“Whatever you have to do to get this ship working.”
“Of course.” Kieran nodded, and Hoepe stuck out his hand, grasping Kieran’s forearm the same way the Augments greeted each other. Grant offered one too, and Kieran took it.
An idea sparked for repairing the FTL.
A working FTL meant they had half a chance of leaving Junk before the warship returned. And as soon as they left the planet and the little freightship was operational, Kieran would find a safe zone for the Observer ship to pick him up, and he would go home and finally get a nights rest.
“You okay, Kieran?” Grant waved a hand in front of his face.
He blinked rapidly. “Yeah, why?”
“You spaced out for a second.”
Hoepe took Kieran’s chin, tilting it up so he looked directly into his eyes. “Acute delirium,” he noted, turning Kieran side to side. “Have you experienced other lapses?”
“What? No.” Kieran slapped his hand away. “I was having an idea for the engine, is all.”
Hoepe proceeded to move his hands around Kieran, examining quickly. “Are you sleeping?”
“Stop it, Hoepe.” He grabbed the hand and pushed it down. “As much as I can, yeah.” And the rest of the time, he had an auto-syringe in his office with a nearly full cartridge of stimulants. Sleep would be nice, but the repairs took precedence, Hoepe himself had said it when he gave Kieran the injector.
Hoepe sighed. “I suppose we’re all a little tired. I don’t want you next on my medical table, I’ve seen enough of your team with burns and lacerations today already. Tired engineers making tired mistakes.”
Kieran pressed a lopsided smile onto his face, nodding. But the burns shouldn’t have happened. He should have been paying attention, should have seen when they wired the power converter backwards and initiated a feedback loop. Kieran knew it was a risk, but the three-hundred percent power return if they were wired properly was too good to pass up. And he had stopped it before it turned into a serious fire, but Rami had been right there, shoving Kieran’s repair drawings into his face, all but shouting, ‘I told you so.’
The Augments, genetically altered survivors of the Red Fever virus, were supposed to be hyper-intelligent and hyper-aggressive. So far, all he’d seen was a bunch of scared, starved, tired kids — even though most of them were the same age as him, they’d spent their entire lives inside a lab and reminded him painfully of the younger kids he’d looked after at home. He spent as much time watching them as he did explaining repairs, and it was a reminder that Sarrin — quick, brilliant, terrorized Sarrin — was exceptional, one of Evangecore’s most prized subjects, and not the norm. So far, Rami’s burns were the only serious injury out of the engineering bay, and Kieran aimed to keep it that way.
“You’re doing it again,” said Grant.
“What?”
“Acute delirium. Are you sure you’re sleeping?” said Hoepe.
“I don’t have acute de-uh….”
“Acute delirium. You’re spacing out.”
“I was thinking about Sarrin.”
Grant let out an exaggerated, ohhhh, waggling his eyebrows.
Kieran frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hoepe held an equally perplexed expression as they both looked to Grant for explanation.
Grant sighed. “Never mind.”
“I am planning to encourage Sarrin to return to Engineering today,” said Hoepe.
“Good luck, Doc.” The repairs would be much easier with her help, but he’d been trying without success all week, and Kieran refused to get his hopes up.
“Leove says I have been too lenient in her medical care.”
“She needs the time. With everything that happened, and her brother….” He let his words trail off. Her brother, Halud, was most likely dead. After losing his own sister, it had taken Kieran a long time to adjust. Heck, he was still adjusting.
But he tried to have a little hope — sometimes siblings could be found, like Hoepe’s identical twin brother. “How is Leove?” he asked, changing the subject. “It’s neat to see the two of you together. Must be nice.”
Hoepe stared at a blank space on the wall, his thoughts taking him far away — Kieran was about to comment on his ‘acute delirium,’ when Hoepe spoke: “It has not been what I expected. We spend a great deal of time in the infirmary removing tracking chips from other Augments.”
“Yeah, but you won’t do mine,” huffed Grant.
“It’s too dangerous without a complete neural scan. We don’t know how your second-skin implant ties in.”
Grant folded his arms, but thankfully said no more — Kieran had witnessed that argument too many times before where Grant gave every reason he could think of, and Hoepe put down his doctoral foot and simply said, ‘no’.
“We are brothers,” said Hoepe, “but we feel very different.”
Kieran shrugged comfortingly. “You just met the guy a few days ago. Give it time. My sister and I had a lot of rough patches too—.” There was more to say, but he found his chest suddenly constricted.
“You have a sister?” Grant asked, suddenly curious.
Kieran pressed his lips together and nodded once. More correctly, had, but that explanation was too complicated to try — she’d died of old age, nearly 200 standard Earth-time years ago. He had a brother too, Andy, still on the Observer ship. Andy had been a year younger than him when he left, but it had been four years for Kieran, and Andy would have only aged a few weeks.
His mom and dad were there too, waiting to hear from him. He’d been unable to write a letter home since they’d first found Sarrin — initially because it felt like too much to send in a short, broken-phrasing communique, and then because their communications system, like everything else on the ship, had been ripped apart.
Maybe he would add the communication array to the list of priority repairs. It was time, he thought, to let them know he was ready for extraction.
“Kieran?” Grant waved his hand in front of Kieran’s face.
“You sure you’re okay?” asked Hoepe.
“Yeah.” He waved them off. “I’ll see you guys later. I’m gonna figure out this engine.”
* * *
Gal stepped off the shuttle, taking a deep breath as the grey demons fanned out around him, finally giving him space to breathe. The Augments disappeared slowly, carting their finds to the engineering bay, until he was completely alone.
Rayne poked her head through the doorway. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he sighed. His body felt lighter than it had in a long time, lighter even than when he had been on the planet. She came forward, and he wrapped his arms around her, inhaling the faint soapy scent of her curly, brown hair.
Too soon, she pulled apart, batting at his chest and checking the door behind her. Satisfied no one was watching, she curled back into him. “How was your trip?”
“Good.” Not as good as this.
A demon tittered, but Gal shot it a glance and it obediently scampered away into the shadows. “The fresh air was nice,” he admitted, wrapping an arm around her waist. “And the sunshine.” He led her out of the tiny shuttle bay towards the bridge. “How are you doing?” he asked, halfway along one of the grey corridors.
Her muscles tensed. “Okay. Kieran says the repairs are going well. Hoepe reports nearly all the Augments are recovered enough for duty. He’s removing their tracking chips so the warship won’t be able to find us — so far none of them are active, but —.”
He took her wrist and stopped her as they reached the two stairs that led to the command bridge, partly because he didn’t want to push through the demons that crowded the landing, partly because he wanted to savour this sweet moment. Her chin tilted up to him as he pressed a single of finger to the edge of her jaw. “No, I mean, how are you?”
She sighed, shakily, brushing away his hand and ascending the steps in a single stride, the demons bowing out of her way. “I’ll be better when you’re okay.”
“I’m
sorry.” And he was, for all her had put her through, for all of the things he had done to land them in this situation — things he would never be able to tell her — and for everything and every way he had ever been less than perfect for her.
“Hoepe says you’re doing better. No more hallucinations.”
He glanced to the side, beady yellow eyes peering at him from the corners of the corridor. “Nope.”
She pulled on his hand as the doors opened, tugging him onto the bridge and to its centre, to the place where the padded, grey captain’s chair taunted him. “Go on, sit,” she said.
The bridge was empty, the constant murmur and soft pings of consoles their only company. And a dozen wrinkled grey demons. He fell back, butt hitting the seat with an oomph. “I don’t know,” he said. “Hoepe’s in charge now. The ship is full of Augments. They don’t even like us.”
She shook her head, pinning him down with her warm hands on his wrists, beautiful body leaning over him. “It’s your ship, Gal. A Central Army ship. It needs its captain.”
He leaned up to kiss her, but she moved away in the instant it had taken him to decide to do it.
Demons pressed controls on the computer access panels that wrapped around the walls of the bridge, giggling.
“Soon,” said Rayne, staring at the blank view screen, “it will all be back to normal. You and me. Flying planet to planet. The way it’s supposed to be.”
The demons crept closer, pointing and tittering at the screen, but Gal ignored them, pushed them as far from his mind as he could. He gazed instead at Rayne, overwhelmed with the warmth that poured from his chest. Aaron was right: something mattered, Rayne mattered.
Whatever it took, he would keep her safe. Things would be okay. He would get better, the demons would disappear, and it would be just the two of them. A low slung farmhouse on an uninhabited planet far away.
“I thought we could discuss a plan,” Rayne said quietly.
“A plan?” His throat suddenly grew tight, his voice strained. “A plan for what?”
“To go home.”
His entire body stiffened.
“When was the last time you set foot on Etar?”
He knew exactly, it was the day the Speakers had told him never to come back. The day they realized he knew more than enough to be dangerous, and yet they could not get rid of him as easily as they had gotten rid of Aaron.
“We need to go back, to tell them about the Augments.”
“Rayne….”
She wrapped a hand around his shoulder. “No, listen. I know how you pretend not to care, but all you do is watch over the crew and me and these Augments. We have a chance to make a real difference here. The folk have been living in fear for years, worried that the Red Fever will return and there will be new Augments. But we were wrong before; they’re not vicious killing machines, they’re kids.”
“They’re not kids, Rayne, they’re in their twenties.”
“I know, but they act like kids, they were in the hospitals so long. My point is, they smile and talk the same as you and I do.” She rubbed his arm. “This is our part to play in the Path. Think of the fear we can alleviate, the millions of lives we can improve if we just help them understand. I bet when we arrive, the Speakers will be waiting for us, the Gods having already told them the Path.”
They would be waiting, that was certain. If Gal could lie down and forget it all, he would, but his bottle of Jin-Jiu — the only thing that had ever worked to numb the memories of every mistake he had made — was disastrously empty. “Rayne, it’s not that simple.”
“Of course it is. In the Gods we Trust.”
“Rayne….” He expected her to interrupt him, but she sat still, waiting. “Why do you think we need to go back right away? Can’t we just take our time out here, under the stars?” He looked to the currently blacked-out viewscreen, the sensor array currently non-functional, and realized he liked that even better than a sky full of stars.
“The general will be worried.” She pressed her lips into a thin line. “I don’t want him to think that I, that we…. I don’t want him to think that we’re defecting and helping Augments, not without knowing why at least.”
Sometimes, Gal could forget that Rayne, beautiful and sweet as she was, was related to the general for the Speaker of Strength. Oleander Nairu had been the general to Hap Lansford’s father before him and now to Hap. He had been the general of Strength during the Red Fever and during the Augment wars. There was a pretty good chance he already knew everything he wanted to know about Augments.
Gal shook his head to clear the thought, ignoring the demons that had crept close on all sides, watching with their big, yellow eyes. Instead, he said to Rayne, “He doesn’t have to approve everything you do.”
“I know, but.”
“I think you are a wonderful officer, tactician, human being.” Far better than him. “And I can’t say how glad I am to have you with me.”
The demons tittered excitedly.
Rayne bent down, kissing him on his cheek. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
And, just in that instant, if he ignored the demons and the arrival of Aaron who glared at him from the Navigation console, he was.
* * *
Sarrin DeGazo woke with a start, scanning the room quickly: six escape routes and twenty-three objects that could be used as deadly weapons.
Stop, she yelled inwardly at the dark clouds that crowded the edges of her vision, the first sign of the trance. But there was nothing here in the quiet, grey, lieutenant’s quarters for the monster to defend against, and it slowly slipped away.
Her heart pounded unnecessarily in her chest. In sleep, she had dreamed of Evangecore, it’s blinding white walls and glaring surgical lights. The monster had been born in Evangecore, as much a part of her now as breathing.
The white-walled memories slowly gave way to the grey sheets that billowed around her, to the grey walls and grey furniture. On the wall was a star chart of a system she couldn’t name — which she originally found troubling because she recalled every starchart she had ever seen, but now merely fascinated her. On the bedside table, a colourful frame with a picture of a smiling brother and sister. The sister was long-dead — old-age, Kieran had said.
A neat set of blankets laid on the floor, undisturbed. Kieran hadn’t come by to sleep in a day and a half.
An image flashed in her mind: Kieran darting across the engine room. It was real, she knew, a vision of him in that exact moment, and she pushed it out of her mind as fast as she could, drawing her knees into her chest. The prescience was a side effect of the experiments she had been subjected to in Evangecore — one of many unnatural abilities bestowed to her by the monster that made her something other than human.
Some invisible arm pressed against her chest, pushing her down and down until she laid flat on her back, then down beneath the sheets. She curled into a tight ball at the foot of the bed.
A gaping hole inside her chest pulled from the inside like a gravitational anomaly, threatening to crumple her weak frame onto itself. In the hole was the space normally reserved for Halud, but he had left her. And with good reason: why stay for a monster if what you were looking for was a sister?
There was no way to know where he was, if he was alive or dead — except…. Steeling herself, she tried to reach out for a vision of Halud, but, as with every other time she had tried, she saw nothing except her own hands in front of her face. Perhaps he was dead, only it didn’t feel like he was dead.
When he’d left, it had been in the middle of a firefight, the warship Comrade attacking the limping freightship. Everyone else was convinced his shuttle had been torn apart by the laz-cannon beams tearing between the two ships. If not, then surely the UECs had destroyed him the instant he stepped aboard the warship. But, if he had made it across, and almost certainly the Gods would have helped, there was no doubt in her mind they would have taken him back to Etar, to the Speakers.
Her mind drifted
to the UEC trap that had been set on Junk to capture her. Dr. Guitteriez had called her the answer — to what problem she didn’t know, but it meant she would never be safe. They had hunted her across the galaxy once, just to see what secret abilities still laid dormant within her. Luis Guitteriez was dead, but his experiments had torn open her fragile mind, and she had used her secrets to escape. No doubt it had been recorded and transmitted.
And Halud would almost certainly be used as bait. He would never be safe. No one aboard the little freightship would ever be safe.
Only Kieran had half a chance if he could escape back to the Observer ship he came from, a place completely out of time, untouchable by the Speakers and the Central Army.
Her eyes went the small puzzle cube, a bright beacon hidden between the grey sheets. She’d fallen asleep trying to solve it, and it must have slid to the foot of the bed during her dreaming. A seemingly simple toy, the “Ru-bex” cube had proven frustratingly elusive.
The mechanics were simple — twenty-six rotating cubes affixed to a central axis — but the interconnecting pivots, layers of complex moving pieces, required her full attention. The puzzle required complete focus, forcing all her other thoughts into the back of her brain and offered her some peace.
Where it laid between the sheets, she could see a row of yellow lining one edge, but the other six squares were mismatched. Perhaps a clockwise rotation of the right arm would benefit. She reached out to turn the cube, but gasped, her arm freezing part-way. There in front of her, where her hand should have been, was a silver skeleton dripping with blood.
She had killed forty-six guards during her escape from Junk only a week ago. The memory played out unbidden, her heart racing as though she was there again: guards screaming, walls tumbling, everything burning, burning, burning. Life ripped from body, molecular bonds disintegrating before her eyes. Brutal, brutal. A true monster. Of course she was, how could she be anything but?
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