Sister Resister

by Kelli Jae Baeli

  A tentacle floated up to stroke my head.

  “Thank you,” Shrtz said. “I have had the yearnings for a very long time.”

  “When was the last time you had sex?”

  “Three hundred of your Pangean days.”

  I leaned back to look at her. “Why so long?”

  “It is often difficult to find my own kind. It is one reason why I journeyed to Pangea. There are clans of us there. I thought to hide in the samegender areas...”

  It was hard enough, I knew, to find ones of own kind. There were plenty of them, but it was dangerous to pursue them. Even when one was found of like mind, there was always the chance they would turn you over to the Militia. Languid had done that. The cute blonde at Double Zero. I had run away to hide, but they had found me. Self-preservation had forced her to betray me. She had been forced to choose between herself and me. I couldn’t blame her. Maybe I would have done the same.

  Shrtz continued, “The geneticist who created me was a direct descendant of Milo Weller, and she had in her possession his notebooks, but didn’t understand them. I read them all, and wanted to test a theory about one of his inventions. I hoped I could convince a member of your clan to to upload a program from a flashdrive into the banks of one of his ships. But before I could accomplish my goal, the Militia descended upon the underground club and I was arrested with all of you...so, you see, now I am searching for that data, hoping it will provide us a way back to Earth.”

  I pushed up on one elbow. “What? Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I did not want to give you false hope.”

  “I’ll take any hope I can get. If we can get to Earth, we can finally be free of the P-Murts.”

  “I lament the laws of our world.” Shrtz sighed, a little off-topic.

  “I do, too,” I said. “So I hope you can find that data.”

  “I continue to try. Now, my lovely, we must cleanse. You may use the water cabinet over there. I will cleanse when you are finished.”

  Reluctantly, I pulled away from this sensuous lover and showered in the tight confines of the water cabinet. Rinsing the dark liquid from my arm, pumping soap from the dispenser in the wall to wash my body, my short hair.

  Refreshed, I stepped out in the drying sheet, to allow Shrtz to go in and do the same.

  When she emerged, she patted herself with the drying sheet, and reached out one tentacle as she did so, to stroke my head.

  “Story Book, I must tell you that during my cleansing, I thought of something. I must return to the Bridge. An investigation of these new ideas is warranted.”

  Sometimes, Shrtz sounded like a bot. Perhaps the rumors were true and cephalosapiens were raised by bots. It would explain their sometimes emotionless but proper speaking patterns.

  I didn’t care. I now understood that Shrtz was a kind creature. A woman. Different from myself. But still worthy of respect and love. Or was that the feralmoans talking?

  I woke from an unexpected nap, and after drinking the last of the day’s water, and tearing open the paste-tube for any remaining nutrients, and pausing at a storage closet I’d missed, finding a small treasure, I joined Shrtz at the Bridge console, where she was once again busy pressing buttons, scrolling through screens.

  I wasn’t sure if this was going to be awkward. I could tell, though, she had switched off the feralmoans. I appreciated the courtesy. “Hey, my favorite ceph. What’s going on?”

  “Consternation! I continue to see this alert light.” She pointed to it, tapped it, and the panel blinked a word and also reflected the word on the clearshield

  “What’s Sunaru?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Well hey, look what I found.” I put on the sunglasses and leaned up to show her the tiny set of buttons on the side. “These buttons adjust the lenses for different light conditions.”

  Shrtz stared at the glasses. Her eyes went back to the clearshield display. “Of course!”

  “What?”

  She pointed a tentacle at the screen where the word Sunaru glowed. “I saw the reflection of this word in your spectacles. Written backwards, it’s Uranus.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It is a clue. There are clues throughout the data, but I have not interpreted them as clues.”

  “What does the clue tell you?”

  “Very little, at this juncture. Except that Uranus is important, somehow. We are supposed to be here, perhaps.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch,” I criticized.

  “The information I have found leads me to believe that Milo Weller left data behind to help us. And coding the word Uranus, however simply, means that I must focus on the planet. Now, I have read everything in the ship, everything in the navcomm I could locate, and on the ePad you gave me, and another I found—”

  “How could you have done all that in less than a month?”

  Flipping a dismissive tentacle at me, she said, “I read very quickly, and my retention is almost one hundred percent.”

  “Oh. Go on, then...”

  “I discovered some hidden files, but I made little sense of them until now. I was able to upload the flashdrive contents in the pod before the suspension took over...”

  “You failed to mention that little tidbit, too...” I frowned. “How did you smuggle that in? The guards searched us and took everything.”

  “They did not search everywhere on my person.”

  I was afraid to ask what that meant. I opted for, “Did you find anything?”

  “Possibly.” She gave me one of her rare smiles. “You see, often, mating activities animate other synaptic pathways. Thus, I think I may have found a solution...”

  Excited, I raked my fingers through my damp hair.

  “I located the history of these transport ships to confirm what I had learned in Weller’s notebooks,” Shrtz continued. “The ships have had many iterations, but this particular vessel is the last of its kind. It made the original journey with the scientists and independent colonists who settled Plovis. Those ships were traded to Pangea a hundred years ago, and they have been used exclusively for prisoner transport.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  She carried on. “Their inventor was Milo Weller. He was a brilliant scientist, engineer, and physicist—”

  “Over-Achiever, much?” I mumbled.

  “...a very wealthy professor,” she went on. “In these particular vessels, he created what was called a core beacon.” She pecked on the screen in front of me until the dossier was visible. “It was keyed to the original location. I might be able to understand the fueling mechanism, and might discern how to make these codes functional again. These mechanisms were embedded for a reason. If the beacon and the transceiver are still operational, we might be able to return to the location of Weller’s choosing.”

  “That’s a lot of mights.”

  She pointed to some gibberish on the screen, ignoring my slight. “Also, I may have found the proper settings to allow us to break the orbit, and then we can use what appears to be—in my estimation—a Spacetime Fold and the Continuum to send us to Pangea...”

  I pulled my new glasses off, pushing the mibber-jibber space-travel talk aside to address the more obvious flaw. “Shrtz. We can’t go back there—”

  “No no...my apologies. I was not referring to your home-planet. I meant Pangea One. The original continent, later called Earth.”

  Quirking a sardonic eyebrow, I said, “The planet of my ancestors.”

  “Our ancestors,” she corrected, with a kind smile.

  “Shrtz...haven’t we already established Earth is probably a ruined planet?”

  “I am hoping it has recovered after all this time. We have few choices, and out of them, I must choose the best one, Story Book.” She fiddled with a few buttons, scrolling more text. “If we can obtain tight proximity, a close orbit, we might be able to land there.”

  “There’s another might.”

  “I have yet to master the landing procedures.
But I am confident I can ascertain the process, once I consider it in more detail.”

  “Wait...is there a reason to believe Earth is not a dead planet?”

  “It was left to its own devices for 200 years. If I can manage to control the Spacetime Fold and the Continuum, using Weller’s data, then we might be able to return to a living Earth.”

  “Spare me the technogarble and just give me the simple-simple version.”

  “Time travel,” she finally said.

  “I thought that wasn’t possible?”

  “Weller may have figured it out. This ship was on the manifest for the mother ship. It was stored in the shuttle bay so its Spacetime Fold mechanism, if that’s what it is, might save us.”

  “You mean no one has ever tested it?”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  Sighing heavily, I dropped into the co-pilot chair. “I hear a lot of mights and maybes. Are we going to gamble our lives on that?”

  “Our lives are already on the line.”

  “True, but--” I couldn’t think of how to communicate my concern. Maybe it had something to do with being ripped to shreds by spooky science.

  “Story Book, it appears that we have nothing to lose by testing this theory.”

  “Oh, nothing to lose, is it? How about our lives?”

  “We will lose those certainly when we either starve or run out of fuel and gravity pulls us to the surface of Uranus.”

  I shoved out of the chair and went to the porthole to stare at the blue planet.

  She spun toward me in her chair. “The STC is merely an opening into alternate time. It is not actually travel at all. It is more a particular route into a cosmic tunnel that connects differing timespaces in the Space-Time Continuum.”

  “Wait....” I turned, my brain was stuttering again. “What’s the difference between timespaces and SpaceTime?”

  “Timespaces are the locations within the Space-Time Continuum, which is four dimensional and also called Minkowski space, and based on Special Relativity—”

  “Stop. That’s enough. I’m sorry I asked. You’re turning my brain to goo.” I knew nothing about this. It was all glutus to me. I had avoided it most of my life, preferring my narratives depicting better lives, and outdated concepts like freedom, liberty, and the quest for happiness. “Are you sure you can make it work?”

  “I am confident, but not sure. I think I have found the path to data on this. I will need some time.” She bent back to the console, deep in concentration.

  While she jabbered on to herself for a while, I started reading the dossier.

  Milo Weller, the scientist who created the prototype of the transport ships now used to take prisoners to Sintori-5, was a brilliant professor of physics and NASA engineer who lived in a place called the , and was rumored to have had an underground bunker where he stored supplies for the coming apocalypse. Most thought he was crazy, until the apocalypse actually happened. Problem was, it had been happening in increments for many years, but so gradually, that many didn’t appreciate how serious it was.

  The pollutants and chemicals and other ecological and environmental issues were seen by those in power as merely a natural progression of the planet’s evolution. This worsened when P. Murt D’lanod rose to power in their government. The D’lanod regime was concerned with money and power, and very little else. In fact, their apathy also served to accelerate the damage, as they removed protections and regulations that helped keep the planet safe. Too few of the populace spoke truth to that power, and so the situation only grew more irreversible.

  Meanwhile, Weller kept records of everything, including disappearing species. This told him the balance in nature had been upset, and it was only a matter of time before all species on Earth would be gone, including the human one. The food and water supply would be disrupted, the populace would grow sicker from the toxins in everything, since regulatory bodies were disbanded by order of President D’lanod, and since healthcare was denied for the majority of the citizens, it all sort of folded in on itself and caused exactly what Weller warned it would. Natural disasters and war hastened that fate to its conclusion.

  No one listened to Weller’s pleas for change, so he resigned himself to a more extreme solution: survival of the inevitable. He stocked that bunker with supplies and other things he deemed important, and finished building a ship that had special capabilities (which Weller remained tight-lipped about), including the ability to refuel itself in space; a ship that he hoped would save a few, including himself, and then could one day return to a planet that renewed itself without the interference of pesky humans. No one had ever seen this magical ship, as Weller disappeared, and his bunker was never found.

  Shrtz and I were on the last of those original ships, which, unfortunately, did not have a bunker of life-saving supplies.

  I thought of the empty canisters of food in the Galley. We had shared the food with the guard, but perhaps it would have been wiser to space him. Just open a hatch and shove him out into the void. I could not bring myself to do such a thing, even though I’d thought about it, and even though, as a member of the Ministry Militia, he was an enemy to humans like me. And to cephs like Shrtz.

  My noodly-appendaged companion had been spending all her waking hours researching the data on board so that we could take advantage of time travel, and get ourselves out of this perpetual orbit around this blue ice planet.

  Time was something we had little of, so any compression of it would be a good thing.

  Thinking about all this, I weakly strolled around the ship and veered down an unfamiliar passageway. How had I missed it? Maybe it was because after a while, all the white corridors looked the same. There, at the end, stood a nondescript door.

  Peeking inside through the window, I saw two large tanks. Warning signs about flammability gave me a feeling of dread. Maybe none of our problems would matter, because soon, those tanks would explode and blow us into oblivion just like all the lost suspension pods.

  I opened the panel on the wall and saw a list of math equations on the inside part of the panel door. I didn’t know what they meant, but I knew that anything flammable on a spaceship was not something to be trifled with.

  I hurried to the bridge to tell Shrtz what I had found.

  8

  ”What sort of tanks?” she asked, when I told her what I’d found.

  “How would I know? I just know there is a flammable sign on them. Shouldn’t we try to...I don’t know...make sure they’re not...dangerous?”

  Her eyes flitted about for a moment, and then she shot out of her chair and flailed her way down the corridor, tentacles flying. I followed.

  When I caught up to her, and steered her toward the mysterious corridor, and the door at the end, she peeked into the window. She stepped back, and I could see her ceph brain calculating, thinking.

  “What?”

  “I believe I know what these are.” Her tentacles were wafting up and down excitedly.

  “What?”

  “Fuel.”

  “Great.”

  “Yes, it is. You recall I said there was no fuel for the hyperspace or Space-Fold mechanisms?”

  I looked back at the tanks. “That’s what those are?”

  “I believe so.”

  She was at the wall panel, staring at the math problems. She did calculations in her head and then punched in some numbers. The door hissed open.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Each equation gives you a number, and each number is part of the code to open the door.”

  “Stellar.” Shrtz made me feel dense, but I was sure she made everyone feel dense.

  We entered the room, and she examined all the signs posted about, surveyed everything around the giant cylinders, and then punched in more things on a panel by the tanks.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Resetting the tanks.”

  “For what?”

  She turned to me, her face all aglow, like she always
did when she figured out something really complicated. “This is the importance of Uranus. The planet’s atmosphere is made up of hydrogen and helium. These tanks are for those gases.” She pointed tentacles. “One for each.”

  “So....basically, we can refuel the time-travel dinger-donger with the stuff on the planet?”

  “Very good, Story Book. But more accurately, the gases from the Uranus atmosphere are drawn into these tanks, mixed and fed into the fuel module.”

  “Okay. How do we refill the tanks?”

  “See these gauges?” She pointed to a panel with numbers. “They are close to capacity. While we have been circling Uranus, they have been refilling. This is by design.”

  “Okay...”

  “You realize what this means?”

  “We’re not going to die?”

  “No...well, yes. But more importantly—”

  “More important than not dying? That’s sort of high on my list.”

  “More importantly,” she continued, undeterred, “it means that Professor Weller meant for us to circle this planet, because it was a source of fuel for the hyperspace module, and that will get us closer to Earth.”

  All I heard was, we’re not going to die, maybe.

  9

  I heard the voice, but struggled to rouse myself from the dream of delicious food and terra firma under my feet.

  I sat up on the bunk, smacking at the coating of nutripaste on my tongue, the communicator clattering to the floor. Shrtz had found two of them under the navcomm, and now she was hailing me.

  I leaned down and picked it up, tapped the screen and the talk button. “Shrtz?”

  Her visage appeared on the screen.

  I launched off the bunk, losing my balance from the weakness that was now forcing me to nap several times a day, and grabbed the doorway to right myself before punching the button. The doors slid open and, bootless, I ran down the slippery corridor to the Bridge, feeling the tremoring weakness in my legs.

  Breathless, I stepped on deck. “What? What have you found?”

  “I fear it would take far too long to explain. And you would not understand.”