Interzeit: A Space Opera (20 page)

Iza showed Lei a garden center in the
Kuipterra
n quarter, her ulterior motive being the consumption of more of the moon’s famous amphetamine tea.

They sat among the trees and well coordinated vines of ivy, grass soft as could be engineered,
the
warmth of
a
solar simulate array beaming down on them.

Iza showed much more enthusiasm for the drink than the sites,
the stuff started to take effect onto both of them. Lei noticed Iza had a small twitch in her eye still w
h
ere she had been punched, the stimulant se
eming to
misfire
the nerve
. She felt demeaned by the whole
thing,
however the two succumb to the natural chattiness of the tea before long.

Lei pulls
herself up, leaning against a tree.

“So have you always lived on the moon?” she asked,

“Pretty much,” Izanami replied, “It’s a good enough place as any.”

“
You know, i
f I hadn’t been a pilot,” Lei added, “I probably wouldn’t have seen half the places I have.”

Iza grinned a little, “Me too. After getting a reputation on the moon, eventually I got picked for invitation only type races.

I hope you realize t
here
are
circuits of low gravity hover racing
all around the inner system, right? The Moon, Mars, Phobos, and even the Earth itself has these kinds of adrenaline s
ports
within some regions.

So I think I’m lucky in that way.” Iza agreed.

“Being a pilot is a blessing, and a curse I think.” Lei continued
,
joining Izanami on a vine strangled bench.

“Its like being a stranger everywhere you go. You visit a bunch of places that are strange and different, you meet people. Even
tually you’ve been through so
many different people and places, that when you return home
,
you are a stranger there too.”

“Hmm,” Iza stands, turning to Lei with a look a deep concentration, her eyes pierce into hers with uncomfortable clarity. There’s
a certain
flair in her eyes from the drink, an overdrive of biochemistry somewhere in its peak. She grinds her teeth in search of the proper response.

Finally she opens her mouth, “Come on. I feel like driving.”

So they do, they leave the garden, and jump into Izanami’s yellow hover racer. She sails them
slowly
through the upper curvature of the dome,
it’s a sparse place, high and dangerous, yet cramped as well.

Too close to the ceiling for most drivers to go quickly it’s a lazy river of automated machines, autopilots, and the ever paranoid.

They speak more on the more abstract notions involved in there lives
.
Sitting gently in the comforting
slow ebb of the tea.
Suddenly to Lei’s surprise Iza asks her a question she didn’t get often back in the outer system.

“Where is home for you?”

The conversation took on a dream like quality, an echo through time rippling on the out barriers of space, rolling back onto
itself
changed, and changing the echo it once came from.

Lei relayed
her childhood on mining ships, and stations of various sizes throughout the belt. Living in small crafts millions of miles away from the nearest outside
group,
or even object for that matter. It was an existence split into four elements.

The first and most important were
the people around you. She had two parents, and several extended family members. The second was the
machines,
their capabilities were the only thing that made the
ir survival a possibility in those
kind of conditions
.

The third was the asteroid
. For the first decade of her life, they were on mining
an
asteroid with a rich array of elements.

Engineers and certain Physicists on the colony would argue
often
on its formation, how it must be a drifter from some planet core some place, or the product of a supernova, ejecting this heavy piece of atomic arrangements and configurations millions of light years across the void in a single solitary journey.

It was not able to be known for sure, but it contained large deposits of
many higher count elements
: Uranium,
Titanium, Chromium,
Rhodium, and Platinum.
It was also full of
several complex rare materials such as glowing Tritium deposits, several pressurized carbonates
of differing hues, an
d the ever elusive
Alexandrite.

These minerals had a gravity to them that reverberated far past the natural tension of their own mass. Once found, its draw
was undeniable
,
and
its
p
ull inevitable.

The fourth factor was space, and it was something that connected all spacers, or anyone who lived without the comfort of a planet and atmosphere (artificial or otherwise). The great mother ocean of all existence, ev
erything that was, and would be, all
caressed in the unseen curvatures of the greatest other, that which some called god, the originator, or cold progenitor of all higher order.

“Its sounds dull,” Iza remarked, “stressfully dull.”

“People are adaptable, as I’m sure you understand Iza.” Lei said, “Though in a certain way it fills you, the emptiness
. Y
ou become like what you see. The bridges of molecules and atoms seem like a natural tem
plate to the higher..
.”

“I don’t know Liang, you need more tea, seems like you have a backlog of mineral metaphors to get out of your system.”

Lei laughs, “My p
rimary audience tends to be Basi
l so…
maybe I’m more used to blathering on than I realize.”

Iza smiles
at her with a distant gaze.

They return to the operations base shortly afterwards, Izanami citing a “crash” from the tea tiring her out. The next solar day the advanced ships of the TianShanTech engineering fleet start to arrive.

Lei arrived to meet them at the designated hangar before their ships even
completed docking in the wilds.

Captain
Xang
arrived with his subordinates within the first few waves of entrants. His wizened faced cracked and glowed with happiness when he saw Lei sitting patiently among the rows of chairs at the terminal.

“Liang!” He shouted, “Late as usual I see!”

She went to greet him, shaking
hands,
he clasped her warmly around the shoulders.

“So happy to hear of your safety Liang, you seem to have more lives than all the other mech pilots combined.”

“Well the truth is Captain, without your teams work on the Tiger, a
nd to be honest, Basil, I would have been lost a long time ago.”

Lei helped with the others in carrying their gear and belongings, enjoying t
he methodical
march back and forth from the hangar.

“The new unit will be arriving later in the solar day,” Xang assured her.

He explained that they had been given the funding approval for a “rolling upgrade” program from the executive corp.

“The new model was basically complete by the time we received orders to rendezvous here with you on Lunar Colony
3
. Due to the somewhat unclear legal air with military mech production we’ve set it up to have a constantly improved mech available with little to no latency time between.”

He smiles slyly, “This of course
,
has the added benefit of being a key turn away from mass production.”

“Sounds like the situation is fragile at the moment.”
Lei added

“Indeed, the interplanetary era is coming to a point of crisis. There will be a transition of some kind, we have to work towards making it a peaceful one, to move away from the shallow vanities of our own solar system, we have to move to the next phase or die in this one.”

She helped Xang get accompanied with the rest of the staff on the base. There was a certain tension at first, the TST Engineers were used to taking orders, but rarely did they work in open collaborations of this type.

Plaskin showed them little deference. She and the other Protectorate staff
s
et
them
up in a hangar
of serviceable qualities, but it was a
fraction the size of what they used
to work with Skyking V
.

This minor rivalry annoyed the TST staff and by emotional osmosis Lei, but it was only a temporary misgiving. As soon as the carrier ship for the Mech arrived, that feeling washed away in a tide.

It docked, and they entered the room as the technicians and ship hands were unloading it.

“I give to you, my greatest work Liang. Bai Hu.”

Its towering form emerged from within the darkness of the ship. It was a pristine crisp white, with silvery plates running over it, complex wirings and devices threaded into them. Its face stared into Lei, a fang plate pattern covering
it’s
would be mouth, a tool for speech only good for communicating one thing.

“When can I test it out?” Lei asks,

“We insist that we run calibratio
ns this evening.” Xang answers facetiously
, “Sorry for the short notice.”

Liang wanders from his side, slowly approaching the titan, she calls back.

“People make plans, but the cosmic decides them,” She smiles, “I don’t know how I’ll forgive you this time though.”

She eagerly awaits their call, barging in
on Iza and her daily routine.
Lei begs
her to join them during the calibration.

“Sounds like it could turn into an ego contest. We’ll just sync our training up tomorrow.”

“I didn’t think you were the type to turn down an ego contest Iza,” She replies,

“Only the ones I might lose.” Iza grins, “Now scamper
away
before I change my mind.”

Basil’s reaction
to the new craft was positive. A good sign, since it was
a veteran pilot in its own right
.
Lei suspected he was even more enthused regarding the upgrade than she was herself.

The cockpit was fairly similar in design than Tiger
West’s,
Basil was plugged into the craft in the back corner, while Lei’s seat was pulled forward up next to the large pilot terminal and controls.

The changes were of a sensory level for her anthrion, if what it experience could be compared to human sense in such a way. For Lei, she noticed during the initial run, tighter controls, the heavy cumbersome plating of the past model being mostly shucked away in favor of a more energy heavy system.

The deflector array had be scrapped and reformed from the ground up. The old heavy me
tal plates designed for space were
replaced with a selectively active array of electromagnetics. The high energy array would activate in response to incoming fire, creating a field powerful enough to bend away traditional missiles and split particle beams, deflecting them into smaller unfocused
ray
s.

That was the theory anyway
.
The main energy shield had been scaled down somewhat, installed into the units left arm.
Finally t
he right arm was weighed down with a giant
gatling
cannon.

After analyzing field data, the engineering corp conclude
d
that t
he stardust cannon had been the most effective weapon system
, and in the redesign, rebuilt it
as a
mounted cannon on the arm
.

The power of the cannon was astonishing, Lei chewed up many solid stone targets during testing. The blasts of
particulates
violently eroded the integrity of boulders without more than a few seconds of fire.

The calibration tests put everyone in the TianShanTech attaché in much higher spirits. Lei always feared the scrutiny of the corps, with their constant demand for results, but now in this moment, as things seemed hinged on a world that Lei could hardly view the horizon of, having some one like her around brought a relaxed confidence to them all.

She was the veteran after all, the survivor. Despite all the turbulence of the recent year, she still remained intact through it
all,
and
with no small risk to her own safety.

Her perseverance, a silent thing, a presence more than a fully socially fleshed out personality trait, was stabilizing, helping the rest of them feel that perhaps they could weather the crisis unbroken.

This respect for Lei began leaking over from the TST camp into the Lunar Protectorate as well, many of the upper staff happy that they were able to vet their pilo
t with someone of such a strong
pedigree.

The tests with Iza were smooth, after their initial scuffle Iza was s
urprisingly open to correction. She
learned the focus control of aiming, although at a slower pace than Lei expected. She chalked this up to the simpler control design of the Skyking itself. Using light, unobtrusive neurological sensors only, the sync time and interference compensation were at fractions (meaningful fractions) slower when shooting from a range.

Lei herself had Basil to focus on such computations, and the complicated machine had decades of self-programmed algorithms to rely on.

Though the progress on that area was slo
w, Iza quickly integrated quick
shots from the rifle into her breakneck pace of fighting.

The staggeringly fast stopping, firing, and
evading, made tracking a shot againt her difficult. Her ability to interrupt a targeting lead, fire disrupting position, and change direction in a fluid single movement, made her incredibly dangerous.

After the first two days of testing
,
Iza
and Lei were brought news. They were relaxing at
a
Kuipterra
n
teabar post-training. Iza was determined to raise Lei’s tolerance, and drag her deeper into the sordid and impulsive world of stimulants.

The message
hit their
ionic networks
simultaneously,
they looked at each other with suspicion and hesitation. If it were both of them, it was from the command base, an authority that issued good and bad ne
ws, but
it was
never
trivial.

“You first,” Izanami said, “Just tell me what it
is,
I don’t want to read it
,
if you have to read it too.”

“Uh,” Lei answered, “That’s fine, I’ll take a look.”

She pulled a window from her wrist, reviewing the memo sent to them. Lei cleared her throat reading it aloud.

“Attention all class two and higher personnel of the
interfactional
..
.Let’s see here…Travel information reports that within two
to
three days
,
Lunar Colony Three will receive an additional war mech, pilot, and support team in order to more strongly unify the cooperati
ve effort
…securing Earth against external threats…”

“Does it say who it is?” Izanami asks,

“No, no it doesn’t Iza,” Lei
answered, “But I think I know
who it may be.”

“Oh?
A friend of yours?”

“You could say that, Septis said he would join me here when he was able. He felt like something was coming, he has…an intuition for danger you might say.”

“Septis…like the heir to the throne, transhuman overload Septis?” Iza prodded,

Lei shrugged, “I don’t know about all that, but he’s very interested in resolving this crisis.”

Iza
looks
into the crystalline prisms scattered the ceiling.

“How dreamy, I wish I knew a prince.”

Lei chokes mid-sip, she wipes her mouth, regaining control of her breathing.

“
Its
…” She struggles to answer, “Never mind, you’ll meet him soon enough, he is
a
like the rest of us.”

“Us?”
Izanami
asks

“Pilots,” she replies, “
Mech
Pilots, we need to work together that’s why we’re all here.”

Iza
agrees, but her sm
ile breaks into
sarcastic
laughter.
Soon after th
ey vanish into the lunar night, floating through
the all and endless vacuum around them. During the night cycle, riding with Iza is more surreal, doubtlessly this is aided by the pharmacological concoctions brew
ed
, and bartered all along the bars, lights, and havens.

The drift along the roadside
,
the lines between the outer and inner space of the colony
start to disappear. One by one the illusionary play of light
and noise cease
.
The city fades away into the shadows.
Lei realizes
she has arrived in the dark weeks. The vacant stars stare in at the dome.

Listlessly changing elevations in the drift, so gently and subtly it sometimes felt that there was no gravity at all, but the sudden object, a velocity passing
by,
an
intentional drop asserts the planetary reality of the place after everything.

In space everything is falling, sailing along the pulls of mass that are invisible, phantasmic. Falling falling on and on forever,
it
is a desperate experience.

The planetary reality was that of an immediate body, something that holds you and pulls you, an object that you cannot escape. The vengeful one was willing even to kill you to keep you, dragging you into one final fatal embrace
.

Just knowing it was there, seemed to inflict a kind of presen
ce on Lei. It reminded her of growing up in ships. They sailed out in the nothingness, no real permanent destination, just a small thing falling forward.

“
Hmmph
,” Lei says,

“Mmm?”
Iza replies dreamily,

“
It reminds me a lot of home…”
Lei trails off,

They spend more time moon
gazing in the hover craft, slowly slipping out of their chemical delirium into a sleepy mute
d
comedown. They return to the base without much c
eremony, and exchange tired
goodbye
s
.