Ion 417: Raiju

by James Darcey

  After all the rest had made its way down the opening, I was faced with the fact that no matter how I tried, there was no way to squish that mattress down small enough. I had even managed to snap the frames on the images to crumple them small enough, but the mattress just wouldn't go. I settled for knowing that the sheets were gone. He would never have slept on the bare mattress, so it was fine. I dragged it back to the bed and sat on it as I admired the now very empty looking room.

  Although the room really didn't feel like 'me', it had lost all feel of the capricious manipulator. I was going to have to spend time trying to figure out just what it would take to be 'mine'. The plastic coated walls in my box would have felt familiar, but they had never been something I liked. The lab morons had never talked to me, let alone asked for my ideas in decorating that box I was shoved into. I just didn't have any experience to know what was even on the list of options to choose from.

  In the other staterooms I found bedding that fit a smaller bed, but I would use it rather than the stuff Teyrn Elon had slept in. Whoever had needed those sheets wasn't Teyrn Elon, and wasn't along on this trip. I even grabbed a few items from the shelves in the other rooms. I had no idea what most of them were, but I did know that they were things to put on shelves.

  I spent a few more hours idly rearranging various useless decorations that for some reason looked better than bare walls and shelves. It was very different feeling the thrill of turning the room into something that was my choice. This felt like the first of many choices that freedom would allow me to make. It was my life on my terms.

  With the decorating done, I moved all the remaining boxes down to the cargo bay where they could be with the other stuff stored there. The whirlwind destruction of Teyrn Elon's influence had felt good, but it had hardly even taken the edge off my craving for exercise. I had left my elaborate exercise setup back on the orbital lab, so I had to improvise with available methods. I alternated between running up and down the stairs and lifting boxes in the hold for two hours. I missed having the tangle of bars to flip through and the treadmill to run on, but my make-shift routine served to burn off most of the energy I had built up with the decorating.

  I was actually breathing hard when I ran up the stairs for the last time. Traxel had come out of hiding, and was watching a holo in the common room when I got there. It seemed to be a report about some humanoids in transports chasing other transports while firing weapons at them. The Cardovans being chased were also firing weapons at the pursuers. When I inquired of him how he had managed to get event reports in high drive he let out another series of those high pitched chirps.

  "We can't. This is an entertainment holo I pulled out of the ship's data files. I have them stored for review when I get called away on short notice trips. I guess this qualifies as such. Haven't you seen this one before? It's pretty much a classic."

  "People find violence entertaining?"

  "This would be described as a rehearsed portrayal of a fictitious event, intended to be enjoyed because people don't like actually being in danger themselves. The plasma bolts are just light effects."

  I shook my head in amazement. There were so many things I had never read anything about. I sat down to watch it with him, and had to admit that the stimulation did trigger a few responses in me, even though I knew I wasn't anywhere near where this was happening.

  We talked for a while as he explained that a lot of entertainment holos were created using elaborate simulations of fictitious events. He even pointed out how some of the explosions would not have happened from the action going on at the time. The people making the portrayal had rigged them all beforehand to make it look more realistic. By now the Cardovans in the holo had proceeded to wrestle with each other, or perhaps this was a mating ritual I was viewing. I prepared a roasted gourd filled with meats to enjoy while watching it. All the wonderful flavors of the food again reminded me of the bland nature of the water on the ship. I would have to resolve that issue soon.

  When the holo ended he left to enter his stateroom, leaving me to sit alone in the quiet of the common room. Suddenly there didn't seem to be a lot I could do. Maybe it was what seemed to be the short list of things that I wanted to do, and were available to do on the ship. I could take a break from digging out every scrap of information from the terminal for now.

  After pacing the length of the common room several times, and test sitting in each of the cockpit seats, I thought about the cabinet full of games. Maybe I could try to play all four sides of a Releso game. I attempted to set up the Releso game, but the instructions seemed to be incomplete. I stared at the tiny colored pieces for a while, before dumping them all back into the box. When he decided to wake up again I hoped that he knew how to play; In the meantime I returned to my stateroom to stare at the images I had mounted on the wall. They portrayed scenes that I longed to see in person. Freedom would give me that chance. It led me to wondering what Terra must look like.

  I slept nearly an hour longer than normal according to the ship's chrono. The first thing I did upon waking, was to start my daily routine. That thought got sidetracked when I noticed the water in the shower feeling very odd. Traxel was apparently still in his room, so I headed down to engineering to investigate the problem without asking for his aid. After all, I had played around with recycler controls before. Just how difficult would it be to fix the problem? I would just re-balance the chemical levels and I'd have my water again. Any chemistry student should have no problems with that.

  I spent quite a lot of time deciding which machines belonged to which system. Though I had messed around with the controls for a recycler before, I'd never even seen a drawing of one. Stellar drive and high drive were reasonably obvious, as was power generation. What I guessed to be life support seemed to be tied into just about everything. That left the recycling system to be this other machine.

  I grabbed the tool carrier from the repair locker and proceeded to pull off the panels. There wasn't much room for crawling into the access, but after I had wiggled a bit I found myself looking at sections that were labeled for thrust vectoring, and field density regulator. That didn't sound right. I reinstalled those panels and took a second evaluation of machines. If that was something for the engines, then that meant.... This panel had to be recycler.

  I pulled the panels off that machine and was rewarded with things labeled for flow direction and contaminate levels. This looked more like recycler systems. I wiggled myself inside and proceeded to test the operation of controls. I'd only been working for a few minutes when there was a shrill screech and Traxel was dragging me out of the hole by my foot.

  "I thought you had enough of trying to commit suicide for everyone onboard!"

  "What are you talking about? I'm trying to fix the water recycler. How is that committing suicide?"

  He pointed a shaking finger into the hole he had dragged me out of.

  "That!... That's the zeta field's interstage cooling system! If you shut that down then the z field overheats in a few minutes and collapses. We're in high drive, and that means when it folds in on itself it'll take us with it, folding everything into nothing!"

  He paused for a moment to calm a bit. His voice sounded a little steadier when he spoke again.

  "At least that's the theory since nobody has come back from something like that to say what really happens."

  He pointed to a machine two panels away.

  "That's the recycler, and it's working perfectly! See the indicators? All within specs."

  I tried explaining to him that the water felt wrong. Only the more I talked the crazier I thought I sounded. There was no way that I could convince him it was all messed up if even I thought I sounded like a fool. After the third try I think I sounded a little more sane with telling him the water was bland.

  "Water is hydrogen and oxygen, period! Sometimes the recycler is a bit off and lets a few parts per trillion through, but nothing you should feel or taste. The readings all say that it's working perfectly.
Do you think that the mighty Teyrn Elon, Head of Flux Genetics special projects division, would settle for bad water?"

  I replaced the panels I'd removed and put the tool carrier back in the repair locker. He stood behind me to make sure I was done tinkering with vital machinery.

  "It's a good thing the ship alarmed to tell me about your tampering or we'd both be dead by now! On a starship for one day, and already you think you're an expert."

  Now that he pointed it out to me so bluntly I realized that he was correct. I'd been too blinded by the differences to realize that I hadn't been having pure water in my room. I tried thinking back to my time of playing the recycler game. I could remember that there were listings for chloride, magnesium, sodium, potassium, and a few other things as well. Now the big question came as to why they had given me water with so many things in it. I didn't have an answer, and I wasn't about to send a message to ask the one person who would know. I wasn't even going to ask if it was possible to send a comm to Teyrn Elon.

  There was no way to add those minerals that I'd grown accustomed to. Even if I could somehow find a way to add them, they would probably end up poisoning Traxel. So far he was a useful pilot, and if I needed to get rid of him it would be less painful to toss him out of the airlock. I just hope that the lack of those chemicals could be alleviated by the new foods I was eating.

  I got into a routine with my exercise, where I could lift boxes in the cargo bay, substituting various boxes for different weights. The extreme terrain shelter was for the heavy push part of my weights, and the portable AI was the warm-up routine. The novelty of the hover cycle had me sitting on it several times, with imagined scenery flying by at five hundred kilometers per hour. According to Traxel it could go up to two hundred before the wheels folded up for full hover mode.

  Every time I went down the ladder to the lower decks, Traxel would follow me if he was awake. He got really nervous every time I ventured near the engineering section, even though I promised not to open anything else without asking him first. I never liked the feeling of not being able to control the things that affected my life, and here I was dependent upon a machine that I knew so little about.

  It helped a lot to have him show me which machines were where, as it was very obvious that the ship had undergone extensive rebuilding in the time since it was first launched. Still the basic arrangement was similar, which I guess was to be expected. I mean there are certain things that a starship needs or it just won't go. Or there's the option of having it go and the people inside not breathing, so it needs certain stuff in order to be a starship. Traxel's explanation of the differences was that The Teyrn liked to tweak everything to his particular liking.

  Being in space, there is a lot of time for everything. I didn't feel like sleeping for too many hours, and even exercise has its limits. So, after exploring about all I could explore that left coercing Traxel into teaching me how to play some games. We watched a few of his classic holos, and alternated with games. This was thrilling to be doing something with somebody. I mean somebody that wasn't testing the adhesion of my skin to the underlying muscles.

  His favorite was one called Rampari. It seemed a simple strategy conquest game at first. However the rules seemed to get more complicated every time we played. The red ship can capture an amber or black ship in a diagonal upward shift, unless there was a solar flare within two parsecs. In that case it had to shift downward for capture. However if the teal ship carried the plasma diplomat then the amber ship could escape by shifting three squares to the right. Or maybe that was three squares up. All I knew for certain was that no matter how many games we played I could never win. My memory was starting to seem a little fuzzy on the details.

  By the sixth day out I was starting to feel weakened. I could still exercise and move fine, but I felt like I had no energy. I know that it must be really bad if I noticed it without thinking about it. My skin was feeling about as smooth as the packing containers in the hold. I was even having a hard time getting an arc to jump more than about fifty or sixty centimeters. I wasn't sure I was still thinking as clearly, and even Traxel noticed I was less enthusiastic about everything. He even claimed I was eating more.

  When he caught me tripping on the stairs, I mean ladder, he insisted that I get checked out. The side table converted to a bio-bed, and I lay on it to endure the scan. I think I remembered reading about that in the manual, but hadn't spent much time on the ancillary systems. Surprisingly, the scan wasn't even painful. A part of my mind was screaming at me that here I was getting tested again, while another part was reassuring me that this was my choice. After all, I could get up any time I wanted. I wasn't strapped into this scanner as I had been in the lab.

  The bio-scanner system went to work measuring all sorts of things including a sample of blood it had taken. Traxel was muttering about how the readings were very odd for an Indigal. They didn't match any of the species he thought I might be. He waved aside the question as to what species I was supposed to be. He was busy pacing back and forth muttering about how odd it was because the information was automatically updated every time the ship docked.

  I had to assure Traxel that I was unusual; in fact I might be the only one like me. At last I told him to try looking under project 417. He gave me an odd glance but keyed in the request. It popped up readings on the screen that matched pretty well. It told how I was low on some enzymes, likely caused by nutritional imbalance. Recommendations were to increase intake of several minerals. Some of the missing minerals could be obtained from simple salt, and others from mineral spices, but a few would be hard to obtain aboard the ship.

  Now I knew why the water tasted funny to me. They had been giving me needed minerals with each drink. This also explained some of my food cravings. My body had been trying to find the missing minerals in another source. I opened the salt dispenser and took a few mouthfuls of that, washing it down with some of the bland water.

  I was pawing through the packages in the food locker, finding a few ocean dwelling things, while only half listening to Traxel ramble on about how he had just known that my bio information had to be in the system because the ship had been docked to the lab. This also confirmed my status as an escapee, and not a pirate. The Teyrn would never want to be without medical facilities in some of the places he visited.

  "Not to worry. This ship was originally a fast courier. Since you said the lab had monitored your bio scans I knew the ship had to have the information because the fast couriers always updated medical information when docked and just like the other high drive ships they... Oh Farslec! I almost forgot about that!"

  He left me in the common room happily munching on some root vegetable that, well it smelled good. I followed along, intrigued by this sudden panic of his. If something panicked him it was probably not a good thing. I found him sitting in the pilot's seat punching buttons and scrutinizing the readouts. Every one of them that he pressed brought with it another little exclamation as the results further alarmed his already nervous nature. Just when I thought he was about to explode, he jumped out of the seat to run past me, headed for the common room. He fairly screamed in my face sounding very panicked.

  "We've got about thirteen hours! Plus or minus about twelve hours!"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We'll drop out of high drive at Reliance Station Sugnoff in about thirteen hours!"

  "Reliance Station?"

  My strength was rapidly returning, and we launched into a heated argument about how we were ending up in Sugnoff system, when I had programmed in Sol system. For all the stuff I had studied, I knew that changing course mid high drive was tantamount to suicide. As it came out, in those moments that we were outpacing the missiles, he had taken the time to re-plot our course so that he could escape me.

  I had planned many things about this escape, but without experience there were a few things I had never thought to consider -- for instance, the fuel capacity of the ship, and whether it had been fully fueled from
the start. As it turned out, Teyrn would fuel up before departure, which I hadn't. The ship normally carried enough fuel to go about fifty parsecs. Terra was about a hundred parsecs away, and Teyrn had used it for some runs a few months ago. There had only been enough fuel in the ship to last about thirty parsecs when I commandeered it.

  He had taken the few moments before kicking in the high drive to change the navigation to Reliance because it was the first place he could think of to jump ship and escape me. He thought that if he could get away then Teyrn Elon would be too busy chasing me to even think of him.

  He shoved aside my protests of anger with the exclamation that this was a fast courier. His outburst kept coming back to that tiny point. Of course this meant little to me until the significance was explained. It didn't matter what he'd been thinking then; what mattered was the reality we faced now.

  High drive ships are equipped with auto-comm devices to share the latest events when they arrive at systems. This is how the news can travel faster than light speed. Fast couriers take this one step further and dump out a record of their logs and messages to the navigation control centers of the system when they arrive. They also dump any classified logs to the associated contact list. When they were first built that had been a military base, but now it would be the local offices of Flux Genetics.

  "Teyrn Elon will have sent a message that the ship was stolen! We are carrying the message of our doom in our own databanks, and when we come out of high drive it will give us away. Flux genetics has offices in several systems, such as Reliance Station in Sugnoff!"

  Our only chance to escape being tossed into a cage for stealing a ship was to prevent the auto-comm from telling them the ship was stolen. Of course the initial instinct for those stealing a ship is to damage the comm-system sufficient to prevent the broadcast. That was the reason it was almost a universal law to invoke piracy laws, and apprehend those ships that failed to broadcast the messages. Reliance Station was home to a very efficient system guard too.