by J. S. Morin
“Less trouble carrying it,” Amy replied. “It’s not that heavy.”
Carl shrugged, abdicating any opinion of his own.
Roddy rolled his eyes but didn’t comment. He’d gotten used to the vibe between Carl and Tanny. They were always either at each other’s throats or up each other’s plumbing. Not a lot of middle ground. Watching him with Amy, he could hardly reconcile it as a relationship in Carlish terms. Amy shot pool, played computer games, gambled, and appreciated the artistic merit of a holovid that was all action and no plot. If Roddy hadn’t taken human anatomy in primary school, he would have sworn she was one of the guys. Aside from an occasional hint of mate attraction behavior, that’s how the two of them interacted.
He was still standing dumbfounded when Carl called back to him. “Hey, take is easy, OK? Make some use of that guitar you’re stealing back. Your job will still be here when this mission’s over. And maybe see a med scanner about that limp.”
Limp? Roddy took a few tentative steps down the corridor, paying attention to an activity that was normally handled by one of the most autonomous regions of the laaku brain. What he found wasn’t a hip or leg pain causing him to favor one side, but rather something held surreptitiously in the palm of his foot. Passing the offending item to a hand closer to his eyes, Roddy found that he’d been carrying his multi-tool.
It was the most versatile weapon in the modern mechanic’s arsenal. With a few twists or flips, it could be used to loosen or tighten bolts, cut, solder, or weld small parts, pry, tap, poke holes, or even diagnose low-power electrical issues. He never went anywhere without it, but it typically resided in a pocket of his coveralls. What was he doing with it out? What was he doing hiding it from Carl?
# # #
Esper sighed as she sat down on the foot of her bunk aboard the Mobius. Her quarters on the Odysseus were lavish by comparison, formerly occupied by an Earth Navy lieutenant commander. But this felt strangely more like home. It wasn’t Mars, where she’d been born and raised, or Bentus VIII where she’d spent years teaching in service of the One Church. But in the relatively short time she’d spent aboard the Mobius, it had found a special place in her heart.
Easing off her telekinesis spell, a crate that had followed her aboard like a puppy settled to the floor. Popping the lid, Esper browsed through the cache of foodstuffs she’d packed for the trip. Provisions had always been hit-or-miss for Carl and his crew, and Esper wasn’t looking forward to switching to a diet of stale sandwich bread and expired cold cuts halfway through the mission. The few supply runs by the Ithaca syndicate had yielded honest-to-goodness edible food. Esper had brought along self-cooling yogurt packs, a month’s supply of Snakki Bars, and three different brands of coffee, all of which had been grown from plants rather than being synthesized in a lab. Lord preserve her if she had to resort to Reddi Brew for another trip. Of course, the coincidence wasn’t lost on her that Reddi Brew was made by Friendli Foods Intergalactic, the same company that produced her beloved Snakki Bars.
Carl’s voice piped up over the ship-wide comm. “Need anything planetside? Speak now or forever hold your peace. Takeoff in under two.”
Home. It wasn’t a planetside sort of thing anymore. It was a cozy place where people knew who she was, liked her, and wanted her around. On Mars, she had always tried to be someone else. On Bentus VIII, she was more tolerated than liked. Even on Ithaca, most of the syndicate considered her vaguely dangerous. Mort prowled the jungles with Mriy and a search party of Odysseus crewmen. The lost marines who’d joined Devraa fled before him. When he found their cities and their ancient places of power, he tore them to the ground. Mort was a wizard. Esper was a wizard. It was hard to be liked by people who feared you.
Esper found the comm panel on the wall of her quarters and opened a channel to the cockpit. “All set down here.”
Home was more than a place, though. It was people. And there had been a lot of changes aboard the Mobius. Esper had gone from being the new girl to being the lone holdover so quickly she still couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Over on the far side of the common room was an empty bunk. Despite Carl’s last-minute efforts to recruit one more member for the mission, no one wanted Mort’s sleeping quarters. Moreover, no one wanted to be the one to remove the wizard’s belongings.
Then it occurred to her. She wasn’t a passenger this time. Esper was the astral drive. Sometime in the next five or ten minutes, the Mobius would exit orbital space around Ithaca and come to a dead stop. Usually, that was the point where Mort took over, convincing the universe to nudge the ship sideways relative to all three dimensions of scientific space and into the astral.
Outside the window of her quarters, the hangar moved. It first sank away, then rushed past horizontally. Thanks to the wonders of Mort’s gravity enchantment, there was no physical sensation of motion—yet another aspect of the job that was beyond her understanding. She continued watching as mountains and trees rushed past below, then a bank of clouds briefly obscured her view. After that, it was a short while until the Mobius climbed free of the moon’s atmosphere.
In one corner of her quarters, a wooden staff loitered against the wall as if waiting for her. It was Earthwood, older than the planet-wide ban on logging, and it belonged to Mort. When he had sneaked aboard and placed it there was anyone’s guess. Obviously, he’d realized well in advance that the next trip for the Mobius would be without him. Taking a long, slow breath, Esper stood, claimed the staff, and carried it out to the ship’s common room. She had a job to do.
# # #
Dr. Akerman wasn’t bad looking, by human standards. Nothing too angular in the face. Not freakishly tall. And unlike so many humans who went one extreme or another on the color spectrum, she had a nice soft brown tone that he could almost imagine as fur. It was about that point when Roddy knew he was getting desperate for female companionship. But that wasn’t why he was in Trisha Akerman’s office.
“I tell you, I was wide awake. I had my guitar and a half-full mug of Reddi Brew. I was upright—eyes open. I’d just said a quick goodbye to my replacement, Jean Niang. All I could think was to take a last look at my engine room before it left without me. That’s when it happened. I had this vivid daydream, like I was walking through an ultra hi-res holo-projector field. I saw all the shit they’d changed. You’d probably think it was minor stuff—real technical minutiae—but I practically lived down there for years. Spent more time in that engine room than in my quarters. Hell, I hid beer down there.”
Dr. Akerman nodded. “And how did you know this was a hallucination?”
Roddy leaned his head back over the arm of the easy chair he was sprawled across. He gave the human psychologist his best condescending glare. “Well, I clearly wasn’t just standing in my own engine room gawking if the next thing I know I was in a hallway, getting out of the way of Carl and Amy coming through with a polymer steel footlocker. If I’d had my head any farther up my own ass, I’d have gotten bulldozed into the deck plates. Those two sure as hell don’t have their heads on straight these days.”
“And you can’t recall how you got from the engine room to the hallway?”
Roddy opened each of his hands in a poof gesture. “Nothing. Zip. Tuuzo.”
“Do you have any idea how long you were unaware of your surroundings?”
It was a fair question. Roddy blew a breath that flapped his lips noisily. “No idea. I wasn’t checking chronos. I knew I had plenty of time to get in and out before Carl took off. I mean, really, what was going to go wrong? Don’t get out in time, I get to go along for the ride. Get there late and my guitar ends up playing off-key for a few weeks in Fiddle Fingers’ hands. Not exactly a galactic cataclysm.”
She nodded and tapped something into her datapad. “So during this daydream, what were you doing?”
Roddy wasn’t sure how much of this he wanted on the record. Technically, they were a criminal organization. Bribery and favor trading should have been common currency. But this Dr. Ak
erman was an Earth Navy ensign, with all the baggage that carried. Being listed as Killed In Action didn’t mean she was any less inclined toward proper recordkeeping and reporting suspicious behavior.
Of course, as a scientific mind-reader—even an inexperienced one who specialized in combat fatigue—Dr. Akerman picked up on his hesitation. “This session is confidential. You can tell me anything.”
Roddy closed his eyes and sighed. There was something both laudable and hopelessly naive in that statement. Sure, she might mean every word. That didn’t mean a snake charmer like Carl couldn’t worm it out of her. It didn’t mean she’d keep her yap shut if Mriy flashed those claws of hers, or if Mort glared at her crossways. Still, if Roddy was going bonkers, he wanted a second opinion before admitting it. “I was thinking of all the ways Niang and his pals fucked up my engine room and all the ways I could tweak it back to the way I like it. Might’ve involved a multi-tool. I was carrying one in my lower left foot when I snapped out of it.”
“You hadn’t mentioned that detail previously. Did you just remember it?”
“Nah. It just didn’t seem all that urgent.”
“Do you often carry objects in your lower hands while you walk?”
Roddy snorted. Typical human. “No. I leave shit lying around when I fill up two hands… of course I carry stuff in my walking hands. Have you ever even met a laaku besides me?”
The glare from Dr. Akerman transmitted at a stay-on-topic wavelength. Ethylene glycol in this one’s veins. Even trying, he couldn’t rile her. “Is there a reason you’d have a multi-tool in hand, instead of, say, in a pocket or tool kit?”
“I wasn’t using it to open beer bottles if that’s what you’re asking. I was church sober the whole time.”
“And you’ve been to the med bay and had a blood scan?”
“Listen, doc. The world’s got all these colors with hard edges on ‘em. Harsh. Grating. Oversaturated. If it were a holo-projection, I’d have the emitter adjusted. When I’ve got a buzz going, it feathers the edges. Smooths things out so everything’s easier to look at. I don’t need a scanner to tell my liver it’s on empty.”
She tapped a few more buttons and set the datapad aside. “Rodek. I’m going to ask you a serious question, and I’d appreciate a completely candid answer.”
“I’ve got my soul inside out here already…”
“How certain are you that you did not, in fact, actually carry out the—well, let’s not mince words here—sabotage of the Mobius’s engine room?”
A knot of nausea curdled in Roddy’s stomach. He’d already worked through convincing himself that it had all taken place inside his own skull. After all, it seemed less real than the crazy world that Lloyd Arnold had sucked them all into. And that was someone else’s head. It only stood to reason that his own delusion was shabbier than an expert wizard’s.
“Roddy…?” Dr. Akerman’s voice had an edge to it. The question wasn’t going away.
“I dunno. 70%? Maybe 60?”
“Rodek! You’re telling me that there’s a significant chance that you’ve just let the Mobius leave Ithaca with compromised shipboard systems. And you’ve said… nothing?”
“I came to see you, didn’t I? Besides, ‘compromised shipboard systems’ is about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about that flying scrap heap. It’s flown like that for years.”
Dr. Akerman stood. Her chest was heaving. If Roddy had an amateur’s understanding of human psychophysiology, she was on the verge of a panic attack. “We’ve got to send a message to the Mobius to warn them.”
Roddy snorted. “Easy there, doc. Confidentiality, remember? Besides, the new astral relay won’t be up and running for three days. We can’t even get a signal outside the system until then. At least, not one they’d get this century. Plus, like I said… 70% sure everything’s fine. Hey, if it makes you feel better, let’s call it 80.”
# # #
Mordecai The Brown was a scholar even by wizards’ standards. He held a degree from Oxford University on Earth. He was also a man of esteemed breeding, able to trace his ancestry back to Atlantis. He was not, either by inclination or adaptation, an outdoorsman. The outdoors was a place that cavemen had relegated to recreational status forty-thousand years ago. Plants and animals lived out there, not sentient creatures that had learned to fashion walls and roofs. Needless to say, Mort was no admirer of Ithaca’s wildlife.
By and large, Mort kept this opinion to himself. His companions on this murder safari seemed to hold a diametrically opposed viewpoint. Mriy made clear her disdain for the heat and humidity, but she relished hunting for both food and sport. Kubu was in his element, an avid devourer of all things fauna and a devotee of open spaces to maraud. His two human escorts, Parker and Doherty, had acquainted themselves intimately with a portion of the jungle that the expedition had long since left in their wake. But both seemed bright-eyed and eager to get to know the rest of the moon’s terrain.
Mort slogged through the underbrush, daring the creeping vines and thorny brambles to have a go at him. But the flora cowered from him, drooping out of his path as best as their roots allowed. Stripped to the waist like a savage, he gleamed with a fine coating of sweat. Undignified, that’s what it was. He’d tried insisting to the universe that it was a cool, crisp day, suitable for a sweatshirt and denims, but he just couldn’t keep it convinced for long enough to make it worth his while. Ithaca was awfully damn smug about its climate for a podunk moon in the middle of nowhere.
“Well, lookie that,” Doherty said, pointing to the sky.
Mort followed the line of that finger to a bank of clouds off in the distance. It was the direction everyone had taken to calling east, but it didn’t feel easterly in Mort’s gut. “What am I lookieing at?”
Kubu perked up, tearing his attention away from the stalk of a grass-like tree he had just watered. “Flying house made the whooshy noise in the sky.” The giant canine was eye level with the wizard now, and his vocabulary was threatening to crest the summit of usefulness.
Doherty nodded. “Can’t say I heard it, but I caught sight of the Mobius from the corner of my eye. Look close, and you can see the hole where they punched through the clouds.”
“Guess that means Kwon’s in charge,” Parker said offhandedly. “I mean, Ramsey left Niang as second in command every other time he’s gone offworld. Since Niang’s taking over Roddy’s spot an engineer—”
“What now?” Mort snapped. “First I’m hearing of the monkey getting marooned here.”
“You never talk to the resupply pilots.”
Mort scowled at the mere mention of them. “Daft prats, the both of them.”
Parker smirked. “My point exactly. They think the same about you.”
Straightening himself and harrumphing, Mort glared off in the direction of the distant starship that served as syndicate headquarters. “Well, that Kwon girl isn’t in change of me, that’s for bloody damn sure. The scientification of criminal life would be one too many straws for this camel’s back. Fellow’s got to be able to look himself in the mirror, and my reflection wouldn’t stand for me taking orders from some math-besotted handmaiden of Einstein.”
“She’s a biologist,” Parker pointed out.
Mort frowned, unaccustomed to the rank and file giving him lip about his metaphoric comparisons. They must be getting over their unease in his presence. “What’s the difference, honestly? One slave of the universe’s pique is as good as another. But if Carl’s run off and not designated a second in command—which, between you, me, and the trees, I’d be shocked if he hadn’t—that leaves me in charge. And since I’m not around either, it’s up to me to appoint a regent.”
Parker and Doherty exchanged a worried look.
“My recording stone is back at the mountain. Find me a suitable replacement.”
Kubu cocked his head, an involuntary yet polite response to having no idea what Mort was talking about. Doherty just shrugged.
Parker cleared his t
hroat. “What the hell’s a suitable replacement?”
“Rock, stone, crystal, gem… oh, about yea big.” Mort spread a finger and thumb with a rough estimate. “Doesn’t need to be anything fancy. I’m no amateur at this business. I could make mountains out of molehills, if I had to.”
“This is loose soil. There’s no bedrock for God-only-knows how far down. We’re a good ten, maybe twelve klicks from the nearest rocky terrain.”
Mort grumbled. “Fine. Just find me the closest thing you’ve got that’ll fit in one hand and hold a shape.”
After a few minutes of searching their belongings and the surrounding jungle, Parker came back with what looked like a miniature bowling ball. “What is it?” Mort asked, narrowing a suspicious look at the object.
“Knock-knock fruit,” Parker said, handing it over. “Something like a crossbreed of a coconut and a blueberry. Meat’s sweet inside, but they’re a pain in the ass to crack open.
Mort gave the fruit an experimental squeeze and held it up to his eye. It wasn’t black, as he’d first assumed, but a deep purple. Unbidden, notes of a song by one of Carl’s musical groups wormed its way into his mind, conjuring images of smoke and fire. Forcing the melody aside, Mort had a brief, pointed conversation with the knock-knock fruit. When he had convinced it to hold a message for him, he began to speak into it like a microphone. The fruit began to glow.
“To the people of the Ramsey Syndicate, this is Mordecai The Brown. Since our esteemed pooh-bah has seen fit to deprive us of his presence, it occurred to me that I am left in the position of highest authority. And, given that my current, self-imposed assignment will keep me away from our little ship-in-a-mountain-shaped-bottle, I ought to appoint someone to command in my stead. To that end, I appoint Rodek of Kethlet as acting syndicate director. Obey him as you would me. Or at the very least, the way you would Carl. Anyone who has a problem with this can take it up with me personally. Anyone who would rather avoid confrontation and undermine Roddy indirectly will rue my return. Capisce?”