There were periodic attempts to bring order to this chaos, of course, but the various illegal trades – drugs, animals, weapons, ancient art, exotic fuels and rare mineral ores – generated such stratospheric profits that the law was always kept at arm’s length. As a result, even the normally arrow-straight traders from Qelandi’s remote villages were finding themselves reluctantly but profitably corrupted. How else, they asked themselves, could someone from a godforsaken desert valley make a reasonable living?
And it was just such a trader who commissioned Julius to deliver a critical spare part to the Orion. After a confusing search, he found the right docking bay and asked the nearest person to confirm the ship’s name.
“It’s Orion, if you’re here to buy or sell,” the tall, hooded woman told him. “But if you’re here to ask questions, the ship’s called the Hey, Fuck Off.”
“I’ve been told to deliver a spare part for this ship,” he announced.
The hooded woman picked up a heavy grey box and carried it into the lower stowage bay of their shuttle, an older model which showed micrometeorite impacts and scorch marks where thick, planetary atmospheres had grilled the ship’s protective coating. “Good,” she said, dusting off her hands. “That’ll help us get out of this shit hole.”
“Is this the ship itself?” Julius asked. His client had told him that the Orion was an interstellar-class freighter, but this smaller ship looked barely capable of reaching orbit.
“It’s our shuttle,” she said curtly.
She showed little appetite for further questions but Julius let his curiosity bubble up. “And where’s the Orion headed to?”
The woman stopped and pulled off her black hoodie in a quick, fluid motion. Then, she span around to face him. “You’re new here, right?” She stood now in a skin-tight black t-shirt and black flight pants. It was a look which was both rather inevitable, given her work, and somehow carefully cultivated.
He shrugged. “Kinda.”
Julius watched, amazed, as she bent over backward to place both hands on the ground in an elegantly gymnastic arc, then flipped herself up from her hands to arrive in a neat, cross-legged sitting position on a metal box. “Kinda?”
He tried not to stare but her body was an eye-magnet. Why are there no girls like this in the villages? Compact and proportioned, and obviously very strong, she was definitely the most attractive woman Julius had seen since leaving home. He felt the familiar surges of lust, but quelled them with the strength of his faith: let this feeling go, or it will destroy you.
“I’ve been driving courier around here for a few weeks,” he explained. “Still getting to know the place.”
“Ah,” she nodded, “so that’s why you don’t know the etiquette. It’s bad manners to ask a crew where their ship is going. Especially around here.”
“Sorry.” By way of an apology, he brought out the shrink-wrapped package from the back pannier of his bike’s storage. It was perhaps a foot long, a sturdy metal part, intended perhaps for a refrigeration or air conditioning unit. He handed it over.
“Good,” was all she said, handing him back an ID card which he scanned into his portable lectern.
A name came up immediately. “Mesilla?” he asked, rather redundantly.
“Is that what it says?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then my secret identity is still in place.” She gave him a huge wink. “You never know what kind of unsavory characters you’ll meet around here.”
Julius blinked for a confused second before he realized she was joking. She chuckled at his discomfort, as though it were her favorite ploy to bewilder impressionable young men. He felt the boiling kernel of lust in his stomach take on a softer, more affectionate tone. He was finding her to be smart, funny, sassy and, perhaps most attractively, very able to handle herself. Where the hell have you been? “Well hopefully you don’t think I’m entirely unsavory.”
“Not at all,” she replied with a smirk. “You’re kinda cute.” With that, she jumped up, flashed him a smile and an unforgettable view of her ample cleavage as she bent to pick up the box, and headed up the ramp into the ship.
“So you didn’t tell me where she’s headed,” Julius reminded her as she disappeared into the ship.
He heard the metal box clanging down onto the floor. “That’s right, I didn’t,” she called down.
Brazenly, and to his own surprise, his legs carried him a few steps towards the ship and, before he knew it, he was standing at the doorway to the ramp. “Do you leave today?”
She seemed to weigh the question, as if deciding whether it was safe to tell him. “No, not today.”
Just say it, idiot, before this chance passes you by. “Does your ship need an extra crewman? You know, someone to clean or cook or…”
“Yeah,” Mesilla replied.
The word sent Julius’ heart jumping in his chest. “Really?” he asked, his excitement unconcealed.
There was a definite smirk of enjoyment as she watched him take this plunge. “Don’t tell me. You’re yet another surface-dweller from a tiny village who’s looking for adventure.”
“Not just adventure,” Julius said. “Answers.” Crap, now I sound like some deranged zealot.
“Well, answers are one of our favorite commodities, young man,” Mesilla said. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do for you.” She tossed him a yellow key-card about the length of his thumb. “Look us up tonight. If you’re still interested, let’s talk tomorrow.”
He twirled the card around between three fingers and caught an enjoyable glance of her ass as she hefted another box up the shuttle’s ramp. What a girl.
“Tomorrow, then,” he confirmed. Julius started the bike with a thunderous clamor of metal and burning fuel. A glowing excitement flooded his chest; it seemed to give every cell of his skin a tingle he’s never met before. Was it the girl? Or the prospect of adventure? Or, he judged, perhaps it was both?
Immediately he heard the voice of The Five in his ear, that sobering judge with all its limits and prohibitions, issuing yet another warning: let this feeling go, or it will destroy you.
“Really?” he asked The Five, his question drowned out by the bike’s roar. He found first gear and guided the bike out of the docking back, towards the street outside. “I’d like to see it try”.
***
Chapter 14: The Triton Summit
They ate in between bouts of questioning each other, but found they were hungrier for information than they were for celery soup, however excellent it was.
Paul found that the two women caught on quickly. They were familiar with lightspeed travel and its implications, and had been on cruisers not dissimilar to the Daedalus. To Paul’s surprise, they even seemed reasonably well versed in the possibilities of time travel, and found themselves shocked at the idea of its misuse.
“But why not simply return to your planet, once you realized Hal had sent you through a Vortex?” Haley asked. “With so much time before the crazy man was due to arrive, you could have warned your people about him.”
It was, Paul knew, a reasonable point, and though it missed some of the subtleties of the problem, he was impressed. Both women were able to visualize events around an unfamiliar planet, with its strange rules and beings, without losing track or requiring repetition. It made explaining the circumstances of Paul’s arrival far easier.
“You’re right, in a way. It would have given me time, but I would only have lived for another forty or fifty years,” Paul explained. “I’d have been unable to blend in with earth’s people from two thousand years before my own time. Even in my native Wales, I’d have had a really hard time being understood, or making friends. They’d probably have just thrown me in jail, or hanged me as a foreign spy.”
“I see,” Kiri nodded.
“In any event,” Paul continued, “I’d have had to hide the Phoenix, which wouldn’t have been easy.” Even at the bottom of a lake, Paul knew from e
xperience, the ship would not have been completely safe. “And two thousands years of hypersleep would have been a one-man science experiment,” he explained. “No one knows what effects it would have had.” Or, Paul thought glumly, will have.
Haley asked the next question. “So, what now, for you?”
“I have two thousand years,” Paul said, the intense strangeness of the sentiment not lost on him, “before I have to stop Julius from stealing the ship in which he comes to Earth and ruins everything. Preventing that is the only way to put things right.”
“And he’s about two thousand light years away?” Kiri asked. Such distances, Paul had already learned, were well without the wheelhouse of colonists like these.
“Yes, something like that. My ship can travel at three times light-speed, or more, but it’s not a new ship, and its performance over those timescales is… Well, a little uncertain.”
This was only a summary of a major argument between Paul and Hal during their acrimonious transit from Earth to Neptune. The pilot argued for the fastest possible transit, hoping to reduce the length of his potentially dangerous hypersleep. Hal had argued that the cruiser’s engines might well be able to propel the ship up to 3.4C or even higher, but that bringing the speed down again after what would have been some six centuries in space would have been courting disaster. “I’ve done the calculations,” he repeated, again and again. “3.4C of deceleration after six centuries is twice as dangerous as 1C of slowing after twenty.”
“And twenty centuries of hypersleep?” Paul countered.
“No more dangerous than six,” he insisted. “According to what we know.” Which, both knew perfectly well, wasn’t exactly much. They could extrapolate and assume and guess, but in the end, this journey would be one giant experiment from start to finish.
“So why did you stop here?” Haley wanted to know. “If Julius is so far away and you don’t want to burden your ship with too much deceleration, shouldn’t you have left as quickly as you could?” Paul admired her for a brief second; it was almost like talking to a beautiful, female version of Hal. She has such a clear, analytical mind.
“Well,” Paul said, wheeling out a prepared lie, “we noticed your distress beacon and were worried about what had happened.” Or, more accurately, Hal had used a period of great confusion and stress to bully me into visiting you, and I still don’t exactly know why. “Besides, your presence here was a tantalizing prospect. We had to wonder whether some ancient Earth civilization had made it into space and tried colonize Triton. We’re so far from anything or anyone, way out here. For a while, it seemed the most likely explanation.”
“Oh, we’re not from Earth,” Kiri reminded them. “We are true colonists; people join our expeditions not knowing if they’ll ever make landfall again. The crew of the Aldebaran was from every system of our star cluster.”
Paul remained deeply impressed by their commitment. Those who had volunteered for the Aldebaran were hardy and experienced, possessed of genuine determination to spread life into every environment it could tolerate. They risked everything so that living things might crawl or swim or float in every habitable corner of every system. It was life’s greatest and best insurance policy. And more impressive still, it was seen as part of their civic duty, a responsibility gladly accepted by these multi-centenarians.
It was time, Paul felt, to pose the most awkward question so far. “Haley, Kiri... I’m sorry to bring this up, but... what became of the Aldebaran?”
“Asteroid strike,” Kiri said quickly. The girls’ eyes met and held steady, as if they were silently exchanging memories of that dreadful day. Could they, Paul wondered, still see their horribly sundered vessel, spewing gases and cargo and passengers into the limitless void?
“You must have felt extraordinarily lucky to have been the only survivors,” Paul asked.
“No, there were others,” Haley assured him. “Other escape pods were released.”
Kiri stepped in. “We don’t know that for sure. None of them ever contacted us.”
Haley sighed. “They might have been damaged, or thrown onto a very different course from ours as the Aldebaran broke up.”
“How many were in your pod?” Paul asked. “And what is the ship’s name again?”
“Epsilon,” she said. “We were five when we left.”
Hal whispered in Paul’s earpiece, “And now, Ladies and Gentleman, may I present... the Elephant in the Room.”
Paul silently willed the machine to just shut the hell up for once. “It must have been a difficult journey,” he offered.
The silence was deafening and after a moment, Paul reached for a change of topic. “Have you been making any observations of Neptune?”
Haley made a curious noise which, upon interrogating his new dictionary, Paul found to be a colloquialism which meant, ‘That would have been an excellent suggestion, had it been made much earlier’. She followed up with, “It’s proved to be our colony’s only real design flaw. There are no windows from which we can see our planet. We’d have to go outside to see.”
“There is,” Kiri clarified, “one porthole up in the ceiling space of the Epsilon, but the way we have it configured right now, it really hurts your neck!” She promised to show Paul later.
After dinner, Haley gave Paul a tour of the station while Kiri carried out routine evening chores. There didn’t seem to be a lot of robot help – two gardening machines and a simple server droid were all that Paul noticed – and the girls took an obvious pride in their self-sufficiency. As Paul took in the various compartments, farms, equipment bays and such, he noticed that some rooms were simply bypassed without comment, as though the tour were being limited by a latent paranoia. Certainly there was no mention of the third woman Hal had detected. While Haley tended a toppling plant in one of the farms, Paul made whispered contact with Hal.
“Are you getting the same vibe that I am?”
Hal responded with his usual, analytical calm. “The third woman is alive, and they don’t want to talk about her. I surmise that she’s very sick, and they’re dealing with it psychologically by simply not dealing with it.”
It sounded reasonable, but Paul was worried. Could the ailment be contagious? Or were these two, in fact, the last survivors from a band of crazy fanatics who had turned on each other? It seemed significant that the teenagers were the only ones left; surely Aldebaran had carried passengers of a variety of ages. Paul had flashes from his high school reading of Lord of the Flies. Perhaps their authority figures had been deliberately sidelined, even incapacitated? And what of the two fatalities? Two bodies in the ground. One alive, but motionless. What the hell happened here?
Kiri emerged from the food preparation area. “If you don’t mind,” she began, “Haley and I are tired. You are welcome to stay here tonight,” she said, motioning to the quiet, green farm modules, “or to return to your own ship.”
Paul smiled as gracefully as he could. “With your permission I’ll sleep here. My suit suffered a tear, and I’d like to check it out more thoroughly before going outside again.”
“Very well.”
Haley followed Kiri wordlessly to their quarters, one of the five modules which branched off from the main hub surrounding Epsilon, and the door slid closed, rather definitively, Paul thought. He wondered if the gesture was a coincidence, or a message: no monkey business during the night, young man, or you’ll end up like the others.
The lights were lowered throughout the habitat, except in the farm modules, which relied on nearly constant light. Paul chose a sheltered corner of an equipment bay and stretched out, using his suit as both blanket and pillow.
“Got a minute, Hal?”
This was always a joke between them; Hal could, he knew, simultaneously govern several planets and playing chess with millions while answering whatever queries Paul might have. At the moment, however, much of his functioning was dedicated to keeping Paul safe and plotting their course to intercept Julius, which needed constant refine
ment and the creation of numerous escape routes and backup plans. “You want something to help you sleep?”
“No, I’m worn out. I’m just thinking about tomorrow. I mean, we can’t stay here too long, and we need to decide what to do with these refugees.”
Hal had already formed his opinion. “We take them with us, of course.”
Paul sat up, surprised. “Hold it, mega-brain. You brought us here. You made me land the Phoenix on a dangerous, frozen moon. You endangered a mission intended solely to save my planet from disaster, just so that we could pick up two mysterious women at the edge of the solar system and drag them along on a two thousand light-year journey?”
“Yes.”
Paul blew out his cheeks. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Hal.”
“They’ll die if they stay here.”
“And billions will die, in heart-breaking, drawn-out, planet-wide agony, if we don’t stop that crazy motherfucker from interfering with my contact with Takanli. You do understand that, right?”
“Perfectly well. I do not believe Haley and Kiri present a danger to our mission. In fact, I believe their value may be incalculable.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Paul offered one more question before he knew his mind would simply need to shut down. “And why is that, Hal?”
The great machine paused briefly and then answered, cryptically but typically. “You’ll see.”
“I’ll see?”
But that was apparently all Hal would say on the matter.
***
Kiri was right, he found the next morning. The observation window in the lofty ceiling of the Epsilon did, as she warned, strain one’s neck. It was, however, well worth it for the view.
“Nice planet you have here,” the explorer quipped. Neptune’s marine blue disc was half in shadow, illuminated at a tremendous remove by the distant sun.
“We’re glad you like it,” Kiri replied. She was in a very prickly mood this morning, and Paul took a moment to read her sarcasm. “The next time you bail out of a disintegrating cruiser, losing hundreds of your friends,” she continued, ignoring Haley’s pleading eyes, “I hope you find somewhere as pretty as this to crash land before you die.”
Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Page 15