by Scott Rhine
“I talk to myself sometimes too. It’s not that odd.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s like she’s arguing with herself. I’m worried that the nanocytes may be affecting her mind.”
“You’re worried, I get it. Ok, let’s check in on her.” Omar turned back to the workstation and pulled up the feeds from around the ship. Sasha was floating in her quarters, legs folded under her as she spun slowly in the air, eyes closed. As Omar centered the image on her, Sasha tilted her head and her rotation slowed to a stop without her moving a muscle. She opened her eyes and looked directly at the camera. Her eyes were hard for Bella to read but something in them made her shudder slightly. Then the girl shook her head and smiled at them, a happy child once more.
“Hi, Omar! Hi, Bella!” Sasha’s voice came over the comm. system though Omar had not activated the audio. “What’s up?”
“Just checking in on you. Everything all right?” Omar said.
“Everything is great. I’ve almost got a grip on that problem you wanted me to solve. It’s got a ton of variables. It’d be a lot easier if I could use the rest of the Fleet’s processing power to keep track of them all.”
“We talked about that, Sasha. The other captains don’t want you in their systems uninvited.”
“They wouldn’t know. I’m super sneaky now. Without them this is going to take forever. I do have another idea that could speed things up though. I think I can get the nanocytes to make me a supercomputer. I’ll just need some raw materials, rare earth metals and such.”
“I’ll see what I can do when we get to the next system.”
“That’ll take, like, forever.” She sounded exasperated. “Fine, if you don’t mind, I’d like a little privacy now.” Bella could have sworn the girl’s face had fallen into darkness as she began to spin once more without any visible action. The video feed cut out.
“Did she do that?”
“Yeah.” Omar replied. “The only downside of having a crewmember with godlike powers is that you have a crewmember with godlike powers. That’s why I don’t worry about her. If she wanted to, she could kill us all in seconds.”
“That’s a comforting thought.”
“It should be. Bella, I understand your concern but I think it’s unfounded. Sasha is a good girl. I trust her to do the right thing. It a lot of ways, she’s a better person than the rest of us in the Fleet with the possible exception of yourself. With luck, we can keep the Fleet from changing her as it has done the rest of us.”
“All right, Omar. I just wanted to air my concerns.”
“So noted. I count on you to watch out for my blind spots. It’s why we’re such a good team.” Omar returned to his work and Bella left his room.
Bella still had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right but she tried to let it go. As the days passed and nothing bad happened, she began to believe Omar was right. When Captain Conrad began to bark about wanting to take Sasha her worry returned. Still, she believed that everything would work out well. Then she got the word that Sasha had been found on the Sikorsky surrounded by dead bodies and it seemed that all her worst fears had come true.
Part IV
“The Moving Finger writes and having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Omar Khayyam
Chapter 16
The boy known as Omar Khayyam Hadi grew to manhood in the great city of Keikruit, perched high in the Alamutian mountains where the sky was eternally tinged with pink and the air was rarified to perfection. It was the center of power for the Ragas, the august leaders of this world of wonder. One might presume that living in such a place would be a life of leisure. Perhaps for some it was, but for the quiet young man with a poet’s name it was a life of endless toil.
Omar was the third child of Sahra and Mohammad Hadi and the only one who lived to adulthood. Poverty was the only birthright he inherited from his parents and it was one he firmly believed he would pass on to his own children. He began working at the age of ten, cleaning dishes and wiping tables at a shop a block from his home, the money given to his parents to help with the eternal debts that hung over their heads. He started his second job at thirteen, as his mother fell ill and could no longer work, then a third at fourteen when his father was killed by an industrial lathe. The boy grew hard and lean, the bulk and size which was his birthright weathered to a wiry tautness which belied his age.
Omar was a serious child and lacked the facility to make friends easily. When his mother finally passed as he approached the ripe old age of nineteen, he was left alone in the world. No longer needing to work a third job to sustain his meager lifestyle, the young man finally had time for something besides sleep.
He began to sit on the outskirts of the city at night, when the misty tops of the clouds which surrounded Keikruit lapped at the rough terrain like waves from some ephemeral ocean. He would stare up at the night sky, picking out the few constellations his father had taught him when he was very young and there had been more time for such things. The memories it brought up were bittersweet but possibly the sweetest he had known up to that point.
More than the night sky did he favor the sunsets, brilliant colors streaming across the sky far beyond anything man might make caused him to feel a kinship with the natural world. At those times he felt connected to something greater than himself, as though the soul of his namesake, the long dead poet Omar Khayyam, lived on in him. He found a copy of the poet’s verse, the Rubaiyat, in a used bookstore and took to reading it when there was sufficient light left in the sky. The words were difficult for Omar, both for their unfamiliar style and because it was the first book he had ever owned. He never understood why his parents, who had owned no books of their own, would gift him such a name. It was an aberration in the simple life they had led.
Omar might have forgotten the book after a time, left off dreaming and returned to the labor that was his lifelong companion, if the Void Fleet had not come and disturbed the stable and stagnant world in which he lived. Omar’s homeworld of Travail was rich but foolish. The wealthy and prosperous, while prepared to put down a revolt from below, had not foreseen an attack from above. Perhaps they thought the days of conquering ships from space were long over.
When the ships of the Fleet descended upon the elite as they wallowed in their ivory towers, they must have realized their mistake. Omar watched the night sky that evening as dozens of warships landed in the city and began disarming the local guard. The militia was trained to fight civilians armed with sticks, not trained soldiers with advanced weapons. Their formations collapsed in the face of the heavily armed mercenaries. The underpaid militiamen had no desire to die for those in power. It took the soldiers from space less than a day to take the capitol and by extension, the world.
Omar, like most of the populace, believed initially that the conquerors had come to rule over Travail, to replace the existing elite with one of their own. It came as a surprise that after the spacers eliminated all opposition they ignored the locals entirely. Transports began ferrying materials and supplies from the surface to whatever great ships they had in orbit. The only time they noticed the poor was in conscripting laborers to gather the materials for transport. Omar was one of those pressed into service to assist this exodus of wealth.
A strong young man in the prime of his youth, Omar’s large frame made him an easy choice for the press gangs. The starmen were fair with their conscripts, many said they were fairer than the former elite whom they had replaced. Each worker was given pay taken from the coffers of the ruling class. The work was hard but the spacers apparently had no desire to work their conscripts to death and there were breaks. Omar used those to sit alone reading his one book. Perhaps it was this that caught the attention of the Void ship’s officer.
“You there!” The woman’s voice was sharp, confident. He looked up, startl
ed and saw a woman with skin as pale as moonlight and eyes darker than the night sky stalking toward him. The crisp uniform she wore might have told him her rank if he knew about such things. As such, he could only tell by her demeanor that she was not one to anger.
“Yes, ma’am?” He replied, not sure the woman could want from him. He stood and placed his book on a table. The officer looked him over and her eyes narrowed as she glanced at his book. Omar feared she would take the book from him, uncertain where he could find another. He closed it and placed it behind his back as he stood.
“I’m looking for someone and I think you might be suitable. Does your culture have taboos about sex?”
“Uh, what do you mean?” The woman sighed and rolled her eyes.
“You do know what sex is, don’t you? Fornication, the old in-out, hide the pickle. Does your planet have some ridiculous taboo about premarital sex or what?”
“I… I guess not.”
“Good. I’ve got an hour to kill before the next ship arrives and I’ve been cooped up on that ship for weeks. Interested?” Omar was dumbfounded. While it wasn’t unheard of for women to seek out men he had never been approached in so blunt a manner. In truth he had mostly been overlooked by women because of his poverty and lack of culture.
“Don’t you even want to know my name?”
“If I had, I would have asked. Look we’re going to be pulling off this rock in a few weeks and you’ll never have to see me again. I won’t get pregnant or give you some foreign disease. I don’t believe in small talk or romance. If you’re not into it, it won’t affect your position here. I’m sure one of your peers will take me up on the offer.”
“I don’t think…” Omar started to say when she cut him off.
“Never mind.” The woman turned away from him and walked back into the offices which the starmen had occupied. Laborers weren’t allowed there so Omar shrugged and returned to his book.
He found it hard to concentrate on the verses for the remainder of his break. The woman had left him rattled. He found out her name from one of the other spacers, Colonel Veronika Kharzin of the Battleship Damascus. The crewman’s knowledge of her seemed to end there except that he was warned not to upset her. He worked the rest of the day with one eye on the offices but he didn’t see her again.
By the next day he had parsed each syllable she had spoken a dozen times, seeking to understand the strange, proud woman. She was completely unlike the women of his experience. Those with whom he had passed some time were all much like him, poor and downtrodden. There was always a sense of desperation in their couplings, a need to cling to one another and hide from the misery of their daily lives which informed and warped the relationships.
Omar found the woman’s confidence intimidating and yet alluring. She lived in a different world than him, one where she could ask for her desires to be fulfilled without constraint. He wanted to be near her again, to try through propinquity to gain some fraction of that strength. The thought preyed upon him while he worked, becoming a vision of all he lacked.
He did not see her that day, or the one after that. It was on the third day that he caught a glimpse of her walking from her office to the front of the ship he was loading. He almost dropped the package he was carrying, so eager was he to catch her eye again. He started toward her until one of the spacers stopped him, the rifle in his hands making argument impossible.
Still, he must have made enough of a scene because the woman’s dark eyes darted toward him. He caught them with his own for a fraction of a second before they returned to the captain she was speaking with. Omar saw, or believed he saw, her lip twitch upward in a ghost of a smile. He returned to work with a vengeance, hoping to arrange a break while she remained on the landing strip.
That was not to be, and by the end of the shift he was simply tired and more depressed than ever. The next morning he was waiting for his assignment when she appeared at the side of the duty sergeant and said a few words. She appeared more beautiful than ever, her very severity becoming the cause of his attraction. The sergeant pointed in his direction and the woman nodded. The sergeant called his name but before he could rise the woman walked away and returned to her offices.
“You’re Omar?” The sergeant asked. Omar nodded. “I hear you know how to read. We’ve got special duty for you today.”
Literacy was not a skill that many of the poor needed, at least beyond simple words and phrases. Omar was not much different in that. The Rubaiyat was the only book he had read but he dared not tell the sergeant that. The spacers wanted him to read through the manifests of the elite’s stockpiles. Luckily it did not require much more than basic reading ability. He was placed in a small room, given a tablet and told to consolidate the lists from the manifests so that the spacers could better decide what wealth to take from Travail.
As he began to read the contents he wondered why the elite had needed to horde such vast quantities of goods. The contents of the warehouses in one region could have fed and clothed everyone on his world. Instead it sat unused in boxes, priced beyond the reach of many who needed it most. Omar felt an anger that had been hidden in him for years rising as he worked. When he heard the door to the small room open he almost rose in anger when his eyes caught sight of her. The angular woman flashed him a smile sharp enough to draw blood and sauntered into the room.
“Hey,” She said lightly. “It looked like you wanted to speak to me. Something on your mind?” All of his thoughts from the last few days flashed in his mind. The things he wished he had said fell apart and seemed foolish in the face of this woman, whose scent was now reaching his nose. She wore no perfumes but simply had a clean, fresh human odor. It contrasted sharply with both the elite and the poor of his world.
“You smell good.” Even as he said the words they sounded inane in his ears. She must think he was a moron. “I mean, uh, you’re different from the women I have known.”
“Not as poetic as I might have hoped, but good enough.” She tapped the door shut with her foot as she moved forward toward Omar. This time he stopped himself from protesting.
His previous experiences had not prepared him for this woman from another world. She drove against him with a ferocity, tearing at his clothes with a hunger which both scared and aroused him. He began to match her movements with his own, overpowering her with his strength even as she fought to regain dominance. Their struggle continued long past their joining, where they each strove to devour the other with their need. It was the most intense experience of Omar’s life, bringing up in him all of the pain of his life as well as a deep and resounding desire for something more than the future he saw for himself. He drove himself against Veronika, desperate to connect with this woman who represented all that he wished he could have in life.
For her part, Veronika seemed as drawn to the simple and honest laborer as he was to her. She clung to him as though he were a buoy in a storm, a lifeline to something she could not admit to herself that she needed. As she crashed against him over and over again, there was in her eyes a fire which each orgasm quenched little by little until exhaustion overcame them both.
After, he looked at her in the low light of the small room. She seemed more peaceful without the jagged edges of her uniform armoring her against the world. Veronika smiled at him, a softer smile this time with just a hint of vulnerability. Omar leaned up on one elbow, a dozen questions in his mind. Instead of asking any of them, he substituted another, unaware of the question’s hidden subtext.
“What will happen to my world when you leave?” Veronika sighed and leaned back, staring at the empty wall.
“I don’t know. I’d guess that whomever was in charge before will reestablish control and things will be much as they were before our arrival. Even if some other faction gains control it will matter little to you. Regime changes rarely make any difference to the poor.”
“You’re so nonchalant about it.” Omar felt the muscles in his back tighten involuntarily. Veronika must have s
ensed the change because she shifted her torso slightly away from him even as she turned to face him directly.
“Well, it won’t really make any difference to me. The Fleet won’t be back this way.”
“But you could do some good here. I know what your people are gathering for transport is only a fraction of what is available. You could redistribute the food to the poor; help establish a better government that won’t cater to the elite few.”
“Why would we do a thing like that?”
“How can you even ask that? People are suffering and you could make a difference. Doesn’t that make it your responsibility?”
“You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the Fleet cares about what happens down here. Perhaps you also think I have any real power. I’m just a soldier following orders. If you want change, it’s up to you.”
“But I have nothing. You have the ships and weapons to enforce change. Where is your Fleet going that’s so important?” Veronika sighed and turned away from Omar.
“Nowhere.” She said at last. “It’s just what we do. The Fleet Captains decide on a stellar system based on starcharts made centuries ago of where human and alien colonies were located. Sometimes it’s a system we can dominate, sometimes we trade. Either way we get what we can and move on. The Fleet couldn’t stay in any one system for too long anyway. The crews get antsy and trigger happy.”
“So you have no purpose? You just drift through the cosmos aimlessly?”
“Me or the Fleet? If I’ve learned one thing it’s that everything in life has a momentum. The Fleet exists because the Fleet exists. We go from system to system because that’s how things are done. As for me, this is the life I chose and frankly I like it.”
“It sounds lonely.” Omar reached out a hand to touch Veronika but she pulled away from him roughly, sitting up.
“I’m a loner. That’s just the way I was made. You’re no different. I’ve watched you working. You’re the most solitary man I’ve ever seen, so wrapped up in your head and that book of yours it’s a wonder you even noticed I spoke to you. It’s that solitude which drew me to you.” Veronika stopped speaking suddenly, as though she had said something she hadn’t meant to say. Looking away, she stood and gathered her uniform. “Look, it’s been great talking shop and all but that’s not why I came here. I’ve got to get back. Thanks for the fun.” Omar watched Veronika dress, seeing her muscles tighten and her jaw set. Before long she was a Colonel again, all sharp edges and severe eyes. She nodded to him curly as he began to dress and left, shutting the door behind her.