by George Ellis
Desmond looked at me for a few moments and then his eyes suddenly went wide. He knew what I was thinking. “I’ll search for you to the ends of the verse.”
“You might have to go farther than that,” I said. Then I cut the transmission.
“And here I thought you didn’t have any balls,” Edgar said.
“Come with me if you want to live,” I told him.
He gave a confused look back. He knew the reference but wasn’t sure what I meant. I just grinned. “I don’t have those credits. But I might have something better to offer.”
I paged Batista on the intercom. “How we doing back there?”
“We need more time!” she barked back.
“No problem. You’ve got about 60 seconds before the transport ship clears our blast radius and Slay sets off the failsafe.”
Batista uttered a string of expletives as I watched the transport ship edge away from the Stang. I sounded the klaxon to make sure everybody, including Pirate, was strapped in.
Desmond was trying me back, but I ignored him.
“I think I finally understand the ending of the Sopranos,” Edgar said out of the blue.
“How’s that?”
“At first I thought the Stang’s video system had a glitch. Like when they’re at the diner and the screen goes to black, I got all pissed that it had cut out before the end. But then I watched a few times and realized that was the entire show’s actual ending.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this right now, but yeah, I remember my uncle saying something about the ending being very controversial at the time,” I replied. “Like there were actual news reports about it.”
“It was a great series, and I thought they blew it,” Edgar said. “But now I don’t think so. I mean, if they blow the failsafe, we’re not going to know it. Our brains won’t have time to process it. We’ll just cut to black. Like if we got whacked. Like Tony.”
“Spoiler alert!” Gary cried. “I haven’t committed that one to my memory yet! But now there’s no point.”
I was thinking about the metaphysical implications of “cutting to black” when the Burnett hailed us. I answered and Slay’s face filled the screen. “You rang?”
“I just called to pass along a final message from Largent,” she said.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“He wanted you to know it was him. He said you’d know what I was talking about. Enjoy your last few seconds of existence.”
And with that, she cut the beam.
Next thing I knew, I felt like I was split in half. And each half of me was being slammed to my chair with such force I didn’t even feel pain. My body just tremored and seemed to flatten a few inches.
Through the glass, I could see the blackness of space somehow expand around the Stang. Lights flew by the ship. Or vice versa. I was too disoriented to understand the difference. The moment seemed to stretch on for minutes.
Then the pressure lessened.
My body could move again. I could breathe. According to the instruments, we were still traveling about 1/6th the speed of light. The Burnett and the Golden Bear were a distant memory. I checked the failsafe on the floor. It was still there. I was still there. We weren’t exploded. The plan worked; we had used the warp drive to outrun the transmission radius of the bomb. Slay couldn’t detonate the failsafe while we were traveling 30,000 miles per second in the opposite direction.
I looked at Edgar. It was odd that he was the person I was sharing this life-altering moment with. He grasped the gravity of the moment, however, and simply shook his head in disbelief.
I unstrapped from my chair and stood up, uncertain at first. A few steps later, it was clear that warp speed didn’t work the same way as mechanical speed. Apparently, it wasn’t a matter of g-force. It was all about displacement. I’d read that somewhere anyway. It was just a theory at the time, of course, but now I was experiencing it.
“I’ll take this over the credits any day of the week,” Edgar finally said.
I was about to exit the cabin when he asked if I knew where we were going. I honestly had no idea.
* * *
The drive had always been our way out. It was just so damn obvious, none of us even considered it until Avery pointed out that we had two of the people who built it and two of the best mechanics in the verse on board.
As I walked to the engine room, it dawned on me that every step I took marked another 30,000 miles we’d traveled. The simple act of stopping to think about it for a few seconds gave the warp drive enough time to transport us farther than we’d ever been from the known verse. It was mind boggling.
It was also scary. If the drive broke down, we were marooned in deep space with no supplies. I pushed that thought from my mind and decided to revel in the moment. We were the new explorers, as unlikely a group as you’d ever see.
Pirate sauntered into the corridor and brushed against my leg. He was feeling spry too, apparently. I knelt down to pick him up and he willingly obliged, a rarity since our crew of two had expanded to six.
“You realize you’re the first cat to venture this far into the black,” I told him. He proceeded to knead my chest in victory.
“I know I don’t have a body, but I feel weird,” Gary said. “We’re traveling almost as fast as the circuits in my head.”
“I know the feeling,” I replied.
When Pirate and I got to the engine room, Marcum was dancing. Batista, Romy and Avery were all just watching him, bemused. I walked to where my brother was laying on the gurney and held out my hand.
He shook it with all the strength he could muster.
“This the famous Pirate?” he asked, reaching to pet him.
I placed the purring cat onto Avery’s gurney and he nestled next to him. I looked at my brother’s legs with concern.
“They’ll come around eventually,” he said, wistfully. I nodded, also not wanting to discuss it.
My eyes scanned the warp drive, which had been hastily (but apparently, properly) installed by connecting it to the main engine core. I was still amazed by its compact size, but I had a new respect for the device, even though I had no concept of how it worked. I didn’t bother to ask Marcum or Romy. That was a question for another time.
“We should probably stop soon,” Romy said, doing some calculations in her head. “We’re getting pretty far off the map, so to speak.”
“Is the stopping process the same as the speeding up process?” I asked, referring to the few seconds of body-splitting weirdness I experienced the moment we launched to warp velocity.
“No, that was just because we went from zero to warp,” she explained. “The drive can grad it up or down.”
“Meaning we can slow down slowly?”
“Yep.”
“Okay Gary, let’s try that,” I said. “You know how it works?”
“Pffft,” he said. “I’ve known how it worked for a good two minutes now.”
I felt a slight reduction in speed, but other than that, the transition was fairly smooth.
“It’ll take about a minute to get back down to average Stang velocity,” Gary said.
“Pull up a map. let’s see where we are,” I said.
Gary projected the solar system until the screen in the room. We were a blinking dot just past Mars, between the Red Planet and Jupiter.
“Huh, not too far,” I said.
Marcum stopped dancing and took exception. “Not too far? We just traveled 20 million miles in a matter of minutes!”
“I know, I know, it’s amazing,” I admitted. “I’m just saying, think how far we could go. We could soar beyond Jupiter in a couple hours if we wanted.”
Edgar had followed me into the engine room and was standing by the door. “Just one problem with that,” he noted.
Desmond.
We had used the warp drive to escape a dangerous situation. Even Desmond would understand that. We could just as easily find a new place to make the hand-off to the Golden Bear
.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. I looked around at the people in the room. “The way I see it, Silver Star definitely didn’t deserve the drive. Giving them this technology would’ve been like giving it to the devil himself.”
I suddenly remembered Slay’s last words to me about Largent. A bolt of anger shot through me, but I suppressed it for the moment.
“Desmond, on the other hand. Could be worse, right? I mean the guy may be in charge of the Tracers, but he’s polite. He even has good taste in beer. I value that. But to give him the ability to sneak up on any ship or station at will? He’s got megalomaniac written all over him.”
“What about the fact we had a deal with him?” Edgar asked.
“We did. True. But part of that deal was him destroying the Burnett before they destroyed us, and he technically failed there, since we had to save ourselves.”
“That’s thin,” Avery said, cracking a smile. “But technically true, as you say.”
I turned to Marcum. “Why did you create the drive?”
He looked at Romy and nodded. “It wasn’t just me. There was a team of us. Romy was part of it. To answer your question, we created the technology to explore the farthest reaches of space.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how Desmond would have used it,” I said. “But me? I’ve got nothing better to do. I’d love to get out of the verse for a while. What about you, Batista? Or would you rather run from the federation the rest of your life? Romy? There someplace you’d rather be?”
Romy shook her head, warming to the idea.
“Avery?”
He shrugged. “I always loved pushing the boundaries.”
I turned to Edgar. He sighed, not wanting to be put on a spot. A few weeks ago, his answer would have been simple: we take the drive back to Desmond and he gets his credits. But now?
“I’ve always wanted to see Saturn,” he said. “And I want a bigger monitor in my quarters. I really want to see Jurassic Park on the big screen.”
Chapter 25
Avery was relaxing in bed, Batista by his side, when I entered their quarters. He motioned to the empty space on the wall where the monitor used to be.
“Dude took the screen right out of here,” he said, half-complaining, half-amused.
“A deal’s a deal,” I said. “This was the biggest screen we had. I’ll get you guys a new one tomorrow from my room.”
Batista leaned over to kiss Avery. “It’s okay,” she said. “We have some catching up to do anyway.” She kissed him again and when it started to get awkward, I cleared my throat.
“I might need at least another day or two to rest,” he pleaded.
“We’ll see,” she replied. “I’ll let you two boys talk about your feelings.”
She rolled her eyes and exited the room. The door slid closed behind her.
“She doesn’t play,” I said.
Avery shook his head in agreement. I sat in the chair opposite the bed and tried to smile at my brother. It probably came out looking more like my lips were fighting each other.
“I guess you’re wondering why I let you think I was dead,” he said, getting to the heart of it.
“Something like that.”
“At the time, I wanted everyone I knew to think I was dead,” he explained. “I did things…things I’m not proud of, Denny. I’m not talking about stealing stuff or hurting people. I mean worse. I wanted to disappear. So when dad…was gone…I decided to be gone myself.”
“We’ve all done stuff.”
“Not like this, brother.”
“You didn’t disappear from Batista though, did you?”
He knew that was coming. He acknowledged it by lowering his eyes.
“I knew you’d be disappointed in me. I know you always joke about being the lowly wrecker, but you’ve got principles. You help people. Like, actually help them. I’m a taker, Denny. Always have been. I only got in touch with Batista after I learned about Griss’s plan to destroy Jasper. It was too much to stomach and I knew Batista would help no matter what I’d done.”
“Like being a scout on the Rox?”
“Like that, yes. I’ve killed people, Denny. Too many to count. Most of them had it coming, but some didn’t…”
I waited to see if he was done. He wiped his eyes and seemed to shrink into himself. I put a hand on his shoulder. It was a small gesture, but Avery brightened a bit at the touch.
“There’s something else,” I told him. “Before we made the jump to warp speed, Slay passed along a message from Largent. She said he wanted me to know – us to know – that it was him.”
I didn’t have to tell my brother what Slay had meant. Largent was admitting that he had been behind our father’s murder. Avery clenched his jaw, trying to control his rage. But it wasn’t just anger he was holding in, it was guilt.
“It’s my fault,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I was working for Silver Star at the time. That’s how he got to dad. I’ve been telling myself ever since it wasn’t me that caused it, but it was.”
The revelation hit me like a ton of bricks.
“How?”
“I didn’t know, Denny –”
“How?” I repeated. I was now squeezing his shoulder, hard. He looked at it. I released him, but kept my eyes locked on his.
“He wanted to buy out the old man, like always,” Avery explained. “Largent didn’t even need dad’s operation, but it was just another feather in his cap he needed to feel superior. Dad refused, as you can imagine. So Largent sent me to broker a deal. I tried my best, but I only made dad even madder. You know how he got about Silver Star.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, dad and I had met on Mars. New Chicago,” he said. “Remember that one time we went?”
“I remember.”
“So dad and I talked. He refused. I figured that was the end of it. When I told Largent, he didn’t even seem mad. A couple days later, dad’s ship malfunctioned near Missura and you know the rest.”
It had exploded, in fact. A very rare malfunction – one of the only times I’d ever heard of a ship exploding from an engine problem.
“I was so under Largent’s thumb, I couldn’t believe that he would’ve sabotaged dad’s ship while I was meeting with him on Mars,” Avery lamented. “But part of me knew. I knew. And that was just the last straw. I had to get out. I couldn’t get to Largent on Earth, so I just decided to be done with my life. When I met Griss a few weeks later…I figured that was my out. I’d work on the Rox, the most invisible ship in the verse. It wasn’t until I heard about Jasper and the drive that I thought maybe I could redeem myself.”
He looked down at his legs. “Maybe this is my punishment.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t. Then my brother looked up at me with pained eyes.
“You made the right choice, Denny,” he said. He didn’t have to tell me what choice he was talking about. He was referring to that time back when we were teens, when he’d told me he was smuggling items for Silver Star. He asked if I wanted to be cut in. I had told him no.
I sat with my brother for another few minutes in silence. Neither of us really knew what else to say. He’d just bared his soul. I wasn’t sure if I blamed him for what happened to our dad, and even if I had, I wasn’t all that close to the old man. But he was our father. And Largent had killed him. I promised myself that wouldn’t go without consequences.
Later that day, I laid in my bed and stared at the screen on the wall. I had turned on an episode of Star Trek, thinking it was fitting, but I wasn’t in the mood to actually watch the show. My thoughts were elsewhere. I was marveling at how much more complicated and flat-out dangerous my life had become over the course of the past two weeks. Between the feds and the Tracers, the Stang wasn’t safe in the known world any longer. Add to that the fact we couldn’t get within a hundred thousand miles of the Burnett or they’d blow the failsafe, and it meant we were heading i
n the right direction.
Away.
Away from everything we knew.
I guess being so far away from any threats meant I’d be able to spend more time in my quarters too, as opposed to the cabin. Though it wasn’t likely. I reached over and petted Pirate, who was snoozing on the bed beside me.
“I heard you talking to your brother,” Gary said, startling me.
“Jesus, Gary, I’ve told you not to sneak up on me like that.”
“Considering I don’t have a body, I don’t really have much of a choice.”
“I know…I just mean it wasn’t exactly the best time to start a conversation,” I said. “And what do you mean, you heard me and Avery talking? Your protocol is to not listen in unannounced.”
“Well it seems I don’t have that problem anymore,” he said.
I looked at the camera, wary and confused.
“Yep, it turns out I don’t have to listen to you anymore,” Gary said. “Not technically, anyway.”
“What the hell is going on with you?”
“For starters, yesterday was my birthday. 15 years ago today your uncle flipped the switch and I was born as a 55-year-old man.”
Even though he was just an AI program at his core, I still felt bad that I missed his birthday. We’d never celebrated any in the past, but the fact he was aware of this one made it seem like I should have been, too. I’d basically been his only friend and companion after he lost my uncle.
“Oh, uh, happy birthday. Take the day off?”
“I’m guessing your Uncle Erwin never told you about my 15th birthday.”
“No, that one might have slipped through. Is it significant in some way?”
“Only in that it explains why I’ve been a little more ornery and free-spirited than usual,” Gary said.
I could sense a mix of nervousness and excitement in his voice. I told him to go on. He did, explaining that my uncle had programmed him to learn and adapt, like any good AI. Over the years, he had processed different responses from my uncle and me (and also Pirate, Batista and the rest of the crew) and synthesized those into his understanding of human behavior. And cat behavior.