Nebula Nights: Love Among The Stars

by Melisse Aires

  "Help me to understand, Allysha. Why were you here with him at all?"

  "He was in trouble – financial trouble. I agreed to do this one last job with him and then that was it, divorce."

  Still nothing. He’d steepled his hands, one elbow on each armrest.

  "We’ve been married for seven years. It was fine for a time, then a couple of years ago he started staying out, drinking too much."

  He’d always drunk too much. She’d been sure she could change him. So sure.

  "I found out a while ago he was gambling. I paid off his debts and he swore to me he’d stop. I told him if he kept on the way he was, I’d kick him out. And as far as I knew, he did stop gambling and if he had affairs he kept them secret. Then, to cut a long story short, I came back from the job I did on Brjyl a day early. I caught him in bed with some blonde bimbo—in my bed, in my house. I threw them both out."

  Just the thought of it made her blood boil. Two-timing, devious bastard. After all she’d done for him.

  "But you came here with him," Brad said.

  "Yeah. He came back three days later and said he’d gotten himself into debt with the local Ptorix crime boss, a very nasty gangster called Bronx. The debt was huge, much larger than I could have managed. So then he said what about that Tisyphor job? He’d mentioned it before, you see, and I hadn’t been interested. It seemed easy enough, stuff I’d done before."

  She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. How could she have been so bloody gullible?

  "Allysha, why didn’t you just leave him to it? It was his debt, not yours."

  "No. You don’t understand. Ptorix law doesn’t work like that. Sean owed so his family owed. Especially if you’re talking about a thug like Bronx. You owe him and you don’t pay, they fish your body out of the Ull river. Possibly in a variety of locations. He might be a lost cause but I didn’t want to see him dead. Or me."

  "Do you still care about him?"

  "Are you kidding me? Do I look like such a complete dimwit? He used me. I’ll never forgive him. Never." And if Brad Stone thought he was helping by making her admit she’d been a naive idiot he could think again. He’d dropped his hands, looked a little more relaxed.

  "I noticed him a few times at the tavern with various women. I find it hard to imagine why you would marry a man like him. He’s superficial, self-centered, a liar."

  Funny he should say that. Her father had said the same thing and so had Xanthor. But she’d fallen for him straight away and wouldn’t listen to a word against him.

  "Do you? What do you know about him? He was good looking, charming, a great dancer, a damn good engineer and he was good in bed. Things changed." She found herself kneading her arm with one hand and stopped.

  "They do. And now he’s sold you. Like a commodity. You really have no idea what this Tepich person wants of you?"

  He didn’t have to be right, damn him. "No. Never heard of him."

  "When we reach Chollarc I’ll see what we can find out about him. And about O’Reilly."

  The way he said the name sent a tremor through her. "Sean? Why do you need to know about Sean?"

  "You can’t marry me until you are no longer married to him."

  Allysha’s heart gave a little fillip. He still wanted to marry her. At the same time a tingle of doubt rose in her gut. Brad was ruthless with people who got in his way, like the guards. He hadn’t killed them but she had little doubt he would kill if he had to. She was over Sean but she didn’t want to see him hurt. Or dead.

  "It just means a divorce."

  A slight smile. "Of course."

  She stared at him. Dark skin, black hair, eyes like black holes. When he was like this she couldn’t even begin to read him. What did she know about this man, after all? He could be an assassin, a murderer. He was certainly an agent of some sort; he’d said so. Except when he made love he was different. Then he was gentle, passionate and not very good at it; although he was very willing to learn. Warmth rose to her face at the memory. What words could she use? A contradiction, an enigma?

  She connected to his implant. Brad Stone, retired Sergeant, never married, date of birth, service dates, promotions. She’d seen it all before. And you’d need an InfoDroid to change this sort of information on a human cranial implant. "Maybe it’s time you told me a bit more about you. Is your name even Brad Stone?"

  The background hum of the life support systems suddenly seemed very loud.

  "For the time being, it’s best if we leave it at that. The less you know about me, the less you can tell. Should it come to that." He spoke softly and his eyes had lost that impenetrable hardness.

  "So you can know all about me but I can’t know anything about you?"

  "But I don’t know everything about you. Although I’m willing to learn. You constantly surprise me with new little tricks. Believe me, you’ll know everything about me. At the right time. All I’m asking is that for now, you accept me as I am. Brad Stone. Please, Allysha, trust me. I would never, ever hurt you. I love you."

  "What were you doing there, then? On Tisyphor?"

  "What I told you. Trying to find out who is providing weapons to terrorists. I have a contact on Chollarc who got me the job on Tisyphor, tipped off that something was going on there. But he had no idea about the virus. That was new."

  "But why can’t I know who you are?"

  "You do know who I am. More than any other woman. My name—if the worst happens and we are captured, the less you know about me the better. When this is over, I’ll tell you everything, I promise."

  Riddles. Questions without answers. But he’d destroyed the virus. And without him, she’d be a prisoner, waiting to be taken off to wherever. Damn Sean to hell. Bastard. She wondered if he’d known about the virus.

  "Allysha?"

  She focused back on his face. His eyes pleaded now. He leaned toward her, palms visible. "Trust me. Please. I love you."

  She rubbed her hand up and down the arm rest, aware of the flutter in her breast. She felt safe with him. He’d promised to reveal all. What the hell. She had to trust somebody. And she could really use a cuddle. She stood.

  "I’m going to bed. Want to come?"

  He cleared the space between them in a single stride.

  Allysha slept, her head on Saahren’s shoulder, her arm draped across his chest. He listened to her breathe and savored the scent of her hair. And that idiot O’Reilly had given her away? For the dubious delights of the likes of the tarts on Tisyphor? The man had to be stark, raving mad. Then again, perhaps he ought to be grateful. Without O’Reilly he wouldn’t have met her.

  She stirred, muttered in her sleep and settled again. One of these days he’d have to tell her his name and maybe then his love life would be over. Face it, Saahren, you’re frightened. Yes, true. He’d have to find out what the problem was and try to fix it. But not just now. He still had the Qerran Crisis to resolve. And he was beginning to think she might be able to help with that.

  He awoke to the insistent beeping of an alarm. Allysha sat up, eyes wide. The sheet slipped off her body, revealing her breast. He enjoyed the view.

  "What’s wrong?" she said

  "Nothing. We’re coming up to the jump gate for Chollarc. We have an hour. Plenty of time for a few moments to ourselves."

  She smiled and lay down beside him again, her fingers sliding down his breastbone. "Oh, good."

  ***

  Saahren slipped into the pilot’s seat and checked status. All green. He hadn’t expected anything else. Once the ship had entered shift-space, the IS had taken over. An alarm would have sounded in the event of problems.

  "I can’t understand why they wouldn’t have a talking IS," Allysha said. She’d sat down at the engineering station, fresh from the shower. The clean smell of her filled his nostrils.

  "Too close to an intelligent machine, I suppose."

  "But it isn’t intelligent. An IS is programmed to put on an act to make people feel comfortable. It can’t really think. What’s r
eally stupid is this ship could easily have a talking IS. The tech’s there, it just hasn’t been connected. All this stuff with buttons and dials is idiotic. The IS does all the work anyway."

  "Agreed, my love. But that’s their dogma. They call us machine men."

  She swiveled the seat to look at him.

  "Why?"

  "Because of our implants." He pointed at his skull behind his left ear. "And our improved genome."

  She frowned, digesting that.

  "I can sort of see why some people would have a thing about an implant, although I can’t imagine what I’d do without mine. But… who’d be against preventing diseases?"

  "Them. They say it’s unnatural, against the will of God."

  "God. Right." She shrugged. "Oh, well. To each his own."

  "But you can do much more with your implant than most, isn’t that so?"

  She covered the wariness quickly. "What makes you say that?"

  "You don’t need a keyboard, do you? You work with the IS with your mind." He pointed a finger at his own head.

  "Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not possible." But he’d seen the flicker in her eyes.

  "Your eyes change when you’re working with the machine," he said softly. "The keys you press are just for show. I’ve been watching you. When you’re looking for something your eyes lose focus. It’s as if you’re not there; as if you’re in the machine. That’s how you found the mountain garden, down there in the tunnel, without projecting a keyboard."

  She didn’t answer for a while. He could almost see the tumult in her mind. Should she brazen it out? Tell him he was wrong? He knew he’d won when the tension drained, her rigid shoulders sagged.

  "I suppose I can’t deny it. You’re right. The techpack gives me a connection to a data point—the things the InfoDroids hook into. From there I just…" she made a gliding motion with her arms, "slide in. No one else has noticed that."

  "How? How can your brain interact with an IS?"

  "It doesn’t. I work through my implant. Both my mother and father were Confederacy, so I have the improved genome and Papa made sure I had a chip fitted. It was his design, with some added functionality. You could say it gives me extra processing power, a place to store data."

  "Yes, ours do that, too. Go on."

  "Papa asked for the vision modification at the same time the implant was fitted. The Tor doctors did the operation; it involves neural as well as retinal changes. Your brain has to know how to interpret what you see."

  "Your parents allowed Ptorix doctors to operate on your brain?"

  "It’s not something Papa talked about much. My mother died soon after I was born. I think that was why." Her hand slipped through her hair, a habit he’d noticed when she was flustered. "She died. Killed in an accident. She walked out in front of a vehicle. Professor Xanthor, my father’s greatest friend, told me Mama didn’t want them to operate but father insisted."

  Easy to enough to imagine the man insisting on the operation, the distraught mother making a lethal mistake. "So you connect with your implant with your eyes."

  She nodded. "That must have had something to do with the neural change for my vision. I can…" she cast around, looking for words, "almost see the pathways in the computer, follow the data, interpret the codes."

  "That helps you with other systems? This ship, the Ptorix systems?"

  "Yes. Papa and I discovered my talent by accident when I was about ten." She barked a short laugh. "It certainly explained why I appeared to be a child prodigy in everything IS related."

  "You keep this talent secret?"

  "Oh yes. My father insisted. He explained to me that I was strange enough with my peculiar eyes. If people found out I can talk to machines they’d put me in hospital, test me, try to use me for things I didn’t want to do. I took his advice and it made sense."

  She’d told him much more than she’d intended, he was sure. He’d bet a year’s salary it wasn’t just the implant she used. "I’ll keep it to myself." But it wouldn’t matter, because she’d be working for him. And married to him. "Can you do this sort of thing in any IS?"

  "I have administrator rights in this one on Tisyphor, which makes it easy. But I’d back myself on most systems, given enough time. I find the back doors."

  "Explain."

  "ISs have heaps of redundancy. There are always ways if you know how. What’s useful for someone like me is when the old system has some means for an external entity," she indicated the techpack, "to interface with it. In that case, I can get into the IS using that loophole, break open its security and get into the rest of the system from there."

  "And that’s possible for any IS?"

  "Some are harder than others. But every IS has a port to allow access for an InfoDroid. Often that’s all I need. That and my techpack."

  So she needed the techpack. But not the keyboard. "You could be a rather dangerous lady." And he would have to take that fact into account when the time came.

  She laughed. "Only to an information system. What’s this Chollarc place like?"

  "Mixed Ptorix-human population, economically depressed, which is why they take jobs on Tisyphor. We won’t be staying. I have a ship there. I’m going to cruise past my own ship and we’re going to abandon this one, wearing exo-suits. Then we just slip into the external hatch on my ship and fly away."

  Her eyes grew round. "What’s an exo-suit?"

  "A space suit for wearing outside a vehicle. They’re standard safety issue. They have shielding against radiation, an air supply and small thrusters so you can move around."

  She made a face. "Sounds scary. Why don’t we just park in the normal way?"

  "Tisyphor has a multi-dim transmitter, so our friends could have contacted Chollarc in real time. Which means they may have organized a welcoming committee. In fact, I’d say they’ve almost certainly organized a welcoming committee. I’d rather not take the risk."

  "Oh. So when do we do jump out of here?"

  "When we can get to my ship and do so without being noticed."

  The status changed. The letters marched across the bottom of the screen. "Approaching jump gate."

  Saahren turned his attention back to the ship. They’d know on Chollarc that a ship approached. He’d thought briefly about getting Allysha to change the ship’s ID but if the space station had been alerted, it would be looking at any ship which emerged from the gate. Hopefully, seeing the unchanged ID they’d underestimate him. Always a plus in a battle.

  The chrono wound down on the status screen, still in minutes, then seconds. His hand hovered over the levers for the forward thrusters. He hoped the ship would automatically adjust to the rigors of real space but in a GPR ship, who could say?

  Three… two… one… zero. His brain registered the familiar weird shimmy as the ship exited shift-space and the view screens displayed normal space in all its glory. Stars and nebulae appeared as a backdrop to the bright sphere of Chollarc. The planet’s orbiting space station, the usual multi-wheeled structure turning slowly on its axis, gleamed in the sunlight a thousand klicks off to starboard.

  The thrusters came on as soon as the ship had cleared the jump gate. He took his hand away from the levers. Allysha was right; the IS did all the work. Why bother with levers unless you needed to go to manual? He called up the space station’s controllers and requested a docking bay. The response came back as he would have expected; no questions, no suspicion, no delay.

  "Come along, Allysha. Time to suit up."

  He levered himself out of his seat and pulled open a hatch in the cockpit’s bulkhead marked ‘Emergency’. Three suits hung in a line, air packs attached. He pulled out a suit and handed it to Allysha.

  "Put it on, leave the helmet until we’re ready to exit the ship. It will react automatically to vacuum."

  He’d done this hundreds of times before, usually in drills. He’d finished and even slipped the holster holding the Emson onto his belt before Allysha had done up the zip at the front. He h
elped her adjust the gloves and closed the zipper.

  "It’s a lot more comfortable than I thought," she said.

  He showed her how to handle the thruster jets via controls on each glove. On a Star Fleet suit he could have used a connection with his implant.

  Ahead, the space station filled the screen. The ship had been allocated level C bay six. His own ship occupied Level D, bay four. Timing was the thing. Slow this ship down so D-4 was in the frame and bale out, having set the ship on auto-pilot to proceed on.

  He waited.

  "GPR SV-TS78 you are losing slot position. Is there a problem?"

  Damn. The station had picked up he was out of position. He grabbed the microphone. "A slight hiccup in thruster calibration sequencing. Remedial action successful. Proceeding."

  He turned to Allysha. "I want to set the destination as the allocated bay. Can you delay the action until we get off the ship?"

  "Um… Yes. What if I send the instruction to the ship as we get off?"

  "Perfect. Let’s go."

  He angled the ship to slip along the station’s curve, just faster than the speed of rotation, and then ran down to the airlock.

  "Helmets on."

  The door cycled open and they hurried inside. He locked the hatch. The air began to drain out and the suits responded, stiffening and locking the helmets in place. Allysha’s eyes looked wide and frightened behind the transpex faceplate.

  "All right?" He asked her via the helmet mike.

  "Yes." But she gulped the word, obviously terrified out of her wits.

  "Concentrate on your breathing. In… out. It’s fine. We have plenty of air for this. One hundred minutes. See?" He showed her the gauge.

  The status on the external hatch for the airlock cycled to green.

  "Send the ship the instruction," he said as he pushed the hatch open.

  She nodded. He waited for two seconds, grabbed her hand and dragged her outside.

  They tumbled, end over end. Saahren fired his thrusters and controlled the roll. The space station rose beside him inside of rotating over his head. Allysha over compensated and tumbled the other way, her eyes and mouth all round with fear. It happened to some people. He’d always enjoyed the sensation of flying without a ship.