To Infinity

by Darren Humphries

  The tech was four metres above the deck plates, both feet planted against the outer shell of another large piece of equipment, hauling a number of cables through an open panel. The reply came from a mouth that held several delicate tools clamped between clenched teeth, “Exactly what you ordered and I got paid for, so push off and let me get back to it.”

  Haynes noticed Keely sat nearby on a silent atmosphere scrubber, glaring at the tech with an intensity that could almost have been harnessed to boil water.

  “How long to put it back the way it was?” he demanded, wondering what the tech had done to upset his crewmate.

  The tech grunted, hauled another metre of assorted cabling out of the guts of whatever it was that was being upgraded and secured them by means of tying them into a sheepshank loop before answering, “Quicker at this point to finish it, especially if I don’t keep getting interrupted every six seconds by people who ought to have better dress sense, quite frankly.”

  “Are you telepathic?”

  “From a race of telepaths on a planet full of telepaths, what do you think are the odds?”

  “Then the tie stays,” Haynes decided firmly. “Can’t you, you know, bodge it?”

  The tech froze for a second and then replaced the tools in any number of pockets that the coveralls seemed to contain (some of them in places that looked like they must be quite uncomfortable) with a terrible deliberation. As the tech descended, with the same deliberate motion, he realised that she was a woman. She was also the same woman who had laid him out in the shipyard outside earlier. Now he understood Keely’s thunderous expression. He backed a few paces away, out of range of any airborne spanners. The woman reached the ground and came after him with a fierce expression, but at least her hands were empty. Her eyes sparked with emerald fire and he considered tangentially that with the burning eyes and flushed cheeks (albeit still oil-smudged) she was more beautiful than ever. It was fortunate that he had not chosen to abandon the tie considering the effect that thought would have had on her temper.

  He felt cold metal behind him and realised that he had backed himself into a corner. The tech advanced until her nose was barely a molecule’s breadth from his.

  “I do not,” she said with a pause between each word that was as cold as the void of hyperspace, “bodge it. Ever.”

  “Erm, fine,” he backtracked quickly. “I’ll just wait in the, um, elsewhere until you’re finished then shall I?”

  “That might be an idea,” the tech stepped back a pace and allowed him to sidle past her.

  “I’ll just go then,” he suggested whilst he sidled, but she had already turned back towards her task.

  “I think that went well,” the computer said enthusiastically as he quit the engineering section. “I mean you really showed her.”

  “Here, I got you a legal access to the galactic net,” he shoved a thin film wafer into an input slot where a laser read the information whilst simultaneously melting the carrier. “Perhaps you can check up on the fate of your old friends.”

  To say that the man was ushered into Master Bentham’s chambers was to misuse the word usher. It suggests a certain level of choice. True, the door was opened by an acolyte who then backed away, bowing, in order to allow him access, but there was a very real sense that the door would have opened in any case and that anyone attempting to block the man’s progress would have ended up bent over at the waist for some very different reasons.

  Surprisingly, the small, old man sat behind the desk that was the room’s main furnishing did not immediately leap to his feet in outrage or even to greet his guest. In fact, for a few moments, he seemed genuinely to be unaware of the other man’s presence.

  The visitor stepped forward and sat down in the chair positioned in front of the desk. Somehow it was clear that his next action would not be so meek.

  “I have heard that you wish to speak with me,” Master Bentham said, not looking up at the man. He finished totting up a list of numbers, made a notation at the bottom of the page and then finally closed the ledger that lay between them. Only then did he meet the quiet, determined gaze of the other man.

  “I asked to see a leader. They say that you are it,” the visiting man said simply, although the statement carried a question with it.

  Bentham satisfied himself with a slight nod of acknowledgement. Religion, it seemed, abhorred a vacuum almost as much as nature and, following the sudden departure of the Holy Prophet, the people of Hochnar had turned to Master Bentham for spiritual (and just about every other kind of) leadership. It was not a position that he was naturally comfortable with, but it was the will of the God and, therefore, he accepted it.

  “I am searching for this man,” the visitor made a gesture and a likeness of the man known to some as Kaymer Haynes formed into three-dimensional existence in the space between them. Bentham had seen holoprojectors before, so the attempt at showmanship was wasted upon him.

  “Are you responsible for payment of his debts?” the priest-leader inquired.

  “Merely putting him back behind the bars that were meant to contain him.” Another gesture cancelled the image. “I can assume from your response that you have encountered him.”

  “He was here,” Bentham saw no reason to lie about it. Any person in the street that the stranger asked would have recognised the face in the image, and probably been a good deal more impressed by the manner of its creation. “He was driven out of this place.”

  The visitor seemed to be unsurprised by this. “How?”

  “By the will of God.” This was neither boast nor empty sham, merely a statement of fact.

  “To where?”

  “I do not know and nor does any other here,” the priest spread his hands expansively (a gesture that seems to be built into priests at a genetic level) to indicate that he included the whole of Hochnar in his sentence.

  “You would tell me if you knew?” It may have been a question, but there was a hint of the certainty of a statement in it.

  “As I do not know, I cannot answer the question,” Master Bentham replied, sitting back in his seat. The crime that Kaymer Haynes had committed was great, but the punishment that this man was likely to mete out could be even greater.

  “I could kill you,” the visitor simplified his threat to eliminate the chance of any misunderstanding.

  “My God could kill you.”

  “I don’t believe in your God.”

  “Would that protect you from the thunderbolt?” Master Bentham asked.

  The other man had to admit that this was a good point. He surveyed the priest more closely. This man was a believer, a man of faith. Not the kind of desperate faith of those who needed something larger than themselves to believe in, nor the shallow faith of those who thought it better to believe just in case, but faith of a man who knew that this was the way that the universe was ordered. That kind of faith was reserved for men who were either enlightened, mad or very good at poker.

  “How did he leave?”

  “In a space vessel hidden here by one of the original settlers. He took a young companion with him and left another behind.”

  “To be punished,” the visitor nodded his understanding.

  “To be promoted,” Master Bentham confounded him.

  “How long?”

  Bentham shrugged, “Several days, a week perhaps.” It was a long time since he had seen the sun. “Tell me. This quest of yours, it is motivated by something more than simple money isn’t it?”

  The other man rose to his feet and nodded respectfully to the priest, “It is simply what I do. I have taken up too much of your time.”

  “Neither more nor less than the God permitted,” Bentham responded.

  The visitor nodded again and departed. Master Bentham watched him go, wondering whether he felt more pity for this godless hunter or for his prey.

  The godless hunter, for his part, returned to his own ship. The trail had run a little colder, but there were still options to follow. First he w
ould need a list of all the original colonists of Hochnar and also a registry of their space vessels. Just in case, a list of all registered ships that had disappeared at around the time of the original colonisation might prove useful. The chase had gotten a little bit harder, but to this man hard was nothing.

  “Finally finished?” Haynes had been pacing around the ship, unable to sit still because he then found himself watching the nearest chronometer obsessively until the seconds stretched to the point that he thought that he had discovered a whole new effect of einsteinian relativity.

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  The tech was stood in the hatchway, still in her coveralls with the many pockets bristling with exotic engineering tools, but looking very different from the last time that he had seen her. Blonde-reddish hair fell around her shoulders in a tumble of waves and curls. Her green eyes sparkled with good humour instead of anger and her face was scrubbed clean of oil or any other industrial lubricants.

  “I finished the job about two hours ago,” she admitted apologetically, “but this ship of yours is just so amazing that I couldn’t give up a chance to take a look around. I haven’t seen technology like this in years and none in ships this size. There’s stuff here that you wouldn’t find in a Republican battlecruiser. I just needed to peek.”

  “I’d give you the tour, but I don’t have the time right now,” Haynes headed towards the flight deck, “Computer - systems check.”

  “Really?” the computer inquired. “That could take quite a while.”

  “Launch systems check,” he clarified, irritated.

  “Oh, we’re OK to lift off.”

  The tech frowned slightly, trailing behind him, “Is everything OK with your computer? I could take a look at it for you.”

  “Much though I appreciate the thought, we have to be going.” It was a curious thing to say to a telepath who, by definition, appreciated every thought, and he didn’t sound like he appreciated any such thing.

  “Hey, I thought that you were going to take me to the city!” Keely objected, now joining the convoy, having to run a little to keep up.

  “Change of plans,” he told her shortly. “Computer, prep for launch. Would you like to get off?”

  The tech swung him around urgently. He took a precautionary step backwards and nearly fell over the nearest flight couch. “Listen, it’s like this. I want to have a closer look at this ship and you have no technician aboard. Don’t lie to me, I checked the manifest,” she forestalled him before he could say anything. “What would you do if the ship failed?”

  “Hey listen lady, this ship doesn’t fail,” the computer told her sharply.

  The tech looked at the screen and frowned again, but decided not to push it, “I’m proposing the use of my skills against passage on board.”

  “No,” Keely and Haynes said in perfect unison.

  “There could be fringe benefits,” the tech said with a suggestive wink, “and it can’t hurt to have a telepath on board.”

  Haynes paused to consider that. It was an idea that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Oh you can’t seriously be thinking of letting this...this...her aboard!” Keely objected angrily.

  “It’s true that a telepath could be useful,” Haynes mused. “It would give me an unfair advantage over some people.”

  “Is that important?” Keely demanded.

  “Where we’re going an unfair advantage is the only kind of advantage that you’re likely to get. OK, er, do you have a name?”

  “I do, but you can call me Lyssa,” the tech replied.

  “OK Lyssa we hit space in one hour, so you’d better get your stuff now.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” the tech replied, delighted. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  “You’re going to smell rank after a few days in those things,” Keely muttered darkly.

  “Your little girl makes a good point,” Lyssa said to Haynes, fixedly ignoring Keely, who was rapidly turning purple with rage. “I’ll pick up a few things in the spaceport boutiques. The amount you paid me for this job ought to buy a few outfits.”

  As Lyssa departed, Keely stuck her tongue out at her back.

  Hard was proving to be more difficult than the quiet man had expected. Only one colony ship had crashed onto the unwelcoming surface of Hochnar and that had been completely cannibalised by the community in a million different ways. It was impossible that enough had been salvaged to fashion a whole new vessel. The manifest of the crashed ship listed no registered space pilots beyond the bridge crew that had died in the collision. Nor did it list any transports as cargo other than agricultural machines and fishing vessels.

  The number of other ships lost at around the time of the founding of Hochnar’s colony was also a dauntingly high one. That had been a time of expansion in the Republic and many ships had set out with only primitive drives and high hopes to keep them going. Their destinations were often as poorly defined as their engineering. Many had been lost in mysterious circumstances. One, he learned, had almost certainly crashed near a place called Tunguska on Ancient Earth many centuries before it had even been launched. That information he retained for the next time that he had to bribe a temporal theorist.

  Widening the scope of the search would just create a whole raft of new dead ends.

  An alarm on the console beeped once. None of the ship’s alarms ever sounded more than once because that was all that was ever needed. This alarm was more of a ‘here’s something interesting to know’ rather than a ‘your ship is about to imitate a supernova’ alarm anyway.

  The ship’s owner looked up from the sheaf of information films that he was studying and scanned the area around him in Hochnar’s orbit, but the space was as empty as it ought to have been.

  “What is it?”

  “A tagged account has just been activated.”

  Upon his arrest, judgement and sentence, quite a bit of information had been gathered regarding the man who now called himself Kaymer Haynes. Most of this had been sealed following the case in order to save the reputations of the daughters of several prominent officials from scandal and disgrace, not mention the kind of notoriety that means a lifetime of running away from photographers. The Warden of Srindar Djem had reluctantly made those records available to him when he took up the case. Further study and research, not to mention hurting people, had uncovered even more information, none of which would have been admissible in a court of law, not least because the witnesses could no longer discuss their testimonies with anyone but their respective deities. Known associates, false names, alternate identities, bank accounts, investment trails, crimes as yet untried and tall tales of past exploits had all come to light and been detailed. The computer systems of several banks had been tagged to send him alerts the moment that certain dormant accounts became active again.

  “Where?”

  “The Caldarea system.”

  The man activated his library computer and called up data on Caldarea III, the only inhabited world in the system, although several of the moons were in the process of being terraformed. It was a mid-level world with no real defining characteristics except…

  Telepathy?

  Now why would he risk going to a place like that?

  “Set a course for Caldarea III and proceed at best speed.”

  As the ship turned and broke orbit, the man began a study of Caldarea III’s banking system.

  “No,” Keely said with the kind of certainty that the galaxy’s largest steamroller couldn’t budge.

  “What do you mean ‘no’?” Haynes stopped walking resignedly. He hadn’t believed it was going to be that easy, but hope springs eternal.

  “It’s a pretty simple word. Is it the ‘n’ or the ‘o’ that you’re having problems with?” She carried on without pause, “I mean no, uhuh, no way, no how, not going to happen, not in this lifetime at least. I am not staying aboard this time.”

  Haynes cast a besee
ching look at Lyssa who quickly shook her head, “Oh, no. I’m just along for the ride. You take care of the childcare issues.”

  Keely bristled at that and Haynes stepped in quickly to avoid another catfight between them. The two women had been bitching about each other the entire flight. That might not have been too bad had they been doing it behind each other’s backs, but they had been willing to do it face to face and, on several occasions, toe to toe.

  “Keely, this place is so corrupt it makes Caldarea look like honesty central.”

  “Hey!” Lyssa said, offended.

  “I’m talking about the bad parts,” Haynes clarified, “and can we stick to one annoyed female at a time please?”

  “If you’re involved in the conversation, I doubt it,” the computer put in unhelpfully, but was ignored by everyone.

  “Look, it seems to me that you have two choices here,” Lyssa decided. “Either you take her with us, in which case you can keep an eye on her or you can leave her behind and she’ll be out the hatch on her own before you can say ‘child slave labour’. Do you want that on your conscience?” She pressed him. “Because I know I don’t.”

  Haynes finally bowed to the inevitable, “OK, you can come, but you do what I say when I say it and without asking any questions, right?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, “And change into something that looks a bit less like a rainbow threw up on you.”

  “I will, I will,” she told his back, delightedly, turning to Lyssa. “Thank you.”

  “Just remember this isn’t a school outing to the zoo,” Lyssa told her.

  “You weren’t, erm, you weren’t serious about the child slavery thing were you?” Keely asked the older woman more hesitantly.

  “Of course not,” Lyssa said with a chuckle. “Out here it’s more likely to be involuntary donation of body parts for longevity programmes.”

  Out here, had turned out to be a mining colony set up to strip mine mineral elements from an asteroid field surprisingly dense in very valuable resources. The miners had advanced the technology to the point of machines large enough to feed an asteroid in at one end and have the component minerals come out of the other end in pre-packaged blocks. The waste rock was recycled into building blocks, the majority of which had provided the fifth planet with a new ring. Such intensive methods cleared the asteroid field in decades rather than millennia, leaving the inhabitants to create new ways of making money off the travellers along the new space lane they had created.