by Greg Curtis
Babies seemed an opportunity too good to pass up. Children half of Leinia and half of Earth would tie the two worlds together, and maybe keep the mission here. Maybe later she'd have a talk with Heather and Dafi, Something about what a blessing it was to have a family. And then of course the doctors who thought no one knew about them as they carried on in secret. Foolish of them. Everyone knew, except for the Leinians of course.
And of course there was one more thing she could do to push things her way. She could break down this strange resistance they had to letting humans travel into space with them. They were worried that it might perhaps set an example. Maybe allow some of their technology to fall into the wrong hands. Human hands that was.
“You know Lar, -” Alice almost felt sorry for him as she set about ruining all his carefully thought out plans, “- this is a big thing. We can't have a baby like this born here. They need a proper hospital. And one far away from any of David's other enemies.”
Her words must have hit a nerve. Lar stopped dead in his tracks midsentence and stared at her, and she could almost see the wheels turning behind his eyes as he thought about it. Weighing up the risks against the need, and knowing she was right. If nothing else they had to protect the baby. And he didn't know it yet but there might be three more primitive human beings soon taking that ride to the stars behind David. Especially if she had her way.
“David has the right to travel to Leinia and bring his family with him.” He stared at her, mulling over her words. “And it would be safer.”
“I'm not talking about David. He's an adult. He can make up his own mind about where he wants to travel and live. So can Cyrea. But the baby is a child of both worlds. She needs to be protected starting with her birth, and then when she's old enough, freely able to travel as she chooses.” And there was the rub. If the child was to decide to spend time on Earth, then something of the mission had to remain there to make sure she was safe.
“This isn't our world. We're only visitors here.”
“You are, but not David, Cyrea or their baby. Nor any more babies they may have. Nor any of the other couples and the babies they may have. They are of both worlds now. Like it or not, your mission has changed. At some stage you're going to have to make contact and set up an embassy. Unless of course you plan on either violating all these people's rights and abducting them back to Leinia or else abandoning them here.”
Lar closed his eyes and buried his face in one of his hands, and Alice was almost sure she could hear groaning. It took a lot of willpower to keep from smiling when she knew her point had been made.
Who would have thought? One child had changed the course of the world before it was even born.
Chapter Twenty Six
“You know I’ve always thought of space travel as something glorious and exciting, and here you seem to have made it into something almost boring. There’s no rockets, no cockpit, no astronauts, no sensation of movement, no nothing. I could just as easily be on Earth.” Which didn’t come anywhere close to describing how let down he’d felt at arriving on a space ship and finding it was nothing more than an apartment block, though it was shaped like a giant golf ball.
Yet who was he to complain? A humble Earthling, off for the first time in his planet’s history to see the stars, or at least one in particular, Leinia. If and when this ever got out he would be famous, on Earth at least, though no doubt the rest of the universe wouldn’t have cared. And more than that, he was off on a voyage to make sure his daughter was born safely in the most advanced hospital possible. Not that the doctors thought there was anything wrong with their baby; there wasn’t. It was just that given all the unknowns and the impossibility of it all, they wanted to make sure and David had readily enough agreed. Not for the trip, though that was amazing, but for his family.
Cyrea was still having doubts, or actually not so much doubts as waking nightmares, as she imagined every possible thing that could go wrong. And if the truth be told, despite his calming noises he wasn’t much better. So the offer of a trip to their most advanced hospital, had been something he’d jumped at every bit as quickly as Cyrea. His only regret is that they'd waited two months before leaving. The doctors had said it would be best for the baby. So for two months he'd been beside himself with excitement. Impatient as a child waiting to open his Christmas presents.
As presents went the trip might be a bit of a fizzer. But so what if the ride didn’t match his imagination? He would have ridden a yak train bare back if it had come with a guarantee of a successful birth and happy, healthy daughter. Compared with that this was only boring. Like a ride in a jumbo jet instead of going sky diving.
The ship itself, or what he’d seen of it while they’d been docking, had been unimpressive at best, which was his real complaint. It looked like nothing more than a steel baseball in space. No rockets, nothing that even looked like either a nose or tail, no fins or wings, and in fact not even port holes. Just a giant steel ball hanging there in the black of space behind the moon. And even the moon, lost as it was in the eternal dark, hadn’t been that inspiring. Just a big hunk of rock hanging in space.
Logically he knew though, as Cyrea had told him several times, that the ship had no need of any of the things he dreamed of. It had no rockets, because it sprinted away from the solar system on antigravity, the most powerful drive known, though in truth it was more akin to falling away from their solar system. And in fact, if it wasn’t for the artificial gravity fields put in place on the ship, everyone and everything inside the ship would be in permanent free fall. However, the crewman who had shown them to their quarters had told him that there currently was no other form of interstellar propulsion capable of matching the incredible acceleration of their antigravity drive. And even if there had been it wouldn’t have been usable. Anything that could accelerate the same way would have left everyone inside the ship as a form of soup on the floors, assuming that the ship even they survived.
Given the incredible distances between stars, acceleration at hundreds of gravities had to be maintained for weeks and months to get anywhere before the pilot became an old man. A ship accelerating at just one gravity, or the same acceleration as a man would achieve falling off a cliff, would take just over one Earth year to reach the speed of light. Then, the journey to Alpha Centauri, the closest star would take another year or so, followed by yet another year or two of deceleration. Three or four years to reach their nearest neighbour, and the journey to Leinia was hundreds of light years further than that.
This humble golf ball in space was actually accelerating at hundreds of gravities, even as he complained it wasn’t moving at all. The magic of their technology was so advanced that it couldn’t even be felt. The Leinians had other perfectly logical explanations for why the ship had none of the other stuff he’d imagined either.
For a start there was no such thing as a warp drive, though the Leinians enjoyed Star Trek perhaps even more than humble earthlings. But space like time was immutable, unable to be stretched or folded. If it wasn’t, the universe would have collapsed billions of years before as the huge gravitational fields of stars and black holes tore it apart. Meanwhile the speed of light was merely the fastest speed that light could travel at, not anything else. Nor was there such a thing as hyperspace despite the endless books written about it.
The ship had no nose or tail, because there wasn’t any atmosphere in space to cause friction, and any dust would be handled by gravitational shields. For the same reason it had no fins, no wings or tail. And with no nose, why would it need a cockpit? The control quarters were actually right in the centre of the ship, where the crew could get to them fastest from wherever they happened to be. Port holes were completely redundant when at any fraction of the speed of light, the equivalent of the Doppler effect would mean that nothing was visible outside anyway. Computers inside could give a much better idea of what the ship was passing through, as well as displaying any other image he might want to see. And as for fusing any form
of mere glass into solid titanium alloy panels, the engineers would have had a fit at the very idea.
The explanations all made so much sense and were perfectly logical. But logic had no place among his childhood dreams of space travel, and he couldn’t help but lament the loss he felt. Cyrea curled up into his arms as he complained, the most cheeky smile on her face.
“Oh I wouldn’t say that. It does have some advantages.” He would have asked but wasn’t given the chance. She spoke quickly in her native language, and the next thing he knew they were falling. He grabbed for her in a sudden panic, and then in time realized they weren’t falling at all. They were flying! They weren’t going to hit anything. They were just weightless. Cyrea had turned off the artificial gravity in their quarters.
He started laughing then, unable to stop himself, as the reality of the impossible hit him. He was floating, he was flying. Experimentally he did a small flip, just a single tip of one of his feet against the floor and they were cart wheeling gracefully through the cabin. It was unbelievable as his eyes showed him the passage of their movement, and his body told him he was falling. It was both scary and fantastic at the same time, as he kept waiting and waiting for them to hit something, and yet they never did.
But no sooner had they reached the far wall then he took off again. Unable to stop himself he tried another and another flight, until soon he was rocketing through space, spinning, diving, somersaulting, oblivious to the floor far below, while Cyrea hung on tight and made sure he didn't do anything too dangerous.
He was a child all over again.
Who cared if there was no such thing as a rocket, or even the sensation of movement? Weightlessness like this was a thrill beyond anything he’d ever imagined. Far beyond the limited weightlessness he’d known when he was strapped in to a diving jet. This was awesome!
Unexpectedly there was a small sound, and he looked down to find Cyrea’s hand reaching inside his jeans. Soon his pants had been pushed down and his briefs pulled aside and she had what she wanted in the palm of her hand.
“So you’ve heard of the mile high club?” She was grinning from ear to ear and suddenly so was he.
As she had reached and then taken what she wanted, so did he. Her skirt and panties, became a memory in seconds and her flesh loomed before him, bait before a hungry fish. He took the bait, his hands finding all that they wanted to and he started to set her on fire, while his lips found her nipples. Meanwhile he felt his top being yanked up and knew Cyrea was doing the same.
“Close your eyes love, and let me work. I’ve been looking forward to this since the moment you said you’d come with me. It’s your first time in free fall, and I want you to remember this for the rest of your life. Besides, I owe you an apology for the first time I cheated in a fight with you, and a big, big thank you for our daughter. This is my present to you.” He tried to tell her she owed him nothing, that he surely owed her far more, and that he had dreamed his whole life of taking a trip on a space ship, but she wouldn’t hear it and slowly he gave in to her wishes. This was her show. He felt her hands eagerly stripping away the last of his clothes while her lips caressed his entire body. Then she let them wander down his belly heading south and he shuddered with pleasure.
“You know, I seem to recall the first time we did this, you were a little nervous about something. Worried perhaps that I might bite it off.” She was licking her lips as she played with him, teasing him mercilessly as she offered him paradise.
“Still feel that way?” She knew he didn’t, partly by the way he had hardened in her grasp at the very thought. “That’s what I thought.”
Maybe space travel didn’t have to be so boring after all.
Chapter Twenty Seven
David’s first inkling that something was wrong was when the sirens started wailing all across the ship, typically just while he was settling down to a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the mess area. Naturally, he had no idea what the alarms meant; in fact they sounded more like his alarm clock than any siren he’d ever heard, but their monotonous sound and the people rising hastily from their seats all around him and heading for the doors told him what they were and one thing more; that it was serious.
Taking his cue from the rest he quickly rose to his feet and began following them, just hoping they weren’t heading for the life boats. Cyrea had shown him the tiny two man pods as part of his familiarization with the ship, and they looked anything but comfortable for any length of time. Fortunately, before heading to the outer ring of the golf ball shaped ship the crew turned left and rushed down two flights of steps to the common room, which doubled as the meeting area.
It was there that Cyrea and himself would spend their evenings, playing some of the strange board games that her people found so amusing, or listening to music, or even playing darts. Darts it seemed was a universal game with all races having a version. The Leinians’ version consisted of a large round board with three bulls eyes, and darts that were distinctly too long with strange reed like tails, but he could still play the game. In fact after three weeks aboard ship, he was almost becoming quite reasonable at it. But this time there was clearly no recreation intended.
Instead once most of the thirty or so passengers had gathered in the room, the captain’s voice suddenly boomed out of thin air, making him jump. That was another of the technological masteries of the Leinians that he could never get used to, they didn’t use loud speakers. Instead, by using directed force fields they could make the very air vibrate anywhere, so it seemed as though the speaker was right beside you. But even as he flinched it was to feel Cyrea’s hand on his shoulder as she had appeared out of nowhere to stand beside him. He held her tight.
“Good people, I’m sorry to have to tell you that for the last thirteen and a half Earth hours we’ve been under attack from an alien vessel. That’s why we’ve been changing course so much, causing all the gravity ripples that may have upset many of you. We’ve been taking evasive manoeuvres as we’ve received warning shots from some sort of plasma cannon across our bow.” That caused a flurry of chatter among the passengers as everyone started trying to speak at once, trying to confirm with their neighbour that the captain had actually just said what they thought he had.
It was a shock to David too as he fiddled with his ear piece which translated the Leinian's words into English, wondering perhaps if it had malfunctioned somehow. This was a peaceful universe according to everything he’d ever been told. And they'd been under attack for thirteen hours and he'd never known? That seemed very wrong somehow. Where were the laser blasts and explosions? And what could he do about it? He hadn't planned for a space battle. When he’d thought of emergencies he’d thought of a fire or some sort of mechanical problem, maybe even a sudden decompression, but never piracy. And thirteen hours? Why hadn’t somebody told them earlier? Not that there was anything they could have done. But at least it explained the repeated bouts of nausea he and the others had endured. Unperturbed the captain carried on, and they quickly shushed and listened to him again.
“Unfortunately we’ve now lost the battle, he’s hit us with a damper field, which has shut our drives down, and the only power we have left is reserves, which won’t last more than a day or two at best, and now he’s towing us at high gravities well off our original course.” Being towed? Faster than the speed of light? David had never considered the possibility, though he wasn’t surprised they’d lost. Other than a meteor blasting laser beam, the ship was unarmed, something else that had surprised him about their ship. Where were the phasers? But why would their assailant tow them? If robbery was the intent, surely he’d just board them and take whatever he wanted. Not that there was anything to steal. And what other reason could there be? There was of course no answer. The captain didn’t know and their enemy hadn’t bothered to tell them.
“We’ve sent out distress signals as best we can, but we think the other ship’s blocking them somehow, and in any case the nearest military vessel is surely many ligh
t years away. We can’t count on any help from them.”
“But what’s important now is that our long range sensors, those that are still working, are telling us we’re heading for a system. An empty system. And it’s clear that this is his destination from the fact that we’re slowing down. Another four hours at our best guess, and we’ll be in orbit around the second world. He has a much more advanced drive than our own. At least twenty times as powerful.” Was there some bitterness in the Captain’s translated voice? David thought there might be. But more important than that was the fact that the drive was more advanced. If the drive was more advanced, then so too was the technology of the attacker. Which meant surely, if he understood the political landscape of interstellar space at all, the attacker was from one of the more advanced races, of which there were only two. The Floyd and the Mentans.