by Mark Wandrey
“Oh, hell no. The institute couldn’t even afford Teddy Roosevelt, and I doubt even the United States could afford Kavul Tesh or Kavul Ato. They’re all leased for our use by the Winged Hussars. I think the captains all owed the Hussars a debt or a favor; I don’t know. An awful lot of that kind of thing goes on with mercs.”
“I always thought it was money.”
“Lots of money, too,” Doc said.
The orcas began to come out of their drug-induced slumber not too long after Pegasus cast them off. Pōkole’s tank was connected to the Shore Pod’s tank, and Terry watched as the adults began to come around.
“Back...” Kray said, the first to speak. “Back beyond.”
“Are you okay?” Terry’s mom asked.
“Back,” Kray repeated.
One after another, the others came around, with Moloko the last to begin speaking.
“Calf gone?”
“You had your calf just as you and the other orcas began to...” she struggled with a way to say it. “After you lost control.”
“Beyond take calf mine.”
“Your calf is still alive.”
“Alive? Where?”
She nodded to the researchers, who opened the little tunnel, and Pōkole swam in. The calf swam over to Moloko and instantly began to nuzzle her, and everyone in the hold breathed a huge sigh of relief. Mother and calf were reunited and acted as if nothing was unusual. Moloko spoke to the calf in non-words, deep subsonic noises the translators didn’t recognize.
“It’s like she’s singing to him,” Dr. Orsage said, taking notes as usual.
“Pōkole,” Terry said. “The calf is named Pōkole.”
“My calf Pōkole?” Moloko asked.
“Yes,” Terry said. “Is that okay?”
“Sound right,” the mother orca replied. “I no milk,” she said.
“How long beyond?” Ulybka, the other female, asked.
“Over five days,” Terry’s mom explained.
“How feed?” Moloko asked. Terry explained.
“Warden figure out,” she said.
“Warden everything figure,” Kray agreed.
“We couldn’t figure out what was happening to them,” Dr. Patel said. The other doctors nodded in agreement.
“Can I help feed Pōkole still?” Terry asked.
Moloko nudged Pōkole over next to the glass and hummed at him, then bumped the glass in front of Terry. The calf nodded vigorously in an unmistakable gesture. “Pōkole like Terry. I like Terry. This good.”
“Excellent,” Terry said.
“I’m very proud of you,” his mother said. He beamed up at her.
“What did it feel like?” Dr. Orsage asked the orcas. “Do you understand why you lost control?”
“Beyond,” Kray said. “Shool cry. Shool cry.”
“What do you think that means?” Terry’s mom wondered.
“I have no idea,” the psychologist said and made notes.
Later, the three transports docked together. Teddy Roosevelt was the only one of the three with multiple docking collars, so she served as the hub. It suited the marine biologists and staff just fine as it put them in the middle of all their charges. The conglomeration of ships was moored to the remains of an ancient mined-out asteroid named Karma Theta Two. The planet of Karma was thousands of kilometers away, a blue-green ball visible from Teddy’s observation dome.
With nothing more to do, Terry settled back into the cramped cabin he shared with his mother. Teddy was so filled with Humans, it smelled like sweat and pee to him. The captain said they were 20% over capacity, but said Human ships were made to take it. Terry wasn’t sure he agreed, by the smell at least. Someone knocked on the door not long after he’d gotten there.
“Anyone home?” Doc’s voice asked.
“Come on in, Doc,” Terry said. The door creaked from rust as it opened.
“Hey, kid, how’d the reunion go?”
“Great! Moloko took to her calf right away, and vice versa. Moloko even wants me to keep feeding Pōkole.”
“Is that the calf’s name?” Terry nodded. “Awesome. Your mom said Moloko didn’t have any milk.” Terry nodded. “Hey, I just wanted to say I’m proud of you for standing up and helping after how bad it was leaving Earth.”
“If I hadn’t, Pōkole would have died.”
“Exactly, but a little kid would have been too busy feeling sorry for himself. What you did was what a grownup needed to do, a man.”
Terry smiled so hard he felt tears making his vision blurry and wiped them away. “He was so tiny, I couldn’t let him just starve or get put to sleep.”
“Four hundred pounds is tiny?” Doc asked. Terry laughed; he had a point. “I wanted to stop by and say goodbye.”
“You’re going?” Terry asked in surprise.
“For a while. I’m going over to Karma Station to talk to some friends, maybe see what I can do to put some pressure on Earth to let us come home without being arrested.”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
Doc shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “What I do know is that we can’t stay here forever. Colonel Kosmalski said we could use the transports as long as we needed, but he didn’t mean forever. So I’m going to go see what I can do. I made a few friends among the mercs.”
“It sounded like Colonel Kosmalski pissed off the government,” Terry said.
“Yeah,” Doc agreed. “He has that effect on people. You keep helping out as much as you can, okay? Your mom depends on you.”
“I’m still just a kid.”
“Not in my eyes,” Doc said, then gave him a quick hug.
“Hey, Doc?”
“Yeah?”
“How did you have the code to our apartment back at the institute?”
He gave Terry his appraising look. “You don’t miss much. Probably make a good SEAL. Your mom and I have been seeing each other for the last month or so, after her divorce to your dad was final.” He looked Terry in the eye. “We didn’t tell you because we were afraid you’d take it the wrong way.”
“I’ve known my mom and dad weren’t happy together for a while,” Terry told him. “Kids notice this stuff, even when we wish it wasn’t happening. Are you in love?”
“Huh,” Doc said with a grunt. “I don’t know if it’s that cut and dried. Let’s say, we really like each other.”
“Good,” Terry said. “I like you, too.”
Doc grinned. “Feeling’s mutual, kiddo.”
“You had a hand in getting Mom healed, didn’t you?”
“What makes you think that?” Doc asked, his eyes twinkling in the cabin’s low light.
“You sent a message to my dad saying you had friends who might be able to heal her. He refused, but she suddenly got better a couple weeks later. Was it those nanites I heard about?”
“Let’s just say she got better and leave it at that. I gotta run.”
“You mean fly,” Terry said with a grin. Doc laughed and was off.
Terry slid into his hammock, hooked the straps across his legs, and pulled out his tablet. The ship had a network, and it was now connected to the GalNet. He grinned when he saw it was an unrestricted node, unlike the one back at his school on Molokai. For a second, he wondered about ‘Adult Content,’ then remembered the Galactic Union didn’t care about such things. Besides, he didn’t think he’d be too interested in pictures of naked aliens.
His mother had mentioned when they got to Karma that Terry would be able to send emails home. They just had to be under a certain size, which was one gigabyte, if he remembered right. It was like the Union’s version of the postal service, only you never knew how long it would take to reach a destination.
Union free messages weren’t like radio transmissions; the messages were bundled together and sent to every ship leaving the star system that was going in the right direction. Since they were just one transition from Earth, the captain said it would get there pretty quickly.
The f
irst message was to his father. Terry still felt conflicted about leaving him behind. Of course, everything his mom and Doc had said about him looked to be spot on, but that didn’t change the fact that he was his dad. Terry had done some pretty boneheaded things, too, and Dad had always forgiven him.
“Dear Dad,
I’m sorry I didn’t have the time to say I was leaving, or even say goodbye. We found out they were coming to arrest us. I know you must have done what you did for a good reason, only I wish you’d told me. I feel sad, like maybe you did it on purpose.”
He erased the last sentence.
“I wish you’d said something. Please write back, I want to know how you are.
Love, Terry.”
Next he wrote a quick note and group addressed it to his friends at the middle school. He was well, and nobody better be saying he’d been kidnapped by aliens. He smiled at his own wit. He said they were trying to figure out how to fix everything, and they’d left to protect the cetaceans.
The last one he wrote was the hardest; it was to Yui. He decided to record it on video, which meant it had to be short.
“Hi, Yui,” he said, and waved lamely at the tablet’s camera. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. I’m sorry. The government was going to have us arrested and kill the cetaceans. So my mom got the Winged Hussars to take us off planet. If I’d known, I don’t know if I would have gone. You’re like my best friend in the whole world.” He shook his head. “In the whole galaxy now!
“The orcas got really sick in hyperspace. Moloko gave birth early, and I had to help save the baby. It’s a boy, and I named it Pōkole. I saved him, Yui! I watched all these videos and figured out how to get him to feed. Hyperspace didn’t bother him like it did the adults.
“Moloko and the others came out of it after we got here, and she likes the name, and I get to keep helping feed him because Moloko’s milk isn’t working anymore.” He glanced at the file size and saw it was already more than half filled.
“I only have a few seconds more video, so I’ll say bye. I miss you. Please send a message back? Bye.” He stopped recording. The computer said it was the correct size, and he used the ship’s GalNet node to properly address it to her. It felt strange addressing it to Tolo Arm, Cresht Region, Sol System, Earth, then her actual address. Before, he’d just used her email address. Then he hit send.
The free message system only let you send one message per day per star system. Sending bigger messages, or one guaranteed to reach its destination via the most direct route, cost 15 credits and up. He whistled. Fifteen credits translated to $450,000 dollars! He had about $150 on his Yack, so that was out of the question. He decided to send the group email the next day.
Terry stowed his tablet, reached back over his head, and shut off the little LED light, throwing the cabin into absolute darkness. He’d been surprised by just how dark it was in a ship with only a few windows. It wasn’t quiet, though. Teddy Roosevelt was always alive with sounds. Fans were running, the distant fusion powerplant was always humming away, and often times the banging of crewmen fixing things could be heard.
In some ways, it was reassuring. He wasn’t alone, despite being trillions of kilometers from home. Only, was the rickety Earth freighter now his home? He drifted off to sleep, hoping it wasn’t.
* * * * *
Chapter 6
Karma Star System, Cresht Region, Tolo Arm
October 1st, 2037
Despite Doc’s claim that he’d be back shortly, it turned out to be almost three months. On July 11th, Terry got an email from Doc. It was sent from Karma Station, and told Terry he’d be gone for at least a couple months, not to worry about him, and to help as much as possible.
“Where did Doc go?” he asked his mom at lunch. “Is he going back to Earth?”
“He’s not going to Earth,” she said, but she wouldn’t tell him anything more.
Despite the orcas’ recovery from the strange events in hyperspace, there was still plenty to do. More than there were people do to them, actually. He found himself learning how to maintain the tank filtration system and review computer records of water condition. Of course, those responsibilities were in addition to his taking care of Pōkole. Just keeping everyone fed and tended to on Teddy Roosevelt proved difficult. Terry had never thought about how much 125 people ate, drank, and more importantly, pooped every day.
The only thing he worried about was he’d yet to hear from his father or Yui. He checked with the Cartographers’ Guild, who traced communications, among other duties. A week later, they confirmed the messages had reached Earth. His mother said not to worry, it was probably the government stopping their messages. She said when Doc got back, they’d find a way around the block.
Pōkole continued to thrive, and all the marine biologists congratulated him on his great work. He was gaining weight at more than a kilo a day. Pōkole also continued to bond with his pod, and they reveled in his young energy. At Terry’s urging, the captain of Kavul Ato was convinced to open another adjacent cargo bay, and the orcas got more room to swim.
As he was working on the water systems as part of his job, he found himself finally spending some time around the bottlenoses, and was surprised at a profound change. They’d been strangely motivated by their trip through hyperspace. They were discussing how they couldn’t wait to go back.
“Why are you so eager to return to hyperspace?” he asked Skritch, who appeared to be the de facto leader of the Sunrise Pod.
“Like beyond!” was the answer.
“What do you like about—” he’d stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open. “Beyond? You call hyperspace beyond?”
“It beyond,” Skritch agreed.
“Beyond, beyond, beyond!” The entire pod had surfaced, and was chanting the world repeatedly.
“Do you know the orcas call it beyond also?” Terry asked them.
“Dark Killers blind beyond.”
“Afraid Shool is beyond,” another said.
They’d taken to calling the orcas dark killers not long after they’d received their implants, though they preferred not to talk about the orcas at all. The orcas called the bottlenoses ‘Swift Brothers.’ Dr. Hernandez found it interesting as he’d studied their psychology. After all, orcas were more closely related to dolphins than other whales, though they were all considered toothed whales.
“Is Shool beyond?” Terry asked.
“No,” they all agreed.
“Mom, did you know the orcas and the bottlenoses both call hyperspace beyond?” he asked her later.
“Yes,” she’d said, “Dr. Hernandez mentioned it in a meeting a couple of days ago.”
“They don’t see each other anymore. How could they both come up with the same name?”
“The theory is, someone said something to the bottlenoses.”
“I don’t think so,” Terry said.
“Can you support that theory?”
Terry loathed when his mom did that. The scientific method required you to be able to prove a theory. Of course he couldn’t prove it. “I can’t,” he mumbled.
“Then tell me when you can.”
Unfortunately, his duty required him to stay too busy, so he had no time to pursue the source of their terminology or how it might have come about. The closest he got to more information was discussing the idea with Dr. Hernandez briefly.
“I think it had something to do with the origins of words to the cetaceans,” the doctor explained. Terry caught him in a hallway heading for a meeting and floated along with him.
“What do you mean?” Terry asked.
“Well, Klaak, the Sidar who specialized in pinplants, said that words are often created by the translation matrix and are assigned in some cases. Maybe that just means the matrix of both cetacean species found similar results and came to the same conclusion. Excuse me, I’m late.”
Terry had plenty more questions, but grownups were always in a hurry. Mostly, he wanted to argue his case. How could the
orcas and bottlenoses both settle on the word “beyond” for hyperspace when they had different experiences? The bottlenoses came out of hyperspace like they’d been to a summer camp, the orcas like they’d been tortured. Then Pōkole ended up with another minor infection, and he was too busy to worry about it.
When July gave way to August, his mother materialized out of nowhere with a tablet full of lessons.
“I have to do school work, too?” he complained.
“Yes, you do. Furthermore, I’ve assigned you extra learning, since we’ll be living in space for a while. Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s junior officers have volunteered to help teach classes. You and all the other children will attend for five hours a day, five days a week. You’ll have two hours a week with a tutor as well.”
“What kind of tutor?”
“You’ll be learning about Union pinplants.”
Terry gawked. “Really?”
“Yes,” she said, then grinned. “Your insights are excellent. Both Doctors Hernandez and Orsage said as much. Let’s see if you take to it.” After that, the time flew by. So much so that when Doc returned, he didn’t notice for two days.
“Hey, kiddo,” Doc said as he floated into Teddy Roosevelt’s galley, the only large space left on the freighter not full of water.
“Doc!” Terry said and slipped out of the strap around his waist holding him to the bench. He pushed over, then gave his friend a hug. “When did you get back?”
“Two days ago.”
“You didn’t say hi?”
“I’ve been pretty busy,” he said.
Terry smirked. “I bet, smooching my mom?”
“Mind your own business, Squirt,” he said and smacked him on the arm. Terry caught himself before he sailed away without thinking about it. “No, we’ve been talking about what we’re going to do now.”
Terry was about to ask what that meant when he saw Doc was wearing a uniform. “Wow, what have you been doing?”
“Working,” he said, and showed Terry the patch on his uniform sleeve.
“Woah, Golden Horde? I didn’t think they hired anyone who wasn’t from China, or something.”
“They had a change in ownership, so to speak,” Doc explained.