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“Your scooter looks like a cross between a moped and a rocket ship,” Kevanne said. “How fast will it go?”
“Faster than any of your automobiles. I haven’t revved it up to full speed because your vehicles on the road present too many obstacles.”
“Doesn’t the scooter fly?”
“It hovers,” he corrected. “Who would you like me to be? The guy from the billboard or someone else?”
“Be yourself,” she said.
“I want you to sit close to me, and my tail will get in the way.”
“Oh! Well, then the guy from the billboard.” She grinned. “I met him first.”
Concentrating on the image, he willed his body to transform. When the personification completed, he swung his leg over the scooter. “Hop on.”
She slid on behind him, and he activated the propulsion system. When the vehicle lifted about two feet off the ground, he guided it out of the garage.
She squeezed his waist. “Oh, my gosh!”
“Do you want to close the garage door?” he asked.
He chuckled as she clutched him tighter with one hand while reaching into her pocket for the remote control. “You’re not going to fall off,” he said.
“You’re not going to do any loop the loops are you?”
“No. The scooter can’t do that—it can do this though. Hang on—” He raised the front end.
“Cam!” She squealed.
He laughed.
After closing the door, she grabbed him with both hands again. “If I can’t fall off, why did you shift so that I could sit closer to you?”
“So you would sit closer to me.” He adjusted the settings on the scooter.
“You’re such a man!” She paused. “What did you just do?”
“Activated the light refractor, which serves as an invisibility shield,” he said. “Why?”
“Because I felt it—like a change in air pressure.”
“Not only will people not be able to see us, but the barrier provides an additional safety feature. You can’t fall, but if you jumped with the scooter in motion, the barrier would keep you from hitting the ground.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. “Do you know how to get to Lake Argent?”
“I have the coordinates programmed into the machine, but I’d like to show you something else first.”
“What?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“All right,” she agreed. “I trust you.”
Her casually spoken words warmed his heart. She could be his mate, possibly a genmate. What were the odds of that? He’d doubted he’d find a woman who completed him—but never would have guessed he’d have to leave her when he did. He wished he could be honest with her, but too many lives were at stake, including hers if the consortium figured out Earth had harbored fugitives. When he left her, there would never be another female for him. Across time and space, he would remain bonded to her until he died.
The scooter raced down the lane to the forest service road. She squealed with laughter. “This is like flying! Like some weird virtual reality motorcycle ride. Can we go faster?”
He picked it up a bit but then slowed as the scooter swerved into the woods. They flew around trees and up and over fallen logs, going deeper into the forest.
They emerged into a clearing where the Castaway sprawled.
“It looks like a pterodactyl!” Kevanne gasped.
“What’s that?”
“A flying dinosaur.”
“You have dinosaurs?”
“Not anymore. They’re extinct.”
Chameleon switched off the invisibility screen and cut the power. The scooter settled into the grassy field.
The dull-gray ship lay over scorched ground like a huge, lame bird. The photon blast, the jump, and the fiery entry into Earth’s atmosphere had damaged several major systems, but most of the ship remained intact.
The surveillance drone buzzed overhead, recording and sending its feed to the ship’s brain. Tigre and the others would learn he’d brought her here, but they wouldn’t find out until later. Had they been here, they would have vetoed the tour. But he had a strong desire to share his world and experiences—the positive ones anyway—and the ship was all he had left. It had been his private vessel, and he’d named it the Castaway to describe how he’d felt—adrift, separated. He’d never fit in among other Xenos or even his own family. He’d inherited his position on the High Council from his geneticist father, who’d been Xeno to the core. Once he’d believed in Xeno supremacy, but by the time his father had passed, his loyalties had shifted from the consortium to the beings they had fathered.
Everything the council stood for had been anathema, but the position offered the best opportunity to counteract its policies. When politics, rivalries, secrets, and dangers got to be too much to bear, Chameleon would take off on the Castaway to planets afar. The vessel had come to mean escape and freedom. It belonged to all of them now, but, in his heart, it was his, and he wanted to share it with Kevanne.
She bounded off the scooter and ran toward the craft. After reverting to his normal form, he followed.
She circled the vessel, studying everything. “It’s incredible. Can I touch it?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
She flattened her hand against the hull as if she were petting a large animal. “It’s not plastic, is it?”
“The hull is fabricated from an IRC—an ionization resistant compound, formulated to be near impervious to extreme temperatures and radiation such as x-rays, gamma-rays, and UV,” he explained.
“Everything you’d want in a spacecraft,” she quipped.
“Would you like to go inside?”
“Can I?” Her face lit up.
The ship rested in sleep mode, but its computer systems remained alert and operational enough to open the hatch. Stairs lowered.
“Are your friends on board?”
“No. They’ve gone to meet with Mysk. He says he has an idea for fixing the ship faster.” He started up the steps.
She scrambled after him. He showed her the sleeping berths, his cabin, the austere brig—omitting he’d been a temporary guest—the engine room with the pulsator coils, the med bay pods, the galley, and the large and small replicators.
“Let me have your garage door closer,” he said.
She handed it to him. He placed it inside the scan chamber of the small, operational unit. The machine hummed as it analyzed the components. In the next compartment, the machine duplicated and assembled the remote. A conveyor rolled out the original and the copy. “Here you go. Now you have two devices,” he said.
“It copied it exactly!” She peered at it. “Even the manufacturer’s name is worn away like on my original. Are you sure it will work? Remotes have to be programmed.”
He nodded. “The replicator duplicates everything.”
“Thank you!” She kissed him. “I only got the one remote when I bought the place. It’s nice to have a spare. Do you have to have the original object to create something?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “We have program codes for items we use all the time: clothing, medicines, and ship parts. If we don’t have a code, then we need the object or a good image with a 3-D view. That’s how we replicated Earth-style clothing. We use this unit for small objects.”
He patted the sliding door on the large replicator. “Despite our shields, an energy pulse fried the components of this one. This is what we would have used to repair the ship.”
“That’s a replicator? It’s as big as my woodshed! It looks like a decontamination chamber or something!”
“It has to be large to fabricate big items. Besides making the parts we need, Mysk’s designers and engineers will try to repair this unit.”
“How is it we’re able to help you at all? The scooter, this replicator, the ship are more technologically advanced than anything we have on Earth. It would be like a person who lived three thousand years ago trying to manufacture and program a smart phone.”
Pockets of advanced ingenuity did exist, like Mysk and his people. “Someone from three thousand years ago would have the same intelligence as present-day humans. What he or she would lack would be a body of knowledge to build upon. There is a natural evolution to advancement. Certain systems have to come first. It would be like trying to invent the automobile before the wheel,” he explained.
Having met humans and Kevanne, in particular, their intelligence had impressed him, and he’d been a Terranophile for a long time, admiring the genetic diversity that had evolved without much scientific tinkering. Recently, they had started to engage in genetic manipulation, and if he could, he would have warned them to proceed with caution. There was a lesson in one of their old legends about letting the genie out of the bottle. Once you let him out, you couldn’t put him back in.
Next, he led her to the bridge. Wide windows spanned a semicircle over the control panels, allowing a view to the outside. There were eight crew stations, including the captain’s position, navigator, and engineering.
“It’s much bigger than I would have expected,” Kevanne said.
“For safety, redundancies are built into the system. The computer flies the ship, but the captain can override the program. Every function can be performed manually or by computer—and from the bridge or from engineering. This vessel has sleeping berths for thirty but carries only six of us, so, as it happens, all of us can convene on the bridge, which makes it convenient.”
She strode to a screen projecting vid of the woods.
“Live feed from a surveillance drone.” His sweeping arm encompassed the wide viewing windows. “We can see in front of us but not behind. Hence, the drone keeps an eye on things.”
“Won’t your friends mind me being on the ship?”
“Probably,” he admitted. “But you’re worth it.” As a member of the High Council, he’d guarded the consortium’s secrets. As a member of the opposition, he’d kept secrets from the consortium. His whole life had been consumed by secret-keeping. When would it end? He hated he couldn’t be more open with his mate. His loyalties were torn in three directions: his mate, the castaways, and the other ’Topian refugees. Responsibilities couldn’t be ignored, but she made him wish he was a different man in a different time. He might not be able to share everything with her, but he could give her a tour of the ship.
He hugged her, his heart aching from the weight of his dilemma. As he folded her into his arms, he caught a flash on the monitor, then another, before the drone flew off in a different direction. He stiffened.
“What’s wrong?” Kevanne asked.
“Two members of the team have returned. You’re going to get to meet more of my friends,” he said.
