw it as a sign that they could do something to defend themselves against the milk-money thieves, the smokers, the drug pushers, and were just saying, “No,” long before it became a First Lady’s battle cry.
A sharp metallic snick marked the passing of the wristband. She stared at it, Simon’s light shining off of it. Co
mposed of a mostly silvery metal, the band was largely covered with colored spaces that had to be some form of information input. The wristband felt both light and heavy at the same time. Her original thought, that it was merely ornamental, went out the window as she remembered the long red fingers moving across the surface of the two inch wide band.
“Guys, can either of you explain what’s going on here?” Gayle’s voice had risen an octave, signaling her approaching panic. “I saw this thing land over here where you two were playing with your telescope, so I grabbed Simon’s bear-stopper and headed over. I don’t know what I expected, but it sure wasn’t this!” she gestured with the weapon.
Kitty shook her head, trying to rid herself of the impending sense of doom that washed over her. “It would appear,” she said stiffly, “that we have just had a real life, honest-to-God spaceship handed to us.”
“And how long do we get to play with it before the big boys show up?”
Simon stood up from beside the body of the alien. “If we don’t get out of here, and soon, we won’t get to play with it long at all. This guy just died. At least, I think so. His chest moved up and down just like ours until a few seconds ago.” He ran his hand through his hair.
Kitty looked at Gayle and shrugged. She laid her hand on Simon’s arm. “Darlin’, we need you to put your old DIA hat on. What would you do if you had a three-person team here and needed to move in a hurry?”
“Divide my forces,” Simon answered immediately. “Someone stays here to see if we can get some kind of control of the ship while the other two go break camp. But we’re not a DIA team.”
“But we’re all we’ve got. What do we do first?” Kitty just stood there and looked expectant.
Simon came to a decision. “Gayle, are you in on this?”
“See if you can get rid of me,” she answered.
“Okay, you two go forward and I’ll go aft. I’m betting that you will wind up with the control room, and that,” he said pointing one thumb over his shoulder, “should be the engine room. I’ll do a quick recon and meet you up front. Then we split up, but not until I’m sure that whoever gets left here is as safe as we can hope for.” He glanced at his watch. Miraculously, only twenty minutes had gone by since he first looked at it. That meant maybe twenty-five from first contact with an ALERT team.
Simon led the way up the ramp and across the threshold into the interior of the ship. His sense of balance fought for control as the gravity seemed to lessen instantly. He held onto the door frame for a few seconds, looked at the ceiling and jumped straight up. Kitty and Gayle looked appropriately amazed. “They’ve got some kind of gravity control,” he said as his feet reached the level of their heads before stopping and floating back to the floor.
“Well, ladies,” he said as his feet hit the deck, “shall we go exploring?”
“I’m not sure. Are we going to meet any more of ... those?” Gayle asked worriedly.
“I don’t think so,” Simon answered. “He said he was the last crewman. How about you, Hon?”
“You’re the expert here, Simon,” Kitty temporized, adding sarcastically, “I’ve never had a need to know, remember? Whatever happens needs to happen soon, according to you. These ALERT teams you talked about. How soon will they show up?”
Simon glanced at his watch, a purely reflexive gesture. “If F-16s were scrambled out of Malmstrom, we should be getting an over-flight within half an hour, figuring NORAD recorded the descent and some of the newer thermal imaging satellites confirmed it. Ground forces? That will depend on just where they’re based and what kind of transport they have. Choppers at the least for the forward troops. The ones who will secure the area. After that, it’s anybody’s guess when a supervisor will arrive on-site. Won’t be long though.” Some of this was getting repetitive.
Kitty shrugged. “What’s the worst that can happen if we fail?”
Simon looked at his wife sharply. “When did this become a ‘we’ thing?
She looked back just as sharply. “You’ve been saying ‘we’ ever since this started. But it actually became ‘we’ the day we got married. If things go wrong, we can always give it to the government, can’t we?” Kitty asked.
“I’d have to say yes. We’d have to negotiate for our freedom, but that shouldn’t be too hard if it comes down to that. Look what we have to bargain with.”
Kitty said simply, “Then let’s do it.”
Simon looked at his wife. “Are you sure? We’re moving into circles where the air gets pretty thin, Hon.”
“Simon.” The name came out with enough snap to make a drill sergeant proud. “We have to go with our strengths, Love,” Kitty said into the surprised eyes of her husband. “You’re the one with the experience in this kind of thing. We go with your feelings, and the way you keep looking at your watch tells me that we’re running out of time.”
“Okay, we take the ship. Maybe find a more remote place to keep it hidden until we can arrange a transfer to an international group. By the way, I didn’t see anything even remotely resembling food or drinks aboard. This thing must have a mother ship in orbit somewhere.”
Gayle stood at Kitty’s shoulder and whisper in her ear. “You want to explain all of this to me?”
“Simon can fill you in later, and I’ll vouch for it, I hope,” Kitty temporized, “then you’ll know almost as much as I do. It seems that Simon was a bit deeper into clandestine operations than he ever let on. Honestly, girl-friend, that didn’t cause this situation, but he wasn’t as surprised as I would have thought. Now, we’re getting a spaceship and the whole world is going to be after our asses.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Katherine Hawke had continued her studies after she married Simon, attending classes at Montana State University, Billings. Math was her first love, and had been ever since she figured out that no matter what, three plus five always equaled eight. Always. The simplicity of the thought appealed to a child afloat in life that changed from one day to the next due to the vagaries of being a military brat.
By the time her parents were killed in an automobile accident shortly after she turned twenty-three, she had exhausted most of the avenues available to her mathematically. What was confusing to most people, she found crisp and clean. All a person had to do was plug in the right values, and everything worked out. Why couldn’t they see that? Theoretical mathematics led to practical applications and soon Kitty had a degree in advanced physics to go along with an impressive string of other accomplishments, including systems analysis.
The three stood in the control center of the ship gazing at the layout. Simon had found that the rear of the vessel was indeed the engine room, and that it was uninhabited. The center two-thirds of the ship was one big empty space and the front of the ship had this cockpit. Chairs for four beings fronted consoles covered with incomprehensible symbols. She knew that someone was going to have to take charge, and she did have the captain’s wristband.
It was the last course of study that Kitty focused on. “We need someone to figure out if we can get this thing off the ground, and somebody’s got to go break camp.” Kitty could tell that Simon was conflicted. He always had trouble when it came to his idea of defending her. He needed to allocate his resources effectively, and his defensiveness was getting in the way.
“Simon, why don’t you and Gayle go break camp and let me work on the controls? That way, you can fill her in on what we know so far, and give her a little background on just how it is that you aren’t surprised by all of this.”
It had been easier than she had thought to get him to do as she wanted. The concept bothered her on some levels and pleased her on others. Kitty watched two flashlight beams bobble away into the darkness. She finally had to resort to stubbornness and pointing out that time was running out to get Simon to leave her here to study the controls. She sat down in what she thought of as the pilot’s chair. It was the only one with weirdly shaped joystick-like controls on the arms.
Katherine Hawke wondered at her own actions even as she began to study the controls in front of her. She had always been a law-abiding citizen until now. This would push her over a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. Of course, she had the support of Simon and Gayle who were both of the same mind. She shook herself, both mentally and physically, and went to work.
She let herself feel the ship around her and was immediately aware of the fact that her feet dangled at least six inches off the floor. Built for beings who probably averaged a bit taller than normal for Earthmen, the chair cut off the circulation to her lower legs if she let them dangle long. That fit with her memories of the being just outside the cargo bay door being tall even though he was on the ground. She shivered and looked over her shoulder.
She shook the ideas out of her mind, settled herself as best she could and closed her eyes. She imagined herself taller and with a longer reach. As if, ran ruefully through her head. She took a deep breath and let her taller, longer-limbed self handle the controls. She opened her eyes and looked closely at the control panel before her. Dark panels set in obvious patterns stared back up at her. Smooth to the touch, there were some kind of symbols that could only be seen from certain angles. “Back-lighting, dammit!” she prayed.
She climbed down out of the chair and began a systematic search of the four positions. Some of the panels were duplicated, and some were not. Duplicate controls, she thought. Probably connected with flight operations. The seemingly unduplicated controls would most likely route mission-specific information to the particular crew-person for which it was intended. A circular depression in one surface defied all guesses, especially once she noticed an opposed depression in the under-surface of a small shelf protruding over the panel.
