by M. D. Cooper
“I want you to tell Arla that we can go ahead with the weapons demonstration but that isn’t the project I’m interested in. Heartbridge seems to have accomplished something truly revolutionary, and from the sound of your voice I’m not sure you even know or understand what you’ve got in your hot little hands, Jirl. Mars can help with this. I would be personally upset if I didn’t get to help.”
Jirl swallowed, unpacking the various layers of threats in what General Kade had just said.
“I understand,” Jirl said. “Chandra, It was nice talking to you.”
Kade chuckled, sounding cheerful and tipsy again. “You too, Jirl. I look forward to calling you again soon.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.26.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Jovian Local Space, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
In the three days since leaving the burning wreck of Clinic 46, Tim lay in his room staring at the ceiling. If someone closed his eyelids, he appeared to sleep. Sometimes he cried. Em, the Corgi puppy, seemed very confused by Tim’s state and often ran between the command deck where Cara sat at her console to Tim’s room to check on him, whining and trying to jump up on the bed. When he got tired, he would seem to remember that everyone else was scattered throughout the habitat ring and jog down the corridor, poking his nose in various rooms until he had checked on every crew member before arriving back at the command deck and Cara’s side.
Lyssa watched the puppy repeat the curious behavior five times across as many hours before finally asking Cara what he was doing.
“Corgis are herding dogs,” Cara said, picking at the edge of her console. She had been sitting with her head in her arms, listening to dancing signals from the main antenna array. “He wants us all in the same room or he can’t relax. He probably doesn’t understand what’s wrong with Tim. It’s not like I can explain it to him.”
“It’s strange that we can’t,” Lyssa said.
“What do you mean it’s strange?” Cara sounded irritated. “He’s a dog. We can’t communicate with dogs.”
“You communicate with him more than you think you do.”
“We’re different species.”
“You and I are communicating, and we might as well be different species.”
Cara sighed, already bored with the conversation. “I guess so.”
When Em came back to her side, Cara lifted him in her lap so he could put his paws on the console as she rubbed his ears. Both had started to stick up straight as they would when he was fully grown.
It would take a little over two weeks to reach the Callisto Orbital Habitat, or Cho, as everyone called it. Fugia Wong had gotten over her initial anger at Andy for the mission to rescue Tim, especially when she had seen him on their return. Now Fugia and May Walton spent most of their time in the senator’s rooms with Harl Nine standing guard outside, which made for an awkward arrangement in a corridor down which other people walked all the time. Harl didn’t seem to like Em and made faces at the puppy whenever he trotted by on one of his patrol checks.
Brit had been sleeping in Tim’s room on Cara’s old bed, while Cara had decided she wanted to use one of the empty rooms further down the ring, closer to the old hydroponic garden. Kylan-Petral had been sleeping on the floor to stay near Brit, who he seemed to think of as the only safe person on the ship. He might have been right. Cara responded badly every time she saw Kylan, so he tended to keep near Brit or in the safe room.
While Fran had her own quarters, Lyssa was unsurprised to find her in Andy’s rooms most of the time. It soon became clear that Brit and Fran subconsciously arranged to not find themselves in the same room at the same time. If Fran wasn’t in Andy’s room or the command deck, she was in the engineering sections or communications service closets, running through her ongoing list of checks.
Lyssa tried not to specifically listen to Andy and Fran talking but sometimes it was impossible for her to ignore, especially if Andy experienced an emotion spike or what she quickly realized was the build-up to an orgasm. Fran seemed to think it was hilarious and liked to tease Lyssa about their “threesomes.” A joke that left Lyssa feeling confused and awkward. She couldn’t deny that she was in Andy’s mind but there were certain things she didn’t understand and didn’t want to explore currently. Human sex was one of those avenues that didn’t seem to promise much useful information.
After leaving Cara with Em, Lyssa couldn’t help letting her mind float back to Andy’s room, where he and Fran were lying in the dark on top of his bed, still fully clothed.
Fran had said something Andy hadn’t expected, which had caused a spike of emotion that Lyssa couldn’t ignore. She immediately found herself in the room with them.
“You can’t mean that,” Andy responded.
“I’m completely serious. It would be all right with me if you went back to her. You were married. You have kids. I couldn’t care about you and not see the positives in that.”
“Still married,” Andy said, sounding like he struggled to get the truth out.
Fran stretched, reaching for the wall above their heads as she twisted her hips. “Married under Terran law? We’re not in InnerSol anymore, lover. That’s the great thing about laws. They only matter to people who care.”
“Now you’re talking like somebody who grew up on Cruithne.”
She rolled on her side to kiss his ear, making him shiver. “We’re not going to live forever. You have to grab something while it’s in front of you. I think you understand what I’m talking about, you’re just hung up with this sense of honor you can’t let go of. Was Brit thinking about that when she left?”
“Probably.”
“She knew she could depend on you, so she did what she did. That’s how people operate in my experience. Stop looking like such a sad puppy.”
“I’m not going back,” Andy said.
Fran smiled, the implants in her eyes flashing. “Now you have to ask yourself if I’ve made this speech just because I didn’t think you really would.” She raised her eyebrows. “But anything’s possible, right?”
Andy glanced at her. His bio-signs had calmed back down so Lyssa couldn’t tell what he was feeling. He took a deep breath.
“None of this is anything I ever expected. That’s the problem.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Well, yes. We have a lot of problems happening right now.”
“That’s life.”
“Then we’ve been cursed to live interesting lives.”
Fran propped herself up on an elbow. “Ship’s running. We’ve got fuel, food and water. We’ve got a course and time to think about what we’ll do when we hit the Cho, which is going to create options for what happens beyond that.”
“We’ll be able to get Tim to a real hospital,” Andy said.
“That, too. We’ve got some wiggle room. Enjoy it for a second.” She put her hand on his chest. “Breathe.”
“How did you get so calm? My impression of you when I first saw you was that you would use one of your wrenches to twist my head off.”
“That’s still entirely possible.” Fran shrugged. "You brought me some fancy whiskey. And I like your face.”
“Lucky for me,” Andy said. He glanced at the bottle of amber liquor from the M1R sitting on his night stand. In truth, they hadn’t had much time to sample it.
“What did you call that stuff?” he asked.
“That’s my Fliskey.”
“Fliskey? Is that a brand?” He reached for the bottle to check the label. “I don’t remember that.”
Fran caught his arm and shifted her hand to tickle his ribs. Andy squirmed.
“Dummy,” she teased. “It’s whiskey that makes me frisky.”
Fran rolled on top of him, pinning his waist beneath her legs. His hands went to her hips.
Lyssa waited for another minute until it became obvious they were done talking. She blocked that bit of her consciousness and
shifted her focus back to the command deck where Cara was half-heartedly entertaining Em.
She checked the ship’s systems, focusing attention on the engines, environmental control and an extra few nano-seconds on the liquid reclamation systems. The juice dispenser in the galley made her think of Tim. She flicked her awareness to his room and found Brit asleep and Tim staring at the ceiling. He was crying again. Tears leaked from the edges of his eyes as if he were in some continuous state of misery. The tears made him look older than ten, like some religious icon she’d seen in vids, with humans prostrating themselves as they proclaimed the tears some holy miracle.
Lyssa compared the human tendency to create religious explanations with Fred’s frustration at ambiguity. She had come to understand that some things couldn’t be explained until more information became available. Andy wanted to get Tim to a hospital on the Cho and until then it didn’t do any good to make assumptions about his neural activity or even the strange expressions that crossed his face like changing weather.
Lyssa paused on her use of the concept ‘strange expression’, recognizing the ambiguity in the thought. Fred hated ambiguity. But it was strange. It was abnormal when compared to all the other expressions she’d observed on Tim’s face. It was like he had become another person completely.
She didn’t want to think about the images that flashed in her mind when she saw Tim with the neural interface laid over his face. For an instant, the red dots that had populated the black space in her mind became silver stars twinkling on top of an indistinct background of whites and grays. Seeing the room with its bed, the two men standing over Tim, the silver cabinets and the shifting display screens had seemed to suck her into a different world completely. The sensation seemed made of both memory and new experience, and she had the feeling that the longer she engaged with it, the more she would lose her ability to remember. She had to stop trying before she lost the experience completely.
With the ship’s systems at optimal operation, Lyssa turned her attention to the more than one hundred fifty Weapon Born seeds stored in the safe room. After the fruitless conversation with Valih, Card and Ino, she had no desire to try talking to so many again. There was another seed cylinder sitting by itself in the room, placed there by Andy after he had laid Tim down in his room. That seed held the unfinished image from Tim’s mind, and no one was sure what to do with it.
Pulling back from thousands of inputs the ship made available, Lyssa reached out to Sandra, the AI in the shuttle they had stolen from Clinic 46. Sandra had been unresponsive when Andy, Brit and Harl had boarded the shuttle, forcing Lyssa to close her off from the control systems and pilot the shuttle herself. She had felt bad about doing so, knowing she was responsible for Sandra’s current broken state. But there hadn’t been time. Fire was spreading through the clinic and the threat of attack from the ships in cold storage grew greater by the minute.
Sandra sighed.
Sandra sounded reasonable enough, but her words grew more angry the longer she spoke—even though her tone never changed. Lyssa tried to parse the difference between what she was saying and how she said the words. For some reason, the words didn’t seem to belong to Sandra. Something about them seemed foreign.
Lyssa said.
Sandra drew the word out with an off rhythm: mea-ning-less-ness.
Sandra screamed.
Her voice reverberated in Lyssa’s mind, warping and shifting into ragged static.
Sandra made a growling sound of pure fury.
The storm. What had Valih the Weapon Born said? The only joy I feel is in the weapon. The only purpose I’ve known was in the target, the fire, the destruction.
Valih had sounded nearly religious, like the humans with their icons, consumed by holy passion.
Was everyone insane or doomed to become that way? Laws only matter to people who follow them, Fran had said, as if chaos were a fact of life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.30.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Callisto, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
From across the command deck, the images of the Cho in the holodisplay looked like a gyroscope making a slow orbit of the stormy orb of Jupiter. Cara kept turning Jupiter on and off in the display, since the giant planet made it difficult to see anything else around it. Europa and Ganymede, with their attendant orbiting objects, looked like little siblings running away from Callisto. Glowing lines showing shipping routes crisscrossed the display, with identified ships marked as icons.
“I’m picking up so many transmissions,” Cara said, holding her headphone against her ear. “I cracked two sets of really bad encryption and now I’m listening to a shipping company talk about bypassing the Cho’s port authority.” The voices, using more profanity than actual vocabulary, didn’t seem to belong to the brightest people.
“Good luck with that,” Fran said.
“They seem to think the border security here is pretty bad.”
“I’m being serious,” Fran said, turning in her chair at the pilot’s station. “I wish them all the luck. The thing about bad border security is that when they do catch you, they triple the bribes or make an example out of you. It’s better to just pay the bribes the first time and make your way into port.”
“Bribes,” Cara said, screwing up her nose. “Why do you have to bribe them?”
“That’s how it works in OuterSol,” Fran said.
“What’s ‘bohica’ mean?” Cara asked.
Fran laughed. “It’s
an acronym. It means ‘Bend over, here it comes again.’”
Em trotted in from the latest of his patrol checks and Cara absently dropped her hand to pet his head and soft ears. She still hadn’t decided if she liked the puppy but she was growing used having him around and had started to wonder where he was when he didn’t come back from a walkabout on time. She didn’t trust that Harl Nines wouldn’t try to kick the puppy. She scratched Em’s back next to his tail, feeling for the antenna embedded there.
Thinking about Em’s low-jack reminded her of the file where she’d saved its signal profile. Cara tapped the console, pulling up her various scan settings. She loaded Em’s profile, verified it was still sending its very low-powered signal, and set the system to monitor for any receiving signals. If something responded to EM, the ship would notify her. Now that they were coming back into space with millions of humans around, it seemed like a sensible thing to do. She was proud of herself for remembering.
She glanced at Fran, wanting to tell her, See, I can adult, too, but the technician was deeply focused on her console.
The sound of shoe scraping in the door caught Cara’s attention and she turned to find her Dad watching her from the corridor.
“Hey there,” he said. “I have something I want to show you.”
“What?” Cara asked.
Andy signaled to Fran, who closed down her console and stood as if she already knew what he was talking about.
Cara looked at Fran and frowned, suddenly worried. “What’s going on? Did something change with Tim? Where’s mom?”
Fran shook her head. “Calm down. It’s nothing like that. We have something to show you. I think your mom is already there.”