“We remain on this approach angle without deviation, and we do not under any circumstances accelerate. I’ve locked the nav,” she declared with no small hint of annoyance, since Aru shouldn’t be questioning her on any of this to begin with. She could guess at his simplistic reasoning: that they ought to bolt through this layer at high velocity to reduce their exposure period. They would certainly need to do that when exiting the coronal layers at the star’s escape velocity; there was no way around that, but not now, not on their descent. They would approach with prudence, minimizing risk. Her captain’s infamous bravado was not required at this juncture. As Captain, of course, Aru could override her navlock from the command console, but she gave him a glare that he knew well, an ominous look that portended a direct physical intervention should he dare pursue such a course of action.
“If it means that much that you, Commander.” He smiled in half sincere acquiescence, then looked in a general upward direction to address the ship’s network. “Where do you stand on the matter, System?”
“I recommend, Captain, we initiate a turn to route us of out of the corona at full thrust.”
The Kinetic’s AI was a state-of-the-art AI8 and fully sentient, but it remained a nagging stickler through all their various adventures over the years. This being their most reckless escapade to date had evoked the worst in it. Mei laughed. “Stick with the mission parameters. That was not the matter he asked you to address, Kinny, and you damn well know that.”
“Then, I believe Commander Li’s entry approach strategy to be the most sage,” System responded.
“Thank you, Kinny,” said Mei. It was odd. This was a total role-reversal in her relationship with the Captain, who was usually the rational one and she far, far from it. Today she was even in uniform, hair to code, sharp and focused… and even addressing Aru as “Captain” on occasion. She could get back to flouting protocol with wild abandon once this business was over.
It made him happy, which was the least she owed him for agreeing to go along with this perilous escapade. No other fleet officer could have obtained approval for such a venture from High Command. But Captian Psyron did not require permission. Aru, the Calidonian nobleman, had a very special status within the Fleet. Mei had served under him for years while he defined his own missions, some in line with the Fleets objectives, and others counter to them. They had defined their careers and made their mark already by defeating the rebellion of Carousel 66. It was a full on war that waged on for years. They battled 66ers and their allied separatists, but they’d also stood off against the Fleet in military matters where carouselian civilians were endangered by their operations, butting heads at times with admiralty. No matter how things ever played out, Aru was never court marshaled, censured, or even questioned! He was, it seemed, untouchable. She often wondered by what unseen hand he was granted such privilege. They had agreed that the day would come when she would dictate the mission. It’s what she had joined for, it’s what she’d waited for, and this mission was everything to her. Just as Aru had his red secrets, so too had she her blue.
“So be it.” He shook his head and conceded. “System, keep us updated on the thermals, voltages, and heatsink capacitance.”
“Aye, Captain.” System dutifully confirmed.
Concession was not Aru’s strong suit, and it would come at a price. Mei saw what was coming before his lips even uttered a syllable. “Now that I finally having you drug-free and behaving in a manner almost befitting a Fleet officer, let’s go over the mission data one more time, shall we? “
Aru had never accepted the intelligence this mission was predicated on, and Mei couldn’t blame him. It was appallingly cryptic. She had not told him how high the order had come from, just that it had been bidden by Service Intelligence, which itself was also something of a lie. The Service, per se, really knew nothing about this, because this order came from an even higher source. The informational basis she'd been provided for this high risk covert endeavor was indeed archaic, but she trusted it because it had come from her master, and that was enough credibility for her. And Aru would just have to accept her word for it. To reveal more to him would only elicit another conspiratorial rant from him about “The Cult of Indulu.” Pffff! If he only knew... And no matter how close their relationship (and they were practically married) they were on opposing sides in the great dichotomy that defined the Taiji system. If there were a Cearulein cult ruling Occitania, even she as a prominent inner member understood it little better than he, and it was surely juxtaposed by whatever mystical dynamic drove Mnemtech and this errant Calidonian captain she served.
She attempted to cut the crap from the get-go, but to little avail. “You’ve agreed to this mission. We’re going to carry it out with the data we have, and we’re going to succeed.”
“Oh, I’m all for success. I would certainly hate to risk a charge of high treason for the sake of failure. We’re being asked to find the proverbial needle in the haystack, a star-sized flaming haystack. And what intelligence do we have to go on to narrow our search parameters?” He raised a finger to his temple in exaggeration and pretended to recall data from his mindlink. That was of course not necessary. The entirety of their mission data consisted of a single graphic, and two short statements they already knew all-too-well. “A golden sphere on the ecliptic. Transits minor sunspot over 20 or so minutes.”
“We are to find the sphere, investigate its composition, extract its contents, and return them to Occitania,” spoke Mei as matter-of-factly as she could muster. “Our directives couldn’t be more clear and concise. The observation is dated to 64 days ago, or 3.2 Rubelian rotations, at which time an equatorial sunspot was indeed present. Thus we have all the parameters we need to conduct a sweep of the chromosphere.”
There was one more little thing: the graphical component. Aru delayed this phase of the argument and stared at her sternly. She held his eyes firmly even as her body wriggled in awkward anticipation, because this was the part there really was no explaining.
Aru summoned a presentation screen across the bulwark of the inner cylinder and called up the image of the documentary portion of their intelligence for the mission: a single cracked and ragged parchment bearing a clumsily rendered charcoal sketch.
The hand that drew it had been a shaky one, and it was all one could do to discern the black blotch at the center as the aforementioned “equatorial sunspot” and the thick black line and arrow leading to a blotchy circle that indicated the mystery object's position.
Still he said nothing, but she knew. In order for Service Intelligence or any other entity to collect such data, a probe would have to have been flown into the chromosphere of the Red Star and the data from it transmitted back to them. This intelligence simply could not exist otherwise, and hence could not exist without electronic records and images. And even if one were observing such data electronically and had been compelled for one reason or another to surreptitiously hand-copy it…
“A 300 hundred year old handmade parchment!” he declared at last and then repeated for clarification, “A crudely drawn sketch on 300 hundred year old handmade parchment.”
She decided to flip this to her advantage this time and take the initiative on the silence game, smirking at him as though she knew something, which she really did not. The silence game carried on for an uncomfortable minute or so before she found herself relenting.
“I don’t know the origin of the intelligence, and I don’t need to. The Service would not have assigned us this mission unless they were confident of its validity. So the rest… the rest we chalk up to mystery.”
Not about to let her off that easily, Aru, the rascal, raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Yes, chalk. Let’s talk about chalk,” he chided. “Whoever drafted this, the man, or woman… and it had to be one of the two, because this drawing is about far from the machine world as one can get, yes?”
She rolled her eyes and gesticulated theatrically in reaction to his expectation of her to render a bla
tantly obvious answer to a rhetorical question. “A seer, perhaps,” she answered with an honest yet probably no-so-recognized turn of sincerity. Truly, she had nothing better herself.
“A Pangean mystic perhaps, holed up away in his cave of solitude? An oracle deep in meditative trance inhaling incense? And when the vision comes, of course, all he has on hand is ancient parchment to scribble his findings upon?”
“Could be,” she agreed curtly with a shoulder shrug. Though really, as she pictured his words, it seemed to her the most plausible explanation yet.
Aru shook his head in dismay. “This mission was assigned to you by Service Intelligence?”
“Indeed, love, it was,” she lied again.
“So this has nothing to do with the Cult of Indulu?”
Mei cringed at the words. She’d never revealed to him her relationship to her master. Cult… hmmph! It was no cult; it was all real. She approached him seductively and leaned in with a pout as though she expected a kiss. “As far as I know, moonman, the only star ruled by any cult is the one we are plunging into.”
Aru backed away cooly. They had not shared a bedchamber in over a year, all part of a demented game they were playing, and she cursed him for perpetuating it. It began by his casual rejection of her advances one evening. Naturally, being a female and scorned as such, she had to punish him ten-fold before forgiving such a slight. So for a month she tantalized him at every opportunity, but refused him the moment he attempted to become more intimate. Once that punitive period was over, she assumed he’d learned his lesson and decided to make it all up to him. She laid in wait in his chamber to surprise him, unclothed and vulnerable, warmed and ready amid flower petals and candlelight. She’d made a full offering of herself and was ready to submit to his every erotic whim. Yet when he entered the chamber and found her displayed in this state, he did the unthinkable. He sighed!
Yes, he had sighed and told her he was tired of all this and that she should just get back to her own quarters where she belonged, how he was sleepy and still needed to read through the intel reports that had come in that day. Fucking intel reports! She was shocked at first, unable to respond. She was on the verge of doing something she only did very rarely, cry. But her fury came forth before the first tear could loose itself into a trickle.
Li Meiyang was a truly dangerous human being, lethally dangerous. Even fully expecting it, Aru could not hope to defeat her hand to hand. In gunnery and techno-weapons he outmatched her handily, but in up close and personal old-fashioned analog combat, he hardly stood a chance. Few did. Li Meiyang was a lifelong student of the martial arts, five schools of it, and she let loose on him with wild fury, a flurry of unanticipated blinding strikes and kicks. She pummeled him mercilessly, and why not? This was not a game any man ever had the right to win!
Being in control of ship command, Aru dispatched secbots his chamber. Through the onslaught, he landed no strikes of his own, but managed to bodily push her back into the entryway where she was subsequently subdued, restrained, and sedated by roving security bots.
She had made a decent mess of his face too. He’d spent the better part of a day in the medbay getting reconstituted, while she had been confined to quarters.
They had managed to talk it out, more or less, and things eventually returned to normal. In retrospect, she realized that battering a male lover senseless was no way to heighten his libido. But he’d had a choice and opted to reject her complete submission, thus he was treated to a taste of her complete domination.
On and on it went, escalating over the past year, til it reached the stage it was at now where neither could bring themselves to even make an overture. This was not a fun game to Mei, not fun at all. If he pulled this mission off, however, all would be forgiven, and she would give him the grand prize of the fulfilling all his erotic notions, and rewards beyond the limits of his fantasies.
She wanted to. Sure, she hated him, but who was she kidding? She loved him.
“Calidon is not a moon!” Aru declared, cueing yet another of their circular banters that had evolved over their long years in space together, but this one was a playful gesture, and she welcomed it.
“Planet Aq Thalassa,” she began, “has nearly 3% more mass than its moon Calidon.”
“Cal-Thal is classified as a dual planetary system by virtually every authority on the matter, with the singular exception of little miss Li Meiyang. So before presuming to school me on the subject, please get all of academia and all governing bodies, on both sides of the Taiji, their machine entities, and humanity as a whole up to speed with your standards.”
“Pfff… it’s a tiny little moon,” she blindly re-asserted in the face of all his evidence to the contrary. “You are a tiny little moonman from a tiny little moon.” She started in to laugh at her own words, with her laughter begetting more and more itself, as though it were hysterically funny. Naturally Aru did not join in, but patiently held a sardonic smirk on his face until it abated.
“At least I come from a celestial body that knows which direction it’s supposed to turn and where its poles are supposed to go,” he remarked in reference to Occitania’s slow retrograde rotation and the extreme variance between its axis and its poles.
“Oh no, you wouldn’t dare!” she challenged him, giggling in mock horror.
He indeed dared. “It’s only fitting how its inhabitants mirror the qualities of such a confused lumbering imbecile of a planet.”
“Oh, you rascal, Aru! Only someone raised in a bloody arid hellscape could speak such evil of my beautiful and cherished homeworld….” she lashed back, reminding herself of one of the oldest joke out there on the subject and putting it forth at once. “How does a Calidonian know he’s arrived in Hell?” she went on, leaving only the briefest pause before he could try to preempt the well-known punchline.
“He doesn’t!” she spat out prematurely.
“Because he’s surrounded by Occitanians?” Aru simultaneously countered.
Mei hit him playfully, that cad! Clearly pleased with his rejoinder, he smiled and laughed with her, at least to the extent his noble-born and military conservatism allowed.
He really was so clever and humorous… and so handsome. There was something about knowing that you could be atomized into non-existence at any given moment that made all the baggage seem inconsequential. She liked this feeling. It reminded her of her cadet days at NavCenter, where she’d been fast-tracked through the program to be commissioned under Captain Psyron of the Kinetic Dream, the daring handsome captain of Fleet fame –who only ever answered to himself. She was starry eyed in love before she ever set foot on deck. And in her thirteen years of service beside him, they had become iconic as inseparable lovers traversing the Taiji and leaving tales of daring valor in their wake. They had surely done all that, but in the day to day space could be quite boring, and over the years the crew members had fallen away til only they two remained. Aru had even broken off his family-approved engagement to the daughter of another elite Calidonian house in light of their unofficialized, yet widely-known and remarked upon, relationship.
This was what she’d been missing, more than the sex, more than the glory: this simple happy companionship. Maybe that's all there really is to love, just being able to joke around.
“Speaking of nightmarish fiery hellscapes…” Aru said. “Let’s see where your brief stint at mission command has taken us. System: full display, real scale, orient to forward vector.”
Since the Kinetic was a centrifuge, it was constantly spinning, so the last command was standard to orient their view in the direction the ship was moving toward rather than any point of the 360 degree plane they might be randomly facing at a given time.
All sides of the tubular gray utilitarian primary bridge suddenly burst forth in the vivid full-scale visual spectrum view in real-time as it was received from the ships outer shield ring sensors. It was Mei’s favorite mode of display because it felt like standing bare in space, free and shipless. The full sc
ope of the forward display was taken up by the colossal form of Ignis Rubeli, the Red Star, its surface bubbling and broiling before them. The weaving strands of plasma twine shifted about the surface by the whims of magnetic storms. It was breathtaking. Though she’d seen such solar images before, never had she actually viewed them whilst within the star, and that made all the difference in how richly one experienced such a sight.
She reached for Aru’s hand and it gently reciprocated. She rested her head on his shoulder and felt happier than she had in ages.
“Kinny, raise bridge temperature 2 degrees,” she ordered. “I’m a bit chilly.”
“Yes, Commander.”
Aru chuckled at her attempt to defy the searing sea of flames. “I think more than anything this occasion calls for… ice cream!”
“Yes! Yes yes yes yes yes!” Mei agreed giddily. She ordered up mango ice-cream with pineapple syrup from Kinny, her nickname for System. Aru joined her with that same old tropical nut-blend selection he never deviated from. They whiled away the time, talking like the old days. They spoke a familiar fare of family happenings, political gossip and going-ons, and playful banter as they tore through the crown of Ignis Rubeli and on into its fiery depths. It surely was a vision of Hell, but to Mei, this moment felt more like Heaven.
The Laws of Man
Exhausted from the prior night's events, Gahre would meet no bed. They did not even offer him food. Their eyes had lit upon the rifle, and they had demanded it at once. Gahre, still as yet unaware of how the authorities would interpret his actions, surrendered the rifle and began to relay his account aloud in public, but the authorities were having none of that. He was whisked away to a detention room and questioned repeatedly over the events. After giving his account to Elder Panthus, then to Sheriff Janker, then to the Ranger garrison Commander Throjos, and once more to man he knew not at all, he lost all patience and attempted to set out for a long-overdue meal and the comfort of his bed. To his utter vexation the sheriff ordered him legally detained. He knew the two town deputy officers personally, so when they apologetically approached him and attempted to grab his arms on either side, he shoved them off with only half his strength, which was still enough force to send one sailing into the wall of the detention room with a marked thud.
DUALITY: The World of Lies Page 3