by Jean Johnson
“Wyzer Beekins,” he corrected, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
“Well, on that one point, you and I do agree; it’s a very odd name,” Jackie said. “I’m sorry your fiancée booted you, but as the Commander was no doubt going to say, a lot of people get booted out of relationships around the world. It isn’t something new, it isn’t going to stop happening, and it doesn’t happen simply and solely because of psychic abilities, or a lack thereof. She could have just as easily dumped you because she loves cats and you hate them.”
“I don’t hate cats.”
“It was merely an example, Colvers.” Jackie checked her boards, then glanced his way again. It was far easier for her to look at him than the reverse, and he was still rubbing the spot where his brow met his nose, as far as she could tell. “For the record, I don’t hate you. I don’t even hate you for hating me so stupidly and needlessly. But neither do I care about you, save as a member of this team. A functioning member, which means no more fat jokes, no more kicking your boots at my abilities, and no more comparing me unfavorably to someone I am not and will never be.
“I am offended that you suggested I would ever betray the United Planets, but I do not hate you. Now. Take in a deep breath, let it out, and think of me as a fellow Human being. As a fellow functional member of this team. Or at the very least, a walking, talking communications antenna if you must dehumanize me in any way. Work with me, not against me, Lieutenant Colvers. Can you do that much? Because I really do not want to have to remind you that there are over one hundred active pilots in the OTL program besides yourself, with no doubt five hundred more sitting on a standby list . . . but only one major xenopath suitable for First Contact situations on both the civilian and military fronts.”
Brad mumbled something. Seated to his left, Robert cupped his hand behind his ear, float-leaning closer. Or trying to; their chief pilot shifted oddly in his seat from the action-reaction of their weightless environment. His copilot muttered again, this time loud enough to be heard.
“Fine. I’ll try to treat you like a functional member of the team.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll return you the same courtesy. As for working with any alien races, that will be my job, literally finding ways to work peacefully with them, not against them . . . but I will never betray my fellow Humans. I am Human, they are not, and that is that. Now, if we’re all settled, I’m bringing the cockpit recorder back online,” Jackie added in warning. “I’ll have to file an explanation why I turned it off, but I do believe fervently in mental privacy. Including protecting yours.”
Maria twisted in her seat to look back at Jackie. “Okay, now that everything is settled? Can you please follow through on your required psychic tests so that I can check them off of my list? It’s a small list of things to do, but I am taking my job seriously.”
“She is not—”
“Lieutenant,” Jackie interrupted him. “I am simply going to do a general sweep. I have a twenty-two-year record of spotless ethics versus efficiency, the last fifteen of which has been spent under close military and government scrutiny. As the Psi League says, what was yours will remain yours.” Hearing a mutter under his breath, Jackie rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Brad, if you’d stop to think about it, you’d realize any sane person—and I do qualify—would be extremely reluctant to touch the thoughts of someone as heavily bigoted as you. And I am reluctant. So this will just be a passive general scan for sentient thoughts within my mental range.”
“Fine. But if you read my thoughts . . .”
“If you would calm yourself and stop thinking so loudly, so impassioned and forceful with your hatred and pain amplifying everything, then the details will not register in my telepathic sweep. Mind your own thoughts, Colvers, and I’ll attend to mine. I also suggest you sign up for a course in general psychic meditation, of grounding, centering, and shielding when we get back. Any Human can do that much with practice, and thus block out general scans and accidental eavesdropping—after all, if you don’t learn to talk quietly, of course someone is going to overhear you shouting every single word. Even if we don’t want to overhear it. Now, be quiet, calm your thoughts, and let me do my job. Professionally.”
He subsided. His fingers were fisted again, save for the last two, which gripped his armrest to keep his arm from floating randomly in its half-tensed state, but Lieutenant Colvers said nothing more.
“Right, then. Everyone, just calm your minds, and . . . think about vegetables. Like what is a rutabaga, or rhubarb, or the differences between zucchini versus summer squash. Carrots versus yams. Anything boring and food-based, so I can sort out your thoughts from any others that might be near.”
That got a snort out of the lieutenant. “Any others that might be near?”
“I’m a Rank 15, Colvers. The last time I was in the military, I could trance while sitting in a station in orbit around Jupiter, and while focusing in a particular direction, I could hear the cargo-ship crews as they flew in from the Kuiper belt as soon as they crossed Uranus’ orbit. Be very glad I have very tight mental shields, and a strong aversion to touching anyone’s mind accidentally outside of the needs of a moment like this. Learn to control your own thoughts, to shield them with discipline, and you’ll be that much more safe.
“Think firmly about food for the next few minutes, to ensure I don’t overhear anything else,” she finished.
Quiet filled the cockpit. Not silence; the thrum of the engines powering the insystem-thruster fields and the subtle whoosh of the air recyclers prevented absolute silence. But quiet followed her words. Satisfied after half a minute that they were complying, Jackie drew in a deep breath, pictured clenching her irritation at Colvers in her hands, pictured herself opening those hands and releasing all such negativity, and exhaled as she did so.
In with the good air, out with the bad air, as the ancient saying goes. Draw in the positive energies—or neutral, at the very least—and expel all the harmful ones. Third breath . . . center my scattered bits of psyche . . . blend and accept . . . blend and rinse clean . . . blend and make smooth and whole . . . A fifth round usually wasn’t necessary, but Jackie didn’t feel centered until the sixth inhale-exhale round of visualizations.
When she did feel that inner bump that ended with a sense of smooth inner calm filling her whole body, she realized just how off-center Brad had thrown her with his shouting and his hatred and his spurious death threat. Setting all of that carefully aside, she unfurled her layers of mental shielding. Each mind came into reach slowly as she allowed her shields to open up first in this direction but only so far, then in that direction a little bit more, like uncurling first her right arm partway, then her left. Each time she found and identified someone else, she unfurled a bit more.
Lars was thinking about rye crisps, rather than the vegetables suggested, and picturing which cheeses to pair them with. Ayinda was longing for a sandwich loaded with slices of crisp vegetables and alfalfa sprouts. Maria was thinking firmly about the dry, unleavened taste of a communion wafer paired with the bitter tannins and rich flavonoids of red communion wine. Of course, they were all stuck with thick gloppy things in pouches until they got back to a gravity-style environment where crumbs wouldn’t be a free-floating threat to control consoles and more, but they could think about such things.
Robert’s food thoughts were filled with spicy corn chips smothered in equally spiced meat, salsa, guacamole . . . she moved on from his thoughts, ignoring the way her stomach rumbled with hunger. There was a food pack in the galley storage cupboards which approximated the meat and vegetables found in a nacho dish, but it just wasn’t the same without any fresh-made chips to dip. And Colvers . . . was thinking about bread. White bread, its bubbles, its softness, turning it over and over in his mind—the bread collapsed, smashed into a lump in his mental fist. A deep breath, and he started again. A loaf of bread. A slice of bread . . .
Blocking out that, too, now that each of their minds were identified, Jackie ca
st her thoughts outward. First in a general sphere that swelled silently, invisibly around them. It took very little inner energy, but it did take a great deal of concentration. At around a total radius of twenty kilometers, forty klicks in diameter, she could barely sense the others, but she had every centimeter of that span covered. Far enough to have brushed another space station had they been in orbit, or another ship traveling in relatively close formation.
But that was a full sensing, not a patrol-style sweep. Twenty klicks was her limit. Jackie had to bring her mind back, retracting slowly, not wanting to strain her mental muscles as it were. If there had been more than the six of them, or if anyone had been out there at the fifteen-klick mark, she might not have been able to reach even to the eighteen mark without extra effort, particularly if that spurious extra mind was noisy with loud, strong, unpredictable thoughts.
Instead, she switched to a cone-like arc of mental focus, expanding her range considerably. Dead ahead in stellar navigation terms was always zero by zero. She swept to her right, going around the compass, mind stretching out for hundreds of kilometers, coming around back to 359 by 359 and then to her starting point, then she swept up, back, down, and around. Nothing. An angular sweep down to her right, up around to her left and back to center was also clean. Sweeping down and left, up around to the right—she snagged on something.
Eyes snapping open, she stared sightlessly at the back of the doctor’s chair while she sorted out the . . . half dozen Human minds. Two pilots, two navigators, a medic, and a planetary scientist—military, not civilian, but still a scientist.
“Ullupi Hadrismattar,” she murmured.
“What?” Ayinda asked her.
“Captain . . . Ullupi Hadrismattar, Space Force Army,” Jackie repeated, latching onto that name and that rank. She could almost see the silver bars and the name tag on the other woman’s green-hued uniform, her clairvoyancy riding bootstrapped to her telepathy. “Which ship are they on?”
“Uhh . . . the Aloha 25?” Lars offered. “She is a good geophysicist, and a good colleague. Why do you ask that?”
Shaking off her focus, Jackie called up the data on the Aloha 25. Nothing. Trying one number higher, she discovered it was the Aloha 26 that had that particular captain on board. “Pinging the Aloha 26 . . .”
Pingback came very quickly, traversing hyperrelay channels.
“This is the TUPSF Aloha 26. What is your query, Aloha 9?” a smooth male voice asked. That would be the copilot, Lieutenant First Class Kiril Leonidovich.
“No query, Aloha 26, just a ‘hello and welcome to Barnard’s Star’ from the 9,” she replied. “You’re estimated to be roughly off our starboard bow at the . . . 337 by 39, by about three thousand klicks. Let me know when your navicomp has our position and speed pinged, please, and what the results are.”
A pause, and the reply came back, “Navicomp has you pegged at . . . 3,447 kilometers as of a quarter second ago, on our 243 by 237; we are free of your heading by 252 kilometers and rapidly widening . . . Commander Jjorge wants to know, how did you know we were here?”
“I was scanning your direction—Major Jackie MacKenzie, Psi Division. What was yours is still yours,” she added politely, formally. “We’re just doing a shakedown cruise of the new crew configuration, which includes giving me a taste of non–Sol System aethers.”
“Well then, welcome to Barnard’s Star, Major. We’ll just be arcing around your position to point us home; we’re inbound with a glitch in our refrigeration system, of all things. Half the food packs are frozen.”
“Sorry to hear that. Have fun chatting with the repair squads, 26,” Jackie told him. “We’ll be home in . . . 7 hours 28 minutes, if all goes well. Aloha 9 out.”
“Hopefully it will. Aloha 26 out.”
“You actually picked up their thoughts at nearly three and a half thousand kilometers away?” Colvers asked her, skeptical.
“A name and a vision of a name tag on a dull green uniform shirt, with captain’s tracks on the collar point above it,” Jackie confirmed. “The more minds there are in an area, the more my distance gets foreshortened. It’s like trying to hear someone speaking at the far end of an athletic field. The more people that are talking between you and them, the less clearly you can hear them. When you’re buried in a whole crowd at your end, you cannot hear them at all, just the people immediately around you.”
Ayinda looked over her shoulder, her expression sympathetic. “You must hate really big cities, then.”
“On Earth, I have to limit my range very severely to avoid being overwhelmed. In deep space, I can reach pretty far, though there does come a point in the territory covered where I lose track of my own body, and I tend to have to consider that my limit.”
“Ugh, do we have to hear the lectures on how it all works?” she heard the lieutenant mutter.
“You did ask. Plus, knowing what I can or cannot do may one day save our lives,” Jackie said. “But just to reassure you, I am done ‘lecturing’ for now. Everyone and everything appears normal, including me.”
“Good,” Maria stated. “Any headaches, dizziness, or pains from overextending yourself?”
“None.”
“Then let’s get under way to our next destination. Roberto?”
Their chief pilot nodded and started murmuring directions to his copilot and their astronavigator.
Breathing deeply, Jackie finished her sweep and extended her focus in the general direction of the other ship, whose flight path was being tracked on one of her secondary screens. She aimed ahead by a few degrees, to compensate for the lightwave lag between what her ship’s sensors saw and what the other ship was actually doing, and picked up a sense of the crew’s reluctance to cease their mission mixed with anticipation of being able to relax while the repairs were being made. Plus a bit of speculation on whether or not they’d be assigned to one of the spare ships . . .
Playing with relativistic speeds was fun. Playing telepathically at relativistic speeds was a subject not quite as fun, for the Psi League and Witan Orders both agreed that it was better to hedge on how telepathy and such seemed to be slightly faster than light itself—for which, the reasons were still unknown—than to reveal to the nongifted that they could detect things which science’s many instruments could not.
After all, it had taken the psychic community centuries to develop machines which could sense genuine psychic energy, dubbed kinetic inergy for how it didn’t obey the usual electromagnetic rules, or even occupy the same frequencies and amplitudes. Science finally could verify genuine psi powers, separating the actual psis from the deluded or the conniving, but there were still far too many mysteries to say they completely understood it.
And people like Brad Colvers often chose to hate the things they did not have and could not understand.
CHAPTER 4
SEMBER 17, 9507 V.D.S. (JANUARY 24, 2287 C.E.)
SALIK WARSHIP G’POW-GWISH N’POKK CHU-HUU
SIC TRANSIT
Naked. Constantly on display for their captors like a meat animal waiting to be selected and butchered. Exactly like a meat animal waiting to be selected and butchered. Li’eth knew he was going to have nightmares about this for years to come if he survived.
If.
They had come for Ensign Gi’ol Chasa-nuq’ara, today. She had given Li’eth a stricken look as they stopped at her cage, just across the aisle and down two spots from his own. Seconds later, Gi’ol had slumped to the bare metal floor when stunned with the flash-pzzzt of the enemy’s nonlethal weaponry. She would wake up before the end, however. They would make sure she was awake long before the end.
The Enemy had two goals in life, after all: galactic conquest, and lunch . . . preferably still kicking, screaming, and begging for mercy.
Coming for one of the officers, though . . . that meant there were no more enlisted prisoners on board. As he’d thought they might, the laser-wielding Salik had drilled a hole through the bridge blast doors, shoved through a couple o
f their nefarious stunner grenades, and plugged the hole quickly, letting the grenades knock everyone out. The Captain of the T’un Tunn G’Deth and his bridge officers had awakened an unknown while later, trapped in the prey cages of their enemies.
They woke stripped of all weapons, clothes, and tools, of course. Nothing that could be used for either an escape attempt or an easy suicide. No recessed or glazed lights inside the cage, just the orange glow of the lamps built into the walls over each cell, so there was no way to break the covers and use a sharp shard to slash one’s wrists. In fact, the cages themselves held little more than the hard floor for a bed, with a matching flat ceiling and side walls, the latter enclosed to ensure no prisoner could reach through the bars and throttle a fellow captive in a much more merciful death than what actually awaited them.
On the one wall with bars, a dispenser had been bolted to them with a soft straw for drinking water—too soft and floppy to impale oneself upon, too short to wrap around the neck for strangulation—and a shallow metal dish with a very rounded rim next to it for holding their food. The last item, a flush basin for biological waste, sat at the far end of the rectangular cage from it. There was enough room in the cages to stretch out with a little bit more to spare, if one didn’t mind putting either head or feet beneath the basin, and very little headroom. Li’eth’s hair just brushed the roof of his cage when he fluffed it up; V’kol, at a thumbwidth taller, would have to be careful when pacing to avoid hitting his head with each subtle bounce in his stride.