by B. V. Larson
She nodded. “That’s better.”
“Then it’s official. Pass the word. This ship is the Liberator.”
A young woman set a plate of the fried food paste in front of Straker with an apologetic air. “Sorry, sir, this is the best we have.”
“I could have gotten it myself,” he told her. Then he ran his eyes up and down her. “But that’s no problem, ah… it’s Campos, right?”
The young woman looked shy. “Yes, sir. Campos. Medic, Second Class. That’s who I was, anyway.”
“You still are. I think you’re our only medic. That makes you Medic First Class.”
She smiled. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ve inventoried all the supplies and tested the autodoc. It seems to be in perfect working order.”
Straker lifted his eyebrows as he ate his food paste. “We have an autodoc?”
“Yes, sir. A good one, too.”
“Then that’s your baby. Ask around for anyone with tech experience to help you figure out all its software.”
“Roger wilco, sir.”
Straker’s eyes remained unfocused in Campos’ direction, as if he were staring through her.
“Sir?”
“Sorry. Just thinking about something. Thanks for the food.”
After she left, Engels leaned over to Straker. “They worship you, you know.”
“Who?”
“Everyone with us. Especially the former Hundred Worlds people you saved from the Unmutuals.”
“They saved themselves. I’m just…”
“Their leader? Their captain?”
“I guess.”
“That’s a powerful thing. Don’t underrate it. Try to remember how you felt as a cadet in Academy, or when you first joined the Regiment, where the officers seemed like gods. That’s how they feel now.”
Straker sniffed and changed the subject. “What’s that smell?”
Engels smirked and set her cup in front of him.
He picked it up and sipped. “Spoiled toilet cleaner?”
“Close. It’s hooch. Fermented and distilled from processed fruit juice concentrate.”
Straker looked around, realizing most of the dozen people in the mess were drinking the stuff. He was about to issue a reprimand when Engels put a hand on his arm. “They’re not on duty, and neither are you. Let them live a little. They’ve been through hell. We’re in sidespace. Nothing can happen here.”
“Oh, I bet a lot can happen,” he replied, eyeing Loco.
He was now flirting shamelessly with Campos. His girl back on Freiheit seemed already forgotten. Well, that was Loco.
More to the point, everyone seemed to be letting their hair down now that nobody was watching them closely.
Nobody but him. He realized Engels was right. He was the captain. He had a responsibility to set a good example, but at the same time, people needed to decompress.
Engels shifted around the table and held the cup to Straker’s lips. “Bottoms up, Derek.”
He gave her a sour look, but sipped. “You trying to get me drunk?”
“There are some pleasant stages between sober and drunk, you know.” She smiled. “Like, buzzed, tipsy, lubricated, or irrigated.”
“Irrigated?” he laughed.
“Why yes,” she said. “Now that you mention it. I am, a little.” She giggled and slipped her hand into his. “Hey, you said you were bored. I hear the captain lets you use his cabin.”
“I am the captain.”
“Oh, well, in that case…” Engels pulled him to his feet and tried to drag him down the passageway toward the ships’ officer staterooms.
Everyone was watching them, Straker realized, and he balked.
“What?” said Engels, still tugging on his hand.
“I—”
Abruptly Straker felt his free arm twisted up behind him and heard Loco’s voice hiss in his ear. “Derek, you’d better go with her. If you don’t, you’ll be rejecting her and she’ll never get over it. Take her to bed and prove she’s beautiful! Because if you don’t, I will, buddy.”
Then the pressure was off and Loco shoved him toward the woman who wanted him. His female, as Zaxby kept saying.
Afraid of this next step for the first time in his life, he almost turned back, but Carla’s pleading eyes pinned him, and his mouth went dry. He smiled a crooked smile and followed her to his cabin.
When the door shut, Carla peeled off her flight suit. She stood naked before him, the dimness hiding the Hok-roughened skin that hadn’t yet gone away.
She began unfastening his clothes. He caught her hands.
“What?” she said, worry in her voice. “What’s wrong now? Is it my face?”
“No, of course not. Your face is beautiful. Just slow down.” Derek kissed her gently, and her lips parted, her hot tongue sending a jolt through his nerves. It seemed as if she would devour him. As they kissed, Carla continued to remove his clothing, somehow never letting her mouth stray.
After an endless moment, the pressure became too much for him. His state of mind progressed from the emotional longing of the thirteen-year-old he used to be, to the culmination of more than a decade of savagely repressed lust.
“Birth control?” he mumbled as they tumbled onto the narrow bunk.
Carla gasped. “My implant should be good for years. Just do it! We’ve waited long enough!”
“I do love you, Carla Engels,” he breathed as she opened to him.
“Damn straight you do, Derek Straker,” she said as they joined. “And tonight, you’re going to love me until you drop from exhaustion.”
Part III: Liberator
Chapter 29
At the edge of nowhere.
“Are we there yet?” Straker asked. As usual, the end of a trip seemed to take the longest.
Zaxby moved his eyes left and right to peer at several of the Liberator’s screens, and then focused a pair on one particular display. He tapped it with the tip of a long tentacle. “This is the sidespace engine arrival countdown. It shows approximately three more minutes. When it reaches zero, we shall emerge into normal space at my chosen coordinates.”
“Which are?”
“You shall see.”
Straker rolled his eyes. “Play your games, then.”
Zaxby responded by rolling all four eyes up and completely around in his head and blinking them in sequence.
“Showoff,” Straker snorted.
“I am not to blame if my highly evolved physiology gives you an inferiority complex.”
Straker snatched the nearest tentacle in a blur of motion and tied it in a knot. “Don’t forget who’s the boss here.”
The tentacle thrashed and flexed, untying itself. “There’s no need to escalate a simple discussion to violence. I acknowledge your leadership, Captain Straker, but protest at your evident insecurity.”
“I’m not insecure. I’m just getting tired of your smartass ways.”
“As opposed to dumbass ways?”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about!” Straker snatched another tentacle.
Loco grabbed Straker’s elbow and murmured in his ear, “Boss, you’re encouraging him. He loves bugging you to get a reaction, especially when you’re on edge with nothing to do. He’s an intellectual bully, but he can only get to you if you let him. Treat him like any other brainiac. Use his brains and ignore the rest.”
“Easy for you to say. He doesn’t target you with his bullshit.”
“That’s because I don’t play into it, see? He’s a super-brainiac, and we need him, but he knows he needs us, too. You can use that against him.”
Straker shrugged off Loco’s grip. “Okay.” He turned back to the screens and crossed his arms, saying nothing to a couple of Zaxby’s further attempts at baiting.
When the countdown ended, the transition alarm sounded and the ship dropped into normal space. Visiplates blazed suddenly with color in greens and yellows and purples. Minor alerts chirped and beeped, and Zaxby manipulated the consoles l
ike a four-armed concert pianist. “Do not be alarmed, humans. We have emerged exactly where I intended, plus or minus a small statistical variance.”
“Beautiful,” Engels gasped. “We’re inside a nebula! We can’t even see any external stars.”
Zaxby swelled pridefully. “And we are extremely unlikely to be detected from outside. It’s far out of the usual travel lanes. The combatants believe there’s nothing here to interest anyone during wartime, where every resource must be turned to battle.”
Straker eyed the octopoid. “Why are we here, then?”
“Patience, my young captain. You shall see soon enough.”
Straker growled and crossed his arms, remembering Loco’s advice.
Engels stepped closer to Zaxby and gently scratched at the leathery skin atop his head, where he liked it. “Come on, Zaxy, give us a hint.”
“Ah, yes, my dear. Up a bit and to the left. Right there.”
Straker ground his teeth, but still said nothing. Engels was obviously trying to butter up the alien. It might be the only way to get answers. Still, he should be the only one she touched like that…
“Please tell us what’s going on, Zaxy?” Engels purred.
“Oh, all right.” Zaxby manipulated several controls and keyboards simultaneously. The main screen changed to show a false-color representation of the view toward the center of the nebula. Dozens of misshapen lumps stood out in white-rimmed black. “This is a multispectral view which allows us to see through the gas. These are large asteroids. There are many more we cannot see, thousands of them.”
“How large are they?” Straker asked.
Zaxby superimposed a scale. “Roughly fifteen kilometers long and larger.”
Engels leaned closer to the screen, then squeezed in next to Zaxby and tapped at the controls. “Why can’t I find anything smaller? Asteroid fields usually range from large chunks all the way down to dust and sand.”
Zaxby waved a couple of tentacles in the air. “Yes, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”
Engels turned on the charm again. “Come on, Zaxy. What’s with these asteroids?”
“I believe you will see when we approach one closely.”
“You believe?”
“Our presence here is based on many years of research in my spare time, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to test my theories directly.”
“But where is here?” Loco said.
“My people call it the Starfish Nebula, roughly translated. I believe it was the reason we octopoids resisted the Hok—the Mutuality—for so long.”
“Riddles,” grunted Straker.
“I like riddles,” Zaxby said.
“I like answers. Would you please provide some?”
Zaxby’s demeanor grew earnest. “I tell you truly, I do not want to get your hopes up in case I am wrong, so indulge an old being’s follies.”
“Old?” said Engels. “How old are you, really?”
“In human-standard years? I slightly exceed two hundred.”
“How long do octopoids live?”
“Perhaps three hundred, if we are fortunate.”
Engels smiled. “So you’re almost elderly. That explains a lot.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re getting crotchety, that’s all.”
“Crotchety: irritable and cantankerous, usually attributed to old age. I suppose that’s accurate.”
“And we forgive you.” Engels hugged Zaxby’s rubbery head.
Straker turned away, feeling as if he would explode. He understood that Engels was deliberately manipulating Zaxby, but he still felt… what?
Jealous? But how could he be jealous of an alien that was obviously not going to hook up with a human?
Or could they? Could either of them be genuinely attracted to each other, an octopoid and a woman? Engels treated Zaxby as a cross between an eccentric mad scientist and a pet, while Zaxby soaked up the attention.
That was what really got under his skin, Straker realized: the attention. That kind of attention should be his alone. The touch. He could feel anger building, even while he knew it wasn’t rational.
Was it?
He told himself that she was merely being practical. They needed Zaxby’s knowledge, so they had to play his games. Eventually, they wouldn’t need him so much anymore and he could be moved to some position within Straker’s organization—okay, future organization—far away from her.
Straker forced himself to be objective and military. This last week with Carla had been spectacular, but running off alone with her was mere fantasy, what with war and oppression all around them. He was in charge of this tiny crew, and he couldn’t afford to indulge in selfish dreams. He had to think of other people and be practical, and that meant love came second for a while. He burned to right all the wrongs they’d suffered.
“So why are we here in this nebula, Zaxby my man?” Loco said in a cartoonishly jolly tone.
“All in good time, Loco my squid.”
“Good one. Hey, if you’re two hundred, why are you still a lieutenant?”
“I only volunteered for the military ten years ago. Before that, I was a scientist and engineer.”
“The usual brainiac stuff. Why’d you give that up? I bet it was cushy.”
Zaxby hesitated, as if choosing his words. “I became bored. I was not allowed to research certain things that I wished to know more about.”
Loco chuckled. “Bet you’re not bored now.”
“Not lately.”
Zaxby reached for the controls again, but Engels shoved his tentacles aside and displaced him from the pilot’s seat. “Let me fly, please. I’m a pilot and I’m tired of just watching. Tell me where to go.”
“As you wish, my dear.” Zaxby sat at the sensor-comm station and began adjusting it to his obsessive specifications.
For the next half hour Zaxby gave Engels directions as if he were the corvette’s captain, while Straker locked his jaw and said nothing. In response, she flew the ship with a deft touch until they approached a designated asteroid. This one measured about thirty kilometers long and half that across, and it spun very gently on its long axis.
Zaxby refined his view on the sensor plates, though Straker didn’t notice anything significant. Maybe the octopoid saw into frequencies humans couldn’t. “Bring us to the far end.”
Engels circumnavigated the rock, and Straker mused on the difference scale made, depending on the objects and the comparison between them. A planet could be called small, but next to it the largest asteroid seemed tiny. Yet now, this medium-sized monolith dwarfed even the largest warship, not to mention their diminutive vessel. And throughout the galaxy there were stars so large they would swallow the inner orbits of a typical system.
Straker wondered whether there was anything even larger than the largest star, and if so, what would it look like? And then he wondered why he was wondering such things. He wasn’t a brainiac, but since their escape and the long-awaited consummation of his relationship with Carla, his thoughts had seemed freer to speculate, more likely to wander into areas outside his usual lanes… and that made him wonder if the military of the Hundred Worlds had limited his potential rather than nurtured it.
Maybe thinking too much would have reduced his usefulness as a warrior. If he’d been free to think more, maybe he would have thought more about all the things that didn’t fit—about the anomalies, that was the word—in his life as a mechsuiter. He’d wondered about Shangri-La, and what it meant if it turned out to be fake. Now he was starting to wonder about other things.
“There,” Zaxby said to Engels, bringing Straker out of his inner thoughts. “Approach that rock formation.”
“Okay…” Engels said, easing the corvette in closer. “What’s special about that one?”
Zaxby said, “It shows hidden three-dimensional glyphs that only my people are likely to recognize, disguised as random rock formations.” He unwrapped his arms to adjust the controls. “I wi
ll now send coded laser pulses in an attempt to activate the mechanism.”
“What mechanism?” Straker said.
“The mechanism that will open the asteroid. Please be silent. There are many possible combinations to try. I must concentrate.” His tentacles grouped around one screen-pad and their tips, with their masses of tiny sub-tentacles, blurred in motion like a nest of worms squirming over an array of symbols, the octopoid written language, no doubt.
“I’m no brainiac,” Straker said to Loco, “but I bet trying to crack a code manually could take a long time.”
Loco grunted. “Depends on how many slots are in the code. Like, a ten-digit code using normal numbers would have, what, a billion possible combinations?”
“Ten billion,” Engels spoke without looking up from Zaxby’s tentacle-tips. “But it looks like their language has at least thirty glyphs or letters. That means a whole lot more. It could take days or weeks.”
“Correct, my dear,” Zaxby said, “but it will take longer if you chatterboxes keep nattering. Or is that natterboxes keep chattering? Your language is endlessly flexible, probably because of its very imprecision. I am amazed such primitive creatures developed it at all.”
Engels rolled her eyes, and then made a few emphatic taps on the controls. “Fine. I’m hungry anyway. The autopilot will hold our station relative to the asteroid.” She stood. “Well, boys, how about some lunch?”
They made their way to the mess and began unenthusiastically preparing another meal of food paste. Chief Gurung entered a moment later with Heiser in tow. They filled their cups with caff, and the Gurkha gestured for permission to sit across from Straker.
“Have a seat, Chief. How’s the ship?”
“The ship is very fine, Captain,” he replied in the musical accent of his people. “It is in good repair. The crew is shaping up excellently, even though we have so many aboard some are hot-bunking. They are all wondering what will happen next, though, and they would like to have some shore leave.”
“As soon as I figure it out myself, I’ll let you know,” Straker said, but at Gurung’s frown he relented. “Really Chief, I’m not sure yet. Zaxby brought us to a nebula and we’re sitting next to a big asteroid hab, trying to access some kind of coded entryway to get inside. That will take hours or days, maybe longer. And no, I have no idea what’s in there, except it’s something built by his people, but he promises it will be good. As the only things we own right now are the clothes on our backs, our personal weapons and this ship, I’ll take any salvage I can get.”