Then they broke off into education rooms for pilot training.
She and Jan and the rest of the flight and command crews spent most of the morning going through interstellar navigational problems, with Aunt Sleak as the instructor.
First they worked through problems using various navigational programs. Then they used handcomps. Then write boards, and finally in their heads–all in specified time limits, according to Spacer military regs.
Jan breezed through it all, navigation his gift.
Naero struggled when it came to scratch boards and doing it all in her head. She had to hang back after the session was over and work with Aunt Sleak. That took an hour longer after everyone else was dismissed.
Great. She wouldn’t hear the end of that. From anyone.
But at least she wasn’t going nuts still.
After they finished, as if that humiliation wasn’t bad enough, she was late for her sparring sessions...with Aunt Sleak and several of the crew’s best fighters.
Which included her smug little brother.
Why did he seem to be rising above it all? Especially while she moped around and didn’t feel like doing much of anything?
Aunt Sleak followed right behind her. All the merry way to the training center on board The Dromon.
“We’re holding a wake for your parents on third night,” was all that her aunt said, out of the black.
A Spacer Wake.
So awesome.
Things just kept getting better.
A big stupid party celebrating her parents’ snuffed out lives.
She didn’t feel like a party. She’d never see them again.
She and Jan didn’t even have a fingernail from either of them.
Her guts swirled like a typhoon inside of her.
Perhaps she needed to hit something after all.
Naero attached programmable, nano-reactive gelpads to her flight togs in the sparring room, covering her head, joints, hands and feet with the same. An invention of the Mystics that modified the Nytex of their suits, the gelpads formed reactive smartarmor, affording some protection against the worst blows. Yet never enough.
Pain. Always an effective teacher in combat training.
Naero waded into three separate clashes with good Clan fighters in different simulated situations.
Naero relied on her own rampant, acrobatic freestyle that combined the best techniques gleaned from each of her formidable fighting parents. Fast. Intense. Inventive and overpowering.
She used unusual angles of attack, walls, floors, and even ceilings and an opponent’s own body, momentum, and blind sides against him or her.
With her pent-up, slow-burn fury, she put all three opponents down before they hardly touched her.
No one cheered or taunted like they usually did in the sparring arena. In fact, they were strangely quiet.
Then Aunt Sleak took on Naero, Jan, and Saemar.
All three at once.
Aunt Sleak grinned and narrowed her eyes to black lines. “Come taste some pain.”
They did their best to rush her from three sides in a combo attack.
Aunt Sleak trip-slung Jan into Saemar, knocking their heads together, dazing them both.
Double reverse kicks kept Naero blocking, forcing her to pull back.
Aunt Sleak pressed her assault, hand and foot techniques blazing. All of them would have been on target, too.
Any one of them would have taken Naero down.
If not for her exceptional speed.
Yet speed alone was never enough against Aunt Sleak. She was nearly as fast, and very clever and adaptive. She could read a contest like Naero only wished she herself could.
Naero only got in a few painful counters. Her knifestrike to the neck just missed the throat.
How could her aunt instinctively know to dodge like that?
An elbow to the hip. A shin kick that made Aunt Sleak’s eyes go wide for a bare instant.
Naero fell for a cagey feint. Aunt Sleak’s spin-heel kick found Naero’s left temple in a splash of light. Painful and startling.
A swordhand thrust tapped her windpipe. Just enough to make Naero gasp for air as she went down. And lost.
She vaguely noticed Aunt Sleak finishing off Jan and Saemar. Naero crawled to the sidelines and caught the rest of her breath.
It would be her turn to get pummeled again soon enough.
Aunt Sleak came by and offered her a lix pak to drink. The basic fruit punch lix tasted stale and sweet at the same time. It sure wasn’t Jett, but it replenished lost fluid and nutrients.
Not in a position to be picky, she sucked it down.
“You’re a good scrapper,” Aunt Sleak told her. “You’ve got your mother’s speed, but not her technique.” She smiled and shook her head. “I could never beat her once she became strong enough and skilled enough. You could unleash a bit more of your father’s power as well. You’ve yet to test your true limits, spacechild.”
At times the bottom dropped out and Naero’s world spiraled out of control into darkness and despair without warning.
Naero stared at her hands crushing the empty lix carton.
She had six fingers now instead of five. One extra on each hand.
Her parents were dead and she was continuing to lose her mind under the pressure.
She held her hands up before her deluded eyes and flexed all of her digits. Even the new ones. She was losing it; definitely not getting better.
And she still couldn’t believe her mom and dad were gone, but they were. She and Jan should be traveling with them, training with them, learning what they knew. They’d never get the chance to do any of that–now, or ever.
So much would never be the same again. She’d never be the same.
“Hey, Naero?” Aunt Sleak snapped her fingers. “You still with me?”
“Yeah. Sorry,” Naero said, looking down, hiding her freaky hands under her. “Just thinking.” She didn’t bother asking if her aunt or anyone else could see the hallucination. She didn’t want them to know. It was all just in her mind, anyway.
“That’s all right. I miss them too, Naero. But keep your head in the game here. Strategy. Tactics. Execution. You have good defenses, but you rely on them too much. You still wait too long for openings instead of making them. Take the offensive a little more. Take some blows if that opens your opponent up. You act like you’re afraid of getting hit.”
Naero rubbed the side of her head. “You got that right. Haisha, it hurts like hell.”
Aunt Sleak chuckled a bit. “I used to be the same way. You didn’t get all your power from your dad, you know. Your Grandfather Amashin was small like you and your mom, but very powerful for his size. He could hit harder than anyone I ever knew, even when he pulled his stuff. He taught me a lot about taking hits and suffering the least damage from them.”
She barely knew her grandparents, mostly from family vid archives.
All of them had perished during various wars.
Like I said, Naero. Your mother was better at all of this than I am.”
“You seem to be doing all right.”
Suddenly she thought of Baeven for some reason, and what happened on the yacht. Somehow he had managed to do several things all at once to ruin the enemy’s plans, and also take out that Matayan Slayer. With apparent ease.
Aunt Sleak had warned how dangerous he was.
While other crew members sparred their turns around them, Naero had to ask.
“Aunt Sleak, do you think Baeven told the truth about the plot to kill you and Zalvano, and kidnap me and Jan?”
Sleak shrugged. “It’s hard to know. I doubt that Baeven would spirit himself onto Drianne’s yacht to warn us for no reason. But it scares me to think that Triax would risk an interstellar incident, perhaps even another Spacer War, to get at you and Jan. You never went with your parents. You don’t have anything they brought back. Do you?”
Naero shook her head. “They never gave us ancient trinkets or artifa
cts. They weren’t frivolous like that.” Naero grinned. “I thought you weren’t afraid of anything, Aunt Sleak?”
“I’m afraid of losing my ass and my fleet, and getting vaporized in another stupid war. You kids don’t know, Naero. You weren’t on the lines in the last one. But tell me, when we left Drianne’s yacht, you didn’t find anything on our shuttle?”
“The neutron detonator?” Naero said. “Zalvano and I did full scans. But if Baeven removed it, he might have simply taken it with him.”
Aunt Sleak grinned; her eyes narrowed once more. “Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask him. I’d bet the fleet times ten he’ll turn up again, Naero. I have so many questions for him, new and old.”
“I want to be there when you ask him,” Naero said. “Jan and I have some questions of our own. We don’t know anything about what Dad and Mom were doing, even if they were working with Shadowforce. If they knew something about this Kexxian Matrix, they never mentioned it to us.”
“Yeah, about that, Naero. We need to be sure. You can’t think of anything someone might want from you or Jan? Are you sure your parents didn’t give you anything to keep safe for them, anything at all from their trips into the Unknown Sectors? A trinket, an artifact, a relic–even data files?”
“No. Nothing. Jan and I have been over this, too. We checked all of our files and logs, and scanned our belongings. Someone might be desperate to find this alien stuff, but the scary thing is–we don’t seem to have it. That’s all I can figure out.”
Aunt Sleak frowned. “We’re missing something important; I can just feel it. Well, I’ve put out feelers with some old friends in Shadowforce. We’ll get copies of your parents’ fleet logs. It might take some time, but we’ll get a line on something.”
“I hope so.”
A shadow fell over them. Jan stood between them and the lights. “You two gonna gab, or fight? We’re up again, N.” Naero sat on her hands, resisting the urge to smooth her hair away from her face with her added digits while she tried to run out the clock.
Leave it to Jan. Apparently he enjoyed getting beaten and throttled. A little bit too much for her tastes in her current state of mind, or lack thereof.
She clenched her six-fingered fists inside her six-fingered sparring gloves and prepared for combat.
15
Finally they had some down time later that afternoon. Six fingers and all, Naero joined her mates to visit Chaela, who looked bored out of her mind, watching wall vids and reading INS feeds on a flip panel.
Chae rolled her eyes but her face brightened as they all filed into her room, holding bunches of greenpod flowers behind their backs.
“Wow, am I glad to see you guys. I’m going stir-crazy in here while Remy’s on his duty shifts, but I’ve got two more whole days to hang out here and keep my stump in this re-growth tank.”
She snarled, pointing to her leg, secured below the knee, immersed in the fizzing, dark green regeneration tank.
In three days she’d have a new foot grown back, but it would be soft and useless as a newborn infant’s. The bones would continue to re-form and harden, and then the painful therapy would begin for her to retrain the joints and muscles and learn to use it again.
Saemar dumped an armload of snacks and drinks into Chaela’s lap. Foil packages and cartons spilled over onto the floor.
“What’s all this crap? I don’t eat this stuff. Get this junk off’a me.”
“Can it, sweetie. This stash is for us. We’re all gonna take turns sitting it out with you, when your squeeze Remy isn’t here, as you regrow your tootsies. And when we’re not in training or on duty.”
Naero winced. They hadn’t bothered to ask her to join the watch team.
Not with her own…situation.
She stopped trying to hide her hands.
No one but her seemed to be able to see her delusions, anyway. Ignoring them and pushing on seemed to be the best way to make them go away.
Tyber pulled a couple of floppy, dopey-looking sim-helmets out of his tekpak. “I have this new simgame you gotta try. The holoimager is amazing. We fight our way to this castle and–”
Chaela crossed her arms. “Save me from the geek patrol. You know I hate your dopey games, Tyber. And I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one of those goofy sim caps.”
Tyber already had his on. He looked both hurt, and stupid. “What’s wrong with them? I’m telling you, this game throcks.”
Everyone struggled not to laugh. Even Zhen. Gallan took some pics and vid with his wristcom for later blackmail. Tyber looked like a total idiot wearing the damn thing.
“Yeah, you keep that thing the hell away from my head, or I’ll rip your arms off and you’ll be strapped down next to me with your stumps in two tingling vats of goop.”
“I’ve never had the pleasure to hafta regrow anything,” Saemar said. She rapped on the wall with her knuckles. “Knock on hull. What if a guy lost his dingdong? Would his stuff grow back? Would it be just the same, or could they, you know, make improvements? I’m not just talking length, but thickness, too. But I digress. Does it hurt at all, sweetie? Or are you all pumped up with drugs and so it kind of feels frost?”
Chaela shifted, blinked, and grunted, making faces.
“It definitely is not frost. It doesn’t exactly hurt, but it kind of feels like bugs are biting me or sticking shock and stun needles in me at times. It’s really weird. But if it gets me back in my squadron, I’m all for it.”
“These are for you,” Gallan said.
On cue, all of them dumped their flowers in her lap, on top of the heaps of junk food.
Chaela just stared.
“What the hell is this? I hate plants and flowers. What am I supposed to do? Make a salad?”
“It’s customary to bring a recovering patient flowers to brighten her room,” Zhen said. She took them one by one and put them into pweaked nanovases set into the medical bay’s walls, quickly and efficiently arranging them into a pleasant pattern.
“Great, I feel like I’m in some kind of jungle now. Hey N…Naero? You okay?”
Naero snapped out of it and came back to the present.
“Sure. You know. Still trying to deal with it all. But don’t worry about me. You just get your foot back. You’ll be running with us again in no time. Uh, sorry. No pun intended.”
“I’m…I’m sorry about your folks, Naero,” Chae said. “We all are. They were good to us. They were stand-up people. None of us know what to do or say.”
Everyone looked down and got quiet.
“Naero, you know we’re there for you if you need any of us,” Chae added.
Naero bit her lip. “I know that, guys. I couldn’t ask for better mates. It’s all…just so new still. I’m still dealing with it. Just give me time.”
They all drew close and put a hand on her. Even Chaela.
“We are,” Chae told her.
Naero pulled away from them before she started bawling.
“Uh, I gotta go. Got a thing with Jan. He, uh, wants to meet him somewhere. So, I’d better go. To go talk about stuff.”
“Sure, sweetie. You go right on ahead. And don’t worry about Chae. We got her covered until her lover boy Remy gets off work.
Saemar turned back to Chaela and patted her hand. “Now, I’ve got the first watch, sweetie. I wanna go over the performance of my last couple dozen guys to see maybe who’s worth another go. I got vid clips from my wall cams so that we can compare both looks and prowess, although you can’t always see that much from certain angles.”
Chaela panicked as the rest made ready to leave. “Quick, someone kill me. A stunner. One of you has to have a way to stun me, right? Zhen?”
Zhen patted her arm. “Sorry, Chae. You and Saemar enjoy your girl time. Tyber, you’re not staying to watch.”
“Awww…Mom.”
In desperation, Chaela snatched one of the sim helmets and squashed her head into the silly thing.
“All right, T. Switch me on. Let’s find that
stupid castle.”
Tyber popped his cap back on. “Yay!”
The caps came to life, forming glowing globes of intricate holographic projections over their heads, immersing them and their senses in the projected adventure world.
Saemar cluelessly kept rambling, focused completely on her pad. “Now what about this guy? Lots of enthusiasm, but I never noticed this growth right here. See it? Let me zoom in. What the hell is that? Do they still have goiters? What is a fricking goiter anyway? Is it like a tumor? Do you think I should be worried about that? Maybe Zhen should check him out for me before we hook up again.”
“That’s my cue to be gone.” Zhen made a hasty retreat. “Bye-bye. I’m out of here.”
*
After she left Medical, Naero located Jan.
He insisted on dragging her to a spiraling session of all things, in Dromon’s enormous network of zero-G orbs and chubes. Usually reserved for younger teen Spacers around this time.
She hesitated at one of the entrance hatches to the chube complex.
“I’m almost of age, Jan. I don’t spiral anymore. I’m surprised you still do. I’m too old for this.”
He pleaded with her. “Come on, N. I’ve been on a memory run. Remember all the fun we used to have going to these on all the Clan ships? We had a blast. We didn’t just go to make out with the other kids.”
Naero raised both eyebrows at him. “At least I didn’t...usually.”
Jan grinned. “Okay, okay, that was later. It used to be such a ride. Remember? It was just us.” He looked down. “Now...it is just us again, sib.”
Naero hugged him close for a moment.
“Oh, Jan. C’mon. It’s all right. Sure, we can go in.”
They slipped inside and closed the hatch behind them. They slid down the waiting chube, lined and scribed with teen Spacer tags and glowing holo flirt notes.
I luv Mishi.
Theon, chube 17.
Azhuri Decimates the Competition
You flip me Nyssra!
They spilled out into the cushion of the primary zero-G orb, floating in a holographic, color-shifting, mirror-lit sphere forty meters in diameter, with numerous other access hatches and chubes.
Spacer Clans Adventure 1: Naero's Run Page 11