He blinked several times trying to clear his vision. The searing burn didn’t seem to be easing. If anything, it was getting worse. Strange sensations echoed around in his mind like memories of pain coming back in phantom form.
“I tried to examine it with mine, but it was too far gone to let me connect at all.”
“This isn’t getting any better,” he said. “How long do I have to leave it on?”
“You can take it off now. It will have picked up enough charge to work for another day already.
He blew out a fast blast of air and shook his wrist. It let loose, and he peeled it off. “That was bad,” he said, glancing down at his hand. “It felt like it was tearing holes in my mind.”
“That’s strange,” she said, picking up a medical scanner and pointing it at his face.
“Yah,” he said, grimacing. “It was like it was trying to get into my dreams.”
She cocked her head to the side and then shook it. “Regardless, your blood glucose levels are low. When did you eat last?” Without waiting for an answer, she stood up and pulled him to his feet.
“I was feeling fine until I put on my glove,” he said, dropping it into his pocket and realizing he felt wobbly. He stopped at the door and leaned against the jamb.
“Wait here,” she said, jumping over to her medkit and grabbing a pharma synthesizer. She was dialing in a cocktail of drugs as she grabbed him by the arm and led him out to the dining room.
“Let’s see if we can find Quinn to get you fed, and then I’m going to make sure you sleep,” she said, pressing the derma-syringe against his neck.
“Not until we get back to the Dawn,” he snarled. The hissing of the drugs entering his system deflated his anger almost instantly. “Damn it. I have to be on deck.”
“You need to be rested and ready when we get back to Tortuga. What I gave you won’t put you to sleep anyway,” she said. “It’ll just stop the dreams from keeping you awake.”
He looked into her eyes and knew.
She was lying.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Have you figured out what killed Marti’s minimech?” Ammo asked, walking up and parking in the chair at the opposite end of the table from Kaycee. They’d both spent the last day out of their suite since Ethan was asleep on the sofa in the sitting room. It was almost thirdshift, and they had the entire dining area to themselves.
“Not precisely. I’ve been reluctant to use my Urah Un after what happened to Ethan’s,” she said, leaning on her arm and staring down at the thinpad in front of her. “The handheld gear we’ve got with us only shows the physical damage.”
“Has Marti looked at it with her main body?”
She nodded. “Her sensor kit on the new body is good, even down to a molecular level, but all we’ve been able to figure out is that the electrodynamic synapses all seem to have been fused.”
“They melted from current draining through them?”
“Not slagged. Real fusion,” she said. “They transformed into new elemental components. Like hydrogen to helium, but much further up the periodic table.”
“Like dirt into TU-142?”
“In a way. Some of the components in Marti’s body have transmuted into heavier elements well into the far-transuranic range. We’re seeing everything from TU-135 all the way up to TU-163.”
“As in transmutation?”
She shrugged. “I talked to Rene about it. He explained to me how light elements produce more energy when they fuse than heavier ones. There’s a point on the periodic table where fusion requires more energy than it produces. Atoms heavier than iron are fusion-endothermic and produce a net energy loss.”
“Could that mean the sink field might be the result of trying to absorb energy in order to fuse?”
“I asked him, and he launched into a long explanation about the amount of energy in a multi-universal spacetime barrier and how sub-quanta polarization fields are coupled to temporal determinacy—”
Ammo held up her hand to stop her from going on. “I might have read about that kind of thing once in college, but it’s the middle of the damn nightshift. You can’t think those are supposed to sound like real words to me.”
“That’s pretty much what I said too, and I was wide awake,” she grinned, getting up, walking over to the liquor cabinet, and grabbing two cut crystal glasses and a decanter of brown liquor. She sniffed at it before she brought it to the table. “I guess this is rum?”
She set them on the table and took a closer seat. Ammo poured for both of them and took a sip. “Yep, it’s rum. And good rum, too.” She let out a slow hissing breath as it hit bottom. “Does that translate to mean you think a spacetime-barrier-quantum-polarization weapon destroyed the colony?”
“No clue. I know we’re trying to steal air from so far above our deck that all we can do is guess. Maybe once we get back to the Dawn…” She picked up her glass and slammed about half of it in a single gulp, realizing that it was a mistake as the rum exploded somewhere inside and her eyes blurred with the aftershock. It took several seconds before she could draw in a breath.
“Maybe good rum is relative.” Ammo winked. “Feeling a bit frustrated, are you?”
She nodded, but swallowed the rest of her glass before the burning subsided. When her voice came back, her vocal cords felt like she was speaking in flames. “The problem is that the few answers we got have only turned into more questions.”
“That is always the result of scientific exploration,” Marti said as she and Nuko descended the stairs from the upper deck. “If the process didn’t result in more questions, there would always be a linear path to every solution.”
“I’d settle for straighter lines,” she said as the Humanform automech walked over and took a seat at the table.
Nuko detoured to the liquor cabinet and grabbed a glass for herself before she joined them. “Where’s Ethan? It’s not an issue, but he hasn’t been on deck in several shifts. Charleigh and I were wagering on whether you had kidnapped him for evil experiments.”
“Sounds like fun, but no. He’s sleeping.” Ammo poured her a glass of the rum.
“For two days?”
“Close, but remember when we discussed the brain trauma he had?” Kaycee asked.
“Yah. Why?” Concern settled across her face and she picked up her rum and took a strong gulp. Without reacting.
Kaycee gasped in sympathetic response. “When we were down on the surface, he touched Marti’s minimech and took another hit to his brain injury. Well sort of.” She sucked in her lower lip and chewed on it as she decided the best way to explain what had happened. “It’s difficult to explain but his Urah Un connected to the field that took out the minimech.”
“You’re saying it tried to drain the electrical energy from his brain?” Nuko asked, finishing her rum in another single swallow. Also, without reaction. She poured herself another round and offered to pour one for Kaycee. The doctor shook her head.
“It’s more like it gave him a dose of information that he can’t absorb correctly. Somehow it tried to upload memories or images, and those kicked him into a pattern of… nightmares.”
“That would be possible through encoding higher level information in the wave function of the energy field. The principle of conservation of quantum information is well accepted.” Marti’s projected face tilted to the side as it emulated a very human look of puzzlement. “I do not know if anyone has ever considered quantum determinism as a functional mechanism for imparting articulate data constructs, but it would be hypothetically possible at sufficiently high energy states.”
“Yah. Rene tried to explain that concept to me.” Changing her mind, Kaycee poured herself another small sip of the rum. “All I know is, in the instant that Ethan’s Urah Un provided a conduit between him and your minimech, it imprinted some kind of memory on his mind.”
Nuko shook her head. “I don’t understand. You’re saying the field gave him an artificial memory?”
“If
it wasn’t identical to what I got from Cantos Vega, and at least superficially corroborated by trace evidence in the environment on Tamilis, I’d have just filed it as normal stress related nightmares.”
“He got it from touching the minimech?” she asked again, turning to look at Marti. “You aren’t having any nightmares, are you?”
“Because of the small relative signal bandwidth of my minimech body, the field destroyed it between comm pulses. If I had not been between bursts for several nanoseconds while preparing a signal packet, it might have transferred information along the RF channel to me. Unfortunately, it did not.”
“I don’t think you’d want this kind of memory,” Kaycee said.
“I do not dream. Even unpleasant dreams would be an interesting experience,” Marti said, looking profoundly disappointed.
She shook her head. “I had them dumped on me when I used my Urah Un to question Vega before we left. Fortunately, they faded after a few days.”
“You said he’s sleeping?” Nuko asked. “Does that mean he’s working through them?”
“For the first four days he wasn’t sleeping at all, and that’s dangerous. The problem was that when he fell asleep, he kept picking at the images in his mind. It made it impossible for his brain to file it away so he could heal.”
“So why isn’t he still doing that?”
“I gave him a neural inhibitor to block the dreams, and something to reduce his metabolism to force him to stay unconscious until they’ve lost some of their emotional intensity. My experience was probably less intense than his, and the effect still lasted for two days, but I’m monitoring his brain wave patterns and hoping he’s better before we get back.”
“We’re less than a day out now,” Nuko said, letting out a slow breath.
Kaycee nodded. “I’m planning to bring him up tomorrow morning, regardless. He can still function if he needs to.”
“Is this going to make his other conditions worse?” she asked.
She shrugged. “We were all exposed to slight levels of TU-142. In his case I dosed him with Termazadrine and Quadrapaxin just to make sure he doesn’t develop Trappist Syndrome. He’s not showing any symptoms of it, but it won’t manifest for several months. As to his other issues, that’s still an open wager.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ethan spent the last two days of their return leg unconscious. Fortunately, the drugs wore off before they got back to Tortuga. When he stepped onto the ConDeck his body felt better, but his mind was still fighting to get above the flaming green sea of memories.
“We’re over the threshold and about four hours from tying off,” Charleigh said as he slid into the auxiliary station behind her.
“Good, I’ll be glad to sleep in my own bed tonight,” he said, leaning his head back against the neck support. “So, what’s changed while I was comatose?”
“Other than that it looks like they’re having a party in Tortuga, not much,” Ammo said. She’d jumped up to give Ethan her seat and was leaning over his shoulder and looking at the sensor readouts. She shook her head. “There have to be at least twenty big ships on the stanchion. Not including the Dawn.”
“Any idea what’s happening?”
“Not a clue, other than the fact that none of the ships look to be standard issue.” She put the long-range optic up on the main screen. “I’d say they’re all raiders.”
“Well it makes sense considering this is a pirate base,” he said, leaning forward and resting on his elbows while he stared at the screen. Most of the ships appeared to be Clydesdales. And all of them had massive artillery hanging out in the open. It didn’t appear they worried much that their guns made their purpose clear to anyone looking in their direction.
“I haven’t seen that much firepower since the last time I did a tour on a multicruiser,” Charleigh said. “It makes me less than fuzzy.”
“Me too,” Ethan agreed. “Fortunately, for the time being we’re all on the same side.”
“Of course, that could change, and knowing our luck, probably will,” Ammo said.
“I hope not,” he said, tapping into the comm. “Carson, can you join us on the ConDeck for a moment?”
“Sure, I’m on my way. Problem?”
“No. I’m just needing to tap into your experience,” Ethan said.
“We’ve got two more ships dropping out of cruise behind us,” Ammo said, calling his attention to two signals that appeared two thousand klicks to stern. “Sorry I didn’t catch those sooner, but their coil wakes are damn near invisible.”
“Holy frak, those are monsters,” Charleigh whispered as they swung their long-range optics to the rear and checked out the new arrivals.
“What are they?”
Ammo shook her head. “It’s hard to tell since none of our new friends seem to run transponders, but if I had to guess one looks like Jetaar’s old ship. The other is a heavily modified Percheron.” She paused and then added, “I think?”
She was right in that the larger of the two had likely once been a freighter like the Olympus Dawn. But it’s resemblance to the original design was hard to pick out from under the layers of new superstructure and the spectacular black and red paint job. It had a massive wing-like structure built off the upper cargo support pylon, with three massive planetary-defense class turrets mounted to it. Beneath the main hull, a pair of heavy arms extended forward with what looked like talons on the end. They looked intended only for ramming and locking onto a target.
It was the kind of ship that would give any freighter captain nightmares. And would have a similar effect on most smaller colony governors.
Nuko whistled. “If they’ve got the reactors to feed those guns, they’d be a blow for blow match for any FleetCom cruiser.”
“At least for the first round or two,” Ethan agreed.
“What’s swinging?” Carson asked, coming through the door behind Ethan.
“Is that a friendly?” he asked.
“I’d say that’s a matter of perspective,” the engineer said. “Captain X is a bit of an independent, but if he’s not already carving us to pieces, he’s not aiming to dance.”
“Captain X?” Ammo snickered at the name.
“I wouldn’t do that to his face,” he said, shooting her dead with an uncharacteristic glare. “Xavier Constantine runs the largest privateer consortium in Coalition Space. He didn’t get in that position by letting people laugh at him.”
“Do we have to worry?” Ethan asked.
“Probably not, but he is flying the Winged-X, so he’s here for business of some type.” He shrugged.
“The Winged X is his ship name?”
“His ship is the Shadowhawk. His banner is the red-X with wings over a corona on a shield of stars. Pirates traditionally all had their own flags that identified them to other ships,” he explained. “All of his fleet will fly the same banner but they usually only light it up when they’re announcing their presence.”
“It’s always good to know who’s killing you,” Nuko said.
Carson walked up beside Ethan and leaned on the console. “I’m just curious why he’s here.”
“It looks like something big’s swinging in Tortuga, and I don’t think we got an invitation,” the captain said. “Can you tell what kind of party is going on?”
“I count twenty-two ships already docked, and two more behind us,” she said as she switched back to the forward view and stepped back.
The engineer nodded. “It looks like a Commonwealth meeting.”
“Commonwealth?”
“It is an old term for a mutually protective government,” Marti explained. She’d walked in behind the engineer and stood off to the side.
“You said there were twenty-four ships,” he said. “Combine that with the fact that they’re all flying colors and that means it’s a Council of Captains.”
“Council of Captains?” Ethan raised an eyebrow.
“The Commonwealth is an underground government,” Carson e
xplained. “A couple decades ago a turf war almost ended all the free pirates, and so to save themselves, the most powerful of the captains got together and divided Coalition Space into twenty-four regions. Each region is under the jurisdiction of a High Fleet Captain who sits on the Council.”
“A government of privateers,” he said. “Then this would be a regularly scheduled event.”
“Not really. They convene a session once or twice a year to discuss business. It’s how we keep from competing over territory and ending up back at each other’s throats.”
“That’s rather civilized, but why are they having a meeting now?”
“Sometimes they’ll call one when an emergency comes up.” He shrugged “Obviously something’s happened while we’ve been gone since the next one isn’t for several months yet.”
“Do you have any idea what it might be?”
Carson shook his head. “We’ve been gone for thirty days. Only thing I know for sure at this point is that the captain who calls for a Council session, is the one who hosts.”
“You’re saying Jetaar called the meeting?”
“Exactly.” He frowned. “That’s strange too, because I don’t think he has convened a session at Tortuga for at least ten years. He tends to be one of the most levelheaded of all the Fleet Captains, so most of the current leadership hasn’t even been here before.”
Ethan made eye contact with Ammo. From her expression she thought the same thing he did.
This session wasn’t because of something that happened while we were gone, it was because of something they expected to happen when we got back.
That meant if they couldn’t pull it off, there was no way they would get out of this with their skin.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“Walker-mon, good you be back, yah?” Magabi said as they tied off to a service lock on the docking stanchion. “Cap’n J is looking to yak-yak as soon as you stand down.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 102