by Martin Tays
“With that on your face? I think not.”
He glared at the engineer. “Wasn’t planning on kissing you, Cath.”
“Um… she kinda has a point.” Ami whispered.
“Crap. That does it. I’ve got to do something about…” Moses looked around the bridge. “Does anyone know where the hell the good doctor is?”
“Med module.” Ami replied. “I took him down there to show it to him yesterday. He took a look at all of his new toys, said something weird, and vanished inside. Haven’t seen him since.”
“What’d he say?”
“Um…” She paused, considering. “I think the word was… ‘squee’?”
“That’s it. He now officially scares me.”
“And…” Cath smirked in her vid window. “You’re still on shipwide.”
“Oh, crap. Shipwide off.” Moses pushed off toward the hatch, then turned back toward Ami. “Now that I’ve publicly informed Doctor Smith that he’s a terrifying individual I’m off to put myself in his hands.”
“Creepy hands.”
“Creepy hands. Oy.” He shuddered, then turned back to the engineer. “Cath? How long until we can push the button?”
Cath paused, considering. “We were in a helluva hurry installing the drive. I want to go over the mounts and connections, again, and run some tests.” She shrugged. “Couple of hours? Three?”
“Fair enough.” He started to push off, again, when Cath stopped him.
“Moses? There’s something else you need to think about.” She paused a moment, then plunged on. “Look, I’m an engineer. I’m good with machines. I’m terrible with people. You know that.” Moses nodded emphatically. “So, the question is this: who’s your backup?”
He pulled himself back over to the vid window and looked at Cath, considering. “Are you sure you wouldn’t…?”
“No damn way.”
“Okay, then. Huh. Okay. Shipwide. Mattie? Please report to the bridge. Shipwide off.” He turned back to Cath. “Acceptable?”
She nodded in her vid window. “You read my mind. She’s a sharp kid. Cuter than you, too.”
“And we all know how important that is in a command position.”
Cath laughed. “You’ve got to admit the girl has a nice butt.”
“I knew letting you join in the mass mooning was a bad idea.”
“What’s up?” Mattie asked as she came in through the bridge hatch and drifted over.
“Mattie!” Said Ami, brightly. “We were just talking about your ass!”
Mattie blinked.
Moses glared at Ami, briefly, then turned back to Mattie. “Don’t ask. Got a job for you.”
“Oooo… kay. Does it involve…?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Your ass has nothing to do with it.”
“Good.”
“Good. I’m off to place myself at the tender mercies of our good doctor.”
Mattie smiled. “You mean the doctor you just said was a scary, scary person? That doctor?”
“That would be the one. Yeah.”
“Good luck.”
“Yeah, thanks. Now shut up. While I’m incapacitated, or if… if something happens, we need to have someone in charge. Guess what?”
She stared at him, then began shaking her head and backing away. “Oh. Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“Yes. We’ve got to have a chain of command around here, and there’s got to be someone next down on the ladder.” Moses pointed at the astonished Mattie. “You’re elected. You’re now the executive officer. You can still scrub the toilets, if you feel the need.”
“Imagine my delight.” She looked over to Ami, who saluted, then into the vid window at Cath, who simply nodded. Finally, she turned back to Moses. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yep. And once we get into the trip, assuming we don’t all die horribly brief and squishy deaths when we turn on the drive, you’ve got a lot to learn. And I mean a lot.”
“Oh. Well, maybe I’ll get lucky and we’ll all die horribly brief and squishy deaths.”
“If that happens, I’ll let you off the hook. Meanwhile…” He gestured around grandly, “You have the bridge.”
Mattie glared at him. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but I’m going to get you for this, Moses Dunn.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys. If it’s any consolation, I’m about to go down and have my body pumped full of medical nanotech by a man I’ve just insulted in public.”
“You know, that actually does help a little.” She nodded. “Thanks.”
Moses looked over to Ami. “I’m planning on hitting her when I come back. If I don’t come back, hit her for me?”
She nodded. “Consider it done.” Ami paused, looking off, then turned back. “Moses, I…”
“Shh. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.” He reached across and grabbed her hand, squeezed it hard, then abruptly dropped it and left without a word.
☼
“Ah. Captain Dunn. Welcome to my frightening lair.” Doctor Smith said as Moses drifted in through the module hatch.
Moses cleared his throat uncomfortably. “You, um, you heard that.”
“Did anyone not?”
“Well, no. I doubt it. When I make a jackass of myself, I don’t take half measures.” Moses looked around the medical module. It was actually the first time he’d gone into it. It looked clean, and bright, and packed with enough gadgets to give any technophobe a heart attack. Then revive him from it, and grow him a new heart to boot.
He finally looked over at the doctor. “You know why I’m here.”
The doctor nodded. “You need a new nanonanny seed package. I’ve been working on it. The lab in this thing is marvelous. And probably on every proscribed list of tech in the system. Do I want to know how you got your hands on it?”
“You don’t even begin to want to know.”
“I assumed as much. I have the initial seed growth suite all set up, but I need a genetic sample in order to program the nannies.” Smith gestured toward his arm. “Roll up your sleeve.”
As Moses folded back the cuff of his shipsuit, he studied the man in front of him. Finally, while the doc was taking what only seemed to be several liters of blood from his arm, he cleared his throat. “Doc. Look, I…”
Smith interrupted. “You’re about to tell me that there was nothing you could do, and that you’re a nice guy, and that you’d give anything not to have done what you did, right?”
Moses stared at him for a few seconds, then said “Yeah. That’s pretty much it, yeah.”
“Well you know what? It doesn’t matter.” He pulled back the syringe and critically considered the contents as he continued. “I actually think you are a nice guy, as kidnappers go. And I will act as a doctor on this trip because that is what I do, and it shouldn’t ― doesn’t ― matter if the people I help are good guys or bad.” He looked back over at Moses. “But please, do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s raining. Okay?”
Moses looked away, embarrassed. “Yeah. Okay. You got it, doc.”
“Good. Now get out of here. I need a couple of hours to get the nanites reprogrammed. Come back then.”
“Right. I…” He saw the expression on Smith’s face and quit trying to talk, drifting out to float in the central corridor.
He finally looked back at the closed hatch to the med module and spoke in a whisper. “I’m a good guy. I am. Really.”
No one answered.
“I’ve always thought it was the gates ― that incredible application of the most angstrom edged physics that has ever existed ― that really screwed us.
Let me give you an analogy. Let’s
say you live on an island in the middle of a vast ocean. Someone invents a magic pair of doors. You walk into one, you walk out of the other, no muss, no fuss. And some brave fool gets into a boat with one of a pair, and goes that-a-way, until he hits another island. And he opens his end of the door.
And from that point on, no one ever goes to sea again.”
Heather Anniston, from “The Forgotten Ocean”
“We called ourselves ‘explorers’… hell, I did, and even at the time I disagreed with the name.
Because we didn’t explore, anymore than a bullet explores between the barrel and the target. We choose specific targets for their colonization potential, went straight to them, and then came home again. The utter, glorious, infinite diversity of the universe ― and there we were, dashing over to glance at one place and then run home again, tails between our interstellar striding legs.
We had eternity to search. We should have been staying out there for centuries, if necessary, and we didn’t. We were too scared.
Explorers. Hah!”
Harriet Tillerman, from Theo Hearn’s “Other Voices”
“Alone in the universe? There’s approximately two hundred million stars in our galaxy. We’ve visited twenty two of them.
Do the math.”
Hermes Van Gelder, from Right Stuff, Wrong Place
Chapter 19
“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu
“Moses, I have a very important question for you.” Ami floated by the command chair, pointedly not looking at the person sitting in it.
“And that would be?”
“Well, I was sort of wondering…” She hesitated. “Not that I care, of course, mind you… but, um…”
Mattie spoke up from the helm. “She’s kind of curious why you’re green, Moses.” She turned and considered him, then continued. “Bright green.”
“Ah. Yeah. That.” He shrugged. “Turns out that Doctor Smith has a sense of humor, after all.”
“This is not correct.” Doctor Smith drifted in through the hatch. “As I have pointed out to you, before, I have no sense of humor. I’ve been tested. I know. You…” He pointed to Moses. “Are just having minor adjustment problems with your subcutaneous systems control nanites.”
“And that is why I’m green.”
“No. That…” the doctor replied, “Is why you’re very green.”
“I see. You know, Doctor Smith… may I call you Clive?”
“No.”
Moses nodded. “You know, Doctor Smith, I believe that you may fit into this crew better than I thought.”
“Now I see. Please allow me a moment, if you would, to compose a suitable insult in response.”
“Please, take your time.” Moses replied magnanimously. “We’ve got all day.”
A vid window popped up before the command chair. Cath looked out. “Okay, folks, it looks like we’re good to go. Kermit? You ready?”
“Oh, har de har.” Moses glared at the doctor, who just looked back blandly. He sighed and turned back to the window. “Okay, Cath. Let’s rock and roll. Sandar?”
The slim astronomer looked over from the nav station. “We’re ready, Moses. Captain. The course is laid in and available to the helm.”
He turned to the helm. “Mattie?”
At the ship’s guidance control station, Mattie looked back over her shoulder and shrugged. “We’re as ready, I suppose, as we’ll ever be.”
Moses reached over to Ami and took her hand, then turned back to Cath and said, simply, “Go.”
Cath looked down briefly, they back up to Moses. “Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“We’re underway.”
“Oh.” Moses blinked. “Huh. That was… remarkably anticlimactic.”
“Sorry. I could make ‘vrooming’ noises, if you like.”
“Maybe next time. Forward view.” Moses turned toward the new window. The entire view was filled with nothing. Not a black nothing, but a featureless, colorless, bulkless nothing that strained the vision and hurt the brain. His eyes started to water.
With some difficulty he finally blinked and looked over at Cath. “So what the hell am I looking at, anyway?”
“It’s a wad of compressed space.”
Ami looked back toward Cath’s window. “A wad. Is that the technical term?”
“I think we officially decided to call it a ‘warp bolus’.” The engineer replied. “It’s a volume a couple of hundred meters across that contains about six cubic light years worth of space. Which means that we’d have to wait about two years for light to cross it and come out again.”
“Remind me to look again in two years. Forward view off.” He turned to Smith. “Doc? Now that we know we’re not going to be smushed in a horribly ironic quantum accident, how can I help you?”
The doctor looked around the bridge. “As long as I’m part of this illegal operation, I might as well do some work. I had the opportunity to examine you while we worked on your tan…”
“Ah-hah!”
“However,” He continued, unperturbed, “I have not been able to examine the remainder of your crew. I would like to correct that.”
“Promise you won’t turn them…” Moses looked over at No, then continued, “… well, any color they weren’t originally?”
“None of them kidnapped me.”
“True enough.” He looked over toward the helm. “Mattie?”
The dark skinned girl safed the helm and pushed up out of her seat. “I don’t know. I’ve often wondered how I’d look blue.”
“That’s entirely between you and the remains of your fashion sense. You’re the XO. I need you to put together a schedule for everyone on board to visit the doctor and get probed.”
“This job sucks.”
“Yes.” Moses nodded. “Yes, it does. And while you’re at it, I’m going to need a training schedule put together and posted. You’ll find a ships qualification regimen online. Everyone goes through it, and I mean everyone. Cath will sign off engineering, Sandar navigation, Sher life support, and you operations. Oh, and Leo’ll have damage control. After passing certification yourselves, of course.” Groans met his words.
He looked about the bridge. “What did you people expect? We’ve got about a third of the personnel we need to safely operate this sucker. The only thing that’s going to keep us safe is everyone knowing this ship like the back of their hands.” He glanced down, then continued. “Take me, for instance. I now know that the back of my hand is green.”
Ami nodded. “And a good thing, too. If it were orange, you’d clash.”
“Not if I were a Gator fan, dear. Now shush. Shipwide. Okay, folks. We’re underway. Mattie is posting a schedule for study, as well as one for visiting the doctor in his lair for a thorough checkup. Tomorrow we’ll put up the schedule for getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Could I get a sweep, please, of the ship? I want to make sure that activating the drive didn’t do anything to structural integrity. Shipwide off.”
A vid window immediately popped open. “Galley to bridge.”
Moses looked up. “Yes, Doug?”
“You suck. Galley out.” The window vanished.
He blinked and turned to Ami. “Did I mention that this was going to be a long trip?”
“Several times, dear. And just how, exactly, can you be a fan of an alligator?”
“No, no, it’s a footb… oh, never mind.” Moses glanced over at Mattie. “Did you ever notice sometimes that you’re not talking with someone as much as near them?”
Mattie snorted. “This, from the man who recited the entire ‘Cremation of Sam McGee’ when Sher mentioned the hab ring quarters were a little chilly?”
&n
bsp; “’There are strange things done, in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for…’ Ouch.” Moses rubbed his arm ruefully and made a face at Ami. “Everyone’s a literary critic.”
☼
“Are you certain about this?”
“No.”
“I see.” S’Nhu-gli floated by the panel and looked down at the readout. He understood the humaan’s written language well enough (though he had to admit the vocal one had him utterly baffled). From what he could tell from the display, his daughter was right.
“There was a gravity surge. Right…” T’han-mri pointed. “Here. I think. About a turn ago.”
“So they’re nearby?”
She ducked her chin to her chest, signaling ‘no’. “I don’t believe so. Gravity does not seem to need to follow the law, as light does. No, the instant they… they did whatever they did, there, we detected it. Here.”
“’There’ being where, exactly?” S’Nhu-gli asked, looking down at the readout.
She pushed over to the far side of the little compartment and brought up a star chart on one of the humaan’s portable video devices. “Here.” She said, handing him the display. “This star, or near it, anyway.”
He considered the map. “And you believe it to be a ship?”
His daughter looked back up. “What else could it be, father?”
“And we detected it instantly?”
She waved her forefoot at the equipment around her. “With help, yes. Instantly.”
“Extraordinary.” He looked down at the instrument, then back up toward her. “How long?”
“Until they get here?”
“Yes.”
“I honestly have no idea.” She replied, uncertainly. “It could be years. It could be days.”
“I see.” He glanced once more at the readout, then pushed away, over toward the intercom the general’s technicians had installed when the little humaan device had been integrated into the warship. He didn’t particularly like the fact that the interloper had been hooked up here, but he had to admit he appreciated not having to suit up every time he needed to speak with his daughter.