The Light Years

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The Light Years Page 19

by R. W. W. Greene


  “It’s not about technique.” She took another slug of the liquor. “Correction, it’s not all about technique.”

  “I’m completely self-taught. Can’t even really read music.”

  “Years of lessons and my music aptitude is very high.” Her voice turned brittle. “The kids at school started calling me a splice when I was little, but I didn’t know it was true until recently.”

  “The gene stuff is a lot better than it used to be. Probably one of the only sciences that has advanced.”

  “The EuroD do love their perfect children.” She left the bed to Adem and took a seat in the desk chair. “I think I grew up hating you. I hated your entire family because my mother kept telling me how grateful I should be to you. I even hated my friends because they had everything without having to make a deal with the devil to get it.”

  “You think I’m the devil?” Adem said.

  “Or your mother is.”

  “I’m really sorry.” He started to get up. “I’ll go.”

  She motioned for him to stay. “What’s to be sorry for? I grew up with food and a roof. I’m very well educated, and I am a near-genius. Plus, I started one of the best bands on Gaul, and I’m entry-level rich. Life is grand.”

  “Still.” Adem didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “Yeah, still.” She held the glass out to Adem for a refill. “I met a little girl in La Merde a few years ago. If not for you, I could have been her.”

  She took her fresh drink and stood beside the view screen that passed for the suite’s window. Adem had it set to show the starscape outside the ship’s hull. The stars weren’t all that visible at near c, but the nearsmart made some good guesses. “Are you here expecting sex?”

  “I don’t think that would be right.”

  “We’re married. How could it be more right?” She laughed.

  He put his glass on the nightstand “Coming here was a bad idea. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing.” She picked up the Martin. “You could do a lot more with this. It has beautiful tone.”

  “We were in for an overhaul about a dozen years ago, and I found it in a storage locker. A member of the wake crew brought it from Earth. I started teaching myself how to play.”

  Hisako strummed a few bars of the song about the woman with the black veil. “The song’s not just about feeling sad. The narrator is feeling all kinds of shit. There’s a whole story behind the song. Why was she cheating on her husband? Was it a one-time thing or had they been lovers for years?” When she started singing the first verse, Adem began to understand. “Maybe you need to have hated and loved someone at the same time to really get it. Have you ever done that?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’d know it if you had.”

  He stood. “None of this was my idea, Hisako. My family–”

  “I know. Lucy told me about the worm-drive. Looks like we’re both stuck.” She offered the guitar back to him.

  “Hang onto it.” He plucked a different guitar from the wall. “I’ll use this one for a while. Thanks for the lesson.”

  Adem was halfway down the corridor before he remembered his new quarters were in the opposite direction. He wasn’t looking forward to going there. The new digs were small, good for sleeping and not much else. There was barely room to pace.

  He squeezed the neck of the guitar. It was the worst of the bunch. Totally synthetic, printed from an old file, and assembled at his engineering station. It had a flat, lifeless sound and barely stayed in tune for an entire song. Smashing it against the wall might actually improve it.

  But it wasn’t the guitar’s fault it was shoddy and getting a better one would require another conversation with Hisako. Adem wasn’t ready for that. He turned a corner and went looking for a quiet place to play.

  HISAKO

  Two days out of Gaul

  Miraculously, Adem’s homemade hooch countered Dooley’s mad-scientist cocktails and I woke up clearheaded. I decided I probably owed Adem an apology – it wasn’t his fault he was the face of all that was wrong in my life – but years of bile had found its focus on one person, and redistributing it wasn’t going to be easy.

  I showered and opted for a solo breakfast, just me and my reader at a quiet table in the cafeteria. Mateo and his friendly grin ruined it by sliding into the seat across from me. “You ready for today?”

  Mixing booze and study-drugs would have put me well beyond Dooley’s level ten hangover, so I hadn’t spared a glance for the engineering manuals. “Not at all. Am I in trouble?”

  “Nah. We’ll go over everything, and I’ll give you access to the simulation stims. You’ll know your way around in no time. I was barely toilet-trained when I started.”

  When I didn’t respond immediately, Mateo began to look like he was going to ask me something both vapid and personal like ‘how was I getting on?’ or ‘how are things going with Adem?’ For years, I’d relied on ‘what are you studying?’ to redirect and avoid having to answer vapid, personal questions, but that might not work on the Hajj. Fortunately, I was a fast learner. “Why did you come aboard the ship?” I said.

  Bingo. Everybody had a story. Mateo started rearranging the condiments on the table. “I grew up on Nov Tero, and my parents were not well-educated. In the poorer sections, they sometimes call Traders ‘Immortals’ because they don’t appear to age.” He smiled sadly. “The gifts of relativity. Anyway, my parents bought into the whole thing and indentured themselves so I could live forever. They spent their whole lives mining copper to buy me a share on a Trader ship.”

  “When did you figure it out?”

  “School. I never told them, though. They were so excited the last time I saw them. Twenty-five years had gone by, and I was barely a year older. Mission accomplished.”

  I shut down my reader and slid it into the thigh pocket of my coveralls. “I’m ready to go if you are.”

  “We’ll have a good day. As long as Rakin stays off the floor, things run pretty smoothly.”

  Mateo made me lead the way to the engine room. I recognized a junction panel here, a conduit there, and got us there without much trouble. I gave it even odds that I’d be able to find my way back to my suite – Adem’s suite – at the end of the shift.

  The silent thrum of the fusion drive was much stronger in the engine room. The vibration ran up my feet and… I flushed.

  Mateo grinned. “Everyone feels it. Sometimes I think the whole department runs on sexual tension.” He pointed. “We’ll start over there with the main console. I’ll walk you through the–”

  Mateo was cut off by a sharp double tap. We both looked up to see Rakin Sadiq behind the glass of an observation window.

  “That’s his office. Hold on. Let me see what he wants.”

  Mateo climbed a short ladder to a catwalk and stepped into Rakin’s office. I could see them talking through the window. Mateo came back down. “He wants to see you before we get started.”

  “What about?”

  “He’s head of the department. He probably just wants to make sure you know it.”

  I climbed the ladder to Rakin’s little throne room and slid open the door. He clutched me to his paunch and kissed both of my cheeks. “You’ve been to the bridge? Forget it. Welcome to the most important part of the ship!”

  I pulled free and bowed the way my teachers had taught me to bow to older, richer people. “I look forward to learning from you and your staff, Uncle.”

  He waved his hand. “You won’t learn anything useful from them. You’ve been to a real university. You probably learned more in one day there than these idiots will pick up in a lifetime. Can I offer you some refreshment?”

  “I just had breakfast.”

  He put a mug of coffee in my hand anyway and directed me to a small couch. He sat close to me and draped his heavy arm along the couch’s back. I could feel its warmth on my shoulders. His knee brushed mine. “I was supposed to have been captain, you know, but I left my poor sister
to carry on the family business.” He sighed. “I have always felt a little guilty about that.”

  “You came back.”

  “I did.” He studied my face. “I have a proposition for you.”

  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear his idea. No one had said a good word about him to me, and this meeting wasn’t doing him any favors either. He wide face seemed set in a permanent leer.

  “It’s nothing untoward,” he said, sensing my discomfort. “I need your help with an engineering project.”

  “You have an entire team of engineers at your disposal, Uncle.”

  “None of them can do for me what you can.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Would you like a drink?” He made a long arm and poured himself a glass of something amber from a decanter. He took a sip and smacked his lips. “A family, as I am sure you know, is a complicated organism. Fraught with well-meaning secrets and some not so well-meaning.”

  I waited. My family had a lot of things it didn’t talk about and many problems that went unaddressed, but secrets… The biggest one, maybe the only one, had come out when I was thirteen.

  “I’m afraid, dear niece, you will soon learn the motives behind your marriage arrangement were not solely of the heart.”

  Shocking. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “We are much alike, Hisako. You don’t want to be on this antique any more than I do. I knew that the moment I saw you. We want control of our own lives. We want to be free.” He sipped from his glass. “I can give you freedom and enough money that no one can ever take it away again.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll talk more about this later, but I will say this: there are things rarer than UA worm-drives.”

  Classified information, my ass. “I–”

  Rakin put his finger to his lips. “It would be wise not to mention this little chat to anyone. People like you and I value our autonomy, but my sister takes delight in controlling others. She doesn’t value thoughts that come from outside her little cabal.” He gestured toward the door. “Good day.”

  He failed to stand and show me out, so I gave up on etiquette and left without bowing. I was a little unsteady on the ladder but recovered by the time I reached the engine room floor.

  “You okay?” Mateo said.

  “Just a little light-headed.” And wildly curious. I didn’t like Rakin but Maneera Sadiq had done little to earn my loyalty.

  “I can show you the break room first, so you can catch your breath.”

  “Let’s just get to work,” I said.

  By the end of the shift, I knew there was no way two weeks in engineering was going to teach me enough about the ship to be of any great use. There were people on Mateo’s team who could tear many of the systems apart and put them back together. Mateo could probably rebuild a lot of them from scratch. The best I could hope for was to become someone who could tell by the readouts and lights whether they were working right.

  “So that’s the tour,” Mateo concluded after eight hours of leading me around the engineering section and through what felt like miles of conduits and corridors. “Any questions?”

  I threw up my hands. “I don’t see how anyone expects me to become fluent in these things by the time my rotation is up. It’s impossible.”

  “It is. But everyone aboard does a couple of weeks down here just to get the lay of the land. The captain likes to know she can send anyone she gets her hands on down here and get a reasonably accurate status report back.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  “You’ll learn how to do some basic maintenance, too. No one is expecting you to become an expert. That would take years.”

  “I thought… I guess I don’t know what I thought.” I’d assumed my genes and my education would make me the smartest person on the ship, but it had only taken Mateo one shift to show me that wasn’t true. “There’s a lot I don’t know.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I’d be lost talking about mass-grav. I’m sure you could work circles around me up there.”

  “You’d be surprised.” No one alive really knew how mass-grav worked. There were plenty of theories and so-called experts, but no one was qualified to do much beyond plugging things in and fiddling with the settings, and even that was asking for trouble. I knew as much about how they worked as anyone, and I wasn’t much more than a button pusher. “It’s UA tech. Rigged to self-destruct if anyone tries to get a good look at it.” Didn’t save them and only screwed the rest of us over. “Show me life-support again, and we’ll call it a day.”

  Captain Maneera Sadiq refilled her mug from the coffee decanter at the center of the small dining table in her suite and offered to refill mine. I demurred. I had barely tasted the first serving, and I was a little afraid it would kill me. It was stronger even than the Turkish coffee my mother sometimes treated herself to. “You know I’ve never actually operated a worm-drive, don’t you? I don’t know anyone who has.”

  “But you know how they work.”

  “I’ve read a manual. I know the theories. I know how a star works, too, but don’t expect me to build one for you. The last person to see the inside of a worm-drive died a thousand standard years ago. The UA tamper-proofed them in a dozen different ways.”

  “If it isn’t functional, there’s nothing we can do,” the captain said. “We’ll put it on the market, sell it to the highest bidder, and let them worry about the tamper-proofing.”

  I considered the inky darkness inside my coffee cup. Neither cream nor sugar had made an appearance on the table.

  “Hisako, can you imagine what it would mean if we were able to measure trade runs in standard months instead of decades?”

  “It would make you an awful lot of money.”

  “You as well. It would also allow you to see your mother again before she is an old woman. Reunite with your friends before they forget you. There could be cultural and educational exchanges between the planets. Tourism. Business opportunities. Scientific advancement. Humanity could be one species again, one giant civilization.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to let you keep it?”

  “They who?”

  “Anyone. The Nov Tero syndicates. The Gaul military. Freedom.” I ticked the names off on my fingers. “Any of those planets could find some use for a working worm-drive.”

  The captain wiped her mouth with a napkin. “The salvage laws are on our side. What we find, we keep.”

  “The laws won’t matter when something so rare is at stake. Even the Traders’ Union will put up a fight.”

  That amused her. “My family helped create the Union. The other families might mutter and grumble a bit, but the Union is held together by laws my parents and grandparents wrote. The drive is ours.”

  “I can’t promise you I can make it work.” I folded my arms.

  “If it doesn’t work, you’ll get your share of the money we make by selling it and the other salvage from the Hadfield.”

  “What else did you take?”

  “Everything we could scrape out of the computers. A dozen androids. Some of the personal effects of the crew. Lots and lots of spare parts. We’ll make a profit no matter what happens.”

  “Is that all that matters to you?”

  “It’s up there.” She offered me a plate of pastries, but I declined. “Dooley wants to move an asteroid into orbit around Nov Tero or Gaul and retire there. That sounds better to me every year.”

  “Everyone says Nov Tero is a snake pit, and there’s a revolution brewing on Gaul.”

  “If there’s a war in progress, we can stay aboard another year or two and let it pass beneath us.” She folded her napkin onto the table. “If you’re finished eating, let me show you what we have.”

  The captain stopped the lift a quarter-way down the spine and keyed her ID into the door of a cargo pod. It opened onto tightly packed stacks of crates and equipment.

  “Is this all from the Hadfield?” I said. “
I’m surprised you didn’t just take the whole ship.”

  “Its sister killed a planet. I can’t think of anyone who would want to fly such a thing, can you?”

  “There are people in La Mur who use frozen refugees to decorate their homes.”

  Only her eyes reacted. “Let me amend that. I can’t think of anyone I would want to see flying it.” She rapped her knuckles on one of the crates. “What do you need to make this work?”

  “Time. And access to the Hadfield’s records. The United Americas invented the thing; I imagine they have an installation manual. How did you get it off the ship intact?”

  “Like all UA tech it’s modular. Disconnect it and carry it away. No tampering required.” She smiled. “Odessa Romanov and her new android are working to decrypt the records. What else?”

  “Three or four good techs.”

  “I have given you full access to the personnel records. Let me know who you want, and I will have them reassigned. This will be an independent project outside the chain of command. You will report only to me.” Her eyes shifted from warm to steel. “Am I clear on that?”

  “Lucy already told me the project was classified.” And the circle of confidentiality had already sprung a leak. But if Maneera didn’t know that, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

  She laughed. “Classified? It’s a very small ship, Hisako. Anyway, I have to present the plan to the shareholders soon. But I do want to keep information leaks to a minimum. At the very least, I want to know what you and your team know first.”

  A thought dawned. “I suppose you’re going to ask me to put Adem on my crew so we can spend more time together.”

  “That’s entirely up to you.” Her eyes were cool. “He’s the best all-around technician on the ship. The rest…?” She placed her hand on the worm-drive crate. “You’re adults in a business arrangement. It’s up to you to decide if you want to turn that into something more.”

  We went back to the lift, and Maneera showed me to a workroom in the belly of the command section. She patted my arm maternally and left me to my thoughts. I contacted Odessa, and she invited me to her suite, which was nearby. A naked man greeted me at her door.

 

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