Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles)

by Jeffrey A. Carver

Julie furrowed her eyebrows. "What is it?" To Bandicut, she muttered, "Kim's with exoarch."

  He nodded.

  The voice from the comm said, "We may have a find. It's an object of some kind, buried about thirty meters deep, just within buggy range to the northeast. I don't know how we missed it before, but it showed up when they repeated some of the orbital scans yesterday. It just came in. We're trying to analyze the data now. We could use your help."

  Julie froze, electrified. Finally she murmured, "Out near—navpoint Wendy, by any chance?"

  "Yeah. How'd you know?"

  She looked at Bandicut with a mixture of excitement, apology, and pleading for forgiveness. He shrugged helplessly. "I'll be right there," she said into the comm, and snapped it off. "I'm sorry! I'm really sorry! But this could be—" Her voice caught.

  "Just what you've been waiting for, right?" he croaked.

  She nodded, swallowing. She looked breathtakingly beautiful as she buttoned her shirt and ran her fingers back through her hair. "I'll let you know what we find," she promised, leaning to touch his lips with a parting kiss. "You're so sweet I almost can't stand it." She gave him another parting kiss.

  He stood up, readjusting his clothing. "I'll call you," he promised. "Or you call me. Or something. Okay?"

  "Okay," she whispered. "Bye."

  "Bye," he murmured, and slipped out the door.

  Chapter 20

  A Time to Heal

  /// John, if that's my translator they found,

  we could be in trouble. ///

  Bandicut shrugged irritably as they made their way back toward his own dorm. He was concerned, in the sense that he felt as though things were moving farther and farther out of his control; but deep down, he was having trouble sharing the quarx's worries about the translator.

  /// I hope you noticed

  that I didn't interrupt you this time.

  I tried really hard not to be a

  "miserable, disgusting little creature." ///

  Bandicut grunted. He was remembering Julie's third-to-last kiss, the one interrupted by the call. It made him shiver to remember it. It also made him depressed. Why did something always go wrong anytime he started to like a woman? /Who said you were a miserable...whatever you just said?/ he muttered.

  /// You did.

  The other night. ///

  /I did? I must have been mad./ He entered the dorm and climbed into his bunk with a groan, snapping the privacy curtain closed. /I wonder how Julie managed to get a private room, anyway. Who'd she get cozy with, I wonder?/ He was madder than he'd thought.

  /// No one. That's one area

  where the exoarch people made out.

  They came late,

  and management wanted to keep them separate.

  Thought they were a bunch of meddlers.

  Some extra cubicles were converted into dorms,

  and they were too small to be multiples. ///

  Bandicut blinked. /How the hell do you know all that?/

  /// Just something I picked up

  scanning the net. ///

  /Before you wrecked it, you mean?/

  Charlie answered softly.

  /// Yes.

  And I have a feeling that

  the new orbital scan that took Julie away from you

  was prompted by my blunder.

  So we both lost out today. ///

  Bandicut closed his eyes, alternately trying to forget, and then to recapture, the memory of Julie. /Yeah,/ he said. /Look, I'm sorry I called you a perverse, stinking little pipsqueak—/

  /// That's not what you called me.

  You called me a— ///

  /Never mind. I'm just sorry, okay?/

  The quarx was silent for a moment.

  /// Okay. Hey, John—

  it's really important that we get out

  to the translator before anyone else does.

  Really important. ///

  Bandicut scowled. /Why? It can protect itself, can't it?/

  /// Sure.

  But possibly at the cost of our being able to reach it.

  It might decide to sink out of reach, to avoid contact.

  We can't let that happen. ///

  /I thought you said it would do what it had to, to stay in touch with us./

  /// I said I thought.

  But I can't be absolutely sure. ///

  /Well—I don't see what I can do about it, anyway,/ Bandicut muttered. /Say, you know, it might be a good idea for us to browse the system board and see what people are saying about sabotage. To see if anyone's onto us./

  /// Getting back out there is more urgent. ///

  /Well, I can't get out there until my ankle's healed. Even if Switzer signs me off, I won't be ready for hopping around subterranean caverns./

  /// That's why I was thinking,

  maybe there's a way to make you heal faster. ///

  Bandicut snorted. /How? By magic? That reminds me, I haven't taken those stupid pills./ He sat up and groped in his bunk storage cubby for the bottle of pills that Switzer had given him. He shook three of them out and took them with a swallow of water from a half-empty drinking bulb.

  /// Not magic.

  But it's occurred to me that maybe,

  with my help... ///

  Bandicut wished he could see the quarx face to face. /Physical intervention? Can you do that?/

  He almost felt the quarx frown.

  /// At first, I didn't think so.

  But I've been thinking about the fever I induced

  by touching your nerve impulses.

  And I've been remembering some meditational techniques

  that I believe could help you

  focus upon your ankle's healing

  and speed it up from within. ///

  Bandicut blinked. Mind-techniques? Even if it were true... /Would you know how to heal a human body?/

  /// Not precisely.

  But your body knows what to do.

  I would just help it concentrate

  and do it faster.

  I've done it before, in past lifetimes. ///

  /But never with a human./

  /// Obviously not. But

  I'd never done it with a Peloinang, either.

  Or a Fffff'tink.

  But it worked with them.

  And on tougher hurts than broken bones.

  I remember parts of it vividly. ///

  Bandicut suddenly felt like another player in a long line of players, in a game he didn't understand. /Are you in the habit of getting your hosts badly injured?/

  The quarx sighed and didn't answer. Instead he began to hum a low, rhythmic chant.

  /What are you doing?/

  But it was obvious what he was doing, and Bandicut's protest died of its own accord. The sound was oddly compelling, not just soothing and restful, but evocative as well. Despite his own resistance, Bandicut found his thoughts filling with restful images of water and dappled sunlight and green leaves on trees, and he felt a female presence nearby, not arousing but comforting, a pair of feminine hands stroking and kneading tension out of his muscles. The sensation was so real that he began to feel cries of relief from his knotted muscles, and he thought, go up just a little, now to the right...ahhhhh.

  The imagined hands found just the right spot. Charlie's humming chant changed in timbre and pitch, and Bandicut could have sworn that his muscles were responding with their own minds to the sound—relaxing, and allowing oxygen to flow where tension had blocked it before. He experimentally tightened his left shoulder; it responded, but as he released it, it relaxed again into the swell of the hum.

  /// The more you surrender control,

  the better. ///

  For an instant, he thought of asking for a nice, relaxing image of Julie to surrender to; but he could hear the tsk, tsk of the quarx leading him in more restful directions, and in the end he gave up to it and imagined that he was floating in a hot, swirling mineral bath...

  He began to see new images, gazin
g inward into his own mind/body/being. He glimpsed a welter of tensions and frustrations and longings—shuttered windows onto deep pains and sorrows of the past, like the loss of his parents and brother and sister-in-law, and the one comfort that was his young niece Dakota. He flickered upon a memory of sitting with her parents, watching her play in a VR booth, her seven-year-old face frowning in tight concentration as she worked at piloting a ship through an imaginary spacewarp, trying to reach...what was it?...the universe of rainbow snow. He wondered wistfully if he would ever see Dakota again. He was suddenly aware of the years of loneliness that had built up inside him, and his occasional feelings of emotional exile, which the neurolink had done so much to assuage, until it had been torn from him...

  He began to tighten up, pulling back from the images; but the quarx's mutterings moved him through them with a whispered,

  /// Not now.

  Those things take time to heal.

  We have simpler business now. ///

  A new image took over, a vision of a stream of golden light pouring into a room, bathing away the hurt of the memories, not changing what had happened, but soothing those hurts and others that rose to find balm. The golden light flowed toward the physical injuries in his body.

  Skeletal muscles relaxed and tightened again, gently; the muscles holding the bones of his left ankle began to draw themselves into a natural conformation that put just the right tension on the half-healed fracture that ran through one of those bones...

  What are we doing? he thought dreamily.

  /// Trust your body to know. ///

  Moments later he glimpsed the actual break, and the edges that needed joining, and he saw the places where the alignment was imperfect. He felt his muscles contract slightly, until the edges shifted into the best fit. Nerve endings fired at the movement, but the signals were stroked into something that said, this is right...and the flow of histamines stopped, and calcium and phosphate ions and oxygen and glucose flowed more freely and accurately...and he could almost see the cells bathed in the nutrient sea, churning out new bone. And in the break, the bone was knitting itself together without a trace of a scar, following blueprints held within each one of those glowing cells...

  *

  When he woke, it was to the sound of the quarx saying,

  /// ...got to get something to eat.

  You need fuel... ///

  He blinked his eyes open, startled to realize that he'd gone to sleep. For a moment, he could not identify what he was feeling. Then he realized he was ravenous. He hadn't eaten a thing last night; he had slept straight through from late afternoon to morning. Pushing himself up, he felt a wave of lightheadedness. He felt drained and hung over. /What have you been doing to me?/ he whispered.

  /// Healing you.

  We demanded a lot of your body, while you slept.

  After you eat,

  we've got to see the good doctor. ///

  It took an effort to get down from his bunk, but once he'd been upright for a few moments, he felt better. /I would hesitate to give Switzer the benefit of that title,/ he grunted, testing his ankle. He felt nothing—but then, with the cast on, he hadn't felt too much anyway.

  /// Well, whatever we call him,

  he's going to be mighty amazed... ///

  *

  Switzer stared at the readouts, scratching his head. "Bandicut, I don't think you even need that cast anymore. Ol' King Cole is going to love you."

  Bandicut blinked. "Say again?"

  "Jackson. I'm telling him that you're cleared for driving duty today. But," Switzer added, frowning as he tapped Bandicut's ankle through the fastract cast, "I'm leaving this thing on for one more day, just to play it safe. There've been too many damned weird things about you lately." He gave the cast a good rap with his knuckles. "Feel anything?"

  Bandicut shrugged. "I feel you hitting me."

  "Do you feel any pain?"

  He shook his head.

  "No fever? Never mind, I can read it right here." Switzer pulled the readout plugs out of the cast. "You can go to work. Hell, you can play soccer, for all I care. Come back tomorrow to get the cast off." He shook his gray-haired head and turned away with a dismissive gesture. It was clear he regarded Bandicut as an annoying enigma, and the sooner the man was out of his sight the better.

  Bandicut was happy to oblige him.

  As he walked to the exo-ops center, Bandicut conceded, /That's pretty amazing, what you did. The ankle feels great. It seems silly to still have this cast on./

  /// I'm glad you're pleased.

  But now, my friend, comes the time for us

  to earn our keep. ///

  Bandicut started to give a jaunty reply, but swallowed it when he realized exactly what the quarx meant. He'd met the translator once before, and he hadn't liked the experience, not at all.

  Chapter 21

  Translator Dreams

  The deep blue Neptune was a comforting companion in the midnight sky, as he drove toward navpoint Wendy. In the week since he'd last been out in a buggy, Triton had completed slightly more than one tidal-locked orbit of Neptune, and the mother planet was once again in crescent phase, a slender scythe in the sky. Whatever misgivings he had about the surreptitious mission he was about to undertake for Charlie, he could not resist the pleasure of the solitude, and the view. He knew there were not too many other people who would have considered this a scenic drive, but he loved the rugged desolation under Neptune's regal presence. He sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with him, that he didn't become as jaded by it as everyone else.

  /// Do you ever get this sort of feeling

  for your homeworld? ///

  Charlie asked, as they bobbed and bumped over the landscape.

  Bandicut squinted, picking out a course through the hilly nitrogen ices. /I dunno. Sometimes, I guess. Why?/

  /// You don't seem to think of Earth that often.

  Or of people you left behind. ///

  Bandicut shrugged. /Didn't really leave a whole lot of people behind. My family's gone—you already know that. Except my niece, of course. And a few friends. But not really any close friends, I guess./

  /// Is that hard for you to accept? ///

  /What are you, a damn shrink? I'm alone. So what? Lots of people are alone./

  For a few moments, the quarx didn't reply. Bandicut tried to concentrate on his driving. He glanced off to his left and watched Napoleon galloping over the dunes, paralleling his route. It was about time for the robot to check in with them.

  /// What about Dakota? ///

  Charlie asked suddenly.

  Bandicut growled in annoyance. /What about her?/ He waggled the control stick, making the buggy veer left, then right. He was annoyed because he was feeling distracted and guilty; he'd gotten a message from Julie, saying that exoarch seemed to be onto something exciting, but they couldn't send out a team until more orbital scans had been done. He felt as if he were lying to her.

  /// I'm trying to understand, that's all.

  Dakota's your niece, right?

  So you don't have a relationship with her

  the way you would, say, with Julie. ///

  /Obviously./

  /// Therefore,

  this thing that you're doing,

  putting your earnings in trust for her,

  is something that you're doing

  for no other reason than that you care for her? ///

  /Yeah, so? What's your point?/ Bandicut braked suddenly, realizing that he was veering from his plotted course. He sighed, noting that Napoleon was heading his way, probably to check on him. He flashed a signal to Napoleon that everything was all right. They were getting close now.

  /// We're just under a kilometer from the cavern.

  I'm skirting the point, I know.

  But here it is:

  Would you miss Earth, John,

  if you were never able to return? ///

  Bandicut felt a sudden chill. He instinctively pulled back on th
e power. /What the hell is that supposed to mean, Charlie? Yeah, I'd miss it. I'd miss it a lot. Why?/

  Charlie stirred with an unusual restlessness.

  /// Nothing...exactly.

  Let's hope the question never comes up. ///

  /Then why'd you bring it up?/

  /// Just...trying to understand your emotions. ///

  Bandicut grunted suspiciously and gunned the motor. The buggy crested a rise with a dim puff of snow, and on his console, two arrows converged. Time to get started. He keyed the comm. "EXO-OP CONTROL, UNIT ECHO. APPROACHING NAVPOINT WENDY. BEGINNING SURVEY RECORDINGS." He touched several switches on the console, turning on the mapping-sensor recorders.

  /I hope you've got this figured out. If I cross the STOP HERE line again—even Stelnik and Jackson will be smart enough to figure out that something is going on./

  /// Time to ask Napoleon to help us, ///

  the quarx said, as they began their sweep over the assigned territory.

  /// When you reach your turn up ahead,

  could you ask it to come alongside? ///

  /You're the boss. Let's just do it right./

  *

  Bandicut stood with his hand tingling on the robot's outer case. He wanted to ask Charlie exactly what he was doing to Napoleon's programming, but he sensed that the quarx was too deep in his work to answer. He only knew that fairly complex instructions were passing through his skin and glove into the robot's central processor. The tingling fluctuated for a moment, then faded.

  /// Okay. You can take your hand away. ///

  Napoleon made a creaking sound over the comm and stared with its black holocam eyes. "Of course, John Bandicut, I will assist as requested."

  "Yes, good," Bandicut said, clearing his throat. Charlie had apparently just instructed the robot to carry on with the survey in his stead while they set out on foot to the cavern. /What now?/

  /// Starting in nineteen minutes,

  we will have a forty-nine-minute period

  in which there will be no spacecraft or satellites

  overhead. ///

  Bandicut took a slow, deep breath. /All right. Hey, Charlie—if we do pull this off? You'll tell me everything the translator says, right? No secrets?/

  /// No secrets, John.