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THE ADVENTURES OF GREGORY SAMSON, SPACE EXPLORER:
THE ADVENTURES OF GREGORY SAMSON, SPACE EXPLORER:
A Farther Orbit
Chapter 1 |
EDICT: This file and subsequent files are sealed from all but the utmost.
This file has been granted sentience and is legally empowered for self-defense.
Unauthorized readers will be expunged.
WARNING: Cognitive identification procedures are underway.
This file has been granted sentience and is legally empowered for self-defense.
Unauthorized readers will be expunged.
WARNING: Cognitive identification procedures are underway.
File: Interview 2
CONTENT: Continuing transcript of interview with local binary organism self-identifying as individual code-named The Origami Man.
SUBJECT: Local binary organism self-identifying as individual code-named The Origami Man.
INTERVIEWER: Scientist __________.
Note: For security purposes Scientist ________’s name and all identifying remarks have been stricken from FILE: Interview 2.
Timestamp
This is Scientist _______continuing the interview with the Origami Man at, ah, ______ on ______.
Let’s recap.
You were implanted with a mimetic, transforming, self-repairing and self-aware machine organism.
A Shipkiller.
Right.
In your neck.
Yes, that’s right.
It seems that your acclimation was rather stressful. A hard adjustment.
You could say that.
You killed a man.
Not intentionally.
Still, you killed a man.
But not intentionally.
That matters.
All right. So what happened after you left Earth? After the thief, ah, Rell called you for help. What did he want?
What do you have to decide?
What’s that?
You said last time you needed to understand my nature ahead of a decision making process. What do you have to decide?
Well, that depends on what you tell us, and on the results of some tests we’re running.
But our ultimate decision is whether to let you live. If we deem you a threat, we will destroy you.
I’m not sure it would be as easy as that, _______.
I’m not interested in having another pissing contest.
We want to know what sort of person you are morally, socially, physically and metaphysically.
It is important for us to have a full understanding of your beginning, in order to accurately extrapolate your character.
With that in mind, I want to thank you for your candor and attention to detail.
You’re a mouthy bastard; it’s quite helpful.
Have you noticed that he seems to be multiple people at the same time?
Oh that could mean anything, you know how easy it is to camouflage a person on the visual spectrum. I’m talking about the way his speech patterns change from moment to moment.
Hm. So he’s not really here?
Yeah, I heard you, but you said…
He’s sort of here.
Thanks. That’s real helpful.
We’re not a fully individual species within a universe like yours.
I feel it’s only fair to tell you that we can still hear you when you subvocalize like that.
Are you speaking to the ship?
Thanks for your candor. Earlier–
You are speaking to the ship. And you hear it in your head? That’s fascinating!
Do you know that you move about when you speak to it?
Yes, I know. It’s a hard habit to break.
Last time, you told me my existence was a variable you hadn’t had to consider before. What does that mean?
Come on, ______, I filled thirteen hours, you can give me five minutes.
Obviously yours is not the first universe we’ve visited.
Whatever you say.
Yours is not the first universe we’ve visited.
There are several distinct types of universe, structural variants that adhere to different physical laws. Universes like yours undergo heat death. By now, there shouldn’t be variable matter here, much less life. You shouldn’t be here. But you are. We’re curious about that.
What are you scared of?
I know I shouldn’t have survived this long, _______, you’re not telling me anything new. What are you scared of?
Tell me what happened next.
Fuck off.
Tell me what you did after you left Earth and I’ll tell you why we’re concerned.
But you are concerned.
Yes.
How about a cup of coffee, _______?
Don’t push it.
I’ll tell a better story with a cup of coffee.
We’re only interested in the facts.
Facts aren’t immutable.
I’ll tell you what you want to know, ______. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken aloud for this long. I’d like something to drink.
There isn’t any coffee. You said it yourself.
You can travel between universes, ________, I’m sure you can manufacture me a cup of coffee. I’ll describe it for–God damn, that was fast. How do you know what coffee is? I was expecting a much longer conversation.
We took the impression from your mind.
Well, thank you.
Jesus, you guys really can’t read minds for shit.
This is like Bustelo filtered through pork rinds.
Not that I’m ungrateful.
What did you do after you left Earth?
I had a really great meal about two-thirds turn clockwise around the galaxy from Earth.
Sometimes I really miss eating.
The first time I left Earth, like really left, I was blown away by the speed. I was so fast. I mean, I had a basic sense of what I could do. I knew that I was half spaceship. A human body hosting an intelligent, transforming alien warship. A Shipkiller. But those are just words. The experience of it was staggering. I remember thinking…well, nothing verbal. But...
Light moved at one hundred and eighty-six thousand, two hundred and eighty two miles a second. It took just over eight minutes for sunlight to reach Earth, which put the sun at an average distance of about ninety million miles. Mars was maybe a third of that when our orbits matched up, thirty million miles and change. Other times the gulf was nearly seven times as far.
Don’t laugh, that was a long way for us.
I knew all of that, all those figures, as easily as I know left from right. Cab had a complete copy of the Internet jammed under my brain like money under a mattress, and the information lurked in my periphery no matter where I was looking.
I cut loose with my engines for the first time and Earth fell away from me, the size of a beach ball, a melon, a pea. And then it was nearly gone, nothing more than a bright point beneath my feet. I felt a pang.
Without spatial reference, it was impossible to tell how fast I was going, which in turn made it hard to maintain an accurate sense of my physical self. Earth didn’t have to be far behind me; the planet could have shrunk. I might be larger, now. Or I might be very, very small. It’s hard to know yourself in outer space.
“Cab,” I said, “how fast are we going?”
--Just over half light speed--
--A hundred thousand miles a second--
There was a gleeful tone to the pseudo-memory of Cab’s voice in my head, an unknowing excitement. He was ready to let go. He was ready to leave, in spite of his proximity to my fear.
“And how far are we going?” I looked uneasily back at Earth. The planet was nothing more than a tiny pinprick outlined in blue, with the planet’s name written next to it in the same color. There were no other blue systems on the galaxy map. Blue for home.
The stars blared their names at me. I turned off the map. The names disappeared but the stars remained, closer than they had been before.
--Ceres is about sixty-three million miles from Earth right now--
--Here--
An empty point lit up ahead of me. It said, in dandelion-yellow, ‘Ceres,’ along with a number in the high fifty millions, which was diminishing quite quickly. Below that was written, ‘Rell,’ in green.
“We’re going past Mars.” I knew instinctively that Mars was about forty-seven million miles from Earth at this point in each planet’s orbit. The information presented itself to my mind and then disappeared. It was like being swarmed by trivia-obsessed gnats.
--Yuh--
I swallowed hard. At a hundred thousand miles a second it would take me ten minutes to travel sixty million miles. That was well past Mars. A journey dwarfing the trip NASA had been working towards for four decades with no end in sight, undertaken on a whim and accomplished in less time than it normally took me to drive to work. A mighty accomplishment for humanity, except that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, other than stand in the right place at the right time. I was powerful, now, but it was too immediate. I’d had too many obstacles removed too fast to feel any pride in my victories.
The minutes ticked by. There was a draw on my body, some barely perceptible force that told me which direction I was moving in, but nothing more. I imagine that without the inertial dampeners, I would have looked like some kind of soup.
If I die, I thought abruptly, I’ll be a missing person. I turned around without changing course and stared homeward.
Two days. I’d been living with Cab in my neck for two days. That was barely long enough for me to recognize what I had become, much less tell anyone else. Even my roommates had to find out by accident. And now I was gone, off the planet, already farther from home than anyone else in human history. If I didn’t make it back, it would be like I had disappeared into thin air.
I should have left a note, I thought, some sort of explanation for my actions. It would have been a kindness, if nothing else. A communiqué in case of the unforeseen. I frowned. Then again, how much danger was I really in? Supposedly, I was immortal, even if I didn’t feel like it. What did immortality feel like, anyway? What did it mean? My skin still felt fragile. Cab said he could fix me. That didn’t sound pleasant. That sounded like I had to be broken, first.
And for whom would I have left a note, anyway? You like that? Whom? Anyway. Dylan knew where I’d gone. Iris didn’t want anything to do with me. My extended family was minimal, disparate and scattered to the wind, and my most recent serious girlfriend left me a year before all this. Things didn’t end well, and we didn’t talk, and what the hell was I supposed to say, anyway? To whom it may concern: I have become host to a sentient transforming alien spaceship, and as a result I have decided to leave Earth in order to keep the planet safe from a species of marauding omnicidal bugs. Best Wishes, Greg. Then I could have crumpled up the paper and eaten it, because there was no one who would have believed me who wasn’t already aware of the situation.
Maybe I should have banged out a quick memoir before I left. A Life Fisted by Circumstance: The Gregory Samson Story.
Two days with Cab and we’d already managed to kill someone. That was reason enough for me to leave. If I ended up just another missing person, well, maybe that was what I deserved.
--I will drug you if you don’t stop muttering to yourself--
--What the hell are you thinking about anyway, your brain is like a goddamn strobe light--
“You can see my brain?” I forced myself to think of something else, and came up with sex. As usual, I was in favor of it. “Was that a bright thought?”
--Actually, yes--
--What were you yammering on about?--
“Nothing,” I said. “Mindless chatter. I’m nervous.”
--Pauvre petit--
--Wanna play I Spy?--
I looked around and snorted. “With what, stars?”
--There’s a hydrogen atom over there--
--And there--
--And there--
--And there--
--And over there is the entirety of creation, you absolute ass--
I laughed, and after a second Cab joined me, in his own way. It felt a little like I was laughing for two. Then Ceres loomed in my vision, all of a sudden, and I ground to a halt with my hands out in front of me to grab…something. Nothing. But the temptation was there. Instincts are hard to let go of. I relaxed and looked around, another instinct, and laughed at the idea that I might be seen. Even Rell was all the way around the other side of the asteroid. I was utterly alone.
Ceres was a dirty blue-brown ball. Compositional information flashed across my displays: gravity, (minimal) atmosphere, (nil) and mineral composition. (Mostly rocks and water ice.) I moved across the surface, hung by the shoulders on my wide dorsal engines. The landscape was rough, pitted, absent of detritus and layered in frost. According to whatever it was in me that could tell this sort of thing, there was more fresh water in Ceres than there was on Earth. I would have made a killing in the asteroid mining business if I had just dragged the damn thing back home.
--Wow, what a pretty rock--
I zipped over the horizon. Time to find out whether Rell wanted to kill me. There were probably better ways to think about my immediate future, but that one possibility overrode all the others in my head. Sure, he had asked me for my help, but he also insisted that we speak face to face, and the man was a thief. I’d only known him for two days, and I only met him because he tried to steal Cab right off my back. I didn’t know that I could trust him. I only knew that I didn’t.
Rell’s ship was propped at an angle at the bottom of a particularly large crater, pointing drunkenly out into space as if dropped there by accident. I came to a full stop and put my hands where my pockets would have been, realized I didn’t have any, and grunted in frustration.
Outer space was a lot like deep water; it had a beautifying effect, so that anything you saw in that environment became unavoidably affecting, a pinnacle of grace, devoid of the flaws that are only apparent on the ground. Which is a florid way of saying that Rell’s ship really looked like shit lying there in an asteroid crater. Someone had sprayed an ugly patch over the hole I’d burned in the hull and then neglected to repaint, and there was a collection of long scorch marks visible across the bow.
Cab marked the pertinent points of the ship, places we could take cover on the surface of the planetoid, available paths of retreat. He wasn’t nervous. He was excited, almost at play.
Something began to shine towards the rear of the ship, just outside of the visible spectrum, and then I heard Rell as if he were right next to me.
“Are you going to come aboard, or just float there?” I just managed to avoid jumping in place. Rell’s tone was pleasant, but his words were explosive in the silence that had for ten minutes been punctuated only by my own murmuring.
The shining spread across the hull, and I realized I could distinguish when Rell’s ship was powered on from when it was not. It was like being able to tell if a person was awake or not, or whether someone was watching you.
“Samson!” Rell said sharply. “I’m a sitting duck with the reactor on like this! Move yourself!”
--Stop ruminating and answer the man, you boob!--
“Yar, Cap’n Rell!” I growled. “Parrrrmission to come abaarrrrd.”
“Are the other humans as weird as you are, Samson?” Rell sighed. The airlock opened, laboriously.
“I like to think I’m a man of the people,” I said. I soared inside and landed on my feet. “An average Joe.”
“Truly?” Rell said. His voice was close but his tone was distant, as if he was distracted.
“Rell, there’s an alien spaceship growing out of my neck.” I put my hands on my hips, because I still didn’t have any pockets. I thought I looked like a tool. “I’m about as atypical as is humanly possible. Open up.”
“Yeah?” Rell said. “You, ah, sure about that?”
“Rell, I didn’t fly sixty million miles to talk to you through the gate,” I said. “Lemme in.”
“Suit yourself,” Rell grunted.
Ceres was small, but it still dragged my feet in a direction that my brain had determined was ‘down.’ Unfortunately, Ceres’ ‘down’ did not appear to be the same as Rell’s shipboard ‘down.’ The door whunked shut, there was a brief pause, and then the gravity switched on. The wall to my right became the floor, the floor beneath my feet became the wall, and the far wall became the ceiling. I smashed into the ground and made a noise like a hamster under five hundred pounds of teaspoons, and Cab started to laugh. Everybody played their part to perfection.
“Cab,” I asked when I got my breath back, “How is it that when I’m in the ship I can survive accelerating to half light speed in under ten seconds, but it still hurts to crack my head on the pavement?”
--Comedy--
“Ah.” I lay still, bruised and confused. “I see. And did you know that I was standing on the wall?”
--Yeah, didn’t you?--
“No,” I said, “I did not.”
--Oh--
--Well, you see that blue dot on the floor?--
--That means that surface is shipboard ‘down’--
“Ah,” I said again.
--I’ll try to give you the heads up about that sorta thing in the future--
“If you would be so kind.” I got to my feet carefully and Cab reorganized us into a simple seven-foot tall mechanical demigod. In the right light, and with a healthy combination of imagination and charity, I looked a bit like Michael Jordan covered in lead foil.
The inside door opened up and I stepped into the hold. Rell was waiting for me, leaned up against a crate smoking a cigar. As soon as I was over the threshold he said, “Lock it down.”
The door closed heavily behind me and flashed red, and I felt the ship power down around us. Rell stared at me. He was tall, nine feet at least, with humanoid legs and two elbows on each arm, and he was covered in thick, reedy fur that ranged in color from the deep forest green of his bare chest to the bright, tropical toucan colors in the crests behind his ears. His face looked like the result of a wild night between a gorilla and a tiger, but he didn’t move like a mammal, he was too graceful. He wasn’t moving, though, just standing there with his odd arms folded across his chest. His face was tight, and the fur around his ears wavered continuously.
“Hiya Rell,” I said. “How you doing?”
He dragged on his cigar. The coal fizzed. After a second he blew twin plumes of purple smoke out of his nostrils, and worked the cigar into the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve been better,” he grunted. He grimaced, then spun on his heel and walked out of the hold. “Come on, Samson, let’s have a drink and talk this over.”
I followed him. What else was I going to do?
Rell’s legs were nearly five feet long. I had to jog to keep up.
“I got your message,” I said. My metal feet clanked on the metal deck.
“Really,” Rell said. “I thought you dropped in for the hell of it.”
“Yeah, I’m around Mars a lot,” I said.
We went into the kitchen. Rell cracked a beer and drained it in four swallows. His Adam’s apple moved eighteen inches up and down, from the base of his jaw to the top of his sternum, and after being amazed for a moment by the distance, I realized it was much more amazing that the alien had an Adam’s apple at all.
He belched magnificently, then cracked a fresh bottle and filled me an honest-to-god pint glass. He held it like a shot glass.
“You got me a special glass.” I took the beer. “You really do need my help.”
Rell grunted and hopped up on the counter, next to the stove. He jumped like a cat, but landed on his butt like a playful chimp. He opened a fresh beer with something hidden in his palm.
“Take off your helmet,” he said.
I obliged him, because I couldn’t drink through the faceplate, and because I knew he had to size me up before he would tell me what he needed. All I could do was wait. I’d seen the look on his face before, when I had to interview a reticent source harboring a hard revelation. People don’t like to give up their secrets, even when they’re in dire straits. The fact that a gorilla-tiger from beyond at least some of the stars would act the same way was unsettling. An awe-inspiring mundane similarity highlighting the fact that however alien he might have been, Rell was ‘people,’ too. I was glad for the quiet while he looked me over. I needed time to adjust. The familiarity was jarring.
Rell’s expression got heavier and heavier. “How old are you?” He asked finally.
He hadn’t been this interested in me the first time we met. I drank some of my beer and decided that lying would be immature.
“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.
Rell took a deep breath and blew it out of his closed lips in exasperation. My father used to make the same noise when he was frustrated and tired.
“You’re a child,” he said. “You’re just a child.” He finished his beer and opened another. I tried to see what he had in his palm. Whatever it was, he had it well-hidden and he was very comfortable with it. He studied me back.
“What have you done?” He asked.
“What, you mean, like, ever?” I said with an empty smile. “That’s a hefty order, Rell. What’s going on? Why do you want to know?” I stowed the ship on my back and clambered onto the counter opposite Rell with my feet dangling four feet off the ground.
Rell waved his hands near his waist and looked off to his right for a moment. Then he nodded and waved his hands again and looked back at me.
“You see a bug?” I asked.
“My computer,” Rell said. “I was checking the ship’s sensors. It’s a personal visual field, so…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Last night I was chased out of the Schlorb system by a team of bounty hunters.” He waved his hands to punctuate his words, and some beer sloshed on the floor. The linoleum absorbed the liquid and burped quietly.
“There’s a price on my head,” Rell said. “Again. A big one, judging from the size of the team that’s after me.”
Bounty hunters. In space. I’d be lying if I told you that the thought didn’t provoke a certain measure of juvenile glee on my part.
I drank some beer. It was good, but beer usually was. “I take it this is not a regular occurrence, you having a price on your head.”
“Not for a long time,” Rell grumbled. “I’ve been careful. A death mark’s not an easy thing to live with.”
I grinned at the reference, and Rell snarled. I guess it wasn’t intentional.
“You think this is funny?” He spat. “Someone wants me dead because of you.”
“Technically, all I did was stand there,” I said. “You’re the one who stole the seed. I’m the idiot Earthling, remember?”
“The Cabernician stole the seed,” Rell snapped back. “I just stopped him selling it to the Krr.” He paused, and then his fur deflated and he drank the rest of his beer.
“At least, that’s what I’ll tell my lawyer,” he grumbled. “Sorry. I know none of this is on you.”
“No harm,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
Rell looked at me askance and raised both of his impressive tufted eyebrows.
“That easily?”
I grimaced. “I have to be off Earth for a while. I did something…It’s safer this way. Helping you will take me away from here. I’m not happy about it, but it’s the truth. What do you need me to do?”
Rell nodded. “Well, I need to find out who wants me dead, and then I need to either convince them to call off the hunt, or kill them. One or the other.”
Cab shifted inside of me and started to pay closer attention.
“You don’t know who posted the bounty then,” I said. I figured he didn’t, I just wanted to say it aloud. Bounty hunters in space. My life was an idiot’s fantasy. Rell shook his head.
“Well,” I said, “Let’s narrow the field. The Cabernicians blame you for the seed theft. They’re a possibility. The cops are after you, but if they’re like the ones I’m used to, they probably don’t subcontract, and I don’t imagine they’re looking to have you killed outright. The same is probably true of the Cabernician species, now that I think about it. These are the people who want you to stand trial. Now, as far as folks who would want you dead, the Krr seem like they would do their own dirty work, given what I’ve heard about them, but maybe they’re trying a new tactic. The Cabernician who’s been dealing with them is another suspect, he’s probably shitting his pants over this. Your broker, or whoever got you the job, they could be behind it, too.” I shrugged. “Seems like there are a lot of people who would benefit from your death, Rell.”
Rell was staring at me with the bottle halfway to his mouth.
“What,” I said, “I’m smart. I read books and shit.”
Rell nodded slowly.
“I also talked to a Cabernician, and a cop named Frewdin. CLEA agent, whatever I’m supposed to call him.” I shrugged. “This is what you want me for, right? To help you sort all of this out?”
A shrill mechanical scream cut the world in two. It was an awful noise, terrified and terrifying, the wail of prey sure of its destiny in the predator’s maw. Cab snapped around me and dimmed the sound, but I could still feel it tearing at the edge of my attention. It wasn’t just noise, it was the fight or flight response conveyed in a sound wave.
Rell was in a crouch, legs wide and body low. A thick crest ran from the top of his head to the base of his spine and disappeared into his shorts. Presumably his species had a tail at some point in their history. His arms were out in front of him, with his elbows loose and his hands open-palmed to the floor. His five fingers were curled and flexed, and his palms had pulled apart along the flanges to reveal four curved six-inch claws, one between each bone. They were yellow-white and translucent at the edges, like a cat’s, and while I know that evolution intended them for climbing, they also made a dandy weapon. I tried to imagine boxing someone with two sets of elbows and claws in his palms, and decided that it was a situation best avoided.
All of this was one instant. In the next, Rell straightened up, relaxed his hands, and said, firmly, “Off.” The scream cut off. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and flattened his hair. He had a certain birdlike affect when frightened. Or maybe bug like, there was a stiff note to his speed. I hadn’t even seen him get off the counter, he had just appeared in the crouch, ready to unleash some horrible Vabling kung fu.
Cab was doing what he could with all the adrenaline I’d produced when the alarm went off, but there was a lot of it.
Rell cleared his throat. “Your grasp of the situation is impressive, Samson, but I don’t need you for your deductive ability. I need your muscle. I need you to save my bacon.”
That had to have been a mistranslation, I thought, shoving my way past the meaning of his words. I couldn’t get into another fight. I had to be careful.
He pointed at the ceiling and twirled his finger once. “That was the ship’s proximity alarm. Someone is about to attack us, presumably the same group that chased me out of Schlorb. They’re the only ones who would think to look for me here.” He grimaced and shook his head. “They must have traced my warp trajectory.”
“You need my ship,” I said. Cab felt like he was grinning.
“I need you to fight these people for me,” Rell said. “And everyone else after them, until we get to the bottom of this. I need a warrior, and I have you, a child with a weapon. Obviously my options are limited, or I wouldn’t be here.”
His tone was calm, but his face was tight, and I know mine was, too, under the imperturbable faceplate. Only Cab seemed unconcerned with the reality of the situation, that we hadn’t made it an hour off Earth without being forced into a fight.
--This is going to be neat--
--What kind of ships do you think they have?--
I swallowed and shrugged and didn’t answer and listened to the growing sense of dread that I knew was my ship telling me that I was going to have to make a decision very, very soon. Kill, or be killed, except I couldn’t be killed, which only left the other part. The worse part.
Dammit, the whole point of getting a liberal arts degree was so I could avoid this sort of situation.
CONTENT: Continuing transcript of interview with local binary organism self-identifying as individual code-named The Origami Man.
SUBJECT: Local binary organism self-identifying as individual code-named The Origami Man.
INTERVIEWER: Scientist __________.
Note: For security purposes Scientist ________’s name and all identifying remarks have been stricken from FILE: Interview 2.
Timestamp
This is Scientist _______continuing the interview with the Origami Man at, ah, ______ on ______.
Let’s recap.
You were implanted with a mimetic, transforming, self-repairing and self-aware machine organism.
A Shipkiller.
Right.
In your neck.
Yes, that’s right.
It seems that your acclimation was rather stressful. A hard adjustment.
You could say that.
You killed a man.
Not intentionally.
Still, you killed a man.
But not intentionally.
That matters.
All right. So what happened after you left Earth? After the thief, ah, Rell called you for help. What did he want?
What do you have to decide?
What’s that?
You said last time you needed to understand my nature ahead of a decision making process. What do you have to decide?
Well, that depends on what you tell us, and on the results of some tests we’re running.
But our ultimate decision is whether to let you live. If we deem you a threat, we will destroy you.
I’m not sure it would be as easy as that, _______.
I’m not interested in having another pissing contest.
We want to know what sort of person you are morally, socially, physically and metaphysically.
It is important for us to have a full understanding of your beginning, in order to accurately extrapolate your character.
With that in mind, I want to thank you for your candor and attention to detail.
You’re a mouthy bastard; it’s quite helpful.
Have you noticed that he seems to be multiple people at the same time?
Oh that could mean anything, you know how easy it is to camouflage a person on the visual spectrum. I’m talking about the way his speech patterns change from moment to moment.
Hm. So he’s not really here?
Yeah, I heard you, but you said…
He’s sort of here.
Thanks. That’s real helpful.
We’re not a fully individual species within a universe like yours.
I feel it’s only fair to tell you that we can still hear you when you subvocalize like that.
Are you speaking to the ship?
Thanks for your candor. Earlier–
You are speaking to the ship. And you hear it in your head? That’s fascinating!
Do you know that you move about when you speak to it?
Yes, I know. It’s a hard habit to break.
Last time, you told me my existence was a variable you hadn’t had to consider before. What does that mean?
Come on, ______, I filled thirteen hours, you can give me five minutes.
Obviously yours is not the first universe we’ve visited.
Whatever you say.
Yours is not the first universe we’ve visited.
There are several distinct types of universe, structural variants that adhere to different physical laws. Universes like yours undergo heat death. By now, there shouldn’t be variable matter here, much less life. You shouldn’t be here. But you are. We’re curious about that.
What are you scared of?
I know I shouldn’t have survived this long, _______, you’re not telling me anything new. What are you scared of?
Tell me what happened next.
Fuck off.
Tell me what you did after you left Earth and I’ll tell you why we’re concerned.
But you are concerned.
Yes.
How about a cup of coffee, _______?
Don’t push it.
I’ll tell a better story with a cup of coffee.
We’re only interested in the facts.
Facts aren’t immutable.
I’ll tell you what you want to know, ______. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken aloud for this long. I’d like something to drink.
There isn’t any coffee. You said it yourself.
You can travel between universes, ________, I’m sure you can manufacture me a cup of coffee. I’ll describe it for–God damn, that was fast. How do you know what coffee is? I was expecting a much longer conversation.
We took the impression from your mind.
Well, thank you.
Jesus, you guys really can’t read minds for shit.
This is like Bustelo filtered through pork rinds.
Not that I’m ungrateful.
What did you do after you left Earth?
I had a really great meal about two-thirds turn clockwise around the galaxy from Earth.
Sometimes I really miss eating.
The first time I left Earth, like really left, I was blown away by the speed. I was so fast. I mean, I had a basic sense of what I could do. I knew that I was half spaceship. A human body hosting an intelligent, transforming alien warship. A Shipkiller. But those are just words. The experience of it was staggering. I remember thinking…well, nothing verbal. But...
Light moved at one hundred and eighty-six thousand, two hundred and eighty two miles a second. It took just over eight minutes for sunlight to reach Earth, which put the sun at an average distance of about ninety million miles. Mars was maybe a third of that when our orbits matched up, thirty million miles and change. Other times the gulf was nearly seven times as far.
Don’t laugh, that was a long way for us.
I knew all of that, all those figures, as easily as I know left from right. Cab had a complete copy of the Internet jammed under my brain like money under a mattress, and the information lurked in my periphery no matter where I was looking.
I cut loose with my engines for the first time and Earth fell away from me, the size of a beach ball, a melon, a pea. And then it was nearly gone, nothing more than a bright point beneath my feet. I felt a pang.
Without spatial reference, it was impossible to tell how fast I was going, which in turn made it hard to maintain an accurate sense of my physical self. Earth didn’t have to be far behind me; the planet could have shrunk. I might be larger, now. Or I might be very, very small. It’s hard to know yourself in outer space.
“Cab,” I said, “how fast are we going?”
--Just over half light speed--
--A hundred thousand miles a second--
There was a gleeful tone to the pseudo-memory of Cab’s voice in my head, an unknowing excitement. He was ready to let go. He was ready to leave, in spite of his proximity to my fear.
“And how far are we going?” I looked uneasily back at Earth. The planet was nothing more than a tiny pinprick outlined in blue, with the planet’s name written next to it in the same color. There were no other blue systems on the galaxy map. Blue for home.
The stars blared their names at me. I turned off the map. The names disappeared but the stars remained, closer than they had been before.
--Ceres is about sixty-three million miles from Earth right now--
--Here--
An empty point lit up ahead of me. It said, in dandelion-yellow, ‘Ceres,’ along with a number in the high fifty millions, which was diminishing quite quickly. Below that was written, ‘Rell,’ in green.
“We’re going past Mars.” I knew instinctively that Mars was about forty-seven million miles from Earth at this point in each planet’s orbit. The information presented itself to my mind and then disappeared. It was like being swarmed by trivia-obsessed gnats.
--Yuh--
I swallowed hard. At a hundred thousand miles a second it would take me ten minutes to travel sixty million miles. That was well past Mars. A journey dwarfing the trip NASA had been working towards for four decades with no end in sight, undertaken on a whim and accomplished in less time than it normally took me to drive to work. A mighty accomplishment for humanity, except that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, other than stand in the right place at the right time. I was powerful, now, but it was too immediate. I’d had too many obstacles removed too fast to feel any pride in my victories.
The minutes ticked by. There was a draw on my body, some barely perceptible force that told me which direction I was moving in, but nothing more. I imagine that without the inertial dampeners, I would have looked like some kind of soup.
If I die, I thought abruptly, I’ll be a missing person. I turned around without changing course and stared homeward.
Two days. I’d been living with Cab in my neck for two days. That was barely long enough for me to recognize what I had become, much less tell anyone else. Even my roommates had to find out by accident. And now I was gone, off the planet, already farther from home than anyone else in human history. If I didn’t make it back, it would be like I had disappeared into thin air.
I should have left a note, I thought, some sort of explanation for my actions. It would have been a kindness, if nothing else. A communiqué in case of the unforeseen. I frowned. Then again, how much danger was I really in? Supposedly, I was immortal, even if I didn’t feel like it. What did immortality feel like, anyway? What did it mean? My skin still felt fragile. Cab said he could fix me. That didn’t sound pleasant. That sounded like I had to be broken, first.
And for whom would I have left a note, anyway? You like that? Whom? Anyway. Dylan knew where I’d gone. Iris didn’t want anything to do with me. My extended family was minimal, disparate and scattered to the wind, and my most recent serious girlfriend left me a year before all this. Things didn’t end well, and we didn’t talk, and what the hell was I supposed to say, anyway? To whom it may concern: I have become host to a sentient transforming alien spaceship, and as a result I have decided to leave Earth in order to keep the planet safe from a species of marauding omnicidal bugs. Best Wishes, Greg. Then I could have crumpled up the paper and eaten it, because there was no one who would have believed me who wasn’t already aware of the situation.
Maybe I should have banged out a quick memoir before I left. A Life Fisted by Circumstance: The Gregory Samson Story.
Two days with Cab and we’d already managed to kill someone. That was reason enough for me to leave. If I ended up just another missing person, well, maybe that was what I deserved.
--I will drug you if you don’t stop muttering to yourself--
--What the hell are you thinking about anyway, your brain is like a goddamn strobe light--
“You can see my brain?” I forced myself to think of something else, and came up with sex. As usual, I was in favor of it. “Was that a bright thought?”
--Actually, yes--
--What were you yammering on about?--
“Nothing,” I said. “Mindless chatter. I’m nervous.”
--Pauvre petit--
--Wanna play I Spy?--
I looked around and snorted. “With what, stars?”
--There’s a hydrogen atom over there--
--And there--
--And there--
--And there--
--And over there is the entirety of creation, you absolute ass--
I laughed, and after a second Cab joined me, in his own way. It felt a little like I was laughing for two. Then Ceres loomed in my vision, all of a sudden, and I ground to a halt with my hands out in front of me to grab…something. Nothing. But the temptation was there. Instincts are hard to let go of. I relaxed and looked around, another instinct, and laughed at the idea that I might be seen. Even Rell was all the way around the other side of the asteroid. I was utterly alone.
Ceres was a dirty blue-brown ball. Compositional information flashed across my displays: gravity, (minimal) atmosphere, (nil) and mineral composition. (Mostly rocks and water ice.) I moved across the surface, hung by the shoulders on my wide dorsal engines. The landscape was rough, pitted, absent of detritus and layered in frost. According to whatever it was in me that could tell this sort of thing, there was more fresh water in Ceres than there was on Earth. I would have made a killing in the asteroid mining business if I had just dragged the damn thing back home.
--Wow, what a pretty rock--
I zipped over the horizon. Time to find out whether Rell wanted to kill me. There were probably better ways to think about my immediate future, but that one possibility overrode all the others in my head. Sure, he had asked me for my help, but he also insisted that we speak face to face, and the man was a thief. I’d only known him for two days, and I only met him because he tried to steal Cab right off my back. I didn’t know that I could trust him. I only knew that I didn’t.
Rell’s ship was propped at an angle at the bottom of a particularly large crater, pointing drunkenly out into space as if dropped there by accident. I came to a full stop and put my hands where my pockets would have been, realized I didn’t have any, and grunted in frustration.
Outer space was a lot like deep water; it had a beautifying effect, so that anything you saw in that environment became unavoidably affecting, a pinnacle of grace, devoid of the flaws that are only apparent on the ground. Which is a florid way of saying that Rell’s ship really looked like shit lying there in an asteroid crater. Someone had sprayed an ugly patch over the hole I’d burned in the hull and then neglected to repaint, and there was a collection of long scorch marks visible across the bow.
Cab marked the pertinent points of the ship, places we could take cover on the surface of the planetoid, available paths of retreat. He wasn’t nervous. He was excited, almost at play.
Something began to shine towards the rear of the ship, just outside of the visible spectrum, and then I heard Rell as if he were right next to me.
“Are you going to come aboard, or just float there?” I just managed to avoid jumping in place. Rell’s tone was pleasant, but his words were explosive in the silence that had for ten minutes been punctuated only by my own murmuring.
The shining spread across the hull, and I realized I could distinguish when Rell’s ship was powered on from when it was not. It was like being able to tell if a person was awake or not, or whether someone was watching you.
“Samson!” Rell said sharply. “I’m a sitting duck with the reactor on like this! Move yourself!”
--Stop ruminating and answer the man, you boob!--
“Yar, Cap’n Rell!” I growled. “Parrrrmission to come abaarrrrd.”
“Are the other humans as weird as you are, Samson?” Rell sighed. The airlock opened, laboriously.
“I like to think I’m a man of the people,” I said. I soared inside and landed on my feet. “An average Joe.”
“Truly?” Rell said. His voice was close but his tone was distant, as if he was distracted.
“Rell, there’s an alien spaceship growing out of my neck.” I put my hands on my hips, because I still didn’t have any pockets. I thought I looked like a tool. “I’m about as atypical as is humanly possible. Open up.”
“Yeah?” Rell said. “You, ah, sure about that?”
“Rell, I didn’t fly sixty million miles to talk to you through the gate,” I said. “Lemme in.”
“Suit yourself,” Rell grunted.
Ceres was small, but it still dragged my feet in a direction that my brain had determined was ‘down.’ Unfortunately, Ceres’ ‘down’ did not appear to be the same as Rell’s shipboard ‘down.’ The door whunked shut, there was a brief pause, and then the gravity switched on. The wall to my right became the floor, the floor beneath my feet became the wall, and the far wall became the ceiling. I smashed into the ground and made a noise like a hamster under five hundred pounds of teaspoons, and Cab started to laugh. Everybody played their part to perfection.
“Cab,” I asked when I got my breath back, “How is it that when I’m in the ship I can survive accelerating to half light speed in under ten seconds, but it still hurts to crack my head on the pavement?”
--Comedy--
“Ah.” I lay still, bruised and confused. “I see. And did you know that I was standing on the wall?”
--Yeah, didn’t you?--
“No,” I said, “I did not.”
--Oh--
--Well, you see that blue dot on the floor?--
--That means that surface is shipboard ‘down’--
“Ah,” I said again.
--I’ll try to give you the heads up about that sorta thing in the future--
“If you would be so kind.” I got to my feet carefully and Cab reorganized us into a simple seven-foot tall mechanical demigod. In the right light, and with a healthy combination of imagination and charity, I looked a bit like Michael Jordan covered in lead foil.
The inside door opened up and I stepped into the hold. Rell was waiting for me, leaned up against a crate smoking a cigar. As soon as I was over the threshold he said, “Lock it down.”
The door closed heavily behind me and flashed red, and I felt the ship power down around us. Rell stared at me. He was tall, nine feet at least, with humanoid legs and two elbows on each arm, and he was covered in thick, reedy fur that ranged in color from the deep forest green of his bare chest to the bright, tropical toucan colors in the crests behind his ears. His face looked like the result of a wild night between a gorilla and a tiger, but he didn’t move like a mammal, he was too graceful. He wasn’t moving, though, just standing there with his odd arms folded across his chest. His face was tight, and the fur around his ears wavered continuously.
“Hiya Rell,” I said. “How you doing?”
He dragged on his cigar. The coal fizzed. After a second he blew twin plumes of purple smoke out of his nostrils, and worked the cigar into the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve been better,” he grunted. He grimaced, then spun on his heel and walked out of the hold. “Come on, Samson, let’s have a drink and talk this over.”
I followed him. What else was I going to do?
Rell’s legs were nearly five feet long. I had to jog to keep up.
“I got your message,” I said. My metal feet clanked on the metal deck.
“Really,” Rell said. “I thought you dropped in for the hell of it.”
“Yeah, I’m around Mars a lot,” I said.
We went into the kitchen. Rell cracked a beer and drained it in four swallows. His Adam’s apple moved eighteen inches up and down, from the base of his jaw to the top of his sternum, and after being amazed for a moment by the distance, I realized it was much more amazing that the alien had an Adam’s apple at all.
He belched magnificently, then cracked a fresh bottle and filled me an honest-to-god pint glass. He held it like a shot glass.
“You got me a special glass.” I took the beer. “You really do need my help.”
Rell grunted and hopped up on the counter, next to the stove. He jumped like a cat, but landed on his butt like a playful chimp. He opened a fresh beer with something hidden in his palm.
“Take off your helmet,” he said.
I obliged him, because I couldn’t drink through the faceplate, and because I knew he had to size me up before he would tell me what he needed. All I could do was wait. I’d seen the look on his face before, when I had to interview a reticent source harboring a hard revelation. People don’t like to give up their secrets, even when they’re in dire straits. The fact that a gorilla-tiger from beyond at least some of the stars would act the same way was unsettling. An awe-inspiring mundane similarity highlighting the fact that however alien he might have been, Rell was ‘people,’ too. I was glad for the quiet while he looked me over. I needed time to adjust. The familiarity was jarring.
Rell’s expression got heavier and heavier. “How old are you?” He asked finally.
He hadn’t been this interested in me the first time we met. I drank some of my beer and decided that lying would be immature.
“I’m twenty-eight,” I said.
Rell took a deep breath and blew it out of his closed lips in exasperation. My father used to make the same noise when he was frustrated and tired.
“You’re a child,” he said. “You’re just a child.” He finished his beer and opened another. I tried to see what he had in his palm. Whatever it was, he had it well-hidden and he was very comfortable with it. He studied me back.
“What have you done?” He asked.
“What, you mean, like, ever?” I said with an empty smile. “That’s a hefty order, Rell. What’s going on? Why do you want to know?” I stowed the ship on my back and clambered onto the counter opposite Rell with my feet dangling four feet off the ground.
Rell waved his hands near his waist and looked off to his right for a moment. Then he nodded and waved his hands again and looked back at me.
“You see a bug?” I asked.
“My computer,” Rell said. “I was checking the ship’s sensors. It’s a personal visual field, so…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Last night I was chased out of the Schlorb system by a team of bounty hunters.” He waved his hands to punctuate his words, and some beer sloshed on the floor. The linoleum absorbed the liquid and burped quietly.
“There’s a price on my head,” Rell said. “Again. A big one, judging from the size of the team that’s after me.”
Bounty hunters. In space. I’d be lying if I told you that the thought didn’t provoke a certain measure of juvenile glee on my part.
I drank some beer. It was good, but beer usually was. “I take it this is not a regular occurrence, you having a price on your head.”
“Not for a long time,” Rell grumbled. “I’ve been careful. A death mark’s not an easy thing to live with.”
I grinned at the reference, and Rell snarled. I guess it wasn’t intentional.
“You think this is funny?” He spat. “Someone wants me dead because of you.”
“Technically, all I did was stand there,” I said. “You’re the one who stole the seed. I’m the idiot Earthling, remember?”
“The Cabernician stole the seed,” Rell snapped back. “I just stopped him selling it to the Krr.” He paused, and then his fur deflated and he drank the rest of his beer.
“At least, that’s what I’ll tell my lawyer,” he grumbled. “Sorry. I know none of this is on you.”
“No harm,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
Rell looked at me askance and raised both of his impressive tufted eyebrows.
“That easily?”
I grimaced. “I have to be off Earth for a while. I did something…It’s safer this way. Helping you will take me away from here. I’m not happy about it, but it’s the truth. What do you need me to do?”
Rell nodded. “Well, I need to find out who wants me dead, and then I need to either convince them to call off the hunt, or kill them. One or the other.”
Cab shifted inside of me and started to pay closer attention.
“You don’t know who posted the bounty then,” I said. I figured he didn’t, I just wanted to say it aloud. Bounty hunters in space. My life was an idiot’s fantasy. Rell shook his head.
“Well,” I said, “Let’s narrow the field. The Cabernicians blame you for the seed theft. They’re a possibility. The cops are after you, but if they’re like the ones I’m used to, they probably don’t subcontract, and I don’t imagine they’re looking to have you killed outright. The same is probably true of the Cabernician species, now that I think about it. These are the people who want you to stand trial. Now, as far as folks who would want you dead, the Krr seem like they would do their own dirty work, given what I’ve heard about them, but maybe they’re trying a new tactic. The Cabernician who’s been dealing with them is another suspect, he’s probably shitting his pants over this. Your broker, or whoever got you the job, they could be behind it, too.” I shrugged. “Seems like there are a lot of people who would benefit from your death, Rell.”
Rell was staring at me with the bottle halfway to his mouth.
“What,” I said, “I’m smart. I read books and shit.”
Rell nodded slowly.
“I also talked to a Cabernician, and a cop named Frewdin. CLEA agent, whatever I’m supposed to call him.” I shrugged. “This is what you want me for, right? To help you sort all of this out?”
A shrill mechanical scream cut the world in two. It was an awful noise, terrified and terrifying, the wail of prey sure of its destiny in the predator’s maw. Cab snapped around me and dimmed the sound, but I could still feel it tearing at the edge of my attention. It wasn’t just noise, it was the fight or flight response conveyed in a sound wave.
Rell was in a crouch, legs wide and body low. A thick crest ran from the top of his head to the base of his spine and disappeared into his shorts. Presumably his species had a tail at some point in their history. His arms were out in front of him, with his elbows loose and his hands open-palmed to the floor. His five fingers were curled and flexed, and his palms had pulled apart along the flanges to reveal four curved six-inch claws, one between each bone. They were yellow-white and translucent at the edges, like a cat’s, and while I know that evolution intended them for climbing, they also made a dandy weapon. I tried to imagine boxing someone with two sets of elbows and claws in his palms, and decided that it was a situation best avoided.
All of this was one instant. In the next, Rell straightened up, relaxed his hands, and said, firmly, “Off.” The scream cut off. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and flattened his hair. He had a certain birdlike affect when frightened. Or maybe bug like, there was a stiff note to his speed. I hadn’t even seen him get off the counter, he had just appeared in the crouch, ready to unleash some horrible Vabling kung fu.
Cab was doing what he could with all the adrenaline I’d produced when the alarm went off, but there was a lot of it.
Rell cleared his throat. “Your grasp of the situation is impressive, Samson, but I don’t need you for your deductive ability. I need your muscle. I need you to save my bacon.”
That had to have been a mistranslation, I thought, shoving my way past the meaning of his words. I couldn’t get into another fight. I had to be careful.
He pointed at the ceiling and twirled his finger once. “That was the ship’s proximity alarm. Someone is about to attack us, presumably the same group that chased me out of Schlorb. They’re the only ones who would think to look for me here.” He grimaced and shook his head. “They must have traced my warp trajectory.”
“You need my ship,” I said. Cab felt like he was grinning.
“I need you to fight these people for me,” Rell said. “And everyone else after them, until we get to the bottom of this. I need a warrior, and I have you, a child with a weapon. Obviously my options are limited, or I wouldn’t be here.”
His tone was calm, but his face was tight, and I know mine was, too, under the imperturbable faceplate. Only Cab seemed unconcerned with the reality of the situation, that we hadn’t made it an hour off Earth without being forced into a fight.
--This is going to be neat--
--What kind of ships do you think they have?--
I swallowed and shrugged and didn’t answer and listened to the growing sense of dread that I knew was my ship telling me that I was going to have to make a decision very, very soon. Kill, or be killed, except I couldn’t be killed, which only left the other part. The worse part.
Dammit, the whole point of getting a liberal arts degree was so I could avoid this sort of situation.
All content ©2014-2017 Benjamin Mumford-Zisk
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.