"Keep me informed,” Mehta said, then ended the conversation.
Ramirez leaned his back against the wall. "Any chance we could find a cart, or something with wheels?"
She shook her head, her frown both thoughtful and disappointed. "Ants can carry five thousand times their weight. Why would they need wheels?"
"Damn." His frown deepened. Was she making that up? How did she know so much about ants? And how did she know that information applied to these aliens?
"Maybe we should take a short break."
That sounded like the best idea he'd ever heard. He eased his butt to the floor and closed his eyes.
"I've been running the numbers," she continued. He opened his eyes. She sat across the hall from him, arms limp at her sides, her face sagging, her eyes at half-mast. "Assuming there were 200 crewmembers on this ship, it's going to take us six hours to get them all down to the cargo bay. So, I like that you're trying to figure out how to make this go faster."
His entire body went slack. Six hours seemed like a lot more than he could handle. By his watch, it was four in the morning, and he had gotten up early the day before, not to mention that he wasn't a young, scrapping twenty-year-old anymore. But if Mehta could keep going, he was determined to do the same.
His feet throbbed, like someone had been hitting them on the soles with a 200 lb. sledge hammer. Across from him, Mehta leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes, looking like she was going to go to sleep, like her very soul had been drained out of her, face sagging like a corpse, a pale lump of dead flesh, inert and useless. Then, her jaw went slack, and her mouth slowly opened, making her look comical, even a little retarded. She took in a deep breath, which resonated in her nose, a loud snore. Her eyes popped open.
"How about a sled?" She said.
His breath came quick, a desperate gasp followed by rapid breathing. Then his face turned hot and his entire body tensed, anger rushing through him like a demon possessing his soul. He slapped his hands to his face, heels covering his eyes, fingers up into his hair. Why was this so upsetting? It was a good idea, and that's what they needed right now.
And that was the problem. She was a woman, and women never did anything that you could trust.
“Ramirez?”
He could see his mother watching, standing across the tiny room, hands folded in front of her, her face calm and accepting, like nothing bad was happening, while his father grabbed the cast iron skillet and whacked him in the ribs, on his butt and thighs, continuing to hit over and over until he heard a bone break.
And when his mother took him to the doctor to get a cast put on his leg, she claimed he fell out of a tree. She betrayed him.
Tears flooded his eyes, tears that should have happened at his mother's betrayal, tears that he had been holding inside his entire life, but he was too tired to resist them now.
He could hide them though. He leaned his forehead onto his knees and wiped away the offending liquid.
"Take as much time as you need," Mehta said.
He jerked his head up. She still sat, looking exhausted, but wearing a soft smile, gazing at him with kind regard. "You know," she continued, "I forgot to thank you for trying to smuggle out some of the technology. That was a very brave thing you did."
He tried to mutter some kind of thank you, but he wasn't sure what actually came out.
"It taught me a great lesson," she continued, "about being able to trust other people."
Damn, he knew what she was trying to do. She was trying to get him to trust her. Well, it wasn't going to work. All women are alike, all women...
He blinked, looking at her light skin, her short-cropped hair, blonde, with a few hints of white at the temples, and that crazy scar on her cheek. She wasn't his mother. She wasn't anything like his mother.
Maybe he could trust her.
He rubbed his hands briskly over his face. This was a new idea, and he didn't feel comfortable with it. But he had to give it a try. "I think I can figure out how to get a panel from one of these walls pulled down."
"Yeah," she said. "Those are nice and slick. It would make a great sled." She stood. “You start working on the sled, and I’ll bring the alien bodies out into the halls.”
He nodded, and while he was checking out the seams in the walls, the bridge called again, and Mehta answered.
“Hiranaka here,” came the voice from the bridge. “The translator just gave me how to get into Netherspace.”
“Excellent. Let’s get going.”
“We’ll be to Earth in less than a day,” Opash added.
“Good work.”
Ramirez’s stomach dropped into his pelvic area. Two more women doing what needed to be done, accomplishing their mission without men up there to help them. He bent over. “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Now exhausted, Mehta and Ramirez trudged up to the bridge, leaning against the door frame as they entered, Ramirez having to duck to avoid the top.
Opash and Hiranaka knelt in front of low panels, like dinner tables at an authentic Asian restaurant, facing a screen filled with the strange colors of netherspace.
“No pillows?” Mehta said.
“It’s killing me,” Hiranaka answered.
Mehta sat at the communications console and directed Ramirez to sensors.
“I hope my knees can hold out,” Ramirez said as he knelt and stared at the panel through his translator lens. “This is incomprehensible.”
“How’s the translation process going?”
“We have about a tenth of the writing on the consoles,” Opash said.
“Try operating the ship controls,” Hiranaka said. “The technology is the same, but the controls have been adapted for their morphology. It’s weird.”
“Did you find the instructions for how to build the ship?” Mehta asked Opash.
She nodded, a satisfied smile on her face. “It’s all right here. Translator’s chewing on it.”
“Bad news,” Ramirez said. “There’s a ship approaching.”
“Type?” Mehta moved into the spot for weapons, then frowned. They needed to figure this stuff out quickly, or they were in trouble.
Ramirez fussed with the controls, but he was having trouble.
“I hope it’s not the Mralans,” Hiranaka said. “You think they realize we have this ship now?”
Mehta didn’t want the answer. But it was likely they did know. And they wouldn’t be happy. Humans weren’t going to get the inferior technology of the Dakh Hhargash; they were going to get technology that would let them compete with and repel the Mralans. And humans knew how to do research and development. Before long, they would be ahead.
“It’s a Dakh Hhargashian ship,” Ramirez said. “And they’re not heading toward us. They’re on a course to Earth.”
Mehta looked at her watch. They were approaching forty hours without sleep. People were going to make mistakes and their reflexes would be slower. And there was not a source of caffeine in sight.
But there was nothing to do now except confront the Dakh Hhargash. “Intercept course,” she ordered, then watched as Hiranaka input the data, one finger at a time, like a non-typist on a keyboard. This was going to be rough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Mehta’s eyes wanted to cross. Her translator lens gave her no usable information, only a few words here and there, like “Communications” at the top of the control screen, as if she didn’t already know that. And what was this cord hanging off the console with a little suction cup? The Mralan ships hadn’t had anything like that.
She’d never sat at communications, and she hadn’t paid attention to where the controls were that Fmedg and Mlendish had operated. So how was she supposed to make a call to another ship?
“Here, try this,” Opash said, handing Mehta a small black box. “Press this button to call them. Then speak into this spot.”
“Thanks,” Mehta said. “You sure this’ll work?”
&n
bsp; “No.”
At least she was being honest. Mehta stood in the center of the bridge, like the star ship captains she’d seen in fiction, not because they had done it that way, but because Zolbon had. So, the position evidently commanded some importance. It would give her additional credibility when dealing with this particular enemy.
She was conscious of her need to impress them with her power, because they appeared to be a patriarchal society. Last time she’d seen their bridge, there had not been a woman on it, and the videos she’d seen of the attack on Earth had also shown it to be an all-male effort. That was assuming these aliens had the same kind of gender structure as humans.
She held up the remote, pressed the button and then said, “Dakh Hhargashian ship.”
No answer.
“They’re changing course,” Ramirez said. “Starting to veer slightly away from Earth.”
She turned to Ramirez. “Did you get any chance to learn anything about these characters?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Do they have women?”
He smiled. “The Mralans have never seen a Dakh Hhargashian woman, but they believe that all humanoid species have the same two sexes.”
“And others don’t?”
“The Pelmians, according to what I read, are dual-sexual. They can be either male or female, depending on how they’re feeling at the time, and which role they want to fulfill. Then there are the Balforthians, who have four genders.”
“How could that be possible?” Hiranaka said.
Mehta shrugged. “Lots of possibilities. Maybe the process where the germ cells split to make eggs and sperm does a double split. You have to have one egg and one each of three different kinds of sperm to get all the required DNA, or whatever it is they have.”
“Dang.”
“The ship’s moving toward the comet cloud,” Opash said.
“Pursuit course.”
Hiranaka input the information, and the ship turned to follow the invaders.
“We’re leaving, okay?” a voice said over the communications system. It sounded like that Zolbon creep.
“Just making certain,” she said.
His image popped onto the auxiliary screen, suspended in the blackness of space, as though he lived out there and breathed the vacuum.
“It’s a green screen, isn’t it?” Mehta said.
“What?” Zolbon snapped.
Ramirez and Hiranaka chuckled, and Opash looked confused.
“Just wondering about the background you’re projecting. Is your bridge all windows?”
“You don’t need to know about our bridge. Our technology is ours alone.”
“I thought you stole it from the Rajeen.”
Zolbon spit. “The Rajeen had plain ships, with screens and indicators and image analyzers.” His hand flitted through the air, as though pointing to the non-existent items he was listing. “Ours is much improved.”
“Oh.” She smiled, not wanting him to see the knot of fear that gripped her stomach. The Dakh Hhargash, then, were not like the Mralans, content to keep what they had without improvement. And therefore, not just any Rajeen technology would equal whatever they had. These could be much more dangerous opponents than the Mralans had made them out to be.
Zolbon stared at her. “You don’t look Mralan anymore.”
“Nope. And this ship isn’t Mralan, either. It’s human. So, you can forget about talking to the Russians. We already have better technology than you could ever offer.”
His face darkened. “How could that be possible?”
“It doesn’t really matter. You just need to leave this system.”
“We’re going. We’re leaving your system, so you can stop following us.”
“You expect me to take your word for it?”
He glowered at her. “Is this the only ship you have? I certainly hope so.”
“You’re trying to get me to tell you the size of our fleet? Really?”
For a split second, he looked disappointed, but then he smiled. “I suppose I’ll just have to surmise, then, won’t I?”
“Whatever works for you.”
“One lone ship.” He shook his head. “It won’t be enough. We’ll be back with more ships, and now that you’re not being protected by the Mralans, I assure you, we will overwhelm your tiny fleet.”
“Then I’ll see you in battle.”
He grinned. “I will enjoy that very much.” His image disappeared, and his ship leapt forward and slipped into Netherspace.
“Should we continue following?” Hiranaka asked.
“Just until they’re beyond the system.”
“Our comet cloud might be a good place to put some early warning devices,” Ramirez said.
Mehta nodded. “But they’ll have to have some serious range. The area of a sphere that large has got to be mind-boggling.”
The view on the screen changed to the sparkling ribbons of color that meant they were in Netherspace. She smiled as she realized she was getting used to it. And she was starting to be able to get information from the images, speed and changes in direction.
“The Dakh Hhargashian ship is thirty seconds to the Oort Cloud,” Ramirez said.
Mehta nodded and sat down on the floor. “Take us back to Earth.”
“Looks like I missed all the action,” a deep voice said from the door.
Mehta turned to see Davis, leaning against the door frame. He looked exhausted.
“I told him he should continue to rest,” Trel said, “but once he figured out he could walk, he wouldn’t listen anymore.”
“Can’t be layin’ down there while my friends are up here puttin’ their lives on the line.”
Mehta smiled. “Your life was on the line down there, you know.”
“Where do you want me to sit?”
“Take weapons,” she said, indicating the spot with her hand.
As he walked to his spot, the deck shuddered. Trel rushed up to grab him by the arm. “What was that?”
“We just dropped out of Netherspace,” Hiranaka said. “Let me see if I can figure out what’s going on.” She tapped on her console, then she paused, then tapped some more. But the main screen still showed the stars of normal space. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“How long will it take us to get back to Earth?”
“If we stay in normal space,” Opash said, “it’ll be several weeks.”
“Damn.”
Davis sunk to the floor. “I was looking forward to some pain meds.”
“Maybe we can do something to take your mind off of it,” Mehta said. “I need you to come up with two things.”
“Yeah?” He sat up straighter, hands on the console like he was ready to start working.
“First is a duty roster. We don’t have enough people to do everything, and we can’t do the maintenance from the bridge. So, we’ve got to have some people here, and some down in engineering keeping the ship operational.”
“Okay. I can manage that.”
“And someone needs to go to engineering now and see if they can figure out why we can’t get back into Netherspace.”
Davis looked around. “Trel, see what you can find out.”
“Right,” Trel said. “Opash, can you get me an overall status? It might point me in a specific direction.”
“Give me a second,” Opash said as she worked the engineering console.
“Okay,” Davis said. He turned back to Mehta. “What’s the other thing you need?”
“A sleep roster.”
He groaned.
“We may only be able to get four hours in twenty-four, but everybody needs some.”
“That means two people at a time,” Davis said. “And I just got mine.”
“I don’t think you got four hours,” Mehta said.
“I got more than anyone else.”
“All right,” she said. “Then who should take the next sleep shift?”
“You.” He pointed a thick fin
ger at her. “I’ll take command while you get a little shut-eye.”
“No, no,” Mehta said. “I’m the commander. I’ll take my sleep last.”
Davis smiled. “That is the way they teach you to do leadership, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Pick two other people. Someone who looks really tired.”
“I pick Ramirez,” he said. “And I already picked you.”
She frowned. “Pick someone else.”
“Did you delegate me the authority to put together the sleep roster, or not?” he said. “Because that’s another thing they teach you about leadership. You delegate, and then you support your subordinate in his decisions.”
She took a deep breath and let it out. “Fine, then. Wake me up in four hours.”
Davis turned to Ramirez. “You, too. Go find a place to sack out.”
“Just stay close,” Mehta said. “If something happens, we need to be back here immediately.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“Ma’am, there’s another ship approaching.”
Mehta looked up to see Opash silhouetted in the door frame of her darkened room. She looked at her watch. It had been three hours since she’d laid down. Not enough time. She started to sit up, but the weight of her head pressed her back onto the makeshift bed. It was like someone had turned up the gravity. “I’ll be right there.” She rolled over so that she was on hands and feet. “Did you also get Ramirez?”
“Davis went to get him.”
She nodded, forcing herself to her feet. She needed some adrenaline here. Her first step wobbled, and the wall tilted.
She reached out for a helping hand, but Opash was already gone. She grabbed the door frame instead, then leaned against it. Wake the hell up!
She stumbled out of the room and down the few steps to the bridge entrance. With each step, she could do better. The door opened, and she stepped inside. “What do we have?”
“A Mralan ship,” Ramirez said.
“Damn.”
“They’ve put themselves directly in our path.”
“We’ve stopped our forward motion,” Hiranaka said.
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