Marcus looked to the others, observing their reactions, looking for some show of emotion. Although he knew that Taz, Jago and Reid had all performed miraculous acts, apart from his brief discussion with Reid on Ga’ouna none of them had really ever sat down to talk about it.
“I don’t have any abilities,” Raven interjected, a puzzled look on her face.
“Nor do I,” said Taylor.
“Not yet, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t manifest later. All of the other surviving members of your squad have, save for you two, so we’d better work under the assumption that you two will develop them too,” the captain warned them. “And when they do manifest, I want you, all of you, to keep them secret.”
“Wait, what?” Taz cried. “So I can’t flex my awesome muscles to get girls?”
“No!” Mitchell scowled. “Even out here in the middle of nowhere, openly displaying your powers could cause panic. Hand-picked C-CORE personnel or not, the rest of the Tengri’s crew are probably still skeptical that humans can develop telepathy, so… whatever it is you all are capable of would almost certainly scare them senseless. Also, we don’t know anything about these aliens who so generously decided to give us a lift. We don’t know where they’re taking us or whether they have an ulterior motive for their assistance. Your powers might be the only ace we have up our sleeves if things go sour.”
“We haven’t really been able to use them since leaving Strom,” Marcus confessed. “At least I haven’t, save for that one dream, and that didn’t exactly come true anyway. Not that I’ve been trying, actually. It scares me just to think about it.”
“Just because you aren’t able to use them now doesn’t mean they’re gone,” Mitchell consoled him. “When I underwent psi training it took me years to master my ability. In the beginning it came and went. I often thought that I’d lost it completely. Sooner or later, it always came back, until one day, I was able to call it forth at will, harness it, fuel it, make it stronger.”
“But, if Division 6 already has people with psionic abilities, then why are they after us?” Taz demanded.
“Because you’re different,” the captain answered. “Terrans have only ever manifested a handful psionic powers before now. Most of them are like me, capable of reading minds, sensing emotion. A rare few can enhance their senses, see through objects, hear a pin drop from a kilometer away or operate in complete darkness. Only one in ten thousand psi wielders can catch glimpses of the future, and at best what they see is little more than riddles and muddled dreams. Your abilities are unique. No Terran can do what you can do. Division 6 would stop at nothing to get their hands on you.”
“But why us?” blurted Taz. “I didn’t ask for any of this!”
“I know. None of you did,” Mitchell replied. “We may never know who is behind it or even how it was done. Marcus has told me about the probe, the field emitter your squad carried to Triton. That seems a likely opportunity but, it doesn’t explain the why or the how. There has to be more to the method than just that exposure. If that were all that was required, whoever did this to you could easily make more clones like you.”
“Who’s to say that they won’t?” Marcus added. “I mean, if these powers are so sought after, and Division 6 knows that the experiment was successful, why don’t they just replicate it?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” the captain replied, his expression serious. “Division 6 had nothing to do with it. If it had been them, they would never have let you loose out in the world. You would have been caged from the moment you were hatched until the moment they dissected you on an operating table. Someone else is behind this. Division 6 may have found out about the experiment, but they seem to know little more than we do.”
“I guess we don’t really have to worry about that,” Marcus sighed. “We’ll never see any of them again anyway.”
“Good,” Jago muttered, slamming both of his massive fists on the table, which trembled under the weight.
“For now, let’s just keep quiet about this,” Captain Mitchell concluded. “We can re-address this matter at a later time. But, for now let’s keep this between ourselves.”
The old squad nodded in unison, acknowledging the captain’s order before leaving the meeting room in worried silence. Marcus stood there alone, admiring the repeating pattern of the waves streaming past the window. How far had they traveled? Where were they going?, he wondered. The others were so distressed over the unknown. Himself, he found it rather exhilarating. He just hoped that, wherever they were heading, they’d get there soon.
* * * * *
After a tense few days, boredom had finally set in. Now, seven days after their departure from Ga’ouna, Captain Mitchell sat at his usual table in the galley, in a murky corner near the forward windowpane. He nursed a stiff drink in a thick square glass, chatting idly with Jago and Reid.
On the far side of the room, Emil Juey, the ship’s custodian, leaned against the kitchen counter, listening to yet another of Knoles’ tiresome tirades.
“Always together that lot,” Knoles ranted. “Don’t see them mixing with us support staff.”
“So…?” Emil mumbled, his mouth busy wrestling with a half-chewed stick of jerked synthetic proteins, still slightly frozen.
“It’s weird!” Knoles insisted.
“Military crew always stick to themselves,” Emil countered. “That’s just how it is, how it’s always been. Even on military ships the combat teams hold back from the support staff.”
At that moment, Mitchell’s canine pet scuttled into the compartment with a skitter of claws, and started hovering around the captain’s chair. He leaned down to pick it up, setting it down on his lap stroking its mottled fur.
“Why did you bring a dog with you?” asked Reid, who found the animal’s presence aboard the Tengri rather anomalous.
“Can I pet him?” Jago burst out before the older clone could answer, his eyes full of enthusiasm as he eyed the small creature with childlike glee.
“Sure,” the captain replied, after a pause while he considered. “Just be careful.”
“Why do you even have a dog?” Reid added.
“If you’d have lost as many of your mates in combat as I have, you might want something more stable in your life, waiting for you when you returned from active duty,” the captain said, hesitating as he realized that Reid was not unaccustomed to losing people he might have called friends.
To his relief, Reid seemed not to have been offended.
“So why a dog? Why not get married? Have children?” Reid pressed, still trying to understand.
“I don’t think any woman would stick around long if she didn’t know when, or even if, her husband were coming home. I’m not sure I’d even want to put a woman through an ordeal like that,” Mitchell replied solemnly. “So a pet seemed the most logical choice,” he concluded, downing his drink.
“Why is a dog that much different? You must spend an awful lot of time away when you’re out on tour. Who looks after him while you’re away?”
“No one. I keep him in stasis,” Mitchell answered casually.
Spot, who had been whining softly, started to growl quietly, drawing the captain’s attention to the discomfort he was enduring under Jago’s increasingly heavy petting. Each stroke pulled at his fur to such a degree that his eyes seemed ready to pop out of his head at any moment.
“That’s enough Ape!” Mitchell warned him, placing Spot back on the ground where he hurtled off at record speed. “Well, I’d better get going. Ms. Karell will give me hell if I’m late for our session,” he continued, drawing suggestive glances from Reid and Jago. “Quit it, you two,” he rebuked them. “And for God’s sake stop wasting time here in the mess. As soon as we drop out of this… whatever the hell you call this-” he gestured to the glow out the window “I want you and the rest of the squad prepped and ready by the forward airlock.”
“Yes Sir,” Reid deadpanned as Jago smirked.
Chapter 11
“I can’t believe I threw my life away for this,” Knoles muttered as he rearranged stacks of crated provisions in the cargo hold.
Knoles was not a man who was known for his amicable demeanor. His temper was outright foul on the best of days, and given the course of their mission, his temper of late had been even more appalling. His protruding brow was now permanently locked in a state of resentful worry, pinched together above the ridge of his nose in an ugly scowl. The crew of the Tengri had taken to avoiding the galley entirely whenever possible.
“Well aren’t you the bright center of the universe,” came Raven’s voice from the hatchway, startling Knoles, who went stumbling backwards into an unsecured stack of crates, sending them crashing to the deck behind him.
He froze in place, his lips trembling with anger.
“What the hell do you want?” he barked, wiping the grime off of his fingers on his heavily stained apron.
He and Raven had had their share of run-ins since the Tengri’s arrival in the Ga’ouna system. Though the clones hadn’t had the chance to get to know the rest of the crew before entering stasis, it hadn’t taken long for the short-tempered Raven to make a snide remark about Knoles’ skills in the galley once they’d awoken. Ever since then, the two had been bickering every few days, each encounter escalating the matter further.
“What are you even doing here?” Raven pressed, eyeing him with suspicion.
“Some of the dry goods were stored in the cargo hold by mistake,” Knoles explained. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“No, I meant on this ship?” Raven demanded. “You don’t seem at all interested in the mission. Or particularly qualified for that matter,” she smirked. “I thought you had to be the best of the best to get selected for one of these C-CORE trips.”
“Watch it, Zorita,” Knoles growled, his nostrils flaring as he instinctively clenched his fists.
“Hmpf,” Raven snorted, curling her lip, not backing down.
Knoles knelt down to begin clearing up the mess, but Raven wasn’t about to give in so easily. She knew she’d struck a nerve, and after days of being stuck aboard the Tengri with nothing to take her mind off of things, this was about as much excitement as she expected to see.
“Why would someone like you sign up for something like this?” Raven pushed. “It’s not like you couldn’t have stayed on Terra and made crap food for a strangers who despise your cooking just as much as you despise them.”
“It wasn’t exactly my choice,” Knoles muttered, his eyes still fixed on the deck.
“What did you say?” Raven continued, stepping into the hold.
“I said it wasn’t my choice!” Knoles shouted at her, springing to his feet and visibly quivering with emotion.
“What do you mean ‘not your choice’? You’re not a clone. Your life is your own,” Raven snapped.
“Tell that to my family,” Knoles snarled, anger and shame burning in his face.
“Your family?”
“It’s none of your damned business!” Knoles fumed, kicking a crate full of canned goods into a nearby bulkhead.
“Oh I see,” Raven sneered, “you’re here to make daddy proud.”
Knoles kept his mouth shut, but Raven thought she could see the hint of a snarl.
“Daddy’s little boy gonna be a space man, make the history books. Shame he’s too dumb to do anything other than heat a pot full of beans.”
“I did it for my sister,” Knoles said quietly, not looking at the woman taunting him, “My half sister actually.”
“Your sister?” Raven exclaimed, taken aback by the cook’s sudden sincerity.
“Father was going to cut her off. It would have ruined her.” He still wasn’t looking at her, just speaking quietly, as if to the crates on the deck.
“Why?” Raven gasped, confounded. She knew little of family, and she had always thought it to be something desirable, a closeness she could never know.
“I’m my father’s bastard son. His weakness made flesh. When my half-sister discovered my existence she demanded he make me a part of the family. He wasn’t exactly thrilled at the notion, so he came to me one night. I was working in a diner. I didn’t even know who he was. My mother had always told me that he’d died before I was even born,” Knoles said. “So when he told me who he was, I was happy. Astonished, but really happy, perhaps for the first time in my life. Then came the threats.”
“Threats?” Raven didn’t know how to react at all.
This wasn’t right. Families were warm, loving things, she was sure of it… just as sure as she’d been that Knoles was a useless, spoilt naturally-born Terran.
“He thought that I’d been in contact with her, that it was my doing that she wanted me as part of the family. I didn’t meet her until much later, after a series of threatening calls, harassment by the police everywhere I went. He’s not exactly a man without means, you see,” Knoles continued. “It wasn’t until he threatened her that I started taking him seriously.”
“He threatened his own daughter?” Raven gasped, horrified.
“Hard to imagine, right?” said Knoles, finally turning to look at her, raising an eyebrow.
For the first time, Raven saw him as a human being, just as fragile as the rest of them.
“He said either I left, or she’d suffer.”
She stared in silence. She didn’t know how to respond.
“So I agreed to go on this… journey. It’s not as if I was leaving much behind anyway.”
“I… I’m sorry,” Raven whispered.
Knoles merely grunted in response, kneeling down to begin stacking the crates once more. Raven was about to leave, unsure as to what to make of the measure of guilt she was feeling for her actions.
“I do more than cook, you know,” Knoles mumbled.
“What?”
“There’s more to it than that, I mean. You might not like the taste, but each meal is prepared according to requests from Ms. Karell. With eighteen crewmembers to care for, each with their own deficiencies and nutritional requirements, it’s not as simple as it looks.”
The clanking of footsteps approaching interrupted their conversation.
“You two on a break?” came the voice of the Tengri’s chief engineer, Nelson Kerr, just before the man himself appeared in the hatchway.
“No Sir,” Raven replied, “I was just helping Darryl sort out some supplies.” With a cautious nod to the cook, she bent to pick up a crate.”
* * * * *
“Bend your knee. That’s good. A little further,” Kaiden ordered as she pressed the captain’s leg all the way to his chest.
“Damnit, Karell, you’ve got a grip like a seasoned deck hand,” Mitchell grumbled, his teeth gritted.
The captain had been showing up at the gym more than was strictly mandatory, though he wasn’t the only one. He knew most of the crew thought that the only reason that C-CORE had appointed Karell to her position was her stunning looks, a sure-fire way to motivate the mostly-male crew. Her smooth, silky black hair reached her shoulder blades, framing her hypnotic brown eyes and her delicate, fine-featured face, but her best feature was undoubtedly her lips, voluptuous without being overly pouty. Her slightly upturned upper lip always glistened, subject of many a male crewmember’s fantasy.
“You’re awfully tense today,” she teased, drawing a feigned glare from the captain.
With most of the crew wrapped around her little finger, she could get away with practically anything. Mitchell hid the pain the exercises caused him well, feeling stupid for doing so but not wanting to show any sign of weakness in front of her.
“Captain, you’re needed on the bridge,” Raven’s voice burst over the ship’s intercom.
Mitchell sighed, grabbing a firm hold on the rim of the massage table and pushing himself into a seated position.
“Duty calls,” he ventured with a grin, relieved at the excuse to get away from the painful calisthenics.
“Of course,” Kaiden replied
with a seductive wink.
He quickly strapped on his motorized knee brace and threw a towel over his shoulders to keep the sweat at bay as he strode out of the Tengri’s small gym. Marcus and the others were already on the bridge when he arrived.
The alien ship had finally transmitted an audio message saying that they would soon be arriving at their destination, but was refusing to answer any further attempts to contact them. As the captain eased himself gently into his chair, the tunnel of energy that had surrounded their ship began to transform, the pulsating waves decreasing in frequency and gaining intensity. The distance between the Tengri and the alien craft started to diminish, and the Terran ship’s hull began to vibrate ever so slightly, producing a low humming noise.
“What’s happening people?” Mitchell demanded.
“We must be coming out of this… slipstream, Captain,” Navigator Wei replied. “The power signature from the alien vessel appears to be diminishing.”
“Damn. That was fast,” the captain acknowledged, rubbing the sweat off of his chin as his mind raced over every conceivable scenario.
“Grey,” he decided. “Take the squad down to the armory. I want everyone suited up and ready to go at a moment’s notice, just in case. For all we know they could have led us away from Ga’ouna only to tear us apart for scraps.”
Reid grabbed Jago by one monstrous arm and pulled him off the bridge, rushing to comply with the captain’s orders, but before Marcus and the others could follow them, the tunnel of energy around the Tengri collapsed in a blinding flash. The piercing headache and nausea they’d felt when the alien ship had first pulled them into the tunnel of light now returned, although in a milder form. It took only a few seconds for the crew to recover, but once they’d regained their wits the sheer magnitude of the scene that unfolded before them stole their breath away. No-one spoke as, one by one, they stumbled forward, closer towards the viewscreen, some even raising a hand to the glass, as if touching the window made the marvel more real.
Cresting one of two large moons in orbit around a lush green world, whose bountiful landscape was dotted by trailing clouds and sprawling vistas of auburn and golden hues, was the largest space station they could ever have imagined. Even having heard Marcus’ description of his vision did little to prepare the clones for the sight before them.
Merillian: 2 (Locus Origin) Page 7