by Jean Johnson
“So. Do you know the words for ‘please stay’ and ‘please be patient’ so I can keep them in their seats?” he asked her politely.
Jackie shook her head . . . then nodded, reaching out to Red Stripes. A couple of pulsed thoughts, and his voice floated out of the crew quarters. He stated two phrases, somewhat similar to each other. Lars nodded and left to join them, practicing the words under his breath. Grateful the geophysicist was willing to help herd their unexpected guests, Jackie picked her way to the cockpit. Then had to reach out and urge the now tee-shirt-and-shorts-clad Red Stripes, mentally and physically, to rise. That let Lars take his place, allowing Jackie to guide Red Stripes mentally through the kitchen and corridor cabins to join her at the cockpit door.
Another awkwardly projected set of commands got him to help her in stripping off the rebreather pack, and with it her helm. Now that she no longer had her helmet on, with the vents circulating air in the cabin, she could smell how much he needed a bath, but she had to set that aside. Jackie stuffed it into the storage locker by the airlock and guided him into the cockpit.
Helping him strap into Lars’ seat was necessary, since the man kept blinking and staring at the faces of the others, then at the consoles. His mind couldn’t settle on any one subject. Children was one, though she couldn’t for the life of her have said why. Handles was another, with an impression of disbelief coupled with disappointment, a hint of primitive technology? But she got him strapped in, and got herself strapped in across the aisle.
“Commander Graves,” Jackie managed aloud. “Are you prepared for a swift departure?”
“Say the word, and I’ll bring the thruster fields online,” Robert promised her. “It’ll knock over a bunch of things in here, though we shouldn’t end up hitting the ceiling.”
Reaching for those distant consoles, picturing them firmly in her mind—she had a touch of clairvoyancy, which was attached to her holokinesis, which was attached to her telekinesis—Jackie danced phantom sucker cups over the consoles down on the bridge, and up in the engineering bay. First things first: Gravity dropped abruptly, leaving them all in zero G, aliens included. That was to ensure that there would hopefully be fewer aliens near control panels that could counteract her work. Ayinda’s dreadlocks started drifting upward again, as did Red’s matted blond locks.
Gravity off, check. More alarms blared outside; the bridge crew were strapped in their seats, looking up at their monitors as they reacted—but she shut off the ship’s main generators, darkening a lot of those screens. And after that . . . the command codes for the ship’s weaponry. Not only did she shut them down, she changed the commands for accessing the guns. Just by a few pushes and pulls, a few different circle-key points, but enough to hopefully slow down these aliens so the Aloha could get away.
The moment the hangar bay went dark, Robert warmed up the thruster engines, scraping the hull off the ground. Brad shook his head. “You didn’t cut the doorway field. We’re still stuck in here!”
Whoops . . . I’m getting tired. One more mind-read, this time from a technician nearby, and Jackie found a console near his limbs. The field shut off—and air rushed out of the bay, dragging forward the hovering ship and anything else not bolted down. The decompression wasn’t dramatic like in entertainment shows, but things did lurch doorward, and kept drifting that way under the lack of any artificial gravity to give them firm friction against the floor.
Power monitors spiked, the Aloha kicked forward under thruster power, and they sailed free. Past a couple startled, limb-flailing, pressure-suited alien techs who had been swept outside by the lack of gravity and the exiting atmosphere. A surge from the ship pressed the Humans into their seats, leaving tumbling aliens, floating toolboxes, and enemy vessel all behind, but not so hard that they couldn’t breathe or speak.
“We should be . . . clear,” Jackie managed. “Free to flee. I changed the codes on their weapons. I think. ’M exhausted, though. Going to need rest and food, then I can tackle our guests.”
“Lurching through hyperspace isn’t going to do anything good for you, either,” Maria warned her. “Not on top of exerting yourself so much. But that was rather impressive, señorita. Flinging aside aliens, and that robot you created!”
Jackie shut her eyes, gripping the armrests. “I’d rather have been practicing schools of . . . of tropical fish, for the Merrie Monarch Festival.”
“You’ll have time to practice while we’re in quarantine,” Maria told her. “But first, we have to get out of here.”
“Already on it,” Robert grunted, accelerating a little faster. They still had a couple more minutes to go to reach half Cee, the requisite speed for navigating a hyperrift successfully. If it weren’t for the invention of insystem thruster-field technology, not only would it be impossible to do anything other than communicate through pinprick hyperrifts, they wouldn’t have been able to reach out to the other planets in their home system, never mind travel to distant stars like this one. But it still took time to get up to speed, and there was no telling how fast the tentacled frog-people would get their systems back up and running.
CHAPTER 6
INTERSTITIAL SPACE NEAR GAMMA DRACONIS
Li’eth was so wrapped up in the aftermath of shock after shock from their rescue that he barely felt their acceleration easing. He did notice the spark-bubble that flashed out from the nose of the rapidly traveling vessel; it was bright, abrupt, and unexpected. He noticed it when it turned toroidal, collapsed, then exploded, expanding into a great, gaping, golden-white maw. That caught his attention, but only for an eyeblink, because he noticed that they dove into it, whatever it was.
The next thing he knew, they were shaking through a tunnel streaked in odd shades of multigray chaos, before being spat out the far side. Reeling in his seat, Li’eth clutched at the armrests, heart pounding, stomach roiling, and head spinning. His mouth was dry, and his tongue had a slightly metallic taste on it.
“Gloin vabhen!” the female in front of him ordered, sitting in the middle seat of the three arrayed on the port side of the cabin. Or at least that was what it sounded like to him. “Fheer shantu gshelguh.”
The gibberish she spoke probably wasn’t that, but with his head throbbing and the whole cabin feeling like it was spinning and sliding off to one side, he couldn’t be sure what she had said. No, that’s our vector changing, he realized, feeling his body tugging down and back to the right, which meant they were flying up and to the left. The acceleration eased, leaving them still speeding rapidly through empty, dark, star-strewn space. Not that he had much of a view, but at least he could see a little bit out the silvered cockpit windows.
Li’eth didn’t know what to make of this ship, that tunnel, or the child-faced people who had rescued him and his few remaining crew. It was obvious from her closely formed space suit that the first woman, the Great One with the powerful mind, was a fully formed adult. Curves for hips, breasts, waist, even her legs and arms were shapely, fully mature. But her face, her scalp . . . Tanned, smiling in a friendly, reassuring way, but devoid of proper marks.
All of them lacked marks, from the tanned woman with the dark curly hair to his left, to the dark-skinned woman in front of him, the pale woman to her left, the tanned and not-tanned men in front of both of them, and that pale blond fellow who had looked to be as tall as V’kol. It was disconcerting. None of them looked like an actual child.
Instead, they looked like unfinished adults. Their auras looked mature . . . well, most of them. The one two seats in front of him flared a little. The woman in the portside middle seat was quite calm by comparison, though the male in front of her, with the black hair and tanned skin, was calmer than anyone, save maybe the blond with the long hair seated somewhere aftward.
The blond male up front . . . his very short, almost fur-like hair reminded Li’eth of a juniormost crew member on one of his earliest ships, back when he was still an ensign fresh out of the academy. Li’eth couldn’t remember the man’s name,
but the private had been given the worst jobs, the scutwork, never trusted with any task requiring authority or care . . . and all because the man had been markless. Li’eth had felt nothing but pity for him, until one day the ship’s computers developed a set of glitches no one knew how to fix, glitches that were throwing off their interstellar navigation ability.
The crewman had knocked on Li’eth’s cabin during his sleep cycle, his aura calm and steady, and had handed a datacrystal to the very sleepy ensign. Li’eth had secured the crystal in a drawer and gone back to sleep, having been up for a good thirty hours trying to help fix the problem since he’d come on board assigned to work with the navigation department. It wasn’t until a full day later that he had gone back to his quarters after helping install a crude patch in place that allowed them to fly, but forced them to stop every light-hour traveled to double-check their heading. Only then had he remembered the crystal and slotted it into a datapad to see what was on it.
The code that scutwork private had written was pure genius. It was a mathematical program that worked around the glitch, compensating to the ten-billionth place for the problems in the processors, allowing them to fly straight. More than that, the realization of what he had in his hands had shamed Li’eth. The crudely patched problem that his fellow bridge officers had come up with over the last four hours, but which still left them drifting off course by five-thousandths of a percent . . . had been solved near perfectly by the juniormost crew member.
Li’eth had gone to the man, had offered to personally set him up with the Royal Astrophysics Computing Corps, or perhaps the Royal University of Mathematics . . . but the man had only shaken his head and replied that he’d still never get anywhere even if Li’eth could get him a job there—a job not involving scutwork and floor sweeping and brute gun-toting, that was. Li’eth had then offered to pay for inked marks, but again had been met with a sad shake of that blond, short-haired head.
I’d not be myself if I got all marked up, Ensign, sir, was the reply. If you can’t accept me for who I am, as I am . . . how much else of my life would have to turn into a lie?
These people were not V’Dan. He knew that. Habit kept his eyes and the brain behind them trying to view them as V’Dan, as strange, half-formed, incomplete adult-children, but the Sh’nai writings spoke of them as a separate race, for all they were supposed to be from the fabled Motherworld of the Before Time. Knowing that he had a part to play in all of this—not the details, but the general gist of it—Li’eth started repeating in his mind over and over, They are adults, and I shall see them as such. They are adults, and I shall treat them as such. They are adults, and I shall respect them as such . . .
Conversation flowed between the other five while he sat there and thought. The Great One was speaking into a headset, shaking her head, nodding, shaking her head. The dark-haired woman in front of her turned and eyed Li’eth a few times, then finally reached over, tugged at a silver packet, and flipped her hand at him with a pointed look. Li’eth, not sure what she meant by it, reached out to her with his mind.
And got mentally slapped. His hands felt a phantom sting, as if he had been a child reaching for a sweet at the wrong time of day, though it had been delivered to his mind, not to his body. The Great One spoke aloud, staring hard at him.
“Please wait,” she asserted in Imperial Common V’Dan, her pronunciation rather good, considering she had only heard him say it a couple of times in her head. She emphasized it with a mental image of him resting, composed, in his chair. And followed it with a picture of him taking the silver bag from its clip, twisting the straw-end thing, and tugging on it to . . . break the seal, he realized so that he could drink whatever was inside.
He was thirsty, and it would fill the time while he waited. Unclipping the bag, he twisted the straw, and cautiously sipped. Some sort of citri-flavor, he realized. It tasted really good, too, sweet and something else, something his taste buds were craving. Salt, that was it. A touch of meatiness, too?
As he waited, Li’eth watched the frustrated-sounding Great One, and reviewed his memories of seeing Salik after Salik—pound for pound as heavy as a V’Dan, if not a little heavier—being flipped up into the air and dashed against walls and floors with nothing more than a thought from her. A strong thought, but still, nothing more than a mere flex of her mind, repeated many times.
If she can do that, then . . . maybe she knows the secret of how to make our abilities work when we want them to, instead of sporadically? Just from that demonstration alone, she is clearly more powerful than most of the Holy One Saints in our entire pantheon . . . if you discount most of the legends as sheer hyperbole. Perhaps close to their equal with the hyperbole . . .
Finally, the woman said something in a very assertive tone, then a more polite one, and ended whatever communications system these people used. She rubbed at the bridge of her broad, tanned, unmarked nose, sighed, then sent him an image. One of both of them drinking from the silvery packs, of her eating out of a different packet, and then her . . . sharing something with him? No—teaching him! Teaching him a language? Her mental projection had her pointing at objects and saying words, then picking up an object—a bowl—and carrying it to a table in the vision, along with a simple string of words that probably meant I carry the bowl to the table.
She then pictured him telling her how to say it in his own language . . . and then pulled back the viewpoint of her projection, showing him that this elaborate pantomime of the two of them cooperating was merely a vision within a vision, for the two of them sat cross-legged on a surface, with her hands interlaced with his, both of their heads bowed, and little bubble-clouds merging overhead to form that vision of each teaching the other their words.
Oh! She means to teach it to me mind-to-mind! I . . . did not know that was possible, he acknowledged to himself, blinking a little. Not that he should be surprised; she was clearly the best-trained Great One he had ever heard of, let alone encountered. There were holy priests back home who would flush and pale for hours, perhaps even days in envy of her abilities, he was sure.
Part of him was very leery of letting her farther into his mind, however. He had too many secrets, too many things that had to be kept secret or they could become a very personal danger to his existence and freedom. These people might have rescued him and the other survivors—and how he wished they had come earlier, when there were still dozens of crew members alive!—but he didn’t know their motives. Other than somehow it would all work out well enough to end the war the Salik were slowly but steadily winning.
On the other hand, they were essentially trapped with strangers, with no way to communicate anything beyond the most basic, gesture-driven needs. The prophecies had never said this Motherworld would somehow magically know how to transport them to the right home system. Without real communication, without real language knowledge . . . He would have to trust in the future the holy writings had predicted, and hope that this Great One had a sense of discretion, should she learn anything about his past.
(Yes,) he projected at her, agreeing to the language learning. She smiled a little in relief and said something to the others. Three of the four in the cockpit relaxed and said things in what sounded like slightly joking tones. The fourth, the short-haired blond man, tensed and muttered under his breath. The Great One replied to his mutterings in a tone both dry yet soothing. Assuming their emotions were as V’Dan as they looked—minus the lack of marks—it was a subtle display of diplomatic maneuvering. Over what, he didn’t know, but Li’eth had heard that kind of tone before, slightly exasperated, somewhat amused, and a hint of dismissive, all coated over with a conciliatory reassurance.
The liquid in his drink pack was finally starting to taste odd. Salty and unpleasant. Li’eth realized it was an electrolyte restorer; those always tasted good whenever a body desperately needed rehydrating until the body received enough. As there were only a few sips left, Li’eth finished drinking anyway, then carefully reclipped the used packe
t under its tension spring.
She touched his mind again—or rather, widened that ongoing perception link between them—and projected an image of the two of them moving . . . elsewhere. Of strapping themselves into place so that they didn’t float randomly while they worked. He nodded, adding a pulse of yes. Then fumbled his way through the odd restraint clasp, until he was free and could follow her through the cockpit door. Then through a side door, more of a hatch, where they had to maneuver around the markless blond male with the long hair and the long limbs.
Or rather, they stopped there so that she and the male could have a conversation. He finally nodded, and she soared gracefully into the next section. Li’eth had to pull himself after her, but there were plenty of handles. He’d seen the size of this ship from outside. It should have been just big enough for generators that could power gravity weaves in the deck, but there weren’t any. That didn’t bode well for how advanced their technology should be.
“Captain!” Ba’oul called out, spotting him first. “What’s going on? Who are these . . . people?” he asked.
“And why did someone give a starship into the command of children?” Shi’ol added, her tone tart with dismay and disgust. Li’eth couldn’t see her face since the Great One was in his way, but he could hear just fine.
“When are we going home, sir?” Dai’a asked, her tone plaintive, her gaze clouded with the lingering horrors of their recent captivity.
He opened his mouth to speak, but found it subsumed by another projection from the Great One. From the wide-eyed blinks of the others, they were receiving it, too. A vision of them unbuckling from their seats, drinking and eating from packets, came to them. They were invited to stay in this cabin, with images of them going to the doorways but turning back rather than crossing into the next rooms. A rather . . . odd . . . image of the biowaste facilities followed, projected first in reality of what the closet-like chamber looked like and which door it was, then she used a drawing to demonstrate the elimination of waste. But the message got through, at least.