by F P Adriani
I slid higher up along his body, finally looking down at his face, at his thick mustache and his smiling, wide mouth beneath. His lips were flushed; so were his cheeks, probably from the wine.
One of his hands slipped behind me, then moved lower along my back, to right above my ass….
“Captain Zarro, you should have never gone to Makron Station,” a loud familiar voice suddenly said.
Gary’s hand jerked away from me as my whole body jerked away from him and I sprung to a seated position on the edge of my bed, my heart wildly banging around inside me.
Then I said through a shaky breath, “What the fuck—Kostas—what the fuck are you doing talking to us! And who the hell are you to tell me where I shouldn’t go?”
“You misunderstand me,” Kostas said in an urgent tone. “I am saying you should not have gone there because you were supposed to go somewhere else.”
“What—how do YOU know? And where the hell are you?”
“For weeks in your timeframe, we were busy elsewhere and we were unable to contact Jim to tell him what to avoid. We did not even see it then because we were focused on that elsewhere. When we finally realized what had happened, we immediately started working on what to do next.”
Gary sat up beside me. “Could you fucking clue us in on what your coded, murky language means? You’re talking as if you know where we’re going next—as if you know the future.”
“Do you know the future, Kostas?” I asked.
There was a pause, a long pause, during which Gary and I breathed hard at each other’s faces, though not from sexual arousal: I suddenly remembered back to months ago, and Kostas’ surety then that I and my crew wouldn’t die on Rintu….
“This isn’t something I’m authorized to discuss in detail,” Kostas finally said now. “But the future isn’t necessarily something specific. The Keepers have a technology that analyzes the many paths available at specific points in space and time related to each individual. We can see where your path will interact with other places, times and paths.”
Now I said, “Thanks for the explanation, but can’t you ever just say things straight? The Keepers do have a crystal ball; it’s just not a perfect one.”
“Yes, all right, Lydia,” Kostas said. “Think of it the way you want. But the point is: you’ve made a mistake. And if you continue on with your current path, it will mean disaster. For you.”
I could feel my heart drop down in my chest at her words, and Gary’s brown eyes shot to my face as he grabbed one of my hands.
Kostas continued: “Aside from Jim’s presence there, we regularly keep an eye on you and your ship when we are focused on, or are in, this universe—but we finally saw that the Demeter hadn’t gone where it was expected to go. You were supposed to pick up your friends in The Cameron Layer.”
Because of what Kostas had said before about my mistake, my lips shook badly when I spoke now: “We—we have a possible job to do there—on Barton-2, but I—well, it’s a lot of work, and I hadn’t decided to take it yet….” My eyes widened as I remembered something. “Actually, Babs was going to hitch a ride to Barton-2 on a cruise-liner. But then when the Makron job came up, I contacted her back and said it would be easier for me to just pick her up here.”
“You should have gone straight to Barton-2 from your last job, Captain Zarro,” Kostas said in a hard voice now.
I felt my face turn very red. “Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that? So what am I supposed to do—should I leave the station now? But nearly all of us have been drinking—”
A sharp, loud sigh, and then a, “This is a damn mess,” from Kostas. “And now we are forced to take care of it. However, we believe we’ve come up with an effective solution—something we should have thought of sooner, and maybe something we should have seen in all of our searches. But not all of the information comes up at one time. In fact, it’s possible that, had we done the search on your path weeks before, we wouldn’t have seen that you should have gone to Barton-2. So maybe this is a situation that is ultimately out of the control of the Keepers.”
“I thought you crowd could gain control of anything,” I said, my voice quite dry.
“What on earth gave you that idea?” Kostas replied now, almost a snap. Her voice sounded more worried than I’d ever heard it sound, and that made me worry, a lot.
“Before,” I said, my lips shaking again, “you sounded as if we—as if we’re going to die.”
“It does look like that will happen—or at least it would have happened had we not intervened.”
My pulse pounding through my body, I jumped off my bed and ran over to my black dresser to pull out clean clothes and yank them on. I watched Gary as he grabbed his clothes from the floor and sloppily began dressing in them.
Our eyes kept darting toward each other—in nervous tics, and his face was a dark red. I felt so sad suddenly, over our aborted romantic evening. How the hell had it come to this?
We would have died kept going through my head as I searched my room for where I’d dropped my red captain’s belt.
Tonight, I had not known that I was so close to death while I was enjoying living so much with my crew. Life just isn’t fair!
*
When Gary and I were done getting dressed, we rushed out of my room and into the hall—and almost crashed into Chen and May. Their surprised faces spun toward me and Gary. And then Kostas’ loud voice came into the hall, and I watched Chen’s and May’s faces fall so far, I felt a pain in my chest over their distress.
“I have contacted Jim directly,” Kostas said. “Get your crew together and we’ll discuss this further. We don’t have much time though. You must get going.”
“What?” Chen practically screeched. His eyes shot to mine. “Does she mean fly—now? I had four glasses of wine—”
“Chen, this is an emergency,” I said fast as I rushed across the hall toward the stairs to the bridge deck. “We’ve got no choice. If you’re not up to your job on the bridge, don’t worry—we’ll—we’ll find someone,” I said as Gary and I ran into the stairway, but I had no idea who I was supposed to find.
*
When I reached my bridge, I immediately saw what Kostas’ idea on the subject was: Jim was sitting in Chen’s pilot seat.
“What the hell is this?” I boomed as I walked up to Jim.
His head jerked my way. “Kostas told me to be prepared to fly. Although I am no expert. I was never a pilot.”
“So her bright idea is for you to fly my ship? Get up—let me sit there.”
“No,” Jim said, shaking his head.
And I felt my blood rise all the way up to my scalp. “Excuse me?”
“This is no time to argue. You’ve all been drinking tonight, and I haven’t been. You didn’t even invite me.”
I glared down at him, saw the quick shake of his bottom lip, which suggested he was annoyed, or maybe even sad. I found the latter hard to believe with respect to Jim.
“Everyone was invited,” I said to him now. “That you didn’t come to dinner was for your own reasons. Don’t push it on me—christ, I can’t even believe I’m having an inane conversation about etiquette after what Kostas told me in my cabin—”
“What did she say?” Chen asked as he rushed onto the bridge. His head turned toward his seat, his eyes spotting Jim, then widening—in anger.
I shook a hand Chen’s way. “Just leave it for now, Chen. Get on one of the science panels and sound the emergency take-off alarm for the next fifteen seconds. I know everyone will be shocked, but shocked is better than worse than shocked.”
Chen did as I asked; then I pushed the intercom on Chen’s panel in front of Jim. “This is the captain. I’m sorry for the alarm but we’ve been contacted by Kostas, so we’ve got to change our plans. Karen or whoever is capable—someone needs to contact the station and ask for an emergency departure—ask nicely, I mean. I’ll pay whatever, if they charge an extra fee.”
I clicked off the intercom and looked down at Jim�
�s face. One of the devices he often had with him was blinking in his hand now.
“What’s going on there?” I asked him, my eyes then moving to Gary, who was practically running toward one of his panels. Then my eyes latched onto Babs and Shirley as they both walked in. Shirley went straight for her usual science panel beside Gary, but Babs hesitated by the door to the hall; her head suddenly lowered, almost as if she’d rushed into here on instinct but now felt like a fool….
“Babs,” I said, “why don’t you take the navigator’s seat and see what you can call up on that panel? I have a feeling we’re going to be getting orders soon….”
I was right: some numbers showed up on the navigator’s panel, and I watched Babs’ dark eyebrows wrinkle and her mouth drop open as she stared down at the panel. Then she said, “Huh?”
“What is it?” I asked her fast, moving closer to her chair.
“We got a sudden transmission from—from somewhere. I’m a little rusty with the computer, but the coordinates inside the message seem to be indicating we need to go to The Alexi Layer—to where the nebula there drops off into a dead end.”
From the back of the bridge, Gary said, “What? That area’s off limits. There’s a torsional anomaly there that would twist the ship apart—”
“That’s exactly where you need to go,” Kostas suddenly said into the room.
“Like I said, it will destroy us,” Gary said in a crabbier voice.
And Kostas replied: “I think that, at this point, you know better than that, Gary.”
“Not after what you said in Lydia’s cabin! How do we know this won’t kill us?”
“You need to trust us,” Jim put in now.
“Why should we?” I snapped, and I would have said more, but Karen had relayed my request to the station—and now she told me that Makron had given us lift-away permission.
Unfortunately, the communal hangar area the Demeter was in seemed more crowded with ships than it should have been, so my crew and I now had to drive the Demeter around on its landing gear very slowly to get out of the hangar without damaging the ship; we weren’t allowed to have the exterior shield-strength at maximum till we were well away from the hangar’s insides and from the tractor beam that finally moved us out of the hangar.
By the time we had disconnected from that, my fingers were shaking, Gary was sweating badly, and Jim looked like he wanted to be anywhere but where he was.
Chen had been strapped into a seat over by Shirley, but he must have noticed Jim’s discomfort. “Can I have my fucking station back now?” Chen snapped.
“Yeah, I think so,” Jim said as he unstrapped from Chen’s red chair, shot up from it, and sighed in relief.
I was in my black captain’s chair, sweating quite badly myself. “Now what?” I said as I watched Chen sit down in his chair.
Jim strapped into one of the free chairs at the back of the bridge and began working at his device again, pushing some buttons there. I was hoping he would illuminate the situation. He didn’t.
I groaned. “Kostas, are you there, for chrissake? We’re coasting away from the station. Should we book away at high speed though?”
“Do whatever you would normally do till you reach the coordinates I sent you; just make sure you set a locked curon bubble for the torsional anomaly as your destination.”
From behind me and on my right, I heard Gary groan; from on my left and on Chen’s left, I heard a small laugh. My eyes whipped to there, and Babs grinned at me and jerked her head toward Gary. Then she slowly shook her head as a little laugh burst from my lips. I could tell she was saying that Gary was still his same-old stubborn self, but, she had no experience with how aggravating dealing with the workers and Keepers could be….
Shirley suddenly said to me that not enough of the crew felt capable of flying the ship now, emergency or not, so a skeleton crew was working in engineering. “Steve drank too much and he’s asleep in his cabin,” Shirley added, and when I looked at her face, it was very red. My eyebrows knitted together as I remembered they had both left the dinner earlier than everyone else, and Shirley had sort of been holding up Steve’s big body then….
I shook my head at that thought; I had more pressing concerns: Karen had sent some numbers to my panel, and the ship’s computer analysis of the numbers showed that we couldn’t work up a strong enough curon stream for another hour, especially because the bubble we’d need to create would have to traverse a space flume to get to The Alexi Layer, which more complicated path would require even more energy than normal.
Now Karen said over the intercom, “Sam finished the rest of the engine-flushing once I fixed the vacuum, but now we need more time to prime the engine for such a strong bubble. I’m—I’m sorry, Captain.” I could tell by the shake in her voice that she felt like she’d fucked up.
“It’s not your fault,” I said to her fast. And then to Kostas: “If you’re there, Kostas, we can’t make a locked bubble to go straight to The Alexi Layer for another hour. Will we be…safe till then?” Everyone on the bridge turned my way now, even Jim. Gary knew what my words meant, but I wasn’t about to illuminate everyone else. My crew needed to do their jobs; I saw no point in making them even more nervous than tonight’s events had already made them.
Fortunately, Kostas never replied to my question, which I really shouldn’t have asked; I hadn’t been circumspect enough, especially around Chen, and now I’d probably made the situation even more tense. But, I was only human too, and, ever since Kostas’ revelation in my room, a dread-of-death feeling kept popping up inside my head, as if the death-boogeyman was constantly right around the corner now, so I should be second-guessing every move I made….
I rubbed at my forehead. “Dammit. On top of everything, I’m getting a headache.”
“Join the club,” Gary said.
“Yeah,” Chen put in on a groan. He was punching at his panel-buttons—quite fast actually, as in, weirdly fast, with his supposedly bad, Keeper-tainted arm and fingers.
My eyes widened at his weird motions. “Chen—are you doing all right?”
“Not really—I mean no and yes. Look at my hand!?”
“I am looking at it,” I said.
“If it keeps it up, it’ll be moving faster than my brain. And we definitely don’t need that happening now.” He sighed. “Gonna switch to my left hand.”
Karen contacted me again to tell me she was pushing the beam-engine priming hard and she could probably get us up two notches in the speed department by traveling in a weak bubble. “We still can’t make a strong enough bubble yet to punch through to The Alexi, but, I think we can hop into a strong locked one from the weak unlocked one, using the momentum of one curon field to jump-start the next one. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve heard others have done it.”
And now I thought, But would it kill us—would this be it?
I didn’t say that to Karen, however. Instead, I told her to get the curon engine ready for the maneuver she’d described.
Then I made another announcement to all of the Demeter’s rooms, including Steve’s room: “We’re going to skip through space using a chain of curon bubbles. We’ve never done it before, so, PLEASE, everyone, get strapped in now.”
Everyone on the bridge did as I said, and, quite soon, Karen was slowly counting down to the weak bubble entry. Once we entered that and the wild silver beams of the bubble space were filling the bridge’s front viewscreen, Karen alerted me that we’d be skipping into the locked bubble in two minutes.
“I hope this works,” Babs said from in the navigator’s seat still. Her head shifted my way, the corners of her mouth slightly turning down. I could tell by the ambivalent expression on her face that she wasn’t looking forward to the jump; nor was she so comfortable on my ship anymore….
Ten-seconds left till the jump into the stronger bubble; my head shot over my right shoulder toward Gary, and his eyes rushed to meet mine. Then the Demeter lurched hard and my head immediately spun toward the
front viewscreen and the various angles of the camera views now displayed there.
Typically, when we initiated a strong curon bubble on its own, the space outside would get brighter from the arcing beams as they encased the ship. However, this time, as soon as the Demeter jumped from such a weak bubble to such a strong bubble, the space outside went through a moment of such shocking brightness that I thought we were in the middle of an explosion.
Someone on the bridge yelled something in fear—and Steve’s voice came over the intercom: “What da fuck is happening out there!”
My eyes had been glued to the screen, but I yanked them away to look at my panel and see where Steve had contacted the bridge from: in his room. “Just go back to bed!” I told him.
“I’m in bed. My head’s spinning and we’re in white outside—”
“Steve,” Karen said fast over the line, “I’ve done a skip from an unlocked weak bubble to a locked strong one—”
“Holy shits,” Steve said in an astonished slurred voice, and I heard Gary laugh.
“We made it—we’re fine, Steve!” Karen said now, and there was an excited lilt to her voice, as if she felt very pleased with herself.
“Well, all right—wake me if we’re dead soon—bye,” Steve said.
I glanced over my shoulder at Shirley, whose face was very red again, and she seemed to be avoiding my eyes….
I looked back at the viewscreen: the view had calmed down, had darkened a bit. I could have changed the camera settings to mitigate the bright beams in the view even more, but I usually tended to let the bubble-view do its thing; I had grown somewhat used to disturbances in the appearance of space—
“Excellent work,” Kostas’ voice suddenly said. “You’re exactly where you need to be.”
“How are you talking to us as clear as ever while we’re in a locked bubble?” I asked her.
“Do not worry about that. We’ll discuss more later. Right now, make sure you and your bubble maintain your current speed, and prepare to leave the bubble in six minutes and thirty seconds—I’ll send you a countdown signal.”