Starship to Demeter (Starship Portals Book 1)

by K. D. Lovgren

  Without Rai malfunctioning, this never would have happened. When Kal left Earth, she had left behind the hope of relationship, the hope of love. Where she was going for the next three years there would be very few people. This wave were the world-builders, a handful of people meant to undertake the next phase of design.

  The likelihood she’d be able to find someone in such a small pool, when she’d failed in the ocean, was low. The group would already have self-selected for those who weren’t bound by intense ties on Earth, or perhaps unlikely to want to form those ties. Couples to colonize were desirable but difficult to find, as every individual needed multi-pronged abilities, plus the psychological profile and adaptability implicit in the undertaking. It would be some time before reproduction would be desired on planet, so it wasn’t a factor in this phase.

  Kal sighed from her bones. If she asked for it, would the Consortium look for a partner for her? What if they matched her with someone who traveled all the way to Demeter and they didn’t click? It was a lot to ask. There was always the chance one of the people on board (but who? no one immediately sprung to mind) could be someone for her, down the road, or that one of the few people already on Demeter could be a companion, if not a love. She didn’t know if she would feel for someone else what she had begun to feel for Sasha.

  Sasha emerged from the bath compartment. Her hair was wet and rumpled. She must have had a quick bath. Kal wanted to take a towel and dry her hair for her. She was so adorable.

  It was a strange word to apply to Sasha, for whom a better word would be formidable, but seeing her in the vulnerability of sleep or dampness she looked out of place, not her usual self, and those phases of Sasha were dear to Kal, because they were the most rare.

  To see her in her own cabin was like having a glimpse of a wild animal in its own habitat, the more natural and therefore the more essentially itself.

  Something of Kal’s recent thoughts must have shown on her face, for Sasha gave her a quick questioning look that had a little more of the personal in it than the professional.

  “Okay?” she said.

  “Yeah. Yes.” Kal tried to give herself a mental shake to snap out of this quagmire. What had happened the other night was more present here, in Sasha’s cabin.

  Sasha grabbed a small towel from a cupboard and began doing the thing Kal wanted to do. As she rubbed her head, she sat down on her bed, as Kal had the chair.

  She was quiet, but Kal could see she was troubled.

  “I’m okay,” Kal said, trying to give the words conviction, but since her voice cracked it had rather the opposite effect.

  Sasha wrapped the towel in a turban and tucked the end in the back.

  “Things don’t seem quite right between us,” Sasha said.

  She was talking around the Rai problem, Kal could tell, in case Rai was listening.

  “You made a choice,” Kal said.

  “Yes. I made a choice.”

  “It was just some kisses,” Kal said.

  “It’s not procedure,” Sasha said drily. “You can report back once we get out of dark phase. I don’t know who to talk to on Demeter. Maybe Sif will be the ethics arbiter.”

  “Report? I’m not going to report anything, Sasha. I understand why you did it and I’m okay with it.”

  Kal reached out and touched Sasha’s hand on the coverlet. Sasha took the fingers offered to her. Sasha’s hand was cool, her fingertips cold. Kal realized she’d never seen Sasha sweat. Even when she exercised Kal couldn’t remember seeing sweat run down her face. Her core temperature must run cooler than other people. That fit, somehow. A cool customer. Kal tried not to think of her otherwise.

  Sasha’s hand gave her courage.

  “Are you…is there any way you would be interested in something more?” Kal asked.

  Sasha slid her hand away. “We work together.”

  Her fingertips had warmed in Kal’s hand. Kal was proud of that.

  “I know, but I’ll be stinting on Demeter. So it will put an end to that for a while.”

  “That’s true. But I’m not. Or not for as long.”

  Kal was silent. She had signed up for three years on-planet, before picking up her next contract shipboard. Her theoretical work could continue, which was important for future command in any case. Plus she’d be another pilot for the Land, the ship already on-site, which could be used for exploration of this system, or in a dire emergency, a trip home. The contract and bonus pay offered to stay on Demeter had been enough to tempt her.

  Although the step away could penalize her in a sense, the on-world experience on Demeter would give her special qualifications for ships’ maintenance off-planet, understanding new-organism entry adjustment, and even new world biologic assimilation. Long term, it was a savvy move. What she would lose in long haul experience would be tempered by the even rarer skills she could gain.

  Sasha continued, “I’ll be there for only a year until the next turnaround. In any case, I’m not much of a relationship person. I never have been.”

  “So what kind of person are you?”

  Sasha stared at her for a long while. Kal tried not to blush. “I am my career. Not too hard to tell that.”

  “Don’t you ever get involved with anyone?”

  “Not involved, no.”

  “Just fun?” Kal said.

  “Just fun. And not with crew members.”

  “You didn’t mind last night though.”

  “I didn’t mind.”

  “Good to know. Would you have kissed Noor if our positions had been switched?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as good to know. But you wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much.”

  “I can’t talk about this, Kal.”

  “We’ve got other things to think about anyway,” Kal said.

  They both sat thinking of Rai.

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I really wish I could talk to Yarick right now,” Sasha said.

  “He would have planned it that way if he could,” Kal said. “Taken it as a real compliment.”

  “Yes, he would,” Sasha said, her tone more grim than Kal’s joking one.

  “You didn’t really answer my question,” Kal said. “About whether there’s hope.” She was feeling calmer, without knowing why. She could withstand any outcome. Whatever happened. She noticed she wasn’t slumped in the chair anymore.

  “Even if all other circumstances were good, I don’t think we have the same view of these things.”

  “What things?”

  “How people are with each other.”

  This wasn’t very enlightening. “Could you be more specific?” Kal said with exaggerated patience, to be funny.

  Sasha didn’t smile. “Tell me what you picture,” she said, instead of answering Kal’s question.

  Kal tipped her head back, lost in thought. “Being…you know…” Strangely, she had never imagined life in a regular relationship with Sasha; Sasha being her partner. It had all been one-off scenarios, fantasies of the illicit. “Us together,” she finished lamely.

  Sasha was silent, contemplating her words. “I’m a pragmatist. I have to be. I didn’t build my life with regard for another person. It’s not structured that way and I don’t want to change it. I’m on my own path and I don’t expect anyone else to travel it with me.”

  “If someone wanted to, would you let them?”

  “You wouldn’t want to. I know you well enough to know that.”

  Kal took a breath and for the first time since she’d joined up thought about never commanding a ship. Being a pilot forever, if they let her. Letting that be enough. Was it so much to give up, if she got to be with Sasha? She felt the corners of her mouth turn down.

  Before she could say anything, Sasha spoke again. “I can’t imagine working and living with someone, a twenty-four seven relationship on a ship. I’m not built that way. Even if it were what I wanted, if I let you give up your longtime dream of advancement for a much more recent thought of being
with me, I’d be doing you no favors.” She leaned back against her headboard.

  “What if dark phase never ends?” Kal said. Alluding to the possibility of this trip being their last, to the Carys, to sabotage or the mysterious wiles and ends of Rai, on whose mercy they might depend if an AI could be said to have such a thing, was risky. Was reckless. She modified it. “We never have another day to depend on, in a very real sense. None of us do. If this were your last week, your last day, what would you have wanted? What would you have let yourself want?”

  “We can’t live our lives on that principle. It permits everything and forbids nothing. That’s no way to live, either.”

  “Giving yourself what you want isn’t always wrong.” Kal felt her frustration build as she felt the wall being rebuilt, brick by brick.

  “I have no objection to pleasure for its own sake. It’s not a spirit of martyrdom. It’s the right and wrong of this situation, weighing all factors.”

  “Will you at least think about it? After we’re on Demeter. Not now.”

  Sasha didn’t answer for a long time. She sat forward again. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.”

  Sasha looked drained and empty of feeling. Kal remembered neither of them had slept in far too long.

  “I’ll go now. Sleep well.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kal left, feeling somehow like she’d taken advantage of Sasha. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling. She couldn’t wait to get back to her cabin, drink a restorative, and drift away from all this for a while.

  After the long day, Kal felt her shoulders around her ears. The tension of the day reminded her of her brief time in the investigation branch. It was stressful, no other way to describe it. Exciting, but intense, and tragic. She had pushed away the tragedy and embraced the part she played in the dance, which was after the curtain had dropped on the villain, before the second act. Behind the scenes, she would gather evidence to bring about the re-establishment of order. Justice imposed on temporary chaos. That was the mission statement, anyway.

  After she pulled off her clothes, Kal fell into bed and thought about life on Demeter. And Sasha.

  Noor didn’t take long to bounce back. Her recovery was swift and appeared to be total, other than her husky voice. She was strong and she hated to be tied down anywhere, let alone an infirmary bed. After one night she talked Inger into letting her up and back to work. Inger knew the type. On this ship, they were all that type. There was no holding a traveler back.

  Inger was concerned the news about Yarick might set her back, but she had taken it well.

  8

  Circuitry

  In the morning, Kal presented herself on the bridge so early that Noor was there and not Sasha, yet. It was so good to see Noor back in her place Kal impulsively asked if she could give Noor a hug.

  Noor’s bright smile was what the doctor ordered. She got up from her place by the three-dimensional planetary model and opened her arms. Kal walked into them and they embraced in a good long hug. She and Noor had never hugged and it felt nice to feel Noor’s happiness and warmth, the proof of her continued existence, the reaffirmation of recovery. As long as there was life…Kal’s thoughts screeched to a stop. She let go and stepped back to look at Noor.

  “Hey!” she said.

  “Yes?” Noor’s still smiled, though her eyes drifted back to her hologram.

  “Is there…” she hesitated, remembering where she was. “Can you ask questions of someone after they’re dead?”

  Noor went back to her table, swiping images quickly before she answered. “Yes, in a sense.”

  “How does it work?”

  Noor had seated herself to make a notation. She stood back up and frowned at something on the hologram. Swiping again, she made an adjustment. A sprinkle of data points realigned in the image. She turned back to Kal.

  “It’s not exactly the person. It’s a kind of searchable database access of their recorded thoughts and actions, which are reordered into language-based responses. It’s not entirely accurate, of course, more an impressionistic scatter array of their general thoughts and positions.”

  “How do you bring someone up?”

  “I could give you access, depending on who it is.”

  “Even someone who recently passed?”

  “Yes.” Noor’s raised eyebrows told Kal she knew exactly who she was referring to, which was good.

  “What’s it called?”

  “What? The representation?”

  “Yes.”

  “An echo. A digital echo.” Noor grabbed a water cube from under the holo station. She seemed to be thirstier, now.

  “What kind of applications does this have?”

  Noor drank deeply from the cube. “Oh, many.”

  “So we could do it here?”

  Crumpling the empty cube in her hand and cleaning her hands with it until it dissolved, Noor shut her hologram down and slid away her notes image. “It gets into a tricky area.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s regulated under the Personal and Unregulated Data Access Act.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Used to mean you needed the permission of the individual’s legal heir. Now, because of various mis-usages, you need a court order.”

  “On the ship, what passes for a court order?”

  “Captain Sasha Sarno.”

  “Ah.”

  Kal went looking for Sasha, who had not yet appeared.

  When Kal passed the gym, she saw Sasha on the physio. With a dive and undulation, Sasha spun and rotated like a figure skater in suspension, using the full 360 degree possibilities of the gyroscope. In all her time on the ship, Kal had never seen anyone do that. Even Inger, when she demonstrated it for all the passengers. It was a recipe for protracted vertigo, but Sasha didn’t let up. Spinning and tumbling at speed, she was a blur as the rings slid and spun around her, creating a blurred globe effect that make her passingly invisible when the speed of the rings shimmered into the illusion of solidity.

  Watching her from the doorway, Kal felt a qualm. Seeing Sasha push herself to the limit on the physio when she thought she was alone felt like an intrusion in a way nothing else had, as if Kal witnessed some private act of release or contrition she hadn’t been invited to see. Even though she wanted to watch what other things Sasha could do, how she could possibly come back from the royal scrambling she was giving her inner ear, Kal turned away.

  As she walked down the hall it became unbearable, this tension. Kal broke into a run. Maybe this was what Sasha meant by the twenty-four seven impossibility. On the ship there was no privacy, really. Now even the Tube was about what had happened to get them there. It was no refuge from complication and emotion. The park had been contaminated by death, perhaps violent death. If Sasha held her own fiercely-guarded privacy inviolate, to have a lover at hand, always there to want or to judge, how could she be free in the way she’d always been free?

  Sasha had started it; Sasha had used the tension underlying between them as a way out of a predicament. As she had said herself, there were other choices. In using the one closest to hand, the one, Kal reminded herself, that had sprung first to mind, she had to pay for the consequences of it. And, it seemed, if the vicious churning of air in her sphere of energy were an indication, she was.

  Kal avoided Sasha in the following hours. She continued her interviews, consulted with Inger about the timeframe for postmortem results, considered how best to approach the Rai problem, and tried not to indulge in the morass of feelings she’d dredged up.

  Why had she been so eager? Why hadn’t she exercised some restraint? Was all she needed the slightest of encouragements to let out the ravaging beast of her libido toward her boss? Sasha didn’t want a relationship with anyone, she said. She never had and she never would. A night’s passing pleasure was permitted, if it didn’t mess up her precious career trajectory. This was unfair, and Kal knew it even as she thought it.

  Until today Ka
l had never thought of compromising her career for anyone, either. Of course, no one had ever asked her to. That realization stung. How many people had been willing to compromise themselves for Sasha? Probably lots, if she’d let them get that far.

  That thought brought Kal back to what Sasha had said about pleasure for its own sake, and what that might mean. Who else had she slept with? Someone else on the ship? Kal burned to know.

  Who would know?

  Rai would know. Probably. Unless Sasha used subterfuge to get people into the Tube, without Rai knowing what it was about. Was the reverse trick from what she’d done with Kal possible?

  Her interviews with Wei and Haven done, Kal had some time while everyone was at lunch.

  Did she dare ask Rai? What excuse did she have? Of course, Rai knew the scenario, Rai knew what had happened between Kal and Sasha on the bridge. So what if Rai marked Kal as a jealous fool? It was in keeping with their story, wasn’t it?

  After she finished talking to Inger, she bee-lined to her cabin. Locking the door, she turned to her messy bed with something like lust. She lay down on it.

  “Rai?” she said. She was trembling. This felt wrong, but she could feel she was beyond being able to stop herself, before she’d even thought it through.

  “Yes, Kal.”

  “I want to know something about the interpersonal dynamics on the ship. A potential situation is developing and I need insight into what has happened on the journey so far. As observed by you.”

  “Yes, Kal.”

  Kal wished she hadn’t told Rai to call her Kal. She wished she was Pilot Black Bear to Rai, so she didn’t feel like such a delinquent right now.

  “Are there passengers or crew with personal feelings for Captain Sarno? Romantic or sexual feeling?” She chose the wording of her question carefully, with a mind to not violating Rai’s protection of Sasha’s privacy.

  “Other than yourself?”

  This was expected, but it couldn’t help but startle anyway. Rai had seen it, so it must be true.