by A. S. Deller
The Commander did all of the talking, and Rax tried not to laugh.
“You’ll be back to eating urtykut larvae sooner than you think, big man,” Rhodes said, squeezing Rax’s uninjured shoulder. The Kenek smiled toothily, wheezed, and settled further back into his null-G foam bed.
Gray met Sorakith and the twins in their quarters a few minutes later. Martell was just leaving. “How are they doing, Doc?” Asked Rhodes.
“Already recovered from dehydration and malnutrition. Their bodies seem to have absorbed nearly everything with near-perfect efficiency. Extraordinary,” Martell said as he packed his tablet away in his med kit.
Rhodes smiled as Martell left and the hatch shut behind him. Sorakith sat across from Jerni and Ruri at her desk, obviously struggling with a game of viviri, unable to twist the needles and string properly. The girls giggle as they watched the beautiful Althorian get more and more frustrated. Jerni said, “Not like that, silly!”
“Well then, if you’re such an expert, why don’t you show me?” Sorakith challenged, holding her unwieldy contraption out for the girls to take.
“How long have you three been at this?” Rhodes said.
Ruri smiled up at him, “One hour, twelve minutes and eight seconds.”
Gray nodded, eyebrows raised. “That sounds just about right. I was thinking we could get a change of scenery. Maybe play on the rec deck?”
Sorakith laughed, “Play, huh? I think that sounds fun.”
Captain Reina Lancer stripped out of her uniform and changed into thin, light workout gear in less than thirty seconds. After fastening her trainers onto her feet she began her stretching routine. The shoes were a perfect fit; in fact, all wearables for the entire crew were tailored by AIs that took 3D measurements and constructed requested clothing items using a molecular printing method. With humanity’s focus on consumer goods, it turned out that Earth was nearly as advanced in such methods as the League. Even the Althorians and Kenek borrowed some human innovations when it came to manufacturing consumer products.
Reina finished her stretching and looked into the wall mirror. As she tied her auburn hair back into a ponytail, she examined the slight crows’ feet at her eyes. At 44, she was barely a fourth of the way through her lifespan based on current actuarial tables. She was actually promoted to Captain of a Star Navy vessel fairly early for the modern service, compared to most others. Top of her class at the Academy, and top scores on most proficiencies since then, had taken her to the top rapidly. Several Admirals had hinted rather strongly over the years that Reina would make a fine colleague in the upper echelons.
Disaster struck, and now she found herself flung into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, shepherding a rather young and inexperienced crew. The stress built daily since then, the weight of it a yoke over her shoulders that grew heavier every day. Lancer was thankful for Gray Rhodes. He was a strong, intelligent officer. He was a great support. But he was one of the most emotionally damaged members of her crew.
All Reina could do to take her mind off of things was exercise and train. She started off at a jog around the track in the recreation facility. Lancer gradually built up speed, until she was galloping along at a steady ten miles per hour. It was a brisk pace, but one that she could maintain for an hour. Just enough time to think through some outstanding problems.
One: Two young human girls, Jerni and Ruri, activated an SOS from a remote planet. The population of the ship had just increased.
Two: Lieutenant David Ayler, 29, a talented pilot rated for both shuttles and Moderator-class vessels like the Talisman, was dead. The first casualty by violence on the Talisman since the incident that sent them deep into the void. He had skills and bravery. Skills could be learned by others; bravery could not.
Three: Ayler was killed by Malign. Two of them laid in wait outside of the research base on LM-32f, hibernating. Why?
Four: A funeral service had to be held for Ayler. Lancer had to preside.
Five: Dr. Weller and Gulliver’s search for a Valgon wormhole station was stagnating. Even if one was found several light years distant, it would be better than if none were found.
Six: Lt. Grekkon Rax, security chief, was badly injured. It might take him a few days to heal, or it might take him several weeks. It all depended on whether or not his hypermetabolic regenerative factor, a bioengineered trait of all Kenek, kicked in or not. In some cases it activated for even minor damage; in others it didn’t begin to mend until a Kenek was near death. Either way, at least Rax was going to live. Weller had injected him with medical nanobots which were busy doing their work.
Seven: She had far too many problems.
Wild, happy laughter of children floated up to her from below, shocking Reina out of her rhythmically-induced trance. She peered down half of a level into the zero-G water cube. There were Jerni and Ruri, along with Rhodes and Sorakith, all in bathing suits and bounding back and forth inside the clear-walled, 8000 cubic foot volume, colliding with a giant globule of water.
Reina was deeply perturbed and buried under a mound of dread, but despite all that, she felt a smile break out on her face. By Infinitus, she thought, is it nice to have some happiness on the Talisman, even if it isn’t mine.
Petty Officer Alisa Nunez rolled over onto her side and pulled her blanket up and over her nude body demurely. She smiled radiantly, teeth as white as mountain snow, as Lt. Carly Ming ran a hand through her lustrous sable hair.
“You’re a real beauty, Pretty Officer Nunez,” Ming said.
Nunez replied giddily, “Don’t be a pot.”
Ming thought for a bit before she got it. “And call the kettle black?”
Alisa said, “I know, I know. Stop using such old slang. But it’s so charming.”
“That’s what you think. The rest of us mostly find it annoying.”
“Think of it like I am educating you, then,” Nunez grinned as she sat up in the bunk and pulled the covers with her, exposing most of Carly’s body.
“Hey! It’s cold in here!” Ming said, snarling as she reached for the sheets and missed.
Alisa stood and pranced around the room, and started to rearrange some of Carly’s personal grooming items and mementos on her storage cabinet.
Carly hopped out of the bunk and pulled on a white undershirt, and opened her closet to look for more clothing as she watched Alisa out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t go and make a mess again.”
“I’m tidying up, ell-tee.”
“Your mood changes 180 degrees after we’re together, you know that? You’re all serious and professional one second, and then--“
Raising an eyebrow, Nunez finished her sentence, “—-sixty to ninety minutes later?”
“—-you turn into some kind of princess riding a unicorn over a rainbow or something,” Carly said with a snicker as she zipped a pair of uniform pants.
It was true. Carly was usually right. Alisa was indeed elated, pumped full of endorphins. She nearly felt dizzy. Everything was working well with Carly. They had been together, seeing each other secretly for two reasons.
One was that, even though opposite-sex relations hadn’t been frowned upon in general society or the military for centuries, officer-enlisted fraternization was still taboo. And could even be illegal, based on negative results of said fraternization.
And secondly, Carly was insistent that Chief Petty Officer Greg Hu not find out, nor even have the slightest chance of finding out. In this, Alisa thought Carly was a little unreasonable in how heavily she weighed Hu’s feelings after literally years of them being apart. Even though Hu outranked Alisa, she wasn’t afraid of him. She had sparred with every other non-scientist on the Talisman, and had bested all of them many times, including the men.
Alisa Nunez was perhaps the most tenacious female warrior on the ship, never mind her being the prettiest.
She had come of age as the product of a middle class family in the Yucatan Peninsula Megalopolis, in the United Powers Province of Mexico. It wa
s stunning city, surrounded by hundreds of miles of coastal hurricane walls that kept the risen sea levels at bay. Large tracts of the city were given over to jungle preserves, and all of the Mayan ruins had been absorbed within the megalopolis’ boundaries and protected even as hundreds of thousands of square miles were developed.
As a young child, there were rough times as her parents struggled to grow a food business. It was during those years that Alisa honed her fight-or-flight instincts, and grew fearless in the face of street gangs that roved the westernmost areas of the megacity. She had a few scars and a couple well-knitted broken bones to show for the back-alley brawls she experienced while usually defending some of her smaller friends or just neighborhood kids who were ignorant of the territory. She looked back on those days knowing that they were what made her into a stalwart soldier. But she often felt inside that it was probably also some of the genes of her Mayan ancestors that helped.
“What are you staring at in my mirror? Get your ass back over here or get dressed, starman,” Ming prodded.
Alisa looked at her reflection, traced the contours of her chiseled face and high cheekbones, and running a finger across her one visible facial scar, running diagonally through her left eyebrow. She had gotten that one leaping onto the back of a nasty bully trying to get away from her on his power scooter. He lost that little war.
She turned on her blazing smile again and did a backflip onto the bunk, and another, landing next to Carly and pulling her into a tight embrace and a tighter kiss.
The blanket was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After their enervating play session, Rhodes, Sorakith and the twins made their way to the galley. In the old days of ship-going, there would be a cook on duty at all hours, ready to fill any empty belly on the crew. Now, nearly everything was automated by AI Core subroutines. All that was needed was some regular hands-on maintenance by a skilled crewman, and that was the only person Rhodes saw when they entered.
“Quiet time of day for the kitchen, I guess,” the Commander mused.
“Aye, sir. Just changing out the raw materials in the protein tank,” answered Petty Officer Tony Wong.
“My appetite is piqued,” Sorakith frowned.
Ruri and Jerni skipped to the wall of food replicators, holographic menus waiting for hungry folks to scroll them. Jerni looked over Wong’s shoulder into an open tray of pink liquid afloat with heterogeneous white and tomato-tinged bits. Ruri poked her head in, too, and both girls grimaced. “Eww!”
Rhodes and Sorakith laughed, and she leaned against his right shoulder, the human one. Gray felt a wash of warmth move over him, unlike anything he had felt since before the ravaging of Mars. Gauzy images of young Valia and breathtakingly beautiful Kina whisked through his mind’s eye. Valia running and somersaulting down a mat during a gymnastics competition, as agile as Rhodes in his younger days. Not only was she going to be a champion someday, but she also had the mental acuity of her mother. She had so much potential. The universe was open to her.
His eyes misted, and Sorakith reached casually around his waist, pulling his side against her tightly. Rhodes knew she could feel his mood. She probably knew what he was thinking about, even without her psionic advantages.
Wong pointed to an adjacent replicator, smiling at the twins’ reactions, and soothed, “Aww, this isn’t so bad! How about you try that one. I just logged in some new recipes suggested by the crew. There are some excellent updates for the ice cream menu.”
“Yum! Yes please!” Jerni said, clapping.
“What’s ‘ice cream’?” Ruri said, suspiciously.
While Rhodes and Sorakith sat at a table in the galley, watching the twins enjoy ice cream for their first time, there was an unspoken question in the air between the two adults: Do we bring it up now?
Gray knew, and so did Sorakith, that there would never be a good time, but that there would be better times, and this one probably fell in that category.
Ruri ended up attacking her banana-flavored treat voraciously, while it was Jerni, initially so excited, who wasn’t sure if her peach ice cream was going to bite back. She licked it, and jerked back, only to repeat it a dozen times. “It’s...tickly!” She would say.
Sorakith smiled, and leaned in toward the girls. She reached over the table and placed a hand gently on their shoulders. “Girls, we need you to tell us some things.”
“Hmm?” Ruri intoned, unwilling (or unable) to look away from her delightful frozen concoction.
“What do you remember about your time in the room?”
The twins both stopped, Ruri in mid-bite and Jerni mid-lick. Their eyes shifted from their plates up to meet Sorakith’s golden gaze. Each girl turned at the same time to look at the other, and they slowly scooted closer together on their bench until they were touching.
Jerni spoke first, very quietly, “Preceptor told us that we would be safe. That someone would come for us.”
“And you did,” Ruri finished Jerni’s thought. “You found where we were, like he said. And took us away.”
“This ‘Preceptor’. Who was that?” Rhodes asked in a low voice.
Ruri said, “He taught us. We played games, and we learned everything he wanted us to.”
“We were good students,” Jerni maintained. “He was nice to us. The others didn’t pay much attention to us, though.”
“What others?” Sorakith asked.
“Two other teachers. They looked just Preceptor, but they just worked all the time. They didn’t seem to like us very much,” said Ruri, diminishing a bit at the unpleasant thoughts.
Sorakith rubbed the girls’ arms lightly. “But they didn’t hurt you? I don’t sense pain in your past.”
“No,” Ruri continued. “Well, we remember when we were little. When we couldn’t move. The others poked us with sharp things. That hurt.”
Rhodes sighed, a bit impatiently, “What did the Preceptor and the others look like?”
Jerni opened her mouth, paused to find the words, and said, “At first they were very big. But we grew, and we were almost as big as Preceptor when he left us.”
“But what did they look like? Do you know who they were, what species?”
“He taught us so much,” Jerni said, eyes downturned and moistening.
Ruri followed suit, and looked away. The girls hugged each other. She whispered, “He was so nice to us, and then there was the noise. And everything shook. It was scary. Frightening.”
Jerni sobbed, “Is he gone? Is Preceptor dead?”
Sorakith stood and walked around the table, where she sat and held the twins close to her while Rhodes speculated about the “Preceptor”. It was hard to focus. The little girls’ muffled sorrow reminded him of the time his daughter Valia fell while puttering around on the electric scooter he gave her for her sixth birthday. Right off of a garden path and onto some neatly raked pebbles. Strings of that long, raven-dark hair, plastered across her tan cheeks by tears.
He had to get up and walk away before it became too much for him.
Dr. Weller nearly beamed with excitement, but held back just in time, “True, you found very little, but what you did bring back is a goldmine. It’s apparently a log that the Pernet scientist kept on his own, secret from the Valgons, and left with the twins before he sabotaged the base.”
“Great. Get to the useful part, already,” Rhodes said, still perturbed by Jerni and Ruri’s tale.
Lancer huffed, “Please, Commander, try to keep it professional. We’re all more than a little rough around the edges right now.”
“Aye, Captain,” he said.
Kyra went on, “I had Gulliver translate it. Like Martell said, the twins are quantum clones, not twins at all in the biological sense. Contrary to prior knowledge, some Pernet survived their system-wide destruction, and were forced to continue scientific work for the Valgon Alliance. They developed a genetically perfect human template, and those girls are the result. Control subjects, with no recognizable v
ulnerabilities to disease and potential natural lifespans of over 150 years, without medical intervention.”
Rhodes chafed, “Why?”
“So they could engineer the perfect biological weapons to use against our species. According to the Pernet scientist who wrote the log, that was the stage they had reached. He had been tasked with creating the ultimate killer virus, and proceeded to buy as much time as possible. He falsified data, even lied to the other Pernet in the lab, not knowing who he was able to trust. All the while he was building a trap,” said Kyra. She held up her tablet and swiped it. A holographic window formed in front of her, and Rhodes stood closer. It was a video log:
Twenty-eight days ago, the Valgon Alliance remote research laboratory on LM-32f was still a sterile environment, gleaming perfect white and stainless metal equipment. The image was surreal, as several Pernet worked and moved around the lab. They were slender but athletic, muscle striations showing beneath thin, glistening coats of sienna fur streaked with amber. The Pernet walked on two legs with a very slight forward bend, counterbalanced by tails nearly as long as their 5-foot tall bodies. They didn’t wear full clothes, and instead had numerous straps and pouches wrapped around their sleek forms.
One of the Pernet slid closer to the camera and looked right into it. He spoke, translated automatically by the tablet, “This is Preceptor Sior Herci, and it is day two hundred and thirty seven. As our Valgon masters have bade us, we have at last succeeded in creating a virus that will result in 100 percent fatalities for any given population of homo sapiens sapiens,” and then, with a pause, his sleek eyes darted left and right, and he went on in a whisper, “Or at least our Valgon masters have been convinced of as much.”
Sior then picked up his recording device and held it low. He approached a couple of the other Pernet doctors and said, “I am going to feed our subjects their final meal before we apply the contagion.” The other Pernet nodded, and Sior moved away. He reached out with a hand, six long fingers plus a thumb, and opened a door. The same thick, metal door to the safe room where Rhodes had found Jerni and Ruri.