Eternity or Bust: Mission 16 (Black Ocean)

by J. S. Morin

  They just happened to be the only crumbs Carl needed.

  # # #

  Esper rapped the holo-projector remote against the pedestal for the device. “I hereby call to order the fifteenth meeting of the ‘Let’s Rescue Carl Club.’ Since we don’t keep minutes, we’ll skip straight to new business. First item on today’s agenda: Carl turned himself over to Earth Navy, and he’s been gone too long.”

  “Point of order,” Yomin said, raising a hand. “It’s only been an hour. How long was twinkle-tongue expecting his verbal contortionist act to take?”

  Esper pursed her lips and looked to Amy. “Did he say anything? Anything at all that might help?”

  Seated on the couch and cradling her tummy as if it were carrying a full-term fetus instead of barely swelling, Amy gave a shrug. “You know Carl. He figured we’d worry, so he didn’t tell us how crazy his plan was until it was too late to stop him.”

  “Point of order,” Roddy said, raising a foot. “You’re all such fucking wind-up toys.”

  Esper pointed to Roddy with a tapping motion, as if knighting him. “The chair requests clarification on that remark.”

  Roddy pitched an empty beer can. It clattered off the edge of the waste reclaim without going in. “Carl’s antics wind you up, and you play out the predictable dance of preparing in case he needs saving. Over and over. You don’t learn.”

  “We’ve needed plenty of rescue missions,” Esper pointed out.

  “But never Carl.”

  “No… that’s not true,” Esper said with a furrowed brow. “There was the time…”

  “Yeah…?” Roddy prompted. “Tell me more…” He ambled over to the fridge while he waited for a response.

  Esper frowned harder. There had to be a time. “We rescued him from the Silde Slims race,” she said finally.

  “Exactly according to plan,” Roddy pointed out as he fished for a fresh beer. “Don’t beat yourself up, kid. I’ve been thinking about it this whole hour. That bastard can get kidnapped, arrested, or held hostage, but he never needs busting out. Even when everyone got sucked into that creepy wizard’s head, Carl was working on the outside. Guy’s slicker than anti-grav nanotech.”

  Shoni shuddered. “That’s one adventure I’m glad to have missed.”

  “Me too,” Amy admitted. “But I’m still worried about him.”

  Roddy pointed at her with a beer can. “That’s your job. Mort’s personal chauffeur here should know better. She’s needed rescuing.”

  Esper opened her mouth to object, but she couldn’t. Even if the Poet Fleet had held a snake by the tail this most recent time, her original kidnapping by them was legitimate. They’d also had to circle back for her at the Gologlex Menagerie.

  Then it came to her. “Peractorum! We rescued Carl from a police station.”

  “Wasn’t us,” Roddy replied with a shrug. “Mort and Mriy did it, and I’m not sure he wouldn’t have weaseled his way out if they hadn’t. But Mort’s a figment of your imagination now, and Mriy works for Tanny. Any Carl-saving expertise has flown the coop.”

  “I have him in my head,” Esper reminded everyone. This wasn’t the crowd where there were still uninitiated ears to worry about. Keesha Bell and Hobson were safely ignorant on Pleasant Valley. “We can ask for advice if you think it’ll help.”

  Roddy slammed down his beer can. “He doesn’t need help. That’s what I’m trying to say. He’s going to come marching back onto this ship with a shit-eating grin on his face and be all ‘What? Was someone worried about me?’ and we’ll look like assholes.”

  “To be fair,” Shoni pointed out. “That’s not usually a concern.”

  “What are you saying we should do, then?” Amy asked nervously.

  Roddy gestured for the remote, and Esper tossed it to him. The laaku held it up for everyone to get a good look. “We are currently on the outskirts on Sol. While it may be the military heart of ARGO and the largest population center in the galaxy, it is also the entertainment capital of the Milky Way. There are broadcasts on the low-priority bands of the omni that’ll take days or weeks to get out as far as our little hell away from home. I say we scope out the latest holovid offerings, and my vote is we start with either Last Stand of Fleet Omega or Honorable Kick Champion Tournament. There are also zero-G cage fights, Silver and Gold Leagues, remote drone swarm battles, and that drooly romance pap you girls like.”

  A knot formed in Esper’s stomach. “I don’t know if I feel right about watching holovids while Carl’s over there risking his life.”

  “One fewer vote for weepy, emotionally crippled humans trying to formulate a reproductive strategy,” Shoni said.

  Roddy toasted his paramour with his Earth’s Preferred can.

  Amy sighed. “I vote for Last Stand of Fleet Omega.”

  Yomin crossed her arms at the doorway to her quarters. “Better that than silly laaku martial arts flicks or human cockfighting. Make that two.”

  Roddy looked around. “I think that shorthanded as we are, my vote makes it official. Last Stand it is.”

  And with that, the meeting of the Let’s Rescue Carl Club drew to an ignoble close.

  # # #

  When the airlock cycled, the Mobius crew scrambled down to the cargo bay. Despite being possibly the most motivated to see Carl return unharmed, Amy was the last to make it to the stairs. Worry and a lingering case of morning sickness conspired to leave her queasy and not quite up for sudden runs.

  Carl stepped through the airlock door and spread his arms like a politician taking the stage at a rally. “Hey, look who’s back!” he said without actually opening his mouth or uttering a sound.

  “Oh, it’s just you,” Roddy said, sapping the mood from the cargo bay.

  It stung Amy to hear it, but Carl occasionally needed a little jab to deflate that swollen ego of his. It wasn’t like he didn’t patch the holes as fast as his friends, family, and the universe at large could poke them.

  “Just me?” Carl scoffed. “Just the guy who booked us passage to Earth with the might of the galaxy’s finest navy looking right at us? The guy who just brokered a deal that might end up getting all our criminal records scrubbed with bleach?”

  “What are you talking about?” Amy asked. “I figured you were going to pull the ‘it wasn’t us, we’ve got a doppelganger ship out there making us look bad’ card.”

  Esper shot Amy a scowl. “You said you didn’t know what he was planning.”

  “Apparently I didn’t.”

  “I never said,” Carl pointed out, wagging a finger on each hand. “I just said I’d have a plan before we got to Earth. This one didn’t involve dropping out of astral under the Pacific Ocean.” He shot a glare at Esper.

  “That was Mort’s idea,” she replied.

  “It didn’t involve faking every ID and transponder code in existence,” Carl continued. Yomin cast her eyes downward. “And it didn’t involve cashing in all my goodwill with Don Rucker to pull political strings.”

  Roddy shrugged. “Still probably our best bet.”

  “So what deal did you make?” Amy asked. She hoped it wasn’t a 24-hour reprieve only to serve out the rest of his life in jail. Romantic as that might have been, she wanted a life with Carl, not just a wedding night and a lifetime of raising their child by herself.

  “I told them where the Odysseus crashed.”

  Amy’s mouth hung open. The silence in the cargo bay echoed.

  “What?” Carl said, looking from one face to the next. “We wanted a wedding on Earth. For a band of outlaws, that’s a tall order. I needed to cash in the only I.O.U. that could cover it.”

  “But you just gave half of it to Tanny,” Esper protested. “And Mriy and Kubu will be there with her.”

  “Your parents are there,” Yomin added.

  Roddy shook his head. “Cold as ice, Peach-fuzz. Kudos. Not sure I could’ve pulled the trigger on that one.”

  “But it was the right thing to do,” Carl protested. “We knew all along
that we were sitting on Earth Navy property. We knew it was wrong.”

  Amy nodded along, then added, “And now your ex, several of your friends, and your own parents are going to pay for it.”

  In the face of his friends’ ire, Carl just smiled. “That’s the beauty of it. I invited them all to the wedding. Anyone who gives a shit about us is on the way to Earth right now. Hell, the planet’s pretty much deserted now. Sure, it’ll be a setback for Tanny, but it’ll put my parents out of the criminal business for good. For fuck’s sake, if I have to, I’ll get Cedric to terraform one of my other asteroids for them. It’s not like there aren’t a hundred thousand of them in that depleted mining belt.”

  “Wait…” Amy said slowly. “So those olive branches you extended…”

  “Bait for the mousetraps,” Carl said with a grin. “C’mon. Don’t look so stunned, everyone. You can tell me about all the crazy plans you hatched to rescue me while we make our way to Earth.”

  # # #

  Carl didn’t have much experience with the shallow astral. Between a wizard-staffed ship and a general desire to outrun adversaries, the deeper end had always been his style. But the public astral gates of Sol kept traffic so shallow that realspace was still visible in ghostly silhouettes.

  “No, seriously,” he said to Amy. “You really weren’t planning a rescue?”

  “Yeah. We took a vote and everything,” Amy replied with a reassuring smile. “Roddy convinced us all to trust you.”

  “Roddy, huh?” Carl said with a grunt as the Mobius passed by Jupiter as if it were a roadside diner. “Does that rodent know he’s not on the registration for this ship?”

  “Technically, Tanny still is,” Amy pointed out.

  Carl winced. “Yeah, well, after tomorrow that won’t matter.”

  “Should still get her off the listing as next of kin.” She paused to watch a formation of patrol ships zoom past, letting all the intrasystem traffic know that Earth Navy was watching over them. “You could have mentioned it was Malcolm in command. At least that way I would have known what you were up to.”

  What was he supposed to say? Sorry for not trusting you to trust me to handle getting to Earth? Yeah, funny joke, letting you think I was marching off to get thrown in prison? “Yeah. Probably should have.”

  Even in the astral, Titan gleamed as they approached Saturn. It caught Sol’s light and sucked in its fair share, but too much of the surface was metal and glass. In all Sol space, it was the closest thing to Phabian, fully enclosed habitats and transport tubes making up for a climate that many still considered unpleasant.

  Mars was on the wrong side of Sol at the moment for a flyby. Carl was just as glad of that. The last thing he needed right now was an impromptu run-in with Rucker goons tipped off by Tanny that the Mobius would be visiting Sol. Sure, Don was practically still family, but that didn’t mean Tanny might not have her own loyalists. If she decided to screw with him, that would have been the opportunity.

  In the co-pilot’s seat, Amy fidgeted.

  Carl leaned back and held a hand out to the flight yoke. “You wanna do the flying?” he asked.

  It wasn’t as if they weren’t locked in on autopilot anyway. The view ahead of them had been the ass end of a bulk freighter. The bulky, utilitarian slug was either a Mutak IV or one of the Ogens—something laaku-made for sure. Thanks to the miracle of strict traffic regulation in the astral lanes, they’d kept 200m behind it since the gate.

  “No. I just…” Amy struggled visibly for the words to express what she felt. Carl had seen the look on her and many others but just couldn’t relate. “It’s just jitters. I mean, why make us take the slow gate?”

  “Probably to give themselves time to reconsider the deal I just cut before we actually arrive at Earth,” Carl mused. “Or maybe Malcolm didn’t like getting bent over a barrel and is messing with us. Who the hell knows? I, for one, was just happy I pulled that miraculous little rabbit out of his hat.”

  Amy pointed. “There it is!” She was positively giddy.

  Carl didn’t see the appeal. Legally, he was born on Earth, but in a bit of poetry crossed with predictive fate, he was actually born aboard a starship on the way in. Any kid born during an orbital descent was destined to fly. The ball of rock beneath the glitz and congestion had never made much of an impression, never taken hold of his heart.

  But there it was. A blue and silver ball resolved into full color once they exited the astral gate into realspace. The laaku freighter and the ships ahead of it broke off. Carl kept on course to let Amy soak in the view.

  It looked like Phabian, Meyang, Old Garrelon, and every other Earth-like out there in the Black Ocean. Whoever had made them that way probably didn’t play favorites, but Earth had been one of, if not the most, successful of its kind. Ships of all varieties swarmed it like flies on a rotting corpse. Manmade habitats larger than battleships lazed in high orbit, gazing down on a planet armored in cities that hardly began or ended but flowed from one to the next across entire continents and spilled into the seas.

  It was busy, crowded, noisy, overregulated, sterile, expensive, pretentious, and home to at least a dozen organizations that hated Carl with professional dispassion—and maybe one or two that took things personally. By Carl’s reckoning, sheer weight of numbers, compounded by the aforementioned pretentiousness, made it the galaxy’s greatest concentration of assholes.

  “Home,” Amy said with a wistful sigh.

  Carl kept facing forward but cast her a sidelong look. Hormones. He could blame it on the hormones if Amy was a little over-attached to the ball of corporate greed and boot-stomping law and order ahead of them.

  Traffic control pinged them, demanding approach vectors, landing clearance codes, and a numeric visitation category for their purpose on Earth.

  “I’ll handle this,” Amy said, scooting up from her slouch and taking the comm. “Traffic control, this is Mobius, Earth registry 066129-AN-9821. We have a temporary landing permit and are on approach to Vegas Prime docking garage Teller 589.”

  “Vessel 066129-AN-9821, please state your official reason for visitation,” a bored traffic controller droned.

  “I’m getting married!” Amy said with a squeal that evoked a high school cheerleader who’d just made the squad.

  “That’s nice, ma’am,” traffic control replied. “Do you have a marriage permit to verify your claim?”

  Carl felt an instant of panic. This whole marriage was doomed because they hadn’t pre-applied for a permit? Bullshit!

  But Amy was nonplussed. Her fingers were already flying over the console. “Transmitting now.”

  “When did we—?”

  “In transit,” Amy said without looking away from the controls. “I looked up everything on the omni that might snag us. I mean everything. Religious excommunication, local construction, worker strikes, conferences, government holidays, double-booking of the band or the rabbi, genetics screenings…”

  “Genetics screening?” Carl asked.

  Amy waved the notion away. “I sent the samples months ago. It’s not like you don’t leave DNA lying around everywhere. Did you know we share a common ancestor sixteen generations back?”

  “Does that make us…?”

  “Nope,” Amy said. “Unrelated, legally. Still, it’s sweet to know. A family reunion that went back to common ancestors would include over sixty thousand people.”

  “Oh. OK, then.”

  “I’m actually more closely related to Yomin than you,” Amy continued. “Thirteen generations back. Us Earth kids… right?” She beamed, still giddy from the proximity of her wedding day sinking in.

  “Vessel 066129-AN-9821, you are cleared to approach. Welcome to Earth.”

  Carl indicated the flight yoke again. “You sure you don’t want to fly us in?”

  This time, the result of that question was a scramble to switch seats and a punching of the throttle once Amy was in control. “Let’s do this!”

  # # #

&nbs
p; Vegas Prime looked like nearly every other square meter of Earth—glitzy, polished, and modern. Certain historical districts had that old world look that got retroverts all weepy-eyed, but Vegas Prime had never been classy or respectable. Aside from possibly New Orleans Prime or Bangkok Prime, it was as close to a lawless den of debauchery as Earth still had.

  And yet the Mobius still found itself in a queue waiting to park.

  The public docking garage was a beehive design, thirty stories of flat honeycombs lined up just far enough apart to squeeze in the typical light freighter or mid-sized passenger shuttle. Carl and Amy watched as the docking arm from Slot 6 latched onto an old Muskrat Pacer-5 and dragged it down to the next available hex in the wall.

  From Slot 4, a late model Edison-K12 came up, clamped in another docking arm. Its engines flared, and the arm released it like a toy starship to flit about the living room—except this was a full-sized vessel.

  “Hate these things,” Carl grumbled. “Always scratch up the paint and the garage never pays for the damage.”

  “We get shitty paint from an unlicensed manufacturer,” Amy pointed out. “You could always just pay for a proper job.”

  “Or just not park on overcrowded planets.”

  “Wedding tomorrow,” Amy singsonged.

  Despite the parking hassle, Carl’s mouth curled in a smile. “Yeah. Guess this isn’t that big a deal, considering.”

  “066129-AN-9821, hold position,” an automated voice ordered over the comm.

  Amy pulled her hands off the yoke. “Haven’t moved in ten minutes,” she muttered, even though the machine wasn’t waiting for a response.

  The docking arm reached up from below, just visible from the forward window. Carl winced as the claw closed around them, hearing the scrape as it fucked up another paint job.

  Still, it wasn’t as if the Mobius entered beauty contests or Carl was looking to sell him.

  Without fuss or pomp, the claw arm stuffed the Mobius into hex K-11 like a fuel rod into an engine core. This was it. They were on Earth.

  # # #