by M. D. Cooper
Grayson took her hand and slid beside her on the small bed. “Feeling better?”
She nodded. “I am. Watching Mr. Fizzle Pop’s antics helps. Is the course laid out?”
“Yes. We’re en route to Pi Scorpii Beta as we speak. It’ll take about four days.”
Four days? Well, at least that would give her time to feel like herself again.
“Do you have a plan?” Grayson asked.
Kylie scoffed. “Of course I do.”
“Would you like to tell me what it is?” He gave his smooth-as-butter smile.
“Assume the identities and go to the party. We’ll kidnap the general, and he’ll lead us to the lab.”
“So…” Grayson said slowly, “he’ll just…tell us where it is?”
“I’m hoping so.”
“He’ll just reveal where he’s keeping stolen tech that’s entirely illegal thanks to the Orion Peace Accords? He’ll just hand it over?”
“Well, no. First we might need to torture him.” Kylie patted Grayson on the arm. “Then we’ll go into the lab, kill a few people, seize some tech, then blow the place up, like Winter said.”
Grayson gave her a sour look. “I’d feel better if I thought you were kidding.”
“I mean, maybe it won’t go exactly like that, but what else can we do?”
“One, we get the intel without the use of torture, then we scout ahead and see what the situation might actually be before we go in.”
“I’d laugh if I thought you were joking.”
Grayson started to sigh, but Kylie reached over and kissed him.
“I’ll be safe,” she assured him. “Everyone will be fine, and we’ll get what we need. You just need to trust me.”
“I trust you,” Grayson argued.
“But not my plans.”
“Er, your plans sometimes could use a bit more thought in the natural progression before follow-through.”
He had a point, but Kylie wouldn’t be so easily beat. “Such as?”
“Such as, if we kidnap a general, do we bring him here?”
She gasped. “Grayson, there are kids here! Of course not. We’ll do it off site. Can’t you just go with the flow?”
“After twelve years of working together, how can you ask that with a straight face?” he grumbled.
He was right; of course he couldn’t go with the flow, just like her plan would most likely go sideways. But she always managed to get through just fine.
“Marge isn’t here anymore, Kylie,” Grayson said quietly. “She’s not here to pull you out of the fire like she always used to.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I…miss her. I know this is what it’s like to have an AI and then to be separated…it just sucks.”
“Life without an AI is very different,” Grayson admitted. “When you’re ready, the Alliance can make sure you get another one.”
“I’m not ready yet. It’s not exactly like adopting a new cat, Gray.”
He shuddered. “Of all the analogies you could make….”
Kylie took his hand. “I know you’re just worried about me. I promise we’ll be careful. We might not do it by the book, but we’ll be book-ish. Book adjacent.”
Grayson leaned over and kissed her. “That’s all I ask. And if you do run into trouble, I don’t care where you are, I’ll get you out of trouble, fly the ship down through atmo if I have to.”
Chuck cleared his throat.
Grayson glanced up. “Or I’ll get Chuck to do it.”
Kylie chuckled. “I like the life and community we’ve built aboard the BQ, Grayson. I won’t do anything that risks it.”
“Good.” He kissed her again, more passionately, until the sound of Mr. Fizzle Pop coughing up a hairball interrupted them.
“NARF! GAG! GROSS!”
Kylie stroked the cat’s fur.
Grayson glared at him. “You did that on purpose.”
Mr. Fizzle Pop flicked his tail. “SO?”
* * * * * *
Pia entered her quarters and took her helmet off to reveal white hair shaved close on either side. The remaining locks on the top of her head stood in a curly fauxhawk.
She walked to a console and palmed a symbol, activating her connection to the person who had hired her.
“Well?” the voice in the hologram asked.
“She’s coming. Are you sure about this? Revealing yourself?”
“I’m sure. Leave the rest up to me.”
CHAPTER 10 - SERA
STELLAR DATE: 12.28.8959 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Grace O’Malley
REGION: Sigma 1199 System, Norma Arm
Stars snapped back into place on the bridge’s forward display, and Sera rose from the ship’s command seat, walking toward it. Her brow was furrowed, as though she expected the stars to tell her something she didn’t already know, something she sought, but had yet to find.
“Do you think it would work?” the captain asked. “Trust me, if it did, I’d frown at stars all day long.”
“I doubt much scares stars.”
Sera turned to see Jason entering the bridge, a steaming mug of coffee in each hand. “True, they do tend to be rather implacable.”
“It’s their nature.” He handed her one of the cups. “Just the way you like it.”
She lifted the mug to her lips, letting the rich dark liquid roll across her tongue and down her throat. “I suppose, most of them have watched the universe unfold for billions of years, and most will spend billions more watching over the black after we’re gone.”
“Think so?” Jason asked, a brow arched as he glanced at her. “We might outlive them.”
Sera shook her head at the playful tone in Jason’s voice. “Of course you’d think that.”
“Well, when you get to be as old as I am, you look at things a bit differently.”
“Your half a dozen centuries of real-time living aren’t a patch on my uncle’s,” Sera reminded him. “Trust me, I’m quite familiar with the ‘long view’.”
“Fair enough. Still, wouldn’t you mind popping in and out of cryo? Maybe flying to another galaxy, or jumping halfway across the universe? There are wonders out there we can only imagine.”
Sera slid an arm around Jason’s waist as they gazed out at the starscape. “Yeah, there are, and I want to see them, but I don’t think it’ll take us fifty trillion years.”
Jason nodded toward the display where one of the nearby stars blazed so brightly that, were its output not muted, no other star would be visible. “Well, that guy’s going to burn out in a few million years, so we might not have to wait that long.”
“Fair enough.” Sera chuckled. “Though we might get bored hanging out here for that long.”
Sera heaved a sigh and shook her head. “No, just that…well, we’ve been at this for years, and we still haven’t found a trace of the core AIs—at least, nothing that would hint at where they went.”
“We’ll get there. We’ll find our clue.” Jason pressed against her side, arm pulling her close.
“Oh yeah?” she glanced at him. “When?”
“Hey, you send out a hundred million probes across the galaxy, and even the anomalies are bound to add up into the thousands.”
“Have we done thousands already?” Sera asked in a worried whisper. “That’s a recurring dream of mine, by the way, that we cross over our thousandth system we’ve checked out, only to find that we’re old and decrepit and we’ve wasted our lives chasing shadows.”
“Time spent with you is never wasted, Sera.”
“What? It’s true. We’re all going to spend our lives doing something. What’s better than doing it with the woman yo
u love?”
Sera barked a laugh. “Well played, mister.”
Sera held out her half-empty coffee cup, waving it in the direction of the massive blue star that dominated the black. “I’d wager a guess that it’s that beastie. Too close to that sucker, and poof.”
“Could very well be it,” Jason said. “Let’s get in close and see if it dropped a beacon.”
Sera nodded as she set a course for the type-A0 supergiant star. It massed over a hundred Sols, and burned so hot that its light was nearly pure white. That, coupled with its size, meant that a lot of photons were speeding in every direction, some quite a bit more energetically than was normal for main sequence stars.
“Let’s see how things look in this morass,” she said while flicking a hand at the holotank, bringing up a three-dimensional representation of the system. “So, there are two type-B stars in the mix here, one hundred and four hundred AU out, give or take. Looks like they both have small planetary systems along with our supergiant—though its kids are all gas giants that are hot and close.”
“Don’t forget that dust cloud. Heck of an outer belt,” Jason said.
“How far?” Jason asked, a marker appearing in the holotank a moment later.
“Going to be slow-going, stripping its data this far out,” Jason muttered. “Should we close in?”
Sera nodded. “Yeah, let’s. But let’s also send a transmission and get it feeding us the summaries.”
Jason shrugged. “I mean, he knew when we were scheduled to get here. We can wake him if we find anything.”
“Speaking of waking,” Sera looked at the bottom of her now-empty cup. “I could use a refill.”
Her husband glanced back at the bridge’s exit. “You know where the galley is.”
“Oh!” she cried out in mock shock. “I see how it is.”
Jason nodded while bending over and brushing his lips against her cheek. “Yes, you do.” His coffee mug pressed against her free hand. “And thank you for the refill.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 11 - MIRA
STELLAR DATE: 12.29.8959 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: OASS Inquiry, system astropause
REGION: Regina System, Outer Alliance
The Inquiry slipped back into normal space with a small shudder that set Mira’s teeth on edge. It had first occurred when the ship shifted into the dark layer, and Aqua had spent the three days of transit from Bysmark to Regina going over every graviton emitter with a fine-tooth comb.
In the end, she hadn’t found any issues, and declared it something that required more data.
Well, hopefully she has enough now, Mira thought.
She dared to spare a glance at the chief engineer, who was hunched over her console, muttering to herself in a tone that did not invite any inquiry whatsoever. After a few more whispered sentences about the parentage of whoever had installed the graviton emitters in the Inquiry, Aqua rose and cleared her throat.
“OK, I think I have it now. With your permission, Commander?”
“Of course,” Mira said with a gracious nod. “Best of luck, Chief.”
“Huh,” the woman grunted as she walked off the bridge. “I don’t need luck, the build team needs luck, if I ever…” Her voice trailed off as she slid down the ladder to the lower deck.
“I’m tempted to monitor the pickups to see what else she comes up with,” Brock said in a hushed voice.
“Or at least to make sure Lorra survives,” Emma added.
Janice cleared her throat. “Perhaps it would be ideal if we had a report on what you’ve stripped from Regina’s beacon, Ensign Brock.”
“Uh…yes. Of course, Lieutenant. I’ll get right on that.”
Brock bent to his task while Emma rolled her eyes before turning to Mira. “Commander, we’re one-point-two light seconds off our vector. I’ve plotted a corrective burn to get us back on course.”
“That’s a long ways off,” Mira said. “That due to our graviton emitter woes?
“I think so, ma’am. Either that, or we have a scan miscalibration.”
“I’ll run tests on that as we cross Regina, Commander,” Brock volunteered.
“Good,” she replied. “Have Janice review your findings. I want to be sure we’re dialed in before we jump again.”
Mira said with a soft laugh.
The commander cocked a brow.
“I have the report parsed, Commander,” Brock announced a moment later. “Looks like insystem traffic is nominal. No current alarms on the lanes, and no recent disturbances in the system.”
“Very good, let me know what further analysis shows. I want a review of any anomalies at the system perimeter, and when we pass the next OASF beacon, strip it and forward the data to me.”
“Yes, Commander.” Brock’s tone was meek, earning him a smirk from his sister.
“Ensign Emma.” Mira got her attention. “I made a correction to your burn profile. You may execute now.”
Emma blushed. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
Mira rose from her seat. “I’m going to check in on the chief. Janice, you have the conn.”
“Aye, I have the conn.”
Well before Mira reached the engineering bay, she could hear the chief swearing up a storm.
“If I find who did this, I swear, I’m going to shove this so far up their ass, they’ll give birth to floating children!”
Wait…what?
A moment later, she reached the bay to see Chief Aqua storming back and forth while Lorra stood nearby, looking like she’d swallowed a quillfish.
“What’d you find?” Mira asked, doing her best not to sound afraid of the raging engineer.
“Rank incompetence is what,” Aqua all but hollered. “One of the secondary polarity controllers was miscalibrated so badly, it was spewing negative gravitons when we wanted positive. Now we’re going to have to check every single one of them.”
“Is that a hardware config check?” Mira asked. “Or can it be done with software?”
“Hardware.” Lorra’s tone was matter-of-fact. “It’s in the normalization system. It’s telling the software the emissions are correct while outputting the wrong polarity particles.”
Aqua let out a string of unintelligible words capped by, “We can’t even tell which are miscalibrated! We might as well tear the ship completely apart and start over!”
“You might have thought of this,” Mira carefully ventured, “but what if we equipped one of the hullcrawlers with graviton measuring devices and sent them out to get a read off each one? Then you can either manually recalibrate any that fail, or write a software update that corrects the readings so it operates properly.”
“Huh,” Lorra grunted. “It’s kinda sloppy, but it’d work.”
“Not the sort of thing we should have to do on a new ship.” Aqua ground out the words in a tone that could weld steel. “But since we also don’t have time to take everything apart, I think that could work. Nice thinking, Commander.”
After confirming that the two engineers had everything they needed for the job, Mira retreated to the galley to check on the ribs she had in the slow cooker. She’d planned to make a meal for the whole crew
to celebrate their first successful jump, but now it appeared as though the merriment might have to wait.
She was debating whether to remove the meat and flash freeze it—a risky proposition—or let it finish and save it for later, when Greg burst into the galley.
“Ma’am, do you have a minute?”
He appeared agitated, so Mira gave him her full attention.
“Of course. What is it?”
“Well, Chief Aqua just told me that you volunteered me to go out onto the hull and measure graviton emitter levels.”
A startled cough slipped past Mira’s lips before a frown knitted her brow. “I told her to use a hullcrawler. I have no idea why she told you to do it. Hold on a mike.”
“Alright,” he nodded while slipping into a chair. “It’s not that I can’t do that, it just seemed odd when we have the crawlers…plus, I have other work to do, and I don’t report up to Aqua.”
“Agreed,” Mira said. “I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
She reached out to Aqua, and the other woman immediately answered.
The greeting was brusque, but smacked of general urgency and not insubordination.
There wasn’t even a hint of apology in the other woman’s words or tone, and Mira felt her blood pressure rise.