Supergiant (Gigaparsec Book 2)

by Scott Rhine

  “What the hell are you doing to me?” Roz asked.

  “This is a defense mechanism. I appear as the person you have wronged the most. You had perhaps the mildest crime and quickest reconciliation of any being I’ve tested. Max was right to trust you.”

  “Why is the woman Max wronged the most a drop-dead sexy starlet? Is there a little Max running around somewhere?”

  “Do I have permission to tell him your darkest secret?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Then you must respect his.” Echo stood and touched the scar over Roz’s eye. “Pilot Mendez, I think I can reactivate your own link to the Collective Unconscious.”

  “What m—makes you think that’s possible?”

  “The speed with which you fell asleep at my touch indicates you’ve been hypnotized frequently.”

  Roz blinked. “I often fall asleep in Ivy’s salon chair during hair washing. She said it was a compliment, a sign of trust.”

  “She’s a spy and a powerful psi. I believe Ivy has been attempting to treat you. From the signs of cortical stimulation, she’s had modest success. I have more skill and training in mental manipulation. I believe with the proper treatment and frequent sessions, we could etch new pathways to make your brain whole again.”

  “My best friend has been hypnotizing me to get passwords and confidential information?” Roz asked.

  “From what I’ve witnessed, you told her everything she wanted to know without hypnosis. She appears to genuinely care about you. Following you to this ship probably violated her orders and jeopardized her mission.”

  “I’ve managed just fine without mind sight this long,” Roz said with pride.

  “You might never have the sight, but you might be capable of intimacy. We could revive parts of you that you thought were dead.”

  “What if I want information on the experimental jump drive instead?”

  The actress look-alike waved a hand, and a silver armchair emerged from the silvery floor. Exhausted, Echo sank into it. “You can have both. If you help me with ship repairs and keep me alive until the subbasement drive is delivered to my people, I will make you coheir of everything I possess.”

  “I don’t want your money, just your friendship.”

  “The inheritance is to formalize our bond because I cannot give details about the ship to anyone outside the Magi race.”

  “Then I accept. I want the entire Union to know that a null brain accomplished an engineering feat none of them could.”

  “So let it be,” murmured Echo. “Tell me what you know about the new drive.”

  “For twice the fuel, you can go from any point to any other point in space a little faster than normal jump drives.”

  “Ten times faster,” Echo corrected.

  Roz’s jaw dropped as she contemplated the magnitude of the discovery. This was bigger than atomic energy. “This technology could enable people to leave the confines of Union space and reach across the gap to other arms of the galaxy, perhaps even to other galaxies.” Some of the elder races were looking for a way to escape the Milky Way before Andromeda collided in a few million years.

  “Yes, though we dare not use the secondary drive until we fix the accuracy problem when predicting the exit point. The present equations don’t adjust for drift in the strong undercurrents.”

  At velocities near two thousand times the speed of light, small errors could lead to enormous and possibly fatal misjumps. Roz said, “Yeah. That would be bad.”

  Chapter 1 – Ghost in the Machine

  Roz worked harder than anyone on the six-person crew to get the small, merchant starship up to code—two shifts a day for four weeks, with only a couple days off. Still, she never grew tired of the inherent beauty of the sphere’s design. Whenever she needed to perform common maintenance, she would invariably find a recessed ring in just the right place to latch onto the hull. Everything was so smooth and elegant.

  While on the bridge, she coordinated repairs and rebalanced mass. She corrected several safety flaws introduced when pirates had converted the ship meant for a three-Magi crew. She stocked every section of the ship with multi-species med kits, spare oxygen, suit patches, food bars, and flashlights—everything they would need to return the prototype ship safely to the academy of sages in Magi space.

  Soon, Roz ordered crewmembers around, and they listened. The entire starship became an extension of her will. She felt invincible. She even proved her worth while discussing drive theory with Echo. When Roz quoted a journal from a certain Bat physicist, the astrogator read everything available by Professor Eesan Crakik, convinced he would be able to solve their drift problem with the subbasement. Echo was so certain of his value that she selected a long-term route to the academy that detoured through Bat space. Echo may have decreed the quest, but Roz had to carry it out.

  During the weeks of flying toward the first jump point, Roz passed the time examining the blueprints of every model of Magi starship known. This alone had been worth the trip. After studying their design principles, she could write her own ticket at any dock or shipyard in the Union.

  On the overhead screen, the astrogator had drawn a gravity line from the nexus in this star system to the one at their destination. Roz checked the computer-approved approach vector and handed control over to Echo.

  Like a vein in the body of the galaxy, the star lane would carry them toward the higher-gravity star at over 150 times the speed of light. With consummate skill, Echo guided the starship under the skin into subspace.

  As a mental null, the immersion had never affected Roz before. Normal people with a connection to the Collective Unconscious claimed that they could sense the event like sunrise or a distant sonic boom.

  To Roz, this particular jump smacked her in the nose like a baseball line drive. The jolt continued through to the back of her brain. Voices clamored for attention, and a wave of dizziness swept over her.

  When Max unstrapped and floated to her side, her breathing was erratic and she held her hands over her ears. Her dark, bobbed hair came to points on either side of her face.

  “Shiraz, talk to me. What’s wrong?” His caring voice pulled her back to the bridge.

  She could stare into those blue eyes all day and be at peace. When she tried to convey her list of symptoms, the words came out jumbled. Max donned a pair of smart goggles from his bag and asked a series of inane medical questions. Talking with a man she wanted to date about her last period was a step too far.

  Fortunately, a short blonde arrived in the elevator to provide a distraction. The jumpsuit she had borrowed looked usable with the sleeves rolled up, but it fit too snugly around the chest and hips. Ivy had been her best friend for the last year on Eden. They were roommates again and did yoga together every morning, but the betrayal still stung. Okay, betrayal was too strong a term, although her actions had been a definite violation of trust. Ivy had spied on her for a foreign government, used Roz’s connections at the Eden Space Station to gather more information, and fiddled with her brain. On the other hand, none of those actions had been hostile. In fact, Ivy’s extended family, the Llewellyns, had funded Roz’s university scholarship, and Ivy had opened her home as a friend. Roz could never stay angry at the pert hairdresser for long.

  Concerned, Ivy said, “Echo told me to hurry. What happened?”

  Max wrapped a medical scanner around Roz’s arm and read results on his goggles. “It’s not anemia this time. Fatigue played a part—”

  Roz sat up straighter. “I’m right here.”

  He ignored her outburst and slapped another scanner strip on her forehead. “Temperature and intracranial pressure are normal. No tumors. I’ll start running tests for other causes of auditory hallucinations.”

  The only thing that stopped Roz from ripping him a new asshole was how concerned he looked. She brushed the curl of hair near her mouth behind her right ear.

  Ivy gripped her hand. “Her brain shows evidence of psi stimulation.”

  “W
asn’t me. I’m mute,” Max said. He had been the only other person on the bridge during the maneuver.

  “Maybe the therapy sessions with Echo have been working, and she’s healing the brain damage,” Ivy said.

  He tore the armband off. “Maybe. Hopefully. Until I find a cause, she’s off duty.”

  “I have too much to do,” Roz objected.

  Ivy prevented her from standing. “We have almost sixteen days until we leave subspace. You don’t have to be back in the chair until then.”

  Max rubbed her temples. “Does that hurt?”

  “Feels kind of nice.” Roz’s eyes closed.

  “Get her in bed,” the doctor ordered. “If she tries to leave your room in the next eight hours, I’ll tie her to her bunk.”

  “Prove it,” Ivy whispered.

  Roz elbowed her friend and asked the doctor, “You’re saying I’m just tired?”

  He avoided her gaze, contacting the Saurian captain on the comm. “Kesh, start looking through the personnel at Prairie station.” There were many environs on the planet, but the major cities surrounded the central grassland plateau. These cities only reached a hundred thousand souls each. The hundreds of little towns outside these enclaves were stuck at 1800s Earth levels until the delicate technology ladder infrastructure could trickle down. “Once we’re back to normal space, radio the planet if you need to. We’re hiring a cook, copilot, and a grease monkey to take some of the load off Roz. Otherwise, she’s going to kill herself and take us with her.”

  Ivy soothed her. “Think of this as a promotion.”

  Max nodded. “Our mission is a marathon, not a sprint. It could take years for us to locate this Bat physicist, Crakik, who Echo expects to solve the prototype’s problem.”

  “Nobody can replace me in the subbasement drive tubes. We can’t risk anyone outside the team seeing the quantum capacitors.” Roz refused to be squeezed out of a historic project, especially after all her work.

  “Right.” Max punched up another comm link. “Reuben, paint radiation biohazard warnings on the tube entrance and fit them with your best locks. Don’t give anyone a key until I say so.”

  Roz began to bluster until Ivy asked, “So you think she has radiation poisoning of some sort?”

  Crap. Roz had been in that tube three times more often than anyone else on board. She had even slept there a couple nights by accident.

  “I don’t know.” Max took off his goggles and wiped a hand over his face. “I’m not a specialist. I patch people together on the battlefield. I’m sure the ship’s designers never planned for people to climb inside the active prototype. The Saurian pirates who stole this craft stripped out or walled off anything they didn’t understand. Maybe they damaged a safety feature.”

  “The designers probably also didn’t plan for the quantum capacitors to stay charged more than a few seconds,” Roz guessed. “Am I going to die?”

  Max grabbed her other hand. “Not if I have anything to do with it. Stop taking your cortical meds, and don’t touch Reuben. His talent can boost mental abilities in a woman. We need to lower the number of variables.”

  “When he touched Ivy during the drive meltdown, she saw visual overlays.”

  “It was an advanced form of aura sight where I could see your personal representation over time as a sort of cloud of choices,” Ivy said.

  “Have you seen anything since?” Max asked.

  Ivy smiled. “We haven’t had the time or the energy for more experiments involving prolonged skin-to-skin contact. Dictator Mendez keeps us pretty busy.”

  Max opened the elevator door. “Get some rest, and we’ll run some tests tomorrow.”

  Dazed, Roz let Ivy lead her away. I can’t die yet. We’re all going to be famous.

  ****

  Roz dreamed of her father lowering her into the jammed combine by her ankles. She could feel the blood rushing to her brain and see her pigtails dangling. She saw herself as a child grabbing a thick vine that had wedged itself in the gears. She tugged until her adult common sense told her to stop, trying to change the outcome of her biggest mistake. Freezing the scene, she analyzed the scenario in the confined space. If it hadn’t been for her pigtail getting caught, she might have pulled back in time. That was why she had always worn her hair short since. She had no desire to relive the pain as the rotating bar cracked her skull and broke her right arm.

  The nightmare transitioned to her dangling upside down in The Inner Eye’s quantum capacitor tubes, hair standing on end. She held a power coupler in one hand, debating whether she should plug it in and restore the prototype star drive. She experienced a surge of panic when she realized Ivy hadn’t trimmed her hair in five weeks.

  How could she stay safe with long hair?

  Chapter 2 – Bedridden

  Roz spent her first day off sunbathing in her one-piece swimsuit on a chair in the desert biozone, listening to a novel on her wrist computer. Though the ship’s biozones were less than 200 meters across, they provided luxurious recreational space for the crew. “I swear you have more freckles on your shoulders today.”

  Ivy basked on a blanket beside her. The sun made her golden ringlets lighter as it made her skin darker. “Yeah. Some of us have to work to get a skin tone like yours. What are you going to do for fun on Prairie?”

  “I saw a brochure with velocipedes—those three wheelers with huge front tires.”

  “This is your only vacation in months and your first visit to a new world. Why would you pick tricycles?”

  Roz blinked. Was Ivy implying she didn’t have imagination? The insult stung. “You have a better idea?”

  Ivy shrugged. “I hear wind wagons are a wild ride. That sounds more your speed.”

  The vehicles were based on an Earth legend about covered wagons that crossed the vast open prairie using sails. Now Ivy painted her as adventurous and fast. “It does sound fun. Will you be joining me?”

  “I might break a nail, which would endanger my new cover,” Ivy said. “I’m going to be Kesh’s secretary when we’re in port, a dumb blonde who files her nails a lot. You’d be surprised how much people reveal in waiting rooms or while they’re hitting on you.”

  “Is your cover identity going to be sleeping with the boss?” Roz asked with a snort.

  The gay Saurian accountant was posing as his dead brother, the previous captain and pilot of the ship. Aside from a fondness for skirting the law, the two couldn’t have been less alike. Despite his scales, Kesh behaved like one of the girls at a spa. They had buried him up to his frilled, brown neck between them in the hot, relaxing sand. His head resembled a stuffed wall mounting of a young dragon. To shield his beady, black eyes from the sun, they had covered his face with a straw hat from Eden.

  “No, but I can talk up Kesh’s virility and Max’s reputation for violence.”

  Reuben, unnoticed at the edges of the biozone until now, protested, “Max is trying to escape that image.”

  Ivy, who had her bra undone in order to tan without lines, resnapped in a hurry.

  In coveralls and boots, Reuben could have passed for an ardent twenty-year-old Human with wooly, black hair and a broad nose. The abundant hair on the back on his hands didn’t bother Roz; however, his slotted Goat pupils gave her the willies. “He doesn’t want more people pressuring him into wet work.”

  “More people pressuring him?” asked Roz. “How often does that happen in a normal day?”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy on most of this, but boss left the Trout because she got excited by the fact he killed without leaving any evidence.”

  Roz pulled her knees to her chest. She felt small compared to the infamous Lisa Troutwine. A little network research had shown that the woman had worked her way through college as a model.

  Ivy asked, “Did Max ever mention who was behind the assassin school he wiped out?”

  “Nah, and he told me not to ask questions that might draw attention.” Reuben hovered near the door.

  “Clearly a Human wit
h a lot of money who wants to profit from lessons learned during the war. No shortage of those. Why are you disturbing my harmony?” asked Kesh.

  Reuben jumped when the hat on the sand dune spoke. “I just wanted to tell the ladies that I sent sensor bots through the capacitor tubes last night. Air quality is fine. No radiation, leaks, or contaminants. Just this thing embedded in the wall from the explosion. I had to seal the hole remotely.”

  He handed Roz a large diamond from a broken tennis bracelet. “Thanks. I’ll give the stone back to Max. You spent all night on this?”

  The Goat computer tech nodded. “My team was at risk. I couldn’t sleep knowing Ivy might … we might have been exposed to something.”

  Ivy grinned. “Anything other than diligence prompt this visit?”

  “I just wanted to let you ladies know that if you get too hot, all you have to do is walk down the hall to our pond.”

  “I didn’t bring a swimsuit,” Ivy said.

  “Never use one myself,” Reuben replied.

  Ivy pretended indifference. “There are other ways to cool down. Right now, I’d kill for a piña colada.”

  After the kid brought them a frozen, fruity, alcoholic concoction, Ivy decided to reward him with a game of “if you catch me, you can have me.”

  Thankfully, the whooping and giggling lovers left earshot soon after. However, the cacti and the basking Saurian next to her seemed less scenic without a friend.

  Roz put on her skirt wrap and went looking for Max. Recent discussions about possible tumors and degenerative brain disorders gave her the bravery to take the initiative. Preferring gravity, she stuck to the inner ring that held the staterooms, galley, and elevator. The tunnels were round and smooth, perfectly balanced and safe, with no sharp edges. The six airlock doors were round and padded, for insulation and to prevent scratches that led to leaks. The six doors provided access to each of the pie-shaped wedges on this level. Multi-story cargo areas alternated with three biozones.