And All The Stars A Grave.

by Greg Curtis

  *********************

  About midnight local time the Targ finally managed to stop whatever it was that was generating the interference field, and Daryl like everyone else there, breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a long evening as they first had to drag everybody out of the city and over to the Sparrow, where he’d set up a pair of remote speakers, and connected them to the ship’s com. From then they could at least hear a partial explanation from the captain of what had happened, which sadly told them little more than what they already knew of the detail, though it gave them some laughs. It was amazing how few people liked the expedition’s scientific head.

  Helos and a few of his followers had been playing with one of the alien pieces of technology on board the ship, when they’d accidentally turned it on. The machine still had power, which was something that should have occurred to them after seeing the bolos and other traps in action. What they should have done then and hadn’t, which was the first reason they were going to be spending some time in the brig, was to have reported that to the captain, and then waited for the ship technicians to examine it. What they actually did was to start to examine it themselves like demented children, opening up the casing and probing its innards.

  Then one of them, in a fit of genius or stupidity, realised it was actually broadcasting something. Music he thought, though it could just have easily been medical records or public service announcements. No one had ever heard a Calderonian speak. In fact some researchers had formed the view that they couldn’t. That they were telepathic. But whatever it was broadcasting was more than just the mechanical noise of its operation.

  From there the steps to damnation were all incredibly logical. First they’d decided that the music was too quiet. They couldn’t make anything out. The reason was obviously that it was low on charge. So without a second thought they’d pulled out a power amplifier out of an unused workstation, another reason they were going to be spending time in the brig, adjusted it to the correct levels and plugged it in.

  At least that guess they’d gotten right. The music had started playing at any volume they wanted, and they swiftly had the entire lab buzzing. But they still couldn’t make anything out. No syllables, no words, no speech, just music. It never occurred to them that it might have been just music. It had to be a message.

  More desperate analysis had followed as they pulled their hair out, and Alers had a lot to pull. Then someone else had apparently decided that perhaps the music wasn’t a message. It was a signal. A signal to something on the ground, and naturally the bumbling officers, Daryl most definitely included even if he’d never been within a hundred metres of the box, had removed it from where it was supposed to operate, sub-apartment block thirteen as they’d designated it.

  Again the solution was obvious. And stupid. They’d taken the device down to the emergency communications room which was normally unattended - for they’d had just enough sense to realise that if they took it to the main comms room, they would have been stopped - and plugged it in. Of course that had proven a complete disaster. The device, whatever it was, had first overloaded all the equipment in the room, fusing it into a pile of useless junk, and then the rest of the ship as it interfered with normal ship functions. Not just translators and com units, it had rendered a third of the ship without so much as life support.

  Fortunately the ship was well equipped with engineers and backup safety systems, otherwise the Targ itself could have been lost. As it was, nearly five hundred crew had spent five or six hours in breathing equipment and suits while the rest worked frantically to reach them.

  Once the source of the problem was isolated, by triangulation of the static rather anything more sophisticated as all the internal sensors were down as well, a team of engineers had started cutting their way through to the room. None of the doors worked either with no power and their servos burnt out, and unfortunately all had sealed themselves first, as they would when the air pressure suddenly failed.

  The repairs the captain had told them, were coming out of their science budget. Their institutions would not be happy. Seventy-eight doors had been destroyed in getting to them. Half the ship’s communication equipment was damaged beyond their ability to fix it. Multiple critical systems including navigation were likely to need days to repair, and then when they got back would have to be replaced. The drives were off line. Life support was working but subject to random failures. And there were random faults in practically every other system as well.

  Once the Targ was jury rigged into some form of working order they were going to limp home – or rather to their home, Unity. And all Daryl could hope for, was that Helos would be spending every second of that time locked up in the brig.

  Chapter Nine.

  The trip back to Unity was anything but pleasant.

  Daryl, like most of the other scientists and crew, had spent most of their time trying to nurse some life back into its battered systems. And, when that wasn’t possible, gutting the other vessels to get spare parts. As a result, neither the Sparrow, nor any of the shuttles or even the two mini warships the Targ carried was space worthy.

  But the Targ was at least holding together, and the technicians had just enough confidence to make him believe it would finally stagger its way there. And by the time it got there, he figured he was well overdue a good rest.

  Standard days had become sixteen hours for him and the other engineers and technicians, and a month of days like that tended to take it out of a person. But so did the accidents which were entirely too regular, and the medical staff were being run off their feet as well.

  Every so often something would just go bang as another jury-rigged system decided it had had enough, and heaven help anyone who was unfortunate enough to be in the way. After the first couple of near misses he’d taken to wearing blast armour. Thankfully the Sparrow had a set he’d borrowed from the marines and it took the worst of the shocks away. It had originally been designed for taking weapons blasts, and though he’d really only obtained it to protect him from alien animal attacks, it was doing the job perfectly.

  Even so, once the others had noticed his new approach they’d started copying him, and there just weren’t enough suits to go around. He had one, and there was also a set for the single combat troop detachment on the ship, The Force didn’t really see the value in ground troops. All up they had twenty something suits, only three of which could be worn by human beings.

  So when he finished for the first day, one of the other human engineers had stolen his suit from him, and carried on. Very soon it had no longer been his suit. They’d developed into a pattern. Whoever was wearing the suit would deal with the heart of the newest system crash, while the others would stand back and deal with the less critical stuff. The stuff that was less likely to go bang.

  It wasn’t a perfect system, and Daryl like all the others had taken several visits to the sick bay where Karen, who was rapidly taking on the twin roles of his personal physician and the annoying voice of reason, would nurse him back to health and then abuse him for being stupid. But she was damn good at her job, and quite frankly so gorgeous that it was almost worth getting zapped just to see her again. And finally he knew her name.

  Doctor Karen Volk. Her name kept running through his synapses, especially when he was tired. Her face too. It was an infatuation he realised, but a damned powerful one.

  In a month of travel though, he’d not really managed to learn much more about her than her name, and arrange a couple of play dates, sadly only for Scratch. Tigger as it turned out, was a cat, and after the first few spitting matches, the two cats were learning to socialise, at least on neutral ground. On either one’s home turf though he suspected, the fur would fly.

  There were three or four other cats on the ship, and as part of their recreational facilities, a pet playroom had been built. The space for it of course, had been taken out of the room sizes of the pet owners. There was no such thing as spare room on a spaceship. But it was worth it he’
d decided. To have a place where he could take Scratch, and let her meet others of her own kind. For the past year she’d had no one but him to talk to, and while the company was great for him, it wasn’t fair on her. Besides, it was like childcare for cats. He’d take her along, drop her off, and pick her up three or four hours later, still purring with excitement about whatever mischief she’d gotten up to.

  On some levels it was difficult dealing with Karen. He was a man, she a devastatingly beautiful, intelligent and warm woman, and he’d been off Earth a long time. The desire was only natural. Especially when he found out how much they had in common, their love of cats for example, and, though she would never admit it, their sense of humour. He actually looked forward to being told off by her, as much as he suspected she enjoyed giving him a hard time, and waited happily for him to do something stupid. But that, while awkward, he could deal with. It was the rest that made things difficult.

  Just to start with she was from New Eden, a planet his people had destroyed for no apparent reason, and he couldn’t help but feel terrible guilt each time he saw one of her people. And he didn’t even have cause.

  Karen herself had never accused him or his family of any such thing, and even once told him that she didn’t blame him. But he also knew that many of her people, especially the older ones, harboured strong anger towards his. He saw it in their eyes when they stared at him, heard it in their voices. He couldn’t blame them either. They had lost their families, parents and grandparents, to some insane act of violence, and even though it was seventy or more years ago, they still recognized all they had lost. Parents and friends they had grown up without, homes missing, and a life lost. Haven as they called it, had been good to them, and they owed the Community a lot, but it wasn’t what they’d wanted.

  It would be a long time he suspected, before they would ever be able to trust him. Longer still till he might be regarded as a friend by any. And yet these were the only humans in the Interstellar Community. The only people he knew, he might ever find a life with.

  There was also a large cultural divide between them. One that was even more fundamental than ancestral hatred. It began with religion. New Eden had been settled by a community of Christians. Not extremists in their position as he understood such things, nor even of a single denomination, but they were never the less staunch. They had their own small chapel on the Targ, and the Sabbath was still considered sacred.

  He on the other hand, other than having gone to Sunday school as a child, hadn’t really had much to do with religion. He was a scientist first and last and everything else was irrelevant. And as Mark had kept pointing out, he had even fallen into some bad ways over the years, taking the lord’s name in vain regularly. A habit he was still trying to curb, with limited success.

  But that was only the beginning. Seventy years in the Community, much of which they had spent finding places within the Force, had left its mark as well. They thought like aliens in many ways. Money was a strange concept for them. They used either barter or more commonly, just their credit allowance. The same as did all others. Their values weren’t totally human either. They watched, and as far as he could tell played, alien sports, laughed and celebrated with their friends from the great races, and spoke a wide variety of languages, many of which no human tongue should ever have been able to utter.

  The closeness between them and the others was perhaps most evident in the gym and recreational facilities. And since he’d discovered the Edenites and there was no longer any reason to keep him separate from them, he found himself scheduled in the same sessions as many of them. The few times he’d managed to make it to any of them, he’d been struck again and again by how closely they mixed with the others. Working out together, sitting together for lunch, laughing at jokes that made no Earthly sense, even showering together in the communal locker rooms after a workout.

  After a while he wasn’t entirely sure they regarded themselves as human any longer. Certainly they never referred to themselves as such. Instead they called themselves Edenites. Something he was not and could never be. Nor he realised, did their fellow crew or even the other scientists regard them as human. He was human, but they were Edenites to the others.

  It was both strange and disheartening to realise, but among them he was as much an alien, as the rest of the crew were to him. Daryl was actually in some ways, grateful for the slavishly long hours on the trip back. It kept him from self-pity.

  On the thirty-second standard day of near exhaustion though, the Divine as the Edenites called him, granted him a reprieve from his drudgery and self-pity. Naturally it didn’t start out as such. In fact it began as though hell itself had reached out and grabbed him.

  He was working on the power conduits in the docking bays, adjusting the flow regulators, replacing the worst hit capacitors, and cleaning the rest. They didn’t have enough, and despite the engineers running a small factory operation to build more, they weren’t likely to. Up ahead more of his team were doing much the same, while Mark wearing the armour, was trying to disconnect the power module to the outer clamps. They needed it elsewhere.

  The conduit was dead, only the residues of the enormous energy flows it normally carried, causing them trouble. The occasional static charge that caused them to hop around cursing. That was actually a universal custom, and quite amusing when a Xetan did it. All those arms and legs running wild as the translator refused to make any sense of the garble that came out of their mouths. But Daryl wasn’t stupid enough to laugh. He’d been zapped enough times himself to know it hurt. But this time somebody must have pushed a switch in the control room. He had just time to notice some sort of spark heading the wrong way up the conduit and scream as he realised what it meant. Power. Raw power.

  He tried to pull away screaming, but human reactions even on adrenaline were far too slow and he watched with horror as he saw the charge arc its way out of the conduit and into the magnetic flow adjuster he was holding. After that things became vague.

  He knew burning, terrible burning, and not just in his arm either. It was one entire side of his body. He saw the ceiling high above flying past him almost gracefully. Then there was some sort of thump and he must have blacked out for a while. After that came a view of more ceilings racing past, and later Karen of the dark hair and perfect smile, looking down on him and saying something. He knew she was probably telling him off for having yet another accident, but couldn’t hear anything at all. It didn’t matter though as it was more than enough just to see her face. He tried to smile, but darkness took him again.

  When he awoke it was to find himself in the sick bay, as he should have expected. Again. This time though he knew he’d been asleep for a long time. His body clock was whispering about days rather than hours.

  When he had the will he started exploring the limits of his flesh and was pleased to find himself mostly intact. At least he could feel his fingers and toes wiggling, but for some reason he couldn’t move. When he looked at his reflection in the steel instruments above, he quite quickly saw the reason. He was strapped down like a lorry load, and the entire left side of his body was encased in white bandages. Half a mummy. He tried not to laugh at the thought.

  In time a doctor or a nurse came over, sadly not his Karen, and told him he was going to be all right. The bones had been set, the burns were being healed, and the nerve damage wasn’t permanent. But he had at least another day or two in the wrap and he wasn’t allowed to move. None of the people in his team had been hurt, apparently he’d taken the full force of the charge, his dumb luck at work again, and his cat was apparently in good hands. He was immediately jealous of Scratch knowing whose hands they would be. Lucky little beggar!

  Meanwhile, he just had to lie there and be bored.

  Daryl discovered quickly enough that life in the wrap wasn’t a lot of fun. Perhaps he wasn’t the most active of people, but even so a day in bed was a day too many as far as he was concerned. Especially when he couldn’t even scratch his nose, and th
is time Karen wasn’t coming to see him. She was on an enforced twenty-four hour leave, and not allowed to return until it was up.

  But in all the time he’d been lying there like a mummy he was told, it’d been Karen who’d tended to him. In fact she’d saved his life several times according to the brusque Regularan nurse who had taken over once he’d fully woken up, and spent more time with him than with all her other patients put together. An extreme waste of her talents as a doctor. Daryl had the strange feeling that she was actually criticising Karen.

  As she carried on though, he realised she was criticising him as well. As if it was somehow his fault that Karen had spent so much time working on him. Which in a way it was, as he had to remind himself. He had after all gone and gotten himself injured again. It was also a nice thought, though he carefully didn’t tell that to his nurse. Especially not when he eventually understood her real interest.

  Karen’s excessive attention was obviously a pre-curser to mating, she told him. She even speculated that for a human he was probably of good breeding stock. They would have strong, intelligent children. And given both their advancing ages and the well understood physiology of humans which dictated that children born to couples in their earlier years would have a superior genetic inheritance, she advised him that they should begin immediately. He wondered if his nurse understood the human physiology of blushing as his face turned the colour of beetroot. If she did, she certainly had no idea of what it signified.