Travels of the Orphan (The Space Orphan Book 3)

by Laer Carroll

There they traveled through hyperspace to a long tunnel in Earth's shadow where the solar wind was especially weak. The Artemis craft were protected from such dangers as the solar wind but Jane always wanted to minimize even minor dangers. It took them several minutes to travel several million miles.

  "Congratulations, people," Jane said to the crew in the roomy cockpit of Diana. Four people sat in the six seats. As usual Leftwich was the pilot.

  Her speech could also be heard over the intercom speakers in the rest of the ship.

  "You have just taken a short hop into another universe. That should be good enough to get you a free drink in just about any bar on Earth or the Moon. Or, come to think of it, Bastet or Mars' Cat City.

  "Now get ready for the next jump, the second of nine from Earth to Mars. In the middle and longest jump we'll reach a speed which would be equal to 73 times the speed of light in this universe. In H-1 it will be one percent of the speed of light."

  With pauses between each jump to be sure they were still on the path from the Earth to Mars it took them an hour and a half before the Red Planet loomed in their view screens. Leftwich called the air traffic control for Mars, still a very small office though traffic was picking up from the increasing number of long-distance spacecraft. He got permission for Diana to land near Mars' Cat City. They did so, the scientists with a couple of crew escorts donned space suits, and walked the fifty or so yards to walk through the force field which protected the city from meteorites and from losing its air to the almost non-existent Mars atmosphere.

  They stayed there four days, long enough for Jane and each of her crew to spend a day and a night in the human-friendly hotel in the center of the city. Most of them got to meet Cats (most of them Kittens: Cats under about thirty years of age), which was the biggest treat for most people visiting Mars City.

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  Over the next several months Diana made over twenty trips to Mars, journeys which Jane felt were needed to really shake down the FTL spacecraft and its crew. Such travel was still very new to Earth and (she felt) needed to be thoroughly tested in actual use.

  Inevitably the superbeing JANE discovered problems and designed fixes. Some SHE or her biological self fixed or scheduled to be fixed. Only one was serious enough to cause Diana to be grounded for a couple of weeks. Jane gave the entire crew time off with pay (but not flight pay) for the first week but had them return for the second week. Military people were constantly training up as well as working.

  In those months the trips to Mars were reduced from nine jumps to seven, five, then three jumps. The first and last were always short jumps to get away from or close to a destination.

  Near the end of the Mars trips Jane began experimenting with and practicing "millijumps": millisecond long trips into and out of hyperspace. These let a ship travel for distances of a few miles.

  Officially Jane did this to allow FTL ships to cautiously approach destinations whose location was not precisely known. She said it was a safety precaution as FTL ships would routinely travel to asteroids and even further such as the cometary bodies in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. This was true, but secretly she wanted such extreme maneuverability during a space battle.

  She had a third reason for such tests. They were more stressful on ships and their crews, especially crews. This revealed more weaknesses. Those of the ship were communicated with the builder of the FTL ships, Boeing, and their hyperspace engines, Lockheed Martin. The weaknesses of the personnel were entered into their files along with the corrective training they underwent.

  Jane's toughness became legendary throughout the Space Force. Her crew members came to hate then love her. She never gave up on them even as she was pushing them to be better. And they did become better.

  Not known to her crew they became exceptional partly because Jane infected each of them with the tiniest amounts of the nanites from Robot. To some slight extent they became superhumans like her.

  Chapter 12 - Lizards

  On December 1st the captain and owner of Cat Centaur Spaceship 101347 made an announcement to the humans of the Solar System, in 319 languages, no less. Soon 347 would have been a "guest" of humans for two years. She and her people had been treated generously. To show the appreciation Elizabeth, her captain, said 347 would host a party on New Year's Eve.

  This would be a huge affair. The spaceship would float at a thousand feet up, high above where the highest of the fireworks went. It would float for twenty minutes above each of the three largest cities in each time zone.

  The day before New Year's Eve shuttle craft would drop down from S-347 at each city and embark up to a thousand people, 200 of whom were invited by the Cats. The invitees would be selected by humans in each city starting December 2nd and announced a week before New Years. The remaining 800 would be selected randomly by 347's computers. All invitees would have to be 21 years or older and in reasonable but not necessarily very good health.

  As the robot selections would be truly random every race, sex, ethnic, and political group would be picked. The selections would be notified by email, so they would have to have a registered email address. With each invitation would be an image of a badge which would have to be printed out. Multiple badges would not be accepted, with only the holder of the first badge admitted.

  Many commentators criticized the process but Elizabeth would not yield. This led many to guess that the Cats, who were known to be big practical jokers, had deliberately left big holes in the process to remain.

  <>

  The Friday before the first weekend in December Jane got a text from Elizabeth asking is she could drop by Saturday night. Jane had bought a house in Colorado Springs somewhat like the one she still owned in Pasadena. She had continued the practice of having big parties at home and there would be one that weekend.

  She said Sure. It would be nice to see Elizabeth again. Their schedules rarely crossed. Too, her presence at Jane's party would give Jane's already-high celebrity an even bigger boost.

  "What do you think she wants?" said Phil. The two were snuggling on her couch looking out the big picture window east to where a near-full moon was rising. Her house was on a shallow hillside behind which a sprawling golf course lay. The slight elevation gave them a good unobstructed view of the sky over the suburbs beyond them and further to the Colorado Springs Airport. The rising and falling lights of planes taking off and landing made a nice light show near the right side of the picture window.

  "Want?"

  "Hah! Innocent. The timing is a bit too coincidental. You home from a mission, a party tomorrow, the Christmas holiday in sight, and her big New Year's Eve flyover in the works?"

  "Oh. Yeah." She sat up a bit straighter. "I keep forgetting that Galactics have this social engineering stuff down to a literal science."

  She mulled over matters as Phil idly caressed her blond hair. Natalie's daughter had been after her to take better care of her looks and had recommended a shampoo that turned it silky.

  It came to her that a 28-year-old human was unlikely to winkle out the motives of a 3000-year-old Galactic. She settled more comfortably into his arms.

  "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

  "Quoting the Bible, now. Does that make you a good girl?"

  "Well, not THAT good." She lifted her lips for a kiss.

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  It took most of the day to get ready for the party even though she had hired a caterer she often used. For one thing, she had to do all the beauty prep that even modern women who were geniuses and military officers were heir to. She also had to consult on the food and decorations and the special needs of some of her guests and endless other details. She wondered sometimes how women without computers inside them handled such matters, as they manifestly did.

  Phil, wise man, kept out of the way in a back room with his remote schmoozing and scheming phone calls and emails and texts. Once Jane came into the room to ask him something. She found him pacing and musing over and mumbling about a vast project
diagram displayed on the big flat screen on one wall. She quietly left.

  She left the caterers doing their jobs and took a shower while carefully keeping her hair covered by a hair cap, then spritzed and primped and dressed. She surveyed herself in a full-length mirror and decided she presented an image of a majestic object of beauty (as Phil had said once). She emerged from her bedroom satisfied but wondering if Galactic human women still were enslaved by social demands to be flawlessly gorgeous.

  The first guests began arriving at 7:30 to the sunset afterglow of a day of chilly but lovely weather. Most were dropped off by robotic Flyt sedans and the occasional limo. Major Smithson Leftwich came as a passenger driven by his wife of a dozen years, an investment researcher who (luckily for him) was able to ply her trade via the internet anywhere in the world where the Space Force sent him. A young man took the car to be hidden away till needed.

  Jane and Laura exchanged greetings and air hugs and air kisses and Jane side-hugged Leftwich. A wise man, he returned the hug gingerly to keep from crumpling her blindingly white A-line dress.

  She held onto his nearest arm for a moment when he would have pulled away.

  "Schmooze but stay alert. We're going to be visited by 347's captain. I want you to meet her and backstop me. Don't strain to stay alert for their arrival, however. There'll be an obvious disturbance in crowds when she gets here."

  "A Cat!" said Laura, a sleek Mediterranean beauty with dramatic dark and light coloring and long obsidian hair.

  Jane nodded and smiled and smiled some more at another set of arrivals, neighbors from down the hill.

  Soon Phil arrived to share the greeting duty, dressed in a casual suit of tan and a light blue open-throated shirt.

  An hour of Hellos was enough and the two left the open doorway to mingle with the guests.

  It was nearing 10:00 when Jane felt the social shock wave attending Elizabeth's arrival. She looked up and saw an unfamiliar air car sinking to land on the roof of her house.

  By the time she arrived at the stairway on the outside of her house Phil and Smithson were there waiting. They followed Jane up to the roof.

  The aircar's gull wings were lifted and a Cat flowed out of it, then turned to face inward as another joined him. The second Cat was Elizabeth, clad in gold glitter that complemented the blue glitter the male wore. They came smiling toward Jane as another pair of Cats emerged from the air car, a male and female clad in bronze and lime glitter.

  "Jane! Phil! And I believe this is Major Leftwich!"

  The three humans did the two-handed handshake of Cats with Elizabeth and her spouse Odysseus. Then had to greet her other two spouses. Cats often had a family made of foursomes.

  As everyone turned to go down the wide shallow stairs Leftwich dropped back to accompany the lime- and bronze-clad Cats. At the bottom of the stairs Leftwich was joined by his wife who was as smoothly social as her husband.

  The drinking and snacking and chatting crowd on the tennis-court-turned-plaza split to let the honored guests pass through. Most of the crowd acted as if nothing had happened although Jane was sure they were following the procession covertly. Only a few looked directly at the Cats and then only in a seemingly casual way.

  Jane and her guests reached their destination: the guest house. This was a one-story building with a small bedroom and kitchenette and a large living room with a big picture window looking eastward. Like the house it was on the slope of the low hill behind which the golf course lay. Like the view in the house there could be seen the nearly-full moon and the rising and falling lights of the aircraft at the airport.

  Knowing her guests Jane'd had the couch replaced with four Cat seats. On each side of them were four easy chairs arranged so that a conversational crescent was created facing the picture window. A snack and drinks buffet had been set up on the dining table which was part of the living room.

  Everyone got refreshments and settled. Introductions were made. Jane and Phil already knew the four Cats but Smithson and Laura did not. Conversation turned general, Elizabeth and the other Cats effortlessly pulling the two strange humans into it. Jane admired their finesse and made notes as to how it worked.

  "I like your DJ's choices," said husband Odysseus. "What other selections does your music library have?"

  "No need to hint, dear," said Elizabeth. "Go look at the music console. And I know you two--" she said to her two other co-spouses, "--are dying to see too."

  Smithson looked at Jane. She gave him an infinitesimal nod. He stood and drew Laura up with him.

  There was a reflective silence as Elizabeth was left with Jane and Phil. Each sipped their drinks and contemplated the view.

  "I'm sometimes struck," said the Cat in a musing tone, "with how much life there is. In this air--" She waved a hand. --and inside us are millions, billions of microorganisms, mostly neutral and many part of keeping us healthy.

  "More life exists flying in the air or swimming in the sea or burrowing in the ground. Even further down in the molten core there is life, fiery beings. Including intelligent ones, indeed far more intelligent than we organic life forms."

  "Truly?" said Phil.

  "Oh, yes. They are well researched. Most mid-sized planets have them. And just as amazing to me, in the ionosphere there is another form of life, also intelligent and also more advanced than mere Cats and humans and Lizards."

  "Amazing," he said. "Is that what the Northern Lights are?"

  "They're symptoms of vast symphonies that the beings play when the Sun is especially energetic."

  Jane was sure the Cat was going somewhere with this. She got up and renewed everyone's drinks and sat down again waiting to see where the conversation went.

  Phil seemed to have also guessed this topic was not an idle one to judge from his next comment.

  "I suppose there's life even in the colder parts of the Solar System. In Europa, I think?"

  "In the seas of Europa, in the atmosphere of its mother planet Jupiter and in the atmosphere of Saturn. Giant balloon-like creatures floating, or flying, in the troposphere of the planets."

  She took a sip.

  "Then there's the Sun and other stars. In the photosphere of most there are giant energy beings. Intelligent too. And deeper down what some call the star gods. Or God. No one knows if there are many or if they are all one to a sun. Or maybe even if all the star gods make up some sort of hive mind."

  "I've heard 'hive mind' applied to a different kind of intelligence."

  "Yes. That's where we fit in, we organic beings. There are thirteen of us in this spiral arm who are very advanced. The Hive Mind or minds is one kind. Then there are you humans with your Human Interstellar Confederation. And we Cats and the Lizards and several others. The Tree beings, for instance."

  She finished her drinks and shook her head No when Jane asked if the Cat wanted a refill.

  "I like the Lizards," the Cat said. "It's not a popular sentiment among we Cats. The Lizards have no sense of humor, we claim. I think it's just because they are so often the butts of our jokes."

  She turned more toward Jane and said, "You'll find that out eventually. I'm sure there'll be one or more expeditions to here before long. There might even be one on its way here now. After all, Earth has some real estate in your hot climes that Lizards might love, being hot-planet natives. And Earth being so close to the entrances to the subspace portals."

  Aha!

  Jane said in a musing tone of voice, "It strikes me that an enterprising Cat might have heard of such an expedition and thought it a great joke to outfit an expedition here herself and beat the Lizards here."

  "Or himself. Yes, that would be a great joke."

  "Well, I suppose I ought to bone up on the Lizards more than I already have. And have my spaceship crew do that too."

  The Cat shrugged. "Knowing more is always a good thing even if you don't have an immediate profit in sight."

  "I've always enjoyed learning."

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  No Lizard
s appeared in the rest of the year, certainly not on New Year's Eve when the world celebrated with fireworks and much else. The videos from S-347 and its thousands of humans and Cats celebrating on its trip around the planet were highly popular, especially the hijinks that took place. Such as when the seven people with duplicate boarding passes who'd somehow gotten past the ship's super-efficient security robots met.

  In the Spring the Space Force tasked Diana to visit Venus and Mercury as well as Mars and the Asteroid Belt. The first time Jane looked out the virtual windows at Venus she was struck by how lovely it looked from space. The hot-as-Hell carbon dioxide atmosphere looked like an immense pearl from above. Not so the even hotter Mercury. It was just an ugly grey pockmarked ball.

  Diana was joined by one, then two other FTL spaceships, all of them as large as Constellation though all with the "fat flying saucer" design of all the Artemis-class ships.

  Diana got an upgrade of her engines and counter-gravity which upped her top-most acceleration to forty-plus gravities. This only brought her top effective speed to 97 times the speed of light. Still this would have allowed Diana to reach the nearby trinary star system of Alpha Centauri in a month if anyone dared to undertake the mission.

  No one did. Alpha Cent, the Galactic Encyclopedia said, had nothing Earth was interested in. Exploratory guided missiles with hyperjump engines traveling ten times the speed of light mapped the three stars and their planets, however. The results exactly matched what the Encyclopedia said, so at least that much of the alien info was verified.

  Dozens of small FTL exploratory craft visited Jupiter and Saturn, again verifying the info in the Galactic Encyclopedia.

  Jane and her boss in the Space Force began planning a trip to Jupiter to allow some scientists to explore the planetary environs, especially Europa. Then she got news from the Confed sentinels that a Lizard spaceship had exited one of the subspace portals and headed inward.

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  Jane was in the Bastet Commons Level the hour she got the news. This was a vast indoor mall where hundreds of human and Cat businesses had been set up, seated in a plaza inside a Japanese tea garden operated by a giant Japanese restaurant franchise. Just outside the nearest windows the outside seemed to be lit by a bright yellow sun under a blue sky.