Her stomach jumped as she opened the door. Meza was standing there, a smile on his face. Wallace was behind him, standing in the doorway of his own office, arms folded, looking serious.
“Myra, I want you to meet your new assistant, just arrived. He’ll be working on the testing models with you, and I’m sure you’ll get along wonderfully.”
He handed her a file. “Here’s his dossier, and now meet Anton Denal.”
Meza stepped aside, and Anton was there, and it was Trae, his hand outstretched. She shook it without thinking. His grip was firm and dry.
“Hello, Myra. Nice to meet you.”
She somehow found her voice. “We’ve been expecting you.” His hand engulfed hers, and lingered a moment before relaxing. Her breathing had become rapid, and shallow.
“I’ll give you two an hour, and then dinner is on me. I need to go over the production timelines with you. Deadlines, deadlines,” said Meza.
“Can you make it two hours?” asked Myra.
“Of course. I’ll tell Wallace. He’ll be joining us.”
“Already heard,” said Wallace from behind him, and now he smiled.
Trae stepped past her into the cubicle. She smelled mint. “Two hours, then,” she said, closed the door before Meza could answer and heard his chuckle from the other side.
They sat down, knees almost touching, and there was a long, awkward silence. An invisible hand seemed to grip Myra by the throat, and her voice fled. Finally it was Trae who broke the silence.
“I’m back,” he said, and the way one side of his mouth curved up in a smile made her heart ache.
He shook his head slowly. “This is all very weird. I’m a new person, but I feel the same. It’s like I went to sleep. I remember the bullets hitting, and blacking out and -- and then dreams—recently—yesterday, maybe. I talked to my parents. I—tried to talk to you . . .”
“Sshhh,” she said, reached over and touched his hand. The face, the hair, eyes, even the hand she touched was new, but it was still Trae: the speech pattern, the mannerisms, smile, all there. “I really missed you, Trae,” she said softly.
“Oh, don’t call me that,” he said, and grasped her hand in both of his on his knees. “Whoever had me killed will expect reincarnation. They’re supposed to think it’ll happen someday on a ship very far from here. I’m Anton, now. It’s who I really am, anyway. That’s the weird part. Trae’s body was slightly modified from the original clone for security. This is mine, the real me, from my first lifetime.”
“I still missed you,” she said, and was startled when he squeezed her hand and leaned close, and all she could see were his sky blue eyes.
“I missed you, too, Myra, as soon as I was conscious again. Everything came back in a rush, and I remembered you right away. You were with me before I woke up, I remember that too.”
“I sat with you a while every week from the time you were inches long,” she said, and smiled.
“Why?” He frowned.
“I wanted you back. It was a way to convince myself it was happening. Meza suggested it. I was having trouble concentrating on my work.”
Trae looked down at her hand in his, and lightly ran a thumb across her palm. She shuddered, and he looked up at her and smiled his wry smile again. “How’s the mysterious lady who used to talk to me in my mind?” he asked.
Myra grinned. “Okay, but she hasn’t had anyone to talk to lately.”
“When you see her again, tell her I like her. I like her a lot. Trae couldn’t say it, but I can.”
“Oh, Trae.”
“Anton.”
“Anton. I feel the same way. I was so afraid you wouldn’t remember me.”
He released her hand, and her heart was singing. “Not likely,” he said. “A new life, a new chance. I promise to be more aware this time.”
“Me, too.” She put a hand on his knee, her eyes wide with sudden focus. “Trae—last night—it must have been as your incarnation was completed—you woke up for only seconds and said ‘Our work must be done soon’, and then you were asleep again. What was that about? It sounded so urgent.”
“I think I know. I was talking to my parents, and it wasn’t a dream. I was there with them in their minds.”
“Attunement. I had it with my parents. I have it with you, but without images.”
“They told me an incredible story. All our worlds will be in great danger if our work isn’t finished quickly. An invasion force is coming, and all freedom will cease to exist here.”
“How?”
He told her, speaking rapidly as she remembered when his mind was fully engaged and his genius was pouring forth unfettered. She listened silently, barely managing to keep up. Mixed in with the story of zealous Bishops and a fleet of warships poised on the other side were new ideas for resizing their own designs to manage the opening of ship-sized pores in the brane, a feat requiring power thirteen magnitudes higher than they’d considered. It went on for thirty minutes, but for Myra it seemed only seconds passed and at the end of it her head was throbbing.
“We’re only weeks from testing. The ship is in orbit. We can’t change it this late.”
“Then build another. We’re only resizing. I’ll do the specs, you model, but in secret, on top of test data analysis. I don’t want Meza or Wallace to know about it until we can build a new ship or refit an old one.”
“The jump tests will be more than enough to occupy them,” said Myra, now excited again for the first time in a year.
“We’ll have to spend long hours together on this,” said Trae.
“I don’t intend to complain about it if you don’t,” she said coyly.
For one second, she thought he might kiss her, and knew the thought had entered his mind. Instead, he grabbed her hand again. “How much time do we have now?”
“The better part of two hours,” she said.
“Then let’s get to work.”
They did, and less than two hours later, when Meza and Wallace came to get them, the design of a new class of ship having a rather unusual shape had already begun.
They called it the Guppy.
CHAPTER 31
I’m not a stupid person,” said Grandma Nat. She perched on the throne of her chair and gave Leonid a haughty look that would have frozen lesser men.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’re only a year out, so it’s not likely the fleet has made a move. With one ship we can pose as a picket or a runabout between the portal keepers. As long as we stay in the right sectors nobody will even challenge us on this side. We have to know when and if that fleet moves.”
“I’m not turning back,” said Nat, and it was final.
“We’re not asking you to. Give us one ship. Shuttle class will do. I’d like to have a few crewmembers for Tatjana and myself. The rest of you go on.”
“Why does Tatjana have to go? This is your idea.”
“It was a decision we made together, Grandma,” said Tatjana. “We talked to Anton again yesterday, and this has to be done. His new ships won’t be ready for another year or more. If the fleet comes through before he gets here he has to know its exact location at any time. He’ll have to fight or somehow get them to turn back. If the fleet has not made transit by that time, Anton thinks he has a way to shut down the portal so they can never come through.”
“What about the rest of us, the rest of your family?”
“Just stay on the same heading,” said Leonid, “at the same speed. If Anton’s ships can’t turn the invasion back, we’ll catch up to you fast, make our own exile. There are dozens of worlds we know of where The Church will never find us. We’ll build our own civilization without them.”
His plan was passionate, and thought out. It was a logical thing to do, but it would put Tatjana and Leonid in terrible danger. For a favorite grand daughter and a man who was like a son to her this was not easy to decide.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Not for long,” said Leonid.
“Those ships could make transit any day.”
Nat hated being forced, but understood the why. She slept on it overnight, and in the morning told them they could go.
They’d packed their things before she’d even chosen a ship and crew to assign to them. She gave them a B-class shuttle that had been ferrying the technical data stores of their empire, and assigned a crew of five. By the following morning cycle the stores had been transferred to her cruiser, the new crew was on board and the shuttle was running fifty yards off the starboard side of her ship’s hull.
Leonid and Tatjana suited up, and said their goodbyes in an airlock. There were no tears; everyone was strangely calm. There were no thoughts of possible injury or death, just a mission to be accomplished.
Deep in her heart, Grandma Nat didn’t care whether The Church won the battle for people’s souls or not. She just wanted her family safe and intact, and it seemed to be ripping apart. She felt small, had to stand on tiptoes to hug and kiss Tatjana first, then Leonid. When he hugged her tightly, it was the closest she came to tears.
They closed their helmets, and she had to leave, watched through a window as the chamber was evacuated, saw the outer door open, the stars and a glowing patch of red beyond the black-hulled ship hovering some distance away. A ship-to-ship line had been rigged. Tatjana and Leonid floated to the door entrance and hooked up to the line. The little jets on their backpacks were like exhalations of air on a cold day. One by one, they scooted along the line and out to the ship awaiting them, human forms, then blobs of white, then gone, and the line were reeled in rapidly to her ship. The door closed, and two important people in her life had left her.
She wiped her eyes dry, went back to the bridge and distracted herself by issuing new orders to her crew.
On board Echo I, Leonid and Tatjana struggled out of their suits and met their new captain. His name was Ben Sparrow, a raw-boned, gaunt-faced man in his third lifetime of service to Grandma Nat. He’d known her as a child in first lifetime. “I was the driver’s son, but it made no difference to her. When she asked for volunteers I was first in line. I’d do anything for that woman. You tell me what you want to do, and it’s done.”
They liked him immediately for the way he treated the crew as equal cogs in the wheels of the ship. There was a cook who doubled as electrician, a navigator, and two men with papers in hydraulics and mechanics. Nate, Jake, Ralph and Samuel. They never heard their last names, or anything else about them. Perhaps they all had pasts best forgotten.
Sparrow knew the plan; his crew knew their jobs. They were barely on board when they pulled away from Grandma Nat’s cruiser, and watched the great ship shrink in the distance.
“This was hard for Grandma,” said Tatjana.
Sparrow smiled. “Nat’s beyond stoic. She can survive anything.”
There was admiration in his voice, and something else: they’d never heard anyone else outside the family call Grandma by her pet name.
It was a small ship, and they were used to the luxurious expanse of a cruiser. The bridge had room for three men crammed in close. There was one lavatory for all of them, a small mess where they ate in pairs, an even smaller galley. The births were amidships, the crew stacked like cordwood, captain’s cabin a bed with shelves on two sides and hooks in the ceiling for his clothes. Two bunks had been taken out of the cabin occupied by Leonid and Tatjana, giving them the luxury of twelve square feet of floor space outside of their bunks. The cabin neighbored mechanics, and it took them a week to get used to the murmurings and thumping from that area.
Over half the ship, separated from the working and sleeping area by a copper plug six feet thick, was the coil and plenum of the vacuum state energy drive that powered everything. Sucking in reaction mass by electromagnetic scoop, the engine provided thrust and an exhaust velocity nearing light speed. With the scoop off, all energy could be diverted to field mass-energy for small folds in space, a kind of pinching effect limited to only three light years by both coil energy and plenum size.
The design had been responsible for the family fortune, but for the task at hand it was not enough.
They wanted to get back to the vicinity of the Grand Portal as quickly as possible to monitor any movement of the invasion fleet. Their captain agreed with them. “We did two jumps a day on the way out. The best I can do is six. The plenum won’t charge any faster than that.”
That meant two months of travel, either being asleep all the time or suffering through bouts of vertigo and extreme nausea six times each day.
The chose the later, and it was the longest two months of their present lives. Captain Sparrow did what he could for them, gave them pills, alcohol, pills with alcohol, tried to teach them meditative techniques. Nothing worked, and the alcohol made things even worse. They did not keep down a solid meal completely for two months; except for the high protein meal they took just before collapsing into sleep at the end of ship’s cycle. They managed to stay hydrated, and recovery was rapid between bouts of nausea. During the final two weeks they noticed a lessening of symptoms as their bodies somehow adapted finally to the pinching of spacetime around them.
The final jump brought them within light weeks of the massive branegate to the other side. On the view screen it was a greenish, elongated star. The scanners had been on continuously the entire trip, their range limited by the times spent in normal space, but they’d kept to the prescribed shipping lane for commercial transport. They’d spotted two freighters on the way, but no great fleet of ships had been seen.
They came in at a quarter light speed, and began deceleration a light week out. It was another month of days spent eating, sleeping and staring at the viewscreen until the gate keepers were visible, looking like planets at this distance.
The ship vibrated softly around them, in front of them the viewscreen showed the green oval of the portal, wisps of gases making a fog-like shroud around the black holes guarding it. Leonid took Tatjana’s hand in his, and they closed their eyes, reaching out with their minds to pluck one string of the field binding them to their own kind.
Anton, it’s father and mother here. We’ve reached the Grand Portal. No sighting of any invasion fleet yet. Do you hear us?
They’d thought they might have to wait for an answer, but his reply was immediate.
Yes—I’m here. Good news about our tests; I’ll tell you later. Glad you made it. Some things being discovered here; looks like there might be agents connected to the invasion, including some people in prominent positions. One of them probably had me killed. Very busy, now. I’ll get back to you in a bit. Bye.
Anton was gone, but something was still there, a kind of awareness that held their focus, and then it disappeared.
“Did you feel that?” asked Leonid.
“Someone else was there,” said Tatjana, “just listening.”
“We’ll ask him about it.”
“Yes.”
Knowing that communication with Anton was immediately available was comforting. It had been an unknown until now. They went back to their study of the viewscreen, and the scanner data as it came in. They were in the very center of the shipping lane, a mote among giants, passing huge freighters lining up for transit to the other side. Picket ships five times their size trundled from freighter to freighter, checking transit papers and cargo manifests. Their own tiny ship was ignored. They might be a taxi or personal craft, and nobody cared. On this side of the brane the only paranoia was in collecting transit taxes on cargos. The real paranoia began on the other side, and hopefully the great fleet poised for invasion was still there.
They would have to find out about it indirectly, for they had no intention of chancing a transit themselves.
Captain Sparrow had the answers to that. He’d spent a career working Grandma Nat’s freighters, mostly on the other side, but had often made transits to transfer cargo to ships heading out of the core. He knew lots of people working either side of the brane, including keepers and the people who served them.
Working the brane and manipulating the higher dimensional tunnel through it was a stressful job, and dreary when not stressful.
There were diversions.
One day out from Grand Portal there was a great wheel of a station more like a city than a port, and occasional visits kept the sanity of some forty thousand workers and merchantmen who frequented it. It had no real name, but was called The Palace, a warren of shops, theatres, bars, brothels and eateries crammed into a space shaped like two doughnuts skewered on a stick and powered by money. On any given off-cycle, The Palace had a population of ten thousand, people shoulder to shoulder in the single, winding street, or riding the long escalator from doughnut to doughnut in search of new pleasures. There was no red light district; the brothels were scattered everywhere. Shops were small, selling cheap to expensive trinkets, and art from both sides of the brane. Bars and nightclubs were large, plentiful and noisy, with barkers on the street to announce the pleasures inside. Prostitutes strolled the street in brief, exotic dress, handing out business cards to interested visitors, and filling their busy schedules in the brothels.
It was not a place frequented or graced by The Church of The Faithful.
Sparrow had contacts everywhere in The Palace, and so did his crew. Nate, the cook, knew every Madam on the station, and had done business with all of them. Merchantmen, keepers, the off-duty border cops who were bribed by them, all came together at The Palace for fun, frolic and easy conversation. And for the cost of a few drinks, a treasure trove of information could be found in any bar any off-cycle of the week.
It was not a place Leonid and Tatjana would ever have visited on their own. The first week they remained in the ship. Sparrow moved as close as he could to the Grand Portal, hovering at the edge of the shipping lane. At this distance the other side was only a hazy, black patch, but freighters could be seen moving back and forth in the chaos of reds, yellows and greens that marked the interaction of normal space and particles within the exotic composition of the brane.
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