Keystones: Tau Prime

by Alexander McKinney

  Jamie hovered in front of the tank, her hair a radiant blond fringe around her face, as her fingers adjusted the controls. She glanced up at the sound of Deklan’s entrance. “This equipment is adequate, but only barely. Using this tech we have to do a targeted repair.” She pointed at Calm’s torso. “It’s a bit like working in the Dark Ages.”

  The doctor standing next to Jamie visibly bristled at the last few words.

  Noticing her colleague’s reaction, Jamie said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m just used to having different options.”

  The doctor didn’t lose all of his irritation but appeared mollified.

  “How is Calm?” Deklan asked Jamie.

  “Stable. He should be fine in a week or less.”

  Deklan didn’t want to wait a week to speak to Calm. He wanted to know more about who Cay was and what artifact he’d been talking about. “A week?” he said. “I’m only going to have you to talk to for a week?”

  Jamie reached back and swatted him playfully.

  “Konstantin is waiting in the hallway to show us to our quarters,” remarked Deklan.

  “The hallway?”

  “I think he’s uncomfortable with hospitals.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of Jamie’s mouth. “Well, we wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable. Let’s hope that our rooms are close together.”

  “I think we’re sharing a room.”

  “How convenient,” she murmured.

  Day 43

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Waking

  Deklan rolled in his bed. He was alone. That happened often since Jamie wasn’t one for staying put. Deklan suspected that teleporting made it easy for her to move to her own bed with minimal effort. If there was one gift that made laziness convenient, it was teleporting.

  He clasped the straps that held him in place for zero-gravity sleep. This ship didn’t have a gravity wheel, so he’d been weightless for most of three weeks now. Three weeks of worrying that the daily exercises and Sanctuarian resistance suits wouldn’t be enough to keep him in shape. As it was, he was only allotted eight hours a day in one of the suits, but even so he was surprised by how little atrophy he had experienced.

  They were supposed to get back to the Terra Rings today, Deklan remembered. An aura of excitement had filled the ship as they drew closer. All of the Sanctuarians had grown up hiding from a xenophobic society that had enforced isolation on them. They had been completely cut off from any news about Earth and the inner solar system. It was like watching people come to the end of a pilgrimage. He, Jamie, Calm, and Cay had been peppered with question by curious Sanctuarians who wanted to know about the smallest nuances of life in their various homes.

  Cay had been best able to avoid these questions by his posting on the bridge, where his Keystone ability let him squeeze the best performance possible from the ship. Jamie had been asked for help with any number of spurious medical problems, which had been primarily excuses to engage her in conversation. Deklan, meanwhile, had put his legal skills to good use. The Sanctuarians were going to declare themselves to be intergalactic refugees. There was no clear precedent for their situation, but Deklan was confident of their petition’s reception. Tau Prime had long been a subject of fascination on the Terra Rings. No one there was going to turn away a relatively small group of people escaping from such bizarre circumstances. The issue could be a political problem or success depending on how it was handled, but it was minor compared to the issue of evacuating Earth.

  Deklan found it amazing how while exploring the universe things kept coming back to his law degree. He also found it amazing that the refugees from Tau Prime didn’t drink coffee. A bacterial infection had wiped out their entire crop over fifty years earlier, and some mornings he craved a cup. They did have a replacement concoction that tasted like a mixture of dirt and roots, but he hadn’t been that desperate. Today he was going to have his first cup of coffee since Serenity had exploded. He kept thinking about the coffee and avoiding the larger issue in front of him: he was scared of returning to the Terra Rings; he was scared of having nothing to do; he was scared of getting back to his normal life. He unfastened the straps that would let him out of bed.

  The bunks above his were empty. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Calm had claimed that his stomach itched where he’d been injured and that he couldn’t sleep. Deklan had heard him toss and turn up there. The sounds of a man struggling with nightmares left Deklan sure that Calm was tormented by the fact of the injury’s having occurred. How could Calm not be? His illusion of invulnerability had been shaken.

  The door opened, and Jamie appeared in the center of the room. She never walked or glided anymore. If she were moving, she was teleporting. Deklan didn’t blame her. If he woke up and could teleport, he’d probably do the same. In her case, though, the inclination was more complicated. Jamie had thought she was unaffected by The Sweep, only to find out weeks later that she had an extraordinary array of Keystone abilities. The discovery must have been overwhelming. She didn’t talk about it and avoided the subject when Deklan brought it up, but he guessed that she was frightened by the possibility of becoming like Slate or someone she wasn’t. Deklan hardly blamed her. On Tau Prime her hair had turned red, and her accent had shifted. If their positions were reversed, however, he would make it a priority to learn how to control those powers.

  Jamie grabbed Deklan and pulled him into a deep kiss. “We’re going to be back home in less than an hour!” The statement was jubilant.

  Deklan had thought that he would never reach home again. The idea of returning to the Terra Rings was light at the end of a dark tunnel. Once there he could let someone else worry about mapping the wormhole network, let someone else worry about the alien ship that had attacked them, let someone else worry about everything. “Yeah, home.” Deklan forced a smile with all of the skill learned from dozens of movie sets. “Where things will be nice and simple.”

  “Simple?” said Jamie. “I still have to meet your mother.”

  Deklan stifled a groan. That was another homecoming event that he’d been avoiding thinking about. If he was lucky, his mother would wait half an hour before asking when they were going to have children. He rubbed his eye and dragged his palm up and down his cheek. “Yeah, that’ll be lots of fun.”

  Jamie lightly smacked him across the shoulder. “Coward.” She stuck her tongue out at him.

  He liked playful Jamie entire worlds more than serious Slate. “Keep the focus on Twix bars,” he said, “and everything will be okay.”

  “Get dressed,” replied Jamie. “I want to be with the others on the bridge when we get there.”

  Captain Andrei had lifted the ban of non-essential personnel on the bridge after Deklan provided legal aid, Calm promised financial assistance, and Jamie worked as a doctor. Cay had never been banned. As the most competent pilot anywhere, he was welcome in every corner of the ship.

  Deklan glanced at his pants and scratched his chin. “We could stay here and celebrate,” he suggested.

  Jamie rummaged through a drawer and threw a shirt at him. “Wear this.” She grabbed the rest of the drawer’s contents and stuffed them into a bag. “We’re not staying aboard any longer than we have to. I want to see my apartment again.”

  There was a lot that she wasn’t saying in that last comment. She wanted to know that Jamie Beal’s memories of her apartment were real memories. She wanted proof that this personality wasn’t a construct of her Keystone abilities. She wanted to know who she was.

  Deklan pulled on the shirt and raked his fingers through tousled hair. “Ready,” he announced.

  Jamie pointed at his feet. “What about some shoes?”

  A blurry line between suggestions and commands characterized her requests, but now was not the time to fuss over the distinction. Deklan caught a pair of shoes in time to stop them from bouncing off his chest. “Okay,” said Jamie. “Let’s go to the bridge.”

  Deklan’s shirt itched and felt too small. I
t had been scavenged from clothes donated by refugees from Tau Prime, clothes that someone had brought along during the rushed exodus but then decided he didn’t want to keep.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Jamie said, but her smile moderated the reprimand.

  They stood in the last row of the bridge with their backs pressed against the back wall. The room was filled with people, all of whom had their eyes locked on the forward screen. It showed the distant end of the wormhole drawing closer with every passing second. This was the last hurdle before the Terra Rings. After a trip filled with complications Deklan was waiting for something to go wrong, something unexpected to derail their plans. Each day without an emergency left him feeling slightly uneasy, like a hidden trap lurking over his head, but nothing had gone awry.

  The mouth of the wormhole was now close enough that the blackness of space was visible through the ring of swirling purple energy. Jamie’s hand found Deklan’s and squeezed once, conveying her excitement.

  When the ship crested through the mouth of the wormhole and broke into normal space, a chorus of spontaneous cheers erupted in the room. Deklan contented himself with a small smile. They weren’t home yet.

  “Engage the Doppler Bubble Drive,” said Captain Andrei. Even his commanding voice seemed to betray a smile.

  Just then a tendril of darkness curled out of Deklan’s pocket like a genie escaping from a lamp. Deklan’s heart sank. Stalker had been absent during the entire trip. His reappearance couldn’t herald anything good.

  Stalker coalesced into human form and frowned at Deklan before looking around him. “What?” he asked. He looked around again. “Why am I here?” His face betrayed a puzzled expression rather than the dark glee he’d projected on other occasions.

  Deklan was glad that the crew was distracted and hadn’t noticed anything yet. “I didn’t try to get you here,” said Deklan quietly. If Stalker hadn’t come of his own accord, the remaining options narrowed down to one man.

  “I did,” declared Cheshire, who suddenly appeared to Deklan’s left next to Jamie.

  The architect of so much that was complicated in Deklan’s life, Cheshire wore the same black clothes as at their last meeting, but he now exhibited a sad smile. “Jeremy,” said Cheshire, “I thought you’d want to hear this as well.”

  “Hear what?” Stalker asked.

  Was Stalker’s given name Jeremy? Deklan was hard-pressed to think of a less appropriate name for the man. “Where’s Susan?” he asked Cheshire. “You said that if I explored the wormhole network I’d find Susan.”

  “I never promised that you’d find your friend quickly, just that you’d find her. She’s still out there.”

  “Hear what?” Stalker repeated in this three-way dialogue, his voice louder and his words sharper.

  Cheshire’s smile grew somber. “Welcome back, but I feel that I should warn you.” He looked at the enormous space stations displayed on the main screen. “The Terra Rings are going to explode in less than four hours.”

  Deklan felt as though he were falling from a great height.

  “Well, ‘explode’ is the wrong term entirely. Instead, let us say that they will be modified.”

  It was always games with Cheshire—serious games, deadly games, but always games. “Modified? Modified how?” asked Deklan.

  “Humanity has to leave this solar system. We’re not safe here. The Terra Rings are going to leave Earth’s orbit.”

  Deklan shook his head back and forth, trying to negate Cheshire’s statement. “But we just got back,” he remonstrated. “We can’t leave yet.”

  “Deklan, I’m sorry to tell you this, but your work isn’t done yet.” Cheshire winked at him and vanished.

  “Who was that man?” Jamie asked in the careful tones of someone trying not to scream.

  “He’s the one who helped me to escape from Earth.” Deklan didn’t bother with mentioning the unorthodox methods that Cheshire had employed. “He also assisted me after the parasites attacked Serenity.”

  Jamie cleared her throat. “But you said that you’d just escaped on your own.”

  “Would you have thought I was sane if I’d said otherwise?”

  Their awkward conversation was interrupted by an urgent announcement by one of the pilots. “Captain, we have an incoming transmission.”

  Cheshire’s face appeared on every screen on the bridge. “Hello, citizens of Earth, citizens of the Terra Rings, and my fellow survivors. Seven weeks ago your, my, and our lives were irrevocably changed by The Sweep. They’re going to change again today. In four hours the Terra Rings are going to fulfill their secondary purpose.” The video feed pulled back and showed three-dimensional holographic schematics alongside him.

  The schematics were of three spinning rings encircling a world. The rings fractured and broke apart, becoming a cloud of tumbling metal. “Don’t be alarmed,” interjected Cheshire’s voice. “The rings aren’t going to explode, but they are going to separate into spaceships.” The schematic zoomed down to a small section of the chaos and revealed ships by the hundreds maneuvering in close quarters but avoiding collision.

  “These ships will take us through the wormholes. We will encounter many dangers, but we also will find new homes for humanity.”

  About the Author

  Alexander McKinney first discovered his love of Fantasy with ‘Dragons of Autumn Twilight.’ From there he proceeded to devour every novel of Dragonlance mythology that he could find. His lifelong obsession with the genre can undoubtedly be laid at the feet of Margaret Weis & Tracey Hickman.

  Branching out from medieval worlds took time, but eventually a dearth of locally available titles required the radical move to the genre of Science Fiction. There, lying in wait was a host of glittering treasures: Herbert, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. Authors who only sunk the hook deeper.

  Alexander lives in the Bahamas and proves that insanity goes hand in hand with a passion for writing as the pursuit of new stories frequently interferes with the pursuit of enjoying beaches and sunshine, a choice that he is certain most people would not make.