by M. D. Cooper
The knowledge didn’t stop the recrimination to which he subjected himself.
It also didn’t stop him from perseverating over new ways the mission could be jeopardized. There was still the issue of Jessica Keller, and how she had made it onto the ship. If she was here, he had to plan for the presence of Myrrdan—or anyone else in known space, for that matter.
Even he could not discern why Myrrdan was so successful—if that word could apply. Analysis of his mass murders, acts of terrorism, and ability to evade all attempts to catch him showed he was highly augmented—easily four times more mentally enhanced than a class 2 human.
That level of augmentation shouldn’t be possible without noticeable physical alterations, but either Myrrdan was the greatest charlatan of all time, or he was as smart as the data suggested.
If Myrrdan was on the Intrepid, it was to acquire picotech, the atomic-size technology which would elevate the New Eden colony to the center of human commerce and power.
Though, if stealing the picotech were his endgame, his methodology was questionable. Why let the ship leave the Sol system at all? More importantly, why point it at a star and sabotage its drive systems?
Bob had far too many questions, for which there were no answers.
To reduce variables, he’d insisted that all humans go into stasis. It made his primary task of physically inspecting, and reprogramming every piece of hardware on the ship much simpler.
There was one human he would permit to wake, in fact, he required her to wake.
Tanis Richards was nearly as large an enigma as the possible presence of Myrrdan on the ship. Granted, an enigma that mostly worked in his favor.
She nearly made Bob believe in the luck experiments.
From time to time strange notions came about in the human sphere. One of them was breeding for luck. Initially proposed several thousand years earlier, the premise was that certain humans had exceptionally lucky events happen in their lives: events such as winning the lottery twice, or evading death multiple times. These humans were bred together in an attempt to produce offspring more prone to luck.
No measurable results were ever observed.
Tanis seemed to defy reality with her luck. Bob had checked her lineage, to see if she was the result of any luck experiments, but had been unable to find a link. Still, she survived when she should not, and had done things that she should not have been able to do—things like Linking with the fighters in battle, as the Intrepid exited the Sol system.
Bob knew others had run the math, and had all come to the same conclusion he had—the outcome of her actions had been impossible.
Whether or not she did have luck, things often went better with her around—she had saved his life more than once. Bob intended to have Tanis out of stasis as much as possible, to make use of whatever special rift in space-time and probability her presence created.
He decided that this was as good a time as any to wake her. Maybe he would be able to gather more insight into what made her tick.
RUDE AWAKENING
STELLAR DATE: 3243433 / 02.13.4168 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ISS Intrepid
REGION: Interstellar space, near Estrella de la Muerte
“So you’re just going to wake me randomly?” Tanis asked, unable to hide the annoyance in her voice. “How often do you intend to do this?”
Bob replied.
Tanis let out a long sigh. “You know that’s not an answer. You must have some idea how often it will be, and how long you expect me to stay up. I do intend to actually see New Eden you know…preferably before I’m falling apart from too many re-juvs.”
“A month! Alone on the ship!” Tanis surprised herself with the strength of her own outburst. “I’ll go insane! I need some sort of companionship.”
Angela’s droll tone joined the conversation.
Tanis rubbed her eyes and sat on the edge of the stasis pod. “I’m sorry Ang…I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you know what I mean—I’m no social butterfly, but even I need some human interaction.”
Tanis rose up from the edge of the stasis pod. “You’re damn right I desire it. Let’s go get him up.” She was in the passageway before the words left her mouth.
“Why is it so cold?” Tanis asked through clenched teeth.
The chamber where Joe lay in stasis wasn’t far. Critical personnel couldn’t occupy the same chamber, but Tanis made certain he was close as possible.
The door slid open, and she raced through, arms wrapped tight around herself.
“Stars! How cold was it out there?”
Joe was exactly where she had left him, first pod on the right. She signaled the unit over the Link, and after a moment the stasis field snapped off and the pod’s cover slid open.
“Wha…what’s the emergency?” Joe mumbled as he struggled out of his pod, “are we disintegrating?”
“Nothing so serious,” Tanis’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “We’re babysitting a nervous AI.”
Bob said.
“I just call it like I see it,” Tanis replied
Joe stood, and Tanis wrapped him in an embrace. “It’s nice to wake and see you…without some emergency.”
The embrace lasted only a second before Joe pulled back.
“Holy crap!” Joe exclaimed. “Why are you so cold?”
“You could have taken the time to get some clothes. They are stasis pods, after all…I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Tanis felt herself flush. “Sorry, I just got caught up in the moment.”
Joe smiled and leaned in for a kiss. “This is about all of ice-cold Tanis I can handle right now.”
Tanis laughed softly. “I’m starved, let’s get some food. I think a BLT would really hit the spot right now.”
Joe pulled a pair of shipsuits from storage. “I could use a bite too, but let’s get dressed first. I don’t want to lose any bits on the way to the officer’s lounge.”
“Is that really what’s up, Bob?” Joe asked as they walked through the slowly warming passageways. “You a bit worried about being alone?”
Joe laughed and nudged Tanis. “You’re his lucky charm.”
“I think I resent that.”
Half an hour later, the pair sat at a small table in the officer’s lounge, working their way through a light lunch.
“So let me get this straight,” Joe said after taking a gulp of his coffee. “You plan to wake Tanis every so often—randomly—to have her check things over and make you feel better, and, because she can’t live without me now, I get woken in the deal too?”
“Are we going to be the only humans up this entire time?” Tanis asked. “The captain won’t be woken at all?”
embedded in a human—it’s not possible for me to be—but my time with Amanda and Priscilla has taught me the concept of trust, and I trust you.>
“Awww…he’s like a city-sized puppy,” Joe chuckled.
“You seem to think this is amusing,” Tanis gave him a sour look. “You’re forgetting that this essentially works out to years and years of extra work.”
“You’re looking at it glass-half-empty,” Joe replied.
Joe paused for a moment. “Damn… never thought of that. There goes logic—ruining another perfectly good figure of speech.”
“You were saying?” Tanis asked.
“Right. Anyway, we’re going to have long walks in the park, and by the beach—if we wanted to, we could have decades to spend with just one another. Maybe I could even teach you to fly.”
“Yeah. And maybe. I could teach you to tell a joke.” Tanis stuck her tongue out at Joe, then paused. “So Bob, you really just want us to do whatever we think we need to do? Just check the ship over, hang out for a few days or a week and then go back under?”
“How often do you want us to do this?”
Tanis nearly choked on her BLT while Joe dissolved into hysterical laughter.
“We should walk the ship—the whole ship,” Joe said later as he and Tanis relaxed in the officer’s common area. “It’s just the sort of thing that could give us a fresh perspective. and something to do.”
“It may take more than a day or two,” Tanis mused.
“I’ll bring a snack, and I bet there are lots of quarters along the way we could crash in.”
“What the hell,” Tanis sat up. “But first, let’s get armored and armed, at least lightly.”
“No argument here. I imagine I’m going to hear rogue bots around every corner, for the first day at least. Not to mention, armor has built-in heaters.”
An hour later, they sat aboard a maglev train, riding to the bow of the Intrepid in silence. Both Joe and Tanis sported light armor, several sidearms and multi-function rifles. Packs rested on the floor beside them, containing food and supplies.
Bob’s voice came over the Link.
“Sorry Bob,” Joe said, “Memories of dark corridors with no power and no comm are still too fresh. To us that was just a couple months ago.”
Tanis turned to look out the window. She watched as the train entered a vast, dark chamber. Emergency lighting in the distance showed the space to be hundreds of meters wide, and many more long.
A light slid into view far below the train, and Tanis saw a bank of superconductor batteries in its dim green glow. Several other similar lights winked on and off in the distance, as the train raced on.
She looked up the cavern on the ship’s schematics, and saw that it was the power storage and regulation chamber for the particle accelerator. The sparcity of green lights revealed that most of the batteries still were offline; a result of the damage to the primary ramscoop.
“I can’t believe I’ve never been here before,” she said to Joe.
He nodded. “Me either. Though it’s not that surprising, I guess. I just checked, and apparently I’ve only set foot in about five percent of the ship.”
Tanis checked the places she had been. “I’ve got you beat. I’ve been in six percent of the ship.”
“Always have to be one-upping,” Joe laughed.
“I don’t see how stating a fact is one-upping.”
“Um, Tanis, you even said, I’ve got you beat.”
Tanis grinned. “I have no recollection of the events to which you are referring.”
A minute later the maglev slowed and stopped at a small station; the end of the line, or the beginning, depending on how you looked at it.
Joe led the way to their destination, a small observation deck above the main scoop emitter, and the furthest forward they could get on the bow, without crawling into maintenance tunnels.
They stepped through the entrance, and both stopped, looking at one another in surprise. The observation deck was dimly lit, soft music played over a physical sound system and a servitor stood beside a bar with a selection of food and wine.
Joe pulled off his helmet and let out a low whistle. “One heck of a posh lounge, I was expecting a maintenance viewport, or something.”
“These couches feel like real leather,” Tanis sat and leaned back, clasping her hands behind her head.
“Quite the view,” Tanis said as she gazed out the large bay window that wrapped over half way around the lounge.
“Can almost see behind us,” Joe laughed, as he handed Tanis a glass of wine.
“I can’t quite make out The Kap.”
“I can’t either, but there’s Canopus to the right,” Joe pointed at the white-blue star.
“And Sirius up there to the left. Just a bit further around and we’d be able to see Sol over there,” Tanis pointed at the rear wall of the observation deck.
“Huh…I just checked, and we’re actually farther from Sirius now than we were back home at Sol—thought it looked brighter.”
“And we’re traveling further from New Eden every minute—seems counter-intuitive,” Tanis sighed.
Joe nodded and sat beside Tanis. They enjoyed the silence for some time, simply staring out into space, arms around each other’s shoulders. Eventually Tanis looked at Joe, “We’ll have to do this often during our thaws.”
“Absolutely.”
After finishing the glasses of wine, they discussed the route to the stern of the ship. While serving on the Intrepid, they had spent the majority of their time in the dorsal arch. Rather than travelling through familiar territory, they opted to work their way down through several dozen decks below them, and travel through the sections of the ship directly above the particle accelerator.
Outside the observation lounge, the utilitarian corridors felt even more stark than on the way in.
Their HUD overlays led them to a wide vertical shaft, which dropped over thirty meters, and rose several hundred more above them. It was lined with various pipes, waveguides, and conduit. Several bots flitted up and down, a few swerving out of the way, as a lift rose up the shaft.
Tanis and Joe stepped on the lift, and she punched the button for the lowest level. The lift waited a moment, then dropped down the shaft. With the low gravity—due to the particle accelerator running on empty—there was a moment her feet lifted off the platform.
“That was a bit disconcerting,” Joe said.
“You’re telling me,” Tanis said as she looked over the railing. “It’s quite the drop.”
The bottom of the shaft pierced the ceiling of yet another vast chamber, one which appeared to be at least a hundred meters wide, and several hundred long. Above them, the roof of the chamber was punctuated by several other shafts, like the one they had just entered through. Bots flitted in and out of them, appearing to be working on the large object below.
“This must be the main scoop’s field generator,” Tanis said, as the realization dawned on her.
“I’ve never seen one that looked like this before,” Joe commented, as the lift settled next to a catwalk.
“You’ve never seen one that can emit a field over ten thousand kilometers wide.”
“Touché.”
They stood a moment longer, looking at one of the Intrepid’s many hearts.
“W
ell, let’s roll,” Tanis said, as she picked up her bag. “We have a long way to go.”
The rest of the day was spent passing through endless kilometers of corridor, bay, and chamber. The posh lounge, looking out over the ramscoop emitter should have prepared them, but they were still surprised by what lay in the nooks and crannies of the ship.
Rounding a corner, near one of the hydroponics chambers, they stumbled upon a statue in the middle of an intersection. It appeared to be a life-sized goat made of solid crystal. Upon closer inspection, they realized that the crystal was data storage, containing the DNA and all knowledge associated with every known bacteria going back to the twentieth century, cross-referenced with every time each bacterium had been found in a goat.
There also appeared to be a personal 2D vid collection of goats stored in the crystal. Many of them depicted people yelling at goats, which seemed to cause the goats to seize up and fall over.
“Wow, someone really likes goats,” Joe commented.
“Maybe a bit too much,” Tanis chuckled.
Not long after, they entered another corridor that was a clear tube surrounded by what appeared to be a brownish substance. Tanis leaned close and let out a small cry.
“It’s just dirt!”
Joe frowned and peered closer. “What? What for?”
“I think it’s a giant ant farm.”
Joe walked down the tube, running his hand along the plas. “Huh, so it is. The sign down here says it’s the personal property of some guy named Pete, and, that no one's to mess with it.”
Tanis laughed, “well, I guess we’d best be on our way.”
After several more kilometers of ship, Joe yawned and stretched. “I know we’ve only been at it for a few hours, but I’d worked a full day before stasis, and I’m bushed. What say we find some place to crash?”
“Sure,” Tanis agreed. “Ironically, we’re not far from my quarters, just sixty-two decks down.”
“That would take all the fun out of the adventure!” Joe looked shocked. “We need to bivouac somewhere exciting.”
“There’s a security duty station, not far from here, that had some bunks for folks pulling back-to-back shifts,” Tanis offered. “Does that satisfy your sense of adventure?”