Eric Flint's Blog, page 212

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 12

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 12

Chapter 12.

Tavana gazed at the brilliant disc of the star – filtered, of course – that was the center of their hopes. “Program concluded, Sergeant. We made it; I think we must be, um, what, something like a hundred eighty million kilometers from the star right now. What now?”

“Now we have to look for a planet we can land on,” Campbell said easily. Tavana knew he was putting up a front, mostly for Maddox and Francisco. There was no guarantee of a planet at all, let alone one worth landing on. “Tav, what I’d like to do is use the Trapdoor to do really short jumps around the system, do a survey. I can pilot like that – I did a stint with a survey team some years back. But I know that takes some tricks with the coils to let you do that any shorter than four hundred million miles, and precision’s not the Trapdoor’s strong point.”

Tav found himself rubbing his chin. “I hadn’t thought about that, sir. Too busy just hoping they didn’t give out on the way here.”

“Well, we’re here, so I’m not so worried. You boys figured out the solution for the Nebula Drive, right?”

Xander laughed. “Brute-force solution, yes, sir. We manually operate the dispensers. The autodispensers got fried pretty completely, according to Tav, so we just made some we can control from inside the cabin. The control field extensions for the Nebula Drive seemed okay.”

“So,” the Sergeant said, “that means that worst comes to worst and the Trapdoor coils go down, we just use the Nebula Drive. Right?”

“Right,” agreed Tav. There wasn’t much point in disagreeing; the Sergeant was basically right, though the Nebula Drive – or “dusty-plasma containment sail”, as his professors preferred – was a lot slower.

“Then what about it? Can you give me short-jump capability, or not?”

“Um… let me check some things.”

“Take your time, son. Don’t do it fast, do it right.”

“Yessir.”

Tavana accessed his notes and references. He hadn’t gotten to the classes that covered short-jump approaches, but he had actually read ahead; that was an interesting part of the Trapdoor engineering, pushing its limits, and he’d had some discussions with his teachers on it. The keys were synchronization and field control and dissipation.

Let’s see… one nice thing is that all those jumps from where we were marooned to here have given me a lot of data on the regular coils and the ones we had to rewind. I can nail down their resonances and quirks pretty well. If my omni can crunch all that data…

It turned out that the omni could crunch that data pretty well. Looking at the plots, it was easy to see the hand-wound ones; they had a lot of anomalies. But none of them seemed fatal to Sergeant Campbell’s idea. There was one limitation, though…

“Sergeant, I think we could. But it would need you to go out and add a couple components to each drive coil circuit. We have the components, and they’re not hard to install I don’t think, but to control the timing and dissipation of the field well enough, we need to install these networked synchronizers.”

“In each bay? So about a day, a day and a half of work to save us weeks of cruising? Let me suit up while you get the components together, son.”

It actually only took Campbell most of a day to do the work, with Tavana guiding him through the first couple and then just watching as the Sergeant carefully and precisely installed the components, verified function with Tavana, and then moved to the next.

The next ship-morning (Tav doubted they were still synchronized with any clock in the Galaxy, but still, they needed some kind of schedule), Campbell had them strap back in, settled back, and gripped the controls. “All right. So I should be able to do a short-jump now?”

“Should, yes, Sergeant. I’m not an expert, though, so –”

“Tavana, it’s all right. I’m the only expert here right now, and I’m not an expert in most of the things we need. You did your best and that’s all I’m ever gonna ask of you.” The Sergeant strapped in. “All right, let’s test this bad boy. All set, Francisco?”

“Yes, sir, Sergeant!” Francisco had been showing extreme mood swings during the journey here, but right now he sounded cheerful. Well, we’ve gotten where we were going and we’re talking about finding a planet. He’s feeling hopeful.

“Then let’s go!”

Sergeant Campbell first tumbled the ship carefully on two axes; Tavana knew that this gave a full view of the entire sky around them. “Okay, here goes nothing.”

The port went black, and then stars flashed out, after a pause that Tavana thought was no more than ten seconds. It worked!

“Nice jump, Sergeant.”

“Thank you kindly, son.”

“So where did you jump us to?”

“Didn’t really matter; not towards the star, not away from it really, just a sort of lateral line. That should give us a chance to locate planets, by checking any parallax from the motion. Let me tumble her again, and then we can start looking.”

“I think I’ve got an automatic comparison set up in my omni,” Maddox said. “Not too hard, right?”

“Shouldn’t be,” Tav agreed.

The stars spun by once more, and Tavana looked over at Maddox. For a moment everything was quiet, and then Maddox shouted, “Yes… yes! There’s planets, sir! And maybe… um, a couple other things?”

“A couple other ‘things’? What kind of things? Let me see what you’ve got.”

Maddox broadcast the detected targets – objects that had changed their relative position due to the microjump. Ignoring the central star, there were no fewer than nine targets.

“Well, now, I see what you mean. We’ve got a couple comets, good-sized ones. And that’s a Jupiter-type gas giant. Maybe another one there. Rocky planet, way too close in, you can tell that by relative position…”

A few more minutes went by; Tavana did some calculations on some of the targets that had a questionable relative position, but his spirits were falling. None of them are in the right location.

He looked at the older man and at Xander, and saw the grim reflection of his own fears. “Sergeant –”

“We ain’t giving up yet!” Campbell said quickly. “See, from these measurements, it turned out we were actually pretty close to the ecliptic before we jumped. There’s a whole swath of the sky over here that we couldn’t see clearly enough to get a match on. What we’re looking for could be right there.”

Tavana didn’t argue, but the “swath” wasn’t very large; it was just the relatively tiny angle where the central star’s glare had made it impossible to resolve – basically little more than the star’s apparent diameter at their prior distance. “Doing another microjump, sir?”

“You got it. Everyone locked in?”

Assured that they were, Campbell triggered another short jump; this one lasted about the same length of time, and the stars shimmered back into existence. After the obligatory tumble, Maddox ran his comparison again.

“Sir, there’s one new target!”

“What’s the location, Tavana?”

Tavana triangulated from the two observations and compared it with the prior results. A trickle of hope started, a painful trickle because there were so many things that could dash that hope. “It’s at… about one hundred twenty million kilometers from the primary, maybe just a little less. That’s well inside the Goldilocks Zone!”

“Well, now, that’s looking up. Can we get a good look at it from here?”

“If you can point us directly at it.”

“I will most surely do that, then.”

A few moments passed and Tav finally got the newly-discovered planet centered, then triggered the telescopic function of the viewport camera.

The enigmatic dot of light brightened, then expanded, becoming a tiny but distinct crescent… a crescent of brilliant green and white.

“Looks like atmosphere. And something else, but I’m damned if I can tell what,” the Sergeant said after a pause. “But if it’s got an atmosphere, our odds just shot way up. Strap in, I’m getting us closer.”

“But, sir,” Tav said, “it’s not at the right distance for a microjump –”

“No, son, but if you’re really good at feeling these things out, just about everything’s at the right distance for two microjumps.”

Tavana thought for a moment, then wanted to smack himself. “Triangulation!”

“Exactly right, son. Once you get close enough, find the direction and distance that will put you a minimum jump away, then jump to that point. Hold on, we’re doing it now.”

Another ten seconds of blackness, a moment of the ship turning, realigning, and then another few seconds.

The screen cleared, and before them was a small globe, but still far larger than the magnified image they’d seen before. Tavana triggered the telescopic magnification again, and the new world swelled hugely; from their new vantage point, slightly to starward of the planet, the surface was more complex; swirls of white cloud contrasted with brilliant green and darker green and brown and buff-colored areas. Seas and continents!

“Sure does look promising. Shame I ain’t got a spectrometer, but it looks good. Except that green color’s funky.”

“Algae bloom?”

“Over the whole planet? Well, if so, that’d be good news for us; that looks like chlorophyll green to me. Let’s check out her vitals, shall we?”

The view from the other microjumps helped refine the size of the new planet – slightly larger than Earth – and Tavana spotted a couple small satellites of the planet which helped pin down the gravity and thus mass of the target. “It’s a little bigger than earth, but surface gravity’s going to be just a little less.”

“Is it… is it going to be safe?” Francisco asked. “I mean… will we be able to go there? It looks very pretty!”

“Does, doesn’t it? Sure a lot better than just black space and stars, I gotta say. But honestly, son, the only way we’ll know if it’s safe is to go there. All the survey software that might’ve been on this tub is gone, and all I’ve got to go on is my gut.”

“So what does your gut say, Sergeant?”

Campbell got up and stretched. “It says that tomorrow’s another day. We’ve been busy today and I’m not going to think about doing a landing until I’ve gotten some rest.”

“We should name the planet first!” Francisco was emphatic.

“I am tempted to call it ‘Hope’,” Tavana admitted.

“Too obvious. Xander?”

“Looks like it has a lot of water, and looks sort of tropical. Call it Lagoon?”

“Hm. I could live with that, I suppose. Maddox?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It looks like a gem to me. We could call it Gem?”

“I say we call it Esmeralda – Emerald, to you.”

The Sergeant chuckled. “You know, I think the kid’s got it. Emerald it is.”

Francisco beamed, overjoyed at being the one to name the planet they had found. Tavana wanted to object, but he suddenly realized that the Sergeant probably would have approved any suggestion by Francisco; the boy needed things to make him feel better, and Tavana was old enough not to need that kind of help, right?

So he shoved the petty disappointment back and clapped; the others joined in. “To Emerald, then – tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow,” Sergeant Campbell said. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll be landing!”

Tavana knew that landing wouldn’t mean anything if it turned out that Emerald’s atmosphere was toxic, the green color caused by something lethal and alien… but in his heart, he didn’t believe that the universe would be that cruel. Looking at the brilliant green sphere, he closed his eyes and said a silent prayer. Please… be a place that we can live.

Please.

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 42

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 42

Part Two

The Start of HDG Enterprises

1631

Chapter 6

Calling Dr. Phil

October 1631, Jena

“Unless you are matriculated as a student or a member of staff, you are not welcome on university grounds,” Werner Rolfinck said to Dr. Phillip Gribbleflotz.

It was like having a door slammed in his face, Phillip thought, but without the actual slamming of the door. He looked from Professor Rolfinck to the other members of the University of Jena faculty who’d witnessed his expulsion. There were a number of smug smirks visible. They didn’t even care that he saw them.

Phillip struggled to maintain his dignity as he turned and strode out of the university grounds. He held himself together all the way back to his laboratory, where he was greeted by his landlord. The perfect end to the perfect day, except it wasn’t even noon yet.

****

Phillip collapsed onto his bed. His landlord wanted the next quarters rent, which he didn’t have, and it was all his former patron’s fault.

Casparus Menius had been paying Phillip’s to research the Quinta Essential of the Human Humors, which had been nice, because that was what he wanted to research. Unfortunately, Casparus had died while on a business trip to Erfurt. The nature of the establishment where he’d died hadn’t impressed his wife, who’d somehow managed to blame Phillip for not just his death, but also for where he’d died. That had resulted in his funding being cut off immediately. That wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been doing his research into the Quinta Essential of the Human Humors at the expense of producing acids for his usual customers. He had very little stock and was facing imminent eviction from his laboratory and bankruptcy.

None of it was his fault, of course. Phillip didn’t think he could be blamed for taking on a little debt to replace the clothes and boots he’d lost in the fire at Anlaby. After all, his patron had been happily paying him a stipend and paying his bills. And with the bills being paid, it had seemed sensible to concentrate on doing the research Casparus wanted him to do rather than waste valuable research time producing acids for sale.

Unfortunately, with Casparus dead and his funding cut off, Phillip needed money fast. He did a mental checklist of his assets, and didn’t like the results. He could pawn enough clothing and footwear to buy in supplies or pay the next quarter’s rent, but not both. That just left his lucky crystal. He walked over to the little niche above his writing desk where it lived and took it in his hands. It was a nondescript clear crystal no bigger than a chicken’s egg. The local pawnbroker had admired it when he saw it and offered Phillip a ridiculous price for it. He’d turned the man down of course — one didn’t sell one’s luck, but maybe the man would be willing to advance a small loan with the crystal as security? Philip resolved to find out.

A couple of days later

Phillip had a well-deserved reputation for the quality of his acids, so he wasn’t surprised to find the orders coming in once word got out he was back producing them. He took the pile of orders and started to sort them out on one of his work benches. It didn’t take him long to realize that many of the orders had been placed by members of the University of Jena’s faculty. He swore as he quickly checked through them. Professor Rolfinck’s name wasn’t there, but of course he wouldn’t sign his own name to an order, he’d have someone else do it for him.

“So,” he said to himself, “I’m good enough to make their acids for them, but not good enough to darken the halls of their university.”

That was wrong. He should be welcome at the university. He was definitely better qualified than most, if not all of the medical faculty. They might have their degrees, but he’d been trained by Professor Giulio Casseri, one of the best teachers of anatomy and surgery there had ever been, for three years and followed that up with years of practical experience as a military physician and surgeon.

Even Professor Rolfinck couldn’t match Phillip’s training. He’d been taught by a lesser man, the man who inherited the chairs of anatomy and surgery upon Professor Casseri’s death, Dr. Adrianus Spigelius. A man who’d had the misfortune to be taught by none other than Professor Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente rather than Professor Casseri.

And now this pretender, and the rest of the medical faculty, were treating him, Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the great grandson of the great Paracelsus, the world’s greatest alchemist of his time, as a mere technician.

Well, that was wrong. Phillip slammed his hands on the bench hard enough to smart. There was nothing mere about his skills around the distillation furnace. He was a great technician, no, he was a great alchemist.

Phillip nodded to himself. He’d show those imbeciles at the university that he wasn’t just a mere technician. He’d show them that he wasn’t just a great alchemist. He would show them that he was the world’s greatest alchemist. Not just in his time, but ever. He would show them that he was even better than his great grandfather.

Phillip’s eyes fell on the empty niche where his lucky crystal usually lived, and he qualified that last thought. He’d start proving he was the world’s greatest alchemist ever, just as soon as he earned enough money to redeem his lucky crystal.

October1631, Sunday, Grantville

Tracy Kubiak counted out the last ten jackets that needed button holes and placed them on the work table with the other four piles. There was a lot of work to do before she could turn this latest order over to the government, but she knew some people who would be only too happy to help her finish them off.

She stretched muscles that were still protesting from the last few days spent over her heavy duty sewing machines as she worked to complete the order and surveyed her domain. She had turned the oversized basement into a workroom when she first went into business making and repairing camping and outdoor equipment soon after she married Ted Kubiak. A smug smile grew on her face at the thought of her husband of four years.

“Are you ready yet? We’re running late.”

Speak of the devil. Tracy cast one last glance over the piles of jackets waiting to be finished and hurried over to join her husband. “Just have to lock the cat flap and I’m ready. So saying she locked the flap that allowed Toby, the family cat, and Ratter, Ted’s Jack Russell terrier, access to the workroom.

Upstairs in the house proper, Tracy discovered that Ted had everything ready. All she had to do was load the baby into the push chair. “You have been busy,” she said

“Someone has to be. You can lose yourself once you step into your workroom.”

She reached up to drop a kiss on Ted’s lips. Ted tried to make more of it, but after a few seconds she pushed him away. “I thought we were running late?”

Ted sighed dramatically. “I’m married to a cruel woman. You get the kids while I load Fred.”

“Are we taking the girls as well?” Tracy asked. Fred was their male llama gelding, which they’d originally purchased to mind the few sheep they ran on their land. The girls were a couple of llama’s that had joined the menagerie after their original 4H owners had been left up-time.

“They insisted,” Ted said. “They can hear the crowd over the road and don’t want to miss out.”

By the time Tracy had collected three-year-old Justin and eight month old Terrie, Ted had the panniers on Fred and was waiting for her. She locked up and joined him for the short walk to Belle and Ivan Drahuta’s place, which was just across the road from their property.

****

Every Sunday after church the extended Kubiak clan gathered at the home of one of the families for Sunday lunch. Today was Belle and Ivan Drahuta’s turn to be hosts. Grown men and women were messing about playing touch football in the yard with some of the children. Others congregated around the grill chatting and talking while Ivan and Tommy Barancek attended to burning the meat on the grill. Children of all ages were running around underfoot, and of course, Fred and the girls were hanging their heads over a fence gobbling up any treat the children cared to offer them.

 

Through Fire – Snippet 27

Through Fire – Snippet 27

“Ah,” the doctor said. “Ah. Well, we don’t trust you because you are clearly a cultured person, from your speech and… ah… very unusual.”

“In what way unusual?” I asked.

He sighed, as though his confusion was overlaid with exasperation at my slowness of mind. A veiled look at his son and an almost imperceptible shake of the head, which I hoped meant that he shouldn’t shoot me just yet, and he said, “Alors, ‘demoiselle, not many women walk abroad alone, on a night like this, and much less will they know how to shoot as well as you do.”

It was like a bucket of water. There are things you realize, when you’re a stranger to the culture, and some you won’t fully understand, and others you do but forget to take them into account.

In Eden, I won’t say that men and women are exactly alike. That would be almost impossible, would it not? Most unmodified women are not as strong as most unmodified men. In Eden, it would be frowned upon if a man challenged a woman to a fistfight, in the same way someone enhanced for speed would be shunned if dueling a normal human. But other than that, gender didn’t matter much. A woman out doors and fighting in disturbed times would be no more strange than a man out doors and fighting.

I’d observed that Liberte was different, but I’d failed to take it into account. Of course, I seemed strange to them. In Liberte even more than in Olympus, it seemed to me that women were protected. I had a vague notion this might come from the parent culture of the seacity, but I could be wrong.

“And then,” he said, “yes, we should know you, or at least have heard of you. There aren’t many people in our class, nor many who would risk their lives to defend Doctor Moreau.”

“I thought your name was Dufort?”

“And what is your name, M’moiselle?”

I took a deep breath. “Zen. Zenobia Sienna.”

He narrowed his eyes, “The Good Man’s friend? But no. I met her many times.”

“I… they did something in Olympus,” I said. “To make me fit in. Temporary changes to my features and also to the way I move and speak. I’m not sure how they did it, but–”

He studied me through narrowed eyes. He didn’t say it was impossible. He nodded once. “Yes. I see. It is possible at least. But why did you come back, if you’d escaped as far as Olympus?”

I shrugged. “The Good Man is imprisoned. I couldn’t leave him here, at the mercy of his captors.”

At that moment there was a sound of something, like a loud hiss, as though of a projectile or a rocket. And then an explosion rocked the house, and the doctor fell, bleeding from his chest.

“Father!” Corin shouted, hurrying near. His mother came from wherever she’d been, holding some source of light in her hand, that was more or less covered by her cupped hand, save where it was directed. Where it was directed was the doctor’s chest, from which a piece of shrapnel protruded. He bled slowly, the blood trickling out onto his clothes forming a dark stain. At least it wasn’t gushing, which of course could be good or bad.

I knelt and set my fingers on the beat of a strong pulse on his neck, “He’s alive,” I said.

Madame Dufort was looking down. She seemed strangely unaffected. Then I looked at her again, in the half-light of the fires ignited in the explosion, and realized she wasn’t so much unaffected as carefully controlled. She nodded to me. “We must take him where we can care for him.” She had a light accent — French, I thought — but more perceptible than her husband’s or her son’s.

She disappeared and came back moments later with what looked like a tray, which she unfolded into a platform. It didn’t surprise me. It was a floating platform used for carrying the sick in hospitals. In my world of origin, Eden, we used something more akin to a sheet, but Earth and Eden had developed separately for three hundred years.

Another bomb hit the house, but nothing touched us.

The three of us, carefully, got the doctor onto the stretcher. He did not wake, nor give any sign of being aware of what we were doing. The fragment that protruded from his chest was a dull gray, probably a piece of ceramite.

Another bomb and I felt the whoosh of air go by behind me. I moved around to place myself between the front of the house and the stretcher, nudging Madame Dufort aside. She gave me a quizzical look, as she pressed the areas in the stretcher that made it rise, then she half-ran down a corridor to the left. Corin and I followed, managing the stretcher between us as if we’d rehearsed this. We carried him past family pictures showing Corin growing from baby to a young man.

In the half-light the pictures looked like something left over from another time forgotten like debris left behind by the receding tide, lost and out of place on the shore.

When we were almost at the end of the hallway a door opened at about waist level, taking up part of the hallway floor. Mme. Dufort stood by a panel operated by a genlock. She had clearly opened this passage and we hurried past her carrying the stretcher down what turned out to be a long slightly twisting ramp, into a straight hallway. As we hurried half bent over the stretcher, it seems to me we went past shadowy forms in the darker areas around us. I didn’t stop to think, but these forms seemed to be vast glass cylinders in which undefined bulks appeared to move.

From above us came the sound of more explosions and of something have the falling. Mme. Dufort moved ahead of us and opened the door to a room on the left. The room was almost cramped, small and crowded with instruments and machines, some of them covered in material and others exposed showing rows and rows of undecipherable dials and displays.

The only lights were a sort of diffuse emergency lights, concentrating on where we were, and everything else was cast into obscurity save for where light glinted on reflective surfaces. It was like moving in a world of half-perceived glistening great beasts, none of them making much sense.

Doctor Dufort lay on the table. He was still unconscious, though we saw no reason why.

“Shock,” his wife said, after examining him with instruments I didn’t understand and couldn’t see clearly. And then, “Corin, I think they’ve entered the house and it would be time…”

“Yes, Maman,” he said, and he ducked into the hallway. I followed.

He looked, surprised, over his shoulder at me, his face reflecting the scant light, and looking very pale. “Why?” he asked, and it was understood he was asking me why I’d followed him.

“Your mother said there are people in the house. I thought you might need a helping hand.”

He shook his head. “No. We have made… arrangements to protect us, and our… and what Father knows. There is a device in the house. It will detonate. If the party in the house knows what they’re looking for… They might not be the only ones, but they are doubtlessly the most interested.”

We walked back almost the same way we’d come, then ducked into a different room, which I’d missed on my way down. Part of the reason I’d missed it is that it looked exactly the same as the wall around it, save for one small spot, where Corin had pressed his finger.

The room was very small — about the size of a regular closet — and empty.

It was also better lit than the rest of the basement, probably because it was so small and the walls were stark and glistening white. Corin looked over his shoulder at me again, but I couldn’t read his expression, and I didn’t know what he was looking for. He shrugged minutely, as though giving up on whatever had concerned him, then put his finger on one point of the wall. Then on the other. Something beeped. A faint voice said, “Press–to confirm.”

And just as Corin was — I presume — about to, there was a whooshing sound from the door between the house and this annex. Corin slammed his whole palm against the wall, and I jumped out into the hallway.

How do you recognize people? In the half-light, with my burner drawn and ready to shoot him, there was only one thing I was absolutely sure of. The man running towards me was Alexis Brisbois.

He ran with the lumbering gait of very large men, but fast, so fast that I hesitated on the burner for a moment, and he was on me, taking the burner from my hands, shouting out, “Corin, Corin.”

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 41

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 41

That in and of itself didn’t mean Phillip didn’t have a doctorate. All it really meant was that he hadn’t been awarded one by Padua before Professor Casseri’s death. It was possible, he thought, that Phillip had earned his degree at some other university, such as Basel or Leiden, which raised another point. Phillip’s lack of proper academic training was obvious. So how did he find a school willing to let him take their exams? Without a bachelor’s degree no reputable medical school would accept him. Except, that is, unless he found himself a new sponsor. Zacharias smiled. He’d seen with his own two eyes Phillip’s ability to attract sponsors. Happy that it was possible Phillip had in fact been awarded a doctorate, the proof of which had unfortunately been lost when his home and laboratory had been burned down, Zacharias turned his mind to other things, such as the experiments he could conduct with Phillip’s new, super strong yellow aqua fortis.

Winter 1630-31

The public anatomy demonstration was running night and day so as to maximize the learning opportunities before the stench of the decomposing body being dissected became too strong, so it was near midnight when Phillip stumbled out of the anatomy theater at Jena and joined the flow of spectators leaving after the last session of the day.

“Is it always like this?” Casparus asked Phillip.

Phillip raised a brow to his patron. “The long hours?” he asked.

“That, and the stench,” Casparus said.

“There’s not a lot you can do about the long hours,” Phillip said with a smile. “Once it’s been cut open a cadaver might last three days before the stench becomes intolerable. So it’s normal practice to continue night and day until the stench is unbearable.”

“This cadaver is into the fourth day,” Casparus pointed out.

“And it smells like it too,” Phillip agreed. “Professor Rolfinck’s problem is he only has two cadavers to dissect over the duration of his anatomy course compared with the up to nine Professor Casseri had for his anatomy courses in Padua. He’s obviously trying to get as much teaching time out of each of them as he can, but I think he’s going to have to accept that he can’t continue with this cadaver and dissect some animals until the other convict is executed.”

“Ah, yes, that reminds me.” Casparus smiled at Phillip. “I’m putting together a party to attend the execution. Would you care to join us? I have a table with a good view of the scaffold.”

Phillip managed not to cringe. Death was no stranger to him, but watching a man being led to his death amidst a cheering and jeering crowd turned his stomach. “Thank you for the offer, Herr Menius, but if you don’t mind, I don’t want to miss any of Professor Rolfinck’s lectures.”

“You’ll be missing a fine spectacle,” Casparus said.

“Yes,” Phillip agreed, “but unfortunately, I need to attend all of Professor Rolfinck’s lectures if I want to keep abreast of discoveries and developments in our understanding of the human body.”

“Ah, you think you might learn something new to help in your investigations into the invigoration of the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors?”

“Yes!” Philip said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. There had already been Dr. Harvey’s theory of the circulatory system since he left Basel, and surgeons had been bleeding patients for centuries in an attempt to balance the human humors. No doubt there were plenty of other, less well publicized, advances that had passed him by in the five years he’d been in the relative backwater of Anlaby, England.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you in the theater again first thing tomorrow morning,” Casparus said.

Phillip and waved Casparus away before setting off for his lodgings.

A week later

Phillip should have gone to the execution with Casparus. It wasn’t that Casparus deliberately set out to cause trouble, but his memory of what Phillip had actually said when he compared dissections in Padua with those in Jena wasn’t the best, and if Phillip had been there, he could have provided corrections or clarifications. But he hadn’t been there, and comments attributed to him took on a life of their own as each person repeated what they thought they’d heard to the next person in the chain. Thus, what finally reached Professor Werner Rolfinck’s ears bore little resemblance to Phillip’s original comments. Of course, Werner didn’t know that. As a result, instead of entering the medical faculty staff room buoyed by a successful public anatomy course, he entered the staffroom fuming at the insult he believed had been leveled at him.

“What do any of you know about this Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz?” Werner demanded of his senior teaching staff.

“I’ve heard that in Erfurt he claimed to be able to make gold from pollen,” Conrad “Kunz” Herbers, a lecturer in iatrochemistry and theories of medicine, said.

“That’s impossible,” Werner said. “You can’t make gold, and anyone who claims that they can is a fake and a charlatan.”

“My informant was most insistent that he saw Dr. Gribbleflotz make gold from nothing more than some magic pollen, quicksilver, sulphur, salt, and some mystical elixir, the secret of which he learned from a Jewish scholar,” Kunz said.

“That only convinces me he’s a charlatan,” Werner said. “He should be chased out of Jena.”

“I’ve heard that he makes a most excellent ointment for hemorrhoids,” Wilhelm “Willi” Hofacker, a senior lecturer in iatrochemistry and medical botany, offered.

“Really?” Kunz asked. “How well does it work?

“Kunz!” Werner roared.

Kunz jumped back in surprise. “I’m sorry, Professor Rolfinck.”

“And so you should be. We have a charlatan in our midst, and all you can think about are your hemorrhoids.”

“You have hemorrhoids, Kunz?” Willi asked.

Kunz nodded. “They’ve been bothering me for over a week now, and nothing I’ve tried has . . .”

“Dr. Herbers!” Werner roared. “I said we were not interested in your hemorrhoids. I wish to discuss how we can get rid of this charlatan.”

“Ah, Werner,” Zacharias said.

Werner spun round to face Zacharias. “What? Are you suffering from hemorrhoids too?”

Zacharias shook his head. “I think you should know that Dr. Gribbleflotz was apprenticed to Professor Giulio Casseri, and studied medical botany under Professor Prospero Alpini. He also spent a couple of years with Professor Gaspard Bauhin in Basel.”

Werner stared hard at Zacharias. “And how do you know this?”

“Dr. Gribbleflotz told me,” Zacharias admitted.

Werner snorted. “All three men are dead,” he pointed out. “We have only the charlatan’s word that he knew them.”

Zacharias shook his head. “Dr. Gribbleflotz matches the descriptions I’ve heard of Professor Casseri’s last apprentice, and Professor Alpini’s son is still in Padua,” he said. “And,” he added, “Dr. Gribbleflotz said he got to know Professor Bauhin’s son in Basel.”

“He’s a charlatan,” Werner insisted. “And I want him run out of Jena.”

“I wouldn’t be so fast, Werner. Dr. Gribbleflotz has a patron,” Zacharias warned.

“A patron?” Werner scoffed. “Who cares if the charlatan has a patron? I’ll soon have this Dr. Gribbleflotz out of Jena, and his patron will be thanking me for saving him from the charlatan.”

“Casparus Ludovicus Menius,” Zacharias said in the middle of Werner’s tirade.

Werner froze. “Our Casparus Ludovicus Menius?” he asked.

“Yes,” Zacharias agreed, “the wine merchant responsible for the high prices the Winzerla vintages have been receiving lately. Oh, and who is also a close friend of Jacob Berger in Erfurt.”

Werner swallowed. The income from the Winzerla vintages was one of the major sources of the university’s financial support, and both Casparus Menius and Jacob Berger were major players in the trade. If he went after That Charlatan Gribbleflotz, they could put pressure on the university, and he could lose his position. “Then I shall have to collect evidence that this Dr. Gribbleflotz is nothing but a charlatan. Then the university’s governors will have no choice but to deal with the charlatan.”

Willi looked up smiling. “Does that mean it’s okay for me to buy some of Dr. Gribbleflotz’ hemorrhoid ointment?”

Werner glared at Willi. “Do what you want,” he said before stalking out of the room.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 26

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 26

“If the pathfinder ship emerges when the star is in extreme contraction, they are at substantial risk of emerging in depths of plasma that will overwhelm its shields and destroy it. Similar risks exist if the star’s spherical symmetry is distorted and the ship emerges in a portion of the star that is still contracted.”

The humans in the room had expressions ranging anywhere from worried to appalled. Caitlin didn’t look at Ed; she knew what his concern would be.

“Can you put a quantification on that risk?” Caitlin asked. “Ten percent? Fifty percent? Somewhere in-between?”

Narso looked to Brakan and Matto, then back to Caitlin. “We . . . are uncertain.”

Caitlin sat up straighter. The Lleix elians seldom admitted to less than absolute certainty. That followed right behind their insistence on consensus. To have an elder say this in a public forum indicated there were deep divisions within the Starsifters who had been involved in their discussions.

“So give me the range,” she said.

Narso’s aureole flattened in distress. “We have so little good data,” he began.

“Then give me a guess!” Caitlin snapped.

Narso looked to Matto, who fingered his com pad again. A chart appeared in the holographic projection, obscuring part of the star field.

“The most favorable estimate is a ten percent risk,” Narvo said in a low tone.

“That’s not too bad,” Caitlin began, only to be interrupted by the Lleix elder.

“The least favorable was in excess of thirty percent.”

That almost choked Caitlin. A one-in-three chance of losing each ship? That was a no-go.

“That’s too high a risk.” She looked to Dannet. “How can we reduce that?”

The Fleet Commander gave her a direct gaze, angles sloping into accepting responsibility. “We send a pathfinder ship through. If it survives the trip, it stays in the system for several days making observations, then returns a message ship to the fleet with the observations which allows us to pick the times of least risk to make the jumps.”

“And if it doesn’t survive?”

Dannet’s angles morphed through gratified-respect to aspire-to-be-of-service. “Then we send another pathfinder through.”

That thought caused Caitlin’s stomach to churn. The thought of ordering Jao and humans to such a horrible death was not one she welcomed. But it would work; she admitted that. Sooner or later, a ship would survive and return the needed data.

“Is there another star we can use for the first link in the chain?”

Narso shook his head, something the Lleix had adapted from the humans, much as the Jao had also done.

“No, Director. All other reachable stars lead to routes where the overall risk in the chain of jumps is greater than through this one.”

Caitlin looked down at where her hands rested on the table, one bracing her com pad and one loosely holding a stylus, for all the world as if she were not involved in a discussion involving almost certain death for members of her fleet staff. She took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and felt her nostrils flare as she released it.

“Very well. Continue with the presentation.”

The discussion that followed took the better part of half an hour. Caitlin followed most of it, but still felt a bit at sea as far as knowing which was best. She kicked herself when she realized that the only ones talking at that point were humans and Lleix. The Jao had been silent for some time, and Dannet’s angles were hinting of impatient irritation. And that provided both an answer and some relief. She sat up and tapped the table. All voices stopped; all eyes turned to her.

“Fleet Commander Dannet, have you heard enough?”

“Yes,” Dannet growled.

“Is the flight possible with our current ships?”

“Yes.”

“Have you made your decision as to the path to take?”

“Yes.”

“Then this part of the discussion is over. Thank you, Elder Narso.”

The Lleix elder continued to stand for a moment, as if not certain what had just happened. Brakan made a slight coughing sound, and the elder inclined his head and resumed his seat.

“Fleet Commander, in the previous meeting Krant-Captain Mallu indicated that a leading ship would have to make the first jump, and it would then serve as an anchor point for the other ships as they made their own jumps.” Caitlin’s voice was calm. She focused her mind on that calmness, as she schooled her body to present considering-choices. It took some effort. “You said a few minutes ago that we would need to send a pathfinder ship. Is that still the preferred approach?”

The ship captains, Jao all, said nothing but looked at Fleet Commander Dannet, whose ears moved to flag resolution as she said, “It is the only approach until the Frame Network can be extended.”

“Then who is the pathfinder?” Caitlin asked. “One of the Lexingtons? Or do we wait for something else?” Her stomach started churning again, and she drummed her fingers on the table, which startled the Lleix present. They abhorred any form of patterned noise, linking it to the Ekhat and their dreaded songs. Caitlin sighed and stilled her fingers, taking up a posture of quiet-receptiveness-to-information.

Some of the Jao in the room looked at her as if she had mouthed nonsense. The rest looked to the fleet commander.

“Ban Chao,” Dannet said. “The ram ship design was based on a Jao pathfinder design, but was made larger, tougher, and stronger. Ton for ton, Ban Chao has the strongest hull and the most powerful shields in the fleet, though it is somewhat lighter armed than the battleships.”

Vanta-Captain Ginta krinnu vau Vanta flicked an ear and then sloped his shoulders in recognition-of-duty. His kochan was allied with the great Dano. He would not be seen to shirk a reasonable opportunity to be of use. That would shame both Dano and Vanta. “Yes,” he said, “that does make sense. We will only take minimal crew, though. There is no point in risking trained lives unnecessarily. The assault troops we normally carry should off-load to the other ships.”

“Not happening,” Tully said, his face flushed beneath his tan.

All the Jao at the table glanced sharply at him, their body angles speaking of disbelief and irritation. Ed Kralik stirred beside Caitlin. She looked over at him as he spoke. “Colonel Tully is right,” he said. “We have no idea what the Ban Chao will jump into. We have no idea what military technologies you might encounter. You could be attacked as soon as you come out of the jump, and you won’t have a way out. That being the case, I’d say you should jump loaded for bear.”

Caitlin saw most of the Jao were confused by his metaphor. “You’re saying that Ban Chao should be loaded with every troop and every weapon that we can possibly load aboard her before she jumps, even the jump into this variable star.”

 

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 11

Castaway Odyssey – Chapter 11

Chapter 11.

“Sergeant?” Xander whispered.

He saw the eyes snap open, look around, registering where the Sergeant was, the person speaking to him, the fact that everything else seemed normal, in the time it took a normal person to blink. He’s always ready for everything.

“Sorry to wake you, sir,” he said.

Campbell sat up slowly. “I figure you must have something you want to say that the others shouldn’t hear. If I agree with you, then there’s no problem. Go on, son.”

“The chances of finding a habitable planet… what are they?”

Campbell pursed his lips. “Well… understand that odds make no real difference here. But anyway… I’m pretty damn sure that’s a G-type star. I was able to do a little trigonometry from our first little jump and the way the star shifted, and that tells me the star’s distance, which ain’t far away at all, and the apparent brightness combined with distance really helps nail that down. So, that said… G-type stars in this neighborhood tend to have planets, but only one in ten’s got an Earth-type planet in the habitable zone, and of those, only one in two’s compatible with our kind of life. So… one in twenty.”

“And if this doesn’t work out… we’re dead, right?”

Campbell looked as though he wanted to argue that, then bowed his head. “Yeah, that’s about the size of it; it’s why I said we got no other options. We have to make a go of it here, because there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Then… look, the main reason we can’t go where we want to, to Orado, is that the supplies won’t hold out, right?”

“Right. Though from what Tavana said, I’m not sure I’d bet on those cobbled-together coils holding out for a ten-lightyear journey. He had to think about it making what turns out to be about a fortieth of that.”

“Still, why can’t you just put all or most of us under, like the Lieutenant? If only one of us – you – is up, or maybe not even you most of the time, we won’t need much food or water.”

The Sergeant was shaking his head even before Xander finished. “It’s a good idea, son, but I already thought of it. Fact is, I only know how to do that using military nano setups. Civilian nanos, like yours? Different setup, different protocols for operation. I don’t have authority to modify them the same way I did for Lieutenant Haley, and none of us know how to reprogram nanos for that kind of stuff. I could dump the procedure to hers easy, but yours? That’d take a nanoprogrammer with a medical bent, or a doctor with the right programming experience, like Dr. Kimei. She’d be able to do that, no problem.”

“You knew her, sir? I didn’t … interact with them much.” He remembered Dr. Kimei well – an attractive blonde woman, friendly and competent… but she usually wasn’t alone, because she tended both species on the ship.

His expression must have given him away, because the Sergeant gave a wry grin. “Not comfortable around Bemmies, eh?” Sergeant Campbell made a face. “I don’t have anything against ’em, myself, but for a colony? They’re experiments, a few generations old. Some were unstable, mentally. They say that’s all cleared up, but dammmit, you don’t want to rely on someone’s well-meaning experiment on a colony world.” He sighed. “Anyway, yeah, I know her. Or knew her, if she got killed in that mess. Nice lady, and her girl Sakura’s a born pilot.”

Xander felt a tiny grin on his face. “I heard Tav mention Sakura a couple of times. Think he likes her.”

“Lot to like about the girl. Little late for that now; if she’s still alive, she and her family are on Orado by now, maybe getting on another colony ship for Tantalus.”

Xander looked out the port as the pitch-black of the Trapdoor space transitioned to the star-scattered darkness of normal space, the mysterious star now blazing brilliantly directly before them. “One chance in twenty. Sergeant… what do we do if …?”

“Honestly, son… I don’t want to think about that much. But … I’ll want to do what I can to make the end easy. We’ll live as long as we can, though. Always a chance someone will find you, no matter how slim. And then, well…” He shrugged. “You understand?”

The thought of having to ‘make the end easy’ made Xander shudder inside. But at the same time, he knew the Sergeant was right. Death by slow starvation or suffocation was something he wanted to spare Maddox, Tavana, and Francisco. “Yes, sir.”

“But let’s keep our fingers crossed. I’ve beaten worse odds more’n once in my life, Xander. Hell, I think we beat odds at least that bad surviving that disaster; that field instability could’ve just cut straight through LS-88. We’re still alive, we’ve fixed all the problems we ran into, and we’re moving. Don’t think I’d have given odds on us doing that well if someone asked me before the fact.”

Xander thought about it. What would have happened if Sergeant Campbell hadn’t happened to be on board? What if Lieutenant Haley hadn’t been caught in the boarding tunnel and able to release the remains of the tunnel? What if they hadn’t had enough food on board, or no heavy equipment with the right kind of wiring? “You’re right, Sergeant. We’ve been beating odds all along.”

“Damn straight we have. I’m betting we’re gonna beat them once more.”

“So will I, Sergeant,” he said. “After all, it’s the only bet left worth taking.”

“Good man. Now,” the Sergeant said, letting the straps pull him gently back into his chair, “let me get some more shuteye.”

Xander grinned, and nodded. His mind more at ease than it had been before, he found it wasn’t long before sleep came for him.

 

Through Fire – Snippet 26

Through Fire – Snippet 26

I got the odd impression that this young man was enjoying the turmoil. Oh, not enjoying, perhaps. He looked like a well brought up young man, which he would be, if he was an inhabitant of this area of town. I doubted he enjoyed the knowledge his neighbors were dying or his family in danger, but he was… alive? Interested? Exerting a perhaps natural bloody mindedness kept under wraps until now?

He looked me up and down, and sighed. “Depends. Why are you so heavily armed, ‘demoiselle, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The streets aren’t safe.”

This surprised a chuckle out of him. He chuckled like Len, too, and could have been Len’s younger brother. He looked over my shoulder at the street, then said, “I say you pick up the burners you dropped earlier, and then help me… collect these gentlemen’s burners, so that my family has something to defend itself with.” He glanced at my shoulder. “Unless your shoulder is so bad that you must have my father’s attention instantly?”

“Your father?”

“Doctor Dufort. Didn’t you know? We’ve been helping people. That’s why they targeted us, I think,” he said, as he divested the nearest corpse of weapons.

I didn’t answer because I was momentarily without the breath to answer. In Eden, due to old and odd custom, men took their wives’ names upon marriage, but Len’s unmarried name had been Dufort. Had some of the family stayed behind? If so, there was a definite family resemblance.

If we’d been on Earth, I’d have been Mrs. Dufort. I didn’t know why Eden did it other way around. It might well have been a whim of the early colonists. He’d been called Len Sienna. But on Earth–

“I didn’t know anything about you,” I said. “Only that you were under attack and seemed to be outgunned.”

He gave me a curious look, his eyes slightly narrowed, then said, “Come on in. My father will see to your wound.”

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in a chair, getting my arm bandaged. The man doing the bandaging looked… all right, not quite like Len’s grandfather, but close enough that you could tell there was a family resemblance. He’d put something on my arm to stop it hurting, and was now bandaging it. “Not quite bad enough for regen anyway, but it should close in twenty-four hours,” he said.

He and his son, Corin and his wife had welcomed me in, and the doctor had thanked me in profuse, confused words, in the tone of a man not sure about this woman who had come out of nowhere to defend them. “You see,” he said, while he was bandaging my arm. “I thought we knew each other… All of us, in this small seacity, in the… the ones who were loyal to the Good Man. And … well, we didn’t expect you.”

By which he meant that he didn’t know me as belonging to their small circle, and therefore he was dubious of my motives and my loyalty. What could I tell him, precisely? What could I tell him to reassure him?

It wasn’t, I thought, that he suspected everyone who hadn’t been in the direct pay of the Good Man of being against him and against all those who served him. It couldn’t be. He wasn’t a fool. But the truth was that there must be a certain trust among a certain class of people here. It would be much like in my native world, where the pilots and navigators of long distance darkships, which stole powerpods from Earth’s orbit, were usually married to each other. In fact, you either married your alternate, or you traveled alone, which was a dangerous practice, since if you became disabled, the whole ship would be lost.

There was a trust, a connection, between the families of pilots and navigators that simply didn’t extend outside it. It was as though they formed a separate class of people, of families who generally interacted with each other. Because the price of bioengineering your children as pilots or navigators was very high, entrance into the group was slow, though steady and probably the only thing that stopped them from having three eyes and sixteen fingers, and so the families stayed in touch through the generations and trusted each other more than anyone else.

It had been the almost immediate attempts to match me to someone, anyone, who could have piloted the ship for me that had been at the root of my wanting to get away. What had made me stay away, decide to stay on Earth, come what may, was knowing that if I married again, it would be because I’d come to care for the other person very much. And if I cared for someone as I’d cared for Len, and found myself stuck out on a ship with him dying, no matter for what reason, nor how, I couldn’t endure it.

My life seemed to still tilt around that moment when I’d been alone with Len, knowing I couldn’t save him, knowing I’d have to shoot him. I didn’t want to have to do that ever again.

And so I’d escaped from Eden and, I thought, from its tight social circles, where everyone had known you since your decanting.

But I’d miscalculated badly. And what was more, Lucius, if he was indeed aware of what I was doing, and Martha had miscalculated with me. Liberte Seacity might be larger than the world where I’d been raised. After all, all we had was a hollowed asteroid. And no, we didn’t know exactly how many people lived there, because in Eden everyone was averse to giving unnecessary information to the authorities. But Liberte might be larger — probably not by much — but it was not the same type of society. Liberte owned other territories and other seacities, and there were many more people under its control.

But here, in the center of its governance, there would be classes of people that worked closely with the Good Man. There would be those who served him as administrators, and, yes, doctors, and medtechs, and other white collar workers. Other than the Good Man, himself, these people would have the most power.

And then there would be a panoply of people who would cater to the Good Man’s physical needs. Yes, all right, his intimate physical needs, too, if what I’d heard about Simon’s father was halfway true. But also his other needs: food, clothing, cleaning, gardening. And then there were the people who catered to all of those people, the vast class of people who lived in the lower levels of the seacity.

My mistake had been to look at that mass of people and see them as amorphous, undifferentiated, permeable. They were not. They were circles of people, each one as hereditarily closed, as guarded, as well known to each other as the navigators and pilots of Eden. For generations, their position in relation to the Good Man had made them better than the other people around them and certainly than the other people in the territories. I realized the rebellion in Liberte would not be people against people, but circles against circles.

The upper circles, those close to the Good Man, those close to Simon, had been consulted in his plans to declare “la revolution” and would have understood his motives, which I still didn’t fully understand, and his reasoning. The others… the kitchen drudge, the multitudes beneath that, who catered to the Good Man’s servants, those would have no reason to be loyal and were probably the ones who were trying to seize power with this coup. At least, I thought, most of the people I’d seen, with liberty caps and arms, most of the looters and fighters on the street had looked like people who’d have lived in the lower levels.

I sat at what had clearly been the family’s kitchen table, while the doctor finished bandaging my arm and looked at me out of curious, hazel eyes. There was enough of Len in his features, in his expressions, that I understood the enquiry and worry and I said, “Of course. Of course, you will not trust me, unless you know who I am. I mean, surely this is a rebellion of the lower levels of the seacity against everyone else.”

His forehead creased, but he gave something not quite a laugh, “The lower levels? But no. There wouldn’t be… Most of the people here are young. Very young. They’re sans Culottes from the territories and from Shangri-la, and from the prisons in Shangri-la.”

“Then why are you so curious about who I am?” I asked.

His look on me sharpened. Corin stood across the table from me, leaning against a wall. I had a feeling the hand casually in his pants pocket was holding one of those little burners he’d been firing out the window before. The doctor’s wife, a middle aged lady who’d tried to cluck over me, had been escorted by her son somewhere in the depths of the house. “I mean, I understand you don’t trust me,” I said.

 

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 25

The Span Of Empire – Snippet 25

Chapter 13

Caitlin hadn’t expected to have the search strategy meeting right away, but in the event it took over a week before she could gather all the people together she wanted. When she groused to Ed about it, he just laughed.

“Be glad you’re getting them that soon,” he said. “I’ve learned more about ships and supplies than I ever wanted to know since I took the base commander’s job. I shoulda joined the Navy. But the base is only partly functional, so the ships’ crews are doing a lot of the loading and unloading of supplies. Even Tully’s troops are having to bear a hand for this. And the ships’ officers need to be available while that is going on, especially on the ships that need repairs.”

“Speaking of repairs,” Caitlin began.

“You’re going to lose the Vercingetorix,” Ed said.

“Crap!”

“She just needs too much work that we can’t do here.” Ed continued. “In another year or so we’ll have a shipyard that could service her, even as banged up as she is. Now, the best thing to do is ship her off to Earth.”

“Isn’t one of the Jao worlds closer?”

“Yeah,” Ed replied. “But that ship is a bastard mix of Jao and Terran designs and technologies. There’s no Jao yard that could handle her, even if they would. No, the Ricky will head for Earth as soon as they put a little more spit and super tape on her. Hopefully they’ve got something they can send to replace her.”

“Yeah, for once that Jao time sense could come in handy,” Caitlin quipped.

When the meeting finally happened, Caitlin decided to follow Jao flow patterns by letting the attendees enter the big conference room before she came in preceded by her primary body guards Tamt and Caewithe and her husband.

Only to the humans would it possibly have seemed strange that Ed Kralik was at the table for what was Caitlin’s meeting. To the Jao, the fact that he was Caitlin’s husband was immaterial. What mattered to them was he was the commander of Ares Base, and not incidentally and perhaps even more importantly, he was in the service of Aille krinnu ava Terra, governor of Terra and first kochan-father of Terra taif. In every way but one the base commander was the political and social equal of his wife. So he sat at the table by right.

The one way in which Ed was subordinate to Caitlin was the same reason she had been the one to call the meeting and why she entered the room last in the Jao manner: she alone had oudh over the search effort. Crusade might be a better word for it. But effort or crusade, regardless of what it was called, she alone was the leader, reporting directly to Preceptor Ronz, member of the strategy circle of the Jao Bond of Ebezon, the organization that stood as parent kochan to the cubling Terra taif. In this she perhaps even surpassed her service to Aille.

Caitlin suppressed those thoughts, along with an attendant shiver, as she took her seat between Ed and Wrot. She looked around the room. All the fleet’s senior officers were there, including Tully and his executive officer and first sergeant. There were a few additional people in the room from the base staff: a senior Lleix elder named Narso from the Starsifters elian sat flanked by Brakan and Matto of the fleet’s staff, and another elder named Gram was seated with Ramt of Ekhatlore. Pyr and Lim sat for Terralore, ignored by the Starsifters and somewhat acknowledged by Ekhatlore. Caitlin made a mental note that their plans for the integration of the members of the Lleix dochaya ghetto-class into mainstream Lleix society seemed to be lagging behind their integration into human/Jao society. If the Lleix elders weren’t careful, they were going to lose them. The liberated dochaya members would assimilate into the Terra taif and leave the skeleton of Lleix society behind them.

She set that thought aside, with a note to return to it later, and tapped her finger on the table. The low murmur of side conversations halted, and everyone looked her way.

“In the absence of a directive from the Bond of Ebezon,” Caitlin began, “we will continue with the search.”

Heads nodded, and postures of willing assent were seen all around the room.

“But the efforts of the last two years have almost conclusively proven that we will not fulfill our search here in the Orion Arm.”

She looked around the room to drive home her next point.

“I have oudh over this. I have decided. We will not continue our search here in the Orion arm. We will go elsewhere.”

Silence. No one spoke, although Jao after Jao adopted obedience to directives as their posture.

“In our last meeting, it was proposed that the search move to the Sagittarius Arm.” Caitlin turned to the Starsifters. “You said that you would provide information as to possible Frame Jump paths between the two arms.” She sat back in her seat and crossed her arms, visibly turning the focus of the meeting to the Lleix.

Narso, the base Starsifter elder, needed no further encouragement. He stood to speak, and his aureole flared to its greatest extent.

“We have gathered all information from Lleix records and Terra taif databases and mapped three possible routes,” he began. He gestured to Matto, who ran his fingers across a com pad. A holographic projection flared into view above the table with three different colored lines snaking between bands of stars that were obviously the Orion and Sagittarius Arms, and had labels to validate that assumption.

“They all share one common step,” Narso continued as a ring appeared around the point at which the lines diverged. “The first sun outward is what Terrans call a Class M7 star. It is a red giant, which ordinarily would be a good target star for this kind of Framepoint jump, because the photosphere would be somewhat tenuous. However, this particular star is also a variable star of the IS class by the humans. Unfortunately, there are insufficient astrographical records available from Jao, Lleix, or Terrans to reliably determine its pulsation period or its pulsation extremes. And there is enough interstellar dust between us to interfere with precise observations. In short, we are not certain just how regular or irregular its symmetry becomes.”

Caitlin noted that most of the Jao in the room had shifted to angles indicating concern, unease, or even in a couple of cases, alarm. She shifted her own position to confidence in adversity. “I am not an astronomer, Elder Narso,” she said. “Explain this in common language I can understand, please.”

Narso’s aureole fluttered. “That will not be very precise, Director.”

“I can live with that,” Caitlin said. “Continue.”

 

Through Fire – Snippet 25

Through Fire – Snippet 25

Driving Blind

I ran until I could run no more. Out of breath, lost, I leaned against a wall and took stock of my surroundings.

I’d somehow run myself out of the cheaper neighborhoods, and into one of the more expensive areas. Not quite to the palace, but an area where Simon’s clerks and accountants would have lived, together with clerks and accountants for other businesses, with middle class shop owners and managers of various enterprises.

It had been a pleasant neighborhood, each house set well within a garden, and from the smells in the air, distinct beneath the smells of fire and blood, there were scents of orange and of various exotic flowers.

I had a vague memory, without a precise date, of coming to a neighborhood like this, perhaps this very same neighborhood, with Simon, to visit his old nanny. The house, accounting for the fact that houses on Earth were above ground and in Eden tended to be underground, was as comfortable as anything I’d grown up with. And there had been gardeners at work in the grounds of various neighbors.

If the fury of the revolutionaries, or the looters, if there was a difference at this point, had burned itself out in the cheaper neighborhoods it carried on here, with vigor.

While I leaned against the wall, I heard the sounds of the same song I’d heard in the palace, and then a series of blows, as of a blade against wood.

Near me, a house was aflame, completely engulfed, with the fire licking at the roof, and casting an uncomfortable heat all the way past the walled garden to where I stood across the opposite side of the street.

From the other side of that house came the sounds of something hitting wood, and from the house to the side nearest me came screams and the zap of burners, the curious smell the burner rays left in the air.

I didn’t want to move. I’d run so far, and I was in a place I didn’t understand, surrounded by people with hostile intent. What I wanted to do, arguably what I should do, was to stay still and shut up, and save myself first, then find Simon and save him, and find out from him what to do to quell this or at the very least to get him to safety.

But I remembered Martha telling me that whatever Simon had tried to do had escaped his control. And then I thought that there were innocents being hurt, innocents dying, through no fault of their own, but because they’d been caught in a peculiar time and place. If I’d been armed in the ballroom, during the ball, I could have stopped the nonsense right then, and then Simon might have been able to hold onto power; to figure out what to do next, and this would never have happened.

I didn’t get the option of staying still; of doing nothing.

With a groan, I pushed off the wall and ran towards the sound of burners zapping.

The gate to the garden had been torn open, and a group of young men in liberty caps were making a semi-circle around the entrance of the house, zapping at anything that moved, or seemed to move inside.

The defenders were not totally helpless. One or more people in there had burners. It wasn’t easy to figure out if it was one or more, because whenever a burner ray came out of a side of the house, all the attackers would turn on it, and the burner would go silent. The first time this happened, I thought the attackers had hit the defender. They thought so too. The song they were singing raised up and became more mocking.

But they didn’t advance towards the house. They were, I realized, just past the maximum range where a low power burner could hit them. The defenders — who presently shot out of another window, drawing the attackers’ fire — only had the sort of little burner that is sold for personal defense. Good for about six feet but not more, the sort of weapon that is fine for every day, but not much use in this situation. Probably a lady’s burner, since those tended to have limited range in order to be small and portable, capable of being hid in a handbag or a pocket.

The attackers, on the other hand, were using long range burners.

Which put the defenders at a distinct disadvantage. While the attackers were cowardly enough to stay out of range, not risking even a minor burn, they could draw the fire of the defenders. The defenders had to know the only thing keeping them safe was the remaining charge in their burners. But those burners always had a low level of charge, and the attackers knew that too.

They were keeping safe, drawing fire, until no more burner-rays came from inside the house, and then they would take over and… I wasn’t sure what they’d do, not the details, but there was the house next door burning, and there was the song they were singing, about bringing the high down low and raising themselves up to make justice over the unjust.

This would not end well.

There was only one thing I could do. I did it. I had a burner in each pocket, and I pulled them both out, and shot as fast as I could. One, two, three four, starting with the ones in the middle, who were nearer me and therefore could respond with better accuracy.

I had the advantages of surprise and speed but, as Alexis Brisbois had so clearly told me, you can’t fight a mob.

They had the advantage of numbers. I’d managed to take six of them out, with deadly accuracy, when I had to duck returning fire, because one of the attackers had turned around and was firing at me. I fired back and got him, but then one of them said, in a loud voice, “Hold up or the next one goes through your heart.”

I looked and realized his burner was, in fact, pointed at my heart in such a way that, should he press the trigger, I would be dead.

“Drop the burners,” he said.

I did, with an inward groan, as I tried to calculate my chances of running away. I would have to run away. At least I’d given the people inside some respite, and perhaps now they could fight back. There was, of course, a chance I’d get shot running away, but I didn’t think so, even though — I noted — there were now three burners trained on me. The other two defenders were going through the pockets of their fallen comrades, removing valuables and weapons. I wondered if this was done in the spirit of not wasting anything, or if it was that sort of group.

My chances of escaping totally unscathed from three burners were good. Not perfect. Nothing in life is perfect, but good.

I shifted my weight to my other foot, ready to start running any moment. And then I saw him. I saw him out the corner of my eye, and was momentarily startled out of my calculations because the young man looked like Len. The resemblance — a lanky build, pale hair, cat-like movements — was almost exact in this half-light, by the reflected fire of the blaze next door. And while my mind knew Len was dead, my back brain clearly didn’t.

Before I could stop, I had reacted, with a look in his direction, a movement. One of the guys with a burner on me turned. Before he could aim, I’d got the third burner from my pocket, and was shooting him, and then his friend to the right. The one to the left I couldn’t get to in time, but the young man had taken him out with a shot of his totally inadequate burner. Only now the two who had been searching the corpses were going for their weapons. I nailed one in time, but the other got me. I felt the burner singe through my shoulder, shouted “merde,” which is either a testimony to the wonderfulness of the implant, or a learned reflex, and then not-Len had shot the bastard, and left me gasping, grabbing my shoulder, while a sticky substance ran down my sleeve.

The man approached, curious but wary, his burner still in hand. As he should be, since he had no idea if I was a friend or yet another would-be looter.

His eyes widened as he got closer, and he said, “Uh. Hello. I didn’t realize you were — I didn’t expect a woman.”

“Do you want me to drop my burner?” I asked through clenched teeth and not just because my shoulder was hurting with that peculiar kind of burn a wound has when your body is trying to figure out how to react to the injury. The other part of it was that he still looked like Len. Oh, not exactly. He was younger and his shoulders were narrower, and his nose was perfectly straight, while Len’s had been broken early on in his pilot training due to his forgetting to close his safety belt and taking a header into the control panel. It had healed slightly crooked, which made him look less than blandly sweet, which this young man did look. Save for the glint in his gray eyes, which was very much as Len’s had been.

 

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 40

1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz – Snippet 40

“I would like some more of your pile ointment.”

Phillip bit his lip as he quickly ran his eyes over Casparus. “They still haven’t gone down?” he asked.

Casparus threw up his hands. “Oh, no, it’s not for me. One of my colleagues is in need of some, and as I was dropping by, I offered to get him some.”

And, Phillip thought, naturally I’m expected to drop everything and make up a fresh batch just for his colleague. This kind of interruption was why Phillip preferred not to have a medical practice. At least his fellow alchemists knew to place an order that could be picked up at a later time. Unfortunately, patients, and more especially patrons, expected to be served immediately. “Please, come into my laboratory while I mix up the ointment.”

Casparus followed Philip, his eyes darting around the laboratory as he followed Phillip. “You’re finding the laboratory satisfactory?” he asked.

“Yes,” Phillip answered. What else could he say? Casparus had purchased the lease on the building and presented it to Phillip as a gift. To be fair, Phillip admitted, it was a very good laboratory, by most standards.

“You don’t seem too sure, Herr Dr. Gribbleflotz.”

Phillip waved towards the distillation furnace. “While I was in Basel my assistant, Johann Glauber and I developed some designs for superior furnaces.”

Casparus’ brows shot up. “Johann Glauber? Not Johann Rudolf Glauber? The man who discovered Glauber’s Salt?”

Phillip hid a smile as he nodded. Johann had done very well for himself in the years since he served as his laborant. Putting his name to a product was exactly the kind of self-promotion he would have expected of Johann, who had constantly said that Phillip would never amount to anything while he refused to promote himself.

Then Phillip saw the look on Casparus’ face. He wasn’t sure how to interpret it, but there was a hint of prideful ownership in his eyes that worried him. He’d heard horror stories from other alchemists about being treated as little more than a performing animal for a patron, so he leapt into describing his preferred topic of research. “I have recommenced my studies into the invigoration of the Quinta Essentia of the human humor,” he said.

Casparus’ reaction was a bit of a surprise. He listened to all Phillip had to say and even asked intelligent questions. When, a little over an hour later, he waved Casparus goodbye it was with an invitation to make a presentation of his research to a handful of Casparus’ friends.

November 1630

Phillip watched the last of Casparus’ guests leave the room. He was feeling quite kindly towards his patron as he cleaned up the remains of his seminar on the invigoration of the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors. The seminar had been well received, and some of Casparus’ colleagues had even asked intelligent questions. Now, as became the evening’s entertainment, it was time for Phillip to leave, by the tradesmen’s’ entrance of course.

Phillip passed his traveling apothecary’s box to a menial, who swung it up onto his shoulder, and after graciously accepting a small leather drawstring purse from Casparus’ majordomo they left.

It would have been uncouth to have examined the contents of the purse in front of Casparus’ majordomo, even if the man probably already knew what was in it, so Phillip waited until they were a reasonable distance down the street before opening the purse to assess how much his patron considered his time was worth. He was pleasantly surprised to find the contents totaled five thaler, which was about five times what a doctor might charge for a consultation. It seemed his patron had plenty of money he was willing to spend. Phillip walked home thinking about what projects he might be able to persuade Casparus to fund.

December 1630

Phillip was hard at work in his laboratory keeping up with orders for his high purity acids when Casparus walked in with a man in his late thirties.

“Ah, Dr. Gribbleflotz,” he said as he led his companion into the laboratory. “My friend here has voiced an interest in meeting you.”

Phillip quickly checked on the state of the various retorts before approaching Casparus and his friend. He held out a hand to Casparus’ friend. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said.

“I’m Dr. Zacharias Brendel,” Zacharias said. “I’m a professor of Iatrochemistry at the university, and I’ve been hearing a lot about the quality of your acids.”

Phillip positively beamed at the compliment. “Would you care for a demonstration?” he asked. “I make the purest, and the strongest acids you’ll ever see.”

“Yes, thank you,” Zacharias said.

“I’ll leave you to show Professor Brendel anything he wants to see then, Dr. Gribbleflotz,” Casparus said.

Phillip had completely forgotten about his patron. He hastily said all that was needed and saw him out before returning to Zacharias, who was staring at the line of retorts on the distillation furnace.

Zacharias pointed to the lineup of retorts. “I see you’re distilling Oil of Vitriol,” he observed.

Phillip looked at the lineup. “There are a couple of retorts of acidum salis being concentrated as well.”

“As well?” Zacharias made a more detailed examination of the retorts around the distillery furnace. “So you are.” He shook his head in gentle disbelief. “You say that as if it is normal to concentrate acidum salis while also distilling Oil of Vitriol.”

“Depending on what I need to produce I’ve had Oil of Vitriol, aqua fortis, acidum salis, aqua vitae, and water all on the furnace at the same time,” Phillip said with a touch of smug pride. He’d never met anyone with even half his ability on the distillation furnace.

“You’re a real master of the distillery furnace!” Zacharias said. Suddenly his brows shot up and he stared at Phillip. “Professor Casseri’s last apprentice was supposed to have been a master of laboratory techniques. Was that you? Were you Professor Casseri’s last apprentice?” he asked excitedly.

Phillip nodded warily.

Zacharias clapped his hands on Phillip’s shoulders. “It’s an honor to meet you, Dr. Gribbleflotz,” he said. “I understand you were making some of the best acids the university had ever seen? And now you’re in Jena?”

“That’s right.”

“And already you’re making an impression on the local market for alchemical supplies I hear,” Zacharias said with a smile. “Now I know exactly who you are, I’m no longer surprised at how quickly you have managed to dominate the market for premium quality acids.

“What have you been doing since you left Padua?” Zacharias asked.

Phillip gave him the short version of his adventures, concentrating on his time as a military physician and surgeon and finishing with his being burned out of house and home in England.”

“But what were you doing to bring such an action upon you?” Zacharias asked.

“I’d just read Dr. Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, and I wanted to test his theory for myself,” Phillip said. He related how he’d been seen holding a still beating heart in his hands.

“That was most unfortunate,” Zacharias said. He stared into the distance for a while before speaking again. “I wonder how long a human heart could continue to beat.”

“I’d like to know the answer to that myself,” Philip said, “but I can’t image being permitted to conduct the experiment, not even on a condemned criminal.”

Zacharias released a heartfelt sigh. “There are so many rules that seem to have no other purpose than to limit our ability to understand our world.” He shook his head gently before looking back at Phillip. “And what are you experimenting with now?”

Phillip couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk about his long time interest. “I’m looking for a way to invigorate the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors,” he said, and from there he went on to describe the current state of his investigations.

****

Zacharias walked away from Phillip’s laboratory in a bit of a quandary. Phillip was known in Jena as Dr. Gribbleflotz, and it had crossed his mind that maybe Phillip wasn’t entitled to the title. Some things were just accepted, such as the idea that people who claimed doctorates had them, unless someone had good reason to doubt it. Zacharias didn’t exactly doubt Phillip’s doctorate, but he did know that Professor Casseri’s last apprentice hadn’t earned his doctorate before his, Professor Casseri’s, death.