by A. C. Ellas
The station was enormous, and so was the cradled cruiser that would soon be theirs. Nick stared at it, speechless. Ten kilometers from bow to stern had seemed large enough on paper when he and Cai had looked at the blueprints. The reality was even larger than that. Dark Star was huge. Laughing Owl would fit in one of Dark Star’s landing bays with room to spare. The ship floated in a cylindrical space, pinned by gantries and umbilicals here and there, but it looked complete—on the outside. Inside might be another matter, of course.
“The hull’s not black,” Nick commented. Laughing Owl had been resurfaced with an eye-twisting black hull that rendered the ship nearly invisible to the eye as well as to sensors. They might be changing ships, but they were still Fourth Fleet, and being invisible was important to them.
Nobody replied, he hadn’t expected that anyone would—his crew had no answers, the information he sought was probably within the not-black hull. They passed the large windows and reached one of the umbilicals attached to Dark Star. A standard docking tube, Nick identified as the guildsmen turned down it. Nick had to force himself to retain his steady pace when what he wanted to do was race ahead so he could explore his new command. At the end of the tube, the outer airlock hatch stood open. The guildsmen didn’t even alter their stride as they crossed from station to spaceship. Nick followed them into the airlock.
One of the guildsmen turned and faced the crew. “Please remain out here until the ship has been tuned to your Astrogator. This is a delicate process and stray thoughts, even from non-psions, might affect it, and borderline sensitives can disrupt the process. If you need something to do, you could start packing up the items you need to transfer from Laughing Owl.”
“What about me?” Nick asked quietly as most of the crew turned back, muttering about what they needed to get done.
“You may come with us. We will provide you with an external shield even though you are naturally shielded—just in case.” The man smiled, something Nick hadn’t thought the Guild permitted of its upper echelons.
Nick continued to follow them, now feeling very much the odd man out, all the way to Cai’s new chambers. It was a long walk, and Nick started wondering about the logistics of moving personnel around on a ship ten thousand meters in length with a width of a thousand meters for the main cylinder where people would live and work.
The Astrogator’s chambers were very spacious but bare of all but the most basic furnishings, as one would expect for a place that had never been occupied. Nick resisted the urge to check out the kitchen and instead focused on what they were doing to Cai. One of the adjuncts was expertly inserting a feeding tube down Cai’s nose. The friendly guildsman held out a pair of silvery disks—they were adhered to one another. Nick took them and twisted them in opposite directions, causing them to separate. He pressed one to each temple and let go. The disks remained in place—he could feel them pressing against his skin as they sought to rejoin each other. It wasn’t painful or even uncomfortable, but there was a sense of silence about him that struck him as odd.
Raw Synde was now being pushed down Cai’s feeding tube, and Nick wondered what it would be like to have Cai use a feeding tube on him. He imagined Cai pushing the pooled semen of many men down the tube into his stomach. He didn’t realize he was visibly erect until one of the guildsmen glanced at him and smirked. He ignored it, and the silent ridicule, with a stoic mien.
Cai was taken into the Chamber and placed on the Astrogator’s couch in the center of the twelve-sided room. All the connections but one were made, then the six adjuncts positioned themselves around the room and made their own connections to the ship. The lead guildsman took Cai’s right hand and carefully pressed the crystal embedded in his palm to the connecting depression in the arm of the chair. The ceiling above Cai opened, and a large crystalline structure descended until it was just a few feet above the Astrogator.
Nick gaped at it, his awe increasing as it began to flash in all the colors of the rainbow and then some.
The friendly guildsman murmured, “The tuning has begun. Come, look at this.” He led Nick out of the Chamber, over to the large interface Cai would work with in years to come. A device was plugged into it, and the guildsman indicated it.
There was both a numeric and a graphical display. As Nick studied it, the number steadily but slowly climbed from the teens into the twenties.
“This shows Cai’s progress for the first-level tuning. Once it’s at one hundred percent, all the neurologic circuits on this ship will be tuned to his brainwaves. Subsequent tunings will increase the saturation of Cai’s coverage of various systems.”
“At what point will you let him wake up?”
“He will wake up after this tuning. He will feel at home here once the basic tuning is complete. The space trials you will undergo are as much to help him integrate the ship’s systems into himself as to help the crew learn how the ship responds.”
* * * *
Cai stretched, wondering why he felt so stiff. The bed beneath him felt... different. So did everything else. Blinking, he sat up. This wasn’t his bedroom, and yet, it was. I was transferred, he reminded himself. This is Dark Star. He slid out of bed and walked into the front room. He stopped to admire the massive interface but resisted the urge to play with it. For now. The rest of the room matched the interface—it was much larger than what he’d had on Laughing Owl. It was also elegantly furnished in black, grey and silver. The carpeting was a dove grey that Cai found nice enough even though he wished there was some color—his eye caught on a hammered bronze circle hanging on the wall. The crimson lambda in the center of it definitely added that splash of color he’d sought.
“Do you like it?” Nick came up behind him from the kitchen. “I was going to wait until your birthday, but this seemed a much more appropriate occasion.”
“It’s a hoplite shield,” Cai murmured, identifying it. “Real?”
“As far as we know, yes. Evie found it for me—her friend again. It’s Spartan.”
Cai turned and embraced him. “It’s perfect, thank you.”
Nick wrapped his arms around Cai and sighed in contentment. “I love you and you’re welcome.”
“I love you, too.” Cai looked into Nick’s stormy grey-green eyes and smiled. “Now, let’s go look at the rest of our new ship.”
To be continued...
About the Author
A.C. Ellas has long since embraced her inner nerd. She revels in her Greekness and in her Geekness. She has two lives—the mundane reality of life here on Earth and the far more interesting life in her head. She is fascinated by ancient history, ancient forms of combat, target archery, sabre fencing, the equestrian sports and all things equine, dragons, spaceships, time travel, organic food and sustainable farming. Above all, she loves science fiction and fantasy of all varieties, especially conventions, which are the only gatherings on Earth where she can find many people just as strange as she is.
You can contact her at [email protected] or through her website www.ac-ellas.com
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