Eric Flint's Blog, page 291

Castaway Planet – Chapter 04

Castaway Planet – Chapter 04

Chapter 4

The stars shone out again, and she sat forward. “Coils recharging. Doing a full survey of the sky again…” She tumbled LS-5 once more around its axes. “Generating full sky view… okay, everyone, start looking. I’m blinking our virtual displays between the first panorama we got and this one. I’m sending different areas of the sky to –“

“Got one!” sang out Caroline. “Brightest star in our sky just jumped a beautiful, beautiful big fraction of a degree! Measure that arc, Sakura!”

“It’s… about an eighth of a degree,” she said after a moment, feeling a smile spreading over her face. “That’s less than a light-year off, right?”

“About zero point two seven light years, I think, which given the brightness means we’re probably looking at a G-type star!”

G-type star. She heard the words with a tremendous lightening of her heart. That was the best possible candidate for a world they could live on.

She heard both her parents let out their breaths in a sigh of relief. “That’s wonderful, Caroline, Sakura,” her mother said. “But let’s not jump the gun. See if any other stars move.”

No one else spotted any that they were sure of, and by the time they were done, the second jump had begun. After another tense-yet-boring wait, Sakura repeated the maneuver and started the comparison running again. This time, Hitomi spotted two more that she thought moved. A close comparison showed that she was right, but the movement was small compared to the now very noticeable movement of the first star. One appeared to be a red dwarf about three light years out, and the other a brighter star five light years away.

That was enough for her mother. “All right, then. Sakura, cancel those other jumps and get us headed towards that star, okay?”

“Yes, Mom — I mean, Captain.” She felt much steadier this time as she set the course. “Given that we’re this close and moving as fast as we will be, I don’t need to do a fancy navigation calculation. Just point the nose at our target and drop out to adjust our course maybe once a day. We’ll be about there in a little less than four days.”

“That’s just fine, honey. Hold off on the jump for a little bit. Everyone, unstrap for a moment so we can all talk together,” said her mother.

The others unsnapped quickly. It took Whips a little longer to release all his hold-downs.

“First… all of you, come here,” Laura said. She reached out and hugged little Hitomi to her, and gestured the others close.

Then her mother looked up as the family gathered, straight at Whips. “You too, Harratrer.”

She could sense a momentary protest that he was too old to need special treatment. “Come here, Whips,” she said, and heard her voice waver. “You’re our family too.”

The patterns that rippled chaotically over Whips’ skin showed that he, too, was close to the equivalent of tears. He drifted over to the others and wrapped all three arms around the Kimei family; Sakura and the others gripped his arms and hands, and even though he was so very different… it was still exactly like a hug from their own family.

For a few moments they all hung there, not moving, just accepting that for now, they were together, and a family, and safe.

Mom smiled finally and spoke up. “That’s right. We’re all here, we’re all alive, we’re together, and no one’s hurt. Right?”

Hitomi nodded, brightening. Melody, eyes still huge and frightened, also nodded. She’s smart enough to know we’re not anywhere near safe yet.

“Right!” said Sakura; her attempt to sound confident and ready didn’t fool Whips, she was pretty sure, and probably not her parents.

“Of course, Mom,” Caroline agreed.

“Exactly right,” Dad finished. “I won’t pretend we’re not in trouble — not even to you, Hitomi. But we could be in much worse trouble.”

“We’re already trying to figure out where we are, and where we have to go,” Mom said decisively, letting go, and allowing the others to slowly drift back to their seats. “I’ve never heard of a Trapdoor Drive failure before, but then I suppose if it happened it would be hard to get news of the failure. Is it possible we’re somehow near our destination?”

“I wouldn’t expect so,” Whips said slowly. “I mean, I’m just an apprentice right now, but I’ve been studying real hard to understand all the key engineering stuff. We were only halfway there. I don’t know how it’d be possible for us to jump the rest of the way so fast. If ‘fast’ is a reasonable term, I’m still finding the swimming really hard with understanding relativity and such. Still, it looked like the field just … deformed and dropped us off. We’re still probably about halfway to our destination.”

“But space is pretty much empty,” Melody said, her voice trembling a little but her tone going to the lecturing one that she liked to use whenever showing off what she knew. “And our destination was EC-G5-4-100-11 Tantalus, which doesn’t have any stars I know of right along our route.”

“Can we tell if this is the right star?” Akira asked.

Sakura thought, then shrugged. “How? If we get close enough or we find a planet we might be able to tell. LS-5 doesn’t have any spectroscopic software on board.”

“My omni does,” Melody said.

A ripple of stroboscopic surprise washed down Whips’ body. “Why in all the oceans would you have spectroscopic software?”

“I was playing with chemical analysis packages,” Melody answered defensively.

“It’s all right, Melody; he wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with it, he was just surprised. As am I,” Caroline said, “but if you’ll let me access your omni we might be able to use it.”

Melody gestured vaguely in the air, and her omni-personal communicator, database, toolkit, entertainment center, and more in one — generated a green light. “Go ahead.”

“From the designation,” Caroline said, “we know that Tantalus’ primary is a G-5 star and Tantalus itself is the 4th planet out from the primary. So the first thing to do is to find out what type of star that is.” She looked at Sakura. “Which camera input should I use?”

“Umm… Hold on a minute.” Where are the specs on all these things? Oh, there’s the info tags… Okay!

“The forward nose camera is continuous spectrum sensitivity from deep infrared through far UV — that’s between about twenty-four microns down to two hundred nanometers,” she said finally with relief. For a moment she had wondered if in fact there were any full-spectrum, unfiltered cameras available. She refined the alignment of LS-5 and made sure the target star was centered. “There you go, Caroline.”

“What’s the camera designation?”

“Sorry. It’s simply designated as camera Alpha in the main systems.”

“Okay, I have the input stream. Melody, direct your spectroscopic app output to my omni, okay?”

“Okay.”

A few minutes passed, then Caroline sat back with a smile. “Based on emission spectrum and apparent temperature, I’m reasonably confident — though not certain, because these aren’t ideal conditions — that we’re looking at a G-3 main sequence star. So it’s not Tantalus’ system, but it is, at least, the type of system we’d like to be in.”

“The Sun’s a G2, right?” Whips asked.

“That’s right,” Sakura answered, glad she knew some of this. “A G3 will be just a little tiny bit cooler and smaller than the Sun, I think, but we won’t notice the difference.” If there’s a planet to land on, anyway.

“Well, in that case,” Akira said, “I think it’s time to get things started and for me to get out some food. It’s past lunchtime, after all. Hit the jump, Sakura.”

He looked apologetically at her friend. “I’m afraid… we don’t have very many rations for Bemmies, Whips.”

“I didn’t expect you would,” Whips said calmly. Sakura bit her lip. The European Bemmies weren’t obligate carnivores, but they did need a lot more protein — of the generally animal sort — than anything else. The more “balanced” human rations wouldn’t be terribly good for Whips, and he’d have to eat a lot more of them, even in proportion to his size. How long would their supplies hold out?

“We’ll have to make do,” her mother said. “I know they’re not ideal for you, Harratrer, but we have I think three months’ supplies. Even with you onboard, we should be able to keep going for two months, and that should be more than enough now.” Unspoken was the fact that immersion issues might become acute long before then.

“Thank you, Dr. Kimei.” Sakura could tell that Whips’ formal-sounding voice hid much more relief and gratitude.

They’d found a good star. The drive was working. Maybe they’d get out of this after all.

 

 

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 42

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 42

February, 1635

Carla was back in Race Track City with her girlfriends. They were in the little shop that sold casein buttons and other knickknacks. It was a pretty place, with lots of glass windows in little diamonds along one wall so that there was plenty of sunlight. Carla’s paisley shirt had lost a button, and they were white plastic buttons. Utterly irreplaceable. But if she took off all the buttons that were left and replaced them with the casein buttons . . . that would work. Besides, the casein buttons were actually prettier. There was a set that had little 240Z embossed on the buttons and another set that had little crosses. She picked a set of cream-colored buttons with pale blue crosses to go with her shirt. They weren’t expensive, but she was broke.

Her girlfriends weren’t exactly flush either, so there was quite a bit more wanting than buying going on. Then a dumpy middle-aged woman came in and picked up three casein canisters with lids. She went up to the counter and said, “Guten Tag, Maria.”

“Guten Tag, Katharina. Do you have cash today?” the woman at the counter asked.

“No, not till I fill these and sell them. Things have been tight.”

“All right then.” The woman behind the counter pulled a sheet out of a drawer and wrote something on it, then the woman buying the canisters signed it, took her canisters and left.

Sofia Anna, seeing this, grabbed a set of casein thimbles she had been eyeing and marched up to the counter.

“That will be eight pfennig,” said Maria.

“I will charge them,” Sofia Anna proclaimed. “I am Sofia Anna von Wimmer.”

Maria looked at Sofia, then at the other girls. Then she carefully said, “I am most sorry, ma’am, but I must have your parents’ approval before I can even start the process of setting up a credit account.”

The others sighed and Carla had an idea. She recognized Hayley Fortney in this. She didn’t know how Hayley was involved, but she was pretty sure that the Barbie Consortium’s mechanical genius was involved somewhere. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to get my parents to agree,” she said to the other girls. “They’ll probably have to come out here to set up the account too. So the buttons will have to wait till that’s done.”

Maria looked cautiously grateful as she nodded to Carla.

****

While the girls were eating apple strudels, Carla excused herself and went to see Hayley. She wasn’t at all sure what she was going to say. Hayley, can you get me a line of credit at the casein shop? Didn’t seem quite the right thing to say.

“Hayley,” she said when she found Hayley — as usual — in the steam shop. “Can you explain how credit works out here?”

“I’ll try, Carla,” Hayley said, looking around the shop.

Carla looked around the shop and saw the people looking at her and Hayley. “Well, I would have gone to your mom, but I figured she’d be busy.” Then she switched to English. “Sorry, Hayley. I didn’t mean to out you.”

“It’s okay. But I am trying to stay in the closet on this.”

Carla grinned. Who down-time was going to get what “staying in the closet” meant, even if they spoke English?

“Come on,” Hayley said, still in English. “I’ll take you to Mom and she can help you out.”

Once Hayley had bundled up and they were out of the shop, Carla continued. “Thanks, Hayley. I haven’t had time to make much money. The English ladies have me teaching math and science. Meanwhile, I lost a button off my favorite shirt.

“Also, you need to know that the girls at the school are probably going to be trying to get their parents to set them up with lines of credit. I don’t know how you’re going to deal with that. Some of them are people you don’t want to say no to.”

“Well, the English Ladies ought to be paying you for teaching.”

“I know that, and you know that, but I don’t think you’re going to convince them or my parents of that. Come on, Hayley. We’re kids and putting kids to work for the grownups’ benefit is standard practice. More here than up-time.”

“Sure. But if they sent you off to be a maid, you’d get paid. Maybe not much, but something. And if you were apprenticed, you would be learning a trade.”

“Right. But money is supposed to be beneath our notice.”

“It’s not beneath Prince Liechtenstein’s notice,” Hayley said.

“Sure, it is,” Carla shot back. “That’s what he’s got the Barbies for.”

“Naw. That’s just because he’s not real good at it,” Hayley said. “Anyway . . . look, I’ll get you some credit. But you need to get your folks to come out and talk to Ron Sanderlin and my dad.”

“Why? About the credit account?”

“No. Because about five months ago the Bessemer steel mill at Linz blew up. They were going from cheat sheets, and we hadn’t arrived yet. They started rebuilding it and a couple of weeks before you guys got here Dad and Ron Sanderlin took a trip up the Danube to see it.

“They saw some stuff and made some suggestions, but Dad’s not an engineer and Ron is a mechanic, and those guys need your dad’s expertise.”

“Things are tight right now, Hayley,” Carla said. “My parents got promised a bunch of stuff. None of those promises has been broken, but they have been reinterpreted quite a bit since we had to run from Grantville. The government isn’t going to be paying my dad. Instead, he’s been made Hofbefreiten. He has a fancy new title, Royal Adviser on Up-timer Engineering, but no one knows what to do with him.”

“We heard,” Hayley said. “But this should be a paying gig. Count von Dietrichstein got the patent for the Bessemer by promising to provide the crown with lots of good steel, as well as the silver he paid for it. The guy has to get that thing running now. I’m not saying your dad can write his own ticket, but the job should pay well.”

“I’ll tell him,” Carla promised.

****

Sonny and Ron spent a couple of hours going over the state of affairs in the Bessemer mill at Linz with Peter Barclay. It was in the process of being rebuilt. And they put him in touch with Count von Dietrichstein.

After he had left, Ron muttered, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the count will have him executed.” Peter Barclay had been both condescending and critical. And, Ron admitted to himself, at least half right. Even from only the discussion they had, Barclay had spotted things that Ron and Sonny hadn’t. Which shouldn’t have been surprising. Peter Barclay was an engineer and had consulted on the first Bessemer plant located just outside of Saalfeld.

****

Meanwhile, Hayley set up a line of credit for Carla and bought some stuff from her to get a little cash in the girl’s hands. Hayley had also set up a policy for the parents of the girls at the English Ladies School. If they wanted credit, their parents had to agree to put up the money. In exchange, the parents would get a copy of the bills and would know what the girls bought. So the “them of Vienna” were effectively required to pay in advance, but didn’t have to look like they were.

 

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 44

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 44

Chapter 44: Paternity and Possibility

“Senator MacLain?”

The voice on the other end was as distinctive over the phone as it was in public address or on television: precise, educated, a pleasant yet cool voice that carried both authority and intelligence — it reminded me somehow of Katharine Hepburn. “This is Paula MacLain. Mr. Jason Wood?”

“Yes, ma’am. I don’t know if you know who I am — ”

“Young man, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be speaking to you.” There was a tinge of humor that took any sting out of the words. “In any case, a senator for New York who wasn’t aware of everything having to do with Morgantown, in these days, would be a sad example of a legislator, don’t you agree?”

“I certainly do, Senator. And I certainly didn’t mean to imply — ”

“Don’t concern yourself with my feelings, Mr. Wood. I know when offense is meant and when it isn’t. Now that you and I have finally managed to connect, let’s waste no more time. What can I do for you? You were intriguingly uninformative to my staff.”

I took a deep breath. I’d decided to go for the most honest route I could, while trying to tap dance around the more dangerous areas. “Senator, a few weeks ago, a man walked into my office, asking me for help in locating his family. To make a long story short, he originally comes from Vietnam. And the descriptions of his two children, and pictures made from those descriptions, match those of your adopted children in every particular.”

There was a long silence on the other end; I’d expected as much, given her history. Finally, “That… is quite remarkable, Mr. Wood. Am I to presume that you would like to find a way to confirm that they are, or are not, your client’s children? And that he would subsequently want to obtain custody of them, if they are indeed his children?” Her voice was carefully controlled, but not perfectly so; she wasn’t taking this as calmly as she’d like me to think.

“Basically correct, Senator. But we also don’t wish to distress the children overly much, either by giving them false hopes or by forcing them to leave a stable home. What I was hoping was that we could permit someone you trusted to take a sample for genetic comparison and do a paternity test on them.”

Senator MacLain was known for her quick decisions. “That much I will certainly do. But I must warn you and your client, Mr. Wood: I will never relinquish custody of my children unless I am absolutely certain that they will be happy and well cared for, regardless of who is the blood parent. I love them both very much.”

I nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “Senator… Ms. MacLain… we expected no less, and to be honest if you felt any differently you wouldn’t be a fit mother for them. It’s not going to be easy either way, but I assure you, I feel the same way. I’ll make that clear to my client.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Wood. And I appreciate, now, the trouble you went to keep this all confidential. Let me see …” I heard the sounds of tapping on a computer keyboard, “Ah. If you would be so kind as to have the sample sent to Dr. Julian Gray, 101 Main, Carmel, New York, he will see to the comparisons. I have no trouble with your obtaining the samples for him; falsifying genetic evidence would seem a bit beyond anyone’s capacities at the present time.”

“Indeed. Thank you very much for your time, Senator. Good-bye.”

Maybe not beyond anyone’s capacities, I thought as I hung up the phone, but certainly beyond mine.

The invoice for the State Police job finished printing, and I tore it off and stuffed it into the package along with all the originals and enhanced versions. Sealing it up, I affixed the prewritten label and dumped it into my outbox.

So much for the simple part of my current life.

It had taken a couple of days to install my newest machine, a Lumiere Industries’ TERA-5. Without Verne’s money, I’d still be looking at the catalog entries and drooling and thinking “maybe next decade.” Now that it was up and running, I’d given it the biggest assignment I had: sorting through all the recent satellite data that I’d been able to find, beg, borrow, or… acquire, and look for various indications of hidden installations. So far it had given me at least twenty positives, none of which turned out to look at all promising. I was starting to wonder if there was a bug in some section of the program; some of the positives it was giving me were pretty far outside of the parameters of the installation as described by Kafan. There was one that might be a hidden POW camp — I’d forwarded that to one of the MIA-POW groups I knew about. Never thought those things really existed any more, but maybe there was more than hearsay behind all the rumors.

The TERA-5 was still chugging away at the job, meter by detailed meter on the map, but this was going to take a while even for the fastest commercially available general-purpose machine ever made. A specifically designed machine for map-comparison searching would be far faster, but not only would it be lots more expensive, but it’d be next to useless for anything else; there’s always a catch somewhere. I preferred to wait a little longer and have a use for the machine later on as well. My only consolation was that I could bet that only an intelligence agency had better equipment and programs for the job.

Of course, with the situation with Verne, I didn’t know what good this was going to do. Without Verne, we’d be pretty much stuck even if I did know where the installation was. I looked sadly down at the thick document lying on my desk. Verne’s will. Morgan as executor, Kafan and his family as major heirs, and, maybe not so surprisingly, me and Sylvie figuring prominently in it as well. This aside from numerous bequests to his efficient and often nearly invisible staff. The sight of it told me more than I needed to know. Verne knew his time was up.

My friend was dying. It hit me harder than anything all of a sudden. I collapsed into my chair, angry and sad and frustrated all at once. He’d been the gateway through which a whole world of wonder opened up for me, and he’d said I’d helped him regain his faith. It wasn’t fair that it end like this, him wasting away to nothing for no reason.

And there was nothing I could do. Yesterday night he’d shown us all the secrets of his house… “just in case,” he said… but we knew there was no doubt in his mind. The place he called the Heart, built out of habit and tradition, only recently having been used by him for the purposes that it had existed… once more to become an unused cave when he died. All his papers and books and even tablets, here and elsewhere.

He’d found his lost son, I’d found his son’s children, and for what? He wouldn’t live long enough to see them reunited, he’d barely lived long enough to be sure it was his son. Dammit! I slapped at the wall switch, killing the lights as I turned to leave.

Then I froze.

I remembered what I’d said to Verne months ago, when Virigar first showed: “I don’t like coincidences. I don’t believe in them.”

What if my idea was still basically true?

There was just one possibility. I switched on the lights again, spun the chair back around and switched the terminal back on. It was a crazy idea… but no crazier than anything else! Just a few things to check, and I’d know.

It took several hours — the data was hard to find — but then my screen lit up with a few critical pieces of information. I grabbed my gun, spare magazines, a small toolbox, and a large flashlight and sprinted out the door.

 

Castaway Planet – Chapter 03

Castaway Planet – Chapter 03

Chapter 3

Sakura clamped her jaw shut to keep from screaming as LS-5 whirled into the void. She gripped the arms of the pilot’s chair convulsively. She heard herself muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God…” and her mother and father both whispering something that sounded very similar.

The whirling, dizzy, uncontrolled spin lasted only a few moments; automatic stabilizer jets fired momentarily and then cut off. She felt the odd floating feeling of microgravity; over the private channel she heard Whips’ own half-formed prayers to Those Beyond the Sky.

For a few moments, no one moved; finally her father spoke. “My God, Laura, what happened?” Dad’s voice was filled with the same disbelieving horror welling up through Sakura, filling her with cold shock. Whips’ electronic link had gone blank, the loss so great that he wasn’t even forming thoughts she could understand.

Her mother was silent. Hitomi was sobbing, the cry of a child who doesn’t really understand, but knows something terrible is happening.

Then she felt a stirring in her best friend’s link. Are you okay, Whips?

I… must be. Panic is useless. His determined statement of that fact gave her a lifeline to hold to, and she sent him a smile that firmed his resolve. I am a descendant of Blushspark herself, child of the Seven Vents, the people who dared the chance to become part of both worlds. I must get a grip, as you would say.

Whips spoke aloud, answering Dad’s question. “The light… looked like a malfunction in the Trapdoor Drive,” he said. “When a ship does the drop into the Trapdoor space, you’ll often see a flash of about that color.”

“So… what, parts of the ship were dropping and others weren’t?” Laura asked, her voice frighteningly casual. Her mother was scared. The thought almost made Sakura panic again. Her mother simply did not get scared by anything.

“I guess so.” Whips squeezed his three hands together nervously. “A field instability — the field’s usually kept larger than the ship by a fair distance, but if something went wrong… I guess it could cause the field to dip down below the outer edge of the habitat ring.”

“Are we going to die, Mommy?” Hitomi asked tearfully.

“We are not going to die!” Laura snapped, and Sakura winced at the underlying near-panic in her tone.

I’m in the pilot’s chair. I should do… what a pilot does. She bent over the displays, searching. “I don’t see any other shuttles. LS-5, are you getting other beacons?”

There was no answer. “LS-5, respond!”

When the AI remained silent, she turned her attention to the displays on the board. Oh… no. “Mom… the AI’s offline. And there’s medical alerts –”

“What?” Her mother had the expression of a doctor discovering their patient had unexpected terminal cancer.

“What is it, Laura?” Akira demanded.

“Radiation. Huge spike, I’ve never seen anything like it. The diagnostics say it was a mixture of the common types plus some particle bursts that I don’t even know.”

“Does that mean we’re going to die?” Hitomi’s voice was almost a whisper.

Sakura saw her mother pause before answering. She’s checking. This is what Mommy does.

Then she smiled and shook her head. “No, Hitomi. It was bad — very bad — but LS-5 shielded us from the worst. We didn’t get a lethal dose, and I’m already directing our medical nanorepair. We all might get a little sick in the next few days, but we’ll be okay.”

Hitomi relaxed visibly, and so did Sakura. She knew her mother wouldn’t sugar-coat anything like this, so saying it was all right meant that it was, indeed, all right. But…

“Mom? What about Whips?”

She smiled. “His pod knows you spend lots of time with us, so his doctor gave me the data and access codes to his medical nanos too. He’ll be fine.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kimei,” Whips said. “I think the radiation explains the problem with LS-5, although I’m not sure why our other systems are working.”

“Trapdoor radiation surge,” Melody said.

Sakura sensed the Bemmie equivalent of a headslap of course! from Whips, but no one else seemed to understand. “What do you mean, Mel?” asked her father.

“The Trapdoor Drive creates a surge of subatomic particles when it’s used,” Melody answered, in the tense, focused tone that she always had when she was thinking to keep herself from being nervous. “That’s why the ship always stops talking whenever you’re preparing for drive activation or deactivation; the particle flux isn’t dangerous to us but disrupts the quantum channels the AIs use.”

“She’s right,” Whips confirmed. “I should have thought of it myself. And the malfunction must have caused the dangerous radiation surge; we were sitting on the Trapdoor interface. But I’m surprised you’d know that, Mel.”

I’m not, Sakura thought. She’s the family genius — heard Mom once say to Dad that Melody might be smarter than both of them put together.

Melody looked pleased, even though still worried. “I studied up on it when I knew we were leaving.”

“Whips, can you get the AI back up and running?” Laura asked.

Sakura saw the rippling pattern of hard thinking on her friend’s skin. “I… don’t think so,” he said, finally. “I’m not nearly finished in my training, and anyway the only way I think might work we can’t use right now. We’d have to shut down all associated systems and extract the cores, then do a clean memory restore. We have a memory backup onboard in the central repository, I think, but the other part means shutting down most of LS-5.”

“Can we handle things without the AI?” Akira asked after a moment. “Shutting down LS-5 and living in our suits may be necessary.”

“There’s still a lot of basic redundant automation in the systems,” Sakura answered, looking at her readouts again. “Exterior comms aren’t working — I think some of the antennas got fried or something — but all the interior systems seem to be okay, and most of the sensing systems are still running.” She halted, staring at the readouts, and felt as though an ice cube were sliding down her spine. “Oh, crap.”

“What is it, Sakura?” her mother asked tensely.

“The piloting and navigation. The automation there is based on the same kind of quantum-channel circuitry as the main AIs, and it was up and running for the drill.”

“My God,” said Akira in a soft voice. “Does that mean we’re dead in space?”

Sakura flipped the controls from Auto to Manual Control. Please, if there’s anything listening… She gripped the joystick and pulled.

LS-5 immediately spun smoothly about its axis, and Sakura felt a relieved smile spreading over her face. She did a quick, sharp test-fire of one of the rockets, and then ran through manual checks of the other systems. “No, Dad. We’re not dead in space. The manual controls are all operating, and systems all check out.”

“Can you run it all?”

She swallowed, then sat up. “I… I guess I have to, don’t I? I’ve got the basics down — the sergeant said I was doing really well. And… well, I think I can pilot LS-5 with Whips to help and Caroline to work with us to figure out destinations and courses.”

Laura looked to Whips. “What is your honest guess as to how long it would take to get the AI back up and running, if we try that? That would bring back our automation, right?”

Whips’ arms curled backward in a momentary defensive posture. “Um, Dr. Kimei, I… I’m not sure we can get it back up at all. I’m just learning, still, you know! If I tried… well, several days, at least. If it worked. And it’s possible I’d mess something else up while I was doing it.”

“Mom, Dad,” Caroline said after a moment, “I think we’d better stick with what already works. If Whips tries and breaks something by accident we could be royally sc… er, in a lot of trouble.”

Laura looked uncertainly at Sakura, and there was suddenly a private channel. Sakura? Honey, this will put a lot on you. Are you really okay with this? Do you really think you can do it?

Mom was being serious, and that meant she had to be serious too. The controls and readouts suddenly looked bigger, more intimidating, and it sank in that what Mom was really saying was we’ll all be depending on you to do it right.

Sakura took a breath and made herself really think about it. Look first, jet later, Whips reminded her. Not the time for your usual charge-forward, Sakura.

I know, Whips. Don’t nag. Still, she knew he was just reminding her of her own worst failing, and she couldn’t argue with him. She considered all the controls, everything she’d have to do — if they could survive at all, something she didn’t want to contemplate. It was terrifying.

But at the same time, part of her was excited. At most she’d expected to get a solo shuttle flight many months from now, with the automatics handling most of it and the sergeant, or another pilot, hanging over her shoulder. This was scarier… but it was real. She, Sakura Kimei, would be the honest-to-God pilot of a real spaceship.

Whips? she sent. Can you keep everything else running?

Everything that’s not damaged now? Yes. I can.

She looked over at Caroline, who met her gaze, frowned… and then smiled and nodded.

Relief burst in on her. Yes, Mom. Me and Whips can run this little ship, I promise.

“All right, then,” Laura said decisively. “It’s not the way I’d have wanted Sakura to get her real flight experience, but I guess it’s our best choice.”

“Yay!” Hitomi said happily. “Does that mean you’re the Captain, Sakura?”

That caused a faint chuckle around LS-5‘s interior. “No, Hitomi, Mom’s the Captain. Dad’s the First Officer. I’m just Navigation. Whips is Engineering, and I guess Caroline’s sciences or something.” She looked over to her mother, who was smiling fondly at Hitomi. “So what next, Captain Mom?”

“Mom or Captain please, the two together are just silly.” Laura looked out the viewport. “Can we get any comm beacons?”

“No, sorry, Mom. Remember I said most of the comm system’s down. Just internals.”

“Can’t you use the other scanning systems?”

“Maybe.” Sakura thought a moment, then after poking around in the controls was able to check out the infrared and radar scans. “Radar’s still working — don’t know why, that’s an RF-based system too. Umm…”

After a few minutes, she shook her head. “I’m not getting any radar patterns that look like other shuttles, no IR glows, either, at least nothing nearby.”

“There might not be anyone else,” Whips said bluntly. “I… wasn’t looking carefully, but can’t we play back the recording of those last seconds?”

Laura looked at him. “I’m sure we can… but why?”

“Because I don’t think I saw any other of those Trapdoor flares. If I’m right that means that we’d be the only ones who fell off, so to speak.”

“Or,” Sakura said slowly, “that if there are any others they’d be somewhere else along Outward Initiative‘s path, dumped whenever the instability reached their area of the hab ring.”

Hitomi brightened. “So once they realize what happened, Outward Initiative can just come back and pick us up, right?”

Sakura winced, and she saw her mother close her eyes before turning to face Hitomi. “I’m… afraid not, honey. If it’s just us, well, they still probably lost a big chunk of the hab ring. There’s going to be a lot of damage to the ship and they won’t dare stop. They’ll have to get to the nearest colony and get repairs, even if they think we might have survived.”

“And with our comm systems out…” Sakura swallowed, but made herself go on, “well, with them out, even if they did come back there’s so much space for them to look through that they’ll probably never see us.”

“And if our comms are out, the same is almost certainly true for anyone else who escaped, so if there are others, we may never see them, and they may never see us,” her father pointed out. “The important thing is to determine what we do next. Are we equipped for a system survey?”

Sakura checked, but got the answer she expected. “Sorry, Dad. No, there’s no survey software installed. No reason to have any. LS-5 is really meant as just a shuttle between orbit and ground and vice versa, and maybe a small ship for moving around a known system. Even in a lifeboat context, it’s assumed we’re in some inhabited system. Surveys are done by big ships, usually.”

She sensed her Bemmie friend suddenly close off, as though he’d had a terrible thought. His next words brought that thought out for everyone to look at.

“Sakura… most of space is… well, very empty. If we’re not in a solar system…”

She saw her mother’s eyes widen, and Caroline’s too; they both understood the implications. “It’s not that bad… I think. The Shuttle’s got its own Trapdoor Drive, so we can go FTL… in hops, because we have to charge the loops to run it — takes more power than the reactor can generate by itself. So… in effect it’s about a third the speed of a regular Trapdoor.”

“So that’s about… what, twenty-five times the speed of light or so?”

“A little more, but yeah.”

Her mother frowned and looked towards the back, and Sakura suddenly understood what she was worrying about. Whips. His people were amphibious, and he had to immerse in water fairly often for his skin and other biological functions. She knew that wasn’t necessary every day, but…

“Honey, let’s say we get to a good solar system. How long will it take to go from, well, wherever we get in the system to landing?”

“Depends on where we come out of Trapdoor,” her sister Caroline said. As a planetographer, Caroline had a good grasp of distances and times in solar systems. “Could be only a few days — long enough to get a good look and choose a landing site — or could be several weeks, maybe over a month.”

“A month.” Mom shook her head. “And each light year will be a couple of weeks, roughly, at the speed we can reach in LS-5. Then… we really have to hope there is a solar system within one or two light-years. Normally two weeks is pushing it for a Bemmie. I’ve got some ideas on how to stretch that — there are recommendations in the literature — but I don’t know if I can stretch it more than two months.”

Sakura tried to hide her dismay. The chances weren’t great that a star was that close. They weren’t terrible — maybe one in two or three — but still, not certain. And even if there were stars nearby, they might not have good planets. And even if it weren’t for Whips… there’s not all that much food on board, especially since Whips’ll eat more than one of us. We’ve got a nuclear reactor with power for years, but our supplies won’t last that long. She glanced at Hitomi — staring back with wide, terrified eyes — and Melody, gripping her seat’s arms so tightly the knuckles were white — and then at her mother and took a breath.

“First thing to do is find out where the nearest star is, I guess,” she said. “I mean, if we are in a solar system, no problem. Everyone keep an eye out.”

Her hands tried to shake, and she paused and took a breath before she reached out to the controls again. Simple. Just a full look around. Methodical, careful, controlled, just like in training.

The gyros and stabilizers could be used to spin the ship without having to use any of the limited reaction mass, so she used that, carefully rotating LS-5 around its axes so that all portions of the sky slowly drifted across the forward field of view.

Stars swam by, and everyone in the ship watched tensely. The beautiful river of light that was the Milky Way pinwheeled around them. Bright stars, dim stars, stars with a hint of red or yellow or blue or pure white shone unflickering against the absolute black of space.

“Anyone?”

The others shook their heads. “I saw some pretty bright stars,” Whips said, “but nothing that looked like it had a disc. At a light year away, I think the Sun would only look like a bright star –”

“Magnitude about minus three,” Caroline said. “So yes, even if we’re close to a good star, if it’s even a large fraction of a light year away, we won’t see it as a disc. And without knowing what kind of star I’m looking at, I can’t make a guess as to how far away it is.”

Sakura knew what she meant. Given how much stars varied in their actual light output, a really bright star could be a tiny red dwarf just a fraction of a light year away, or a supergiant star hundreds of light years off.

“But…” Caroline continued, smiling, “we don’t need to worry about that. Sakura, just charge up the Trapdoor Drive and give us a few hours hop in any direction.”

Sakura laughed, feeling some slight relief. At least we can find out how bad we’re screwed. “Parallax, right?”

“Right. Move only a little ways and we should be able to see movement of a nearby star against the background of the others. You recorded the whole globe of stars around us, right?”

“Yeah. And really, only the very bright ones matter, I think — over first mag, probably.”

“I’d guess you’re right. That’s only twenty or so back home, probably not much more than that here. We can track that pretty easily.”

“Okay, then — can I do that, Mom?”

Her mother smiled. “Of course you can. ‘Make it so’, navigator.”

 

Sakura heard the first chuckle since the disaster go around the cabin. “Aye, Captain!” She turned back to the controls. “Unsealing Trapdoor Drive controls. Drive shows green. Coils charged.”

Despite the desperate circumstances, she felt a thrill go through her. Her first solo flight… and she was doing a hop in interstellar space!

“Since we have no idea which direction we want to go, I’m just jumping the way we’re pointing. Set for four hops, total distance a few light-days. We’ll check the big stars after each hop, while the superconductor storage coils are charging. Okay?”

“Sounds good to me, Sakura.”

She found herself holding her breath as she reached out and touched the activation button.

Without a bump or jolt, the universe outside disappeared, and the Trapdoor Drive sent LS-5 hurtling on its unknown course. “Trapdoor Drive activated! We’ll be under drive for… about one hour and ten minutes.”

This is going to be the longest hour ever.

 

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 41

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 41

Chapter 14: Barbies’ Vienna Branch

January and early February, 1635

Sanderlin House, Race Track City

“Frau Sanderlin, may I give credit to Ursula Kline?” Magdalena Hough asked timidly. “She is a good woman and if she can get some of the bottles for her herbs, she will be better able to sell them.”

Gayleen Sanderlin was at a loss. “Well, I guess so. I mean, it’s your shop. What do the other ladies who work there say?”

Magdalena hesitated. “Well, some agree. Others think we don’t have the money to give credit.”

Fortney House, Race Track City

“Frau Fortney, may I give credit to Renate Treffen?” asked Peter Zingler. The bootmaker was literally hat in hand, and Dana Fortney didn’t have a clue what to say. She knew who would, but her daughter was in the shop working with Sonny on the boiler for the steam car they were trying to build. And Brandon, who might know what to do, was out at his experimental farm, mulching God-knew-what with chicken poop to make compost.

“Let me think about it, Herr Zingler. Do you have to have an answer right now?”

240Z Shop, Race Track City

“Herr Sanderlin, can you get me credit at the Up-time Diner? Things have been tight and . . .”

Ron Sanderlin looked over at Pete Greisser. He was a good guy, if not the brightest Ron had ever met. Hard worker and willing, but not great with money.

“Just till next payday. Maria, my sister, is in from the country and, well, money is tight and . . .”

Again Pete trailed off and this time Ron had to fight back a curse. The pay was late again. He knew that the empire was having financial troubles but, damn it, when you hire people you’re supposed to pay them.

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Pete that of course he could have credit at the Up-time Diner, but then he remembered he didn’t own the diner. “I’ll see what I can do, Pete.”

Dana’s Office, Fortney House, Race Track City

“We’re getting a lot of people asking for credit,” Dana Fortney told Gayleen Sanderlin. The office now had its own set of filing cabinets. Dana had gone to the cabinet-maker Moses Abrabanel recommended. She also had a nice roll-top desk she had had made right here in Vienna. It had cost a fortune, but was worth it.

“I know, but what are we going to do? Most of those people have jobs. A lot of them have jobs with the government. They aren’t getting paid. And even the bribes are barely enough to keep body and soul together. If they aren’t government employees, they aren’t even quartered.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t pay for the raw materials we need.”

“Talk to Hayley,” Gayleen said. Then she shook her head. “It’s really weird asking a fourteen-year-old for financial advice.”

“Fifteen now,” Dana said automatically. Then, “And how do you think I feel? She’s my daughter. She’s supposed to be coming to me for a raise in her allowance while I tell her to be more frugal. Not the other way around.”

“Oh, stop bragging.” Gayleen laughed.

****

“This isn’t working,” Hayley said. “And I don’t know why.”

It was pretty clear that the sudden increase in the credit requests was because the emperor was late again with the wages, and not just for the race track workers but for everyone in Vienna. And a lot of those people were owed a lot more than a couple of weeks’ wages.

“Well, it’s not their fault that the pay is late,” Gayleen Sanderlin insisted. “What the heck is wrong with Ferdinand III?”

That was true, Hayley knew, but that wasn’t what she was thinking about. “He’s probably broke too. Meanwhile, we have to figure something out.” Damn it, this should be working better. They were selling good products, really good products, at bargain prices. Stuff people needed, stuff that would make their lives better. They ought to be selling more. Hayley wished Susan Logsden was here, but she didn’t know what Susan could do that she wasn’t. Then she realized that who she really wished was here was Sarah Wendell. “It’s an economic problem,” she blurted out.

“Okay?” Gayleen said doubtfully. “It’s an economic problem. What is the problem? And more importantly, what’s the solution?”

“I have no idea!” Which was true in general, but in this particular situation, the answer was that they would have to give credit.

****

Hayley consulted with Jack Pfeifer, their lawyer. “The problem is that we want Sanderlin-Fortney Investment Company to give credit, but discourage using it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re actually in a pretty good situation here, right on the Danube with a couple of north/south trade routes so there are plenty of raw materials available and not all that expensive. But that doesn’t mean they are free. When we sell something on credit, a pair of pants, a box of aspirin, or whatever, we have to pay cash for the materials to replace it.”

Jack was nodding.

“Right. Cash would be better. But if we don’t give credit, we run out of customers, or close to it. If we make it too easy to get credit, then people who should be paying cash will be buying stuff on credit.”

“Charge interest?”

“Sure. But most of our sales are small. Keeping track of who owes how much interest would be a nightmare. For us and them. And some of our sales, well, they aren’t quite charity, but close to it. We really don’t want to send a bunch of people to debtor’s prison.”

“You can always forgive a debt,” Jack said. “And you can do it selectively. You can forgive or not, as you see fit. You can forgive some, but not all. You can forgive the interest. You can decide not to call it in this month and maintain your right to call it in next month. Once you own the debt, it’s pretty much up to you what to do with it.”

“What we need is a form that we can have printed up that makes it clear, so that we have a legal record. They fill in the amount and sign it. Then it goes in the money box. And we keep a ledger of who owes what. We’ll leave it up to the shopkeepers who to offer credit to, but everyone who gets credit signs one every time they use it.”

“That should work and is not that different from what merchants are already doing. How much interest and how do you want to work that part?”

“Let’s set it up so that each year after harvest, we apply five percent to the total owed.”

“That’s not very much. And if they manage to pay off their debt or even pay it down just before harvest, they will pay even less interest.”

“I know, but I don’t want to drown people in debt. I just want to make them think about paying cash.”

“I’m not at all sure this will make them think hard enough about paying cash.”

 

Polychrome – Chapter 18

Polychrome – Chapter 18

Chapter 18.

I felt the chill of the morning deep in my bones as I awoke. I never liked camping as a kid, and I don’t like it any better now. Who was it who said that adventures were unpleasant things happening to people a long way away?

I dragged myself out of the little tent and onto the remainder of the little shelf of rock I was on. I wasn’t sure of the point of this little exercise, but you generally didn’t argue with Iris Mirabilis. I got out the little folded picture of a campfire he’d given me and shook it four times as instructed – once to each of the four cardinal directions.

As I finished the fourth, the picture shimmered in front of me and suddenly there was a blazing little fire on the stone almost at my feet. I jumped a bit. I’d pretty much expected that, but having it happen… even after all the time I’ve been here, it’s pretty startling, especially if it seems to be me doing it.

I carefully didn’t look very far around as I cooked up a simple breakfast and ate. Then I washed up as best I could with some water on my face and hands, and packed up everything. Pack settled, I took a deep breath and looked up.

Caelorum Sanctorum towered over me, a titanic mass of cliffs and ridges and slopes that seemed to go upward forever. For a moment, the lazy, sour-faced part of me just whined, because it didn’t look as though I’d made any progress in the last few days.

I glanced behind me. I almost regretted that, because while it did demonstrate that I’d made progress, I damn near got dizzy enough to fall off. Below me the mountain dropped away and away and away, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand feet, more? I had no idea really how high I’d come, or how much farther I had to go. Iris apparently thought I could make it in five days, or maybe he just wanted to see how long it took me to give up.

Well, I’m not giving up. Not after all that training, and not after I’ve come THIS far.

I made sure everything was secure, and then stepped up to the rockface. I found a handhold, pulled myself up, set my foot on a little ridge of stone, reached out, pulled up.

Focus. I’d freeclimbed when I was much younger – a stupid, stupid hobby that I’d often looked back on with a combination of wistful memory and wincing recognition of how easily I could have died. I’d found anything I could climb and gone up it – alone. Without any equipment. Without help. Sometimes a few hundred feet in the air, alone, doing it for as far as I could tell just the sheer adrenaline thrill of ALMOST getting killed.

And now I was doing it again… at least two orders of magnitude worse. Well, okay, this time someone else wanted me to do this stupid thing, and I did have a little equipment. I took one of the safety spikes from my pack and slammed it into the stone, tied my rope on carefully. Hmm. No handholds here at all.

I’d reached one of the sheer sections of the mountain, shining gray-white like polished cloud in the slanting sun of morning. It looked as smooth as a morning fog even close up. In fact, I realized with bemusement that it was smooth enough to have a dim reflection of me in it.

“Well, not much longer.” I reached up and focused, and the stone suddenly gave under my fingers like butter.

Too much. I took a handful of it away without thinking. I tried again, this time remembering the exact procedure I’d perfected over the past couple of days. This time I ended with a scooped-out handhold with a perfect grip.

The entire mountain was of course an impossibility. It was also more than ever clear, now that I could look out over things, that I wasn’t exactly in the same world that I’d been born in. Here I was above the ground at what must be, by now, over 50,000 feet, but the sky was only a little darker blue, and while it was pretty brisk right now it was going to warm up later – and I could still breathe. This kind of thing would be pretty obvious on satellite view, so we were in the parallel, different universe of the Faerie for sure.

So here I was, climbing a mountain of solid cloud. One that I could scoop out like soft butter if I wanted, or walk on like it was stone. That wouldn’t save me if I fell, though, not from this height. Oh, sure, if I focused it’d be like butter, or even water, instead of stone, maybe even cotton candy, but if you hit anything at terminal velocity… well, there’s at least two reasons you call that “terminal”.

So, I thought, why the hell is he risking his hero doing this mountain-climbing stunt?

I gave myself another handhold, pressed on. Iris Mirabilis was hard to figure. When I first met him he greeted me in a friendly-enough fashion – aside from that lightning-ball stunt – but I’d at first gotten the impression he didn’t like me much. That had changed in the last few months, and I just didn’t know why, which bothered me. I’ve always been used to people not liking me, and other people liking me, but it’s not often that someone would change their opinion without my understanding what I’d done to manage it.

Still, that wasn’t going to help me with the business at hand. I settled down and started climbing for real.

It was a few hours later that it happened. That’s always the worst point – you’ve been going long enough that you’ve got a routine, you’re starting to get really tired, you’re thinking about maybe getting lunch, something like that and then –

I squeezed too hard, lunged up a bit too much, and suddenly hand and foothold broke off under me.

I plummeted downward like a rocket; gravity, at least, worked just exactly the same here as it did back home, something for which I really was not grateful right now. I grabbed for my rope, held it in my gloved hands, tried to time it so I could slow myself gradually rather than –

I mistimed it; all my weight slammed onto the rope, and the safety spike popped out of the cliff like a rotten tooth. “Ohhh crap,” I heard myself say in a sort of “Hellboy” tone.

After the momentary pause I was heading back down fast, and the recoiling rope caused the spike to bash me insultingly in the head. This did, at least, remind me I had other spikes. I pulled two from the belt harness I periodically replenished, gripped them tight, and hammered down.

With my mortal will focused on the spikes, the metal tore into the stone easily. My arms screamed protest at the impact, though, because it was like trying to hold a blunt knife straight as it tried to cut through a moving couch. The noise was incredible, a screeching wail of stone and steel with sparks showering like a fountain from the point of impact. I saw the spikes wearing away, bending —

—I released those two, grabbed two more, slammed them in, and –

W H A M!

Slowly, I picked myself up. “Well… I’m alive. That’s a good thing on my checklist, I think.” I was in a ten-foot deep miniature crater, and by the way the wall on my lefthand side was cracking, I suspected there wasn’t much rock that way. I carefully stood up and pulled myself gingerly upward. As my eyes cleared the edge, I cursed.

I had just landed on – well, mostly through – the ledge I’d camped on.

Most of the morning had just gone to waste.

I took a few minutes to cool down, because my first impulse was to just tear my way up the mountain with bare hands as fast as I could go – something which would undoubtedly quickly end with me falling again without anything but the bottom to break my fall, and me.

But once I had my emotions under control, I began to climb with a calmly infuriated energy. I was sick and tired of climbing this apparently unending mountain, but I was not going to let it beat me. Grip, control, pull, step, grip, control, pull, step, up and up, every few hundred feet another spike, grip, control, pull, step…

I felt my stomach growl, paused, hung myself on a couple of spikes and ate a sort of compressed granola-type thing Poly had given me. I did finally have a smile at that, because some trace of her perfume lingered on it somehow, storms and flowers touching my nostrils. Then I went back to climbing. Dig handhold, grip, control, pull, step…

Suddenly I reached up and there was nothing there. No, wait, there was, but inward…

I pulled myself up once more, shoulders and hands and neck screaming, and saw a much shallower slope, a ridge running straight to the peak of the mountain, and – standing precisely on the peak – the immense figure of Iris Mirabilis, looking somehow small against the vastness of the mountain. Despite my exhaustion – I realized now that it was evening, the sun setting and casting a rich rose over Caelorum Sanctorum – I rose to my feet and trotted the remaining few hundred feet to the peak.

It was cooler here, but still nothing like the sub-arctic unbreathable chill of near-space I’d have run into on Earth, that I’d almost died in the one time I lost contact with Poly on the way here.

Iris looked down and smiled as I reached him. “Well done. The evening of the fifth day, and you stand on the peak of the Mountain.”

“You seem to have hitched a ride on a ski-lift or something. I didn’t notice you climbing.”

He laughed. “I climbed this mountain more than once in my youth, and in some wise it is a harder climb for me than you.”

Looking at his heroic frame, I grinned back. “I suppose it might be, at that. So, no offense, but what the hell was the point of my spending five days clawing my way up this impossible mountain?”

He looked serious – not grim, as he had with other questions I’d posed on occasion, but grave. “There were many points, in fact, to this apparently purposeless challenge. The simplest, and most to the point in our ultimate purpose, was to see you alone, set a task that you were not forced to complete – that you could choose to abandon at any time, or could simply fail at without direct consequence, and a task which presented no little risk to you. It is in my mind that when first you came here – even had I been able to grant you in an instant the skill and strength you now have – you would have given up that climb long ere you reached the summit. Would you say I was wrong?”

I thought on that for a few moments, gazing back down towards the Rainbow Fortress, a tiny toy castle so far away that in the fading light it was hard to make out at all. Finally I sighed. “No… no, I’d say you were right. I’ve had a lot of projects I started and gave up on after a while.”

“But not this? You hold our fate in your mortal hands, Erik Medon. What guarantee have we that this is different for you?” Despite the words, it wasn’t an accusation, or even a demand. It was, to my surprise, simply a question.

I looked up at the Rainbow Lord; his face here was … different than in the Throne Room or other parts of the castle. He was no less impressive, no less powerful, but I saw lines of worry and care which I had never noticed before. “I wish I had a guarantee for you. All I can say is that…” careful, Erik, careful… “… the realm of Faerie, the land of Oz, and all these things are part of my soul in a way nothing else is. For years those were my favorite stories, and in some ways very privately so, because I never met anyone else who knew them all until I was much, much older. Baum’s stories … they’re one of the top five things that shaped my entire life, and finding out that they’re real… there are no words, Iris Mirabilis. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to speak and write, but I have no words to say what this place and… its people mean to me.”

He allowed a faint smile to touch his face, and I thought for a moment I saw a slight gleam in his eye that I couldn’t quite read. Then he straightened up.

“Fairly spoken, and true. We are forced to rely on your heart and your head, Erik Medon; an unlikely hero you seemed when first you arrived, as you yourself admitted, yet much has become clearer to me since that day.

“Another reason I had you climb Caelorum Sanctorum is that here – and here alone – can I be absolutely certain that I speak to you with none other to hear. While I believe my castle is secure, while I have done all that can be done to maintain the secrets of my house, I know full well I am beset by enemies of surpassing cunning and power perhaps vaster than my own, who were able to fell the greatest of the kingdoms of Faerie.”

“So while you’re probably right, you’re still not going to take more chances than you have to.”

“You have the right of it. Truth be told, I would have had you brought and trained here, were it possible, that it be utterly impossible for any eyes save my own to know who and what you were.”

I looked around the peak. The top was actually quite broad, with the literal peak – the highest point – a couple hundred yards away, a miniature mountain itself about sixty feet high and a few hundred wide. “Why couldn’t you?”

“In a moment,” he said, postponing that answer.

“Okay, then why did you want to have me up here where no one else can spy on us?”

“Because there are a few things I must say which cannot be said in my throne room, regardless of their truth.” He dropped to one knee in front of me – which still left his head well above mine. “Erik Medon, I must apologize to you. I have committed – and must continue to commit – a grave wrong upon you.”

“Er… how do you mean that?”

“In two ways, if I am to be honest. Firstly, even now – a year after you arrived – there are elements of the Prophecies which I have not told you, and cannot. Even though it is possible that they may have some vital key to your survival.”

I’d known there were some things he was probably still holding back, but that was a new, and unsettling wrinkle. “You’re saying that the other material in the prophecy – the stuff you haven’t told me yet – might be something that could save my life?”

He considered, then nodded slowly. “It is… possible. Not certain, not, perhaps, even probable, given what I now know about you and the other aspects of the Prophecy. And of course you and I are both aware of the terrible dangers of acting too overtly on Prophecy unless it is absolutely necessary.”

Yeah, the classic Evil Overlord Mistake: someone makes a prophecy that a certain baby will be your downfall, so you run out and kill off all the babies that meet the spec, except naturally you miss just ONE of them, and she grows up being trained for vengeance upon the baby-killer. If you’d just left things alone, she’d have grown up to be a farmer. “Yeah. I know. But … that’s still pretty hard to just ignore.”

“And thus I must beg your forgiveness. For as I understand the Prophecy, I have no choice but to withhold this information.”

And maybe get me killed in the end… but that’s part of the risk of any hero-ing. I shook my head, then laughed a bit. “You’re forgiven, I guess. You’re the King, and you have to make the call as best you can.”

“I thank you.” He did not rise. “And in the second case, I wrong you in the simple fact of your presence. I – not Polychrome, though she was my agent and, she has said to me, blames herself for this – I called you forth from your world, brought you here to my castle, and I have had you forged into the best weapon that could be managed, all to protect my people. This is not your war. Even if there is, as you and I suspect, a connection between your world and mine, it is … unfair that you be drawn from your world in a single day, lacking time or knowledge, and set on this course. I feel it was necessary… but still I am ashamed that I, Iris Mirabilis, must hide myself behind a True Mortal and pin the hopes of my kingdom on one who owes me no such service… especially as we both know the probable end of that service.”

No wonder he didn’t want to say this in his throne room. He’s implied some of this, but no King can afford to be caught doing this kind of abject apology.

But it occurred to me that he was also right. I was owed this apology. But, as I looked at his bent form, not like this. If he’s being honest, he deserves honesty.

“Iris Mirabilis, stand up.”

He saw the expression on my face, and stood, a questioning look on his own.

“Understand something, please, and perhaps it will remove your need for any apology.” I took a deep breath. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m not doing it for your kingdom. I’m not even, entirely, doing it for Oz. I’m doing it for…”

He raised a brow at my hesitation. “Yes?”

In that moment, a part of my courage failed me. I finished the sentence, “… for myself. For my own dreams, for my own spirit.” Which was true, as far as it went. But it did not quite go far enough, and perhaps I should have… but I could not bring myself to state the unvarnished truth facing Iris Mirabilis here, alone.

For a moment I was sure that he knew exactly what the real ending of that sentence would have been. His violet eyes seemed to burn through my own straight into my brain, and I was suddenly very aware that it would take very little effort from him to send me falling to my death, training or no.

But whatever he knew or suspected, he said nothing; instead he straightened. “Then… no apology is needed, I suppose. I have given you an honorable route to achieve your own goals. So be it.” He turned towards the other side of the mountain, away from the Fortress. “To answer your other question, because this mountain is sacred to us.”

Caelorum Sanctorum. No surprise there, at least not entirely. “So no training field on top of the Mountain of the Heavens.”

He smiled very faintly. “No. That would be… not wise.” He looked outward. “Erik Medon, you go to fight for all Faerie. I felt… it was only proper you stand here, where no mortal has in… millennia, at least. The Above watch us. Sometimes, rarely, they give us a sign. But even without a sign, this is a sacred place and one of great import for those who begin on such a journey.”

“The Above and ‘they’… so it’s several gods.” I was still unsure what to think of the whole god thing, but if even Iris took it seriously…

He gave a surprisingly open smile. “Several indeed. And hard to know the truth of them it is, as hard perhaps for us as knowing the truth of Faerie is for you. Yet –” he broke off. “Look! Mortal, look there. Do you see?”

The deep vault of the sky here was a deep cerulean blue, with only a few wisps of high cloud. But in one of those wisps, for a moment, something flashed. At first, it seemed to be just a sundog, the phantom rainbow glow from ice-crystals. But it bloomed and deepened, and for an instant of time that seemed as brief as the moment between life and death, and as long as eternity, I saw into that spectral realm, streets that glittered with gold and emerald, a mighty palace that seemed made of great beams of wood set in a pattern almost familiar, and – in a fraction of that timeless instant – figures of untold majesty.

Then it was gone. But I had no doubt what I had seen. “That… those buildings, the way the roofs angle…” I could barely bring myself to even try to say it; I felt a bone-deep chill of awe and disbelief, in some ways stronger than that I’d had when first I met Polychrome.

“And so I know you, Erik Medon, know your heart by what you have seen; not that you have seen it, but by what that sight is to you.” He nodded slowly, seeming almost as affected by the sight as I. “Perhaps you do have a warrior’s heart within. But whatever the meaning, they have given us a sign. They are watching. I shall hope this means we have their blessing as well.”

“But… does that mean… are you…?”

“There are questions best left unanswered, Erik Medon,” he said quietly. “Take that to be whatever answer you prefer. You saw … what you saw. It is a sight given to few enough of my people, and even less often to yours.”

I nodded slowly. I wasn’t going to get that answer. But as he summoned his Rainbow to take us, I could not help glancing back and thinking of the Rainbow that bridged heaven and earth, and the god who watched over it with a horn, seeing all upon which he fixed his gaze… and look up at the massive figure leading me to his palace, and wonder.

 

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 40

1636 The Viennese Waltz – Snippet 40

Hayley gestured Carla to a bench and came over to sit down next to her. Hayley’s dark brown hair was held back with a scrunchy and there was a grease smudge on her forehead that Carla wanted to wipe away.

“What can I do here to make money?” Carla didn’t mean to say it that way, but it just spilled out of her mouth as soon as she opened it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that, but I don’t know how things work here. And . . . well, Mom and Dad didn’t exactly ask my opinion before they brought me here.” Though she didn’t know it, that was the right thing to say.

“I’ll try to help,” Hayley said. “What do you know about?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I was in theater arts at Grantville High, stage setting, some acting. I’ve learned German, of course, and some French and Latin. From before the Ring of Fire, I know tap dancing, though I’m out of practice. Mom and Dad had me taking lessons since I was six, and I didn’t like ballet as much as tap. And I can play the piano. Not real well, but I can play it. They made me take a gymnastics class on Saturdays. I’ve sort of kept that up since the Ring of Fire. Wednesdays were Japanese classes, ’cause Dad said the Japanese are really big in electronics.”

“I doubt Japanese is going to be much use, but maybe the piano.” Hayley paused a minute. “Do you know how a piano is made?”

“Sort of. I know the basics.”

“See if you can find out if anyone owns the patent on pianos. And if someone does, they probably don’t know how to build them. You can probably make some money working with whoever they have trying to build them. I don’t know about the tap dancing or gymnastics. Would the English Ladies think it was a good idea? Maybe you could teach tap or gymnastics at the English Ladies school.”

Carla grimaced at that.

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s the school. The students aren’t the children of the washer woman. They’re pretty status conscious and I’m not sure how comfortable they would be with going to school with someone who is being paid by their parents to teach them something.”

“I’m glad we have the tutor,” Hayley said. “Are you doing the correspondence course?”

“No. No one knew we were leaving. I didn’t know we were leaving. We have some course work in the baggage we brought, but not enough. And it’s been turned over to the English Ladies as my tuition to the school.”

“Well, that’s good,” Hayley said. “At least some of it will get to the people here. What courses?”

“We have the textbooks I was using in Grantville, both a copy of the English version and new German version. Biology, comparative history and German lit, also stage dressing and blocking, and studio management. It’s the senior year stuff for theater arts behind-the-scenes program. Before this happened I was going to be the down-time Frank Capra or Busby Berkeley.

“But it’s just the text books, not the course notes and like I said, my parents gave them to the English Ladies, so I have to share them with the whole school. And it’s not like I can write back to Grantville and get another copy. I think the books are hot.”

Carla was trying very hard not to cry. None of this had been her idea, but she was going to be tarred with the same brush as her parents. It wasn’t fair.

“Well, I’ll talk to Herr Doctor Faust and see about getting your school copies of the course outlines.”

Carla choked a laugh. “Your tutor is Dr. Faust? Has he sold his soul yet?”

“No, but he does get teased about his name a lot,” Hayley said repressively. “The stories are over a hundred years old, even in this time. And his taking up natural philosophy rather than theology fit too well with the legends.”

“Sorry,” Carla said.

“It’s okay. He’s a nice guy, and I think he’s sensitive about it, even though he tries to laugh it off. So I thought I should warn you.” Hayley changed the subject. “I can write back to Grantville. Are there any messages you want me to send?”

“Yes, I had some friends who came to the school from Rudolstadt. Not that I have any idea what I’m going to say.”

Carla looked at her watch. It was a down-time-made pocket watch. Those could be had in Grantville and Magdeburg now. “Oh, shoot. The girls from school are watching the emperor. Do you know how long he’s going to be driving around the track?”

“Not long. He generally goes for about ten minutes at a stretch. You should probably get back to them.”

“About that, Hayley. Some of them have made some comments about you being just the daughter of a mechanic. Which they figure is about the same as a groom in the imperial stables. Should I tell them you’re part of the Barbie Consortium and could buy their parents out of pocket change? I don’t know if you’ve been keeping quiet about it on purpose or if they were just being snooty.”

“Well, they are just being snooty.” Hayley smiled. “What’s wrong with a groom, after all? But, no. Don’t tell them, please. I really don’t want them pressuring me, or their parents pressuring my family, about money.”

“I won’t say a thing.” Carla assured her, thinking, Well, that at least gives me an in.

“Thanks,” Hayley said. “And I’ll be thinking about what you can do to earn a bit of extra cash.”

****

Carla ended up too busy to do much in the way of starting businesses because the English Ladies put her to work teaching algebra to the young ladies of good family. Not on the basis of her owing it to them or anything. Just because she had had algebra and knew more about it than anyone else. About half Carla’s school day was spent as the teacher of this or that up-time discipline, often as not with two or three of the English Ladies as students. It put an uncomfortable distance between her and her fellow students, but the English Ladies didn’t seem to care.

 

Castaway Planet – Chapter 02

Castaway Planet – Chapter 02

Chapter 2

Laura smiled as she dropped through the entry hatch to see that her husband, Akira, had just finished strapping Hitomi into her crash seat. The seven-year-old was behaving very well, clutching her winged-wolf plush and pretending it was flying back and forth in front of her, but otherwise sitting still. “You made good time,” she said, giving Hitomi’s inexplicably blonde hair a ruffle and kissing Akira on the cheek as she passed.

“Hitomi and I were taking a break in the exercise room,” Akira replied, making sure his own long, black hair was firmly tied back, “so we were not far away.” He glanced back to their second-youngest. “Melody, tighten your restraints.”

“Daaaad,” Melody protested in the tone of put-upon children everywhere, “it’s a drill, not an emergency, and the straps squeeze too much.” She looked appealingly at Akira, her face and hair looking like a miniature mirror of her father’s Japanese features.

“Don’t argue with your father,” Laura said firmly. “The point of a drill is to do everything right all the time, so that if a real emergency ever does happen, you don’t have to think about whether you’ve done it right when it counts; you just do.”

She finished locking down her carryon. “We’re still two short. Outward Initiative, this is Laura Kimei. Where are Caroline and Sakura?”

The omnipresent AI that ran the starship Outward Initiative responded immediately. “Caroline is very nearly at your assigned shuttle. Sakura was in cross-corridor E-3 and will arrive in a few minutes.”

Laura nodded, and tried to ignore Melody’s predictable grumbles. Sure enough, Outward Initiative had barely finished speaking when Caroline dropped precisely through the center of the entranceway, landed, and walked to her location, locking down her own carryons with perfect, practiced motions. “All ready, Mom,” she said, sitting down and locking in.

At least one of my children is organized. Though sometimes a bit much for her own good.

Laura sat down and strapped herself in, bringing up the telltales for the shuttle on her own iris displays. She couldn’t pilot such a ship — few people could, and of her family the only one who had any idea how such a ship flew was Sakura — but she knew the check routines.

Landing Shuttle LS-5 was one of over one hundred similar shuttles, spaced evenly around the spinning habitat ring of the giant colony ship Outward Initiative. The “Trapdoor Drive”, which was how the ancient Bemmie word for the faster-than-light device translated, may have reorganized a lot of views of physics, but it hadn’t given them the ability to generate gravity on demand, so habitat rings still spun, and probably always would. For a lifeboat, this was convenient; to launch away from the main ship simply required detaching the links and centrifugal force would hurl LS-5 away from Outward Initiative.

 

LS-5 was already loaded with most of the cargo the Kimei family was bringing with them to the colony on Tantalus (formal designation EC-G5-4-100-11) — medical equipment and supplies, biological research and analysis systems, and the most current 3D manufacturing systems which would produce just about anything given the right materials as input. They were lucky they got one all to ourselves, given that there were over a thousand colonists on this mission.

No, she corrected herself. Not luck, just supply and demand. The only luck is that they needed both doctors and biologists, so we got double priority for me and Akira.

Sakura suddenly plummeted through the hatch and instantly ran toward the pilot’s console, dragging her carryall bag with her. The console wouldn’t actually be active except in a real emergency, but Sakura had argued that if there was a real emergency, it only made sense to have the only person with any flight training already sitting there. “Hi Mom, Dad, drill number one thousand six hundred twenty seven can now complete! And look who’s with me!”

“It’s only drill number thirty-seven,” Caroline corrected Sakura. “We do one drill a week on average and we’re almost halfway to Tantalus. And what are you doing here, Whips?”

Laura saw Whips’ arm-tendrils curl inward nervously. “Well, Sakura said the regulations claimed I should go to the nearest designated boat, and…”

“And she was perfectly right, Harratrer,” Laura assured him, using his official human name; the tendrils relaxed. “Just get your tie-downs on. Outward Initiative, let Harratrer’s pod know that he’s with us during this drill.”

“They have been informed,” Outward Initiative replied. “Proceed to Phase II of drill.”

Melody sighed from her seat. Some drills ended once Phase I — getting to the lifeboat — was completed, but with Phase II — actual preparation for launch — being tested, there was no getting around the need to finish strapping in properly. “What a pain…” she muttered.

The display in front of Laura was a “reality overlay” that included status telltales as well as enhancing key images in reality. She could see everyone’s medical condition and current location status, but there was still procedure to follow. “Everyone settle down, we’re doing count-off. Laura Kimei, here and secured. Nothing to report.”

“Akira Kimei here and secured,” her husband said immediately. “Nothing to report.”

“Caroline, here and secured. Nothing to report,” the seventeen-year-old said quickly.

“Sakura, here and secured! Nothing to report!” said the irrepressible black-haired girl from her pilot’s seat.

“Melody, here and secured,” came the bored voice of the ten-year-old in the seat behind her. “The straps dig into me. Otherwise nothing to report.”

“Hitomi and Skyfang!” announced Hitomi proudly. “Ready to fly!”

“Harratrer of Tallenal Pod, here and secured,” said Whips in his usual calm, slightly buzzing tones. “Nothing to report.”

“All present and secured. Pilot’s station, report status.”

She could see Sakura straighten with pride. “Pilot Station reporting! Launch systems… green, on standby. Autopilot and AI Support, green, on standby. Maneuver rockets, green, all self-checks complete. Life support, all green, fully supplied. Cargo integrity, all green. Nebula Drive, green, seals intact, updates complete. Emergency Trapdoor Drive, green, seals intact, updates complete. Nuclear reactor, all green, on minimal operating level. Atmospheric jets, all green, secured and sealed. Variable configuration actuators, all green. Sensor systems, all green. LS-5 ready for launch, Mom.”

Laura smiled at the last word. Not quite the formal tone preferred, but she’d checked off all the vital systems. Laura could, of course, see all of that on her displays, and in fact the operation of LS-5 would be done entirely by the onboard AI if a real emergency occurred. All AIs except the main shipboard AI were kept shut down at most times, of course, because the colonists would be on a world with minimal automation aside from whatever they brought with them.

“Good,” she said, then went on with the procedure — it was her turn. “Medical station — all crew and passengers show green.” Not surprising, of course; not only did she track her family’s health, and that of over half the colonists on board, regularly, but modern medical treatment combined with the standardization of medical nanotech implants had virtually eliminated poor health for those who didn’t simply abuse their bodies to the limit. It won’t be long before doctors become completely obsolete, she admitted to herself. And honestly? I think I’d be okay with that.

The simple check procedure done and everything on LS-5 showing green, Laura relaxed back into the secured chair. There was nothing to do now but wait while everyone else finished checking off and the usual wait to cycle through the launch sequence as though they were actually doing an evacuation. This week, unfortunately, the sequence was starting from the last shuttle and counting down, which meant they’d be waiting a while.

She activated the nose cameras, giving her a view of Outward Initiative. As the whole ship spun, not just the hab wheel, there was no relative motion, so the great ship’s forward section, silver with multiple patterns of other colors from the logos and flags of its builders and supporters, glittered unmoving and stark in the exterior floodlights against the utter, unrelieved blackness of the… not-exactly-space that was generated around them by the Trapdoor Drive. Three kilometers long and well over a kilometer wide, Outward Initiative was one of the larger human vessels operating today — though not quite the largest.

She could never look at that sight, of the impossible-black space and the brilliant starship, without thinking on what it meant that she could be here, with her family, traveling at eighty times the speed of light to another star. Barely two hundred years ago, we were still stuck in our own solar system, all alone in the universe… and then it all changed.

Changed, when Dr. Helen Sutter discovered an alien skeleton in earthly strata sixty-five million years old. Changed, when NASA and the Ares Corporation discovered an ancient alien base hidden within the Martian moon Phobos, and another on Mars itself.

And changed forever when Dr. Sutter, trapped beneath the ice of Europa, discovered that the aliens had left behind one last, incredible, wonderful legacy: a new, intelligent species that turned out to be as curious and eager to learn as any human being ever was.

Laura smiled and glanced back, seeing everyone — even Hitomi, for a miracle! — sitting quietly. Melody’s slightly-glazed look showed she’d brought up one of her immersive games to pass the time, or maybe one of the interactive books she liked. Whips was relaxed, his three-sided form rounded slightly from the pressure of the artificial gravity, and the rippling patches of light and color on his sides showed he was in a good frame of mind.

Her husband caught her eye and smiled and winked. He’s still as gorgeous as when I met him, she thought. Akira Kimei was dancer-slender, delicate featured, with black hair so long he had to pay constant attention to controlling it whenever he might be entering a low-gravity area — a bishonen even at the age of forty-three.

She winked back. Of course, being forty-three now is a lot different than it used to be; I’m forty-five but I haven’t aged that much since I was in my early twenties. With average lifespans over a hundred and seventy-five, “old” had been redefined quite a bit.

Sakura’s wireless link was active, and Laura smiled. Sakura never stopped talking even when she had to be quiet. Sometimes she was a bit sorry for Whips, but the Bemmie adolescent and Sakura had been best friends for years, even before they applied for the colony trip. She supposed he’d gotten very good at listening along the way.

She gave a satisfied sigh and settled back.

Alarm klaxons suddenly screamed, and as her stunned mind tried to grasp what that meant, the pressure door to the hatch slammed shut and locked.

“Oh, my God…” Sakura said, and Laura heard fear in the usually fearless voice.

Stars bloomed into existence around them; Outward Initiative was — incredibly — no longer in the Trapdoor Drive mode.

No, her horrified mind said numbly, It’s worse than that.

For one splintered fraction of an instant, she saw something in the displays that was utterly impossible; a ghostly shimmer of structures below them, as though part of Outward Initiative was here, with them, and the rest… not.

Even as she saw that, even as Sakura’s shocked gasp was dying away, there was a thud and a virulent flare of green-white light, and LS-5 was suddenly spinning away, uncontrolled, free-falling, lights momentarily flickering and threatening to send them into darkness. With only fragments of metal and composite following it, LS-5 hurtled away into the emptiness of interstellar space.

 

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 43

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 43

Chapter 43: Beware of Spooks Leaving Gifts

I stared down at the disk in my hand. The fact that it contained possibly treasonous information made it seem as heavy as lead. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t the worst of the things I had to deal with. My date with Sylvie last night, our third “real” date, had been bittersweet at best. We were happy to be together finally, but another fact overshadowed our enjoyment: despite three days of careful work, Syl, Verne, Morgan, and their few other trusted contacts had turned up precisely nothing. My “brilliant idea” was a washout, and Verne was worse than ever. Once in a while he seemed to improve slightly for a few hours, but it always came back. No mystical influences alien to the house. No mental controls on Kafan that they could find. Nothing.

I sighed. Syl wasn’t coming over today — the Silver Stake had three shipments that needed to be classified, and she didn’t want to be faced with Verne right now anyway.

I glanced at another envelope on my desk, one which in any other circumstances would be causing me to call up Syl for champagne and a very, very expensive dinner out. But even it barely gave me a momentary smile. I sighed; putting the CD into a protective case, I put the case into my backpack. Time to send it off on a delivery.

As I opened the front door, I saw a package lying on the doorstep. I picked it up, noting that it had no mailing stamps, no return address, nothing.

Belatedly it occurred to me that being in this business I might expect to start getting mail bombs soon. Well, if it was a bomb, it certainly wasn’t movement activated. I hefted it a couple of times; light, not much more than paper in here, if anything. There could still be enough plastique in it to do serious damage, though; it didn’t take much high explosive to do a number on you.

I shrugged. Not likely to be a bomb; what the hell. I ripped it open.

No explosions. Looking inside, I saw another envelope and a sheet of paper. It was a note:

Jason, you have the god-damned devil’s luck. Here are the IDs. Destroy the disk. Since I know you’re too damn curious for your own good, I’ll tell you that somehow whatever you’re up to got the attention of one of my bosses and they caught me. Instead of shutting us down, he told me to make the IDs. Must be personal — he told me not to even mention this to the other members of our, um, group. So this one’s free. But I’d worry, if I were you. If even HE thinks you’re involved in something important enough to let you off a felony charge without so much as a warning, you’re playing with nukes, not fire.

Jammer

I stared at the package, then opened the envelope. Birth certificate… passport… driver’s license… Jesus, even documents showing he was proficient in woodworking and construction (about the only salable skills I could find) and a Black Belt certification from Budoukai Tai Kwan Do in California. I looked closer. That was a genuine passport, seal and all.

Who were these people? And what the hell had I gotten myself into now?

 

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 42

Paradigms Lost — Chapter 42

Chapter 42: Reaching Limits

TO:{Jason Wood}wisdom@wis.com

FROM:{The Jammer}

SUBJECT:EXCUSE ME????

Did you have ANY idea what kind of mess you were trying to get me into? No, let me revise that. Do you have ANY idea what THAT kind of mess can do to me?

Dammit, Wood. This guy’s an international fugitive and you want me to give him a bulletproof ID? What are you mixed up in THIS time?

So there were limits to what the Jammer would take casually. Nice to know, but I wished he’d stayed in his omnipotent mode for a while longer.

Look, I know enough about you to know that you know perfectly well who this guy is, at least on the public-international level. So, since I also know you’re not into helping criminals every day of the week, I’ll assume you know something I don’t know, hard as that is to believe, that makes this guy worth helping. Okay. But for this little bit of work, I’m charging. Not money, naturally. You’ll make available a writable CD-ROM on a dial-in line, at 2:15 Tuesday evening. When it’s finished writing the data that gets sent to it, you’ll take the disk — without reading it, and believe you me I’ll know — and deliver it to some secure locale of your choosing. In a separate letter, you tell me the location. Once that’s done, I’ll deliver your IDs.

Oh, man. What was I getting myself into? He could be downloading anything from recipes to Top Secret documents into the drive, and I had no doubt at all that if I made a single attempt to read the contents that he would find out; he was that good.

But then again, what was I asking him to do? Make a set of ID for a known international criminal. And if my guesses were right, he might well be working for one of the organizations that was supposed to track Kafan down. No, the Jammer had the right to ask something like this; I was asking him to put his ass on the line for me, so he was asking me to stick my own neck out.

I typed out a very short reply,

Terms accepted

And sent it off.

A week into my work and I wasn’t really any closer to figuring out how to approach Senator MacLain without opening about a dozen cans of worms that were better left closed. On the other hand, I was starting, I thought, to close in on the location of this mysterious Project. The break had come a few days ago, when a search program had highlighted the Organization for Scientific Research; a check showed that not only had the OSR always been heavily involved in biological research, but it had previously had a couple branches in the Far East — one in or very near Vietnam. During the ’70s, those labs had been discontinued. A bit of digging on my part, however, showed that the discontinuance had actually been a transfer of ownership to interested parties, probably in the Viet government. Details on the site were vague — the OSR files from the ’70s were hard to access, since it had been a UN venture to begin with, and now that it had separated from the UN and become a private corporation it was possible all the old records not directly relevant to operation had been purged. And stuff that old often wasn’t online anywhere in any case.

It might be possible, however, to take the vague info I had and combine it with a careful modeling of the layout as Kafan remembered it and see if a pattern-recognition program could come up with anything using satellite photos of the area. Probably there were records of the installation on one of the intelligence computers — NSA, CIA, whatever — but I wasn’t about to try hacking one of those. This had to be an independent operation if at all possible. With Verne’s backing, we at least didn’t need to worry about whether we could afford it.

That brought up the next problem. Verne. Syl had tried a number of things, but though it appeared to help some, over the next couple of days Verne went downhill again. He was visibly older.

I closed my eyes. Genetically engineered people, ancient civilizations, vampires, priests…. damn, it was a wonder my head didn’t explode. All that stuff combined was enough to…

All that stuff combined?

I straightened. Reaching out, I grabbed the phone. “Verne? Sorry to disturb you, but I just thought of something.”

Verne’s weariness was now evident in his voice. It was still as rich, but the underlying tone lacked the measured certainty that was usually there. “And what is that, Jason?”

“Verne, you talked about how certain forces might have returned, right? Isn’t it possible that what’s happening to you is an attack? Maybe even carried by Kafan, not consciously, but nonetheless part of him?”

The silence on the other end was very long. Then:

“Not merely possible …” Verne said slowly, “but even probable. Nothing like this has ever happened to me, in all these thousands of years. Can it be coincidence that it happens now, of all times? Most unlikely. My brain must be affected as well, if I did not think of this myself.”

“Is there a way to find out?”

“Most likely,” Verne said. “With Sylvie’s help, Morgan and I should be able to determine if any mystical forces other than my own are operant here.”

“What about biological? You did say that living things could affect you.”

Verne hesitated a moment, considering. His voice, given hope, was stronger now. “I do not believe any disease, howsoever virulent, could affect me without some small mystical component. This was one of the Lady’s blessings, and it is not within the power of ordinary science to gainsay that, even in this era. My metabolism differs so greatly from that of anything else on this world that I doubt it would even be recognized as living by most tests. No, if this is an attack, it must be a magical one. Thank you, Jason.”

“No problem. Will you need me for anything?”

“No, my friend. You have given all that was necessary. We will endeavor to make this as short as possible, that your lady be not unduly inconvenienced.”

“Is it that obvious to everyone?”

Verne’s laugh was the first genuinely cheerful thing I had heard from him in a week. “Jason, such things are always obvious. And welcome, I assure you. You have finally accepted that which was always in your heart.”

“Don’t you start. I may have been slow and dumb, but I don’t have to be reminded every day.”

He chuckled. “Good night, Jason.”