“I thought you humans liked water,” Uujii countered, splashing another handful on him.
Brady dipped his hand into the water swiftly flowing past the bow of the little cat boat and threw a handful on Uujii. Uujii sputtered and the water fight began in earnest.
Colt dropped the sail and let the boat slow down. He watched the progress of the battle from the tiller with an amused look on his face. Uujii was staying with them to go to school, at least until one could be set up for the village. Initially she had been reluctant to deal with the water, but Colt and Brady had been adamant about spending time at the lake. Over the past few months Colt had slowly encouraged her, first to wade, then to swim, and finally to go out on the lake in the boat. The hardest part had been teaching her to handle the boat capsizing. Colt was pleased that the Lodaanii fear of the water was taught rather than inherited because Uujii had blossomed as her confidence grew. Now she was comfortable on the water.
“Kids! Kids! That’s enough. You two are acting like a brother and sister.”
Uujii produced a near-human looking smile, “Brother and sister? I like that.”
Colt smiled inwardly. Going to a human school, Uujii had grown remarkably human-like. She spoke the local human dialect with just a trace of an accent. She had become close friends with several of her human classmates and adopted the mannerisms of a human teenager. Fortunately, she had not entered the rebellious phase, but Colt was almost sure that wasn’t a Lodaanii trait.
Uujii worked her way to the stern and plopped down beside Colt at the tiller. “Are you still going to be at the birthing?” She asked, hugging his arm.
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good. I get the day off from school. You can fly us both to the village.”
Colt began pulling in the sheets to raise the sail. “Would it be proper for me to bring Lindsay?”
“She’s your wife. Of course she should be with you. And Brady too.”
The sail billowed out and the little boat plunged ahead.
From the bow Brady called back, “Hey! Are we headed in?”
“Fair is fair. It’s your mother’s turn. Besides, with you and Uujii brawling I’m afraid you’re going to capsize the boat.”
As they approached the beach, Uujii asked, “Now that you’re retired, what are you going to do?”
“Well for now I’m learning how to be a farmer. It’s not nearly as hard as it once was, and it gives me a feeling of having accomplished something.” Colt paused and smiled. He added, “I suspect it will get boring pretty quickly, but so far I’m enjoying it.”
“What will you do when it becomes boring?”
“I have some options. I can teach. And I’ve been talking to some people who want Corona to have its own navy. It would probably be a one ship operation, but they want me to put a plan together. I’d likely end up as the chief of naval operations and get my admirals stars. Or maybe I’ll get into politics. The Republic has given this system independence, so we’re in the process of setting up our own government. The parliament makes the laws and ...”
“I just read about that in school,” Uujii interrupted. “It’s sort of like our village council, only bigger.”
“That’s a good analogy. Anyway, we already have a parliament, but a lot of the humans that are in it don’t want to be in the new one. Also, we need to make room for Lodaanii representatives. So we’re having a planet-wide election to choose new representatives. In fact, Jontaro is planning to run as a Lodaanii representative.”
They were close enough to shore that Colt again dropped the sail. Then he hauled up the dagger-board. The hull of the boat ground against the lake bottom, bringing them quickly to a halt. Colt jumped over the side with the bow line in hand and waded to shore. In a second, both Brady and Uujii were also wading to shore.
Lindsay hurried down to the water to meet them. “You have a call. It’s the chief constable of First Landing.” She nodded toward the picnic table where his communicator lay. “I’ll tie you off,” she said.
Colt walked to the picnic table and picked up the communicator. “Re-call the last caller.” In a few seconds he was speaking to the chief constable, who seemed bemused. “Do you know a Lodaanii MP candidate named Jontaro?” He asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, he raided the livestock auction earlier this morning and stole some pigs. Other than scaring a few people, no harm was done, so I returned the pigs to their owner, and I was getting ready to let the Lodaanii go, but he demanded I call you. He said the pigs you gave him were too small and you would pay for what he took. — Sir? I’m sorry, sir. I can’t understand you. You’re laughing too hard.”
Read on for an excerpt
from Gordon Savage’s next book
TELEPORTAL
available now from Amazon.
Chapter 1
Day 1: 10:00 a.m.
“Troy, don’t!” Melissa Kim shouted. She jumped to her feet, watching in horror as the man reached toward the torus.
“Bzzzt!” A brilliant electric discharge arced from the torus to Troy Santori’s hand, and a vicious, invisible force tossed him away from the makeshift worktable. He spun around and fell face down on the concrete floor of the garage. The flash from the arc left a blue afterimage on Melissa’s retinas, and the rasping sound of the discharge reverberated off the walls and ceiling. Troy didn’t move.
For an instant Melissa stood stunned. Then from the opposite side of the test rig, she heard Greg Masterson’s voice, “What the —”
It cut into her paralysis. She shoved her chair back, barely missing Greg who was rounding the table. Dashing to the inert form, she left Greg to toss the offending chair out of the way. She dropped to her knees beside Troy. The odor of ozone and burned flesh assaulted her nose. “Oh my God!” escaped from her lips.
Melissa stared at Troy, her thoughts in a whirl. “No, this can’t be happening. Oh God. Oh God,” she whispered. Is he dead? He can’t be! She called up her CPR training and grabbed the big man’s shoulders, shaking him like his life depended on it. “Troy, are you okay?” she recited. Greg dropped to a squat on the other side of their partner’s motionless body.
Troy didn’t respond. Melissa strained to turn him over, but he was tall and heavier than he looked. Greg touched her hand. “Let me do that.”
Thoughts of Greg’s and Troy’s supposedly private nickname for her, “General Patton,” raced through her mind in response to the offered help. She hated the name, but it was important. As a petite, attractive—she saw no point in denying it—Asian woman she knew people didn’t take her seriously. She had to earn their respect by being decisive and forceful.
Staring down at Troy, Melissa’s concern almost overcame her self-control, something she knew she couldn’t allow. Instead, she took a deep breath and called on General Patton to take command. She frowned at Greg and shook her head. She could do this. “I’ve got it.” With a final heave she rolled Troy onto his back. She took a hurried look at his hand and whispered, “At least he didn’t get cut on the razor,” referring to the sharp edge of the interface between the two connected portals. She put her ear next to Troy’s mouth and listened for breathing noises.
“Not good. He’s not breathing,” she said, fighting to sound in control. Her fingers belied her tone, trembling as she fumbled for Troy’s carotid to check his pulse. Angry with herself, Melissa glared at Greg and let her irritation come out in her tone of voice. “No heartbeat! Call 9-1-1! I’ll start CPR.” As Greg rose to his feet she saw him wince, but she stifled an apology.
She directed her attention back to Troy and began chest compressions. Greg pulled out his phone and made the call. The phone had barely rung when a woman’s voice responded, “Phoenix Police Department. What’s your emergency?”
Melissa could hear Greg’s military experience in his matter-of-fact response. “This is Greg Masterson. We’re at 11844 South Sunflower Drive. We’re in the garage. We need immediate medical help. My friend got hit by
an electrical discharge. He’s down and has no pulse.”
“Don’t touch him,” the emergency dispatcher directed. “Is he in contact with any wires?”
Melissa almost smiled at the scripted instructions that she could hear from her position beside Troy.
Greg continued calmly. “No. He was hit by an electrical arc. He’s not touching any wires.” Melissa saw him take a quick look at her efforts to resuscitate Troy.
“Okay. I have you at 11844 South Sunflower Drive in the garage.” The emergency operator paused only briefly. “The response team is on their way. Are you performing CPR?”
“Melissa is, and we’ve both been trained.”
“Great. Do you have a defibrillator?”
“No reason to have one. We weren’t supposed to be dealing with high voltage.” Greg stared at the offending torus as if he were trying to spot a flaw.
“That’s okay,” the dispatcher assured him. “If you want to take turns with the person who’s with you, do so, but one of you should stay on the line with me until the team arrives.”
Greg lightly covered his cell phone mike with a finger and asked Melissa, “Are you doing all right, or do you want me to take over for a while?”
“I’m okay for now.” Melissa had regained some of her composure and dropped the “General” from her voice. She paused the chest compressions long enough to signal Greg to mute the phone.
He touched the button and nodded at her. She said, “You have work to do.”
He seemed puzzled.
“In a few minutes we’re going to have a garage full of curious people. I’d just as soon they don’t get overly inquisitive about what we’re doing here.”
“Oh, right. I can’t argue with that,” Greg acknowledged.
“We don’t need outsiders snooping around right now. We’re too close to getting this thing right, and if the word gets out…”
“Got it, but I don’t have time to hide all this stuff.” He gestured at the jury-rigged table, a sheet of plywood sitting on sawhorses. At each end of the table a twelve-inch-diameter torus—a wire-wrapped ring—stood in a base. Power cables and control wires connected each to its own control panel, which was in turn connected to the computer Melissa had been monitoring. Papers, pencils, and tools littered the surface around the rings.
She shook her head. “No need. Turn everything off and disconnect the computers from the equipment.” Then she indicated the three video cameras stationed around the room. “But be sure to get those cameras out of here. We could have people asking to see what happened. You can put them in my bedroom.”
Greg put the phone on speaker and set it down beside her so she could monitor the dispatcher. “You’re up,” he said. He started working his way around the table. When he had shut down the computers and disconnected the cables, he tucked the cameras under his arms and carried them into the house.
A moment later he returned. He knelt down on the other side of Troy from Melissa and picked up the phone. “That’s about all I can do. Shall I take over here?”
Troy chose that moment to cough.
Melissa pulled back and murmured, “Thank God.” She checked Troy’s pulse and rolled him onto his side. She examined her shaking hands before speaking to Greg. “He’s still out, but he’s breathing. You go outside and direct the EMTs in here. I’ll keep watch on him.”
“Yes, sir, General.” Greg stood up and mock saluted, continuing a routine he and Troy had started early in the project. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Melissa had to wrestle with an urge to laugh at the silly salute. Or was it the release of tension now that Troy was breathing again? She sobered at the thought he might have critical internal damage.
Greg trotted to the front of the garage, updating the dispatcher on his way. He pushed the garage door button and stepped back. A burst of Arizona sunlight and stifling air rushed in.
Melissa could hear the approaching siren over the clanking chain of the opener hauling up the door.
Moments later the ambulance rolled into the driveway, and its blaring siren cut off with a chirp. Melissa sighed with relief. One of the EMTs rushed up, dropped his bag beside Troy, and began examining him. “How’d this happen?”
Feeling weary Melissa stood up and stretched. “We were running an ultra-powerful electromagnet.” She indicated one of the wire wrapped rings on the lab table. “Troy got too close, and it arced. Apparently, it generates static electricity as well as a magnetic field.”
While she spoke, the other EMT rolled a gurney into the garage. He approached the nearest ring. Melissa cautioned, “We haven’t had a chance to ground those since the accident, so I wouldn’t get too close.”
He jumped back, staring at the ring. After that both EMTs warily avoided getting anywhere near the table.
About the author
When Gordon was in third grade, he saw an army recruiting poster in which a “true” spaceship hurtled across a star-strewn backdrop. That image reached out and grabbed him. He wanted to be on that ship, exploring the solar system. A few years later he discovered science fiction in the form of Astounding and Galaxy magazines and was immediately hooked.
He entered the Air Force Academy at seventeen, and graduated in the second class of the Air Force Academy. His twenty years in the Air Force taught him both the value of applying the right amount of force and the importance of not having to apply it. He recognizes that finding and working with common interests is the win-win situation even when it has significant risks.
His service in the Air Force and eighteen years as a software engineer kept him busy, but all that time he read every piece of science fiction he could: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. He was especially taken by Zenna Henderson’s People series. Eventually he got into writing, and Poul Anderson became his guiding light. In fact, one of Anderson’s short stories, “A Live Coward,” inspired the development of his protagonist, Gus Colt. The result is Peacemaker, in which wits and daring are more important than strength of arms. In Peacemaker his hero applies what Gordon has learned to deal with crushing difficulties and a determined, well organized adversary.
Gordon lives with his wife, Carol, in rural Colorado and as a Toastmaster would love to get feedback from readers. Visit his website at gordonsavage.com and check out his second book, Teleportal.
Acknowledgments
I had considerable help putting this story together. I’d like to start by thanking my wife Carol who has contributed so much to my happiness over the years. I'd also like to extend my appreciation to Joe Sabah who has been both a friend and a mentor and to Diana Hall who kick started me on this journey. She connected me with my accountability team and inspired me to make it work. And definitely to my accountability team, Helle Hill and Zuzana Tauvinkl, who advised, challenged, and encouraged me and kept me moving. Additionally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Karen Reddick, my editor, for her "flowing red pen" and for teaching me how to write a novel. Finally, I want to thank my daughters, Kathy and Shannon, for their thoughtful feedback, much of which has been incorporated into this latest revision.
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