Overload Flux

by Carol Van Natta

  It was unfortunately true that some pilots abused their access to the emergency occupant-monitoring system and used it as their personal entertainment channel. Mairwen thought they were lucky the ship didn’t have the upgraded system that included visuals.

  She sealed the entry door and stepped closer so they could speak quietly.

  “I know why. Is it exactly the same make and model of ship?”

  “Different stateroom configuration, but close enough.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “My talent feels hot right now, like it did when I reconstructed the ‘playroom’ those sick fucks made.” His low voice dropped to a whisper, and he shivered as if his talent was consuming his body heat. “I can see everything. Hear everything. Like it was yesterday.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She felt hopelessly out of her depth, but she couldn’t leave him like this. Maybe whatever it was about her that cooled his talent could help him now. She pulled up the room’s only chair to face him, close enough to thread her knees between his. She took his hands in hers.

  “Look at me.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t know what you’re asking.” He looked down and refused to meet her gaze.

  “Yes, I do.” She leaned closer so she could pitch her voice just to him. “It’s what you did at the spaceport with the woman who called herself Green and with Dr. Onndrae. It’s how you found the collector when he hid among the joyhouse kitchen staff.” The thought of his focused, talent-enhanced intuition directed at her made her nervous, but he already knew a measure of her secrets. He was afraid of his talent, fighting it, and that couldn’t be good for him. Her unease was mostly old habit, not present danger.

  “Luka, look at me.”

  She thought he’d refuse again, but after a moment, he looked up and into her eyes, and his pupils slowly dilated. She stilled her sensory inputs until there was nothing in her universe but the sound of his breathing, the exotic scent of him, the warmth of his hands in hers. She admired the lines of his sensual mouth, the stunning colors in his eyes, the well-defined, sculpted shape of his broad chest and taut abdomen, the two old scars on his ribs, the thin line of dark body hair that trailed down from his navel, the heady maleness of him. It was almost like relaxing into full-tracker mode meditation.

  “Mairwen,” he said, after what could have been short seconds or long minutes. He made her lose track of time. His voice was thick with emotion, and his expression had gone from haunted to something she couldn’t name, but it made her heart skip a beat.

  “You are...” He trailed off, as if searching for the right words. She couldn’t describe what she was feeling, either, just that it was powerful and melted inside her like hot wax.

  She gave into a rising, aching need and rose from her chair to kneel on the platform, facing him and straddling his thighs. His hands tightened on her waist as she sank into his lap. She grasped his wonderfully naked shoulders and kissed him fiercely. He responded almost immediately, then took over the kiss with sensual strength.

  She loved the feel of his skin under her hands and wanted more. They broke for air, gasping, and he slid his hands up to gently push the sweater back and slide it off her arms onto the floor, then glided back up her arms to her shoulders, where his hands hesitated.

  “What are these?” His passion-hazed expression darkened as he circled the furrowed, irregular scars with his thumbs. “Souvenirs from vocational school?”

  She quirked a smile. “No. When I... graduated, I had to leave their tracers behind.”

  He kissed the scar on each shoulder, then returned hungrily to her mouth, and she couldn’t suppress a deep tremor. He dragged his lips away from hers to drop his forehead onto her shoulder and stroked her sides, generating heat and goose bumps at the same time. “Someday soon, let’s do this when neither of us is exhausted or hurting.”

  “Or about to be interrupted,” she whispered, hearing the approach of booted feet on the carpet outside Luka’s door. She slid back and off his marvelously strong thighs and scooped up her sweater, resigned to it being a pitiful substitute for the heat of his chest on hers. She pulled the sweater on as the entrance chime sounded.

  She moved the chair back, then unsealed the door to reveal DeBayaud, who glanced at her with mild curiosity, then apologized for interrupting. He asked Luka what schedule he wanted to set for the three subjective ship days it would take to get to their first destination, a flux and supplies stop called Horvax Station.

  “Ask the pilots to sync us to the local day length on Insche 255C, if the exploration records have that data. One of us besides the pilot should be awake at all times, but that can’t be me right now. I’m flatlined.” He looked at the display clock on the wall. “Let’s meet at fifteen thirty ship time to set shifts and talk about plans.”

  DeBayaud nodded and headed toward the navigation pod. Someone, probably Adams, was puttering about in the kitchen area. She turned back to Luka. He no longer looked distressed, just tired.

  “You need rest, Luka.”

  She resolutely ignored her body’s crying need for his and turned to go. She needed a few hours of sleep herself.

  “Mairwen,” he said, and she stopped and looked back. “Could you help me find... control?”

  She hesitated, then said, “We can try.”

  It was the glimmer of hope in his eyes that made her agree. Even though she had no clue where to start, and her own controls eroded the moment she was anywhere near him.

  At the meeting six hours later, Luka summarized the case thus far, saying that they suspected Balkovsky and Schmidt had been killed to cover up the fact that the source of the bad vaccine was a hybrid planet, and that their trip was to see if they could prove it. The team’s pre-flight briefing hadn’t included the part about the deaths, and Adams, who had worked with Balkovsky, was visibly angered by the circumstances. Mairwen thought the others were calmer, or at least hid it better.

  Luka opened the portable display. “We’ll be stopping at Horvax Station for a resupply and to pick up the xenobiological sampling kit that hadn’t been ready when we left Rekoria.”

  “Will we load flux, too?” asked Ta’foulou. It took Luka a moment to understand the question through Ta’foulou’s thick Arabic accent.

  “Yes,” said Luka. “We may need the extra fuel. No telling what we’ll need when we hit the Insche 255 system.”

  He gave them the briefing Mairwen had prepared on the few facts and many conjectures about failed terraforms and hybrid planets, and emphasized the extra safety precautions they’d need to take. He asked Haberville to report what she’d found in the navcomp datacube.

  “The exploration data is sparse. Gold G-type star, of course. It was a First Wave terraform candidate, so 255C has a similar day length and orbit period to old Earth. Records say it was poisoned five hundred and three years ago. Six continents, a few tectonic plates. One small moon. Nothing else worth mentioning. The solar system has an asteroid belt in fourth position. The in-system transit point is between that and 255E, a gas giant.”

  Haberville and Ta’foulou set up alternating six-hour shifts to pilot the ship, and DeBayaud and Adams set up their schedules to correlate. Luka had already introduced Mairwen as his assistant, which exempted her from a security shift.

  Adams, it turned out, was an excellent cook who cheerfully volunteered to make all their meals, which she and the others promptly agreed to. She didn’t used to care about food until she met Luka. Her grumbling, cautious brain insisted that he continued to be a bad influence.

  After the meeting, Luka went back to his room, and DeBayaud, an avid redball fan, hooked into a trid of one of the dozen prerecorded games he’d brought with him. He leaned his whole body into each play he watched, but kept any vocalizations to himself. Mairwen thought it made him look like a demented mime.

  She went to see Haberville in the navigation pod for her turn for the personalized safety briefing. While everyone else on the ship was dressed in old, comfortable clothes
, Haberville looked like she was going to a party, though to be fair, perhaps wearing tight, shiny outfits counted as comfortable to her.

  Most safety briefings were prerecorded holos, so Mairwen was impressed that Haberville took their security so seriously. However, she turned out to have a disconcerting habit of crowding personal space and touching often, most of which Mairwen managed to subtly evade. When she would have made her escape, Haberville asked her to stay and chat a minute.

  “How long have you been with Foxe?”

  She was still standing and was wirejacked into the navcomp from her unobtrusive skulljack, so she was multi-tasking the realspace conversation with whatever the nav and engine comps were telling her.

  “Two weeks,” said Mairwen. It seemed a lot longer, like she’d known him for years, but they’d been an eventful set of days.

  “Throbbing as a pulsar, if you like your partners lean and wiry.” Haberville said with a wink and a lascivious smirk. “From what I’ve seen, half the women and some of the men at La Plata would hot-connect with him if he flashed the ‘go’ light.” She made some adjustments to a holo readout of the light drive’s flux. “Have you had him yet? Is he as good as he looks?”

  Mairwen affected selective deafness to Haberville’s personal questions, the same way she’d done with Malamig’s similarly inappropriate inquiries over the years. It was oddly unpleasant to think of others wanting Luka as a lover. Or more accurately, to think of Luka wanting them. Logically, it shouldn’t matter if he engaged in sex with multiple other partners, but logic wasn’t very comforting.

  Haberville apparently took Mairwen’s expressionless silence to mean she was offended.

  “Don’t mind me, I’m just naturally nosy. Gets me in all sorts of trouble.” There was little contrition in her tone. “So, how’d a good-looking woman like you end up here?” she asked, and managed to briefly touch Mairwen’s upper arm. Mairwen twisted out of range quickly. The only person she wanted touching her was Luka.

  Mairwen drew breath to answer, but Haberville held up a hand and closed her eyes a moment, signaling she was communing with the navcomp.

  Mairwen was glad of the interruption, finding the thread hard to follow and not sure what Haberville was asking. She already knew about the investigation, and probably wasn’t looking for a recitation of Mairwen’s history. The personal flattery was meaningless, so she ignored it.

  When Haberville opened her eyes again, Mairwen said, “I’m usually a night-shift guard. I’m temporarily assigned as Foxe’s assistant for this investigation.”

  “Lucky you. You’re better with Foxe than Velasco is.” The way she said Velasco’s name suggested she didn’t like him. Mairwen wondered when Haberville had met him. Knowing Velasco, he’d drooled when memorizing Haberville’s generous breasts.

  “I have no basis for comparison,” said Mairwen, relieved she’d answered the earlier question without engendering further probing.

  Haberville laughed. “You definitely belong in the Investigation Division. You fit right in.”

  Haberville was distracted by the navcomp again, and Mairwen took the opportunity to escape. She was perplexed by the whole conversation. Haberville the pilot was sharp and competent, but Haberville the person was uncomfortable to deal with. Mairwen felt a momentary pang for her old days on the night shift, where the only interaction required was with comps and equally anti-social co-workers.

  She drifted through the common area, where Luka was discussing cooking techniques with Adams. They were of similar height and coloring and, from a distance, might have been mistaken for cousins, but Adams’ dark hair was short and well behaved compared to Luka’s riotous spikes, and Adams had the noticeably more muscular build of a dedicated weightlifter. She decided she liked Luka’s long-distance runner’s build better.

  She went to her room and changed into running shoes and a long-sleeved, thin pink T-shirt and navy knit pants that covered her knives, then went through to the exercise room. Luka smiled briefly at her as she passed by, and she nodded. He looked better after having slept, and smiled a lot during his light conversation with Adams, but there was still a brittleness to the edges of him. Had they been alone, she might have touched him in reassurance, though whether it would be for Luka or herself, she wasn’t sure.

  She engaged the treadmill unit, then disabled its monitoring functions. She’d rather not leave a record of anything that might be different from normal human behavior. The unit was high quality, but still didn’t feel the same as running on stable ground, regardless of the manufacturer’s claims. She remembered something Luka had said about preferring to run on a planet surface, and she had to agree. Planets smelled of a million living things, while exercise rooms smelled mostly of stale sweat and machinery, even with her senses dulled to practically dead.

  Luka’s request to teach him control had her dredging up memories of her first months after surviving the final alteration procedure. She tried to analyze them objectively.

  CPS trainers introduced the candidate trackers to pain and brutality on day one and never let up. The first few weeks, when the candidates didn’t know how to ignore sensations, all it had taken was loud sounds, powerful smells, or a simple bruising pinch. The better the candidates got at handling the painful input, the more creatively savage the trainers got, all to make sure the CPS owned them, mind and body. Some trainers loved their jobs. Those that loved their jobs too much sometimes suffered fatal accidents once their trainees acquired useful skills.

  Pain wouldn’t work for Luka, even if she could bring herself to suggest it. Physical pain would just feed the emotional trauma his talent and imagination were already creating. Pleasure required time and relaxation, usually in short supply in situations when his reconstruction talent was needed. All she had to go on was that he regained some control over the talent and the talent-reinforced memories when she touched him, or at least when she was close. She couldn’t very well be at every violent scene he saw. He needed a way to stop the cascade before it started, whether or not she was there, but she couldn’t think how. She wished she was as clever as Luka.

  She heard footsteps approaching the exercise room and identified them as Luka’s. She looked at the clock and realized she’d been running for over an hour. Thinking he’d probably like some time on the ship’s only treadmill, she slowed to a stop just as he entered the room. He was wearing running clothes and a towel draped around his neck, so she’d guessed correctly. And universe help her, he was wearing shorts that displayed his perfect hips, thighs, and calves.

  She pulled at the front of her tank top where it was plastered to her chest from sweat. As always, his smile fluttered something in her heart. The first hint of his woody scent reached her and curled up into her thoughts like a caress. Images and ideas blossomed in her mind as he strode toward her. She dismissed the ones that started with licking him and stepped closer so she could speak quietly.

  “You use pacing and running to help you think. Perhaps it could help you with... what we talked about earlier.” Despite her flattened senses, the welcome full scent of him gave her a floaty feeling. She could almost feel the hormones flooding her system when her body was near his. It was hard to make herself remember that she needed to keep her mind on his security.

  “I’m game.” His eyes were looking down at their almost-touching chests, and his breath was shorter. “Tell me what to do.”

  Mindful of audio that might feed to the pilot’s console, she kept her voice low and her phrasing oblique. “The… possibilities seem to overwhelm you with everything at once, like overload flux in a light drive. Start running, slow, and draw out a single piece of one of your memories at a time. Maybe isolate only the sounds, or only the strongest image. When you feel the overload coming, focus on the feeling of running—the flexing of your feet, the pumping of your lungs, the impact on your hips, the burn in your legs.” She briefly touched his chest, his hip, and his thigh as she spoke. “Once you’re back in your body, try the same
isolation again.”

  He looked dubious but nodded. He handed her his towel, stepped onto the treadmill, and adjusted the settings for his stride. He started running, and she had to force herself to look away to keep from staring at how stunningly graceful he was. She hung his towel on the nearby rack, then crossed to the weight bench closer to the door, needing the distraction.

  “Please stay,” he said, not looking at her.

  “Yes,” she said. Even if she’d been planning to leave, the subtle desperation in his tone would have kept her there.

  She set the weight machine for light repetitions, snapped her arms in, and began smooth, controlled anterior lifts. She was relieved that the shoulder she’d dislocated was performing as it should, with only minor residual pain. The healer had wanted to do more, but Mairwen couldn’t risk discovery of her alteration abnormalities. The CPS drummed into all trackers the absolute imperative to only use designated CPS minder healers, meaning there were noticeable differences to be found.

  She wished she could see Luka’s face, to know if he was in trouble, but her selfish desire to keep him from harm wouldn’t help him develop the internal controls he needed. She switched to diagonal dorsal pushes and poured her unnamable emotions into the physical effort, letting them energize in and flow out with each repetition.

  The first time Luka stumbled, she froze, only relaxing when he picked up the rhythm again. The second time, she was up and in front of him in a flash. He focused on her. He didn’t smile, and he looked uneasy, but he didn’t look like he was in over his head yet. She caught his eye. “Just run.”

  He nodded and she relaxed. She was tempted to simply stand guard and wait for him, but she suspected he’d feel guilty about it and cut his run short if she did.

  “I’ll be in my room,” she told him. With one last glimpse of his glorious backside and thighs, she went straight to the fresher.

  After her shower, she finger-combed and smoothed her hair back away from her face and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was muscular, lean, and not curvy, though she’d become more rounded in the last four years, since she hadn’t been using tracker mode and constantly taxing her body’s resources. Active trackers often looked like famine victims. Her skin and coloring were night-shift pale. She doubted the rest of her scars, from where she’d removed the other tracers with her own knife, plus more recent scrapes and bruises, added to her appeal. Luka was the first person who’d ever caused her to worry about it. She wondered if he preferred his lovers to look less battered.