The sun above switched off. The horizons died away into blank gray walls, and lamps glowed eerily, like disembodied spirits.
He sees himself in a mirror, and there is a mirror behind him, his image reflected infinitely as he reaches out to touch and all the others reach out to touch him and—
A voice fragmented Cal Shemzak’s total disorientation. “Sir?”
“What?” Cal looked down at his rifle, which had turned into just a cheap plastic model.
Backlit as though by some spotlight, a tall figure carrying something on a tray marched slowly into the weird twilight room that had once been a desert.
Cal could see that the man wore a topcoat and tails. “I thought, sir,” said the man, “that you would like some freshly made iced tea.”
Cal sighed and slowly reoriented himself.
Of course: projection, hallucination, and hypnosis. The Jaxdron were increasing the sophistication of his mental workouts.
But why? What were they all for? They knew he was intelligent, and certainly they had the power to brainwash him, dissect him, do whatever the hell they pleased. Then why were they toying with him?
“Thank you, Wilkins,” said Cal as he took the iced tea and drank. Demi-dream or no, this bizarre business had certainly dehydrated him.
“Lunch will be served soon, sir,” said the servant. “I believe you just have time for a shower.”
Cal Shemzak acknowledged Wilkins with a nod and set the empty glass back on the tray, wondering what kind of drugs had been in it this time.
Well, Laura, he thought, your brother is getting in deeper and deeper.
He smiled to himself. These creatures were damned weird and damned clever. But dollars to donuts they’d never encountered beings quite like Cal Shemzak or his sister Laura.
And Cal Shemzak promised himself the Jaxdron were going to rue the day they started messing with them.
“Thank you, Wilkins. Nothing like a little exercise in the morning, what?”
Chapter Four
“You’ve got a black hole for a brain if you think I’m going to get on an operating table for that guy,” Laura Shemzak said. Her black hair was longer now and she had a new habit of running her left hand through it.
“Laura, now that Dr. Mish has … uhm … reassembled and reoccupied his … shall we say, mobile unit,” countered starship captain Tars Northern impatiently, “there is no reason whatsoever that the implant the Federation placed in you should not be removed.”
“Yeah, but which one?” Laura said. “I’ve got so goddamned many, how is he going to know he won’t shut off my speech modulators or something!”
Silver Zenyo looked up from her meal, smiling nastily. “Oh, but that would be a blessing!”
“Shut up, you painted bitch!” Laura said, her dark eyes flashing at the exotically dressed officer. Laura wore her usual black jumpsuit and blood-red scarf.
“Now ladies,” said Northern with a mollifying gesture. “Laura, now that you are a member of the crew, you’ve got to have more respect for your shipmates. And Silver—you can well understand Pilot Shemzak’s feelings about biotech operations. Remember her experience on Baleful, shooting her own brother as she was secretly programmed to do by Overfriend Zarpfrin and the Federation.”
“It wasn’t her brother, it was a copy,” Silver said, daintily dabbing her lips with a napkin. “A cyborg copy of Cal Shemzak, just like the other pair of copies we’ve got hidden away so that our gentle blip-ship pilot doesn’t plug them as well!”
Laura opened her mouth to shoot another insult at the midshipman from Morpheus Three, but stopped herself. She looked over to Dr. Michael Mish, the robot body that externalized the consciousness of the artificially intelligent starship she sat in, the Starbow. Dr. Mish wore a white silk jacket and floppy bowtie, his mane of white hair and kind eyes making him look like a kindly grandfather in one of those old movies she and her brother Cal used to watch.
Laura reminded herself she had promised to trust these people. Besides, as much as she hated to admit it, Silver was right. She had to get this goddamn device off her optic nerve.
She sighed and nodded. Uncharacteristically mute and sullen, she stared at her mystery meat grown in the hydroponics section, her mind ranging back over what she had been through in the last month.
After finishing an Intelligence mission on Walthor, she had discovered that the mysterious Jaxdron—the only other intelligent species in the galaxy with stardrives and weaponry sophisticated enough to challenge the might of the Federation and the separate autonomies of the Free Worlds—had raided an experimental Federation station on Mulliphen. Mulliphen was close to the Fault, a weakness in the fabric between normal space, Underspace, and the complex array of potential different dimensions. They had destroyed the Causal-Field Generator that attempted to explore these strange intersections of time and space, and had kidnapped her brother Cal.
Federation officials had at first been reluctant to grant her permission to acquire a blip-ship—a small, experimental starship she had been surgically altered to pilot—and pursue her captured brother, “Hopeless” was the term Friend Chivon Lasster had used. But hopeless or not, Laura knew she had to try, that she had to fall back upon her unique intuitive abilities to rescue Cal. Then Overfriend Zarpfrin had interceded, dispatching her to the planet Shortchild to be assigned the latest model of the XT blip-ship line. From there she was to proceed to where sensors showed that the Jaxdrons seemed to be headed: Baleful, one of the few human-colonized worlds the aliens had actually captured in the five standard years of the first Galactic War.
However, the freighter Ezekiel, conveying her to Shortchild, was attacked and put out of action by a group of pi-mercs—pirate/mercenaries—under the command of this strange man, Captain Tars Northern. Northern was well-known by Overfriend Zarpfrin and Friend Lasster. Years before, his ship Starbow had apparently been one of several experimental artificially intelligent starships, a project headed by Zarpfrin. Chivon Lasster had been Northern’s copilot, and lover. But when, unexpectedly, the Overfriends terminated the project and ordered that the starships be destroyed, Northern had already absconded with Starbow, having anticipated the order. He left Lasster behind, as well as his own loyalty to the Federation. Since then, he’d formed a weird crew of misfits who now cruised the starways on mysterious missions.
Laura, in her inimical fashion, had smuggled herself aboard the pi-merc ship—by taking the place of Northern’s contract wife, Kat Mizel—and attempted to coerce the crew into making up for the time she had lost by taking her to Shortchild. Since Northern was interested in utilizing the blip-ship designs himself, a deal was struck: if Laura would allow them to study the XT Mark Nine, they would take her to Shortchild. However, it was discovered that the precious metal attilium existed on Shortchild. Captain Northern had attempted to steal it and was caught, along with Midshipman Gemma Naquist. Laura rescued them and the journey to Baleful continued, the Starbow committed to the rescue of Cal Shemzak for its own reasons.
On Baleful, though, Laura discovered the true reason she had been allowed to find her brother. The Federation, not wishing Cal Shemzak to serve their enemy, wanted him dead. They had implanted a device in Laura that programmed her to automatically shoot him on sight. She had, but the real Cal Shemzak had been taken from Baleful by the Jaxdron, leaving behind three enigmas: cyborg copies of the man Laura had killed.
The Jaxdron, briefly tangling with the Starbow, had sent its resident semi-psychic Dansen Jitt a taunting message to follow them to a planet clear on the other side of the galaxy. There, the Jaxdron said, they would find Cal Shemzak. There they would find their destinies. Jitt had had the impression that these destinies were not particularly good ones.
Laura glanced past the elaborate neo-Victorian furniture and draperies of the stateroom in which the assembled crew dined, to the view of space afforded by the panoramic vu
-plate stretched across the wall. The majestic images of countless stars clustered there, swimming in soft shimmer; intimacies of comets, flecks of planets, all tangled in the strange forces and energies that governed this incredible universe. The Starbow now traveled in Underspace, and the view was a composite representation of the area of the galaxy they traversed.
As the others of the Starbow crew finished their dinners, Laura allowed herself to realize that, as truly odd as the company was, they wished her to be their companion. That much had been clear in the strangely moving ceremony-like acceptance of her after the sad business near Baleful. She had to give up this new fear of having her body entered and tampered with, she thought. In this strange and forbidding universe, she had to trust someone.
“I apologize, Dr. Mish,” she said, her thought sincere but her words still evincing a faint truculence. “It is very difficult for me to trust someone after—”
The doctor arched his eyebrows and smiled gently. “Please take my assurance, dear lady, that all my knowledge and technology shall be used. You must remember that I feel a great deal of regret that I did not realize the deadly nature of that particular microchip linked to the core of your cybernetic processor array. I was looking for weapons, not programming. I should have done a more detailed analysis.”
“Spilt milk, Doctor,” said Laura. “At least we know that Cal is still alive. And I guess I do want to talk to those copies of him without having the compulsion to kill them. Have you had any more thoughts about why he Jaxdron would make duplicates of him?”
“Experimental purposes?” suggested Gemma Naquist, tinkling the ice in a water glass thoughtfully.
“Then why leave them behind?” asked Captain Northern. “It doesn’t make sense. For that matter, not a whole lot about this business with the Jaxdron makes much sense.”
“Human sense, perhaps,” Dr. Mish interjected. “But not enough is known about the creatures to hypothesize upon the components of Jaxdron sense. My computers come up with nothing substantial based on anything discovered on Baleful, or on the patterns of Jaxdron activity in the past five years. And analysis on those robots that waylaid me shows nothing more than that they could have been constructed on any decently advanced industrialized planet.”
Dansen Jitt shook his head sorrowfully. “They’re totally mad … and terribly dangerous! I say that we just forget this whole thing and get as far away as possible.”
“Sorry, Jitt,” said Captain Northern. “We’re committed … for more reasons than one.”
“How long before destination, Captain?” Laura asked.
“This is going to be a long trip, people. We’re headed to the other end of this side of the known galaxy, clear on the other side of the Fault. It’s going to take over a month.”
“Good, then I’ll have plenty of time to talk to those Cal Shemzak clones,” Laura said. “How are they doing, by the way?”
“They’re principally occupying themselves by playing board games of various sorts with each other,” said Gemma Naquist. “Otherwise, they seem to be just plain confused.”
“Board games? That doesn’t sound much like Cal. Of course, they aren’t really my brothers …. Anyway, Doctor, when can you get this operation done?”
“Tomorrow morning would be convenient,” Dr. Mish answered.
“Fine, just name the time and place and I’ll be there.”
Captain Northern looked at her like a fond, pleased father. Things were apparently rolling along on Northern’s new time schedule, Laura thought, though God knew what that was. There were many crazy things about this boat that she hadn’t yet scraped the surface of.
But she’d get down to the bottom of it all, she told herself. She liked nothing better than mysteries, and the ship they traveled upon and its disparate crewmembers certainly had plenty of mysteries hanging over them.
Yes, she thought, fully recovered now from that frightening dream and its aftermath earlier that morning: all of this might actually turn out to be fun.
Chapter Five
The Starbow slipped from Underspace at a much earlier time than previously expected: later that evening, ship’s time.
A standard measure, of course, in any pirate ship, was to have state-of-the-art, far-range sensor equipment for twofold reasons: to locate possible prey and avoid possible pursuit.
From her cursory examination of the Starbow, Laura surmised that the starship had much better equipment than any she’d ever encountered before, equipment able to penetrate the high-energy barriers between Underspace and normal space, to detect specified sorts of activity there. In this it excelled, at the very least, her blip-ship and goodness knew what other Federation ships.
What other equipment did this strange and intelligent ship have? she wondered. This equipment had often come in handy. She’d already discovered that the Starbow’s equipment enabled it to elude Federation gunships, which was one of the principal reasons why the Starbow had been so successful in its raiding missions.
But the sensor arrays had been programmed to detect even more. Both Dr. Mish and Shontill the alien searched the galaxy for the rare transuranic element known as attilium. This was what they had been seeking aboard the Ezekiel, and why Captain Northern had gone down to Shortchild with Laura—to pilfer some of the Federation’s supply.
Shontill was in search of his lost people, apparently fugitive in Omega Space, where physicist Cal Shemzak was researching. Thus the lines of interest converged, and on that quiet evening on the Starbow, yet another line was intersected.
Sensors showed the presence of attilium in a ship floating in normal space. It was a derelict ship, and the telltales revealed as well that this was no normal ship at all, but one of alien design. Apparently not Jaxdron.
As it happened, Laura was already on the bridge when Shontill was called for.
Although these were not the Navy sort of people she had become used to of late, in service of the Federation, they were her new crewmates and she was determined to get to know them better and to do her bit in the running of the ship. When the ship’s computer alerted bridge crew to significant activity on the far-range sensors, she was sitting with Communications Officer Tether Mayz, learning her duties and sharing some of what she knew from her own training as a blip-ship pilot.
“It’s damned strange doing all this rigmarole with your hands,” she told the tall and handsome lady behind the banks of keyboards. Laura studied the arrangements of the various modes of communications through the starways and through the ship. “In my blip—my XT, that is—it’s almost all mental. Oh, I’ve gotta nudge a toggle or punch a switch from time to time, but if I want to use the starbands, I just kind of feel out the frequency, like a violin player feels out the right note, and then receive or broadcast. Now, if I’m a singleton—that is, if I’m on call without my blip-ship around me—I can just peel back some skin on my arm and do some of this manually.”
“Amazing.” the tanned Jenuvian replied demurely. “I wonder, though, Laura, with all this circuitry integrated into your body, don’t you feel heavy?”
“Special suspension grids powered by tiny molecular servo-motors take up the slack, Tether, but the weight differential is not that much. So even if those for some reason short out, God forbid, I can still get around very easily. And with the blip and me complementing one another maintenancewise, I don’t have to worry too much about—”
A delicate but insistent chime announced that the sensors had picked up something of interest. Lt. Ratham Bey, manning that board-area at the time, tapped orders for a read-out immediately. The computer quickly spit out data flagged with special orders. The special orders were to immediately notify the top personnel, Captain Tars Northern and Dr. Michael Mish, and let them alert the alien known as Shontill as well, at their own speed.
As it happened, there was no need to alert the doctor. No sooner had Bey turned his brown face
to communications and Mayz was about to key open the lines, than the tall, stoop-shouldered robot strode in, long white lab smock aswish about his legs.
“Yes, yes, no need to call me, but get Northern up here fast,” he instructed. “Hold the message to Shontill a few minutes. I don’t want the big lummox excited. He tends to break things.”
“How did—” Laura began, then remembered that Dr. Mish was an extension, a personification of the Starbow’s intelligence, and hence had an awareness of all the sensor activity, much as she had such a grasp when she piloted her blip.
“Spooky, huh?” said Tether Mayz. “He used to do stuff like that all the time and I never could figure it out. But now that the cat’s out of the bag for the whole crew, it all makes sense. Still strange, though. Maybe we’ll eventually find out the other stuff too.”
Laura had no time to ask just what “the other stuff” was; she was too busy listening in on the excitement.
Captain Northern stormed on deck. He’d either been interrupted mid-sleep or mid-drink. His usually neat attire was disheveled, as was his longish blond hair.
Dr. Mish, standing above the boards, did not look up as he said, “Splendid news, Captain. We’ve got some sort of alien artifact. Spacecraft. Derelict.” Mish spouted off the coordinates. “Only a brief detour and then emergence from Underspace will bring us there. And Captain, it looks similar to the spacecraft we found Shontill floating in—only not so old!”
Captain Northern rubbed his hands together with the kind of boyish glee that sometimes came over him. “Navigator, did you mark those coordinates?”
“Aye aye, Captain,” responded Dansen Jitt in sober tones.
“Please plug them into your automatic pilot, and when the course is set, I want immediate diversion of course.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Laura objected, hands on hips. “What’s this going to do to our schedule? We’ve got my brother to save, you know!”
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