Authors: K.S. Augustin
Blood?
“He was standing in front of the panel when it exploded,” Srin explained. “At first there was nothing I could do. The gravity cut out and it was pitch-black.”
Yes, Moon remembered that bit well.
“When the emergency power and lighting came on, I used the comms to contact the infirmary, but there was still no gravity.”
The medics covered Savic up to his neck with a thin, flashing blanket, strapped him down then began walking back in Moon’s direction.
“He fell quite a distance when the gravity came back on.”
The men, med-bed between them, brushed past her.
“I should follow,” Srin said, after a small hesitation. “Just in case there’s anything I can help with.”
“Of course.” Moon knew her voice was distracted, but her mind was full of conflicting emotions. She faced him and gave him a quick, tight smile. “I’ll be along after I’ve checked the lab and cargo bay.”
Srin nodded tersely and, after squeezing her shoulder with his hand, trailed after the medical team.
To distract herself, Moon hurried down to the cargo bay the moment full lighting was re-established. She stepped past scorched panels and groups of intent soldiers who would have otherwise intimidated her, without looking. Her pace quickened as she reached Engineering, until she was almost at a run when she reached the cargo bay doors.
The metal panes refused to open on her approach, but Moon was an old hand at this by now. Unhesitatingly, she searched for the override hatch, whipping it open with impatient fingers. Instead of a button, a sturdy handle filled the space. With a grunt, Moon pulled down on it and the doors slid open with an echoing clang.
It was like stepping into a church, a place of infinite wonder and respectful veneration. Before her, was the concrete manifestation of everything she had been working years towards.
It was strange that, after so many years of studying and manipulating the varying phenomena of stellar plasma, Moon had never seen a positron-shielded fission bomb crucible. The Science Directorate had no problem providing her with the latest in computing power and ever-more-powerful simulation tanks. But this…this represented a new dimension in spending. What had inspired the investment of the equivalent of a planetary budget?
What had changed in the past two years? What exactly had propelled her from the outskirts of lucrative applied research right into its centre, with an entire spaceship and a fission bomb factory at her disposal? Not to mention the ultimate in galactic secrets, Srin Flerovs. Was it really as Srin and Drue had hinted—that her research might provide a weapon to use against living stars? Somehow, she still couldn’t believe that the Republic was that evil.
She walked forward gingerly, even though there was no need. A giant ball four metres in diameter dominated the modified cargo bay. Its uppermost curve almost touched the matte-compound-covered ceiling, and the ceiling’s texture accentuated the smooth, unmarked surface of the sphere.
There was nothing out of place in the bay, which was as it should be. Moon had been adamant about the placement and configuration of the large launch area. Besides the crucible and its supporting structures, only a handful of consoles dotted the floor, none of them easily movable.
She moved closer and the sphere’s mirrorlike surface distorted her figure into perfect elongated curves over its surface. She wanted to touch it, run her rough human fingers over its sleek purity, but was afraid she might leave a mark—some oiliness from her fingertips, perhaps.
She abhorred the idea of marring its flawlessness in any way. This was where her fission packet would be formed, what the military so crudely referred to as a stellar missile. She eyed the surface carefully from various angles, but couldn’t see any obvious cracks or bends anywhere.
On the opposite side, towards the ship’s hull, the sphere was connected to a tube, lined along its length with field generators. She walked around the crucible and examined the tube’s exterior. The generators, housed beneath the metal skin at carefully calculated intervals, would switch on and off at precisely timed intervals, moving the formed packet along and accelerating it at the same time.
Extra reinforcing had been added at the junction of tube and hull. Beyond that, an extra array of magnetic field generators was positioned around the tube’s outlet, helping guide the packet to its ultimate destination. Being the stuff of stars itself, Moon knew the packet would emerge looking like a miniature sun, shooting through black space and tunnelling its way into the core of a white dwarf star. The target had already been chosen, and was merely awaiting final measurements and confirmation. It was a DZ-type star in M1908, otherwise known as the Suzuki Mass. And there, her small living controlled explosion would hopefully begin the reactions that would bring the star to life again.
She breathed a sigh of relief as she saw no obvious damage to any part of the crucible’s delivery mechanism. Briskly, feeling more confident, she walked over to one of the monitoring consoles and activated it. While she didn’t know the specifics of how her machinery interfaced with the
Differential
, she knew that it was hooked into the main propulsion systems—for the amount of energy it required, it had to be. As she anticipated, the console hummed to life a second later.
Moon read the information that scrolled past her eyes as the machine began its sweep of connected equipment. It appeared that everything in the cargo bay had been secured and fortified so well even a hyperspace accident couldn’t affect it. She was sure she didn’t have enough reserves to run a full semi-simulation diagnostic, but a deep light-level run should give her enough information to check the crucible and tube’s integrity. Without hesitation, she started the test, directing output to her lab, then stepped back. There was nothing more she could do here. The diagnostic she had initiated would take two hours to run. There was a mess in the lab she should start clearing, but she found herself reluctant to get going. It seemed she was clearing up too many work spaces these days. But she couldn’t order soldiers to do the job for her, either. They were busy with their own problems.
With a last glance at the gleaming crucible, Moon exited the bay. Now that her most immediate worries were out of the way—Srin was safe, her equipment was safe—she had time to reflect on her reaction to Hen Savic’s injury.
She was happy about it.
She knew it made her look like the basest kind of human, but she didn’t care. What the man had done to Srin, pumping him full of drugs for almost two decades just so he’d have an intellectual marvel he could vicariously live through, was vile beyond measure. And Moon knew she wasn’t gentle or charitable enough to let such an atrocity slide just because its perpetrator was hurt.
Lips set in a grim line, Moon strode back to her cabin. It might be too much to expect that the bathroom was fully functional, so she contented herself with stripping off her creased sleeping clothes and changing into something appropriate to the work that lay ahead. When she took off her pants, she realised that she had been barefoot the entire time—from the time she woke to that terrible siren, to her walk down to the cargo bay and back. She laughed, and it sounded a bit hysterical even to her own ears.
She continued dressing. When she finally got a pair of boots on, she walked back to the lab, this time scanning the contents with assessing eyes. She would definitely need some help positioning the databanks back in their familiar places, but she could lift the clearboards by herself and restore her meal table to some semblance of order.
Swiftly she got to work, clearing the lab until its Spartan efficiency started to emerge again. She moved the blunt shards of one demolished clearboard into a corner where it could be cleared away later. She checked the chrono on the wall and noted that an hour had passed. There was still another hour to go before the diagnostics from the console in the cargo bay would be piped to one of her panels. She decided it was time to visit the infirmary and see whether Hen Savic was alive. Or dead.
The bastard was still alive.
Moon tried to look sympathetic as she approached the sterile field surrounding his bed. It took every gram of self-control to keep the distant concern tacked on her face as she neared the medical staff. Against an adjacent wall, Srin sat, calm but pensive. Slightly above him and to his left, a glowing rectangle—a smaller version of the clearboards in her lab, offset from the wall—blinked the latest medical data.
“You’ve been working with Hen Savic, haven’t you?” a voice from behind her asked.
She turned. It was one of the infirmary’s team of three doctors, a pleasant looking older gentleman by the name of Jared Jonez. His waist may have been slightly thicker than a younger soldier’s, and his dark hair might have been sprinkled with grey, but he still exuded the kind of confidence that told Moon he could break her arm without breaking thought. As if she needed any reminder that she was aboard a military vessel.
“Actually, I work with Srin.” She beckoned to the seated figure with a movement of her head.
Maybe there was something about her tone of voice that indicated her lack of worry where Savic was concerned, because Jonez frowned. “Oh. Well, we have him in a stable condition in any case.”
Curses.
“What were his injuries?”
“He has obvious injuries from being hit by a piece of metal thrown by an explosion, and there are burns over his face and neck, and down one leg. There was some internal bleeding, but we contained that as quickly as we could.”
“And the prognosis?” Moon was almost afraid to ask.
“Maybe two weeks until he’s on his feet again,” Jonez mused, looking at his patient.
“How many other people were injured?”
“During the accident, you mean?” He sighed. For a moment, Moon saw a flash of concern beneath the soldierly exterior. “Three fatalities. Twenty injuries, two worse than Dr. Savic. But everyone’s getting treatment.”
She felt a touch on her sleeve. It was Srin. He had slipped up so quietly she hadn’t heard him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“I wanted to check on him, too.” Which was true enough. She was happy to let the hovering medical staff make of that what they would.
She smiled at Jonez—a quick and perfunctory movement of her lips—then beckoned to Srin. They moved to the edge of a far wall.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked quietly. “First there was that terrible alarm. Then the anti-gravity cut out.”
“It was definitely a hyperspace accident. Dr. Jonez was talking to some of the other staff when they were first treating Hen.” His voice was low as well, not carrying very much beyond the two of them. “They didn’t want to say too much while I was around, but it sounds like this isn’t the first time Republic ships have had such accidents. Nobody seems to know the cause.”
So this wasn’t the first time such an event happened. But, even with the limited communication resources available to her in recent years, Moon was sure she would have remembered an accident like they’d just experienced. Unless the Republic was wary of the public reaction to such facts. Strange how she was more likely to accept the second explanation now than, say, five years ago. She grimaced at her increasing cynicism.
“Maybe Drue will give me more information,” she mused.
“How’s the lab?”
“Not as bad as it looks. I’ll need some muscle to help me rearrange everything, but we should be ready to get back to work tomorrow. That is, if you want to?”
“Working with you, Dr. Thadin—” and Moon swore his eyes actually twinkled, “—is the highlight of my day.”
She couldn’t help the smile that curved her lips. “Maybe I’ll get you to come down and help me move the databanks back into place,” she teased.
His expression sobered. “Certainly, if that’s what you’d like me to do.”
“No,” she said. “You can stay here. It can wait till tomorrow.”
She shot a glance at Savic’s body, lying supine on the bed, under the faint pink haze of the sterilite field. A pair of tubes ran into his nostrils and there was a small pump delivering medication to his body via an uncovered forearm. Above him, the steady rhythm of his heart traced a regular waveform; his brain pattern was more erratic. Would he regain consciousness at all that day, or the next?
That was none of her concern. And neither was the dynamic between the figure beneath the medical blanket and the man standing near it.
There was so much of the relationship between Srin and Savic that she didn’t understand. She thought Srin would be jumping for joy and planning an escape attempt the moment he found out his handler was injured and unconscious. Yet, like a dutiful friend, he had followed Savic’s body down to the infirmary, not leaving his side from the time of the explosion. In Srin’s place, she might have been tempted to break Savic’s neck the moment after the panel exploded, and blame it on the accident.
Had Srin considered that? She didn’t know. Right now, she wanted to kiss him, to press her lips against his, just to help reassure herself that she was beyond the chaos of the morning and that Srin really was in front of her, but the presence of other people walking to and fro dissuaded her. It revealed a reticence in her she never thought she had.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and quickly left the infirmary.
Srin watched Moon walk away with the faintest of smiles hovering on his lips. His astrophysicist might think she could shield her thoughts from the world—and maybe she was successful with most people—but not from him. The momentary flickers of expression across her face were like extensive briefings to him. There was an instinctive empathy that dug past the blocks in his mind and somehow latched on to an emotional brain that wasn’t affected by the drugs that had been pumped through his veins for an eternity.
She wondered why he called for medical help as soon as he could after the explosion, and why he was staying by Hen’s side. Truth be known, a part of him wondered about that himself. There was an ancient term that seemed to describe his situation—something that sounded like “Stock Syndrome.” He had heard of it while a young science undergraduate. It described the eventual bonding between a captor and his or her victim after a period of time in each other’s company. Srin couldn’t deny there was a part of that in the dynamic between himself and Hen. After all, Hen was the steady rock of his existence. The man’s persistent presence even overrode his own enforced forgetfulness, sinking into the permanence of his distorted memories. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t forget Hen Savic.
But Stock Syndrome also assumed an identification of the victim with his captor. Srin was still too full of seething resentment to feel completely sympathetic towards his therapist/handler. So why was he here, sitting patiently by the bed like a loyal hound, waiting for Hen to wake up? Because, despite his current disability and Moon’s evident confusion, he was thinking of his own long-term goals, ironic turn of phrase though that was.
He could feel the chance of escape, like a piece of slippery silk between his fingers. Here was the opportunity he’d been waiting for—a way of breaking free of the Republic’s iron grasp. It was a slim hope, but he was banking on a drowsy Hen coming slowly to consciousness, and speaking with slurred honesty before his natural deceit kicked in. In order to be in such a position, he had to convince the medical staff that he was sincerely worried about Hen’s condition.
Not that such a thought wasn’t true. When Srin looked at the unconscious black man, he saw deception and obfuscation, but no violent intent. If Hen died—only a faint possibility now he was safely in medical hands—there was no guarantee that Srin’s new keeper wouldn’t be worse. From the way Moon spoke, Srin gathered that he had been kept on a standard two-day cycle for years. If allocated to a new therapist, there was no guarantee that would continue. Maybe a less-cautious person would manipulate the doses. Who knew the possible repercussions of such change? No, it was not an ideal situation, but Srin harboured a pragmatic affection for the man who had been his minder for almost twenty years, which meant he hoped that Hen would live, but that he would also give Srin the information he desperately craved.
Beyond that, he wouldn’t think. He needed to take things one step at a time and at that moment the most important fact he had to discover was how exactly Hen was slipping the drug to him. And that meant acting as a concerned friend, even if that wasn’t fully the truth.
The afternoon segued to evening and Srin stayed in the infirmary, leaving only briefly to stretch his muscles and grab some food. He masked his concern and growing impatience each time he re-entered the medical bay.
By his own reckoning, he was on the second day of his cycle and wasting precious hours isolated with Hen’s injured body, instead of spending it more productively—with Moon, for instance. He clenched his teeth just thinking about it, aware he was being torn in two different directions. Knowing Moon, she was back at the lab, single-handedly cleaning up the debris and probably running all kinds of cross-checks and diagnostics. He would love to be there helping her. Even knowing she was in close proximity—they didn’t have to be touching or even looking at each other—was enough to calm him down. His headaches seemed to decrease in intensity when she was around.
Unlike now. Absently, he rubbed his forehead with stiffened fingers. Was Hen even aware of all the side-effects of the drugs he was pumping into Srin? Was
he
even aware of them? His head hurt, and it was due to more than the drugs. If only he—
A moan from the body next to him catapulted Srin from his chair, all thoughts of pain forgotten. He hovered by the head of the bed, watching as Dr. Hawness—Jonez’s replacement, since he had gone off duty a couple of hours ago—and a nurse fussed around the medical readouts, trying to keep any sense of cool calculation off his face.
“Please try to relax, Dr. Savic,” Hawness instructed in a low but authoritative voice. “You are safe in the infirmary.” He glanced up at Srin. “Mr. Flerovs brought you in.”
“Srin?” Savic’s voice was thick and slurred from the medication and his state of half-consciousness.
“Yes. Please be still. You’re in a stable condition but you’ve undergone emergency surgery. Please don’t try to move.”
“Doctor,” Srin interposed, “could I talk to Hen? At least reassure him that I’m okay?”
Hawness blinked several times as he thought on the request, before finally nodding. “Give me a few minutes first.”
Srin nodded and moved off, far enough away not to be a bother, but close enough to make sure nobody forgot he was there. He watched as Hawness and the nurse moved about, their obvious knowledge translating into an elegant efficiency of motion as they adjusted the equipment by the head of the med-bunk. He felt a bit like a child as he watched them. Their movements were the result of their skills and experiences—the result of their memories. He had but one ability—to calculate equations at blinding speed. And nothing more. The Republic might think he was some kind of irreplaceable prize, but he would have traded everything he was, any strange ability he had been born with, to live a normal life. A life with a future, a family, a partner. Perhaps someone like Moon. It didn’t escape him that it was precisely due to his abilities that he’d met Moon Thadin. In any other universe, at any other time, they would have passed by one another, unawares.
Hawness finally moved away from Hen and nodded once at Srin. With a small smile, Srin moved up to the medical bed. Hen’s face looked normal again, cleaned of traces of dried blood and sweat. His eyelids fluttered as he struggled to stay awake, but it was obvious he was fighting a losing battle.
Srin bent low until his mouth was close by Hen’s ear. “Hen, can you hear me?”
“Y-yes.” Savic swallowed hard, a liquid kernel of sound that travelled down his throat.
“Everything’s okay. You’re in safe hands. Srin brought you to the infirmary.”
“Srin,” Hen said after a long pause, his eyes still closed, the lids still fluttering.
Damn, but if he didn’t work fast, Hen would sink into unconsciousness before he managed to lever any information out of him.
“We need to know about Srin’s medication,” Srin whispered urgently. “Where is it kept?”
“Me-med….”
Srin bit back an expletive. This wasn’t working. He wanted to lift Hen’s body and shake some lucidity into him, but knew such an action would be spotted in seconds by the staff who passed behind him as they worked.
“Dr. Savic,” he hissed. “Where is the medication kept?”
“Benzo…work…out….”
Srin never thought of himself as a violent man but the urge to slap his minder across the face was almost irresistible. It would be satisfying to be the one inflicting pain for a change.
“Yes, yes,” he agreed, throttling the temptation and calming his voice. “The benzodiazepine group of drugs. Where do you keep them? Dr. Savic?”
But it was too late. With a small sigh, Hen Savic slipped into unconsciousness. His breathing deepened. His face was relaxed.
Srin had lost the opportunity.
Maybe he should have sought out Moon and shared the news of his failure with her, but even a forgotten habit was entangled too deep for him to ignore. Srin had been alone for so long he almost instantly discarded the suggestion of seeking out company. Instead, he walked down to the propulsion bay. As he hoped, the engines were idling and the observation bays that partially overlooked the machinery that powered the
Differential
were unlocked and open to normal space.
The men he saw moving about in the bay were walking faster than normal, a natural consequence of their mishap, but there was no panic. They had jobs to do and they were intent on doing them to the best of their ability—transporting everyone aboard to a faraway stellar mass in order to test their latest weapon. He was up-to-date with what an earlier self had scratched into a panel in his small bathroom. The exclamation mark next to a small graphic representing StellMil was simple yet undeniable.
The soldiers below him might not know the exact consequences of their actions, but history would still judge them as culpable for the sins of their leaders. And how he wished he was one of them. They didn’t realise the treasure they held in their minds? the remembrance of special times; the laughter and tears of family and companions; the visualisation, however incorrect it may later prove to be. As ignorant as they were in so many ways, they were still anchored to life in a way Srin wasn’t.
Even an asteroid or a comet had more worth than him. It had regularity, and a past, present and future that were denied to him. Fuck, did that sound too self-pitying? Srin’s lips twisted as he watched the engineers move from console to console. He couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but could decipher meaning from their body language? the way they moved, the gestures they made and whether others turned to look or kept on working.
He twisted and looked out into space.
What was left to him now that his first, and best, chance of inveigling information out of Hen had failed? Would there be an opportunity to try again? Or was he condemned to a life of mist, ending his life believing he was still twenty-five and suffering from a mutant form of adult-onset progeria? Part of him was resentful of his own cleverness in finding a way of communicating with his future selves. Left to wallow in ignorance, he might have been happy. But being drawn to small images and text scraps had left him enlightened and disillusioned.
If he asked Drue Jeen to move him to a new cabin, the scratchings would be out of his grasp. That was a possibility; after all, the panel that injured Hen had exploded right outside his quarters. A request to be relocated wouldn’t seem too outlandish. And then he could be happy in his ignorance, not yearning for something that would be forever out of his grasp. He could enjoy Moon’s company? maybe even something more? without torturing himself with futile thoughts of a future together. If he moved away from his small archive of messages, his fingertips would meet only smooth, blank surfaces, a goal to be aspired to with an equally smooth, blank mind.
Except, he knew such happy ignorance wouldn’t last. Hen and the Republic might be able to short-circuit his memories, but they couldn’t change his basic personality. And his personality was such that he would find himself at this juncture again. Perhaps not looking out at hard vacuum while soldiers toiled below him but, nonetheless, aching to remember until he realised the futility of such a dream.
He stared at the blackness outside. Unblinking, it stared back at him.
“It was an unmarked crease,” Drue told her. “Or a crease that realigned itself. We’re not sure exactly which.”
Moon’s lab looked as if she was still in the process of moving in. The pile of broken pieces from a dislodged clearboard lay in a heap, and there were heavy databanks still strewn across the floor. The functional clearboards were dark, as power had not been cleared for her use yet. That was ostensibly what Drue had come to tell her, but she could see beneath the exhaustion to the desire to speak to someone unaffiliated with the Space Fleet, one person to another. She was Drue’s logical choice.
They sat at the table at the far end of the room and spoke quietly. Moon wanted to sleep—it was late and she was tired from the terror of her early morning wake-up call and what had ensued—but the strange vulnerability in Drue’s eyes pulled at her. She clenched her jaw to stifle a yawn, and blinked quickly when it made her eyes water.
“I thought all the creases were mapped,” she said. “And immovable.”
“All our transport routes have been mapped and used for a couple of centuries now,” he agreed, staring at the surface of the table. “And in ninety-nine percent of cases, they remain safe.”
“There’s a one percent that isn’t?” she asked. Anomalies in hyperspace? The concept was unheard of. The back of her neck felt cold, as if an icy blast of wind had just hit it.
“It’s classified.” He looked up at her then, and she read a myriad emotions on his face—worry, stress, a pleading.
She shrugged, a wry smile twisting her lips. She was in such a vulnerable position, she couldn’t imagine betraying Drue’s confidences.
He searched her eyes, trying to detect potential betrayal, then his shoulders sagged.
“The reports first started coming in twenty years ago,” he said. “It took the loss of a few military-grade, scout-class ships before we realised it wasn’t due to mechanical failure or pilot error, but that there was something wrong with the creases themselves.”
Moon knew enough about hyperspace travel to know that ships used the creases to travel, in much the same way as a marble follows the path of a shallow runnel. Shallow, so it could be slipped into and out of with relative ease, yet still definite, so it could be followed. Sometimes creases met other creases and a decision had to be made regarding which one to take. That navigation work was done by computer, since hyperspace was incomprehensible to the human mind. Pilots who tried to gaze upon its unfiltered form often went insane. Through centuries of exploration, a network of transport routes had been compiled. But now Drue was telling her that all their information might be in vain.
“They’re shifting?” She was alarmed. Without the creases, intergalactic travel was impossible. And shifting creases were almost as bad as no creases at all. She didn’t relish the thought of being stranded on an unknown planet somewhere, with all avenues of further transport cut off.