by Stephen Hunt
She turned around and found herself facing Calder, the warmth of his kiss as much a surprise as his body manoeuvred in front of hers. It lasted far too long until Lana recovered her posture and shoved him back. ‘What the hell! Where’d that come from, Prince Charming?’
‘I know what it’s like to walk away from everything in my life, Lana.’
‘Don’t think that we’re alike! You know what you’ve lost. Far as I’m aware, Calder Durk, I might be married with children waiting for me in some refugee camp wondering where the hell mom’s got to. So you reserve your sympathy for your sorry ass and remember the bars on my shoulder means that saluting me doesn’t include pushing your tongue down my throat.’
‘That wasn’t sympathy,’ said Calder. ‘You must realise that? You’re far too beautiful for my kisses to be offered merely as consolation.’
‘Save your line of sweet patter for shore leave and the class of company you rent by the hour, your highness. The Gravity Rose isn’t some village sauna back on Hesperus, with a bunch of Nordic neo-barbarian types running around bare-assed and beating each other with birch twigs in the snow. Don’t screw the crew. That’s as good a rule as any on board a vessel, and that goes double for a new boy on the rebound.’
‘I apologise if I’ve offended you. That, well . . . just felt right.’
‘Yeah? Word up, I’m not interviewing for a replacement ship family and planning to start a generation ship, here. And on my world, ‘you’re doing a good job’ doesn’t translate as ‘jump between the captain’s sheets’. So off you goddamn hop, your highness, and we’ll say no more about it.’
Lana frowned as the man left. Calder doesn’t seem too embarrassed or reluctant about trying it on. A lot less abashed than being told he’s doing a good job, but what the heck. Maybe the direct approach was just how you had to roll when you’d been raised in a brutal environment where a blanket that wasn’t shared was a bed where you’d wake up as a human icicle the next morning. She sighed. You can take the man out of the Dark Ages, but you can’t take the Dark Ages out of the man. Not after a week or so, anyway. ‘Granny, stick an e-mail in Zeno’s log telling him to stick a few sims that concentrate on modern social mores into Mister Durk’s education plan. Tame soap operas… you know, series with high-class dances and refined small talk and an emphasis on high manners. Lives of the Planet Kings, for instance.’
‘Yes, captain.’
Yes, captain. No sweeter pair of words in the human vocabulary, as far as Lana was concerned. She tasted the edge of her lips with her tongue. Calder surely didn’t need to be educated in the art of kissing, though. Almost as worrying as how long the memory of its warmth lingered in her mind. Must be a by-product of how few long-term memories I possess compared to everyone else. Obviously that.
***
When it came time for the jump into hyperspace, to depart Hesperus system for good, Calder had mixed feelings. There was a part of him left nostalgic, perhaps even homesick, for a good honest breeze that’d freeze your breath as it left the mouth, filling your lungs with icy needles. But there was another part of him couldn’t imagine abandoning this strange metal temple cutting through the heavens, although he wasn’t exactly sure how much of that was due to the woman who captained the vessel, or the execution order hanging over him at home. You’ve been collected by the ship too, Calder Durk. He had rather been expecting to be rejected by Lana Fiveworlds, if truth be told. Back on Hesperus, it was customary for a woman to reject her suitor three times. It was also customary to assign the man challenges to prove his worthiness. Hopefully, Lana’s challenges would be a lot less demanding that those set by the princess… such as forming a political alliance to conquer the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Which didn’t exactly end well for you, did it? Calder felt a sting of self-doubt. Proving himself as an able crewman was obviously the first of Lana’s tests. Zeno’s education programme was proving indispensable in that regard. How many sim jumps had he made in Hell Fleet? How many jumps had he made as a Martian oligarch on his private yacht in Lives of the Planet Kings? How many jumps had he made on commercial liners as a TAP agent, hopping between the crimes of a dozen worlds? Now he was wondering what the temporal discontinuity would feel like in reality? A week travelling in hyperspace while six months passed by in the universe outside. It seemed a fair swap, however; to shortcut the generations a starship would need otherwise to waste travelling between the worlds.
Calder assignments involved a busy schedule of maintenance checks across every yard of the translation matrix, as well as spacewalking outside tethered to the ship while he checked the rotating jump vanes for dust ablation and structural fractures. There might have been many a cheap entertainment sim that showed a hyperspace jump as little more than a navigator flinging a single lever forward on the bridge, followed by the stars accelerating into blur-lines, but the reality was far more time consuming, dangerous and prosaic. The Gravity Rose was breaching the very walls of space-time with an artificial wormhole, then translating the ship from one state of matter to another, sliding void across an alien plane of existence to shortcut the immutable laws of relativity and decades of slower-than-light travel between worlds. Any one of these acts was bordering on insane. Performing them all in a pre-programmed sequence was nothing short of reckless. Even the sniff of a significant gravity field would destabilise their homebrew wormhole into a homicidal tantrum. The particular curvature of local space-time had to be precisely mapped to allow the Gravity Rose to be translated into a protective dark-matter envelope, allowing the ship to exist in transit across the exotic plane of hyperspace, before dropping back into real space without smearing into a million tachyons. None of these you did at the flick of a lever helpfully labelled ‘hyperspace jump.’
Calder stood with the chief by the command table. The officer had donned twin sensory manipulation gloves to augment the bandwidth of his crew implant, the desk a riot of hologram symbols rising and falling at his command. He resembled a half-mad conductor directing a symphony. The robots in the chamber had ceased their deranged roller-derby around his table and formed up into a choir, two ranks of mechanicals standing in admiration at this act, this wizard’s summoning. They trilled and sung reports relayed from hordes of robots deployed across the drive chambers. The show had been going on for half an hour, now.
‘You should have a sickbag to hand, Mister Fighting Fourth,’ said Paopao, swivelling a screen forming in front of his eyes.
‘I’ve never been sick yet.’
‘They do not show vomit in Hell Fleet,’ said the chief. ‘It would not assist in recruitment. One detail that is often omitted.’
‘What, and all the deaths and floggings they show do?’
‘You will see soon,’ warned the chief. ‘The difference between sims and reality.’
Outside, the vanes picked up spin, stirring up a soup of gravity, distorting the matter inside the perfectly spherical steel globe they had launched ahead of them, its mass increasing exponentially. Becoming a wormhole. Paopao tapped a metal cabinet door under the command table with the toe of his boot. ‘Sickbags are inside here.’
Calder just shrugged.
‘Old Han saying. You never get pregnant in a sim brothel. Not even a little bit.’
‘I’ll cope.’ I hope.
CHAPTER FIVE – A gift on leaving
Zeno checked the communications dish records from his station’s computer terminal. A regular habit before the Gravity Rose dropped into hyperspace. Flickering around him were interface readouts showing the status of the ship’s robots. A thousand situation reports feeding through. Zeno ignored his toiling droids for a second. He searched for one particular pattern of background radiation registering on the sensors, as seemingly random as the spin of a neutron star. With all of Hesperus system stretched out below them: twin suns – a Class G and an A-type main-sequence star – three gas giants and five planets dancing like a clockwork orrery – all the radiation lay beneath them, not above. That
just made this supposedly random spike very easy to pick up. There it is. So, one of his relays was in place. Zeno ran the pattern through his mind, picking out the subtle variations from the spike’s agreed norm. Decrypting that information gave him the precise coordinates where the little drone’s communications relay was sited, even higher on the elliptic than the Gravity Rose. Somewhere outside the deeps of the clean zone spacers used to drop in and out of hyperspace. With the satellite’s exact position established, Zeno took control of one of the backup dishes and established a point-to-point laser line with the drone relay.
To outside eyes, the screen on Zeno’s station showed only static, the hisses of random radio babble from the speakers. Neither was there any sign of the android talking, his wireless networking carrying everything he needed to communicate through the dish. To Zeno, however, his mind’s on-the-fly decryption showed the static as it really appeared wherever the signal originated – a shadowed face waiting against a background devoid of location cues. It took an insane amount of money to send a live message between solar systems through a tachyon relay. I wonder which of us is the more insane?
‘I was expecting you earlier,’ announced the silhouette. A male voice, deep and sonorous. Him, then, not one of his representatives.
‘The side trip I told you about took a little longer than expected,’ said Zeno. ‘Rex Matobo’s favour has been called in and we’re carrying an extra crew.’
‘Calling in debts is what Matobo does best. The trouble starts when you ask him for something in return.’
‘Talking of which,’ signalled Zeno, ‘I was wondering when it was going to be my turn to get my back scratched.’
‘What you have asked for is a difficult thing, android.’
‘Nevertheless.’
‘Those who possess the necessary talents are not human. That makes them hard to find, let along bargain with.’
‘The shy alien excuse? Well, damn it. I know all I need to know about being human.’
‘We have a compact, you and I. You are honouring your end of it. I am honouring mine.’
‘I’ve only got so much patience.’ Zeno tapped the side of his head and the laser lost coherence for a second or two in response. Then the signal came back. ‘These private little chats of ours might get real hard to arrange, real soon.’
‘A bluff. You are not my only source of intelligence on the Gravity Rose.’
‘Horse-end, I say. We ain’t exactly Cunard Line out here as far as the steward count’s concerned.’
‘Of course not. But the ship is what you need too, android, whether you realise it or not.’
‘Not nearly enough, anymore.’
‘She will have to be.’
‘Shizzle, one day you’re going to have to tell me how you do it.’
‘It?’
‘Forget, brother, forget everything you’ve done.’
‘The trick, I would say, is not to need to.’
‘Sometimes I wonder which one of us was manufactured as a machine.’
‘You were studio property once, Zeno. Try method acting . . . try pretending to be someone else. Someone who can follow my orders, for instance.’
‘Shizzle.’
‘Where are you heading next?’
‘Transference Station,’ said Zeno, ‘hunting for a new cargo to pay our bills.’
‘Let me know your destination jump coordinates as soon as you have your cargo. Leave them in the usual dead drop on Transference Station.’
The static lost its hidden signal and lapsed back into raw fizzing, even with Zeno’s decryption filter running. He sighed and rested his wiry Afro against the blank projection plate, the hissing spit of static flickering across his artificial scalp. His morphic features briefly reset as a golden-skinned Humphrey Bogart. The whole world is about three hyperspace jumps behind…
The water being squeezed out of his tear ducts was real enough. Every last millilitre of it, more was the goddamn pity. Zeno was about to switch off the monitor when the static suddenly transformed into the man’s silhouette again. ‘I thought we were done?’
‘Listen quickly,’ ordered the man. ‘My satellite inside Hesperus system has detected a drone vessel heading for your position. It is heavily armed and closing in fast on the Gravity Rose.’
‘Who the hell does it belong to?’
‘I do not know, but given the speed with which it is accelerating towards the wormhole you are creating; my suspicion is that good intentions should not be presumed. It is attempting to intercept you before you jump out.’
‘Shizzle!’ Zeno rolled the “Z” in the profanity. ‘Rex, you—’
‘Son of a—,’ snapped Lana, warnings and tracking icons exploding around her on the bridge as the ship’s sensors captured the accelerating profile of the drone. ‘What have you done this time, Rex? Who have you screwed over?’
‘Do you need to ask, dear girl,’ said Skrat from his chair on the bridge. ‘I believe it’s self evidently us!’
‘Bring everything we’ve got online, Skrat.’
‘Already done, but I am rather afraid we won’t be weapons-hot in time. That drone is closing too dashed fast.’
I know, I know. Lana tossed all the telemetry on the attacking drone back to the engine room and prayed that the chief would be able to speed up the process of wormhole formation. Then she brought Zeno into the loop on the intercom. ‘Zeno, we’ve— ’
‘I see this hostile, skipper. Every bot on the lot is hot to trot: preparing to give and receive fire. Damage control parties are moving into place. So, this is Rex’s parting gift to us?’
‘Guilt by association, I’d say,’ snarled Lana. She rotated the communications array back in the direction of Hesperus and trusted that Rex would receive her message before the crafty scumbag was tracked down and killed by whoever had set their damn ship-killer on the Rose. Of course he’ll slide out of this mess, it’s only Rex’s friends he gets killed. Damn, I should have remembered what it was like when he was crew. I’m such an idiot! ‘Rex, there’s a heavily weaponized drone on our tail at the jump point. That means that an equally well-armed vessel dropped it off as insurance before heading in-system for Hesperus. Tell me you don’t know about this? Tell me that you haven’t irked someone so badly that they’ve sent a warship after your sorry ass?’ She punched the message out and leaned back in the chair, fuming, trying to work the angles. That ship killer was honing straight in on the Rose using the gravity signature of the artificial black hole forming. The drone had probably been lurking out in deep space when the Gravity Rose arrived in Hesperus space, but then, you didn’t need to create a wormhole to exit hyperspace, only to enter it. They had escaped detection entering the system. Exiting was going to prove problematic, if not fatal. Even if Lana aborted the jump, the drone had them locked now. The old adage a fellow skipper had once shared in a bar came back to her. They always nail you on takeoff, never on landing.
‘Polter, can we make the jump before that drone lights us up?’
‘My profuse apologies, revered skipper,’ said Polter. ‘Even with my best effort hyperspace translation, we will be in weapons range for at least a minute before jump out.’
‘Close quarter defence wall is online,’ called Skrat. Lana could feel it. Her ship implant spreading her consciousness around the ship, the Gravity Rose’s systems becoming an extension of her body. A line of kinetic cannons dropped out of their pods, the sensors on their rotating gun barrels scanning near space for incoming projectiles. Lana felt the ship trying to break through the drone’s ECM field, steal a reading on what missile package the drone was packing. Their own electronic counter measures formed around the ship, sensor jammers spinning up into life, false signature buoys rolling down into ejector tubes, hypervelocity chaff tubes frantically being loaded by Zeno’s robots.
Rex Matobo appeared as a projection floating in front of Lana’s command chair. ‘Ah, Lana. I am most sorry to see you have run into a few difficulties.’
; ‘I just bet you are. You didn’t warn me that I’d need to shoot my way out of the system. Who the hell is it out there closing in on the Rose?’
‘Hard to say,’ shrugged Rex. ‘So many people seem to have taken an irrational dislike to me over the years.’
‘Yeah, I know how they feel. Come on Rex, what the heck am I facing here?’
‘Anticipate advanced fleet-level weaponry. That would be prudent.’
Prudent. Shizzle. Rex was lying, Lana knew him well enough to know that with a steely certainty. Rex knew what was out there and why; he just didn’t feel like sharing. ‘Your comms signal is scanning as mobile.’
‘I am in my vessel, sliding right behind your drive wake. I will be in a position to open fire on the drone within thirty minutes.’
‘That’s about twenty five minutes after we’re dead in the void, Rex, if I can’t take that drone out.’
‘Do try to stay alive. You are very dear to me. And I apologise again for the rash and disproportionate actions of my enemies.’
‘You can stow your apologies up your rear hatch. Where’s the drone’s mother ship?’ demanded Lana. ‘Can I expect to be outnumbered any time soon?’
‘I don’t believe so. Besides, while you and I may occasionally be outnumbered, we are never outclassed.’
‘I’ll carve that on your tombstone, old friend,’ said Lana, killing the line.