Mimic and the Space Engineer Boxed Set, Books 1 - 3

by James David Victor

I LEANED BACK in my seat, my heart beating to its own personal fiesta while the rest of my body was on cruise control. The whole situation was surreal. In a very short couple of hours, I had gone from a janitor and maintenance worker on a government-contracted mining vessel in deep space to a fugitive on the run with an undiscovered life form that had the ability to shapeshift.

  “Ay, you guys remembering to breathe back there?”

  My gaze turned to Gonzales, who had turned the pilot seat around after putting us into autopilot. Or at least I hoped she put us on autopilot. Otherwise, our escape would be a short one.

  “I do not necessarily need to breathe,” Mimic said flatly.

  “I’m fine,” I answered just as shortly. “Just catching up with everything that’s happened.”

  “Right? It’s been a bit of a rush, hasn’t it?” Gonzales said.

  Alerts suddenly sounded and I looked to the flashing lights. “What does all that mean?”

  “Nothing good,” Gonzales answered tensely, whipping around to grip the controls with pale knuckles.

  Ciangi cleared her throat and her bright eyes flicked back to Mimic and I. “Now, I could be wrong, but that sound usually means that we’re being targeting by another vessel.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t mean targeted with hugs and good times.” I said sarcastically.

  “No…not quite.”

  “Great.”

  There was a ripple in one of the displays and then a brilliant beam of green cut through the utter darkness of space. Our little stolen vessel tilted to the side, away from the onslaught, but not before it scorched our underbelly.

  Alarms went off in earnest, and what little calm was in our merry band of misfits fled immediately. Bahn unbuckled himself and ran over to the meager weapons array and Ciangi turned herself to the controls that handled…I didn’t know what. But it was something important, I was sure.

  “They’re rounding for another fire!” she said, reading off a display that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

  “They’re certainly choosing a strange movement pattern,” Ciangi said. “They definitely could have blown us out of existence three times over.”

  “That’s because they don’t want to blow us up. They want Mimi,” I said, using the nickname I had given her.

  “That is unfortunate,” the alien said dryly. “I do not want to be wanted by them.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure they never lay a hand on you again.” I assured, patting her shoulder.

  “It is not their hands I am worried about. I have read much during my time in your quarters. I have learned what terrible, malicious things your species has done to those that are different, in the name of science or progress. You’ve killed your own planet, and now you trawl through space looking for new worlds to destroy.”

  “Wow, harsh,” Gonzales grumbled instead of the several expletives it looked like she wanted to say as the ship dodged yet another blast.

  “Apologies. I know that you, the individuals, had no hand in it, but you, the human race, most certainly did. Your language doesn’t seem to have much of a way to easily say which one I mean without some sort of drawn-out explanation.”

  “That’s Common Tongue for you,” Gonzales said. “There’s twenty words for what you’d never care to say and only one word to mean twenty different, important things.”

  “Could we put the linguistic discussion on hold until after we survive this, if we survive this?” I begged.

  “Oh right. That’s probably a good idea.”

  “They’re closing in! I think they’re going to try to drill us!” Ciangi suddenly announced.

  “Are you kidding me? That’s clearly a fourth date activity. They haven’t taken me to dinner yet.”

  “Gonzales, is now really the time?” Ciangi complained.

  “Why not? If we’re going to die, I want my last words to be a hilarious pun.”

  “They’re firing again,” Bahn shouted over the two. “Stop bickering and start with the evasive maneuvers!”

  “Nah, I thought I would just keep flying in a straight line,” Gonzales snapped back, jerking the ship downward then into a tight spiral. My stomach churned and I was definitely feeling an uncomfortable mixture of being overwhelmed and terrified. I didn’t know how to fly a ship. I didn’t know how to handle the weapons array. I didn’t even know how to decode the different readings on the dozen or so sensors that Ciangi was staring at.

  I was useless, and the only thing I could do was hold onto Mimic’s hand and pray we got through the attack.

  But how could we? We were outgunned, out-engined, out-everythinged. There was only one way the battle was ending, and that was with us dead and Mimic in captivity, destined to be poked, prodded and experimented on for the rest of her life—however long that might be.

  “Wait!” Ciangi called.

  “Not exactly the type of situation where I can do anything remotely similar to waiting.” Gonzalez retorted.

  “There’s another asteroid belt up ahead, about three times more dense than the one we dug Mimic out of,” Ciangi continued, undeterred. “We can definitely lose them in there.”

  “Won’t they just go around and wait for us to go through the other side?” I asked quietly, wincing away as blinding green shot across in front of us, resulting in a wild buck from the ship. “We can’t just sit in there forever. Eventually, they’ll have backup here.”

  “That’s true if we were going to stay in the field. But on the other side, there’s a wormhole. One that previous research vessels have studied enough to know that it’s stable, even if they’re not sure where it leads.”

  “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” Gonzalez asked incredulously.

  “Impossible,” Bahn said.

  “What is impossible?” I asked, feeling completely out of the loop in the daring rescue that I had started.

  “She wants us to go through the wormhole. A wormhole, mind you, that no one has ever gone through before,” Gonzales said, jerking the controls again, slamming us against our restraints. “Heck, not even a machine has made it through to the other side yet.”

  “Do you know another way to make sure we don’t have our butts handed to us on a deeply fried platter?”

  “Is that a custom among your people?” Mimic asked. “I do not recall reading that.”

  “It’s a saying,” I clarified.

  “Ah, I see. More Common Tongue play on words. One day I will catch on.”

  “Yes, you will,” I assured her. “But only if we survive this. So, I say if this wormhole is our only hope—even if it’s a super shaky one—I say we grab it with both hands and get us out of here.”

  “Fine!” Gonzales snapped. “But everyone better hold onto their giblets, because I’m about to try to navigate am asteroid belt without a kinetic sensor.”

  “Wait, this ship doesn’t have a kinetic sensor?” I cried.

  “It’s a simple transport vessel. Of course it doesn’t have a kinetic sensor.”

  “What is a kinetic sensor?” Mimic asked, head turned towards me curiously. To give her credit, she seemed completely calm about the situation, which was more than I could say about myself. “And why are we saying it so much?”

  “It’s a mechanism that’s used for space navigation that involves sailing through large amounts of debris or other possible collisions. Very useful for a mining vessel to have.”

  “But not so much for a tiny transport ship,” Ciangi added.

  “Don’t worry,” Gonzales said, somewhere between sarcasm and blind optimism. “I’ve got this in the bag.”

  “What bag?”

  “I just— You know what? Never mind. Just hold on!”

  I complied, and just in time. Gonzales swooped upwards in a tight circle, giving me a brief feeling of weightlessness, before she slammed downward and to the side.

  Large rocks appeared across the windshield, dotting space like little brown flecks that were rapidly becoming l
arger. I couldn’t even count half of them before we were past them, more green bolts shooting past us as we delved into the thick of it.

  My thoughts couldn’t quite process all the dips, dives, turns and tumbles Gonzales took us through in our wild escape. I didn’t even know how she was managing. Occasionally, we scraped against the side of one of the floating space rocks, causing us to ricochet this way and that, but no one said anything when we did. We were all waiting with bated breath, seeing if we would survive this absolutely impossible situation.

  My fingers wrapped through Mimi’s as we hurtled forward. The blasts of the mining ship grew less wide and searing as we gained distance, and as the seconds passed, a tiny sliver of hope began to form in me. Maybe we would make it. Maybe we weren’t about to be forcibly boarded and executed in the name of science.

  “There it is!” Ciangi yelled, breaking the tense silence. “One click on your two o’clock! Punch it!”

  I looked in the direction of her shaking finger, trying to see what she was pointing out. If I squinted, I could almost make out an area of space that seemed to warp and buckle under its own weight, as if the very fabric of reality itself was being ironed into neat little pleats.

  “Here goes nothing!”

  Gonzales did indeed ‘punch it’ and we went hurtling forward through the lip of the void.

  For a moment, it seemed as if the entire universe halted, just hanging in the balance like someone had pressed pause on a net-flick. And then, just as suddenly as it had halted, everything sprang back into motion.

  Stars, planets, and bursts of colors spun by us as we sped through the cosmos. It was almost as if we were caught in some sort of interdimensional slipstream as we rushed through the folds of the wormhole.

  I looked over to Mimic, and her features seemed to blur and extend in an impossible fashion behind her, like I was seeing several dozen images all stacked on top of each other. Although maybe that was just from the violent rattling of my head from the ship withstanding the force from traveling to…wherever it was we were traveling to.

  “I think I see the ending!” Gonzalez announced.

  It took all of my effort to turn my head forward and look back out the nav-window. Sure enough, I could see the kaleidoscopic myriad of colors cut off, leaving the cold, dark voice of space beyond the circle. I never thought I would be so happy to see that particular darkness, and yet I was immensely relieved.

  “Now, let’s see if we can survive exiting through the event horizon.”

  Okay, maybe not immensely relieved.

  The rattling grew worse as we approached the circle that was our ticket back to reality. Maybe my brain was going to end up as pea soup before we made it to safety.

  Teeth clenched together, knuckles white as I gripped the armrest of my chair, and heart safely lodged in my throat, I held on for dear life as we hurtled forward. I couldn’t tell how much was Gonzales pouring all she could into the engines, and how much was the wormhole forcibly vomiting us forward.

  Then, just when I was sure I was going to lose it, we shot out of the other end and into space. A cheer erupted from the others, but I could only breathe raggedly as exhaustion overtook me.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Gonzales said, sagging in her seat like someone had let all the air out of her.

  “If you did not believe that it would work, then why did you say that you had it in this bag of which you speak?” Mimic asked.

  “False bravado,” the engineer/pilot answered honestly, not bothering to lift her head from where it was resting on her arms. “I’m full of it.”

  “Amongst other things.” Ciangi remarked, patting the darker woman on her back. “You did good, especially for a weapons engineer.”

  “What do you mean especially for a weapons engineer?” Gonzalez demanded.

  “I mean, we all know the scope for that field of research is much narrower than most of mechanical or nuclear engineering.”

  “Just when I think you might have pulled that stick out of your—”

  I sighed and looked to Bahn. I didn’t have the energy for their semi-playful, semi-spiteful banter. “So, where are we?” I asked him, finally unbuckling myself. I could feel bruises starting to form on my shoulders where the straps had been and knew I would certainly regret those marks the next day.

  Bahn didn’t answer, instead crossing over to regard the screens of the nav-station that Ciangi had abandoned to bicker with Gonzales. I watched as he looked from one to the other, and then the other, until he finished examining all of them and returned right back to the first screen.

  “Well?” I asked anxiously.

  “We are not anywhere.”

  “What do you mean, we’re not anywhere?” Gonzales said, breaking away from her conversation with the other engineer to crane her neck in our direction. “I see stars. I see moons. We’ve gotta be somewhere.”

  “Well, if you’re going to argue semantics, then yes, we’re somewhere. The issue is, this somewhere is not anywhere on our maps.”

  “What? That’s impossible!” Ciangi protested.

  “And so is sailing through the eye of an unexplored, unregulated wormhole in a transport vessel, and yet here we are,” Bahn offered.

  “So, what?” Ciangi asked. “We’re just lost in sp—”

  “Don’t finish that,” I said, cutting her off. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe we’re just in a really obscure system that’s buried in the database.”

  “Perhaps. Let me search now.” Bahn quickly punched in a code and started what I recognized was a coordinate search. I had seen one run before back during my very first job when a virus had infected the autopilot and caused the ship to fly to a paradise-resort planet without the proper authorization. We had thought that we were lost at first then too, but had quickly discovered the error.

  Maybe this situation would be solved just as easily.

  Several more moments passed before Bahn finally sighed and sat down.

  “Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the array in disappointment. “Not a single map, constellation match or even similar system. Wherever we are, no one has ever been here before.”

  “So, you’re saying that we somehow shot to a part of space that is completely undiscovered?” I asked.

  “Looks like it,” Bahn confirmed my fears.

  I sat back into my chair, my legs growing weak in awe. Although humans had only had long distance space travel for a little over a hundred years, our telescopes, satellites and drones had been busy mapping the known universe for nearly five hundred. We had charted out lightyear after lightyear of space, even ones we wouldn’t explore for another hundred years.

  And yet…here we were. Someplace we couldn’t possibly be.

  “Higgens?” Mimic asked quietly, her small, delicate fingers resting on my arm once more.

  “Yeah?”

  She looked to me with a worried, and slightly guilty, gaze. “I think I’m hungry.”

  Oh dear.

  2

  SOME SEMBLANCE OF A PLAN

  “FIRST THINGS FIRST,” I stated. “We need to wait here until the coast is clear, and slip right back through the wormhole so we can get Mimi some food.”

  “What were you feeding her when she was in your care?” Gonzales asked. “You were hiding her on the ship for a while, right?”

  “Just a couple of weeks from start to finish,” I answered

  “And what did she eat then?”

  “I am sitting right here,” Mimic interrupted. “You can direct your questions about my care toward me.”

  “Alright then. Alien, what did you eat?”

  “Mimic,” she corrected. “And several different things, ranging from several recycled blaster cores to the nuclear energy created by your system.”

  “Wait, you were that weird energy dip?” Ciangi asked, suddenly more interested.

  “Yes. What I was able to absorb there allowed me the energy to take on a form similar to yours.”

&nbs
p; “Similar to?” Ciangi raised an eyebrow. “You look pretty human to me.”

  “There are a few unfortunate flaws in your anatomy that I edited out. Namely the redundant organs and excretory system.”

  “Oh, uh, that’s good to know. I guess,” Gonzales interjected. “So, um, I’m sure we could find some sort of energy for you to—”

  “Apologies, but that is not what I require now. Those meals were to expand my mass to the point where I could shift into the larger form I wanted. Now I need actual sustenance. The minerals and other compounds that allow me to be, well, me.”

  “And what exactly are those?” Gonzalez asked.

  “I do not know what you call them. Merely that they were plentiful in my home. Perhaps if you had some scrap left from what you destroyed, that could sustain me until we’re able to return home.”

  “Unfortunately, anything we smashed up was sucked into the tubes and into the processers or recyclers,” Gonzalez lamented.

  “So, what you’re saying,” I said slowly, realization dawning on me slowly, “is that there’s nothing for Mimi to eat until we get her home.”

  “Um, yeah. I’m afraid so.”

  “Might I point out,” Bahn interjected, “that if she starves to death, it would make our entire risking of our lives rescue mission an exercise in futility.”

  “We’re not going to let you die,” I assured Mimic, holding her hands once more. “We’ll get you back home in a few hours and find a nice, uh, comet for you to munch on.”

  “There might just be one hang-up in that plan,” Bahn said.

  I couldn’t help but sigh in aggravation. My nerves were stretched thin as it was and I certainly wasn’t feeling up to more friendly back and forth. “What is it?”

  “It seems going through a wormhole was pretty hard on our engine,” he said. “As in…we might have burnt out the crystals that give it power.”

  “Then use the reserve fuel.”

  “Burned through that too.”

  “Nuclear energy?”

  “This is a simple transport craft,” Bahn said. “There’s no nuclear back up or dampener. Right now, we’re stuck on impulse and that’s not going to get us home any time in the next billion years or allow us to survive the shake-up of going into the wormhole.”