THE NEXT TIME I heard from the Tane Ikai, they didn’t even bother coming around and opening up a voice channel. Just sent a damned WaVE from over on the artificial moon.
Plan to wait three days to see if wormhole normalizes. Do you have provisions/facilities adequate for that time period?
I scowled at the screen and swore.
“What?” Pita asked, although she could have accessed the message herself. She really does work hard to seem like a fellow crew member.
I read her the message aloud.
“So, what’s the problem? Three days is great! That gives us more time to try and bypass the field. Or it might go away before then, and we can get out of here under our own power.”
“I know. They’re just so damned arrogant. I mean, they can’t even open a voice channel?”
“It’s a good thing,” Pita said in a soothing voice. “Sure, they’re jerks. But it gives us lots of time to take what we need and get it all packed up nice and inconspicuous.”
“I guess,” I growled. “I’ll bet Baden Methyr sent this message. All prim and proper now that he’s with his precious captain.”
“Let it go, Jahelia. You want me to send an answer?”
“No, I’ll do it.” I typed a brief line and sent it off to the other ship with a contemptuous flick. No issues. Thanks for your concern.
Maybe they wouldn’t get the sarcasm, but at least I knew it was there. “Okej. Let’s get back to work.”
I’d completely disassembled my datapad, spreading the components on the deck since I didn’t have access to the little worktable in my sleeping quarters. It seemed ironic that being a techdog was a more useful survival skill than martial arts or weapons training, but so far that’s how it was turning out. Pita’s intricate and detailed knowledge of every circuit, chip, wire, and screw on the ship came in handy as I Frankensteined the pad. We made a good team. The pad already had some “modifications” from PrimeCorp, ones that were slightly outside the strictly legal. Sedmamin had asked me, quite seriously, if I had concerns about carrying illegal tech. I’d almost laughed in his face, considering that my body was full of tech that, while not technically illegal, I’d certainly gone to great lengths to keep secret. I simply smiled and told him that if it wasn’t obvious from the outside and was reasonably code-camouflaged on the inside, I was fine with it.
“Work on the pad, or on the field?” Pita said. “If we have three days, we should have time for both.”
I considered. If we could get rid of the gods-damned field, I’d show Paixon my azeno and take my chances in the rest of this system. Or try my luck with the other wormhole on my own. I’d rather die going it alone than on Paixon’s charity.
But everything we’d tried so far to identify or affect the field had resulted in a big fat nothing.
“Let’s keep working on the datapad,” I said finally. “We’ll get it completely ready, but we won’t download you into it yet. If the field goes away by itself, we can move quickly. And if we end up leaving the ship, we’ll transfer you and we can go.”
“What’s your plan if the field dissipates?” Pita asked as I set to work re-routing some hair-fine fibre circuits in the datapad. “Would you risk the wormhole to Delta Pavonis?”
She’d managed to get one long-range scanner working intermittently, so we’d had a “look” at the wormhole—or at least its radiation signature.
I shook my head, then remembered that Pita couldn’t see me. That was the hardest adjustment to having an AI companion. “Whatever happened to it, that thing feels . . . evil. Pretty sure we’d fry in seconds, if the skip drive would even activate it.”
“What about the other one? Where the alien ships came through?”
I was attempting to nudge a thin strand of wiring to the side with the tiny pair of tweezers on my multi-tool. Pita’s use of the word alien gave me an unwanted shiver, and I almost messed up. I swallowed and refocused. I’d been trying to avoid thinking about those alien ships, although I hadn’t said as much to Pita.
The appearance of a Chron ship had been bad enough. The Chron War was before my time, but they were still the bogeymen of Nearspace. With good reason. Killing machines, bent on wiping all of us—and the Lobors and the Vilisians—out entirely. There isn’t much that scares me, but when I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about Chron coming into our house at night and killing us all. I didn’t even know what they looked like. In my nightmares, they were tall, dark entities, featureless behind shadowy faceplates. They didn’t speak, moved with absolute silence. You wouldn’t know they were there until you opened your eyes and one was leaning over you, putting the barrel of some kind of weapon to your forehead. An ice-cold ring against your flesh. You’d be completely paralyzed, unable to move or scream or even think straight. Completely and utterly helpless. And you’d glimpse horrible, alien eyes behind the visor in the instant before they fired.
That’s when I’d wake up screaming, every time. Memories like that don’t go away easy.
And it hadn’t been only Chron coming through that wormhole. The ship that had followed—the one even Pita couldn’t identify—had been something out of another nightmare. I pulled the tweezers away from the datapad and shivered again.
“Jahelia? Would you go through the other wormhole?”
“No,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “I think we’d head deeper into this system, see what we could find. Check in here later to see if the Delta Pav wormhole had opened up again.”
“I don’t think that would be smart. We only have provisions for a limited amount of time,” Pita said in a matter-of-fact voice. “To say nothing of fuel. Eventually we’d run out of both, and you’d—”
“I know! You don’t have to remind me!” I snapped my hand back and threw the multi-tool against the dark field wall. It bounced off and landed with a clatter near my feet, where I sat cross-legged on the decking, barely missing the vulnerable inner casing of the datapad. For some reason, that only made me angrier. Only the knowledge that I needed it to finish rigging the pad stopped me from picking it up and throwing it again. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. Pita displayed remarkable insight and stayed silent.
There’s nothing I hate more than feeling helpless.
After a minute, I picked up the tweezers and went back to work.
Pita muttered, “Sorry,” but I didn’t even answer her.