by E. M. Foner
“I think I feel something,” Blythe said hopefully.” Make it go faster.”
“They’re fighting me,” Paul grunted as he tweaked the thrust of the navigation jets by hand. “I estimated the overall elasticity of the system for the calculation, but the error is causing all of these little bumps. This could take a little longer than I thought.”
Blythe drew the designer sick-up bag out of the plastic envelope and began breathing into it. “I had oatmeal with yogurt and raisins for breakfast,” she warned him between breaths. “This could be pretty gross.”
“Don’t watch the main screen!” he exclaimed after looking over to see how Blythe was doing and following her eyes. “Stupid! I should have thought of that,” he mumbled to himself, and switched the real-time simulated view of their rotating system to his small navigation monitor. Then he punched up one of the alien nature documentary channels on the main viewer.
“Oh, that’s better,” Blythe enthused, after a couple of minutes watching the small deer-like creatures with big green eyes nibbling at red fruits that friendly bushes were practically dropping in their mouths. “Everything is much nicer when it’s not spinning around.”
“We’re starting to turn pretty good now, you should weigh around ten pounds or so,” Paul informed her.
“Mmmm, better than nothing,” she agreed. “So how do you feel about Aisha?”
“What?” Paul choked out in astonishment at the non sequitur. “I’m trying to operate a very complicated system here. Don’t surprise me like that.”
“Why should you be surprised?” Blythe persisted. “Are you feeling guilty about something?”
“I’m going to try going rigid on the tow cable,” Paul replied, pointedly ignoring the question. “If it works, it should eliminate the vibrations.”
“You can have as much time as you want to answer,” Blythe offered helpfully.
“That’s not right,” Paul said, dividing his attention between the feedback from the tension sensors and his girlfriend’s sneak attack. “Uh oh.”
A bank of red lights flashed on the console, followed by a heavy impact on the hull which resulted in a shower of sparks from the main viewer. The lights blinked off and then came on again with a blue glow, indicating they were running on the emergency batteries. The slight feeling of weight vanished entirely, then came back rapidly until it reached normal gravity as the ship accelerated.
“We’re not losing any air, so if the hull was punctured it self-sealed,” Paul reported tersely. “I hit the emergency return just in case. Gryph can grab us and take our speed down gently if there’s nothing else wrong. I’ll come back and try to chase down the magic junk ball after I’ve checked the damage. Sparks are never a good sign.”
“What happened?” Blythe asked sympathetically, even though she was secretly relieved that the experiment was over.
“Cable broke,” Paul explained. “Joe’s not going to be happy if I don’t find the ball and get the magnetic grapples back. The vector of one of the navigation jets must have been a little off, so when I went rigid with the cable, it couldn’t take the angular moment. The cable’s only strength is in tension when it’s extended that far and rigid. When it broke, that cut off the current, so it went from being a long rod back into being a stretched cable and snapped back on us.”
“Are you sure you didn’t wreck your own experiment to get out of answering my question?” Blythe asked teasingly. “Or does the mere mention of her name get you so excited that you can’t fly straight.”
“Cut it out,” Paul said angrily, still upset over the failure of his maneuver and the damage to the ship. But the instant he saw the expression of forced cheerfulness on Blythe’s face crumple into a hurt look, he reached across the central console and grabbed her hand from the armrest. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head as she turned away from him. “I’m not mad at you, it’s just the experiment—no, it’s not that either. I’m mad at myself for being so confused.”
Blythe struggled to compose herself before turning back to the young man, who was truly shocked to see wet tracks below her eyes that looked suspiciously like they had been left behind by tears. In the eight years Paul had known Blythe, since he was thirteen and she was twelve, he had never seen her cry. If she had asked him to run away with her at that moment and never return to Union Station, he would have agreed.
“You’re my best friend,” Blythe finally said, her voice breaking a little with emotion. “I thought that we would always be together so I really didn’t think about it at all. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Paul confessed. “I guess I always just figured you’d tell me what to think when I needed to know.”
Blythe gripped the hand that was holding hers tightly and came around with her other fist in a roundhouse to punch Paul hard on the shoulder.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, though Paul saw the corners of her mouth twitching as she fought to restrain a grin, so he knew she was on the way back to her old self. “Am I supposed to be some kind of dictator or something?”
“It just means that I’d trust you with my life,” he replied solemnly, while looking squarely into her eyes.
“That’s not fair!” Blythe retorted, letting go of his hand and rapidly considering her options. “Are you making me responsible for your happiness? Mom always said that men are trickier than they look, but I never believed her until now.”
“I’m not trying to be tricky,” Paul replied, with one eye on his small navigation monitor as they rapidly approached the station. “I just don’t know what you want. I want you to be happy.”
“And Aisha?” Blythe asked softly.
“I want her to be happy too,” Paul admitted miserably.
“And you?” Blythe prodded.
“I just want you both to be happy,” Paul answered after a pause.
“Tricky,” Blythe summed up his responses conclusively while nodding her head. “Just tell me one thing. What is it about Aisha that’s captured you so quickly?”
“I’m not sure,” Paul replied. “Even though she has a family back on Earth, there’s something of the orphan about her that makes me want to take care of her. Maybe if I was older and she was younger, I could adopt her the way Joe adopted me.”
“I need taking care of too sometimes,” Blythe insisted.
“Really?” Paul asked in surprise.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied in irritation. “I think you’re both tricky.”
Fourteen
A group of around two dozen professional treasure hunters and wealthy auction attendees had taken over half of the Mac’s Bones campground with their family-sized cabin cruisers. Joe saw it as a mixed blessing, for while they paid cash on the barrelhead, they complained about the hook-ups, the ambiance and the neighbors. He could have forgiven the whining if they hadn’t all preferred imported wine to home brewed beer.
The only thing keeping the unusual campers at Mac’s Bones was that they had all won items in the Kasilian auction and chosen Union Station for their delivery point. It didn’t take Joe long to figure out that they believed Union Station would be the first stop for the treasure-laden Stryx science vessel, and that would give them a chance to resell their auction bargains before the galactic market was flooded with an influx of high-end items.
Despite their seemingly glamorous occupation, all but one of the moneyed campers turned out to be crashing bores with a talent for calculating percentages. The exception was an ex-mercenary named Clive Oxford, though it later turned out that he had chosen his last name earlier in the month from a brand label in an upscale clothing boutique. Clive looked to be in his late twenties, with a triangular scar on his chin that made it look like he had been shot in the face with a war arrow. Orphaned as a small boy in what might have been a space accident or a failed piracy attack, he told Joe he wasn’t sure about his exact age. He had been rescued from starvation by a Vergallian trader and grown up with no human cont
act until he was in his teens.
Joe enjoyed practicing his Vergallian on the younger man, and their common background as soldiers of fortune gave them plenty of stories to share over Joe’s homebrew. Clive had wised up to the limited career options available to young men fighting other people’s wars at a much earlier age than Joe, and he was pursuing a new career as a treasure hunter. Joe politely refrained from asking him how he came to own such a well-equipped scout ship. Beowulf also demonstrated an uncharacteristic liking for Clive from the moment the human arrived in Mac’s Bones, and even skipped a nap one time to supervise the treasure hunter’s calisthenics outside of his ship. Both men were on their third pint of the evening, though Beowulf was the only one counting.
“The trader who took me in was named Keeto, and he wasn’t a bad man for a Vergallian,” Clive told Joe in answer to the latter’s cautious questioning. “He fed me well and didn’t ask me to work any harder than he did himself. I might still be with him today if our engine core hadn’t cracked just as we were putting in to Hwoult Three for an overhaul. I was maybe sixteen by then, big for my age, and one of the local man-eaters took a fancy to me.”
“Uh oh,” Joe interjected, having had his own run-ins with Vergallian alpha-females.
“Yeah, and at that age, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. We’d had a bad run of trading and scavenging, I’ll tell you more about that in a minute, and Keeto was hard up for cash. The lady, Idree was her name, basically ran the port city, and she made it clear that Keeto could either accept a free overhaul and go on his way leaving me behind, or he would never get off the planet again. I don’t think anything scared Keeto more than being stuck on one rock for the rest of his days, and I’m not sure what he could have done even if he was willing to put his life at stake. Anyway, I went to sleep in my bunk one night and woke up in Idree’s harem.”
“Damn Vergallians,” Joe muttered under his breath, but he didn’t expand on the point because he wanted to hear the rest of the story. Beowulf was also listening, with his massive head cocked to favor his good ear.
“She was a bit of a tease, Idree, or maybe she was playing a cat-and-mouse game, because she didn’t try to dose me with those pheromones right way. By the end of the first morning, I saw enough of her other toys to know I didn’t want to become one of them, no matter what. Then I remembered Keeto had warned me before we landed that there was a human mercenary hiring hall on Hwoult Three, and that if stumbled across them, I might find myself pressed into service.”
“You know that’s just a Vergallian myth,” Joe remarked. “He probably saw one of those Grenouthian documentaries about the old Earth navies and got confused. Either that or he was afraid you’d run off.”
“Volunteer or draftee, either of them sounded pretty good to me at the moment,” Clive replied. “And sometimes I wonder if Keeto saw the whole thing coming and was making sure I had a chance for an out. Anyway, when Idree sent for me in the afternoon, we both found out that I was tougher than I looked. After a few weeks of hiding like a rat in the under-city and licking my wounds, I found a mercenary crew leaving the system and signed up. I wouldn’t have made it without the Vergallian dogs, they used to bring me scraps of food and warn me of the Queen’s patrols.”
“Makes my life sound like a walk in the park,” Joe commented, looking at Clive with new respect, as Beowulf offered up an atta-boy for the unnamed Vergallian dogs. “How about another beer?”
“Twist my arm,” Clive responded, so Joe took the young man’s mug and turned to his right to fill it from the tap, all without rising from his seat. The two men and the dog were drinking on the lower deck of the converted ice harvester, which Joe had repurposed as a brew room. Beowulf, perhaps inspired by Clive’s story, disappeared upstairs for a moment and came back with a bag of mini-pretzels, which he dropped in the young man’s lap. Clive fumbled opening the vacuum-sealed bag, maybe he had never handled one before, and a fountain of pretzels sprayed into the air. Beowulf selflessly assigned himself to clean-up detail.
“So what were you saying about a bad run of scavenging before you put into the Hwoult system for repairs?” Joe resumed the conversation.
“Right,” Clive continued his narrative after gulping a handful of pretzels and taking a long pull from his freshly drawn beer. “The thing about Keeto is that he really wasn’t much of a trader, even for a Vergallian. And he didn’t care, as long as he could keep his ship flying. His real passion was hunting ancient treasure, though he wasn’t above dropping everything and heading for the latest gold-rush, whatever the metal or mineral. Which was good for me, because even though mining is treacherous work, we did more of it on planetary surfaces than asteroids. So I got in a lot of gravity while I was growing, some of it well above Earth normal.”
“By treasure hunting, do you mean looking for old wrecks in space to scavenge?” Joe followed up. “I’ve heard stories about a few aliens striking it rich that way, but it seems to me that it’s always from an accidental find, a navigation error taking a trader off the main shipping lanes, or a badly calculated jump coming out the wrong place.”
“No, Keeto was a pretty bookish guy,” Clive replied. “He told me he would have stayed on Vergal and spent his life studying history if he hadn’t needed to work for a living. I’ve never met an alien who knew so many dead languages, he claimed that reading things in translation just isn’t the same. He would spend most of his time on the ship sitting like a statue as he read through whatever historical records he could load onto his heads-up display to look for clues to extinct civilizations. Next thing I knew, we would find ourselves decked out in environmental suits trudging over some wasteland of a world, looking for clues to lost cities. And you know what? We found a few over the years, but they were always stripped nearly bare of anything worth taking and selling, not that Keeto was ever disappointed. It was as much about seeing history first-hand as making a living to him.”
“And you caught the bug yourself?” Joe inquired sympathetically.
“I want to find something that no living man has seen before,” Clive admitted, a little shame-faced. “It’s not that I don’t care about galactic history, and I guess I learned something about it from the old Vergallian’s conversation. But putting down on some rock that had its atmosphere ripped away hundreds of millions of years ago and looking for traces of an underground city, it’s in my blood.”
“Not all civilizations end with a catastrophic war or a planetary scale disaster,” Joe commented philosophically. “I was on a rescue mission to a planet behind the Mengoth lines around twenty years ago, some place that showed up on the nav console as a number code since it didn’t even have a name. No signs of technology or advanced civilization, but the land masses were covered in dense jungle like you wouldn’t believe. We landed on the ship’s transponder beacon, it was a scout that had gone down after colliding with space junk the moment it came out of a jump, and the vegetation had practically covered the ship less than a month after it crashed.”
“Did you get your people back?” the younger man asked, as he draped a hand over the dog’s back and scratched behind Beowulf’s ears.
“Yes. Although the stuff growing on that world was poison to humans, there was plenty of water they could sterilize and the emergency dehydrated rations held them over. The point is, the crew had nothing else to do while they waited for rescue or starvation, so they took turns exploring. And practically within shouting distance of their crash site, what looked like a small vine-covered mountain turned out to be an ancient city made of some kind of glass substance that the vegetation couldn’t crack. They were systematically searching for an entrance when we showed up, and I swear, you never saw people less excited over being rescued. If it wasn’t for the rations running low and the possibility that the Mengoths spotted our ship entering the system, I think we would have needed to use force to pry them away. For all I know, they may have gone back later.”
“That’s exactly what it’s like!” Cl
ive declared, giving Beowulf a friendly thump on the side. “There’s something about discovering an ancient structure that makes you crazy to look inside. That’s why I’m here,” he added, watching Joe closely as if he expected to read something from the older man’s face.
“Maybe there are some ancient locked doors on Union Station, but even if you find them, it’s not very likely the Stryx will let you open them,” Joe said doubtfully.
“Oh, it’s not the secrets of the Stryx I’m after,” Clive replied with a laugh, seeing that Joe was totally in the dark about his real quest. “And I see they are as good as their word about keeping the confidence of strangers, even from their friends. I came here because it’s rumored that the Kasilians have the last known Key of Eff.”
“Isn’t that a musical thing?” Joe asked. “It doesn’t sound like something you can run out of.”
“It’s a captain’s key,” the young man explained excitedly. His eyes bright with fervor, he leaned towards Joe and lowered his voice as if he was worried somebody might be listening. “You’ve heard of the Effterii, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Joe admitted complacently.
“The legends say that they were the Stryx before the Stryx existed,” Clive expounded. “Of course, nobody has records going back that far, not even the Stryx, so much of what I know is from hints and passing references in ancient epics or inscriptions. Keeto made the Effterii his life’s work, he would trade everything of value we had on board for the slightest bit of information, even if the source was dubious. I started discussing it with the librarian on the last Stryx station I visited and got referred to Libby, who told me to come here. One of the things that everybody agrees on is that there was a live Key of Eff in the imperial museum of Thark at one time, but the whole collection was lost during their civil war. I believe it ended up in Kasilian hands.”