by M. D. Cooper
Sabrina said.
“Oh, really?” Finaeus asked. “Settlements out this far? You realize what that means, right?”
Jessica did. “We’re in Orion space, and at least twenty years from home.”
“Bingo.”
“Then we have some time on our hands,” Jessica grinned. “Join me in our cabin, would you, Trevor?”
* * * * *
Nance couldn’t sleep.
The events of the last day filled her mind, making it feel as though it would burst. Somehow, Erin seemed oblivious to it—off with the other AI, doing whatever it was they did in their little Expanse on Sabrina.
But she knew what she did.
There had been no stealth ship at Gisha Station, and no incoming fire from Bes’s destroyer. That had been her doing—as had the enlarged opening in the stasis shield that allowed the TSF soldiers to attack, and, finally, the solution that had helped Finaeus get the Ford-Svaiter mirror to work.
Except it hadn’t been her; it had been the thing inside of her, the thing put there by the entity she had met so long ago on Senzee station.
The Caretaker.
THE END
THE WORLD AT THE EDGE OF SPACE
PERSEUS GATE – SEASON 1: EPISODE 2
BY M. D. COOPER
FOREWORD
I’m having a blast writing these Perseus Gate books, and I sincerely hope they are fun reads for you. I feel like I’m channeling my love of Farscape into them, and that’s a great thing.
In this episode, the crew must begin their journey across Orion Space to the Inner Stars, and then to New Canaan, deep within the Transcend. They’re looking at twenty years of travel—if they can get a dark layer map, and supplies.
It’s going to be a wild ride getting back home, one that will send the crew of Sabrina down some rabbit holes on the far side of space.
M. D. Cooper
AWAKEN
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Outside Naga’s Heliopause
REGION: Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy
Consciousness returned to Cheeky in slow, unsteady increments.
At first it felt as though she was surrounded by a nimbus glow and fear set instantly.
I’m dead. Fuck, I’m dead!
There was no answer to her cry. The glow didn’t change, and Cheeky tried to reach Piya.
Piya didn’t respond, but Cheeky felt her Link re-initialize and her neural enhancements come online. She was alive, surely neural enhancements didn’t persist into the afterlife.
An ear-splitting screech assaulted Cheeky and she screamed.
“Cheeky, can you hear me?” a voice said as the screech began to fade.
Cheeky realized she still had a mouth and it seemed to work, though it was dry, and her tongue felt stiff.
“Y-yes…”
“Good! That means your new ears are working. Your eyes are open, but you probably can’t see yet. Give it another couple of minutes while your visual implants calibrate.”
“Is that you, Jessica?”
“Yup!” Jessica replied brightly. “We’ve been taking shifts with you, waiting for you to awake. Looks like I won the lotto.”
“Are we…is Sabrina OK? I remember seeing a huge fight—right before…”
“Yes,” Jessica said, confirming Cheeky’s memory. “We made it. We all made it—sorta.”
“Where’s Piya, then?” Cheeky asked. “And what do you mean about ‘sorta’?”
“Piya wrote herself into static storage, so she’s safe. You took a lot of radiation damage out there, and we had to restore parts of your organic brain before we could pull her out. Your vision centers were the worst. The medbay’s autodoc replaced all of that with artificial matrices for now.”
Cheeky took a deep breath. She remembered passing over the mining ring, seeing the searingly-bright accretion disks of the orbiting black holes, the baleful light of the Grey Wolf Star. The heat. So much heat.
“And the ‘sorta’?” she asked after a moment’s contemplation.
“Well, we jumped through the gate! Yay! Go us, and all that. Finaeus and Nance got a mirror made in time—by some truly serendipitous work on Nance’s part from what I can tell—but something went wrong. We’re a ways from home.”
Cheeky chuckled, the movement welcome, but painful at the same time. “If we’re on Sabrina, then I’m home.”
“Sabs!” Cheeky cried out. “Are you OK? Did you get hurt?”
“Glad to see you’re still rolling with the metaphors,” Cheeky said with a smile, feeling her cheeks stretch differently than she was accustomed to. “I have artificial skin, don’t I?”
“Yeah,” Jessica replied and Cheeky could hear the smile in her voice. “Looks good on you too.”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Cheeky replied. “I like my natural stuff. Don’t think you’re going to make me all plastic like you.”
“It’d be fun!” Jessica laughed. “We could be twins!”
“Wait, stop changing the subject. What happened after we jumped? Are we coming into New Canaan now?”
“I didn’t change the subject, you did,” Jessica said, admonishing in both her tone and gaze.
“Sooo…”
“Well, I assume you know of the Perseus Arm…”
“Of what? The Milky Way Galaxy?!”
“Yes,” Jessica said, and Cheeky could hear the grin in her voice.”
“Jessica! You better be kidding!”
OBSERVING NAGA
STELLAR DATE: 08.19.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Outside Naga’s Heliopause
REGION: Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy
“Seriously?” Cheeky asked from the pilot’s console on the bridge. “Who names their system ‘Naga’ anyway. Just sounds like some awful place full of complainers and whiners or something.”
Jessica shrugged. “Maybe it is—or maybe it means something like ‘delicious fish’ to the locals.”
“Doubtful,” Cargo said. “Place looks light on the…well… everything. I don’t think there’s anything delightful about it.”
Jessica had to agree. From what their passive scans of the system had picked up, there was one—marginally—terraformed world, a few dozen space stations, and a couple of habs on the moons around one of the jovian worlds.
Radio traffic and energy output substantiated an estimate of less than one million inhabitants.
“They should still have supplies, and we can scoop deuterium and helium-3 off their star, or one of the jovian planets,” Finaeus said.
“Plus, there’s nothing else around for at least ten light years. I don’t fancy dumping into the dark layer without any maps,” Cheeky added with a glance back at Finaeus. “The jump to get here was terrifying enough as it was.”
Jessica noted a softness in Cheeky’s expression as she glanced at the ancient terraformer. As the pilot turned back to her console, her eyes caught Jessica’s.
Cheeky gave a soft chuckle and then winced as she turned back to her console.
Jessica’s mind flashed back to that fight in the deep black at the edge of the Kapteyn’s Star System. She had been part of a fighter squadron flying in the older ARC-5 models—though they had been new at the time. The enemy had been a trio of Sirian scout ships sent to probe the Victoria colony for weaknesses
One of the enemy ships had detonated their reactors rather than be captured, and Jessica’s fighter had been close. Too close. It had taken days for the S&R crews to find her, and when they did she had been in rough shape.
She looked down at her hand, rubbing her purple-hued fingers together. That was when she had received her first artificial skin—something necessary to replace her long-gone natural skin, and to seal her weakened body off from infection.
Cheeky passed a mental smile over the Link.
“Sabrina,” Cargo asked, his voice breaking into Jessica and Cheeky’s private conversation. “Any luck on faking an ident?”
“Was it a replacement?” Cargo asked.
“Seventy years,” Jessica said, whistling. “Then we really are close to the edge.”
“What’s got you so dreamy, Sabs?” Cheeky asked.
“No,” Cargo responded.
“Not especially,” Jessica added.
“Been there, done that,” Finaeus chuckled. “It can be fun, but really, it’s just rocks and stars and balls of gas. They all start to look the same after a while.”
“That can’t be how you feel about it,” Cheeky said. “I bet you’ve seen some amazing things out there. Like…what’s the weirdest animal you ever encountered?”
Finaeus put a hand to his chin. “Hmmmm…there aren’t as many extra-terrestrial lifeforms that one would consider to be ‘animals’ as you’d think. We made most of the animals that you find on the FGT terraformed worlds—even the really weird stuff like the flying pigs on Sardonis in the Aldebaran system. Most of the crazy things are just adaptations of things from Earth, or Earth’s far past—stuff that we adjusted to be suited to the planets after terraforming was done.”
“Yeah, but there are alien lifeforms on some worlds. Things that existed before the FGT showed up and started terraforming,” Cargo said.
“Yeah, we did encounter worlds that already had life. Mostly the worst things that we hit were plants that were a bit more mobile than we would have preferred—or right-handed biology. That stuff is a real pain in the ass to deal with.”
“Right handed biology?” Cheeky asked.
Finaeus chuckled. “Where’s Nance when you need her? She’d know about this stuff. On Earth, life evolved using what are called left-handed amino acids. We know now that it was a quirk of the supernova that caused the Sol System to form that made them so. However, on many other worlds, right-handed amino acids were prevalent, and life formed from those.”
“What’s the big deal about that?” Cargo asked, appearing genuinely curious.
“Right-handed biology might as well be silicon-based as far as humans are concerned. If you encountered a right-handed plant and tried to eat it, it wouldn’t be able to interact with your body. It would be about as nutritious as sand—and don’t even get me started on the places where life evolved using amino acids and sugars. Those places are nuts.”
“Nuts, how?” Cheeky asked.
“Well, one of them had trees with leaves that appeared to be crystalline; sharp too, could cut you wide open. Then there was this one low-g world—a super-Earth, so the thing was huge—where the surface of the planet was covered in kilometers of this weird foamy stuff. It wasn’t a fungus or anything analogous to Terran life.
“Actually, that’s where the weirdest animal was from too!”
“Oh yeah?” Cargo asked. “What was it?”
“Well, it was kinda disgusting. It was basically a giant tick-looking thing that had a huge airbag on its back. It would float along, above the foamy surface of the world, and when it found some place that had its version of food, it would plop down, dig in and absorb it all. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t almost a kilometer across, and thought our ships were great snacks—we spent half our time avoiding the things.”
Cheeky gave a convulsive shiver, and Jessica found herself in agreement with the sentiment. A kilometer-sized tick trying to eat a ship was the stuff of nightmares.
“Seriously?” Cargo laughed. “That thing sounds hilarious, not dangerous. What could it do to a ship anyway? You could just shoot your way out.”
“Yeah.” Finaeus nodded in agreement. “But then who’s gonna clean the ship. Not me, that’s for sure.”
“Sera told you guys about those, did she?” Finaeus asked. “For someone running The Hand, she’s not so good about keeping secrets.”
Iris announced.
“Then what’s our new name?” Cargo asked.
“What about crew?” Cargo asked. “Do we need to take on new personas?”
“It’s not a lot, but it’s some worlds, customs, and stuff that we can use if anyone enquires about where we’re all from,” Finaeus said.
“You’re going to have to stay on the ship, though,” Jessica said to Finaeus. “You’re a well-known figure.”
“Jessica, seriously, you tracked me half-way across the Inner Stars before catching up with me. I know how to blend in.”
“Just this once,” Cargo said with a note of finality in his voice. “We need to limit variables as much as possible this time out.”
“Fine, Just be sure to pick up some good food,” Finaeus said. “We’re out of beef and lettuce. A good burger would go a long way when dealing with being cooped up in here.”
“I’ll add it to the grocery list,” Cargo said while casting the older man a dour look.
“See that you do,” Finaeus replied and walked off the bridge.
“Gee, he really wanted to get off the ship,” Jessica said, staring after him.
“Can you blame him?” Cheeky asked. “We might not get to another station for weeks or months. Our little jaunt on Gisha Station wasn’t exactly relaxing, I’ll have you know.”
“Well, at least you got off the ship,” Jessica said with warm smile.
“Yeah, and then off the station, and almost into a black hole,” Cheeky replied, her tone chilly.
Cargo chuckled, long and slow. “Well, then you certainly weren’t bored.”
Cheeky shot the captain a dark look before her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Getting a wicked headache.”
“All sorts of new stuff?” Cheeky asked. “Is that code for pretty much everything?”