He turned to the classified files, detailing Fleet intel on Nym activity over the last decade. Aside from a few skirmishes between battleships and Nym battle cruisers and Lily Stewart’s appearance, there wasn’t anything that explained their ability to time travel. They rarely even left their corner of the galaxy since the Fleet’s adoption of a “Shoot first, ask questions later” policy when it came to their cruisers in Commons or Fringes space.
Obviously that didn’t mean anything. Everyone knew the rumors of the Nym’s technological capabilities, but there wasn’t much in the way of hard evidence. They would have to develop better transporter and ship cloaking mechanisms for time travel to work based on the accepted theories outlined in Rian’s files.
One popular theory involved the use of a vortex. Essentially, find the right kind of vortex, engage the hyperspace engines to a specific rate of distance, then abort the hyperdrive and allow the vortex to carry the ship into another time. It was unproven; the reality of space travel was that if a ship found herself in a vortex, she was coming out in pieces. That was what happened a couple centuries back to a few science ships dumb enough to test out that theory before the ban on time travel took effect. There really was no such thing as the “right” kind of vortex in space. Besides, even if that were possible, there hadn’t been a recorded vortex anywhere near the Nym world in years.
Another, more plausible but untested theory hypothesized the use of wormhole-like energy currents that could transport matter through a space-time rift, treating the energy waves like doors into different eras. Wormholes occurred naturally and far more often than vortexes, but a ship was likely to meet her demise in the same manner. Assuming the Nym had manipulated space rifts naturally, this theory was likeliest.
But what if they had actually developed a device that could propel them back and forth through time? Rian made a fist at the idea.
His computer shrilled to signal an incoming message, interrupting his train of thought. He checked the sender’s ID: N. Marska. His sister. He considered dismissing it, but knew she would keep calling until he authorized her message. He tabbed the “receive” icon on the screen, and his twin’s face appeared, blue eyes sparkling. She had changed her hair again, and bright red streaks ran through her shoulder-length black curls.
“Hi, little brother,” she said.
She was ten minutes older than him and never let him forget it. They were closing in on their mid-thirties now. It was well past time to let it go. He forced himself to smile. “Hi, Nalia.”
She propped her elbows on her desk and rested her head on her hands. “You know damn well why I’m calling and why I’m calling you in your office instead of your apartment.”
“Cabin,” he corrected.
“Whatever. I just put Anya in front of the vidscreen and Jonn’s at his poker game. I called Dad and he said you were docked at Rubidge for a couple of days.” She grinned. “You know what I want to know.”
He really wished she would stop reading the tabloids. “There’s nothing to tell, Nalia,” he said. Fleet’s ability to monitor every message was never far from his mind.
“Oh, come on. Even Dad told me that everything in the press is lies and there really was a frozen body found on a patrol ship with crappy life support.”
“Nalia! Shut up!” He could tell her what life support actually was later.
“You happen to be commanding a shit-hauler with a notorious reputation and you’re one of three ships that docked at a Fleet base since the story broke. One of the others was a newer patrol ship, the other a battleship. Am I right?”
“Damn it, Nalia.” He really wished he could cut off visual on messages and use the kind of telephone technology Lily had told him about. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to remember how often Fleet monitored messages sent from captains’ offices. Never, as far as he knew. And if their father had been talking... “How did you figure it out?” he asked quietly.
“I didn’t. I was messing with you. You just told me.” She sounded positively gleeful.
Aggravation clenched his gut. “Are you trying to get me court-martialed? That could happen, you know.”
“Military channel,” she said automatically. “I think you’re safe.” She rolled her eyes, and Rian uttered a silent prayer to the gods that she would finally grow up soon.
“Sabi eabht ermabt releabvart a eabh ro ealish?” Nalia asked devilishly.
For the gods’ sake. It was the secret language she and Rian had created as children. Is the time traveler a he or a she? “I can’t talk about that now, and please stop acting like a child on my office computer,” he said. But he knew Nalia and her persistence. Her refusal to stay out of anyone’s business was one of her qualities that made a Fleet career impossible. He had to distract her somehow. “I met someone,” he said suddenly.
Nalia raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? You never tell me about your girlfriends.”
“She isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Now who’s acting like a child?”
She had a point there, but he was doing it out of necessity. “This is very new and I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere yet,” Rian continued. That much was the truth. “I feel very...differently about her than anyone else.” Also the truth. Manhandling women in lifts wasn’t something he usually did.
“What’s she like?”
“She’s a pharm tech,” he lied. Half-lied. She would be one soon. “Very smart and outgoing. She has a great sense of humor.”
All true. Lily didn’t hide herself at all. He liked that very much. No pretensions about her.
“Is she pretty?”
She was more than that. “Yes,” he finally said. “She’s beautiful.” That word still didn’t convey her smile or the curve of her hips.
“Is she on board the Defiant?”
Rian didn’t answer immediately. Nalia’s jaw dropped, and he got a bad feeling that she had just put two and two together. “Oh my gods!” she gasped. “What happened to Mr. Captains-Don’t-Get-Involved-With-Subordinates?”
He breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t come up with four. “I didn’t know she was going to be joining the crew,” he protested.
“A patrol ship has a pharmacy now?” she asked suspiciously.
Damn. He thought quickly. “She works in the infirmary dispensary,” he said. “And we’ve only been out to dinner a couple of times.”
“I never thought I’d see the day my by-the-books little brother broke his own rules.” She snickered. “What’s her name?”
Rian hesitated.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll know you’re making her up,” she warned.
Lily was an uncommon name in the Commons, but not unheard of. He could tell Nalia the truth, and he did.
She leaned back in her chair and gave him a sly smile. Rian tensed. He knew that look. They were kids again, and he had been caught passing around a bottle of sala with his friends at their boarding school. He was about to be blackmailed.
“Don’t you dare,” he hissed.
“Mom and Dad will be thrilled.”
“Nalia, don’t. If and when I decide Mom and Dad need to know, I’ll be the one to tell them.”
“But you never tell them anything,” she wheedled.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“You have no idea how pissed off Dad was when he heard about your promotion through military channels.”
Actually, Rian did. He had received an angry message from the retired Captain Marska two days after he took over the Defiant. “He only did it to make a fuss and remind me he’s my father. This technically isn’t a promotion, and he knows it,” he pointed out. “I’m still officially a commander.”
Nalia dismissed that comment with a wave of her hand. But then, she wasn’t military. She didn’t get it.
“Just tell them,” she said, an uncharacteristic softness in her eyes. “They worry about you.”
Rian snorted softly. Their parents were Fleet through and thro
ugh. They had gone months at a time without seeing them when they were kids, only remembering they were parents when school administrators notified them about achievements and punishments. Nalia couldn’t even offer a token excuse like the expectation of grandchildren—she had that covered with her toddler, whom they had barely seen in her two years. Nalia’s husband’s parents, owners of a freighter company, doted on the little girl instead.
But Rian knew if Nalia told their parents about Lily, there would be calls just to be difficult, an investigation into her background, and then all hell would break loose.
“If this goes anywhere, I’ll tell them,” he promised. He paused. “I’d like to be in a position where I have to.”
“I know you,” Nalia said. “Remember our deep, mystical twin connection. You really like her.”
“I have other concerns, too,” he began.
She cut him off. “Rian, you told me you met someone. You even described her in terms broader than ‘she’s female.’ You never do that.”
Rian’s hand hovered over the “disconnect” icon on the screen before she could wrestle more information from him. “Nalia, I have security issues with a known alien terrorist faction to worry about. I have to go now.”
“Good night,” she said. “Call me when you get the chance, or I’ll tell on you.”
* * *
Lily surprised Taz in their weapons training.
“It’s a laser rifle,” she pointed out. “It’s easier to aim with a charge instead of bullets.” Her father had taught her to shoot with pellet guns and a hunting rifle, putting bullets in rows of Diet Coke cans balanced on a fence.
The Defiant had a target shooting simulator on board, and Taz had set up a program that projected moving human-sized targets across a screen along its back wall. He had prepped a few weapons for her and she had hit a few targets on his command, making the projections explode into pieces before a new one took shape.
“This is easier than the laser pistol,” she said. “I learned to shoot on something similar.” One of the targets shattered as the charge, set to stun, hit its mark.
“Remind me never to piss you off,” Taz remarked. “Let’s try two.” He adjusted the projection from a console and a pair of black outlines raced across the screen. Lily felled one immediately, but the other was being difficult. Its form shrank as it ran towards nothingness and dashed side to side. She fired three more charges before it finally exploded. The status light on the top of the rifle changed from green to yellow.
Taz noticed it. “This’ll have to be charged soon,” he said. “And I have to clean up before a few security officers come in to try out some new toys they picked up on station. They’ll be here in a half-hour or so.” He took the rifle from her and clipped a charger to its stock before stashing it in the weapons locker.
“They’re training at eleven?” She remembered military time. “Twenty-three hundred hours,” she corrected herself.
“Patrol ships never sleep.”
“What are you patrolling, exactly?” Whenever Lily looked out a window, all she could see were endless stars and, in the distance, the occasional abandoned satellite or rare ship.
“Nothing while we’re orbiting around the station,” Taz replied. From the control console he turned off the projection. “We’re heading to the Fringes, the area where people don’t start firing at Commons ships, to drop off that science team and keep watch for smugglers. If we find any, we call in a larger patrol ship, like Bishop’s Pride, or a battleship to take care of the rest.”
“Everyone keeps talking about the Fringes. What are they?”
“Independent republics. The further away from the Commons they are, the more they hate civilized space.”
“And you don’t arrest anyone yourselves?”
“Not often. Depends on the pirate and his ship. A ship like the Defiant mostly just points to the bad guys and lets others take the credit, and in between does the crappy jobs no one else wants to do, like hauling museum artifacts.” He double-checked the weapons locker to make sure it was secured. “Lights!” he barked harshly, and the room’s illumination decreased. “I could teach you some hand-to-hand combat,” he offered.
Lily regarded him for a moment. He wasn’t quite as tall as Rian, and almost skinny. If she didn’t know he was a soldier, she wouldn’t have considered him threatening at all. “I don’t know,” she said. “Most of you in Fleet are twice my size. You also have a desk job. Is there even a point?”
Taz looked offended. “I’ll have you know I graduated from the academy with a concentration in engineering and an award for hand-to-hand combat. I’m only stuck in communications until I’ve decided to stop enjoying myself at my job. And I’m sure what you meant to ask about is if there are there effective self-defense methods besides kicking someone in the balls. There are. That’s the first place we anticipate being attacked by a woman. You have to catch them off-guard.”
“You sound like you speak from experience.” Knowing Taz and his attempts at womanizing, he likely was.
They left the room, and he palm-locked the door behind them. He was quiet; his expression darkened. She had hit a nerve.
“Yeah,” he said. “My ex-wife’s mother.”
They waited for the elevator, and Lily tried to process this new information. “Wife?” she squeaked out. Ex-wife? He wasn’t even twenty-five.
He shook his head. “You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you. Alcohol is required.” A few guys bearing security insignia and carrying gun cases stepped out. Taz ordered the elevator to the mess. He was quiet until they sat at the bar, beer in front of him and a glass of blue wine for Lily.
“I got married when I was seventeen,” he finally said. “Arranged marriage. They’re common where I come from. Vu’saar,” he explained, seeing the question on her face. “It’s a small planet in the Hefronn Galaxy. If the Defiant was heading there at top speed, it would take about four months, to give you an idea of how far away it is. It’s beyond the outer Fringes, minds its own business, and hates technology.”
“Vu’saar, then. Aren’t you human?” she asked.
“Humanoid,” he corrected. “Same as you, with a few subtle differences. Most Vu’saarns have telepathic or empathic talents. My empathic talents are very weak, and my ex-wife has none. Our parents were elders there, and probably still are. It’s a position you’re born into, similar to royalty.”
“So you’re a prince.” The idea of Taz being royalty would have made Lily giggle if he weren’t so unusually serious.
“I was,” he said. “I was the oldest child in the family and entitled to take a place as an elder, except I’m not a telepath. They don’t look kindly on non-telepaths in the ruling class. Another elder family had the same problem with their oldest daughter, so they decided we should marry and live as commoners. I was fine with that, and so was Maranda.” He took a long drink from his beer, and Lily followed suit with her wine.
“We got along fine. We didn’t love each other,” he stressed. “But we got along well enough. I knew she was seeing someone else behind her parents’ backs, and I was okay with that.”
Lily nodded, pretending to understand.
“It was a political alliance, Lily. Our parents were mortified that they made children who had to speak to be heard, and they wanted us out of sight. Anyway, one night Maranda went out with her boyfriend and I was out with my brother. I came home first, and at dawn Maranda was dragged home by her mother, who was enraged that she was having an affair and I didn’t care. We never...” Taz had the decency to color. “Um, you know. Knew each other that way. We were just friends sharing a house. My mother-in-law beat the shit out of both of us, and we were disowned by our families. Me, Maranda, and her boyfriend got on a freighter to a planet on the Fringes-Commons border. They joined the freighter crew, I joined Fleet. I haven’t been back to Vu’saar since.”
“What happened to Maranda?”
“Arranged marriages aren’t recognized in the C
ommons, so there wasn’t an annulment to worry about. I last saw her about five years ago, when I ran into her on a station at random. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“And so during that beating you—” Lily gestured with her hand.
“They took a couple of hits. Hurt like a bitch.”
Taz spoke the last part with his usual affable style, but it was forced. There was a palpable negative energy around him that Lily had never seen before. What a terrible thing to experience, especially so young.
He polished off the last of his beer with more gusto than necessary. “Please don’t tell anyone,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“A lot of people in the Commons don’t like Vu’saarns,” he continued. “They think I read their minds when they’re not looking, and I can’t do that.”
Lily sort of understood, and sympathized with him.
He tried to lighten the mood. “Besides, if I could read minds, I might actually have better luck in the bars, right?”
Chapter 10
Lily was hunched over a table in the mess, datatabs and a coffee cup spread out in front of her. She scribbled notes on one of the datatab’s screens with a stylus in between scrolling through information on the other. She was wearing what Rian was starting to think of as her uniform—slim black pants and a nondescript blouse, blue this time, another simple outfit from her excursion on Rubidge Station. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she kept scraping her bangs out of her face. Aside from handwriting her notes instead of keying them on a portable comp, she looked completely at home.
Rian knew she was studying the Fleet pharmacy program and had an exam in two days’ time. He had tried to keep his distance the last few days in a vain attempt to regain his professional demeanor, the call from his sister notwithstanding.
He admitted this morning that it wasn’t working. Lily Stewart was under his skin, invading his thoughts at inconvenient times. He couldn’t read intel reports about Nym infiltration without thinking of her being kidnapped, nor order a coffee at his office replicator without remembering her marvel at the devices. When he signed off on security logs, he thought about her friendship with Ensign Shraft, which, if he was honest with himself, he envied. The man was an idiot by choice; the gods knew he was bright enough to manipulate long strings of code to make a bunch of bots dance for his amusement but had shown little interest in taking his talent with computers in a positive direction. But when Rian thought about it, he was friendly with most of the crew, and now he wished he was the one who had thought to teach Lily something about self-defense. It would have been a perfect excuse to be with her for a little while without raising too many suspicions. Only a few, anyway. Captains usually didn’t teach people to shoot with a laser rifle. And hand-to-hand combat—forget it. As soon as he touched her, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and not in a way that involved a sleeper hold.
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