New Light

by Ben Johnston

  Tom stared back with wide eyes, frowning. “Are you OK, Anniya? Did I do something?”

  Anniya blinked, relaxed her glare, and appeared to be making an effort to smile. “S-sorry.” She glanced at Christopher in the pilot’s seat manipulating the starmap. “I don’t usually hang out in places with lots of people.” Her eyes shifted back and forth between Christopher and Tom. “And I don’t usually hang around people, well, at all.” She cleared her throat. “It’s been a few years.”

  Tom’s eyebrows pulled together. He blinked, peering at her. “A few years? You haven’t talked to anyone in years?”

  Anniya’s eyes narrowed and her mouth pulled up. “Well, I’ve talked to lots of people.” She tilted her head with raised eyebrows, looking upwards. “Though, they were usually people I was about to knock out.” Her eyes shot to Tom.

  Anniya’s lips drew back in a toothy grin. “I like talking to people.”

  Tom swallowed.

  Anniya held her grin, then blinked. “I just. I just haven’t.” Her smile wilted. “Just haven’t hung out with anyone. Or been around anyone.”

  Christopher leaned back, looking over his shoulder at Tom and Anniya. “Well, you’re hanging out with us now. And you’re gonna be around lots of people on Heenu. So once we get there, you should think about putting your makeup back on. And more good news, the air’s bad.”

  Anniya narrowed her eyes and tilted her head at Christopher. “Bad air?”

  He winked at her. “You can wear a breathing mask to help cover your face. The planet’s being terraformed. The atmosphere is sort of.” He turned back to the floating transparency, leaning close to it, squinting. “Sort of iffy.”

  Christopher shrugged at the floating transparency then returned to the ship’s controls. A translucent green arrow now floated glowing above the navigation slate on the console. Christopher turned the Vectan shuttle until the glowing arrow pointed directly forward. He then reached forward to the control console and slid a large, sleek silver lever forward.

  The lone, sparkling galaxy suddenly lunged at them, swallowing their shuttle. In the blink of an eye, the windshield was filled with stars. They were back inside the Phoenix galaxy.

  Christopher reached up and tapped the oval glass slate set in the depression atop the console. The glowing arrow above the slate vanished, replaced by a cloud of tiny points of lights that bloomed to life, a zig-zagging line running through them. Reaching into that little starmap, Christopher positioned his finger on the tip of the zig-zagging line. The first section of the line glowed brighter than the rest.

  Christopher sat-back in the pilot’s seat with a sigh. He looked upwards, as if speaking to the ceiling. “That’s the first of forty two jumps. So, because it takes so long to position the ship for each jump, why don’t you two go find something to keep you busy.”

  Looking ahead, he slapped his hands down on his knees, stood from the pilots seat, then reached forward and with his right hand withdrew the oval glass navigation slate from atop the console, and with his left hand grabbed the floating transparency out of the air. He then collapsed back into the pilot’s seat, let the rectangular transparency floating in the air to his left, then set down and tapped the oval slate on his lap.

  The starmap bloomed to life above the clear glass slate, and with a thin silver stylus, Christopher began to scrawl little three-dimensional symbols and objects into the air around the projected starfield. “Yup. This is gonna take some time.” Reaching out and to his left, he used his stylus to make corresponding notes on the transparent rectangular sheet floating there.

  While Christopher plotted their jumps, with nothing else to do, Tom and Anniya explored the Vectan shuttle.

  Anniya learned all the Vectan security systems on the ship as she walked along tapping various little readouts with her finger, placing her hand against hatches and locker doors. At her touch, the readouts’ lights all flicked from red to green, the lockers and hatches all popped or dropped open.

  Tom followed behind Anniya, taking out objects and devices from the open drawers and lockers to examine them with wide eyes. In the back of the shuttle, Anniya unlocked a large panel. A schematic of the ship was displayed.

  Looking over the ship designs, Tom placed his finger onto the panel, on a spot near an engine, a small area labeled. “Expansion. See Updated Operating Instructions in Secure Inclosure.”

  Tom looked away from the panel at Anniya, frowning. “This shuttle has some kind of experimental expansion slot. Secret Vectan stuff. That’s pretty bright.” He looked back at the panel. “Some component is supposed to be installed here, it looks like.” He glanced back at Anniya. “You didn’t see any documents lying around, did you?”

  Anniya turned, her eyes dancing around at all the open doors and hatches on the walls and floor and ceiling of the shuttlecraft. “Sure. I think I saw something that looked important. A little leather booklet that was locked. I left it inside a compartment in the captain’s console.

  Tom and Anniya located the booklet, finding it was marked ‘Secret’, but when unlocked by Anniya, the single transparency it contained merely made mention of some initiative and contained no information about the experimental expansion slot. They tossed the transparency aside and located the actual expansion slot in the back of the ship where a device of some kind was intended to be installed in the future.

  Tom looked at the big empty slot in the wall, frowning. He blinked a few times. “This looks like an interactor unit would be installed here. But that’s not the material from which an interactor unit’s multiplane connection lines are made.” He pointed out bundles of thick, impossibly dark cables. “Normally interactor connection lines are kind of a dull mustard metallic. But these ones are blacker than black.” The young scholar leaned in closer. “Wait. These look like. Are these made of...”

  Anniya interrupted Tom, pushing him aside as she leaned in close to the utterly black cables, her eyes wide and glowing. “Wow! What the heck is that stuff?” She blinked, her eyes returning to hazel, leaned back and tilted her head. “Actually. It kind of seems like I’ve seen this before.”

  “Wait. You’ve seen this material before? Does that mean you can do your thing with it?”

  “Do my thing? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re thing, Anniya. Where you just look at something then you can make it? Like you did with goldenlight in the colosseum, or when you disintegrated the restraining net Doctor Cernon fired at you.” Tom looked down at the ground, scratching his head. “Or wait. Do you make stuff, or do you just break stuff?”

  “I can’t just make anything. Like, permanent, light-based materials. That would be weird. I just make power light and solid light fields. What you’re talking about is when I grok a material. So when I grok a material, I can break the material, disintegrate it. That’s when I am able to make the light with which it was imbued. Like that red metal net the old shard shot me with. Remember that? Here. I’ll show you.”

  Tom nodded. “Oh, I remember, you don’t need to...”

  Anniya’s eyes flashed with a neon cherry light and Tom found himself suddenly restrained by a glassy red net that wrapped around him, holding his arms at his sides.

  Tom’s eyes went wide, his smile huge as he struggled to breathe. “See, this is what I was talking about.” The color of Tom’s face was starting to match the color of the glassy, glowing net. “You can make stuff, like this net!” His voice was a strangled squeak.

  The net suddenly vanished, releasing the out-of-breath Tom. The young scholar fell forward, his hands on his knees, his chest heaving as he sucked gulps of air into his lungs. Anniya shook her head. “But that net is not permanent. It’s not material. That was just the lightfield version of whatever your big friend shot me with earlier.”

  Tom took one more big breath before standing and shaking his arms loosely in front of him. “Still, wow. It sure seemed to work on me!” He blinked at Anniya, then turned to the open slot in the wall of the
shuttle. “So, can you tell what kind of light the material of these connection lines is imbued with? Can you see that by looking? Or grok it or whatever you do?”

  Anniya blew air out of her nose. “So, Tom. Look. I can’t just look at a material and instantly know what it is.” She glanced up at the ceiling, her mouth to the side. “Well, sometimes I can. But most of the time I need to focus on the stuff for a bit. Think about it. Kind of gaze at it. It feels sort of like solving a maze that slowly reveals itself to you. Or like following the blowing leaves to find an air current.” She glanced at Tom. “Some mazes are simpler and some breezes are gentler.”

  Returning her attention to the empty slot in the wall and the dark material of the connection lines, she rubbed her chin. “This material is… If I spent a day I might be able to make some progress. Eventually, after I finally understand it, once I grok it, then I can make the light it’s imbued with.”

  Tom smiled widely. “That’s a step in the right direction. If you are able to make a class of light, that’s good enough. We can actually take it from there. You can just enter the light ratio into a synthesizer, and we can derive the photic and lumical properties from that.“

  Anniya squinted one eye at Tom. “Enter the what into the what now?”

  “The light ratio. Enter it into a synthesizer. You know, the ratio of hard to softlight? That’s all we need. With the ratios we can sort out the frequencies with an algorithm and then derive the plane elements from that.”

  Brow low, Anniya shook her head. “Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Tom held out his hands. “Light ratios, Anniya. You’re a lightmaker. The ratios you use to mix your light?”

  Her hazel eyes stared at Tom beneath her lowbrow.

  Tom scratched his head. “How do you make your higher-order light, Anniya? I saw you use three distinct forms of inertialight. And you just netted me.”

  Anniya’s eye fell to the ground, looking back and forth as if she was reading something. “I’ve never really thought about it.” Her eyes stopped moving under her raised eyebrows. She looked up at Tom, her eyes wide. “I guess I just do it by feel.”

  Tom scratched his curly head. “By feel? How am I supposed to use a feeling to synthesize a class of light?”

  After a severe yawn, with red eyes, Christopher rose from the pilot’s seat to see Anniya staring out the window at the stars. “Oh hey, Goldie. I didn’t see you come into the cabin. Listen, I’ve still got twenty one jumps to make, and I’m pretty drained, so I’m gonna call it a day and go lights-out for the night.”

  Anniya stared out the window, her back to Christopher. “I had an entity that lived with me.”

  Christopher stared at her, blinking, eyebrows slightly low. He scratched his head. “New conversation subject, I guess. So, an ‘entity’, huh. What does that mean?”

  Anniya stared at the stars. “A fox.” She dropped her gaze to the floor. “He’s probably still on Namoon.”

  Christopher nodded. “OK. So a pet fox. I’m guessing he wasn’t living at your house, or you wouldn’t be wondering about him.”

  Anniya turned to Christopher, giving a slow shake of her head. “No. He was a lightfox. He was intelligent and wise.” She turned back to the window, staring at the sharp points of light against the blackness. The eternal night of space. “And he was my friend.”

  Christopher blinked hard. “A lightfox.” He yawned again. “Very nice. Sounds like a great friend.”

  She dropped her head again and turned away from the stars, walking slowly past Christopher. “Oh Spirit, where are you?”

  “I am right here, Anniya.”

  In an instant, Christopher had phased a rifle into his hand and spun to point it directly at a shiny little fox that was suddenly sitting on the ship’s control console. “I’ve gotten less sleep than this before.” His wide, bloodshot eyes bulged. “What in the fracted Ruin is that!” Christopher rubbed his face then pulled the hand away to stare at the fox’s glowing, sky-blue eyes. “You see that too, right? I’m not hallucinating.”

  At that very moment, Tom walked through the entry and into the main cabin to see Christopher and Anniya looking surprised. “Hey guys, so how’s the...” Tom then saw the shiny fox with the shining eyes, its coppery-orange fur adorned with curling and swirling patterns of faint gold. The young man’s eyelids yanked back. He held out both his hands at the shiny little animal. “What the fleck is that thing?!”

  Anniya’s eyes were hardly less wide than Christopher and Tom’s. “Spirit! Why do you appear to them?”

  The shiny little fox looked back and forth from Christopher and Tom, then to Anniya. “They are your true friends, Anniya.”

  “They are not my friends!” She turned to Tom, looking him up and down, one eyebrow raised, her nostrils flared. “The little one’s so gullible.”

  Tom frowned.

  She turned to Christopher with a half-squint. “And the old one’s sorta creepy.”

  Christopher frowned with Tom.

  She turned back to the little fox. “What makes you think they’re my friends?”

  “They are your true friends because they risked their lives to save yours.”

  “Yeah, but they only did that because I have something they want. And it’s like, their job, or something.”

  Tom’s mouth fell slightly open. “Our job?” He shook his head. “Anniya, it is not our job to get into blinding boltfights with the Vectans. We saved you because we’re genuinely good people.”

  He looked at Christopher, blinked, then turned back to Anniya. “Well, I am at least.” Christopher’s brow fell.

  “Spirit, do you know why they did what they did? Do you know their intentions?”

  “Anniya, I see actions. I know they saved your life by taking actions that risked theirs.”

  Anniya turned, assessing the big messy archeologist and the disheveled young scholar. “Great. Friends that I don’t get to choose.” She gave her head a slow shake. “Who wants to choose their own friends anyway.”

  Chapter 30

  As it approached the space station, Jonas’ starship was dwarfed by the great crystal and metal dock. The enormous space station itself resembled a sunflower, its mirrored surface glittering with pinprick lights from sprays of windows and portholes on its surface. The crystal docks, big enough to fill a valley, were the petals of the flower. Towards the curved horizon of the planet below, off in the distance, other similar space stations spanned out above the surface.

  Glaring with reflected sunlight high above the blue and green of Vectus, the great mirrored sunflower hung. Below, down on the planet’s surface, lay a city of sharp glass and metal. The gleaming station had a thin glassy spire in the center of its base, a great needle that, like an impossibly long and thin flower stem, shot down to the surface of the planet below. There the long and thin glass tube met with the top of a soaring, thin, mirrored spike of a building, a skyscraping needle that rose up from the middle of the sharp glass and metal city.

  Stepping onto the station’s glass elevator labeled. “Central Spire”, Jonas watched the room around him shoot upwards as with no feeling of motion his elevator moved rapidly down the central spire. The space station shrank away above and the horizon outside flattened from curved to flat as his elevator reached the top of the central spire, arriving at its uppermost-floor, the sky lobby. Blazing noon sunlight flooded through the domed crystal-clear ceiling of the room, showing the blindingly-blue sky with the three suns blazing overhead. The light from the powersuns added subtle glows and textures to the murmuring people moving over the smooth pathways past the gurgling fountains. The powerlight shimmered and glowed in the small flowing lanes of water, glinting off exotic fish.

  He took another lift to the ground floor, then took a platform. His platform took him through the sharp, glass city, heading towards the far mountains. The smells of forest filtered through the platform’s force fields as he passed through a tunnel of trees. When the tunnel vani
shed, he beheld a soaring palace of dark wood and glass.

  Motion ceased instantly. Jonas stood and stepped off his platform onto the vast, open esplanade. Moving through the crowds on the platform promenade, Jonas passed several lines of guards before entering into a great main hall. All of the palace’s wide and clear crystal windows were open to the bright noon. The space was filled with a complex assortment of flowering trees and plants. He followed the wide, tiled, central path, his boots slapping the stone floor as he jogged up a few wide stairs to where premier Rechter stood, back to Jonas. He stood looking out a great arched window over the forest.

  The young, raven-haired Advisor took a few steps towards the motionless premier, then waited.

  Without turning around or moving, Rechter spoke. “The Golden Champion escaped. The board of advisors was wrong.”

  Jonas bowed, then stood straight. Rechter turned his head to the side, giving Jonas a view of his hard profile. “Chair Advisor.” The premier’s eyes did not look at Jonas. “Watch the School.” He returned to gazing out at the forest. “The new board of advisors thinks the Union is to blame.”

  Jonas bowed again. “I shall convey your orders to our spies on Administra, Great Leader.” Still bowing, he took three steps backwards, away from the premier’s back, then turned and proceeded down the stairs and out the big doors. There he descended more stairs, down to the semi-crowded floor of the main hall, bright under the big crystal windows in the ceiling, hinged open to the bright noon day. As he passed through the crowd on the floor, those who noticed him either looked away quickly, or nodded. All moved out of his path.

  He exited the great hall and out on the esplanade came upon a group men and women in long, silver coats dressed in midnight blue Vectan officer’s fatigues. The group stood in a V formation. A tall man with short blonde, nearly-white, hair stepped forward to stand before Jonas.

  Jonas, standing straight, his obsidian hair glittering in the sunlight, addressed the man. “Colonel Alexander Glatchez.”