Endless Blue

by Wen Spencer

  "I'll be shortly." Mikhail slapped off the com. "I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand. Rabbit might have just walked out of here as a Red, but the main reason I'm letting him go is because I believe in ten or twenty years, with the Baileys beating that Red mentally out of him, he will be just as human as you are."

  "I'm not human."

  "Yes, you are." Mikhail cried and came to grab his shoulders. "Turk, I was brewed in a petri dish and decanted out of a bottle just like you. I know I'm human, and I know you're just as human as I am."

  "When you can fur over under stress, we'll talk about being the same," Turk didn't trust himself to stay in the room. He was angry enough to hurt someone. He didn't want it to be Mikhail. Blind as he was, Mikhail still meant well. It wasn't Mikhail that he was angry with.

  Paige had lied to him. He'd asked that first day if he was the only Red onboard, and she had told him yes. They were all Reds, and she had told him that he was the only one. He'd been so gratified that she didn't look at him in horror, that she treated him with compassion, all the while keeping the truth from him. That under the skin, she was no different than he was.

  * * *

  Upset as Mikhail was over the fight over Rabbit and Turk's whole reaction to it, he put it aside when he saw Tseytlin. The man looked completely distraught.

  "What's wrong?" Mikhail put out a hand to steady the man and was dismayed when he flinched away.

  "There are nefrims on the ship." Tseytlin whispered.

  "What?" Mikhail reached for the alarm but Tseytlin caught his hand.

  "No, no, no, they don't know that we know that they're there. We have to get the upper hand here." Tseytlin scurried to a parts locker and started to dig out equipment. "I have to apologize to you, Captain. You told me that they were there and I thought I was through, but I should have trusted you and looked harder. Instead I just thought you'd gone a little loony on us. Considering your family history, I thought it best not to comment on it."

  What was Tseytlin talking about? Mikhail hadn't said anything about nefrims being on the ship. And what did he mean—family history? Did he mean the infamous bloody reigns of various Tsars of ancient Russia?

  "Calm down man, and tell me what's wrong," Mikhail said.

  Tseytlin scurried back to Mikhail, his arms overflowing, to whisper, "Back at Fenrir, when you asked me to look for invisible aliens, I was worried you were going over the edge. Especially when I set up a standard perimeter security line and not a thing showed up. I was worried that you were losing it. I truly was."

  You and me both, Mikhail thought. But he had Tseytlin looking for seraphim, not nefrim. "What's happened?"

  "I found the bastards!" Tseytlin winced at his own loud outcry and dropped back to a whisper. "The ship is crawling with them! Invisible—or something."

  "Nefrim?" Nefrim were a meter tall with half a dozen limbs. The seraphim were—as far as he could determine—snake-like. "Are you sure?"

  Tseytlin nodded vigorously as he piled the equipment into a cart. "The notes you gave me earlier—most of them I can't understand—had details on the results of sensors used to detect 'ethereal beings.'" Tseytlin indicated quotes around the words with his fingers. "I had to look those words up. But it made me realized that our standard security system was inadequate for this place and—and—I had the Rosetta people get me sensors for testing a myriad of things. Not the standard motion and heat—just—just—everything. I threw together a small grid in the hanger, just as a test run, and fed them all through pattern recognition software to a rendering engine."

  "Okay." Mikhail tried for a soothing and calm answer. "The seraphim become visible then?"

  "Seraphim hell!" Tseytlin pointed to a bank of monitors. "Look!"

  Each sensor reported in a different color of light. As each sensor was mapped out, it was just a mass of disorganized colors playing through the vast space. It overlaid the slight distort in the air that Mikhail recognized as a seraphim moving through the hanger. He scanned the monitors, looking for the composite image, expecting to find the snake-like form of the seraphim. But the composite was the familiar multi-limbed body of a nefrim.

  "But that's not what I—" Mikhail stopped. He couldn't truly 'see' anything any of the times he 'saw' the seraphim. He had only gotten impressions. The seraphim were already messing with his mind; perhaps they were influencing what he saw too. "Are they using some kind of camouflage gear?"

  Tseytlin shook his head. "They're passing through walls, equipment and people. It's like they're not really there, but they are."

  "Ghosts." Mikhail murmured.

  "Kind of. Out of phase with us somehow. Most of the crew doesn't seem to perceive them. Only a handful of reds react to them but don't seem to be able to track them."

  Hardin had said there were no nefrim in the Sargasso. He might have been lying, but more likely mistaken. If this was the nowhere that you went when you misjumped—and the only such nowhere—the universal constant for failing to safely arrive back to normal space—then it would also be where lost nefrim ships went.

  21

  War Room

  Turk was still glowering when Mikhail called a meeting of his officers. Mikhail didn't know how to make things better for Turk, so he ignored him, hoping that giving Turk time and space to work it out would help.

  "Our mission was to find the Fenrir and the other missing human ships." Mikhail had set up the recorder to include their briefing with the engine if they ever reached that point. "We were to determine if they were in enemy hands. At first there seemed to be no nefrim activity here, but now we've found that the seraphim are nefrim with abilities we've never seen before."

  "Nefrim ghosts." Turk grumbled from where he was holding up the wall.

  Hak had claimed that the seraphim were enlightened beings but the rest of their race was descending into hell. Certainly the description matched the nefrim's habit of reducing planets to rubble, uninhabitable even by them. Mikhail wasn't sure he wanted to drag his crew through the metaphysical. He decided to stick with the concrete facts.

  "What's more, the humans here consider the seraphim as holy beings. Ethan Bailey, most likely, believes that angels are speaking to him, giving him commands."

  "Can we trust the crew of the Rosetta if that's the case?" Kutuzov glanced to Turk for the answer.

  Turk darkened. Mikhail expected him to say 'no' after his fight with Captain Bailey. But Turk looked away, and gave an unbiased accounting. "There was no reason for them to lie to me about Ethan's activities; we all thought that the Svoboda had sunk. Their radio was broken, so they couldn't have known the truth. They've had been out of contact with Ethan from when Paige—Captain Bailey bought the Rosetta and left Ya-ya, nearly two years ago. They thought he was here in Ya-ya translating. He contacted them when they were in Georgetown Landing and asked for them to meet him and their cousin's boat, the Lilianna, at Fenrir's rock to do salvage on a ship in minotaur waters."

  "What Eraphie Bailey told us confirms most of that." Mikhail said for Turk's sake. "Ethan was working independent of his family and called them in without giving them all the details of what he was working on—and that lead to the deaths of Lilianna's crew."

  "Ethan Bailey was working with the nefrim though?" Kutuzov said.

  "Yes," Mikahil said. "But we don't know what the nefrim's agenda is."

  "Kill. Destroy. Leave things in ruin." Turk growled.

  "That fits the description of Fenrir's Rock." Kutozov said.

  "There seems to be simpler ways of destroying a landing," Mikhail said.

  "Every landing will probably have an engine," Tseytlin pointed out. "And if the humans think they're escaping this place, they'll be more than willing to do the work for 'the angels.' It's an insidious trap if you ask me."

  Mikhail shook his head. "It feels too subtle for nefrim."

  If it wasn't for the visual evidence, he wouldn't believe that they were dealing with nefrims at all. What the Hak told them fe
lt like the truth: the race had been cleanly divided into the ethereal benign seraphim and the corporeal malevolent nefrim. "Captain Bailey felt as if the notes she collected from her brother's workshop showed two agendas."

  "I'm not making much headway in understanding these notes." Tseytlin was leafing through the papers. The engineering Chief rubbed at his temple as if the paper was giving him a headache. "I've studied what United Colonies High Command gave us on Fenrir's engine and I—I don't think I can recreate this work, not without years of work, the help of Baileys' mechanic and one of them translating. A minotaur who knows what the hell it's doing would be helpful too. The ones we have know nothing."

  Which was what Mikhail was afraid Tseytlin would say. Said minotaurs thundered overhead. The newest game introduced to them was kick ball.

  "Why do we have these minotaurs onboard?" Lidija Amurova interrupted. She'd been the crewmember assigned to 'ride herd' on the minotaur children, as Captain Bailey put it. "Surely someone in the city knows more than I do about how to treat them."

  "I want to gather as much information as possible on these aliens," Mikhail said. "The human ships seem to be grouped together based on what star system they were trying to jump into when they were lost. In the Sargasso, the minotaur landings are close enough to trade with. It's possible that in our universe, we could make contact with the minotaurs."

  "We have enough trouble with the nefrim," Ensign Inozemtsev muttered. Mikhail had included him despite his demotion from Red Commander to Turk's second-in-command. Despite his fight with Captain Bailey, Turk might decide to stay with the Rosetta when the Svoboda chased after Hardin.

  "The minotaurs might be our ally against the nefrim." Mikhail pointed out. "For all we know, they might even be fighting with the nefrim on another front."

  They thought about it and nodded as the implications soaked in.

  Mikhail steered them away from the minotaurs and back to Ethan Bailey's notes. "The question is: is there evidence that we're looking at two divergent agendas?"

  Tseyltin blew out his breath and started to leaf slowly through the papers, laying them out in piles. After a minute, he nodded slightly. "I think there are three actually, or to be more specific, there's the original start point, and then the two branches. The start point is this pile." He placed a hand onto it. "It has nothing to do with warp engines. They're obviously building an experimental device, using scientific methods, and keeping close track of their attempts and failures. It's from this work that I got the idea for the sensors. They seem to be attempting to interact with the invisible nefrims but the focus was on audio, not visual."

  "Nefrim talking, that would be a first," Inozemtsev said.

  It would. Humans had never detected up communication between the nefrim ships or had even been able to establish that the nefrim used language. If the seraphim were nefrims, and Ethan Bailey had learned their language, that in itself would be important information.

  "This pile." Tseyltin tapped the second stack of papers. "They're all warp engine information. There are huge jumps in logic missing. Like all their no-brainers have been left out. I'm guessing that every . . .being . . . that worked on this part was on familiar grounds. There was no need to grapple with translations on paper."

  "That leaves these." Tseyltin motioned to the smallest pile. "They're so cryptic, it like they're nearly written in code."

  Mikhail shifted the pile to in front of Ensign Moldavsky. "I believe you're the expert on cryptology."

  Moldavsky winced but nodded. She started to leaf through the papers.

  "This supports what we've been told," Mikhail said. "Ethan was working on communicating with the seraphim. Project number one. He has a breakthrough and Hardin gets involved . . ." Mikhail paused to consider the facts. "Hardin gets involved because Ethan's next project for the seraphim is developing a working warp drive."

  Turk grunted. "If Hardin doesn't know that the seraphim are nefrims then he's only seeing Ethan's work as a way back home."

  Mikhail nodded. "But it worries me that Hardin lied to me when I told him what our mission was and asked him what he knew about Fenrir's engine."

  "He paid for everything," Turk growled lowly and started to pace. "He had to know what was going on."

  "Exactly," Mikhail said.

  "Why would he lie?" Tseytlin asked. "We have a spaceship with minor damage and intact warp engines. You'd have to be blind not to know how rare that is here."

  "Because we're Russians," Inozemtsev said.

  If it had been Mikhail in Hardin's place, he would have joined forces with an old classmate. Was Inozemtsev right? Had Hardin lied because the Svoboda wasn't a United Colony ship? No. Mikhail had stated that their orders originated from the U.C. High Command. Inozemtsev stirred restlessly, reminding Mikhail that his crew was waiting on him.

  "Hardin's motivation will have to remain unknown," Mikhail made a note to go back and consider it. "We have to consider him 'hostile,' but I don't think he's working with the seraphim. If he and Ethan Bailey were both working with the seraphim, Ethan wouldn't be encrypting his work. Since Ethan is the one that started the work with the express purpose of communicating with them, let's assume he's the nefrim collaborator."

  "Hardin funded the work," Mikhail returned to the chain of events. "But he wasn't there when the Lilianna arrived with Eraphie onboard."

  "Assuming she didn't lie to you." Turk growled.

  Mikhail couldn't see any benefit for Eraphie to hide a connection to Hardin, but Turk was right, he had to stay skeptical of everyone and everything, least he blind himself. He had to make some assumption, though, to follow threads of thought. "If what the Baileys are telling us is true, Ethan needed two ships to do salvage on a seraphim ship. He arranged for the people he trusted most, his family, to meet him at Fenrir's Rock instead of working with Hardin. I don't think its coincidence that the Lilianna arrived while Hardin was elsewhere. If things had gone the way Ethan wanted, his family would have been on their way long before Hardin returned."

  "Do you suppose the navigation system on the nefrim ship is intact?" Tseytlin suddenly asked.

  They all stared at Tseytlin dumbfounded. In fifty years of war, they'd never been able to capture a nefrim ship with its navigation system intact. Unlike human ships, the nefrim engines didn't record jumps. They had never been able to tell where the nefrims were jump from. The coordinates of the nefrim home worlds were still unknown.

  "They couldn't have the self-destruct alarmed while jumping," Tseytlin said. "We've ascertained that weakness in their self-destruct mechanism. If they jumped in here like we did, no enemies in sight, there's no reason to arm it, and then—bang—they could have bought it just like us."

  "Oh Christ, if its is . . ." Kutozov gasped out what they were all thinking.

  "Motherload!" Inozemtsev murmured.

  "I think finding the nefrim ship just moved to the top of our priorities," Mikhail said.

  "I think, sir, that these might be map coordinates and dates." Moldavsky pointed to symbols on the encrypted notes. "These symbols here are minotaur numbers." When Mikhail looked surprised that she knew, she added. "Becky was teaching the minotaur children hopscotch in the hanger. They marked the grid in chalk and used minotaur numbers. They use hexadecimal instead of base ten. So this set of symbols are two numbers separated by a non-number character. They could represent longitude and latitude. And here, in the corner, someone has translated this other set of symbols into a human date YYST."

  One of the first things that was explained to them once the Rosetta crew started working with them was "Yamoto-Yamaguchi Standard Time." All spaceships kept Earth Greenwich time. But with the odd time dilation, each newly-arrived ship soon discovered that their clocks and calendars matched no other version in the Sargasso. Apparently the close as the human landings had ever come to war was over time standardization. In the end, they settled on adopting Ya-ya's clock and calendar. The Svoboda was still trying to determine what the dilation would m
ean in regards to their return.

  "Eraphie said that the seraphim ship was in minotaur waters," Mikhail said. "This might be a listing of wrecks that the minotaurs know about. One of them might be the ship we want."

  Moldavsky made a sound of disgust as she flipped the paper over. "There's dozens."

  Mikhail nodded. He nearly asked Turk to check to see if Ethan had given the Rosetta the location of the salvage, but then just made a note to ask himself. What would be ideal was tracking down Ethan and trying to pry the truth out of him. Eraphie said he went to Mary's Landing. Mikhail paused, considering. "If Ethan had a workshop here in Ya-ya, and both the Rosetta and Red Gold are on their way to Fenrir's Rock, why would Ethan go to Mary's Landing?"

  "It doesn't make sense," Turk agreed. "The Baileys hate Mary's Landing. When we were out in the middle of nowhere with a failing engine, Paige refused to even consider going there, even though Mary's Landing was closer."

  "Eraphie couldn't believe Ethan decided to go," Mikhail said. Eraphie had said that Mary's Landing made up debts to enslave anyone with adapted genes. Hardin claimed that almost everyone out of Georgetown fell into that category. As a newcomer, though, Hardin had nothing to fear from Mary's Landing. "I wonder if Ethan had a choice. Hardin was fronting a lot of money for the project. What if Mary's Landing was Hardin's silent partner? Hardin kept it secret because the Baileys wouldn't work with Mary's Landing. Everything went smoothly and the project was nearly at a successful end."

  Turk understood where he was going with the logic. "Mary's people go to check on the engine and a fight breaks out as Ethan realizes who is paying for the work. Somehow during the fight, the engine gets activated and warps out ahead of schedule."

  "Yes. Wait. No." Mikhail frowned. Something wasn't meshing. "It . . ..It couldn't have been Ethan that started the fight. He was outside the blast zone."

  "That blows a very good theory." Tseytlin complained.

  "Maybe," Mikhail thought a moment. "What if it was a Bailey but not Ethan? The Lilianna arrived just hours before the engine warped out. What if they're the ones that started the fight?"