Hearts and Minds: An Impulse Power Story

by J. C. Hay

  He sighed in obvious relief, and Syna eased onto the bench to finish what was left of her juice. He returned to the door and relied on it for support. Syna noticed he favored the wounded leg now. Whatever pain-tolerance trick he’d pulled, it had worn off during his sedation. He stared at her, and Syna fought the urge to meet his eyes.

  She traced a scar in the composite tablecloth as distraction. “I’ll drop you off at my next port of call—that’s Tammuz. They’re close to the main trade lanes so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding transport anywhere you want. I’ll even keep my own price reasonable, at least compared to what you spent on that Narcissus.”

  “The yacht wasn’t mine.”

  “Oh?” Syna hoped her disbelief wasn’t as obvious as it sounded to her.

  “It was donated by an…associate. He will be upset at his loss, but I suspect he has larger problems on his plate at the moment.”

  Syna nodded. “I’m certain. You can call him as soon as we reach the spaceport.” He opened his mouth and she held up a hand to stop him. “I wasn’t going to leave you there to die, but that doesn’t mean I am thrilled with having you aboard my ship. I like my solitude. I’m used to it. In five days we’ll reach port, and you can go back to whatever it is you do.” Far away from me, she resisted adding.

  He limped to the table and sat down heavily. She looked up without thinking, met warm chestnut-colored eyes that seemed concerned and sympathetic. Fear flashed through her, rapidly followed by a long string of astrogation equations, anything that would keep his mind off of hers.

  He gave a tired smile in response. “You gave me strict instruction, and I like my skull in its current condition.” He winced suddenly and pressed two fingers to his eye socket. “Mostly at least. That said, you’ve described your plan. Allow me to make a counteroffer.”

  Galen felt the wave of distrust flow off her, a chill of nausea that he fought to calm. She’d promised to kill him if he went in her head again, and she had that steel in her eyes that made him certain she’d do it. Better to stay on her good side. He waited until her suspicion had dwindled. “I don’t need to be an empath to know you hate the Tse.”

  She snuffed quietly, but said nothing.

  “I can probably even extrapolate—you like your freedoms, out here on the edge of settled space. The wildness of it. The Tse take all of that away and impose their version of order.” He felt her shifting from curious to impatient—one of the many reasons psi-talents were forbidden from taking part in negotiations. He rushed to his point, rather than lose her interest. “The Tse are coming.”

  She coughed out another laugh. “Tell me something I didn’t know. The Tse only exist to expand the Hegemony.”

  “Not like that. I mean they’re coming, as in the entirety of the 371st phalanx fleet is en route while we’re talking.”

  “And you know this why?”

  “Because I’m one of the reasons they’re coming.”

  Her disbelief and scorn filled the space above the pitted composite table, and Galen tried to keep his offense off his face. She’d never understand that it wasn’t the sort of thing he could turn off, any more than she could stop broadcasting her emotions like a loudspeaker.

  “Hear me out. There’s a revolution going on down there.” He pointed at the window and hoped she understood he meant Hamunaptra, rather than the dead moon beyond the transteel. “People like me, psions, are standing up to the local government and their Tse supporters.”

  “The Tse are backing an outlier government? Why bother, when they could just take the planet?”

  “Because the planet produces psi-talent with unusual frequency. The government was collecting the best talent and trading them to the Tse, in return for the appearance of independence.”

  “And that’s why your friends are making a stand, and why there’s a fleet of Tse war cruisers headed this way.” She shook her head in disbelief.

  He nodded. “In a nutshell, yeah.” He picked up a smell when she shook her head—not quite nutmeg, but similar—and he wondered if it was her shampoo or her natural smell. He immediately tamped that voice down. There was no sense in even thinking like that. Not only had she promised to kill him, but it was entirely likely the Tse would do the job for her. He needed to keep his mind on the work, and maybe he’d live long enough to get back to Hamunaptra when it was all over.

  “So what is your counteroffer? Join the revolution? Sorry, Galen, but the last I checked doing the right thing didn’t pay well.”

  “Not exactly. And if it’s money you’re looking for, then you’ll be well compensated.”

  She said, “Keep talking,” but he could feel her curiosity pique, and not at the mention of money. He kept himself from nodding at the discovery.

  “The Tse are coming, like I said. But they aren’t here.”

  “Look around. The Quarry’s a ship for running, not fighting. The two scramble missiles I fired at your playmates cost me almost a month’s wages. Against a Tse fleet, the Quarry’s not even going to be a speed bump.” A hurt sound came out of the intercom, and she glared at it. “Bree, you know I’m right. They’ve got weapons that would go through your shields faster than you can calculate the number of pieces they’d blow us into.”

  “You didn’t have to say it out loud.”

  Galen could have sworn the AI sounded hurt at the prospect. “Does she—it—do that much?”

  “Eavesdrop? Most of the time. Though it’s not really eavesdropping when I’m the only person on the ship. I’ve got to talk to someone, and Bree’s pretty good at filling the time.”

  “I’m also capable of reading the literature of several cultures aloud, not that you want to hear anything other than—”

  “That’s enough, Bree.” He detected annoyance and a faint whiff of embarrassment flash across her psyche and smiled, wondering what the story was there. Perhaps later he could coax it out of the gossipy AI. The machine certainly seemed willful enough.

  “It wouldn’t require you to square off against the whole Tse fleet, but I can’t say there won’t be combat. Actually, it’s a situation where your speed would be exceedingly handy. I want your help taking a lighthouse.”

  She laughed, loud and hard. “I made a mistake; I should have locked you down. Obviously you scrambled something in your brain with your little stunt on the yacht.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Then you’re dangerously mad.”

  “It can be done. I know how. It’s what we were on our way to do when you intercepted us.” He suddenly realized the implications and winced. He slammed his hand down on the table. “Dammit!”

  She looked at him, concerned. “What is it?”

  “I just realized what happened. Who hired you to hit us?”

  She looked down at the table. “It was a third-party job. An intercessor between the employer and the employed.” It wasn’t unusual, he knew. Especially if the employer had a reason to keep his identity secret.

  “And yet the Tse knew almost to the second when you’d make your attack and launched their assault simultaneously.”

  “The edge of the magnetosphere isn’t exactly uncommon for boarding assaults.” Suspicion and discomfort warred across the landscape of her emotions.

  “No, the coincidence is too high to ignore. It explains everything—only the officer had a psi-shield, so they hadn’t prepped for the intercept. They had to have received the information about our trip and been forced to act quickly, using the nearest available ship. We’ve suspected for a while that we had a mole in the resistance, so we tried to hide our mission from all but the most trusted. It leaked out barely a day before we went into action. And then an independent pirate attacks the one ship designed to be our salvation, at the same time a Tse corvette happens to launch its attack?”

  “I’m not in league with them.”

  “Obviously. I sensed the rage on you as you wiped them out. But whoever hired you was, and they needed to use your attack as a cover up. S
orry, everyone, there was a pirate attack.” He held up his hands in a mock-apologetic shrug. “No survivors, so sorry.”

  She stood and stormed across to the viewport at the fore. He could see her features reflected back in the transteel, felt the anger simmering barely controlled under her composed surface.

  Galen counted to ten, giving her a chance to respond before he continued. “If we disrupt the lighthouse beacon, the fleet will have to turn back. There aren’t enough lighthouses out here for them to recourse on the fly. It would cost them weeks, and that’s time we need.”

  “I don’t come cheap.”

  Galen stared at her. Jonas would have risen to the occasion, disarmed her with a clever double entendre. He had no such inclination. Not that she was unattractive, but his first call was the mission. Secure the lighthouse. Buy time for the revolution at any cost. “Double your standard rate. Plus fuel and expenses.”

  “Quadruple it. You’re asking me to go on a suicide run.”

  “If you don’t live, there won’t be any opportunity to spend it anyway. Sure. Quadrupled.”

  She blinked. “I should have asked for more. You’re desperate, as well as crazy.”

  He grabbed the juice bag off the table and squeezed a mouthful down his throat, then gave her his best mad smile. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  ~ * ~

  Syna flopped into the navigator’s chair and pulled out a clipboard. It was an idiosyncrasy to calculate flight paths by hand, but the steady progression of numbers always served to calm her. Even if Bree’s math was more reliable, the rote familiarity of the action helped her make sense of things. She pulled up a chart on the monitor and stared at it, her hand poised above the tablet, until her vision blurred.

  “I can calculate that, you realize.” The AI’s helpful voice came up from the speaker at the station, rather than over the bridge comm. A halfhearted attempt at privacy.

  “How about you check my numbers when I’m done?”

  “Are you so flustered that you fail to trust your own calculations?”

  “Who wouldn’t be flustered?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t understand levels of attraction among humans even slightly.”

  She glared at the monitor. “Where did you learn that?”

  “You’re the one who installed a library of erotica, rather than fine literature.”

  Syna narrowed her eyes at the panel, her voice an angry whisper. “This has nothing to do with attraction. It’s got everything to do with the fact that he hired us for a suicide run.”

  “If he knows a plan, then it’s hardly a suicide run.”

  “Listen to you. You sound like you trust him. He’s been aboard the ship half a day and you’re suddenly best friends?”

  “That is not what I said, and you know it. I merely intimated—”

  “That he wouldn’t go on a suicide run himself. I had considered that. There were only the two of them aboard the yacht.”

  “So perhaps his plan simply needs speed and two handy souls?”

  Syna hated when the AI fished for compliments. It was unsubtle. Too like Anbjorn.

  She chuckled quietly. That was a can of worms she wouldn’t even consider opening. Anbjorn had a lot of flaws, gods knew, but she wasn’t about to go maudlin now. Syna shook her head and copied down a series of numbers from the chart.

  “My estimation is that Proxima Thule would be the likeliest lighthouse to disrupt the assault. It also matches the direction the yacht was heading when it left the planet’s magnetosphere.”

  “Thanks, Bree.”

  “That would be roughly two days in null. I wish I could do better than that.”

  “Two days is fine, Bree. I— Wait. I told you not to calculate that.”

  “I finished the calculations before you entered the bridge, so technically I am not in violation of your order.”

  “Wonderful. Tell you what, why don’t you and short, dark and curly just take care of everything and wake me up when it’s time to die?” She slammed the tablet down onto the console and shoved herself out of the chair. She’d taken three steps before she realized that she’d just gotten in a fight with a computer. She stood in the door and rested her hand on the doorway frame. “Bree?”

  “Captain.” The AI’s voice was pensive.

  “Thank you for running the numbers for me. Print them to the NavCom monitor and I will take a look at them, please.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  Syna debated apologizing as well, but settled for a sigh and a wry grin. “I’ll be back in a second. I just need to run to the mess and get a drink.”

  When she returned, the calculations glowed in pale green on the monitor as she’d asked.

  Neat. Orderly. Numbers didn’t let messy things like emotion clog up the works. They didn’t care about how you looked or who you spoke to last. They were regular and constant. They didn’t change. Or die.

  Syna bit down on her lip and leaned back in the chair. “Gods, Anbjorn. You were impulsive, but at least you never let uncertainty hold you back.” Even if he didn’t know what to do, he tended to act first and dig his way out afterwards.

  She glanced down at the nav console’s comm, but the active light was dead. Bree had decided to give her some privacy after all.

  So how impulsive is the psion? And wouldn’t you like to know?

  Syna grimaced and turned back to the numbers. It didn’t matter what she thought about him, his talents terrified her. Her mind had always been her own, and she’d been raised on nightmare stories of psions using people like puppets. Worse, their victims didn’t even realize they obeyed a will other than their own.

  So why didn’t he force me instead of hiring me?

  The numbers for the trip to Proxima Thule seemed sound, though she felt that Bree pulled them a little too close to the gravity well of a stellar mass. Moving farther out would ensure the Quarry stayed safe, at the cost of only a few extra hours. Syna updated the calculations with a quick dance of her fingers across the keypad.

  It certainly wasn’t an effort to buy a few extra hours with the psion before the action started, she was only being cautious. She repeated the idea until she sounded convinced.

  Besides, the psion had nothing to appeal to her. None of Anbjorn’s mass, none of the feral beauty that Anbjorn had inherited from his Vanyari parents. Galen was more like Anbjorn’s shadow—thin, dusky, and quiet to Anbjorn’s over-the-top masculinity. And gone, as soon as they completed this half-witted scheme of his. Assuming they lived through it in the first place, of course. There was no point dwelling on it, because in a matter of days he wouldn’t be there.

  So why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?

  Syna shook her head. “Like it makes any difference. When we drop out of null at Thule, the Tse are going to gut us and wear our skins as a warning.” She spoke louder than she’d intended, startling herself with the sudden vehemence of her words.

  As if in response, the main system’s lights came up, and Bree’s voice came out of the comm panel. “Captain? Is the course set the way you’d like it?”

  Syna glanced at the monitor again, debating changing the whole thing and resetting the destination for the farthest point from Hamunaptra she could chart. She let her breath out in a slow sigh. “Yeah. Anything happening out there?”

  “Normal traffic only, Captain. Salvage rights on the yacht and the Tse vessel would not be determined yet, so no ships have approached.”

  “And no new Tse ships showed up?”

  “Not yet, Captain. Shall we hold off another twenty-four-hour cycle?”

  “No. No, we may as well get this over with. Set a course for the L5 jump point and transition to null space on course for Proxima Thule.” Once they’d shifted out of normal space, she could let her guard down, at least for a while.

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Is there hot water?”

  “Cyclers are full and performing at maximum, yes.”

  “Perfect.
If you need me, I’ll be in the shower. Call if there’s a problem with the jump.” The roar of maneuvering jets sounded as she left the bridge without waiting for a reply.

  The shift to null caught him off guard. No warning klaxons sounded, no indications of any kind to let him know they were about to rip open part of the fabric of reality. One moment the stars danced past the window in a slow pavane, the next the ship filled with the whine of distortion as the Alcubierre Drive began to dump energy into the null wave.

  Outside, the stars faded and blurred into a milky, featureless gray. The distortion caused by the creation of the null wave folded them out of normal space—it kept interstellar travel to reasonable times, allowed society to stay in touch.

  Galen looked through the transteel, saw the blank expanse and watched. A pattern existed there, in the minute colorless swirls of null. Faces. Voices. So close that he could see them if he looked just a little longer. He blinked and glanced at his chrono. Twenty minutes had passed since the transition.

  He shoved himself away from the window and slapped at the shutter control until it engaged. He kept his other arm tight across his eyes, desperate to resist the urge to look back out at the nothingness. When he heard the reassuring thunk of the shutters sealing closed, he counted to thirty and dropped his arm.

  He looked around the mess, suddenly thirsty for anything that might calm his nerves. Something that might take away the quiet almost-voices that crawled along the very edges of his awareness. On a weak prayer he called out, “Bree? You listening?”

  “How can I be of service?”

  “Tell me where she keeps the booze for starters.”

  “Second chiller unit from the far right corner. Unless you mean the captain’s personal stash.”

  He tugged the door open and found three bottles of grain alcohol. In each an odd polyp of something floated—like a collection of connected disks through the center of the bottle. He unscrewed the first and sniffed. Wood, moss and earth assailed his nostrils. Vodka and lichen. Very interesting. She didn’t look like the sort of woman who spent much time drinking with the Vanyari. He remembered the computer, still waiting for a response from him. “This will do fine, Bree. Thanks.”