Backflow Boxed Set

by F. P. Adriani

Copyright © 2019 by F. P. Adriani

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, without express written permission from the author and publisher.

Published by F. P. Adriani

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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This boxed set contains the three books in my Backflow series: Backflow, Firestone, and Omnivelocity.

*

Backflow

The backflow light went on just as the Demeter was approaching the Genteran station.

Genteran’s atmosphere was often quite chaotic, but making a soft landing on the planet now wasn’t too much of a problem for my ship: when the Demeter had been built years ago, retractable exhaust nozzles had been fitted into all of the main sides, and that omnidirectional thrusting capability allowed my crew and I to make very specific adjustments during both flying and landing.

For years I had been doing well with my shipping business; I could afford the expense of maintaining the Demeter’s complex design. However, that very complexity also meant errors in operation were more likely.

Gary, my lead engineer, had recently fine-tuned the Demeter’s sensor system to more immediately indicate if any backflow through vents and nozzles was happening—as it was now: that yellow light for the aft starboard nozzle was flashing on the silver panel in front of me.

Alone on the bridge and strapped into my captain’s chair, I pressed one hand to my forehead and pounded the other hand on the intercom button on the black electronic panel beside me. “Gary, the aft starboard backflow light is flashing me.”

“I see that,” Gary replied over the intercom. “I’m making adjustments—or at least I’m trying to.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” I said, my voice sharper than it probably should have been, and that was partly because, nowadays, I was always at least a little worried about my ship.

No matter that the Demeter was a quality spacecraft design, all machines were still subject to thermodynamic constraints, so would wear and probably never be exactly the same as before. And quality components to keep a quality design in good working order weren’t always available everywhere in the galaxy.

Over the past few months, the aging Demeter had been having more engine and nozzle problems, and, several times, my crew and I had been forced to stop at maintenance space stations; we’d lost time on our routes, including on our current route. And at this point, I just wanted to get done with this Genteran run, which would be my last major run for the rest of the month.

I really did not want to deal with anymore problems. Yet here was the backflow light….

Now Gary said, “You know that I’ve been making more adjustments to the fuel-rod calibration, but the rods are still sticking too much. Hydroambin fusion quite often creates pockets of vacuum-like space in the chambers. When we’re hovering a lot, like we have been to get correctly positioned for landing—if the rods don’t descend as fast as they should into the main chamber, the vacuum issue occurs more often, and it can cause reverse motions inside the system, even into a nozzle if there’s a pause in thrust. The total force then moves in reverse.

“It’s not an enormous reversal—like we’re not going to explode from high-pressure excessive contamination. The Rodrum Barriers take care of that. Still, nothing’s a hundred percent in every individual usage context. And the Rodrums will only start working once the backflow pressure begins approaching a specific threshold, which hasn’t happened now, as far as I can tell.

“But Genteran’s got pain-in-the-ass emission jets from subsurface venting at this time of year. I told you to expect a little contamination when we land—”

“But that was before we stopped at Trifold Station, Gary. I thought you meant that if you didn’t fix the liner in the starboard nozzle, then the engine would get contaminated. But the engineers at Trifold fixed the liner.”

“Well, you know very well that I can’t be certain of anything. The ship’s still fifteen years old. The liners aren’t entirely the original ones in this design. Anytime you refit or patch, there’s probably a weakness introduced into the material at those seams. Again, I don’t need to tell you that. You know materials science.”

“I know I do,” I said. “But, I’m not in engineering with you. And that means I can’t see minute-to-minute, every single thing that’s going on from here. I’m alone right now, too. Babs just left for her downtime…and we’re descending on course now. Five minutes to go till we near the surface hook-up, and now the backflow light’s gone out. Is that promising then?”

“Yeah, it’s promising. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go on again. Which means: don’t yell at me if it does go on again.”

I laughed. “Sorry I got too heated. I just want to get this done. This drop-off’s worth a lot of money, and the hydroambin deal I made is very reasonable—but you probably remember from the last time we were here that Genteran isn’t exactly a hotspot to be stuck in. I told you I’ve only been to this particular station once, years ago. It’s actually the oldest station on Genteran, and, based on what I’ve heard since, it still isn’t a state-of-the-art place. I just want in and out of here light-fast.”

“I know,” Gary said. “We’ve started the final approach to GS—I’ve been adjusting the forward top nozzle stream, minimizing. It’s still too much, descent is too fast. Steve, adjust all belly thrusters, 2% baseline for 30 seconds as the landing gear descends….”

Gary continued giving instructions to his staff, and, my heart pumping a little too hard for comfort, I watched the Demeter’s landing on my bridge’s front viewscreen, my eyes becoming absorbed in the view from below and before the ship.

The silver-gray silhouette of Genteran Station slid onto the bottom of the screen. Above the structure, where the Genteran sky was usually a yellow-green, today it was all green, with some streaks of bluish-gray, which made the land look as if it was an industrially polluted place, when it actually wasn’t. It was just quite a geologically active place, which was one reason why there weren’t many settlements on the huge planet. That humans had to live indoors here was another reason: while Genteran’s atmosphere did contain oxygen, it didn’t contain enough oxygen and did contain a few human hallucinogens….

Fortunately, Genteran had laid-back flight laws independent of any Interplanetary Commerce And Flight Committee rules, and that meant Genteran only dealt with an entry and exit if a ship asked for help, which was a setup I really preferred. Right before we first entered the atmosphere today, I had simply signaled the station about our approach.

The Demeter was too big to fly right to the station, so, using the landing gear, we now had to slowly drive along the enormous earthen-platform toward the station’s link-up terminal.

I raised the volume of the bridge speakers, so I could hear the bump-and-grind vibrations coming from the planet’s surface and shaking the Demeter’s lower decks and sensors. The Demeter was a long, relatively flat ship with only five main decks—

I glanced down at my silver panel to check something—and noticed another backflow light come on, this time from one of the belly nozzles.

“Gary!” I said, sitting up straighter against my chair’s strap.

“I know—I know,” Gary replied. “I see it. I’m dealing with it.”

I sighed hard, my eyes still on the yellow light. “I don’t understand. We haven’t used that nozzle since several minutes ago.”

“I think it’s a delay. We must have gotten backflow then, but the sensor didn’t pick it up right away.”

“Awesome. This is going well.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Gary said.

“I know,” I replied. Then I linked up my intercom with the cargo bay too, which was where Chen, the Demeter’s pilot, was.

I had done some piloting early on in my in-space career. I knew how to fly the Demeter and had been doing some of that flying today. But, piloting wasn’t something I preferred doing, and, most days, I usually had too many other things to do.

Chen usually had too many things to do too, and he usually did two things at once—like right now he was helping May, the cargo-bay director, and her assistants ready the cargo. There was a pilot’s console in the bay, from where Chen was also coordinating with Gary on landing the Demeter.

Years ago, I’d had many of the ship’s controls rigged up so that everything wasn’t limited to the bridge only. Just like the Demeter had exhaust capability all over, I wanted it to have bridge capability all over too, especially in case of an emergency.

“Chen,” I said over the intercom now, “I’m about to contact GS. Get ready for the numbers for hook-up pressure.”

“I’m ready,” Chen said fast.

“How’s the moving going?”

“We just finished it.”

“Good.”

Normally, my crew and I wouldn’t be prepping cargo at this late stage, but our last stop had been only the day before on the planet Jarox, and we’d unexpectedly picked up a large amount of extra cargo from there, cargo that I was hoping I could convince GS to buy. We had kind of just shoved in the load before we took off; the bay was packed now, and I was hoping that the cargo unloading at GS wouldn’t take long….

“I just got a message back from GS,” I said to both Gary and Chen. “I’m sending you the numbers.” I punched in some instructions on the keyboard extension in front of me; then I kept my eyes on the different camera views on the bridge viewscreen as the Demeter moved closer to the station.

Most of the huge sprawling structure looked like a dark, metal city, with little flecks of silvery electrical equipment all over. I could see no people anywhere outside, and, so far, no one had in-person answered any of my communications; I’d only gotten text-messages back.

Genteran wasn’t a popular place, largely because it was in a backwater area of the galaxy. But, I preferred doing business with forgotten places: because they weren’t visited as often, they were usually more amenable to buying whatever I was selling.

On my bridge viewscreen now, the station’s big, gray sleeve-extension emerged from the closest terminal and began rolling forward toward the starboard side of the Demeter. The sleeve would attach to the cargo-bay opening and become a sealed ramp-tunnel my crew and I could move through into the station.

It was early morning now on the planet; my plan was to unload the cargo and be gone before the evening. And I always intended to stick to my plans.

*

The sleeve was finally completely attached to the cargo bay, and I was finally walking through the gray tunnel and then into Genteran Station; the inside looked different now compared to the last time I was here—or at least compared to my memory of my last time here.

The struts supporting the high ceiling above me were rustier, and the floor was dirtier with the blackish sand that covered much of the ground on this part of the planet. The station’s air was drier, too; between that and the dusty black grit my booted feet kept kicking up, I couldn’t help coughing.

Getting stuck outside on Genteran wouldn’t kill a person very quickly or anything, but I’d suited up anyway. I hadn’t, however, pulled my helmet over my head. Considering the air inside the station now, I probably should have sealed my suit….

There was a cavernous room up ahead; slightly to my right inside that space, someone was sitting behind a black, table-like desk.

I walked up to him, a small smile on my face, and my personal transactions ledger and ICFC forms in my right hand. “I’m Captain Lydia Zarro,” I said to the table-guy. “My crew should be behind me in a few minutes with the cargo you ordered.”

The table-guy’s shoulders in his black shirt were far too relaxed, and his flushed face only nodded up at me. He looked as if he wasn’t about to speak, ever. I knew people tended to be apathetic on Genteran, but I really wasn’t in the mood for any bullshit today, including apathetic bullshit.

When the guy still didn’t say anything, I shoved the ICFC forms onto the table, my fingers pointing down at the dollar amounts.

His blue eyes followed my fingers. He finally spoke, but only to say, “I guess this is in order.”

“You guess? Are you in charge?”

“Sure. I can get you what you need. Someone mentioned plastics and minerals were coming in….”

“Yeah, and we’re supposed to pick up fifty containers of hydroambin.” I glanced around the big room, looking for a cargo loader—and cargo. But, other than some tables and a few people sitting at them, I saw none of the sealed red containers used for holding hydroambin.

Hydroambin was a form of strange matter; it was first discovered on an asteroid many years ago, and while Genteran wasn’t the biggest miner of hydroambin today, Genteran did mine quite a bit of hydroambin.

Small pellets were the natural form of hydroambin, but the molecules behaved like atomic nuclei: the hydroambin molecules were glued together so strongly by an unusual molecular force that they were extremely hard to break up. Hydroambin couldn’t easily be melted or turned into a gas; it was very stable and normally wouldn’t react with anything.

However, the molecules could undergo several types of natural decay over long periods of time, and they could also be split through a reactor process—a process that would yield enormous amounts of energy.

Both the natural decay and the reactor process would also yield some ambin alone as a byproduct, and, unlike hydroambin, ambin tended to be highly reactive and would usually try to bind with any hydrogen nearby, even if the hydrogen atoms had already been fused into molecules—under the right conditions, ambin could break up molecules to “vacuum” the hydrogen.

Safeguards were always built into the red hydroambin containers and also into reactors, so no ambin, especially liquid ambin or ambin gas, would get out: the Demeter’s borcradium reactor vessels were lined with hydrogen-composite nodules that would absorb unrecombined or unburned ambin. The nodules were scattered over the lining like bubbles of sand in certain spots, and the insides of hydroambin containers were usually constructed in a similar way, just in case any natural hydroambin decay had begun….

My eyes kept searching the big station room around me, but they still encountered no red containers. “Are you not prepared to sell us the ambin?” I asked the guy at the black table, but I really meant hydroambin. People tended to call hydroambin just ambin, partly because ambin was considered the most important component, and partly because that ambin usually had hydrogen attached was a given. And, right now, I was in too much of a rush to speak accurately; both my hands and my face were twitching in impatience. I felt sweat coating the inside of my suit, and, going on the wave of warmth hitting my face, it seemed like the whole fucking station was just too hot—the heat from the ongoing geological activity was yet another problem on Genteran….

The guy at the table sat up a little straighter, and a little sharply—as if he’d only just fully realized we were engaged in a business transaction. “I don’t know anything about the ambin,” he said now.

“Huh?” I replied, my mouth dangling open afterward, my breaths coming harder and faster. My right hand jerked to the right. “The ambin trade was part of the deal, as the ICFC forms say. If you don’t have the ambin to offset the cost of the cargo, the price on the cargo will go up.”

His hands pulled my ICFC forms closer. “Uh—uh…” he said.

And I stared down at the top of his dumb head.

Then he added, “We have a small staff and security detail here all the time, but the rest of us live at the local Housing Station. We only show up here when there’s business to be done. But I’m not in charge of that.” He stopped talking; then he stared up at my face.

Beneath my tightening lips, I ground my teeth together. “There used to be an office on the left—where’d it go?”

“I don’t know. I only just moved to this side of Genteran and this job this year.”

“Who the fuck am I supposed to deal with here—can you answer that?”

At the sound of my almost-yelling voice, I saw the other heads in the room finally turn my way. One head rose up; it was dark and attached to a tall slim body in a blue outfit that had seen better days.

“I’ll help you,” the head said as it came closer. Just like the guy behind the desk, this guy didn’t seem to want to smile either.

He took my forms from the table and read them for a moment. Then he said, “I’m supposed to be in charge, but we really are informal around here.”

“I can see that,” I snapped. Were they all fucking stoned? The air inside Genteran structures was always filtered, but there was a pretty strong hallucinogen, Hash, in Genteran’s outside air, and I knew that many of the planet’s residents would often step out there to get high.

Still, I’d never encountered such blithe Genteran people. I wondered now if the Hash was somehow still getting inside, and maybe that was why the people before me seemed sluggish. But, it was more likely that having to be indoors so much dulled their responses. It wasn’t natural for humans to live on many different planets with different atmospheres and sunlight profiles and without the greenery humans had evolved in. That was why my home away from the Demeter was still on Earth; I always spent my yearly, two-month breaks there. I had another place on the sandy moon, Pink, but I only used that cottage while I was on runs, whenever I decided I needed a break then.

I had intended to take a break soon after here. But whether I would be able to take one remained to be seen. If I couldn’t make a deal here on the cargo I’d been hauling around for here, then I’d have to find somewhere else to sell it to. Carrying around extra cargo for extra time meant extra mass I needed more energy to transport. I had been in business with the Demeter for ten years, and I always planned things down to the gram, down to the minute, and down to the penny. Yet lately it seemed like my plans always needed far too much adjustment when I was “on the road.”

I was about to open my mouth to the guy in front of me again when I heard the beeping of one of the Demeter’s cargo loaders from behind me. I turned around and spotted May sitting in the driver’s seat of the boxy gray loader, her hard yellow spacesuit helmet closed over her head. She stopped the loader and gave me a thumbs-up, but I had to flash her a thumbs-down.

She was pretty close, so I saw her surprised face. Then I saw her slow frown.

“I should have used my communicator sooner to tell you to wait!” I said then, my right forefinger now pressing the suit-communicator button on my other arm. “The deal hasn’t been done yet.” I spun back around to the guy in blue. “Well? Should I get back in my ship and leave or what? Do you people even give a shit?”

Apparently, they did give a shit because, though it took half an hour, we finally struck a deal close enough to the original deal I had planned. And it was a good deal: the station also agreed to take half of my extra cargo.

*

Hours later, May and two other loaders were finally moving from the station to the Demeter, carrying the hydroambin cargo I had been promised. Someone had stacked it farther back in the station than it should have been stacked, and it took longer to remove than it should have taken, but at least I was able to get some. I knew we would be getting too low on reactor fuel soon, and at some point Gary would need to electromagnetically fix more pellets to rods and fully reload the reactor, probably before we would get to the next layer of space, where we had to make another drop-off, right before we would hopefully be on our way to some much-needed rest….

The tall GS guy in blue was named Cambridge, and I worked with him at that same black desk in that same big room to finalize the transaction forms.

As we were doing that, Cambridge said, “Where you headed to next? Hope you’re not on a schedule.”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” I said, looking at him. “I’m making a drop-off at Sereska Station tomorrow.”

Cambridge pointed a broad, dark hand up at the ceiling. “Storms now. Look at the weather reports from Weather Central here.”

My eyes widened at him, but there was no computer anywhere in sight, and I didn’t have a portable computer on me; I couldn’t confirm Cambridge’s statement.

So I just nodded at him and said, “See you later,” then turned around toward the exit.

Soon, I was walking back through the quite dark sleeve toward the light at the opening of the Demeter’s cargo bay, and then I was stepping into the bright bay and Chen was coming toward me fast and telling me about the weather and that we couldn’t lift off for several hours at least, possibly not until the morning, or even later.

“What!” I said loudly, stopping so short that I dropped all of my transaction forms. “You’re kidding.”

Chen shook his head and sighed as he bent to pick up my papers. “I wish I was. But I’m not that funny.”

I was frowning heavily. “Well, if we’re stuck here, we’re stuck here. What can we do? I guess some of you can take this time to hang out at the hotspot Genteran Station is. I’ve never been in such a stimulating place with such passionate people. It took me thirty minutes to get them to accept that I wanted only one loader lifting at a time because there was no fucking room for more than one in the shitty narrow spot where they’d stacked the ambin. Have they been huffing the Hash for breakfast every day?”

Chen had pressed a palm over his blue shirt, and he was laughing hard now, his shiny black hair shimmering beneath the cargo-bay lights.

A small smile on my face, I slowly shook my head from side to side as I took the forms back from him. I turned away to walk across the cargo bay—and then I spotted Babs, my science expert, walking in; she was in her usual black shirt and pants, and her muscular thighs beneath were pumping fast.

“How are you doing?” I said to her when I reached near her and the spacesuit drop-off closet.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she said in a gruff, rushed voice, running an equally rushed hand over her black bob of hair.

I slipped off my yellow spacesuit and placed it in the slot where it would be vacuumed clean by the closet. I smoothed my hands over my red shirt and red leggings, then readjusted my belt and turned on my communicator built into there. When I turned around again, Babs was still there.

 “How’s Derry doing?” I asked Babs. Derry was her girlfriend and Derry had been taking care of some of the cooking on-ship—except for the past two days because she’d come down with a bad cold and had been in their cabin most of the time, which was at my suggestion, or really my order: an outbreak of anything on a spaceship just wasn’t good, even if it was only a common cold.

Babs walked with me out of the cargo bay and into the hallway. “Derry’s all right, but I wanted to talk to you about the reactor. I was just down there getting numbers from Gary, and he told me he had to recalibrate again and make more adjustments. There was also some contamination—”

“I know,” I said.

“Well, I told Gary three times over the past few weeks to douse the fuel rods with perfluor in the order of their location, so each calibration would last longer, but he didn’t listen to me!”

“Babs, I think he’s actually done what you said, if I’m not mistaken. He told me that yesterday. But, are you saying he’s being sexist? Because if you are, I’ve known him for fourteen years, and I haven’t seen anything like that from him.”

Gary had been the lead engineer of my ship for five years. He was a few years younger than I, but we were both over thirty-five, so we’d been around long enough to have quite a bit of experience behind us. Babs, on the other hand, had only been working on ships for a few years, and she and Gary often bickered over how to do the work here. It was one of those things that I felt I shouldn’t interfere with as a captain: Babs and Gary were both adults, so fixing this friction with each other was their responsibility. At some point, though, I probably would have to interfere, and that point seemed to be coming up….

Now Babs was saying, “I didn’t mean sexist; I meant stubborn.”

I couldn’t help laughing a little under my breath. “Well, that I have noticed about Gary.”

Babs smiled; then she rolled her brown eyes.

And, as if Gary had heard us talking, my communicator went off, and Gary’s voice came off my side and into the hall.

For an instant I was afraid he had heard us talking about him, but his words gave no indication of that. “Lydia,” he said, “could you come down to engineering as soon as you can?”

“All right. What’s up—something new?”

“No, just something old. But I’d rather explain in person.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

*

Babs kept going down the hall, but I disappeared down the stairway to the engineering deck, which was the lowest deck on the ship; the ship’s vast belly was below engineering, and there were a lot of workings in the belly area because of the reactor assembly above and because of the exhaust nozzles positioned around the ship.

I’d been in the belly of my ship before; it was a hot, rather dark place I didn’t enjoy visiting, so I hoped when Gary had said to come down to engineering, he meant engineering ONLY.

*

Fortunately, he had meant engineering only; unfortunately, he wanted me to come near to the reactor, near to the main reactor shaft, which was another thing I didn’t enjoy doing.

“You don’t expect me to go in there, do you?” I asked Gary. We were getting suited up in red, maximum-protection suits in one of the more open spots in engineering, where a dozen busy crewmembers were moving around working.

Gary turned to look at me now, his long fingers snapping up his red suit. His helmet’s diamond-glass was still open, and inside there, his thick, golden-brown mustache twitched above his mouth, as if he felt like laughing but he didn’t want to let it out. His brown eyes on me were sharp—with humor and maybe something else, a familiarity, like, You know I know how you feel, Lydia.

And now he said, “I go into the shafts most days. Why so afraid?”

“Well, if there’s nothing to worry about, why the suits?” I shot back. “There’s the field around the shafts anyway. The suits seem like a redundancy.”

“They are, really. But what if the electrical power failed and then the shafts were exposed to the air with no field around them to lock any free ambin that accidentally escaped from the core?” He must have seen my too-wide eyes and that my hands had stilled on my suit. I heard his low laugh, saw his mustache vibrating. “Stop worrying, Lydia. The field and all the ambin sensors are working fine; there’s no free ambin out here and, at worst, if there were free ambin and no water vapor nearby for it to rob hydrogen from, it would fall on your skin and give you a temporary rash till your skin cells regrew in.

“Always remember that this isn’t a true nuclear reactor. Even the hydrogen we fuse has been ambinized, so fusing it isn’t the same as with normal hydrogen isotopes. And any free quasi-neutrons can’t make it outside the core; they’re recaptured in the hydroambin-splitting fission process or in the ambin reduction chamber, or they’re absorbed by the stable neutron sponges in the core linings and workings. And, really, there’s never more than minimal a-day-at-the-beach radiation in the rod-shafts. Hydroambin reactors really are the safest kind of reactor ever built.”

“I know,” I said. “But I still don’t want to be near them. Humans didn’t exactly evolve in a reactor of any kind.”

“Nor in a spaceship, but you live most of your life in one.”

“Touché,” I said, and I could feel my cheeks were flushing. I yanked my suit’s red helmet over my head, to help hide my face.

And I saw the clear smile on Gary’s face now.

“So,” I said, “how’s the recalibrating work going? Oh—did Chen tell you about the weather reports? It looks like we’ll be stuck overnight! Chen says there’s too many strong electromagnetic eddies in the upper troposphere to lift off safely. He’s afraid the eddies will ‘scratch’ weaknesses into the outer shield.”

Gary nodded slowly, the short waves of his sandy-brown hair sliding against his cheeks beneath his red helmet; he pressed the final button to seal his suit just as I pressed the equivalent button on my suit. We waited a few moments for our bodies to adjust to breathing the suit-air. Then, over the suit-communicators, we continued our conversation, while moving toward where the shafts were in the back half of engineering.

In a careful voice now, Gary finally said, “Chen’s right about the eddies…but I could strengthen the shield and neutralize the eddies, one-by-one, if we move through the troposphere very slowly while running the atmospheric damping injectors.”

“We’ll use up more fuel then, Gary. You said you had to replace some of the beam engine filters, so you probably don’t have the beam engine running now, huh?”

His mustache shifted down at the corners; his face twisted in annoyance. Then he said in a hard voice, “I really don’t think lifting off would be a problem.”

We had almost reached the reactor shafts, and now I remembered my conversation with Babs. I stopped walking. “Gary, did you douse the fuel rods based on what Babs suggested recently—about their order?”

His helmeted head jerked toward me. “Where on earth did that come from?”

“Could you answer my question, please?”

I thought I saw his mouth tighten before he spoke. “Well, actually, yes. I did follow Babs’ suggestion…but something went wrong somewhere. I must have missed something or accidentally contaminated one rod with the effluent from the other’s dousing. It isn’t always easy working in the shafts using the robotic arms, or even when I’m in there myself, or if Steve is or whoever. Nothing’s a certainty.”

“You love saying that,” I replied. Then: “Gary, we’ve known each other a long time, and I love you, my friend…”

“…You…what?…”

“…But,” I continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “you have tendency to dismiss other people’s suggestions and stick to a predetermined plan. You’re in here far too much and you’re too used to controlling the whole show here!” I spread my arms to encompass the big space around us. “I’m giving you an order to make sure you fully consider other people’s suggestions. There’s more than one person who knows how to do each thing on here for a reason. Science is about looking for where you could be wrong. I know you probably know best once you take all the factors into consideration, but probably no one always knows best.”

Beneath the slight golden tint of his helmet’s glass, Gary’s cheeks reddened, a lot.

And then I felt kind of bad for what I’d said. Now I added quickly, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Gary.”

“You didn’t.”

I just glared at him.

And then he sighed hard. “All right. You did. But, maybe I need embarrassing once in a while. You tend to set me right somehow.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.”

We began walking again, and we finally reached the entry to the main reactor shaft. The shaft was on the right side of the large, long, box-like structure of the core, which was oriented parallel to the Demeter’s long axis.

The core wasn’t visible because three red rod-shafts surrounded the forward end of it, and in the back area, where several nozzles connected to the core’s combustion chamber—that back area of the core was behind a field and more walls, both of which protected the rest of engineering from the high temperatures of the combustion chamber and nozzles.

The core area was effectively a segregated space inside engineering, and the solid red wall of the shaft in front of me and Gary rose high toward the room’s gray ceiling. Gary pushed two buttons on the wall’s black electronic panel: one button to increase the protective field’s strength, and the other button to open the shaft. An instant later, the gaskets on the red panel wall and a connecting wall unlocked, and then the red wall in front of us slid open along a groove in the gray floor.

Inside the area between the shaft’s walls, it was somewhat dark. But I could still see the numerous, black-and-red speckled rod extensions; they pointed to the left, where the core’s primary vessel was, behind another field and a black wall.

“This is nice,” I said to Gary now, “but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. You said you wanted to show me something. So what am I supposed to be seeing?”

“Just watch,” Gary said, his gloved fingers manipulating some more buttons on that exterior electronic wall-panel.

And as he did that manipulating, I spotted something inside the shaft, over on the right side, where the back end of the rod extensions fitted into the side wall; a patch of foggy green began growing and glowing there, till it looked almost like Genteran’s sky. The bit of sky clung to the wall and curled toward the rods, then stopped just short of touching the hydroambin there.

My mouth fell open as I stared at the odd miasma. “What is that?”

“It happens only very occasionally,” Gary said. “It’s an exterior reactor plasma from a combination of factors.”

“Did the contamination do this?”

“No—though I think it’s probably increased the plasma’s lifespan. The few other times it happened, it lived so briefly that I didn’t get a chance to show it to you.”

I turned my head toward him. I could feel a curious little smile on my face. “How come you wanted to show it to me so much?”

My question seemed to have caught him off-guard, because now his head jerked slightly and his hands fell to his sides. Then, his brown eyes locked right onto mine and he said in a lower voice, “Now that is the question—”

Another voice broke into our conversation, coming from outside of our suits—Steve’s voice. “Gary, how long are you gonna be there? We’re supposed to back up Karen with the ion-pad installation….”

Gary pressed the speaker-button on his suit. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he said into the room around us. Then he clicked off that same button—and then his brown eyes slid right to my eyes.

I smiled at him and glanced back into the shaft; the green glow was still there, but it seemed to have shrunk a bit. “It looks smaller.”

“Yeah,” Gary said. “Maybe it’s finally going for good.”

“Well, I’m glad I got to see it while it was alive and thriving!”

“Me too,” Gary said, and he smiled big at me then, his brown mustache curving in a really pleasing-for-me way.

*

A few minutes later, Gary was walking away, and I was removing my protective suit. When I was finally in my regular red clothes only, I grabbed my transaction forms from where I’d left them on one of the panel-tables; then I walked out of engineering and went up two decks, toward my office, which was near the bridge.

When I had almost reached my office and was still standing in the hall, I ran into Babs again, who said: “Chen’s back on the bridge.”

“I know,” I replied. “Babs, could you come into my office?” I walked in there now. “I was down in engineering talking to Gary, and my fears were getting the better of me at one point. Could you give me an outline of the initial reaction in the reactor again?”

Babs shrugged and fell back into the black armchair across from my silver desk. “All right. Whatever you say, Boss.”

I smiled at her as I sat behind my desk and opened a drawer. I had some background in science, materials science specifically, but I’d also gone to school for finance, and my focus had been on that more; hence, this business of mine.

Still, science was integral to my business—and to my survival in space!—so I needed to at least have a rudimentary idea of how things worked on my ship. Because I had Babs and Gary on here for most of the science issues and because the financial aspects of my business kept me distracted day to day, my mind sometimes sieve-like processed the science things. So I made Babs give me refresher courses occasionally.

She had done some teaching in a university, so she was very good at educating me. And whenever she would do that, she would get really into it, moving her quite muscular arms around very expressively, her long fingers pointing and drawing circles and arcs in the air, as she was doing now.

She sat forward on her chair and explained about how hydroambin was first split with Landreau pulses, which splitting would leave ambin molecules alone and “hydrogen atoms” alone. “Once anything’s been bound with ambin, it’s no longer normal matter; the hydrogen in hydroambin’s been ambinized. When those hydrogen atoms are released via the initial fission of hydroambin, the hydrogen atoms are then fused together into ambohelium, releasing lots of energy, and mostly furilons and quasi-neutrons, which are used to split any remaining hydroambin the Landreau pulses missed, or for starting another fission-fusion cycle from more fuel-rod insertion, or the furilons and neutrons are absorbed. Most of the resulting lone ambin and other products are shot into the next chambers, where they’re burned or reduced into their components, or they’re reabsorbed or recycled, or used to power the ship without combustion. Some of the energy released in the first chamber is also used for powering the ship.

“Engineering controls how much and how long the whole process goes on, depending on how much we need for thrust or power or whatever. Right now, the beam engine’s down for maintenance and we’re stationary; the reactor’s off, and we’re on zenite and battery power.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said now. “When I was down there, Gary showed me a plasma in the main reactor shaft. It was so strange.”

Babs nodded slowly. “It’s the electromagnetics in the shafts and near the chamber, and in the rod constructions, and then any excess heat from the chambers—crazy things can happen around there.”

“I hope not that crazy,” I said. “I’m also hoping the atmosphere calms and we can get out of here within a few hours.”

“Me too,” Babs said. “I’m supposed to take Derry to the mineral museum on Sereska Station; she’s so excited about it. …You know, I thought it would feel odd having her on here, but it seems really comfortable. I’m glad we made the jump in our relationship—and that you found a place for her on the crew—thanks for that.”

I smiled at Babs and typed some ICFC information about Genteran Station into my computer.

“So,” Babs said now, “did you see Chen and May finally hooked up?”

I raised an eyebrow at Babs over my computer screen. “No, I didn’t see that.”

“It took them too long, don’t you think? They’ve been working together on here for two years.”

“Is that like a lifetime to you?”

Babs rolled her eyes. “Hardly. But I could tell they liked each other from early on.”

Lately it seemed like everyone on my ship was pairing up, except for me. I worked for most of the day for every day we were in space, and we were in space for most of the year. If you didn’t hook up then, you were only rarely hooking up. It was hard to maintain a relationship when you and your partner were living in separate solar systems.

But, I was the captain of the Demeter; I couldn’t afford to get overtly involved with anyone on my ship.

Now I said to Babs, “Is it just me or is everyone hooking up here lately? Maybe there’s something in the filtered air.”

“Or, just being in close proximity and the perpetual animal need to get laid are responsible.”

I snorted a little, probably too low for Babs to hear. But it had been longer than I wanted to think about since I’d gotten laid, no matter the perpetual need.

I said slowly now, “Babs, you and the others on here are lucky: you both agree to be on-ship, so you’re together every day. I’ve told you my marriage lasted less than a year. I didn’t have my own ship then, but I shipped off one month on someone else’s ship, came back two months later, and didn’t know why the hell I’d married Peter in the first place, when I knew I couldn’t make it work. He should have come with me. The marriage might have lasted then. But he was so close to his family on Earth, and we were both quite young.”

“When did you first meet Gary?”

“I’m sorry?” I said, laying a form onto my desk. I glanced at Babs fast, then I opened one of my desk drawers to get a pen.

“When you first met—were you both married then?”

“I didn’t know you knew Gary was married years ago. You’re always butting heads with him.”

Babs waved a careless, so-what? hand. “That’s just work stuff. Lately we always shoot the breeze when our downtime aligns.”

“Really?” I asked, my eyebrows rising. “Well, Gary and I actually first met after I was divorced, and he was getting married a few months later…. But what does this have to do with anything? And why didn’t you just ask him this?”

“I kind of didn’t want to. It’s better to ask you.”

“Why?” I persisted.

“Because we’re both women,” Babs said, and that annoyed me. She always liked to play mysterious, word-game conversations, but I just wasn’t in the mood for that now.

I was thinking about the weather again and how I should prepare a text-message to send later, indicating that I might be late to the next drop-off. I had actually planned to get to Sereska a day earlier than necessary, so, even if we wound up having to stay here on Genteran overnight, I’d probably make it to the Sereksa drop-off on time. But then it was possible we’d be stuck here more than one day….

I sighed hard now, and Babs misunderstood my sigh. “I’m sorry,” she said fast then, “I shouldn’t have pried.”

“Did you pry? Into what?”

Babs didn’t respond, but she was staring right at me.

“So, anyway,” I said then, “I’ve really got to finish up this paperwork now. Thanks for the refresher course before.”

“Anytime, Captain,” Babs said, standing up. She quickly saluted me; then she spun around and left my office, walking stiffly and formally like a soldier, while I laughed at her retreating back.

*

I was still in there working when Geena from the Demeter’s dining room intercommed me. “Bill and I want to serve dinner early, like, now. Is that all right?”

 A hard, relieved breath shot out of my mouth. “Yeah—that’s very good, actually. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that sooner and tell you to do that—or tell you directly what was going on. We might be stuck here for a while.”

“I know. Chen was just here. I figure being on Genteran longer might be a blessing: I could see about restocking a few things.”

“I wouldn’t expect to find much at the station,” I said in a dry voice.

“Yeah—I’ve heard that…. So, I’ll make an announcement about dinner now—will you be here?”

This trip out, there were fifty people on my ship, including me. But I normally didn’t sit in the dining room when most everyone was there, and I wasn’t in the mood for breaking that habit now.

So I finally told Geena, “I’ve got to check on May in the bay. Save me a plate, and I’ll pick it up later!”

*

In the cargo bay, I found May bent over one of the red hydroambin containers; she was using a highlighter to make marks on the container’s white label. May and her assistants had stacked the red containers in the back of the bay, close to where the biggest doors to the rest of the ship were; May was in her green overalls now, so she really stuck out against the complementary red color of the containers.

“How’s it going?” I asked her.

She turned her head to me, a frown shifting across her face as she straightened up. “I don’t care for the sloppy way these containers are labeled. There’s no specific ambin grade listed on some of them! I just wanted to make that more obvious for when engineering comes to get them….” Her dark brow rose at me. “You know, Lydia, because we got rid of only half the excess cargo from Jarox, we’re still too tightly packed in here. Can you sell the rest to Sereska?”

I was frowning now. “I don’t know yet. I’ll ask them that in my message to them…well, maybe not yet because I don’t know what the hell my schedule will be,” I said, sighing heavily.

*

A little later, I left the cargo bay and went up to the dining room to get a plate full of pasta.

I brought it down to my office, and I was behind my desk eating that meal and doing bookkeeping work when my intercom went off—Gary’s voice again, rushed this time. “Lydia, could you come down to engineering again?”

I swallowed the food in my mouth and smiled. “Got another plasma to show me?”

“I wish I did—no. This is something else. This is a problem.”

*

My heart was galloping as fast as my legs as I rushed through the ship toward engineering. When I finally got there, I saw that both Gary and Steve were in red protective suits now, and they were standing over by the reactor, in front of that same shaft as earlier.

Gary walked up to me and asked me through the exterior speaker on his suit, “When we were here earlier, did you see anything unusual inside the shaft?”

I frowned. “What? No—I mean I don’t know. It’s pretty dark in there. I…”

“Well, Steve saw something before, and we’re trying to figure out what.” There was a look on Gary’s face—a twitching, worried look.

Now my heart really began running away with itself. “Saw what—what did it look like?”

“I don’t know,” Gary said. “It’s not there anymore. The sensor camera near there wasn’t pointed at that spot right then, so it picked up nothing. And there was nothing on any other view. Karen’s crunching some numbers now, to see if she can get anything from the other sensor data.” Gary pushed the communicator-button on his suit. “Steve, come here.”

I watched Steve turn around and walk closer, his tall, suited-up form moving fast.

When he reached us, Gary told him: “Describe what you saw again—I want Lydia to hear.”

“Well,” Steve said, his voice his normal deep one, “there was a thick spot of black and blue—it was hovering over the rods, farther back toward the back wall. I thought I saw the spot move.”

“So couldn’t it have been a plasma?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen a black and blue plasma inside the shaft,” Gary replied.

I looked from one man to the other, but they didn’t seem inclined to add anything more.

“So what the hell is the problem then?” I said. “No offense, Steve, but the shaft is shadowy. And just because a black and blue plasma has never appeared there before doesn’t mean it hasn’t this time. Remember the backflow.” I looked at Gary. “You said it probably made the green plasma last longer. Well, maybe the backflow also caused this black and blue one.”

“Maybe,” Gary said, but the wavering tone of his voice sounded even less sure than a “maybe.”

My eyes were right on him now, willing him to say more. But it seemed he wasn’t going to do that. “What’s going on—is there something you’re both not telling me?”

Behind his helmet’s yellowy glass, Steve’s broad face was frowning. “Well, it just didn’t look right. I mean, it moved a little deliberately…like it had intentions.”

I couldn’t help laughing a little. Once the sound was out, I felt bad about it, but the whole conversation was a bizarre experience: the two men seemed so spooked, and neither had an easily frightened kind of personality.

However, my simply remembering that about both of them made my heart suddenly go faster: if they weren’t easily frightened, but something in the shaft had frightened them, then maybe there really was some substance to this. “So what do you want me to do? Do you want me to get Babs to come down?”

“Yeah, that would be good,” Gary said, nodding inside his red helmet.

*

I called for Babs over engineering’s intercom, and she answered from in her cabin.

“Gary wants to brainstorm an issue with you here in engineering,” I said.

“Now?” Babs replied. “I was just going into the shower—”

“That can wait, Babs,” I said in a firm voice.

*

I was suited up in a protective suit, watching Gary and Steve moving around inside the main reactor shaft, when Babs showed up. Her normally neat dark hair was messy now, and her face was too pale; going on that and her thick voice over the intercom before, she must have been asleep not that long ago.

I waved my right forefinger in a circle at my suit; Babs nodded at me fast—then rushed over to the suit closet to get a protective suit for herself.

She slipped the red suit over her black clothes, sealed it, then turned on the suit’s communicator. “What’s going on?” she asked now as she rushed in my direction.

And Gary said to her over the linked communicators, “Steve saw a plasma in the shaft here. I don’t know if it’s from outside contamination, or maybe the last recalibration caused it. It could be ‘pollution’ from the perfluour.”

“It isn’t,” Babs said in a frosty, defensive voice.

And Gary sighed. “That wasn’t intended to slight you, Babs. Perfluour is a standard fluid for the mobile parts of the assembly. The problem today is: the robotic arms can’t seem to shift the rods in the right direction, and Steve’s been trying a manual shift for five minutes now, and again the rods aren’t fitting correctly toward the core-door connection.”

Babs passed right beside me as she moved toward the shaft; behind her helmet’s glass, there were golden, glistening sweat-drops on her cheeks. “Why should that be happening?” she asked now as she entered the main shaft.

“That’s what we’re—tryyy—ing to figure out,” Steve replied, his choppy statement punctuated by a groan as he did something inside the shaft that apparently proved very frustrating, something I couldn’t really see.

Most parts of the Demeter had sensors and cameras, as did the reactor shaft in front of me, but there were probably too many people in the shaft now to yield a good camera view—and I wasn’t about to actually go inside the shaft to get a better view….

“Look,” I said, “do you all need me? If not, I’ve got to get back upstairs and start seeing about contacting our next stop—any word on that, on when we can expect to leave here? Anymore weather reports? Have you talked to Chen?”

Gary looked over his shoulder at me. “Yeah—the conditions have worsened actually. I’m sorry, Lydia.”

I felt so damn flushed in the face now, and I wanted to get out of my fucking suit, mostly so I would have the freedom to kick a fucking wall.

“Honestly,” Gary continued, turning around to me fully and lifting a helpless-looking, boxy gloved hand, “I now think we should wait till the morning at least. It’s probably for the best.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded and walked away to take off my suit.

A moment later, as I was popping off my helmet, Gary rushed over to me and said through his suit’s speaker, “I’m sorry about all of this.”

I pulled a mild, no-big-deal face at him.

“Maybe I fucked up the rod assembly,” he said.

“I doubt it,” I replied, unlocking my red gloves, then pulling them off slowly, one by one. I lifted my head and noticed that Gary had been closely watching my motions.

We looked at each other for too long a moment, too long a strange moment. And then I finally said, “Is there something else?”

Now, he sighed. “I didn’t mean to frighten you or anything before.”

I laughed a little. “I wasn’t really frightened. I’m really frustrated. When most of you will be getting off on Sereska Station and Aper Minor, I was looking forward to spending that break on Pink. But now that break seems to be moving farther into the future.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. And, actually, I wanted to talk to you about Pink—”

—A loud scream—from over by the main shaft.

I jumped farther away from there as Gary rushed toward there, which rushing made my heart pound harder—in sudden worry for him. I scrambled to put my helmet and gloves back on; then I moved closer to the shaft.

Just then, Steve burst from the shaft and began arguing with Babs, who was at the entry to the shaft.

“I saw something in the reactor window!” Steve shouted now.

“What—what did you see?” Babs asked fast, throwing up two questioning, red-gloved palms. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Well, I did!” Steve said. “It was black edged with blue, and it turned toward me, then flew past the window. It paused. It was aware of me.”

“Come on,” Babs said, her eyes rolling. “Nothing could be in there. Nothing could survive in there through the high temperatures when you were testing before. It’s probably residual electrical stimulation from when the reaction was going then. There’s leftover loose plasma or particulate pollution in the core because the cleaning wand missed some spots. It happens.”

“Not like this,” Steve insisted, in a too-loud voice.

Normally I would have been pissed, like he was shouting over Babs. However, I could see his flat cheeks were shaking, and I could hear how unnatural his heavy, fast breathing was. Something had really frightened him again….

I wondered what the hell Gary was doing that he had fallen so silent. He had disappeared into the shaft, and when I moved even closer to there now, I saw he was standing before the reactor window.

I thought I heard a frown in his voice when he finally spoke: “Lots of deposits on the inside of the window. Babs is probably right; the wand didn’t do a good job this last time. I’ll program it for another pass.”

“It’s not the wand,” Steve insisted.

Gary’s helmeted head turned toward Steve. “Steve, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not seeing anything now. Let’s go check what the chamber camera recorded, all right?”

*

By the time the four of us made it over to the camera control area, we had attracted a small crowd of the other engineering staff. Karen, one of the engineering assistants, had just been working at her personal station, looking over the reactor sensor information from today, but now she began working on the main computer console that controlled engineering’s many cameras and sensors.

But no matter her efforts today so far, she couldn’t find any data-based physical evidence of a plasma in the rod shaft from earlier, from when Steve first saw something.

I watched Karen’s long fingers type at the black computer keyboard as she called up all of the recent recordings from the camera in the primary reactor chamber. Now I watched that camera-data; I watched it slide over the large viewscreen beside the keyboard—I watched the still and moving images of the dusty, big, semi-dark chamber…but I didn’t see anything moving inside. Neither did the others, including Steve.

He finally looked at us, through a very red face. “I know what I saw.”

“Well, it’s true the camera can’t reach every part of the chamber, including not all of the window area,” Babs said now, her round face frowning gently.

“That’s right,” Steve said fast, and his head jerked a nod at her.

“Babs, why are you frowning?” I asked now. “Did you see something that made you change your mind?”

There was a pause. I thought Babs wasn’t going to respond, but then she said slowly, “I don’t think Steve imagined anything. I think he saw something. But we need to come up with a better explanation.” Her right gloved hand slid in a circle over the screen, around one particular image. “You see that there in the corner where it’s brighter? Doesn’t that particulate pattern on the lining nodules look too round and too large? And there’s another right here. I’ve never seen reactor residue patterns in such regular shapes—have you?” Her head turned to Gary.

“No,” he replied to her then on a frown, “I haven’t seen that before.”

*

I listened closely as mostly Babs and Gary continued discussing the reactor situation—discussing it and finally coming to no conclusions. There were just too many unknowns, and that meant further analyses were necessary, especially because, as Gary finally said, “It could be a structural weakness inside is leading to a repeated, more regular pattern as the particles bounce during the reaction, and we can’t take that chance. We’ll open the core and send in the Bot.”

The Bot was a three-foot-tall, thumb-shaped machine that could work under various core conditions without getting damaged. The Bot had very precise “fingers” of various sizes that could project out from its casing on all sides; the machine could spin, or extend its height up or contract it down, or it could hover in the air; the Bot could basically reach any area inside the core.

The engineering crew often used the Bot when the core was too hot for anyone else to safely work inside. But now the Bot would be used for a not-too-hot but unknown core condition.

I stood watching Gary as he programmed the controls on the machine’s white front; then he finally moved the Bot into the main reactor shaft and raised the exterior shaft shield. Standing outside there now, I watched the Bot slide farther into the shaft, then through the core’s open door.

I followed Gary back to the computer console, where the others still were, and where Karen now had the Bot’s viewpoint blown up onto the viewscreen. The moving images from the Bot were quite shaky at first; the robot was adjusting itself inside the core, based on the instructions Gary told Karen to feed through the computer keyboard.

More lights were on inside the core now, but they weren’t bright, and they didn’t illuminate every spot. The large, red-and-white, room-like area was still mostly shadowy-dark, including the odd, “pimpled skin” of the lining; the pimple-nodules projected to different distances from the lining, so the protuberances could more thoroughly capture residual ambin and quasi-neutrons and other things at different stages of the reaction process. The sandy-looking pimples had been spaced apart from each other in a uniform way—but now there were strange circles around some of the pimples, almost as if someone had been playing a ring-toss game there and had left burn marks behind.

There were central mechanisms and workings inside this first core room, and then workings positioned in various spots around the central workings; farther back, the main core chamber narrowed, and even farther behind that, there was another narrower space that led to another chamber.

The second and third reactor chambers didn’t—couldn’t—have cameras inside; it was also too dark inside there for any of us in engineering to clearly see those spaces from the main chamber’s camera, and Karen was suddenly having trouble with the controls for illuminating those other areas.

“Just send the Bot near there,” Gary said to her now. “We’ll turn it and get some more video and stills of the main chamber from that direction; then we’ll move the Bot into the next chamber.”

Karen did as Gary instructed, and I watched the bouncing view get bouncier with the Bot’s motions, and then I watched the view get darker: one of the lights near the Bot had suddenly failed.

Karen’s long fingers moved over her keyboard faster, and she must have turned on a light on the Bot because the view brightened, but it was only a narrow cone of brightening toward that darker end—

—A shocking flash of white shot across the screen, as if the Bot had turned or the core had.

“What the hell was that?” I asked fast.

“I don’t know,” Babs replied, and she began moving closer to Karen now.

In fact, we all moved closer to her and the screen. And now I couldn’t take my eyes from it; I didn’t often come down here and take a look inside the core, but even I could tell that the white and now black filling most of the screen just wasn’t a normal occurrence—

Karen began turning the Bot in another direction, apparently in an attempt to get something other than the blurs of black and white—then suddenly the blurs turned into a shocking sharp blue and the Bot’s camera lurched—or the Bot itself lurched—or was thrown. The image on the screen spun, and more flashing blue filled the screen.

The Bot’s camera seemed to be sideways now, but it was still working, and in that working view, something was moving, something large and seemingly angry. It jerked forward and engulfed the Bot, till the computer screen went completely black.

Nervous heat shot into my face. “Oh shit!”

“I told you!” Steve shouted.

“All right. Something’s in there,” Gary said in a flat voice.

“No kidding!” Steve scoffed.

“What the hell is going on—what the fuck could be in there?” I demanded. I hadn’t really expected to get an answer, but, good-old Gary did his best to give me one.

“It must have been the plasma—the backflow. Genteran’s never been studied enough because it’s huge and so much of the crust is so impenetrable. Who knows what the hell’s here underground?”

“Well, whatever the hell’s here underground is now in HERE,” I said.

“Gary,” Karen said fast now, her blue eyes on her screen, “the sensors are picking up nodule damage—some type of corrosion’s eating away at one corner of the lining.”

Gary’s head spun to me, and his brown eyes were flashing, as if his mind was working at a feverish pace to come up with a solution, which his mind did come up with, though it wasn’t a solution I wanted.

“There’s no choice,” Gary said to me. “We need to evacuate the ship now.”

My suddenly furious eyes widened at him. “I can’t leave my ship—my whole life is in this!”

“I’m sorry, Lydia, but we don’t know what this is—look what it did to the Bot?” Gary’s head swung toward Karen and the viewscreen, but no matter what she tried, she couldn’t get the Bot’s camera to come back on—and now the chamber camera was also just showing black.

Gary’s head shot in Steve’s direction now. “Get on the reactor console and turn on the emergency shield around the core and the outer shield around the shafts.”

My heart was pounding hard as I watched Steve rush to another panel table. Then I said, “You’re not serious, are you, Gary—that we’ve got to evacuate?”

“Yeah, I’m serious!”

“Gary, I need to talk to you alone.”

“But, Lydia—”

“No buts, Gary!” I said in a hard voice, before turning around and marching across the room toward where his office was.

Gary followed behind me, and neither one of us said anything, till we reached near his black door.

I didn’t walk inside; I just turned around to him fast. “What the hell are you doing, Gary? Why are you being so rash?”

“Lydia,” Gary said in a calm voice now, a calm I suddenly found really annoying, “you saw it too: there’s something in the reactor, and we’ve got to get it out. We don’t even know what it is, or what it’ll do next—it’s clearly taken over the core. Will it take over the ship next? Think, Lydia.”

I ground my teeth together. “I am thinking. If we weren’t good friends, I’d throw you right off the ship for speaking to me so condescending like this.”

He sighed hard and short, as if he were talking to a frustrating pain in the ass, which didn’t exactly please me or make the situation better.

“Look,” he said now, “we’re arguing here and the dangerous situation still stands. I’ve got to inform the others—”

“And make a ship-wide announcement. Me too.”

“So why are we arguing?”

Sighing suddenly, I pressed a hand to my helmet and was about to speak again when Steve rushed over to say, “I’ve put the reactor shields on maximum. What next?”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Gary said, and he looked at me when he said it.

*

The three of us remained there by Gary’s office, discussing (a.k.a. debating) what to do next. My head was pounding, my mouth was dry—mostly because it kept falling open and staying open. Leave my ship? What a fiasco! All my money was tied to this business; now I had some fucking thing setting up housekeeping in the core of my business!

I felt the weight of the crazy situation suffocating me, and my helmet wasn’t helping matters. But, I was afraid to remove it at this point….

Gary was saying something now. But I quickly cut him off: “Look, let’s assume the thing wants something in the core contents. How long before there’s nothing left of what the thing wants and it decides it wants to come out?” Nobody replied to my statement. And then I sighed hard, in resignation. “You’re right, Gary—we’ve got to move fast—make quick decisions and execute them quickly. But how do we do that—what do we do first from an engineering standpoint to secure the core better, even if we leave the ship?”

“Well,” Gary said, “so far the thing seems to prefer the reactor—at least we’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary anywhere else. We’ve had the joints to the nozzles retracted and closed for hours now, so I’m assuming the thing’s been in and around the core area for hours, and it’s right inside the core now. So, as far as I’m concerned, if the core’s what it wants and what’s keeping it here, it can have it. We can drop the core.”

The room seemed to spin around my head. “Drop the core?!?” I said in a loud voice, noticing several of the engineering-staff’s heads sharply turn my way: my suit was still on speaker from before, so my statement had just been broastcasted to the room. Now I added, in just as loud a voice, “A new reactor costs more than I’ve made this past fucking month, and that’s including this job on Genteran!”

Gary spread a red-gloved hand toward me. “What do you expect, Lydia? The core’s already been damaged by its new tenant. And isn’t losing the core better than losing the whole ship? If it gets out, who knows what else in here it might take a liking to?”

“But how do we get the core out?” Steve asked now. “We don’t have a retrieval unit here.”

Gary looked at him. “We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way: we’ll have to cut it out manually. Use the laser saw to cut through the hull; then open the inner-hull doors to the reactor’s structural shaft; then drop the supports, locks and shields, and let the core go. But there’s the locking on the nozzles against the reactor, and there’s the failsafe: someone will have to remain in engineering to release all the locks.”

“Who?” I said.

Gary didn’t respond. Neither did anyone else in the room, for that matter.

“Well? What the hell do we do, people?” I asked finally, my voice very impatient now.

Gary spoke again. “Either way, staying here, cutting down there—there are risks, after what the thing did to the Bot. It’ll take at least six of us, but it’s my responsibility to physically remove the core—I have the most experience too. But, I’ll stay in engineering and direct everything from there if no one else will volunteer to stay and unlock the internals.”

There was a silence, too long a silence. I thought no one would speak, and when I was about to open my mouth and take the decision out of their hands, Steve finally spoke: “Look, I’ll work things on the internal engineering end, but I’m not gonna lie and say I wanna do it. I’m just the next in line in the experience department. But, wow, this sure sucks.”

“Steve,” I said, “none of us wants to be stuck on the ship. I’ll be here too, watching everything from on the bridge—”

“Lydia,” Gary interrupted me, his words coming faster now, “I think it’s best if you leave the ship with the others and you all go over to the station. You can watch us work from on the cameras there.”

My back stiffened, and I flashed Gary a look I didn’t often flash him: a pissed-off look. “I’m the captain. And I’m not leaving my fucking ship.” I was breathing too hard, facing Gary still. Inside, in my mind, I forced myself to calm down. It took me a moment to speak again, but I finally said to Gary, “Are you sure this is the best way to proceed—that we should do this with the core? What about giving the thing access to the nozzles instead—maybe it would slip back outside then.”

“Or maybe it would somehow break through a nozzle and slip into another part of the ship,” Gary pointed out. “I figure that if we let the core out, the thing will have a direct opening back to the planet’s surface. It’s a path of least resistance and it knows the place. Who knows—maybe it inadvertently got sucked into here and it misses the planet or would like it better.

“Lydia, you know I’m not sure of anything. That word’s not in the language of science. But I just think we’ve got no goddamn choice now.”

*

“No goddamn choice” wasn’t something I ever wanted to hear with respect to my ship. But as I moved toward the bridge to make a ship-wide announcement, I realized that Gary’s “no goddamn choice” was correct.

Still, it was very hard for me to accept, so I was determined to find a way to remain on my ship—to find some necessity for my being here. There were no technical necessities I knew of, but I kept trying to come up with some important reasons inside my head, even while, over the ship’s speaker-system now, I was telling my crew to remove anything of personal value and high-tail it to the station.

When I was done with my announcement, Gary’s voice came over the same speaker; he gave everyone more specific information, which I listened to with a reddening, frustrated face; my plan to remain on the ship now seemed increasingly ridiculous to even my own mind….

A moment after Gary finished talking, Chen rushed onto the bridge. “Lydia, is all this true?”

“Yes!” I said.

Chen frowned. “I wanted to confirm with you directly.” He glanced around the bridge, his dark eyes finally falling on his red pilot’s chair. I saw his chest beneath his dark shirt rise and fall in frustration at first, then finally fall in resignation.

Like quite a few of my crew, Chen didn’t have any close family members planet-side anywhere. He preferred being in space, and he had been a flight fixture on the Demeter since shortly after I’d bought it. This ship was like his family, and I considered him a close friend, as I considered all my long-term crew members. I knew how Chen felt now; I could see it in his hunched shoulders, in the flatness of his mouth.

Finally, he lifted his head and looked at me again. “But, Lydia, what about the storms? Will they interfere with the core removal, and will the Demeter get fined for dropping the core? It’ll probably open then.”

“We’ve got no choice,” I said on a sigh, my words sounding like Gary’s. I had detached my helmet to make my announcement before, and now I removed my gloves and laid them beside my helmet on one of the bridge tables; then I turned back to Chen. “I’m certainly not in the business of sacrificing my life or the lives of any of my crew. We can’t drop the core in space without critically damaging the Demeter’s exterior, and Gary said the nearest station who could remove it is days away. We’re going to last days with some fucking thing in the reactor—and when we might need to use it? No matter if it can live in there, for all we know, using the reactor would make it grow bigger—the fucking reactor might have created it!

“We just don’t know what’s happened—if it was on the planet and found its way in, or if it’s been made in the reactor and maybe needs it to live—or needs ambin or hydroambin or both—I have no idea. I only know this ship isn’t big enough to house us and it. I’m sorry to just dump it on this planet, but here is where it seems to be from. And if we don’t dump the core and we sit here for forever, at some point the thing will probably come out onto Genteran anyway. This will be my response to any goddamn Genteran objections,” I finished, lifting a stiff middle finger.

Chen laughed hard at my finger. But his smile quickly faded. “I guess I should get my stuff—” he began to say.

But Gary suddenly strode in. “Sorry for interrupting. Just wanted to let you know we’ll be ready to get started in about twenty minutes. Lydia, once everyone other than the seven of us in engineering is out, have the station detach the sleeve…or else the thing could possibly come across to there.”

I pulled a face at him. “It’s living inside a reactor, but GS’s walls will be a deterrent?”

“Well, still, there’s no need to give it a direct conduit to the station’s interior…. Are you ready to go?” Gary’s helmet had been hanging off the back of his head, and now his hands quickly adjusted his helmet as his head turned toward Chen.

“I was just going to my room to get my bag?” Chen said, leaving a questioning sound at the end, for Gary first, then for me. Chen’s eyes were right on me now.

But before I could respond, Gary said to him, “Yeah, you better go.”

“I’ll meet you down in the cargo bay, Lydia?” Chen questioned again.

But I only shook my head at him. “No. I’m not going anywhere.”

I didn’t look at Gary now, but I could have sworn I felt tenseness coming from him. “Lydia,” he said in a sharp voice, “I told you—you’ve got to leave.”

Chen’s gaze bounced between the two of us, as if he was waiting for both of us.

“Just go,” I told him.

I watched his eyes fall onto his chair one last time, before he rushed out the doorway.

I turned to Gary. “Once again, what the hell do you think you’re doing—giving me orders, and in front of the other crew!”

“Lydia, how many ways must I say it: you need to leave. I’m the one who’s got to remove the core, and I just don’t like that you’ll be on here—it will distract me too! What do you want me to say? I know I keep overstepping my bounds, but we’ve got an emergency here, and I suddenly don’t care about being formal. I’m worried about you.”

I ran a hand over my long hair. “And you think I don’t feel the same?” I said now, my breaths coming harder. My eyes swerved to his and found his flashing with something—annoyance and some type of assertiveness, an assertiveness I didn’t particularly care for. “Save it for the thing down below,” I finally said, jerking a thumb at the floor. I wondered if Gary knew what I meant….

And then he said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. You’re being overly protective and too assertive, behaving like a stereotypical kind of guy when you’re not that kind of guy. Interrupting me when we’re talking, then trying to push me where to go. I can take care of myself.”

Gary’s face was flashing several shades of red, almost as dark as the suit on his body. “I know that,” he said now. “But I can’t help caring about you—is that a crime?”

“No, it’s not a crime. It’s just this shit going on is the last thing I had planned for today—or any day! I appreciate your trying to help and your prompts too, but I’m not sure leaving my ship is the best thing to do. I can be another set of eyes on here—”

“You can be another set there, at the station in front of their viewscreens. I had Karen send a message to them the moment you left engineering. They’re expecting everyone, including you.”

“You bastard,” I said, but it came out pretty flat. I was tired of arguing over the issue: this was an emergency, and there was no way I could argue that away.

Gary was right this time: the bulk of my crew would be inside the station; there was no need for me to be on the ship—and if the worst happened, it was senseless for me to be another casualty here….

At that horrible thought, my eyes rushed to Gary’s, and I realized then that his had softened—not with tiredness though, with something else.

“This really isn’t the right time or place for this, but, what the hell—how’s this for a stereotypical kind of guy?” Gary said fast now in a shaky voice, and then his face quickly came closer to mine, to kiss me right on the mouth.

*

An instant later, he pulled back. His face was all flushed, and mine felt just as flushed. But before I could speak through my stunned open mouth, he spun around and rushed out the bridge doorway.

I stared after him, feeling mostly fear, and then a little anger. What a time he chose to kiss me—why didn’t he do it sooner, under better circumstances! Had he lost his mind, or were we all losing our minds? I couldn’t believe what was going on—some monster in the core. I’d never even considered that a possibility.

My breaths were coming too hard, and that wasn’t only because of Gary. I had to pull myself together and think. I remembered my emergency case in my office; I kept my most important possessions and business info in that case. I would go grab it, then go to the station.

However, I suddenly couldn’t move. I was afraid, afraid of the thing in the core, and afraid for Gary the most—I couldn’t help it, I realized now. I knew him the longest out of anyone on the ship, and he had just kissed me. Now what?

*

Later, I was finally in Genteran Station, in one of the lower-level rooms, facing the long axis of my ship. It was still light out, but the outside of the station was also artificially illuminated now, because of the emergency situation and because a mild mist-storm had just moved into the area.

My eyes roamed over the Demeter’s dark hull, down over a silvery seam, then to under the curve of the belly. The exterior sections of the four belly nozzles had been retracted after landing here, and someone had just turned on all of the hull’s underside lights; I could see the general area beneath the glow of all the lights, but I couldn’t see many details because they were too far away.

Before I had walked through the sleeve to the station, I had donned my protective suit’s helmet and gloves, but now I removed those coverings and laid them and my emergency case onto a table.

Cambridge stood beside me; he was setting up a camera view on a very large computer screen, so we could zoom-in at my ship while my crew was working on it.

I pressed the communicator-button on my suit. “Gary, are you linked up—can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Gary said, his voice coming out of my suit’s speaker.

“Where are you? Have you seen anything more on the sensors and cameras for the reactor area?”

“I’m in the shuttle bay, getting the portable platform. Babs noticed something on the internal sensors before; she’s on her way to you from another part of the station.”

I lowered my voice now, feeling my heart suddenly strangely vibrating. “Gary, I’m worried about you.”

“I know,” he said.

A pause, during which I chewed my lower lip.

Then I said, “I just hope this is the correct decision.”

“Believe me,” Gary said, “so do I.”

*

I remained in that same station room, my mind rapidly going over my finances and already feeling drained of all the money that would soon be flowing from my wallet.

Cambridge finally finished his work on the viewscreen, and now my eyes kept going to that large projection, expecting to see my crew show up. But my crew seemed to be taking too long a time.

“What’s going on—Steve?” I said, over my suit’s communicator.

“Yeah, I’m here. Alone.”

“I’m sorry, Steve,” I said. “Anything going on inside the core?”

“Not that I can see. The sensors inside are reading normal at the moment; the camera there and the Bot camera are still dark. And I’m not seeing anything on any of the shaft cameras and sensors—GOOD.”

I sighed. “Well, keep the line open…and remove a few pulse guns from the locker—”

“Already done,” Steve said.

“You know,” Cambridge said from beside me, “you’re going to be fined for the ambin and radiation leakage.”

I pulled a face at him. “Not my biggest concern right now. And it’s especially ridiculous here when you mine hydroambin.”

“Yeah, under controlled conditions.”

“I doubt it,” I snapped, knowing the reputation the planet’s workforce had for being lackadaisical.

Cambridge’s black eyebrows rose at me now. “You’re acting like you think we caused this.”

I turned to him fast. “Well, didn’t you—and this planet?”

There was a pause. Then Cambridge’s heavy, dark eyes slid away to out the window, and he frowned. “There are stories about things that live here—weird things people have seen occasionally but couldn’t explain. So we explained it away with the Hash. But the thing you described before does sound like what people call, Genteran’s Ghost.”

“What we saw in the core was no ghost,” I said now.

Cambridge shrugged, the blue fabric covering his shoulders shifting. “It’s a metaphor.”

“I don’t deal in metaphors. I deal in realities. In science.”

“So what do you think the thing is then?” he asked, his head turning to encompass Babs too. She had just walked in and she was looking down at her blue, hand-held computer-device. Derry was right behind her, her skinny bare arms clutching a red bulging bag in front of her white shirt.

“I haven’t gotten and still can’t get enough info from the sensors,” Babs said now on a frown, still staring at her device. “But I think I’ve detected some ambin and hydroambin clumping—asymmetrical solid lumps moving around the main chamber. Since the reactor’s inactive, I’m assuming the ambin bound in the lining is being eaten by or combining with whatever the thing is….”

“And what will that mean?” I asked her.

But she just frowned and shook her head, her eyes still on her console.

I turned to look at Derry; her nose was too red and her skin was too pale beneath her short, curly crop of red hair.

“Derry,” I said, “why don’t you rest in that big chair?” I jerked a hand to the right, where there was a soft-looking, blue armchair against one of the white walls.

“Thanks, Captain,” Derry said, and then she promptly sneezed into a white handkerchief, before collapsing back onto the blue chair.

I glanced at the doorway to the room, but I couldn’t see much farther into the hall outside because of a curve in the wall out there. “So where is everyone else?”

“They went to the station’s restaurant,” Babs said now. “I took one look at it and didn’t feel hungry anymore.”

I heard a low rumble of laughter from Cambridge.

My eyes gazed out the window again, finally latching onto the dashes of red moving below my ship—six dashes, six of my suited-up crew. One of them waved big in our direction—Gary probably. I could have asked if it was him waving, but I suddenly felt shy about doing that, especially with my other crewmembers nearby, especially with Babs nearby.

Gary’s voice came into the room now as he gave instructions to Karen: “…Try to keep the camera on the opening as much as possible. Who knows if this’ll be important information to have for the future?”

Because the hull was too high to reach from the ground directly, behind Gary, someone was now using a handheld control to shift a big gray platform to beneath where the core was inside the ship.

Gary and Sam, who was another of my engineering crew and the oldest person on my ship, and then Karen with her camera—all three of them finally went up onto the platform.

“Lydia,” Gary said, “can you hook up with Karen’s signal? That way you can watch everything from close up, as it’s happening.”

I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted to see everything, especially if it turned ugly. But, I asked Cambridge to take care of the hook-up anyway.

By the time he’d done that, Gary and Sam were at work using the laser saw on the hull’s outer layer.

The outer hull was held together by both structural seams and locks, and also magnetic locks. Steve actually could have unlocked just about everything from his end, but….

“The problem is,” Gary said as he worked, raising his voice over the buzzing noise from the saw, “I don’t know how the core will fall when it doesn’t have a retrieval unit to attach to. It could damage even more of the outer hull if it catches somewhere and yanks it, and the outer hull is harder to repair…. I’m making the opening larger than I think it needs to be, to avoid making an even larger area of damage, if that makes sense…sorry for all the damage from the cutting, Lydia,” Gary finished.

I sort of grunted at his words at first. Then I quickly added, “Just keep going—you’re doing a great job—all of you. If you need me out there, don’t hesitate to ask.”

“No,” Gary said, of course.

“Captain—” Karen’s voice “—are you getting what I’m filming?”

“Yes,” I said, my eyes on the split views on the viewscreen, the magnified view from the station’s camera and now the even more close-up view from Karen’s camera.

“How long do you think this will take?” she asked, but she seemed to be talking to Gary.

“You’ve never seen one of these done, huh?” Gary said.

Karen must have shook her head quite hard, because the camera view was suddenly vibrating. But then the camera view just as suddenly stilled—on Gary’s face in his helmet, on Gary’s sweaty face.

My eyes widened: I’d never seen him so sweaty. He looked as if he’d rather be anywhere but there at that moment.

I felt a terrible tightness in my stomach: Gary had only been acting I-know-what-to-do-because-I’m-a-tough-guy confident; he was actually very worried. And now he was stuck doing this dangerous shit.

I wanted to run out into the station and force one of the stoned bozos from GS to get into a suit and take care of the removal, but I didn’t have that authority, and they probably didn’t have the brains….

“Lydia, are you all right?”—Babs’s voice.

My head spun to her. I felt a bit sorry that I had removed my helmet; my face must have been revealing how upset I was on the inside. Too late to hide that now, though.

I sighed and turned off my communicator. Cambridge had just stepped out of the room and Derry appeared to be dozing, so now I said to Babs, “I’m really worried about them, especially Gary.”

I didn’t say anything further, but I could tell by the slow way Babs nodded that she knew what I really meant. I thought I saw a spark of humor in her brown eyes, but it seemed the situation was too tense for her to let the humor out beyond that.

I switched my communicator back on and glanced back and forth between the viewscreen’s two images. Gary and Sam had seemingly finished more than half of the hull-cutting, and now there were almost three sides of what would apparently eventually be a rectangular shape parallel to the ship’s long axis.

“This should go faster now,” Gary said. “I’ve been trying to get the feel of the best angle to hold the saw at. You all right, Sam?”

“Yeah,” Sam replied in a gruff voice. “My shoulder’s feeling the strain though.”

Technically, Sam had more years of experience on a ship than Gary. But Sam had spent many of those years in the Space Force as a lower-level engineering technician. I knew he considered his time on my ship his retirement; he’d said many times that he didn’t want the stress of responsibility, the stress of making decisions, and that was why he was normally just the part-time gopher of my engineering section. He certainly hadn’t signed on for all the physical—and dangerous—work he was doing today….

“Gary,” I said, “have Sam switch off with Chris.”

In Karen’s camera view, I watched Gary nod, his brown eyes right on her camera, which felt like they were right on me. “Chris, get up here,” Gary said now.

“Thanks,” Sam said in a relieved voice. “I feel like an old man—but then I am an old man.”

Several people laughed now, including me. And Gary went back to his sawing once Chris joined him on the platform.

 As Gary had predicted, the rest of the outer-hull cutting went faster, and right before Steve was supposed to open the magnetic locks that were still intact in that area of the hull, Gary had everyone move away from the opening and pull the platform back, so it wouldn’t get crushed.

He told Steve to unlock the locks, and then a moment later the outer-hull piece loudly crashed onto the Genteran earth below.

My crew now worked on pushing and pulling that heavy hull section aside, using a small hydraulic hauler; when they were done with that, they put the gray platform back.

Karen’s camera caught a glimpse of Gary’s face again, and this time it was very red as well as very sweaty. “Steve,” he said, “let the locks go on the first inner-hull door.”

“Got it,” Steve replied.

Gary was on the platform again and now he reached up to the gray inner hull; he pressed one of his palms to it and his other palm against a nearby electronic button—but before he could actually do anything further, he began slipping on the platform. “Whoa,” he said, one of his feet really sliding and making him fall down to his knees onto the platform floor.

“Gary!” I said, jumping closer to the station window, my heart galloping wildly.

“It’s all right—I’m all right,” he said, his voice a little unsteady and a little tired. “It’s very damp out here—with the mist-storm.”

Cambridge had come back into the room, and one of his hands motioned to me as he walked closer. “Does he need more people? I can ask a few to suit-up. We can bring out the wet-vac and mop the platform when you need it.”

“Actually, that would be really good,” I said.

Gary must have heard Cambridge and I talking. “We’re all right—” Gary said fast “—we don’t need anymore help.”

“Gary,” I said, “you can’t do this if you’re fucking falling off the platform!”

There was no reply.

“Gary?” I repeated, my head spinning over to Cambridge, whose dark eyebrows were now knitting together at me.

“Gary!” I said for a third time.

“I think,” Babs said, “we’ve lost communications.”

She was right: the viewscreen image from Karen’s camera was getting fuzzy. From the station’s camera view, though, I could see that they still looked okay out there.

However, that view wasn’t good enough for me. “Well, that’s it: they’re getting help. Cambridge?” I finally said, raising an eyebrow at him.

*

By the time Cambridge and I and someone else from the station got the wet-vac, then stepped outside and walked down the station’s main exit ramp, the mistiness in the air had increased and the air had gotten darker too. It would be night soon, and the nights on Genteran were quite dark and really eerie, which gloomy atmosphere would probably fit the task at hand….

As the three of us moved closer to my crew, I pushed the communicator-button on my suit and stated quite emphatically that I had brought help. Gary had been standing on the ground, looking up at the Demeter, but, at my words, his head spun right to me, his mouth dropping open behind his helmet’s glass.

“Don’t,” I said in a sharp voice as I stopped near him. “I’m the captain, no matter if you’re in charge of this particular action. I won’t interfere with your work, but don’t test me.”

I thought Gary would frown or maybe pout now, but he surprised me by laughing softly.

I flashed him a little smile, then said, “Here’s the wet-vac,” as the semi-automated machine slid closer to us over the blackish ground.

“I’m Cambridge. I’m the Operations Director of this station,” Cambridge said to my crew. He had linked up with our communicators when he put on his blue spacesuit inside GS, and now his blue-gloved hands shook Gary’s red-gloved hands, and then Karen’s.

Watching Cambridge now, I felt surprised at his title; up until this moment, he had acted like he was just some flunky left in charge of the station. But I should have seen that wasn’t true: he knew how to do too many things inside the place, just like he knew how to set up the wet-vac.

Cambridge’s assistant, Perry, now moved the vacuum to beside the platform, but Cambridge actually started the thing and then instructed Perry how to vacuum not only the platform’s top, but the “air” near the platform.

“It doesn’t need a surface to operate,” Cambridge explained. “The wand can be fixed vertically. The air seems pretty static under the ship, but the dehumidifier inside the vac won’t be able to keep it that dry here when we’re outdoors.”

“Every little change helps,” Gary said, and now he went back up onto the platform. “So far, so good,” he added, as, this time, he was able to get a good foothold on the drier-now surface.

He stretched his arms over his head, and he and Chris began working with Steve to slide that first inner-hull area aside.

The rest of us remained mostly silent now, our heads raised as we watched every motion Gary and Chris made; when they finally reached the second inner hull, Gary told Chris to leave the platform.

Gary’s back was facing me, and he lowered his arms a bit sharply now, his shoulders finally shifting into a too-stiff stance.

“What is it, Gary?” I asked, my heartbeats picking up momentum.

 “This is the last cover,” Gary replied. “Inside there’s the core’s structural shaft and the core at the top. We don’t know what we’ll see.”

“I think we should all get back,” I said fast.

Gary’s head shifted over his shoulder, toward me more. “We can’t all do that. I’ve got to check the shaft and release the horizontal locks inside the frame before we drop the core.”

“What?!??”

“I won’t have to go that far in,” Gary said fast.

“I wish you didn’t have to go in at all!” I snapped, but my voice sounded more desperate than anything else, and my chest was heaving in my suit. A few heads turned my way, the faces attached looking surprised at my worried tone—and that made me realize I’d clearly dropped my professional exterior. My feelings were getting in the way of my position, which was unlike me….

“Do what you need to do,” I said to Gary now, and he slowly nodded, then turned his helmeted head back up toward the hull.

Then he quickly jumped off the platform. “Actually, let’s all move back like the captain said. We’ll wait a minute after Steve unlocks; then if nothing…appears, I’ll get back to work.”

We all moved away from the cut-out, and I was suddenly feeling really guilty: this whole situation was my fault; if it weren’t for my worrying about preserving at least some of my ship, we could have just left the fucking ship here, handing it over to whatever was now living in it. If something happened to Gary or any of the others, I’d never forgive myself. Their lives couldn’t be replaced; my ship could.

Before Gary could tell Steve to open the inner hull, I laid a hand on one of Gary’s arms. “I can’t let you do this—how stupid I’ve been! It’s not safe for anyone. The ship isn’t that important. My wanting to preserve it is forcing all of us to possibly trade our lives for it.”

Gary curled an incredulous-looking mouth at me. But before he could speak, Karen said, “Captain….”

But then she never finished what she was going to say because Gary finally spoke: “Lydia, what makes you think the rest of us don’t care about the ship too? We live here for a good deal of our lives! Do you want to take a vote? I’m pretty sure that if you do, at least everyone under it right now wants to do what we’re doing.”

“He’s right, Lydia,” Karen said, nodding her head. And then there were a few grunts of assent from my other crewmembers.

“It seems so dangerous though,” I said, feeling my heart warming toward my crew, which only made me feel more worried for them. I felt damned here, no matter what….

“Being out in space is so dangerous too, every moment, every day. Danger comes with this life,” someone said—Sam.

My head turned to him, and I saw his slow nod at me, and his faster smile.

“All right,” I said then, through a red face. “Carry on.” I took another step away from the cut-out in the ship, and so did the others.

Then Gary said to Steve, “We’re ready—release the last locks and see if it will slide aside from your end only. My arms are too tired to be too careful with doing it manually, and, yeah, I’m more spooked now….”

“Got it,” Steve said. Then: “You should try being in here all by yourself!”

“Sorry about that—I should have left two of you inside.”

“I could have asked for that, Gary, but you’re needed out there more than in here…. The locks are all open, the hull shaft-door is loose and sliding….”

“Um, actually—no, it isn’t,” Gary said.

“Shit!” Steve replied, and my heart began galloping faster than ever now.

There was a loud communal groan from the others, and a long sigh from Gary. “Well,” he said, “the shaft hasn’t been opened in years from this end, and this is what happens when that happens. I’ll have to do it manually too.” He walked closer to where the cut-out was and jumped up the platform’s steps, and then three other people moved over to the platform too, including Cambridge.

“I’ll help,” Cambridge said.

“Me too,” several others said, in unison.

“I’ll keep the vac working on the platform,” Perry added.

“And I’ll be there with my camera,” Karen said.

“And I’ll be there with—with me!” I finally replied, and everyone laughed.

Now several sets of arms and palms worked at the dark inner-hull door, applying pressure to it, trying to shimmy it loose—it finally began detaching; then Gary told the others to leave the platform. “I’m going to work the rest loose with Steve—Steve, I think you can use the shield-variance function turned down low to jolt the door—just wait till I step away and give you the go-ahead or you’ll jolt me!”

Gary came down to the ground and said fast, “Steve, turn on the shield now, the lowest setting.”

Steve did what Gary instructed, but it wasn’t enough.

Gary sighed loudly. “Give it another jolt now, one setting higher.”

Steve gave it two jolts at that higher setting and the door finally began sliding open on its own—sliding quite loudly, actually, which seemed strange.

“There’s probably some corrosion on one of the long ends,” Gary said, moving back up onto the platform. “I’m surprised the sensors didn’t pick it up, but it must have been between the locks at the seam, and the sensors couldn’t interpret it correctly. I’m going up now.” His head inside his helmet twisted to glance down at the rest of us, especially at me; then we all moved closer to the platform.

Gary pressed a button on the other arm of his suit and then another button on a panel beside the opening in the hull. He had to stretch quite far over to reach that panel because the platform wasn’t right beneath that area.

“Gary, we can move the platform,” I said.

“No need—I’m already done. Now for the fun part.” A silver ladder on a track descended from the opening, and Gary grabbed the rungs and lifted himself onto the ladder, his helmet tilting back as he looked up into the shaft.

“Can you see anything unusual?” I asked.

I thought I saw his head try to shake, but then he must have realized I couldn’t see much motion because the back of his helmet was to me and the head area of a protective suit could be quite stiff. “No, nothing unusual,” Gary said now. “The core looks perfect from under here. Come see for yourselves—Karen?”

She moved closer with her camera, tilting the lens up at the shaft, and I walked to right beside her and lifted my head, my eyes finally directly connecting with the giant hole in my ship’s hull.

Though the shaft inside was lit, it was still a shadowy corridor, and viewing it from this perspective was a particularly weird experience, as if I were looking inside my ship’s intestines, inside a dark smelly place I really didn’t want to view. There were metal beams and other structural workings on the sides of the shaft, away from the opening, and then at the very top, part of a matte-black plane was visible—a movable support-plane beneath the core. As far as my captain’s eyes could tell, neither that support nor anything else inside the shaft looked out of place….

Gary had turned to gaze down at me, and now our eyes directly met. He seemed to be hesitating, waiting for something, probably for me to give him the go-ahead.

“Guess there’s no choice then. Go,” I finally said.

He nodded slowly and began climbing the ladder; he stopped several feet into the ship and pulled something from the small pack attached to his suit, and I realized then that he’d come prepared: he held a pulse gun in his hand now.

He climbed off the ladder and onto that level he was at; then he disappeared from view for a long moment, while the rest of us alternated between looking up the shaft for him and looking at each other’s worried eyes.

Then, just when I was about to check if Gary was still alive, he reappeared and said, “I’ve released the inner frame locks. I’m seeing nothing everywhere and the shaft down here looks perfect. I’m brave, but I’m really not that brave. I’m not checking the levels all the way up to see if the shaft’s been weakened anywhere by age recently, and so dropping the core will do too much damage. I’m sorry, Lydia….”

“Get back down here now,” I said, and in such a hard voice, a few helmeted heads turned my way. So then I added, “It’s not worth risking yourself even more.”

Gary began climbing down, and when his booted feet finally loudly hit the platform, he told Chris to help him slide the platform away. Cambridge pushed the wet-vac back toward the station, and then we all began rushing in that same direction—and then Gary gave Steve the go-ahead to open the magnetic locks around the core, release the plane support, and drop all the shields around there.

And now a new worry flashed across my mind: just like the inner hull wouldn’t slide, maybe the core wouldn’t disconnect! Then what?

…But my worrying had been for nothing, because one moment we were all standing waiting for the core to drop, the next there was a rushing noise and a mechanical roaaaar—and then the core was slamming into the ground, and we were all jumping even farther away, and my heart was crashing into my rib cage so crazily and I was gulping for air so fast, it felt like I was on the verge of a massive coronary event.

“It’s down!” Gary shouted to Steve now. “Raise the external shields.”

I stared over at the wreckage of one of the hearts of my ship, at the silver, red, and black long rectangular container of the core. Part of it had been unevenly crushed by the impact with the ground, and, no matter Gary’s earlier assurances about the low radioactivity of the core, there were still at least some dangers. And, going on the stiff way everyone out here was suddenly standing, they were also remembering the dangers.

Chris now pulled off the measuring device attached to his red suit; then he held the device toward the damaged core. “Elevated levels of radioactivity, but nothing too bad. Bizarre—the core’s been breached, but I’m detecting zero lone ambin and zero bound ambin on several exposed lining nodules.” His green eyes fell on my eyes and then on Gary’s. “Did it dissipate that fast?”

Gary’s head turned as he stared around the misty area beneath the ship. “It’s likely in this weather. Any free ambin molecules probably immediately combined with whatever hydrogen is in the mist.”

“But what if something else is responsible?” I said, thinking of what Babs had said about the core sensors detecting mobile ambin inside.

And as if I had a crystal-ball for the core, there was a sudden, extremely loud banging sound, like stone hitting stone—or stone hitting core. And then there was another roaaaar, only this one sounded like the kind that came from animals, not ships.

All of our heads instantly shot right toward the core, and that was when we all saw it; the core was vibrating irregularly, as if a giant, furious fist was inside there pounding on it, trying to get out.

Perry from the station began running toward the station as the rest of us fumbled backwards in the same direction. Gary pulled out his gun again, but I had a sinking feeling that the gun wouldn’t do shit, and I wasn’t sure that was the best response anyway, as long as the thing didn’t try to hurt us, if it got out….

How stupid that “if” was: the thing was pounding so hard, it was making enough noise to wake the solar system. I scrambled to lower my headpiece’s audio intake from the exterior, and I noticed the others fumbling with their suit-controls, probably trying to do the same lowering.

But, soon, the noise from the core was so loud, it was beyond the capability of the suits to block. I now felt the ground vibrating beneath my booted feet as the thing continued pounding. Part of the core suddenly shot up; then there was a sharp tearing sound, and more silver and red parts exploded upward.

Then there was a brief, ominous silence.

And then there, right at the core, a dark-blue miasma began emerging, the edge of a plasma; the plasma mass slowly slipped out of the tear, pulling three shocking neon-blue holes along with it. The blue holes rose higher, both independently inside the giant miasma and with the giant miasma as the plasma grew upward, which finally revealed that it actually wasn’t all plasma: there were solid parts, brown and red stone-looking solids floating inside of and covering some areas of the plasma—long arms, or maybe tentacles, were slipping and sliding into the misty air now, their edges glowing a neon-blue, too.

The three blue holes, which seemed to be eyes—the neon eyes were now facing our way. But if they registered what we humans were, the eyes didn’t seem to care, because a moment later, they shifted far to the left, toward where the long edge of the Demeter was, toward where the rest of Genteran was.

The thing kept rising and then began roaring again, the sound so loud it swept through my body and made my knees shake. We all rushed back toward the station again, but the thing still seemed unaware of us.

It roared even louder and pounded on what was left of the core, and then it finally fully slipped from inside and climbed over the wreckage, its tentacles striking the ground and sending earth into the air all along its path as it moved away.

Its angry appendages kept flailing at its surroundings, but I and the others ran closer to it now, so we could observe its journey from under the ship.

When the being reached beneath the sky and then the moonlight from above, it let out another load roaring and pounding session, till a hole seemed to open in the Genteran earth; the tentacles began deliberately moving into the hole—and the rest of the being quickly disappeared inside.

The roar finally died, and then there was nothing left but the mess the manic being had made of the earth and my ship.

*

“Holy shit—what a fucking disaster!” I said a moment later through shaking lips.

A few of the others laughed loudly. Then Karen lowered her camera and asked, “Is that it—is it gone?”

“Who knows? At least it’s gone from my ship. It seems it didn’t like it inside. And I’m ever so glad it didn’t find the visit comfortable.” I was trying to make light of the situation, but my knees were shaking as I stared at the mess all over the ground, at the trail of mess; it went off into the distance, right up to where the hole the bizarre being had made had seemingly closed up. But the rest of the surface—I would be responsible for that. The fines….

I sighed loudly. And then Gary said, “Unfortunately, now comes the repair and clean-up….”

“What will this mean for Genteran?” Cambridge suddenly asked now.

Gary turned toward him. “We don’t know. Babs, did the communications come back up? Have you been listening and watching?”

“Oh yes—fascinating!” Babs said in a very excited voice.

“Um, I wouldn’t exactly call it that from out here,” I replied.

“I believe,” Babs continued, “that we’ve just witnessed the emergence of a new species!”

“Babs, I’m glad this is giving you a fantastic climax, but it wasn’t exactly a species I want to be friends with. It didn’t exactly look comfortable with what it’s become.”

I was frowning at Cambridge, whose mouth was shaking at me. Shock was sharpening his dark eyes, and they seemed to be asking me, Can we humans still live here now?

However, that was a question I certainly had no answer to.

*

The next day, I was back inside my ship, on the bridge with Babs; we were coordinating over the communicators with Gary and a team from Genteran as they all worked on the core clean-up.

The damage had turned out to be not as bad as I’d thought it would be: the “plasma being” had apparently consumed or merged with most of anything that would be damaging to human health especially.

“I figure the plasma being either got sucked up accidentally through the nozzles,” Babs said to me now, “or there was some incomplete combustion for some reason. Post-reaction ambin or hydroambin then made it into the exhaust, and that attracted the being to the ship. And then it developed a new taste while inside the reactor.”

Babs was standing at her bridge-station to the right of and slightly behind me; her eyes were on her electronic panel-table. She’d been up most of the night going over the data we’d accumulated about the plasma being and the whole incident. Her normally neat black bob was lopsided, and she had bags under her eyes, but I’d never seen her looking happier.

“Babs,” I said, “how do you know its taste is new? Maybe it can also become solid in part when it encounters hydroambin naturally on this planet.”

“Maybe, or maybe not,” Babs said. “Maybe it needed the specific conditions inside the reactor; maybe what happens to hydroambin and specifically ambin post-the reaction process—maybe that changes it into something that can now be used differently by that species. I really think that’s probably the case, based on what Steve reported about what it looked like at first and the initial ghost-like image from the Bot camera, and then later on with the sensors picking up haphazard destruction of ambin-containing parts.”

I sighed hard as I made an adjustment on my silver captain’s panel. “Whatever the case, I’m still left with a hole in my ship’s hull, and we can’t get to work on any welding because we’re busy cleaning up the mess the creature made. With the damage in the rod-shafts, in the belly and on the ground—we’ll be busy for days on that even. I did not want any of this, so how did I wind up with it? My shitty luck.”

Babs’s head turned my way, over her shoulder. “Sometimes bad things have to happen for good stuff to happen. Lydia, think of what this will open up: we’ve got a record of new life! We’ll go down in the science history books for this.”

My eyes were rolling. “I think you’re exaggerating.”

Her head shook fast. “No, I’m serious. There’s another issue here: these beings fix ambin inside themselves, cleaning it from their environment. It’s a helpful quality for a species to have.”

“Great. So someone will come and exploit the thing? That would be going backwards to disgusting human cruelty toward other species.”

Babs shook her head even faster as her whole body turned my way now. “I didn’t mean that! And it’s probably too angry an animal to work with in any capacity. But its existence might mean a way to allow an increase in hydroambin mining here, lessening the damage elsewhere: at least here on Genteran, there’s a form of natural lone-ambin clean-up. Maybe accumulating more solid matter actually HELPS the beings, makes them stronger.”

“Assuming there’s more than one of those things.”

“You said Cambridge told you there have been sightings.”

“I suppose,” I said, but I was frowning. No matter those sightings or the appearance yesterday, the hole the being had made had indeed closed, and there had been no more signs of any beings since. It seemed that so much was still so uncertain….

I let out another sigh, running my fingers through my messy, knotted hair; Babs wasn’t the only one who’d barely gotten any sleep overnight. “I’d really just like to get out of here. Everything else that happens as a result of this fiasco is not my concern OR my problem. I’m just hoping we can weld the ship back together to space specifications, or else we’re really fucked here—my ship stranded!”

The bridge’s intercom suddenly beeped—Gary, from outside the Demeter. I hadn’t had a moment alone with him since before the core drop, and now every time I heard his voice, my heart would become abnormally agitated. We’d never discussed that kiss….

“Yes?” I said to him now, my finger on the intercom button.

“We’re almost finished with the clean-up,” Gary said. “Another hour, I think.”

“Great job—that was fast!”

“Thanks mostly to the Genteran helpers.” Gary’s voice lowered a few notches. “Cambridge asked if we might pay them—a bonus?”

“Of course,” I said. I got the feeling that Cambridge had been hearing the cash register singing all along. I knew the people on Genteran didn’t have much opportunity for odd jobs because this was such an out of the way place, but I couldn’t sustain the whole planet with the money I made, especially when I was operating at such a loss right now.

Still, the workers here had indeed done me a huge favor; the clean-up would have taken longer if my crew had been the only ones working on it. I would definitely give the Genteran crew a bonus—and then some.

“Gary,” I said now, “what about the hull—can you give me an estimate on the time involved?”

“I can give you a guesstimate: three days, maybe four. I’ve coordinated with Cambridge again—he’s having some newly produced corascite panels shipped from another station. They should get here later today. Then there’s the heat-testing period; then we finally attach. It’s not like I haven’t done it before, when I was working patching at Oberon Station. It’s just finicky and tiring. I’m going to rest up overnight, if that’s all right with you, Boss.”

“Of course it’s all right. Take whatever time you need. I’ve sent word to Sereska that we’ll be delayed for days—no choice. I know it sucks that we’ll have to operate on the beam and zenite engines alone for a while. But I’m really happy most of my ship is still intact and that the shaft sustained minimal damage.”

“And someday soon,” Gary said, “we’ll do a core replacement, and then everything will be like nothing happened.”

“You’re right—thanks, Gary!”

“No problem,” he said, and I could have sworn I heard a huge smile in his voice.

*

Later, I was in the station again, in that same room with the camera view to beneath my ship. A few people were working under there now, hauling away the last of the disaster debris.

I turned away from the camera view, because I had actually come into the room to talk to Cambridge. He was seated behind a long black desk, leaning back in the cushioned red chair there, his face looking quite pale. I had intended to discuss a few business things with him, but I wound up asking him if he was feeling well.

He frowned then, clasping his hands across his red shirt, over his waist. “The thing is: we don’t get much coming our way here from off-world. And when word gets out that this place is a risk for a reactor core, that won’t do much for any business dealings here. I’m afraid this place will become a ghost station.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I had been so overwhelmed with and distracted by my own problems, I didn’t realize that the station—or even the whole damn planet—could now be in a much worse position than I was. I could—and would—leave. But Genteran’s people were now officially sharing the planet with a “ghost.”

“We’ve got a lot of data on the plasma being,” I said to Cambridge now. “We’ll certainly share it with you, and you can instruct any incoming ships what to do with their Rodrum Barriers, if they have them, and also what their shields should probably be set on to prevent any backflowing anywhere else.”

“Thanks. But even among the tech-savvy, people get suspicious and afraid. I’m a business-person first and foremost, as I think you can probably tell.” He grinned hugely at me, and a light laugh escaped my lips. “But, it’s hard to do business when there’s few to do business with and you can’t make people feel secure while you’re doing it.”

“Well, Cambridge, another thing I think would help: more communication during atmospheric entry. I know you want to maintain independence here, both on the ground and in the air, but, considering what’s happened, that would leave people flying too blind here.”

“You’re right—that’s one of the first orders of business, I mean behind other things. Speaking of business—” his grin widened even more “—when I contacted Blue Station for extra help for your core clean-up, I was told there’s a core in storage there—a newer model, a Number Seven, a Pelchrist, with improved reaction start-time at rod descent.

“I didn’t ask the station’s engineers to bring the core over then, but I’m thinking of asking them now. The price would be half the going rate—I mean, I think you and I could come to satisfactory terms over this. I really think it’s a great deal.

“So, what do you say: would you be interested in a new core at a reduced price?”

I couldn’t help laughing: only moments ago, he was poor-mouthing and woe-is-me-ing; now he was working me like a professional haggler at a ship auction.

But before I could respond to his offer, Gary walked into the room. Since I’d seen him yesterday, he had showered—I knew this because Babs had contacted him about something early in the morning today, and he’d told her he was just getting out of the shower then.

But now Gary had been working on the core clean-up for hours; his red helmet was off and in his hands, and his face looked tired and a little dirty.

The state of his face tugged at my heart, and I didn’t know what to say to him. My mouth moved a bit but nothing came out—at first. Suddenly though, I remembered Cambridge was still sitting in the room. I jerked a thumb at him now. “Cambridge says he’s got access to a beaut of a reactor, a Pelchrist. He wants to sell it to me at half-off.”

Gary glanced between both me and Cambridge; then Gary began laughing softly. “Pelchrists are hard to come by because they don’t make many. That would be a step up from what the Demeter had—not that it was bad by any means. But is this really the right time? We can make it to Sereska fine on the other engines. We could shop there for a reactor.”

“I’m sure you could do that, but it won’t be a Pelchrist,” Cambridge said in a smooth voice, leaning farther back in his chair and looking very comfortable as he did so. But then he suddenly snapped the chair forward and stood up. “How about I leave you two alone to discuss it? You look like you could use the time.”

He smiled now as he strode past us, then out the doorway to the rest of the station.

I was about to open my mouth and begin a more detailed discussion with Gary about the reactor—and us—when Babs walked into the room. There was a small smile on her face, but I thought I saw wariness in her brown eyes.

“What is it?” I said fast. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Babs said. “It’s just, the thing is, Lydia: I’ve decided to stay here.”

I frowned now. “Well, we’re all stuck here at the moment.”

“That’s not what I meant, Lydia. I mean…I want to stay on Genteran after that. This is an opportunity—to study something exciting! I’ve been talking to more people from here, and there have been quite a number of plasma-being sightings, especially near another station—I want to travel to there too. This one sighting here has actually been the only sighting in this zone. I’m thinking that maybe the plasma being somehow got stuck in this area of the planet, but it’s not native to here….” Babs’s voice died because she must have seen my perplexed, reddening face.

“You mean you want to leave leave—as in, leave the Demeter? But I need you on my ship, Babs! I thought everything was perfectly set up—”

“It was—it was! This means nothing toward what I feel about you and your ship. This is about what I feel toward here. I can get some serious science done here, methodical and on one issue. I really feel that this is important. I love being on the ship with you all—” her eyes fell on Gary, and she smiled “—yes—you too, Gary!” There was a low rumble of laughter from him now. “But,” Babs continued, “things come up in a random fashion there, and, lately, with Derry around, I’ve been feeling like I need to put down more roots somewhere.”

I was still frowning. “What about Derry—is she all right with this?”

“She’ll go wherever I go. She’s already told me so.”

“Lydia, Babs,” Gary said on a sigh now, “it was so hot working out there today, and I’m feeling like a sweaty wreck. I’m gonna go get cleaned up. I’ll see you later?” He raised a brown eyebrow at me, and I nodded fast, then watched his red-covered back as he walked out the doorway.

My eyes shifted right to Babs. “But, Babs, what am I going to do without you on the bridge?”

“You’ve got Gary—you should move him up there! Steve can take care of engineering.”

“But none of us are science ONLY. You fit that, and I’m not sure I can find a replacement for you.” What a mess this trip turned out to be—I’d lost not only a core; now I was also losing a crewmember!

“Like I said, Lydia, Gary would be perfect. I’m serious, Lydia. I think he’s wasted down in engineering only.”

“Now you’re championing him? What the hell happened there?”

“What happened is…I’m growing up a bit, or maybe I’m seeing myself as I should have all along: I need my own project. It’s true that Gary can be stubborn, but I can be bossy.” She laughed a little under her breath. Then she jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the doorway. “Cambridge mentioned there’s a materials-science position opening up here too; they were going to put out an advertisement over the ICFC airwaves to maybe import someone. But I just happen to be here.”

In case Cambridge or anyone else from the station poked his head into the room, I lowered my voice when I spoke now: “But, Babs, I thought you thought this place was a dump.”

“Well,” she said on a smile, “I guess it’s my kind of dump!”

I couldn’t help laughing.

However, a few minutes later when I left the station and walked over to my ship, I was no longer smiling but was frowning heavily.

This situation sucked! I didn’t want to lose Babs. But, somehow, I’d already lost her….

When I finally stepped onto my bridge, Chen was in his seat there, working. “I’ve been plotting out a few alternate paths to Sereska Station, sans reactor, to see which would save the most zenite and Evan hydro….” Chen’s voice died when his eyes turned up to my unhappy face. “What’s going on?” he asked fast now.

“Babs is leaving! She’s staying here on Genteran.”

Chen’s lips soundlessly dropped open; he looked the way I felt. Since practically the first moment Babs had walked onto my ship, I had been close with her; now, I would be losing that closeness, and so, apparently, would Chen be losing the same.

“W—well,” he finally managed to stutter out.

“Babs thinks I should move Gary up here. How would you feel about that?”

“Fine. That would be good. The thing is: we’ll still be minus one science-mind on the ship.”

“I know,” I replied on a sigh.

“I’m really sorry to hear this, Lydia, but back to the other thing—should I continue on with my work?”

My eyes had been on Chen, but my mind had been working fast over something else. “Yes,” I said to Chen now, “but don’t spend too much time on it because I have a feeling we’ll have a new reactor very soon.”

*

I was still on the bridge when I next saw Gary again. Chen had left for a break, so I was alone when Gary walked in and found me sitting in my captain’s seat, staring off into nowhere.

“What happened with the reactor offer—did you accept it?” Gary asked me.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I just sent a text-message to Cambridge.”

Gary turned away from me slightly. He must have showered since I’d last seen him inside the station; he was in a beige, shirt-and-pants outfit now, and the waves of his brown hair glistened with damp. “Okay,” he said now, “I’ll start preparing for the installation….”

“Wait,” I said, standing up. “Babs is definitely leaving the Demeter. She thinks you should be on the bridge in her place.”

Gary flashed confused, stunned brown eyes my way.

“Could Steve take over for you, you think?”

Now Gary’s back straightened, till he was standing quite stiffly. “Sure, Steve could take over—especially with Karen and Sam there.”

“Then I guess it’s a done-deal—provided you accept it.” My head was lowered slightly, but I was looking up at Gary through curious eyes, curious eyes above a gently shaking mouth.

“Lydia,” Gary said then on a long sigh. And that was all he said.

A silence filled the air between us, and it felt like the most awkward silence I had ever experienced around him.

I finally took a deep breath. Then I said in a lower voice, “Do you remember the last time we were on this bridge together?”

“I sure do,” Gary said, his broad cheekbones turning a pale pink.

“Gary, where did that come from?”

“From years and years of build-up.”

My shocked mouth fell open. “How? I don’t understand.”

“Come on—yes, you do. From the minute I met you—but I was already with someone else and I couldn’t back out. I didn’t want to—I did love Joan. I’m not in the habit of marrying women I don’t love. But, in retrospect, I should have backed out. If I was feeling something for you, I wasn’t feeling enough for her. And I was right: it didn’t last. We weren’t suited to each other.”

My mouth twisted a little now. “It seems you and I have a history of winding up with people we’re not suited to. How do we know we wouldn’t be next on the list?”

His brown eyebrows rose, but he took a step closer to me. “You really think that? Because I don’t.”

“I don’t know what to think, to be honest. I think that, deep-down, I’ve always felt something here.” I jerked a finger in the space between us. “But by the time I started realizing what I was feeling, you were part of my crew, and I’ve always had a rule about not getting involved with my crew.”

“Well, you’ve gotten involved with Babs—and I know not sexually. But people can’t help their emotions.”

I felt the pressure of tears behind my eyes now, because…he was right. That Babs was leaving was hurting me a lot more than it should have been for “just an employee.”

I lifted my sad eyes right to Gary’s eyes now. “Why didn’t you say how you felt sooner—like years sooner!”

“Because of what you just said: you weren’t interested. I could tell that. I think everyone could.”

“Who’s everyone—you mean people know?!?” My face felt like it was totally red now, and I wasn’t sure which embarrassed me more: my red face in front of Gary, or the idea that my crew knew how Gary felt about me while I did not know.

Now Gary said, “I’m sure some know—no, I know some do. Babs, for one.” He rolled his eyes, and they finally fell right on my face. “Even though we debated sometimes, I felt like she was an ally on this, and now she’ll be gone.”

I couldn’t help frowning. “I hope we’ll be gone from here soon already, and everything goes all right afterward.”

Quite quickly now and in one motion, Gary’s whole body turned away from me. “I’ll get on the installation prep right away to make sure everything goes perfectly. Especially if I’m going to be up here….” There was a question in his statement—and, more importantly, in the soft brown eyes he turned on me.

It took me a moment to build up the nerve, but I finally moved closer to him and laid a hand on one of his bare forearms, which hand then slipped into his hand, into his warm hand. “Gary, this feels strange…but, I think I’ll get used to it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it before.”

His eyebrows were up again, and there was a delicious smile around his wide mouth and heavy mustache. “Really?” he said. “I’d like to hear what you thought then, and what you’re thinking now….”

“Oh my—” I laughed lightly “—not sure I should go into that on the bridge!”

“Then I really want to hear it,” he said.

We were both laughing now, and then a moment later we were both finally closing the gap between us, till we kissed for the second time ever—and I soon realized how much better this kiss was than the first one, and then I was soon closing the bridge doors, and locking them.

*

In order to get the Pelchrist installation done as efficiently as possible, Cambridge imported some engineers and other workers from Blue Station; then they, a few of Cambridge’s own people and Gary and my other engineering crew made the installation. It took them days to finish that and all of the post-installation testing involved, and to weld up the hull too.

Ten days after the Demeter first landed on Genteran, my crew and I said a happy goodbye to Genteran and a tearful (on my end) goodbye to Babs, and then the rest of us were finally on our way to Sereska Station—and then I began developing panic-attack feelings.

Gary was now at his new—and hopefully permanent—perch on my bridge, but no matter his repeated assurances to me about the core installation and the hull repair, I was having a hard time believing that the hull would survive the first space-flume trip to The Sereska Layer.

This would be the hull’s first real test; lifting off through an atmosphere was one thing, and the hull had resisted the immense forces of that just fine when we left Genteran.

However, a planet was generally spherical, so in many cases a planet could effectively be treated as a point mass with predictable uniform forces around it, which was almost never the case for space flumes: they were an entirely different thing to physically navigate. Though the flumes did most of the work, the extreme forces inside them were often unpredictable in direction because the space flume shapes were fluidly unpredictable.

As we approached the Sereska flume now, Gary was behind me at his new station on my right, and Chen was in front of me at his usual station on my left; the three of us were coordinating with Steve down in engineering, who had been sending commands over his computer to the new reactor.

“This feels weird,” he said suddenly over the intercom.

My heart began galloping a bit wildly. “What feels weird, Steve?” I asked fast.

“Gary up there, me down here,” Steve said. “How many times have we navigated flumes while working together?”

“We’re still working together,” Gary said. “We’re just displaced in space with respect to the ship. Speaking of displacement, I’m getting too much variance in the primary heat coil beside the beam engine.”

“I see it,” Steve said, but he said it in a way that was a bit too tart.

Gary let out a low laugh. “Getting territorial already?”

Steve’s louder laugh came over the intercom line. And then Chen and I joined the laughter.

I was smiling now as I worked my captain’s panel, checking various areas around the ship, including the cargo bay; May had just sent me back an everything’s-in-place-for-Sereska text-message.

Now I just hoped everything was in place for my whole damn ship….

We finally entered the flume to Sereska, and I could feel sweat dripping down the sides of my face as Gary and Steve got into a companionable duel over how best to navigate the flume, which actually wound up saving me from having a heart attack.

I never thought that they would be so funny while working at “opposite” ends like this, and their humorous banter took away some of the sting that a missing Babs had caused me. The camaraderie of the two men also took away the stress of their and Chen’s maneuvers inside the superfast moving space flume. I didn’t pay as much attention to the technical aspects of the trip through, and, when the shearing forces almost approached the tolerance-level rating on the hull, I just went with the flow of Gary’s and Steve’s banter through the danger—and then the next thing I knew, the Demeter was shooting out of the flume and all of the hull sensors were reading fine on my panel, and on the engineering and science panels, too.

“You can stop holding your breath now, Lydia,” Gary said on one of his trademark low laughs.

I glanced over my right shoulder at him and gave him a quick, slightly shaky smile. He seemed to know me very well now, but then that wasn’t surprising: for days we had been spending quite a bit of delicious time in his cabin whenever we could find the time….

I turned back to the front of the bridge; I stared at the wide viewscreen there, at the mostly black space outside the Demeter, at the pinpoints of bright stars and planets.

I always marveled at how vast everything was. Though humans had reached many very far places, the Universe still seemed never-ending, unknowable. My crew and I had encountered strange things on Genteran, and the people there would now be living with that strangeness more intimately. However, there were probably even more strange things in the rest of the Universe. There might even be more dangerous things, too.

For sure, there were pluses and minuses out here. But who knew what excitement might come up next? That navigating the unknown—that was really what always kept me coming out into space.

My eyes still on the vastness beyond my ship, I smiled widely now, both at myself and at everything my ship was, because no matter what might happen during any future experiences with the unknown, after everything that my crew and I had been through together, I was pretty sure that we would be ready for those new experiences.

Firestone

My crew and I were on our way to one of the largest space stations in the galaxy when Chen told me he and May wanted to get married at the station.

I was in my black captain’s chair on my bridge; my boyfriend Gary was behind me and on my right at his science station. And now he and I both said to Chen at the exact same time, “Congratulations!”

I grinned at Chen. “Will you want a bigger room? There’s the junk room on the first maintenance deck—it’s been needing a cleaning for, well, years now. It’s quite big, so we could refit it as an apartment. Would you be interested in it?”

“Yes!” Chen said, nodding rapidly, his shiny dark hair shimmering beneath the bridge’s bright overhead lights. He was sitting on my left in his red pilot’s chair, and he swiveled it toward me now. “I’ll have to discuss it with May of course. But we’ve been bouncing back-and-forth between each other’s cabins—” Chen cleared his throat, through a rapidly reddening face.

He and May had first gotten involved months ago, but I hadn’t noticed their relationship for most of those months, which I considered both a testament to my being somewhat out of touch with the social life of my crew, and a testament to how professional my crew were: they were able to keep their private lives separate from their work lives, even when they lived where they worked for most of the year.

“Well then,” I said now, getting up from my chair, “there’s no time like the present.” I looked at Gary. “Can you handle things here by yourself for a little while?”

“No problem,” Gary said, smiling at me, his heavy brown mustache curving with his mouth in a very pleasing-for-me way.

For a long moment, I couldn’t take my eyes from him; I was feeling something I didn’t want to feel at the moment, that I didn’t want to think about at the moment.

Quickly now, I turned back to Chen and said, “Let’s go take a look at the junk room.”

*

As Chen and I moved toward the Demeter’s upper decks, I thought of The M-Word. Both Gary and I had taken the plunge with other people years ago, which plunges wound up being mistakes. But, I had finally hooked up with Gary a few months ago, and since then, The M-Word had occasionally popped into my mind—and then popped right out, probably because I made it pop right out, especially before it could pop out of my mouth.

Still, marriage was something that even couples in today’s modern, zipping-across-the-galaxy times usually considered at some point. It seemed the human heart hadn’t evolved as fast as our technology had….

I wondered if the dynamic on my ship would soon change yet again; I’d recently lost Babs, my science expert. I hoped I wouldn’t now be losing both my pilot and the director of my cargo bay.

Chen and May were still fairly young. Chen didn’t have any family on Earth; I wondered if he was planning on creating a family, but I didn’t want to pry by asking him about that.

Also, because of some crazy recent events, my crew and I had been forced to stay at Sereska Station longer than I’d planned. We had to do more maintenance on the Demeter’s engines and other parts there, which meant I’d never gotten to take a break on Pink; nor had my crew gotten to take one on Aper Minor. We were even more overworked—and overstressed—than normal, so I’d scheduled us to go back to Earth soon for an extended break. But now I worried that an extended break there might lead to a permanent stay for Chen and May….

When I finally stepped onto the Demeter’s first maintenance deck, I reached for my new belt. I normally wore a leggings-and-shirt type of “uniform,” as I was wearing now. But I’d recently changed my usual belt to a captain’s tool belt. It was soft yet kind of cage-like; the flexible red fabric fitted above my hips and slightly onto my hips, and it contained several nice-sized pockets and built-in devices.

My fingers now slid along the stretchy fabric, in search of my built-in communicator. “May,” I said, glancing down at my belt, “Chen told me your news—congratulations! We’re taking a look at one of the junk rooms upstairs. I’m offering it to the two of you, once we clean it up. You want to check it out now?”

“Oh, Lydia, that sounds great!” May said over my communicator. “But, since we left with the cargo from Vitalia, somehow I misplaced one of the containers of columite we picked up from Sereska. I’ve had to move a bunch of containers to look for it. I’m sorry, Lydia….”

“Don’t worry about it—you’ll find it. Where the hell could it have gone anyway—into a black hole?” I laughed softly at my own words.

“It’s just so frustrating,” May said, in a voice vibrating with said-frustration. “I’m so careful about staying organized.”

“I know. That’s why you’re on my ship and why I want to keep you here!” I blurted out. My face felt a bit red as I turned to Chen beside me. I did not want to pressure either of them, but I was afraid that I had indeed just pressured both of them. I said fast now, “Come up if you can when you’re done, May, all right?”

“Yes!” she said, and I saw Chen smile. His cheeks were a little red, and really, I’d never seen him looking happier.

I clicked off my communicator, and Chen and I reached the junk room. I opened the black control-panel beside the metal door so I could unlock the room. I usually kept most of the rooms on my ship locked; I trusted my crew, but, occasionally, I had paying passengers on here; or cargo-loading workers and other staff as new, temporary crewmembers, as I had right now. So I generally followed a lock-the-rooms policy as much as possible, especially in certain parts of space, and where we were now was one of those certain parts.

I punched my captain’s code into the junk-room’s electronic panel; then I turned on the heat inside the room and unlocked the door. It slid open—but only a little of the way.

“Yikes,” I said. “Could the workings in the wall be rusted?”

“Yeah,” Chen replied. He was beside me now, pressing his palms to the door, right near where I had just pressed mine.

My face reddened as we tried to slide open the door more, but my reddening state wasn’t only because I was physically straining myself; I was embarrassed that I’d offered this room to Chen when I couldn’t even get the fucking door open.

Chen hit some buttons on the control-panel and we worked together for another moment, applying pressure to the door again, till there was a loud sucking sound and the door finally opened all the way.

Other than a shaft of light sliding in from the hallway, the room was quite dark inside. But the lights on the ceiling should have come on automatically. When I tried to flick them on now using the interior switch right inside the doorway, the lights wouldn’t work.

“Oh christ,” I said, glancing at Chen’s profile. He was standing in the doorway, and I could have sworn I saw a laugh bubbling behind his face. “Not much of an offer, huh?” I said to him now, my mouth curling into a wavy line.

His laugh finally came out. “It’s no secret that this ship is getting up there in years.”

“I know,” I said on a frown. “It’s due for a major remodeling. Might as well start here!” I pressed my belt communicator for my lead engineer. “Steve, I can’t get the lights to come on in the junk room on Maintenance One. Are the bulbs out or is it the switches and panels? Can you get me some light in here—”

“Hang on, Captain,” Steve said. A pause. Then: “The sensors are showing the panels are fine. But I’m getting some bulb problems, yeah. When was the last time you updated the workings in the bulb-canopy?”

“Um…I have no idea. But it’s clearly too long a time, probably from before you started working here…. Never mind, Steve. We’ll get flashlights from the closet down the hall. But, add the canopy-repair to your list of side-tasks.”

“Will do,” Steve said.

Chen and I now went to the hall maintenance closet and removed two flashlights (which were both working—hooray!); then we went back to the junk room.

I walked in first, sliding the beam of my flashlight over the room’s contents, then sliding a few of those contents out of my way. “I probably should have organized this space better,” I mumbled, not expecting a response from Chen, and I didn’t get one. “Let’s clear a path to the other end—so you can get a better idea of the room’s size and shape.”

“Thanks, Lydia—it looks like it’ll be great.”

“I hope so,” I said, feeling a little breeze of warmish air touch my face as the room’s heating system started up for the first time in a long time.

Chen and I attached our flashlights to our clothes now—my light to my captain’s belt, his light to the belt of his black pants—and the two beams fell on an old panel-table. Years ago, I’d had someone move it from a closet in the cargo bay to up here. The table must have been part of the bridge from before I’d bought the Demeter: the tabletop’s rim was a metallic brown, which some of the fittings and decorations on the bridge still were. But, someone had changed much of the bridge to a newer, brighter, redder style—probably so the ship would look nicer and entice a buyer, who wound up being me….

Now I said to Chen, “I think we should start by moving some stuff to the emptier closets in the hall—should have probably sold some of this shit to a scrap hauler years ago! I just hate to get rid of things.”

The panel-table had roller balls on the bottom, but they were old and stiff, so when Chen and I tried to use them now, the table would only move an inch or two at a time.

“We’ll be here all day like this,” I said on a groan. “Let’s lift it—it doesn’t feel too heavy.” Both of my hands were beneath the table’s top, at the corners where two of the legs were. But Chen was stronger than I, so when he lifted his end, it wound up higher than my end. I instinctively pushed forward toward the table—and hit the frame beneath the table’s top, knocking a part of the frame open; it was actually a small drawer, which hadn’t been visible before it fell open.

The drawer slid forward even more now, and something from inside fell down into and then quickly out of the shaft of my flashlight. In that brief instant, I noticed a flash of red….

“Hang on, Chen—let’s set this down. Something fell out.”

We dropped the table, and I groped around on the floor with one hand while I directed my beam of light with the other. The light hit something even brighter than the light: a small, oval, reddish stone. I picked it up, then unclipped my flashlight and put it on the panel-table, angling the light so the stone and my hands would be in the beam.

My eyes locked onto the glowing stone. It felt so cool and light in my hand, but it glowed in mostly bright-red, fire-like streaks, with dots of white and fluorescent yellow floating inside the liquid-like fire at the stone’s center.

The effect seemed to be a type of luminescence—a product of physics, chemistry or possibly even biology. A bioluminescence seemed too far-out an explanation. But there could have been some chemical reactions going on inside the stone that had excited the electrons there and ultimately led to the emission of photons.

“Chen, turn off your beam,” I said, as I turned off my own beam. “I want to see what happens to the stone in the dark.”

What happened was: the same thing. The stone kept glowing and seemingly did not fade at all; a fluorescence induced by light probably wasn’t going on. The stone could have been irradiated years ago, and now heat from the environment was causing a luminescence. But, the light coming off the stone seemed too powerful for that, and the environment around the stone seemed too cold.

I also didn’t see how phosphorescing could be happening, especially to this degree: again, the stone had been sealed in a dark cold container for years, and the lighting in the room was low now, my flashlight not that powerful; other than that and the heat from my hand, I hadn’t directly subjected the stone to any radiation. The stone could have been undergoing radioactive decay but hopefully wasn’t, considering I was holding it.

But, again, if the stone wasn’t naturally decaying, how had it gotten excited while lying in the cold dark for so long? What would have been powering any chemistry inside it during that same time period?

The stone had just fallen onto the floor, and I knew that fractures and other mechanical changes could produce luminescence in some materials. However, an effect like that probably wouldn’t have lasted this long; the stone seemed to be maintaining the same intensity of glow, as if it held a mini-volcano inside. I’d never seen a more beautiful stone….

I said some of my thoughts on this to Chen, and he replied, “Strange that it was inside the table. Why would someone lock up something so beautiful?”

I shrugged, my fingers closing around the stone. “I have no idea—BUT, finders keepers,” I said, before slipping the small stone inside one of the pockets on my belt.

*

A few hours later, my crew and I were finally approaching our next destination: Cardoon Station Twelve.

There were a bunch of Cardoon stations positioned around the galaxy; this Cardoon was one of the biggest. It was also quite a happening place, which would really be a perfect place—for Chen and May to get married.

On my bridge now, Chen and Gary were at their usual work areas, and I was sitting in my captain’s chair, giving and getting info from Cardoon Twelve’s Space Entry people, and looking up at the bridge’s front viewscreen. The Demeter was approaching the bright-red Cardoon Twelve almost head-on toward the round, shiny black hub at the station’s very top, which was the station’s main Space Entry hub.

Cardoon stations were built with extremely long main axes and curved docking “leaves” that radiated out perpendicularly to the main axes. Farther down along Cardoon Twelve now, the top of one of the red leaves slowly opened.

A moment later on the silver electronic panel in front of me, I received more landing data from Space Entry; I told Chen and also Karen in engineering to cut all thrusting and set the ship to a minimum coasting state: minimal forces would be generated so nothing coming from the Demeter would interfere with Space Entry’s protocol for landing in a leaf; Cardoons were highly populated stations and had a lot of rules about what you could and couldn’t do while landing.

My upper lip was sweating now, and I could see Gary’s hands were lightly shaking as he worked one of his science panels.

“Everybody loves visiting Cardoons, but no one loves landing on them,” I said, turning toward Gary even more. I heard Chen laugh, but Gary only sighed and rolled his brown eyes.

“It’s easy for you,” he said to Chen. “Your job’s done now, you lucky bastard.”

Chen was still laughing.

I jerked my left hand his way, but my eyes had remained on Gary. “Chen’s feeling high on his impending marriage.”

“Not that high,” Chen said fast. “It’s only a few hours away, and, frankly, I’m more nervous about that than this!”

I looked at him now, laughing myself. “You’re absolutely right: marriage is scarier than landing on a Cardoon.” I pushed the intercom button on the black panel beside me, hooking up with engineering. “Gary, Karen, do well here. If I get fined, I’m taking it out of your salaries.”

“Will do, Boss,” said Karen, but there was a clear shake to her voice. When Gary had taken Babs’ science place on my bridge, Karen had been moved up to the second engineering position because Steve had been moved up to the first. But Steve had just gone on his downtime, so, right now, everything in engineering was down to Karen. This was actually her first landing on a space station, and it had to go and be on a Cardoon….

“Karen,” I said fast now, “I was only kidding.”

“Yes, Captain,” she said, but her voice didn’t sound any less nervous.

“Is everyone afraid of me on here?” I asked no one in particular. And no one in particular responded.

Space Entry suddenly signaled me, and a clipped voice from there said over the communications-line: “Looking good, Demeter, except you need to make a 0.01-starboard adjustment toward our south pole or else you might torque north when the tractor beam attaches.”

 “You heard Space Entry,” I said to both Karen and Gary. And then a moment later on the viewscreen and on my silver panel, a pale-blue, shimmery beam emerged from the opening in the red Cardoon leaf.

The blue beam slowly traveled through the black of space and approached the Demeter’s nose. The beam was a magnetic-powder beam, which was one of the safest tractor beams; it was made up of billions of extremely sensitive tiny magnets that would constantly shift the Demeter’s “poles” when necessary, to carefully attract it toward and then slowly move it into the station.

“The beam’s locked,” Gary finally said.

I nodded, my eyes still on the shimmering beam on the viewscreen and on the way it seemed to effortlessly make us close the gap with the station’s curved leaf-extension.

I looked at Chen as he, in coordination with Karen and Gary, made a few final adjustments—and then the view on the viewscreen brightened as the Demeter gently slid into the leaf’s internal hangar.

The streamlined space inside was vast and mostly silver and white. I felt the Demeter settle down as the pull of the beam diminished. The ship rolled forward slightly on its landing gear inside the hangar’s wide tracks; then Karen increased the braking, and the ship came to a full stop, the hangar’s massive locks finally snapping over the landing gear.

Letting out a relieved breath now, I unstrapped from my chair and said “Phew!” as I stood up and turned to both Gary and Chen. “So, what do you say—let’s not do that again for the rest of this year?”

“That’s up to you, Captain,” Chen said.

And I nodded and smiled at him, then left the bridge.

*

Not long after, I was walking out of my ship and then out of the Cardoon hangar; I had some paperwork to do in the Space Entry office down the long hall outside the hangar area.

As I would often do on a job, I had intentionally arrived at Station Twelve early. The cargo I had to pick up wouldn’t be available till tomorrow, so my crew and I would now have a night of time to kill—having fun, I hoped.

When I was finished with the Space Entry office, I walked farther down the hall to where there was a big electronic wall-poster with a list of businesses in the station. I hadn’t been to this particular Cardoon in a number of years, and things-businesses could change rapidly, even in space.

Space stations typically contained lots of people from lots of places with various dispositions and pasts, including bad dispositions and pasts. On the poster, there was a listing for a restaurant/bar on the level below the hangar where the Demeter was parked; the restaurant was part of a chain so probably wasn’t too seedy.

I tapped a forefinger on the listing as if it were a target; then I walked back toward the hangar where my ship waited.

*

In my cabin later, I was brushing my long hair as I picked out a change of clothes; I had just contacted Chen, and he told me that he and May had registered their intent to get married in an hour, in the station’s Public Status Office.

There were over sixty people on my ship right now, and more than thirty of us would be going to the wedding and then the restaurant I’d chosen.

I removed a dressy brown blouse and black slacks from my closet, and once I was inside that outfit, I put on my red captain’s belt and slipped my ICFC card inside one of the belt’s pockets. Tonight’s festivities would be my treat.

*

I was finally sitting beside Gary and watching May and Chen as they stood on a silver podium and said their marriage vows to each other. There were greenhouse-grown white flowers on the yellow table behind them, and Chen and May were in colorful, almost-matching clothes: they both had on red, long-sleeved tops; beneath that, May was wearing flowing gray pants and Chen was wearing straight-legged black ones. They were almost the same height, and seeing them together like this, in profile with such happy smiles on their faces—it made me realize how well-suited they were to each other….

I felt a whisper of a touch on my left hand, and when I turned my head to the left, Gary smiled at me and took my hand in his.

He didn’t speak and neither did I. But I could feel something pass through his warm brown eyes into my eyes, and I wondered if, at that moment, we might have had a little bit of the May-and-Chen about our appearance.

*

After the ceremony, there were lots of congratulatory sentiments and hugs from my crew—and from me, too. Chen and May smiled at all of this through red faces, but I noticed that their eyes kept going back to each other.

I felt a little laugh bubbling inside me: the newlyweds probably wanted room-time back on the Demeter, or maybe even somewhere on the station—shit, I should have thought of that sooner and looked that up on the hall poster.

“Hey,” I said fast now, to Chen and May, “I planned on treating everyone at the Neptune Grill, but how about a night for the two of you in the hotel here? Would you like that? It would be my treat. The rest of us can party without you, if you two want to go get a room….”

Chen’s face got even redder, probably at my inference. “No! We want to party too. The hotel room would also be fantastic—for later.”

“But you’re too good to us,” May said, her golden-brown face smiling as she grabbed my left hand and squeezed it a bit. “We can’t accept your paying….”

“Yes you can! It’s my gift to you. And I’m actually really flush right now, given that last enormous delivery to Armine. I urge you to take advantage of my flushed state.” I laughed a little, though what I’d said was the truth: at Sereska, I’d luckily landed that new fantastic Armine job, which had paid much more than enough for me to make up for the money I’d recently lost on Genteran.

That new Armine job had also led to a new future relationship between me and the planet; the Armine government had rigid schedules for deliveries at specific times every year, and I’d signed a contract to meet their needs.

I loved making deals that would guarantee me income in the future, because a life in space normally meant no guarantees, period.

*

The whole galaxy must have decided to eat at the Neptune Grill on the night of the wedding: the floor, the tables, the bar—everywhere was packed with people. I hadn’t been in such a crowded public place for recreational reasons in years.

Among all of the noise and activity from strangers in the big room, my crew and I filled several long tables, where we laughed and ate and drank: even more of my crew wound up coming to the restaurant than I’d thought would come….

I finally noticed that our pitchers of fruit whiskey on the Grill tables were almost empty—not that I needed to drink anymore. I’d had over two glasses of the whiskey, and now if I lowered my head even slightly, it would begin swimming. But, I was pretty sure some of my crew wanted more alcohol and could handle more of it than I could. Even if they couldn’t handle it or even if I wound up spending too much money, I suddenly didn’t give a shit—this was a celebration!

I grabbed one of the empty pitchers and stood, saying that I’d be back with even more booze, but my words came out quite slurred. I heard a few bursts of laughter from my table.

Then May and Chen got up from it, and May said, “Lydia, I think we’re gonna take off for the hotel now, if that’s all right.”

“Of curse it is,” I said incorrectly, giving May a big, uncharacteristic-from-me wink.

More laughs around me, including from May—and Gary, who stood up now but was lightly shaking his head.

“I’ll be back right before the cargo pick-up tomorrow,” May said. “But let me know if you need me earlier than that.”

I laid a hand on her back over the soft red fabric of her top, finally giving her shoulder a squeeze. “I will. Jus’ you make sure you have a good time tonight—on me. I wanna hear all about it tomorrow.”

The laughs this time were even louder.

*

A moment later, I was walking toward the bar at the back of the dining area. The bar spanned the width of the room and it was crowded with bodies, but I managed to squeeze myself in between a few of them.

Gary came up behind me; then the person to the right of me left her barstool, and Gary gestured for me to take the empty seat. When I did, he slowly shook his head at me, a small smile curling his lips.

“What?” I asked him.

“I haven’t seen you this drunk in years,” he said.

“I’m not drunk.”

“Come on, Lydia.” He was laughing under his breath now. I couldn’t really hear it over the noise in the room, but I could see his mouth and throat moving. My eyes lingered on the smooth, muscular curves of his neck; then my eyes rose up to his hard jawline and his thick brown mustache, which curved in a sexy line around his wide mouth. Mmmm. Later….

Gary’s big hand was suddenly waving in front of my face. “Lydia, are you there?”

“Yes, yes, I’m here,” I said, though I didn’t feel too confident there, and I realized then that, yeah, I was a bit drunk. I took some deep breaths and tried to get a better bearing on my surroundings.

The room’s lighting was subdued, and there didn’t seem to be enough employees around to handle the crowd, including that there weren’t enough bartenders. I waved a quick hand several times and finally managed to catch the eye of the older bartender with the long dark hair and sweaty face—I couldn’t blame him for being so sweaty when the room was so full. I felt so damn flushed myself….

“What can I get for you?” the bartender asked me fast as he moved my way.

I lifted the empty glass pitcher toward him. “Five more of these—fruit whiskey, please, jus’ lighter on the whiskey part this time.”

“Sure. That’ll be a hundred ICFC dollars.”

Automatically I reached down for my red belt and opened a pocket, looking up at the bartender first, then at Gary’s still-smiling face. I suddenly found myself unable to pull away from his brown eyes, because of the promise I seemed to be seeing in them; that his warm hand now reached over and pressed against my lower back did not help the situation.

Finally yanking my eyes from his, I grabbed my card from my belt and laid it on top of the bar. But when I turned my head back toward the bartender, I noticed his widening dark eyes. What had I done….

My eyes shot down to where he was staring—to where that weird stone was now lying on top of my ICFC card.

When I’d paid the server for the drinks and food at the table earlier, my belt must have been turned to the wrong spot on my middle. I’d put my ICFC card back into the wrong pocket then, and, somehow, the stone got stuck to the card—or, moments ago, I was too drunk to realize that I’d grabbed both items….

“Where’d you get that?” the bartender asked me fast now, his eyes whipping up to mine.

“Wh—what?” I said as my eyes dropped to the stone again. “It’s just something pretty I found.”

“Just something pretty…” he mumbled.

“What’s the problem?” came Gary’s voice, Gary’s slightly hard voice, which he’d directed at the bartender.

“Well,” the bartender said in a lower voice as he leaned closer over the bar, “that looks like a firestone.”

I frowned at him. “A what?”

“A firestone. I’ve only seen pictures of them. They’re rare. Only a few have been found. They seem to be connected to the planet Rintu.”

I shrugged. “Never heard of it. But how do you know about all this shit?”

He frowned now, at me. “I didn’t always own this place. For years I was with the Galactic Exploration Service. I retired early and bought out the Grill from someone else. I got tired of being on the go all the time.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, more in polite sympathy than as a fact of my feelings. I couldn’t imagine wanting to “sit” in one place for years on end. I’d always had trouble with remaining stationary, even as a small child….

I picked up the stone and held its cool, peculiar fire tighter in my hand. “Firestone—I like that name.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go yelling it all over the place,” the bartender said.

“I think you’re being too dramatic,” I replied, but I did stick the stone back into my belt, my fingers repeatedly making sure the top of the side pocket was completely closed over.

The bartender abruptly moved away, probably to get my drink order.

Someone had vacated the seat on my left, and now Gary quickly filled it. “I think I’ve heard of those,” he said on a frown, his eyes staring at the wall behind the bar.

“The fi—the stones?”

He nodded, his eyes shifting to me. “They’re presumed to be alien.”

I couldn’t help laughing hard—a.k.a. too loudly—at the serious way he’d phrased that.

And now he began laughing at me again—and shaking his head at me again, too.

*

My crew and I stayed at the Grill for a few more hours. Then we all went back to the Demeter, where Gary and I went straight to my room and got naked.

The first time I’d ever seen Gary naked, I was surprised at how hairy his whole torso was. But then hairy male bodies were also my favorite kind….

I ran my hands over my guy’s hairy body, loving the contradictory feel of the scratchy-silkiness there.

Standing in the middle of my cabin and stroking Gary, I thought of the whole day, of May and Chen, of their marriage and what their future together might hold. I felt a pinpoint of longing inside my chest, but before it could expand, I squelched it. There were too many other things I had to do….

“What are you thinking about?” Gary asked me softly now, from near my left ear, where his face was alternately nuzzling me and kissing me.

“I think…I think it’s nice on my ship when people get along well and are happy with each other.”

I felt Gary still against me. Then his warm brown eyes came into my view as he pulled back from me a bit. “Are we happy?”

I smiled at him. “I think so—yes, of course. I mean, I am. Are you?”

“You know I am,” he said then…but had there been a slight, ambivalent vibration behind his statement?

I sighed, loudly. “Today was a long day; I’m finally not so buzzed and I can clearly feel my surroundings—so now I really don’t want to talk much!”

“Me either,” Gary said, and a lewd smile filled the space below his mustache as his hands silkily slid over my lower back, then lower.

For some reason, I couldn’t help laughing—but that lasted only for an instant, because Gary quickly ended my laughter with a kiss.

*

When I woke up in my bed the next morning, I was alone. That was often the case with me and Gary: though my crew knew Gary and I were involved, I did not like to show this too much “in public,” so we usually wouldn’t walk out of either of our rooms together.

I was sighing as I unfolded my naked self from my sheets and sat up—too fast. My head spun and pounded. Remembering last night, I rolled my eyes. I really shouldn’t have drunk so much when I knew that early today I would have to visit several Cardoon offices; I had to make sure everything was ready to be transferred for loading onto the Demeter later, and I had to oversee that the loading was being done right, business-wise, from the Cardoon end. The station was really just the middle person because I was picking up cargo from a private manufacturer and bringing it to another private manufacturer.

Suddenly, though, I did not want to be bothered doing anything today. I wanted to fall back onto my mattress and fall back asleep. Even though my hangover was mild, it was still annoying. And last night Gary and I wound up having a more athletic session of sex than normal, probably because we’d both been fired-up with booze….

“Fired-up”—that stone. I sprung off my bed.

When Gary and I had reached my cabin last night, I’d whipped off my clothes; they were scattered around the room now, and I was really worried…for no reason. I located my belt on the floor; the red fabric was pushed up against the metal frame of my bed, and when I pulled open the belt’s side pocket, I found the stone still nestled inside.

I couldn’t help breathing a relieved sigh as I removed the stone; I loved the way it looked and felt in my hand, so I really didn’t want to lose it.

I walked across my room to my black dresser and slipped the stone into the gray lock-box I used for my captain’s ID and my ownership title for the Demeter. Then I put the box into my cabin’s wall safe—and locked it.

*

Not long after, I was dressed in my usual shirt-and-leggings, chewing on a cruller and walking into the cargo bay.

I wiped my mouth when I reached May, who was standing near one of the bay’s decontamination poles as she made adjustments to the red seal around the top of a large container.

“How are you doing?” I asked her in a cheerful voice.

She spun around and spread a hand toward behind her, wiping her other hand on her brown overalls. “Great, Captain! I finally found the missing columite.”

“Good. Maybe last night helped jog your memory. I hope you had a good time then.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Lydia—Captain, I mean,” she finished, quickly glancing at a few of the others working in the cargo bay, including one of the new, temporary crewmembers.

I lightly laughed off May’s use of my first name; I wasn’t such a hard-ass boss that I needed to hear my title all the time, pulling rank over everyone around me. This wasn’t a military operation, though I did appreciate when people did their jobs to a competency level equivalent to military positions, which my regular crewmembers always did.

I swallowed the last of my cruller. “May, don’t worry: you always do a great job, or else you wouldn’t be on the Demeter. Congratulations again, to you and Chen. Now I’m off to see the Cardoon powers-that-be. We’ll see if our estimate of lift-away time will wind up being an accurate one.” I rolled my eyes. “I doubt they’ll be as efficient here as you are. Keep up the good work.”

I walked away, my eyes roaming over the others in the bay, including a few of the temporary crewmembers. One of them was quite wide in the torso area and he didn’t move too fast. I knew one of the cargo-loader machines was being repaired, and I also knew from the status-update panel in my cabin that one of my regular cargo crewmembers wasn’t feeling too well; yesterday he’d remained on the ship on an extended downtime while the May-Chen festivities were going on….

I wondered where Chen was now, and as I walked out of the cargo-bay hatch and down the bay’s long gray ramp, I used the communicator on my belt to contact my bridge.

“Chen here,” Chen said over the line, and there was a touch of tiredness in the sound.

“How are you doing today?”

“Oh—I’m fine, Captain—it’s just taking me longer than usual to fully wake up….”

“I’m sure it is—after last night,” I said, unable to help myself, or the slight shake of laughter behind my words. “I’m off into the station—I might be gone for a few hours. I want hourly updates to the bridge on our status—engines, fuel, and cargo especially. I don’t want to hang around here any longer than necessary. Yesterday Space Entry said that a higher number of ships than normal would be coming in and going out today—I don’t want to be stuck here, waiting for permission to leave this leaf.”

“You got it, Captain,” Chen said. “I’ll take care of everything while you’re gone—and here’s Gary. We’ll both look after the Demeter.”

“Great—tell him I said hi, and see you later!”

*

The work I had to do with the station’s powers-that-be offices took me an hour longer than I would have liked; nevertheless, it was a good hour longer: I managed to get a deal for a future delivery for this actual station.

It wasn’t my usual kind of shipping work because this new deal wasn’t for useful goods and materials; this deal was for an enormous technology exhibit that Cardoon Twelve would be hosting. Luckily, I happened to have another deal worked out for the week before, on the planet the exhibit would be transferred from. It would be easy—and quite cheap for Cardoon Twelve—for me and my crew to pick up the exhibit from where we would already be dropping off cargo.

“Didn’t you wait till kind of late to set up the delivery if the exhibit’s so important?” I asked the woman in charge of the paperwork in the Cargo Office.

From her long black desk, the woman frowned up at me a little sourly, and I thought she must have taken my question as a criticism. But she said now, “My boss sprung it on me only two days ago. I’ve been scrambling to find someone with a reasonably priced service. All the shipping companies are hearing the cash register sing louder than ever.”

I couldn’t help laughing. I watched her blue eyes roll and her mouth drop open in an overly dramatic way. Then she said, “I’m sure you know bosses.”

“Actually, I don’t. I haven’t worked under one for eons. I’m my own boss.”

The woman blushed a bit, her eyes nervously shifting. “Oh—sorry. No disrespect meant. You’ve talked so personally to me today, which is refreshing, actually. And I’m pretty new as the Organizer here—as an Organizer, period.” Her voice lowered. “I took this job because I needed the money; all the science positions in this layer were filled at the time. I’ve been looking at elsewhere for a science or even a tech position, but, so far, I haven’t found anything.”

I frowned a bit, thinking. “What’s your specific background then?”

“I taught chemistry at an obscure university for 15 years—on the other end of this layer, on the planet Tryton. But there are so many political problems there, and the money for my job finally dried up—right before my marriage did.” She sighed, the sound soft and sad. “It’s been a bad few years. I needed a job somewhere with a change of scenery so I wasn’t reminded of…things.” Her blue eyes rose up to me. “Well, that was embarrassing—too much information!” She laughed under her breath a little.

“You seem to have a good sense of humor about yourself,” I said, smiling at her now.

“I hope I have one about life. I do have one, really—that’s how I’ve been moving forward…. Speaking of which,” she lifted a piece of paper and a pen from her desk, “you just need to sign here and write your ICFC shipping ID number beside your signature. I’m sorry you said things have been delayed for you today.”

“Oh—no problem. It’s not your fault. And my crew’s been sending me updates about my ship; things are going well there. I’ve got a really good crew.”

“That must be interesting—traveling around and working as one group, never knowing what you’re all going to see next.”

As I signed the Cargo Office paper, I glanced at her. “You ever thought of working on a spaceship—I mean in science again?”

 “Actually, no, to the space traveling. I got into that university job right after I graduated college. It was comfortable for me. I always wanted to live on Tryton; my grandparents grew up there and used to tell me stories…but the reality there today isn’t the same as their reality from back then.”

“Yeah, living has a way of destroying reality over time…. You know, I’ll be honest: like I said, my crew is great, but I recently lost a female crewmember from my bridge. And I’d like one back, especially in science. Right now, my science right-arm Gary’s on the bridge, but I think I might need a science department on the ship in general. We spend a lot of time in space, so we come across phenomena that we need to deal with in more detail sometimes. My engineering crew are too busy keeping the science of the ship functioning, so they can’t spend enough time on the other science stuff. Would you be interested at some point—in living and working on my ship? I’ve noticed how efficient you are with the paperwork. Things in the Records Office did take too long, but this stuff with you went much faster than usual at Cardoons. It seems like you had all the paperwork ready for my pick-up here even before I landed yesterday.”

Her face was very red now, and she pressed a hand to her thick, dark hair, then to one of her cheeks. “I did have it ready days ago, actually. I like to keep ahead of schedule. But, oh—it’s so embarrassing that I was just complaining to you about bosses. I came off like I’m a complainer who can’t take orders. Why would you offer me a job now?”

I sighed. “It’s been my experience that the stuff you don’t plan quite often works out better then the stuff you do plan. While making plans and keeping to schedules is my business, part of that planning and scheduling is being familiar with what new opportunities might offer—and how they’ll affect the ones I’ve already accepted. I’ve just got to stay fluid and be open to things.”

“I like that thinking, Captain Zarro.”

“Call me Lydia when we’re just talking casual like this, and, half the time on my ship, my crew does the same.” I looked down at the woman’s nameplate on the front of her desk: Shirley Sanchez. “Can I call you Shirley?”

“Of course!”

I straightened up more and adjusted my red belt. “So, I’ve got to check the Demeter again now. You want to come along and get a little tour of my ship? I know this is, like, out of the blue, but—who knows? If not my ship someday, maybe you’ll decide on another.”

She got up from her desk. “I’m actually due for a lunch-break right now, so, yes, Lydia—I’d love to see your ship!”

*

“Wow, this is really impressive!” Shirley said when we were finally standing in the Demeter’s cargo bay.

It was buzzing with activity, both from my crew and from the station’s cargo crew bouncing up and down the Demeter’s long ramp, either on foot or inside cargo loaders full of containers of both minerals and plastics. My crew and I would be taking the cargo to an industrial manufacturing complex on one of the Keron planets, but, for now, May was organizing slotting the containers into the free space in the cargo bay, based on her layered, alphabetized system.

She was standing in the center of the huge room now, giving orders. Her brown overalls were half-covered in gray dust, and her arms were pointing this way and that way, but there was a satisfied smile on her face: everything was going on schedule.

I glanced down at the clock readout on my belt: as far as I’d seen and heard today, it looked like we’d be able to lift away on schedule too, provided that would be suitable to the station.

My head turned back to Shirley; her blue eyes were wide open and transfixed by the busy scene in the bay. I said to her now, “I guess this is quite a change from working in a college or in an office.”

She laughed. “It certainly is! Is it like this all the time?”

I shook my head fast. “No. It can actually get even more busy. But most times we’re flying in space, and it’s a boring grind—or we’re not working at all but we’re playing board games in the dining room, or just vegging out on Aper Minor or on Earth. But, come on—I’ll show you a bit more of the ship.”

We moved through a few of the decks now, chatting as we did so. I introduced Shirley to a few of the crew, including Gary, but, ultimately, my time was short and so was hers: she had to get back to the Cargo Office.

As I was walking her out of the Demeter, I asked her, “So, what do you think—of my offer? You look like maybe your head is spinning.”

She laughed, her head bobbing a few times now. “It is—it is. You know, I don’t often go into the docking leaves. I see the ships through the viewer-window in my office sometimes, but when you’re standing right next to spaceships, or in them, they seem a lot bigger. Traveling to this station is the most space traveling I’ve ever done. I grew up in the other end of this layer.” Her eyes fell on my face again. “You must lead an exciting life.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “I guess I do—actually, sometimes, it’s a lot more exciting than I really want,” I said in a dry voice.

“There are quite a few handsome men on your ship, including that Gary.”

“Well, uh, Gary is actually spoken for.” I was smiling, but Shirley must have seen something behind my smile that I really hadn’t intended to be there.

Her face turned the darkest red I’d seen on her so far. “Oh god…. I guess I said the wrong thing again?”

I shook my head fast. “Gary is handsome. You’re not the first woman to say so to me, but, yeah, Gary and I are an item, which is no secret on this ship…. So, about the offer—I’ve gotta make a drop-off of today’s cargo on Keron-3. Then I might have to make another smaller drop-off afterward. Then we’re heading to Earth. But, on the way there, we can swing back this way and pick you up. Would you like to see Earth? I think it’s something no human should ever not see.”

“Oh, I agree.” Shirley’s blue eyes suddenly widened so much, the whites of her eyes looked like two light bulbs had been switched on behind there. She grabbed one of my forearms. “Actually, Lydia, you know what? Could I come with you now? I can’t explain why, but I suddenly feel like this is right for me. I just turned forty-five—and, well, I’ve been looking for something, something new and exciting. But there’s been nothing. I thought this station would be exciting, but, reality again—let’s just say people are in and out of here so fast that the excitement is only momentary. I’ve made no ties here. And I barely have any belongings. I got rid of nearly all of them when I became single again—maybe a life of travel would really suit me now!” Her lips twitched—into a slight frown. “But, if I do wind up hating being on a ship and you wind up hating me on yours, you can just drop me off on another Cardoon or something.”

“But won’t you be out of a job on the Cardoons if you walk out of this one?”

She nodded fast. “Yes, but I meant you can get rid of me quickly if you want—wherever.”

“Oh I doubt that will happen,” I said. “Shirley, if you don’t mind my saying, you seem like you underrate yourself. I’ll have to make it my mission to build you back up. I was once newly divorced, too. I was young then, but I still know first-hand how difficult it can be after a marriage fails.”

“Yes,” Shirley said, her voice more somber now, her head turning away from me.

I let out a quick breath and ran a hand over my hair, smoothing away a strand from my right eye. “So, why don’t you go pack your stuff? Just contact my ship afterward, and one of my crew will be along to help you move whatever you’ve got.”

“Omigod,” Shirley said as she spun away from me, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!” She began sprinting down the hall outside the hangar, and, laughing loudly now, I watched her dark hair and blue skirt flying behind her running body.

*

I continued walking through the station, toward the Records Office; I had to turn in a form containing questions about the cargo workers from the station, about how much time they’d spent loading, about how well (or not) they did, etcetera.

As I opened the door to the Office and walked in, it suddenly occurred to me that my “stealing” Shirley from the station might piss it off and negate the museum deal I’d cemented via Shirley. Now I felt stupid that I hadn’t thought of that before…but I also knew that I would never be short of work: the galaxy was a constantly busy one, and some places were extremely dependent on imports from far away because their natural environments were nothing like those on Earth, where humans first evolved. Even if I had Ten Lydia Lifetimes, I’d still never run out of jobs to do in the galaxy.

I shrugged off whether the museum job would actually happen; then I got back to work on this current job.

*

Later, when I was almost done in the Records Office, Sam, one of my engineering gophers, contacted me, to tell me that Karen was prepping the beam engine and Steve was on a break. But, Steve wanted to buy something in the station, so he was going to help Shirley bring her stuff to the ship.

“Where do you want me?” Sam asked me suddenly. Then I lowered the speaker on my belt: one of the Records Office employees was staring at me with shocked eyes, as if Sam’s question meant something sexual.

I suppressed a laugh at her and told Sam, “Just continue with whatever you’re doing. I’ll be back within the hour—and it looks like we’ll be able to leave in two hours.” I raised an eyebrow at the employee, and she clicked a button on her silver computer, then looked at the computer’s screen and nodded a “yes” at me.

I left the Records Office and walked down the long hall outside, and as I passed the Cargo Office, my stride slowed; I thought of going in to verify the museum deal…but then I quickly decided against it: Shirley might not have quit yet, and even if she had, once she was back on my ship, I’d just ask her what she thought about the probability of the museum job’s happening now. Or, I’d just contact the station—and the museum—later and see if I was still listed as the shipper….

I finally turned around the corner of the long hall to the shorter hall outside the hangar where the Demeter was—and, as I turned that corner, I nearly crashed into a guy rushing around the corner.

He was big and he seemed kind of clumsy, considering he’d almost trampled me. But, he was also dressed nicely in a gray tailored shirt and slim black pants—and, considering he’d just come from the hangar’s hall, maybe he worked at the station….

“Pardon me,” the guy said now in a deep, smooth voice touched with a rolling accent I couldn’t identify. One of his large hands jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you leaving on the Demeter?”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking fast. He and I were the only ones in the hall, I was unarmed, and my heart was pounding; I had suddenly remembered that the best people didn’t always wind up at this station….

“I am actually looking for the captain of the Demeter,” the guy said smoothly.

I straightened up more. Another man had just come out from the hangar and into the hall, and I recognized him as one of the station’s cargo people. As he passed me by, he nodded at me in acknowledgement, and I nodded back.

Then I turned to the strange big guy and said, “What’s this about? I’m the captain of the Demeter.”

The man’s dark eyebrows rose and his even darker eyes quickly surveyed my face. “Well then, I have a proposition for you. I heard you have a stone….”

“A what?” At first, I honestly didn’t realize what he was referring to; then I remembered the firestone, and felt my cheeks begin to color and my hands begin to sweat. I didn’t like the direct way he was looking at my eyes, and I could have sworn I saw some kind of challenge in his. He might look classy on the outside, but his attitude was rude.

“Excuse me,” I said, turning away from him fast and starting down the hangar’s hall. “I’ve got work to do.”

“But I’m interested in buying the stone,” the man said, and I could tell from how his voice had loudened and shifted that he had followed me, which was why I quickly clicked on my communicator to broadcast to Matt in my cargo bay.

I didn’t really have a security team on my ship, but Matt had been a police officer in a Space Force unit, and he worked in my cargo bay partly because he liked doing physical things. It seemed now would be his time to shine….

“Captain,” came his deep voice over my communicator, “what’s up?”

I was going to open my mouth and tell him to come to the hall here, but when I glanced over my shoulder now, the hall was empty.

*

I walked fast toward the Demeter, passing a few of the station’s loading crew inside the hangar. May was there too, and she was shaking hands with another group of the workers.

“So is everything done then?” I asked May as I stopped nearby, my voice coming out shaky.

May’s head swung toward mine. “Yep. And right on time. They did a great job. With all the tonnage we had to move today, I’m surprised we weren’t here till late tonight. No one took a break.”

“I’m giving you all a bonus then,” I said, my voice steadier this time.

One of the men from the station thrust a hand out to me as he said, “Right on!”

I was smiling and lightly laughing as we shook hands, but my eyes drifted to behind him, up to the Demeter’s closed, black cargo-bay hatch.

“Thanks for the good work,” I finally said to the station worker in front of me, dropping his hand, “but we need to get going soon. I’m sure we’ll be back to this Cardoon again and we’ll see you then.”

“You bet,” the guy said. Then he waved at me before he and his co-workers moved away.

“Let’s go, May,” I said fast as I walked toward the Demeter, my booted feet striking the smooth gray floor hard.

“Lydia, is something wrong?” May asked in an urgent voice as she caught up with me.

“I just had a weird encounter; it was probably nothing, but I had Matt close the ramp-door.”

“I see that,” May said.

I clicked on my communicator—to Chen, who was on the bridge again. “Chen, I need you to run a scan to make sure no one unexpected is on board. Let me and May in now, but no one else—oh shit. I forgot: Steve’s coming back with Shirley. Well, Chen, just make sure when you let them in, no one else comes in.”

“What, Captain?” Chen asked in a perplexed voice.

“Just please do it, Chen.”

“Of course, Captain. It’s just your voice….”

My voice—which had a shake in it again that I didn’t particularly like—my voice now said, “There was a guy—asking about that stone—”

“What?” Chen said again.

The cargo-bay hatch began rising; May and I had almost reached the gray ramp.

And now I was rushing up it as I said, “I’ll explain more later, Chen. I’m just a little worried here…. Shit. Ugh. I just thought of something again. Chen, I need you to look up some information….”

*

“You mean to tell me you hired a stranger on the spot?” Gary said to me, his brown eyebrows rising and his mouth dropping open.

We were alone in the hallway outside my bridge, and the person we’d been discussing was now being set up in her own cabin on the second quarters-deck, which was above the deck where my cabin was.

“Lydia, I’m shocked,” Gary said now.

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling and kept them there for a moment. “Shocked about what? She’s as dangerous and untrustworthy as an infant. I trust my mind and feelings, and we immediately hit it off. You met her too—was she scary?”

Gary sighed hard. “All right—you’re the boss. But don’t you want to research who she is?”

I looked him right in his brown eyes. “Do you think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to take off with her aboard without checking on her. I’ve had Chen look her up in Cardoon’s public-records database. She is who she says she is—and Chen sent a text-message to Tryton. We’re just waiting back for a reply. We won’t lift away till we get one.”

“I just don’t understand: you impulsively let a stranger on here, but you’re worried about a two-second conversation with some guy in a public hall?”

“Why don’t you believe it was weird?”

“I do believe it was weird. I want to punch him in his fucking face for scaring you, to be honest. But you’re also letting something some bartender told you during a party upset you.”

“And what do you think my response should be now—what else should I be doing? We’re leaving, as planned. But I’ve been minus a science person ever since Babs, and now I have one back.”

In perfect unison, Gary’s eyebrows jerked to higher on his forehead again. “That’s what this is about—Babs? It still bothers you? But I thought—I thought everything was going well on the bridge—”

“Dammit, Gary, I’m not demoting you. This has zero to do with you. I just think we need more science people on the ship, period. That I found the stone helped bring that home to me. Things come up out here.” I quickly waved my arms around the hall. “Who knows what will happen next?

“The museum job—it’s something new. Maybe I’ll take on more of those types of jobs; when the crew here is varied in their knowledge, that might expand the kinds of jobs I can take. I do get tired sometimes of feeling like just a truck driver of mechanical shit when there’s so much more out here to do.”

Sighing again now, Gary ran a hand through his wavy brown hair. “All right—I see your point. And I think it’s a good one.”

*

Chen finally gave me a thumbs-up on Shirley’s background on Tryton, so I decided to be up front with her; I hated to put a damper on her seeming exuberance over being on my ship. But, a part of me still wanted to hear her response….

We were in her cabin now, and she was unpacking her stuff. I quickly told her about the man in the Cardoon hall. Then I said, “So, if I’m wrong about you and you are someone nefarious, I’m telling you right now: I won’t put up with it. I’ll throw you in the brig.”

She pressed a shaking hand to her chest, which hand was holding white bikini underwear. “Omigod—I’m not here even two seconds and already there’s controversy! You’re still docked—do you want me to just leave?”

I laughed now. “No. I trust my instincts; I think you’re harmless. I’m just trying to cover myself more.” I grinned at her.

And she let out a loud relieved breath. “Who do you think the guy was—the one who started you worrying? What was he looking for?”

Frowning now, I shrugged. “I don’t know what he wanted. He must have overheard something last night and made a bigger deal out of it than it is. There are all kinds of crackpots visiting space stations.”

“Tell me about it.” Shirley rolled her eyes as she carefully pressed her underwear into a drawer in the room’s silver dresser. But now her arms abruptly stopped moving. “I just thought of something—are we safe on here from crooks?!?”

I didn’t know how to respond to her question, but that had nothing to do with her: she’d asked what I’d been thinking about since the moment that guy had accosted me. “I have some weapons on here,” I finally said. “But, this isn’t a warship, and if I go around flashing that I have them, it might make the people I do business with think I’m a thug shipping business, which type of businesses do exist….

“But don’t worry about any of this. You just worry about getting acclimated here. Later you can come on the bridge and I’ll show you around there. For now, I’ve asked Steve and Karen in engineering to train you a bit and make space for you to have an office in one of the rooms near there.

“Honestly, we should be fine—business-as-usual and all that. I’ve almost never had more than minor problems out in space, and I don’t anticipate I’ll have anything more than that in future.”

*

A little later, Chen contacted me to say we’d finally gotten the official Cardoon go-ahead to lift away.

I left Shirley’s room and went straight to my bridge. Leaving a Cardoon was as meticulous a process as arriving was; we couldn’t start any engine thrusting till we were a safe distance away.

From in my chair, I watched the front viewscreen as the blue magnetic beam slowly glided us through the opening in the hangar and then into space-black. Gary was on my right, telling me and Chen the numbers on the ship’s movement status.

In the middle of that, I frowned and said, “Gary, I need you—and Shirley—to take a look at that stone and give me an analysis of it.”

Gary was busy with the departure, so, at first, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He pulled a frown at me; then his eyes finally shifted, in understanding. “Oh—okay. But, right now, I’d rather make sure the beam’s dissipated enough before Steve starts the engines, or else we might get electromagnetic flares along the hull….”

“Um, yeah,” I said, “I don’t want that.”

Fortunately, I didn’t get that; both Gary and Steve perfectly executed our disentanglement from the beam, and moments later we were on our way toward the next space flume and layer, and toward our next drop-off on Keron-3.

*

The day continued to be a busy one: we now had preparations to make for when we would reach Keron-3, and Shirley had to be set up in her new office, which wasn’t much bigger than a closet and which used to be Steve’s space when Gary was my lead engineer.

While Steve moved some equipment into Shirley’s new area and began training her on the equipment, I spoke to Gary—about the firestone. I’d removed it from my safe, and Gary had been examining it with several microscope attachments at one of the science ports in engineering.

That same thing kept bothering me about the stone: how could anything phosphoresce after spending years in the dark? I’d also had the stone in my completely dark safe for hours today, and, again, there had seemingly been no loss of light intensity. This must have been why that bartender had warned me and that other guy had accosted me….

“So, do you have an explanation yet?” I asked Gary. “Maybe the stone absorbed something else from the junk room, and maybe it’s doing the same thing now?”

Gary was bent over a long gray microscope extension; he had positioned the fat electronic lens right over the glowing stone. “I can’t see what,” he said now as he straightened up. “It would have to have been concentrated right near the stone, or else the energy would have dissipated too much for the stone to absorb so much. The table it was in hasn’t been connected to electrical power in a long time. The room’s temperature-controlled and it was cold, so the effects of thermal radiation on the stone would be minimal.

“If the stone somehow did absorb significant energy from the atoms in that table’s structure or wherever, and apparently continued to absorb that energy ad infinitum—that’s not by any mechanism anyone has observed before, as far as I know. That’s what I remember hearing about the stones, like I mentioned in the Cardoon bar: it seems the stones are powered by an unknown energy source. They’ve been tested over the years, researched, but there are so few around for testing—and no progress was made because the stones couldn’t be penetrated.”

“Then how the hell are we getting energy from them as photons?” I asked.

“That’s the most baffling part.” Gary’s long fingers reached for the stone and snapped it out of the microscope. His fingertips traced over the stone as he spoke now. “I guess the best description of this is: it’s thermodynamically inert, or maybe thermodynamically impenetrable. There’s the boundary where the solid surface of the stone apparently starts, and there’s the light we can see outside that boundary, emanating from the stone’s direction. But, from our perspective and the perspective of my equipment, nothing is actually crossing the boundary from inside to outside. There’s an effect out here but no cause. Obviously, some energy is coming off it somehow. It’s hitting the exterior and turning into or somehow exciting already existing photons, because our eyes can perceive the stone’s existence. But, still—everything is happening for us outside the stone.

“Maybe there’s a mechanism of energy transfer across the boundary that we can’t perceive. Energy can’t get into that boundary from out here, but from inside, apparently, some form of energy is getting across and out. It must be a strange form, like the strange mass we make use of—like Lobos mass for inducing an Earth-like gravitational pull on gravity-deficient planets with human colonies.

“Over the past few hundred years, we’ve documented many anomalies and unexplainable physical interactions in space. This stone may be yet another one.”

“So,” I said slowly, “if we can keep perceiving the stone while not being able to access it thermodynamically, it seems like it’s completely powered internally, like a perpetual-motion stone. No wonder some people want the stone then.”

Gary nodded at me fast. “Yeah. All I know is: something is apparently powering it inside; I just don’t know what. Maybe whatever atoms or whatever it’s made of—maybe they’re superefficient energy converters—maybe they actually can absorb from outside. They can immediately take and convert energy from anything, even the air, and convert it to another form that’s usable for the stone. But, there’s no evidence of any unusual energy field, or convection, etcetera, around it. Lydia, I’m just stumped.”

“What exactly are you stumped about?” someone asked. Shirley. She had just walked up to us, and now her eyes were shooting a question at both Gary and the stone. “What have you got there?”

“A firestone,” I said. “It’s what that guy in the Cardoon hall wanted. Take a look at it.”

Gary handed the stone to her.

“Hmmm,” Shirley murmured, her blue eyes lighting up a little, almost like a child’s. “How interesting-looking.”

Gary adjusted a knob on the microscope. “It’s actually even more interesting than it looks. It’s unexplainable.”

Shirley lifted her face to Gary’s. “How so?”

“Take a look,” he said, waving at the gray microscope.

Shirley did look; then the two of them spent a little time discussing what Gary had explained to me.

When Shirley finally lifted her eyes from the microscope, she stared down at the stone attached there and said in a slow voice, “Have you heard of infinite wells? Maybe the hypotheses about them are actually based in fact. Maybe this stone is a bucket for an infinite well of some kind.”

Gary was frowning. “I’m not familiar with this.” He looked over at me, but I just shook my head from side-to-side.

“Well,” Shirley said, turning to the two of us, “here’s how I used to explain it to my students—I knew that would come in handy outside the classroom someday!

“But, consider the idea of a perfect absorber. Let’s say you had a well of water that you could keep adding water to ad infinitum, but the water couldn’t evaporate or get out or be removed, except by a perfect bucket, which is also an infinite well, and so is also very limited in how and when the water could get across it. But as soon as the bucket hits the well, the well opens, and the bucket can get the water. Once you pull that bucket out, the water’s locked inside it, and there’s no way to get it out, at least no known way.

“It may be that the stone-well is—was a technology for a being that no longer exists. Now the complete technology for how to use the bucket and well is just lost.”

Shirley removed the stone from the microscope, then held the stone in one hand while the forefinger of her other hand rhythmically poked down at the strange, fiery surface. “I remember hearing about this type of stone years ago—there was an article in The Journal Of Theoretical Space Chemistry, I think. I wish I could remember the details, but….” She sighed and shrugged, her small shoulders quickly shifting the white fabric of her blouse. Her eyes looked up at me and Gary; my eyes had widened at her: I was impressed with the way she’d explained everything.

I watched her face flush. Then I smiled and said, “Great job in explaining the wells, Shirley. I knew I was right about you and that you’d fit in here!”

She laughed a little and her flush deepened. She really did seem like a very intelligent, very nice woman. And I was sorry that her life apparently hadn’t turned out to be the life she wanted. Hopefully, her life on this ship would turn out much better.

*

When I left engineering, the stone was nestled in my belt once again, and I was thinking about the boatload of paperwork I had to do in my office—I’d gotten backed up lately because I’d been busier than normal with other issues on my ship, and, occasionally, even I tired of always having to be such an organized businessperson. The partying break I’d taken at the Cardoon hadn’t helped matters: taking a great break could really make you feel averse to going back to work afterward.

Of course, I had to go back to work now anyway, but I moved through my workflow feeling quite lethargic.

That night, the Demeter reached the next layer of space. At that point, some of my crew were asleep; others were getting ready for the graveyard shift.

And I was thankfully lying on my bed on the verge of sleep—till Chen intercommed me from on the bridge.

Groaning, I got up and moved to the wall intercom beside my bed; I noticed the time on the clock there—it was later than I’d thought. “Chen, what are you doing there still? I thought you were on your downtime, and Pete was on watch for the autopilot.”

“Pete actually was on watch—still is. But we’ve noticed something we want you to take a look at. Can you come to the bridge?”

I sighed. “All right. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

I flung off my pajamas and yanked on my usual uniform, then rushed down the hall outside my room, picking up Shirley along the way. She had been wandering the deck in a sweat suit, her face looking pale and lost; she said she’d been having trouble staying asleep because of the slight humming noises and vibrations coming from the ship.

“You’ll get used to being here,” I said in an abrupt voice. “But since you’re up, you might as well come with me to the bridge and get your first look at it….”

When we reached the bridge, I was kind of sorry I’d asked Shirley to come there: right away I saw that Chen hadn’t called me to here because of a routine issue. On the front viewscreen, there was a ship—a massive ship, a delivery ship like mine probably, only it seemed outfitted for more than delivering; there were lit up tubes of what appeared to be electrified weapons along the emerald-green ship’s front and sides. The weapons radiated outward all the way around the long axis of the ship, in an umbrella-like fashion, as if the weapons also functioned as armor. And, going on the numbers Chen was relaying to me now, this highly weaponized ship had been following us for almost an hour.

Space could be dangerous socially, especially deep space in far layers where the Interplanetary Commerce And Flight Committee, the Unified Planetary Government and the Space Force didn’t have any presence. So I knew some private ships and paranoid captains were armed to the hilt for defense, not offense.

Still, I also knew that because the galaxy was so damn big, two ships “meeting in the night” and then sailing together for an extended period of time was extremely rare. There were many previously traveled “safe” paths for flying to most individual places, too, including to Keron-3, if that was even the green ship’s destination.

But, right now, we were also in the dead zone of this layer; for hours there would be nothing massive here—either natural or human-made—majorly affecting our plotted paths and movements, especially restricting them.

My head turned toward Pete, who was sitting in the pilot’s chair; Pete only came on board my ship occasionally, and he wore the hat of an engineering assistant or a pilot when necessary, as he had been doing tonight. Chen was standing beside him now, and they had both been looking down at the pilot’s panel.

Pete finally glanced up at me and said, “Captain, that ship was far behind us for most of the hour, but five-minutes ago I switched to a coasting-path, and the ship switched right along with me—and it’s been moving closer.”

“Are you getting an ICFC identification beacon from it?” I asked.

Chen shook his head fast. “No. We’ve also enlarged the view to all visible angles—there’s no ID insignia on the hull anywhere.”

A ship’s not broadcasting an ID and not having an insignia was against the ICFC rules while the ship was in ICFC controlled space, which that ship and mine were.

“Clearly,” I said now, “if they don’t have either identifier, they don’t give a damn about following the laws of spaceflight, which is not a good sign….” My voice faded when I turned to my right and spotted Shirley there. She was standing behind the science panels, looking down at them, her hands dangling helplessly.

Right now, Gary was probably in his cabin asleep. Earlier he’d told me he was feeling unusually tired tonight, so I’d told him to go to bed—without me. I didn’t have the heart to wake him now, but I knew Shirley probably couldn’t do Gary’s job yet.

I walked over to my chair, my right forefinger finally pressing the intercom on my chair’s black side panel. “Karen,” I said in an urgent voice, “Chen and Pete are too busy right now to take care of this, so you and your assistants need to do two things: work the science panels from there and get on the communications-line. Send out a distress call to the Space Force.”

“What?!?” came Karen’s shocked voice.

“Just do it. And fast. Then tell Steve to get down to engineering.” My finger jerked from the intercom—but my order to Karen had been too late: the image on the front viewscreen changed as a bright-red, comet-like shape appeared from one of the green ship’s weapons-tubes. The red comet-blast soared through space, right in the Demeter’s direction.

“Shit!” I screamed. “Raise the exterior shield-strength to max—” Again, I was too late: the red shape grew so large, it blocked the view of the green ship behind it, and then the Demeter lurched as the red pulse made contact with the aft part of the hull. Those of us who weren’t strapped in promptly fell right onto the floor—me, Chen and Shirley.

Chen and I scrambled back to our feet, but Shirley was still half-lying on her ass; her eyes were too wide and too still in her pale face. I asked her if she was okay, but I had no time to pamper her into feeling better: in all the years I’d been flying the Demeter, no one had ever fired on it. Not only was I scared now, I was fucking pissed.

“Raise whatever hull defenses we’ve got—fast! Sound the hull-breach warning alarm, and all crew get strapped in,” I yelled over the intercom as I fell back into my captain’s seat and strapped into it. Chen helped Shirley to her feet then helped her secure herself in one of the chairs in the back of the bridge; then Chen rushed to the navigator’s seat and panel near Pete, which navigator’s station was usually empty because I had no official navigator.

“Pete, stay there, but I’m taking the lead,” Chen said.

“Be my guest,” Pete replied, exhaling in relief.

“Shields are at maximum now!” Steve suddenly said from engineering.

I smirked. “Um, it’s a little late—which is my fault. Any info on damages?”

“Nothing that would affect life support. Luckily, aft Nozzle 2 took most of the force of the blow—sensors are showing a small rupture on the bottom half. And we’re experiencing a slight wobble because the equilibrium’s off now when we’re thrusting. We’re adjusting some of the settings to compensate.”

“Did Karen send the message—”

“What the fuck was that?” someone shouted—Gary, as he rushed onto the bridge. His brown hair had been pillow-pressed into a lopsided shape, and he was in a white T-shirt and red pajama pants. His shocked eyes immediately jerked to mine.

And my right arm flailed up toward the viewscreen. “That fucking ship fired on us!” I wanted to say more but the ship-wide breach-alarm sounded and was apparently set to too loud on the bridge. I hadn’t had to manipulate the alarm in years; I couldn’t remember where its control was on my panel. My fingers uselessly scrambled over there now. “Wow, that’s too damn loud. Gary—get to your panel,” I shouted, but he was already there.

The wail of the alarm suddenly diminished, thanks to Gary.

My breaths were coming too fast. I felt so blindsided—I had been so blindsided. And that fucking ship was still there—and still following us.

I glanced at the others on my bridge. “Any suggestions from anyone on what our options are? I know in the dead zone here, we’ve probably got no options for outside help anytime soon, which means it’s up to us to get ourselves out of this.”

The Demeter had two retractable pulse cannons: one on the front of the ship, and one on the back below the nozzles. However, as far as I could remember, the cannons hadn’t even been tested in years, and I’d never had to use them so hadn’t tested them in practice either. This wasn’t a warship, and I was no general.

Nevertheless, I was still feeling so pissed. My eyes were on the viewscreen, and the menacing dark-green shadow of that ship and its electrified weapons was still there; it hadn’t fired on us again—yet. It seemed to be waiting for something from me. And, wow, did I want to oblige….

“Gary,” I said, without turning around to him, “when was the last time the cannons were tested at a maintenance depot?”

I could have sworn I felt Gary’s head whip toward me. “Lydia,” he said now, and I could tell by the severe way he’d said my name that he wasn’t a fan of my cannon idea.

“I don’t see that we have a choice here,” I said. “We can’t just sit here and not respond—”

“That ship has a Level Seven weapons-apparatus and an equivalent shielding. I’ve never seen a ship like that in person—I’ve never even heard of one being this far outside The Reimark Layer, which is full of mercenaries. This looks like a warship that’s been refitted into a commercial ship—but, apparently, in name only.”

I snorted and intended to speak, but Chen interrupted me: “Captain, we’re getting a communication attempt from them—should I let it through?”

“Yes—audio communications only.”

“Captain Zarro, I’ve given you only a little taste of what I’ve got here,” that same accented voice from the hall said over my bridge speakers now. “Why not turn on your video and I’ll turn on mine? Then we can make a deal over the stone, face-to-face.”

I shot up straighter in my chair. “I never give people I don’t know and trust a view to the inside of my bridge, and I don’t know or trust you, you fucking scumbag.”

Now he responded in a smooth and confident tone: “What does the inside of your ship matter when I have command of the outside?”

“You wish,” I spat.

“Test it,” he said.

And my fingers on my front panel quickly cut the communication. My breaths were coming too fast again—what to do—what to do….

“Captain—Captain Lydia,” came Shirley’s shaking voice, “what’s happening? Why is he doing this because of the stone?”

I glanced over my left shoulder at her. “I don’t know. But, at least that he wants the damn thing so much, he’s unlikely to destroy us. That must be why there’s only been the one shot so far. Maybe I should play along….”

My fingers hit my panel, opening the line again. “Scumbag, whoever you are—let’s say I agree to send you the stone in a capsule, how do I know you won’t try to shoot up my ship afterward?”

“I do not think you have a choice. I come from The Reimark Layer. We have our own rules, and, as you might know, war is our business.” Now, he cut the line.

“Captain,” Chen said to me then, “they’ve moved even closer.”

“I can see that.” My eyes were on the viewscreen again; my heart was bouncing around inside me like an errant lightning bolt as sweat streaked down my cheeks.

“Steve,” I said over the intercom now, “ready the cannons.”

“Lydia, what—I think this is a mistake,” Gary said fast in a loud voice.

But I gave him a hard look back, feeling a spark of anger at him.

“I meant, Captain, I don’t agree that we should do this,” Gary added in an even faster voice.

“I appreciate your willingness to criticize my course of action, but do you have any actual ideas to offer?” I was so pissed at him. I was having enough problems with the asshole guy on that ship. I really didn’t need my own fucking boyfriend to start behaving like an asshole on this ship, questioning my command.

Gary must have seen something in my face; I had been glaring at him. But now he just sighed hard and said, “No, I don’t have any ideas. I’m sorry for what I said. This just sucks so fucking much.”

“Nooo kidding,” I said. Then I added fast, “Does the firestone really matter? I’m inclined to just send it over, then take off while they’re distracted by that.”

“Captain, I—I actually have an idea,” came Shirley’s unsure voice. “I know it’s not my place to say, but, like you said…how about just running away? There’s no shame in that. It’s a valid course of action at any time. Steve showed me your curon engine. Why not set up a spacetime bubble with that—and just get out of here fast!”

It was true that sometimes you had to be sitting outside a situation to see the inside of it clearly. The rest of us on the bridge now looked at each other with why-the-hell-didn’t-we-think-of-that? eyes.

Then I said to Steve in engineering, “Can you set up a locked curon bubble that the warship can’t enter? Do we have enough Evan hydrocarbon to fuel that for an extended period of time—to give us some breathing room, so we can plot a new trajectory?” I frowned heavily. “Forget about the Keron job; we’re probably not gonna make it on time.”

Steve didn’t respond right away, but I heard him talking with someone else—Karen, it sounded like. Then he finally said, “We didn’t plan on having to use a locked bubble in this part of the trip—we were supposed to refuel before we reached Keron-3. But, unless I’m mistaken, there was a surplus of Evan in the cargo bay from our last refueling, and Karen just gave me the numbers on the Evan gauges on the beam engine; I think we can comfortably manage jumping into a locked bubble now and remaining for about four hours. I’ll need about ten minutes to set it up.”

“Then do it—and let me know right before it’s ready.” I clicked back with the warship. “You win: I’ve decided to send over the stone. I’ll release it in a capsule in about twenty minutes. Be ready to capture it.”

“I knew you were too smart to pass on my offer,” the asshole guy said. “I’ll expect your capsule—and without any tricks.”

I sighed now. “No tricks. I know when I’ve been beat.” I clicked off the line. “Yeah right,” I spat. Then I glanced at both Gary and Shirley and said, “Come with me,” before rushing off the bridge.

*

When I reached engineering, Steve was over by the long gray casing of the beam engine, which was to the right of where the red shafts of the ship’s reactor were. There was a big space between the two engine areas, where several people were running back and forth, providing back-up to whatever Steve was doing.

“How’s it going?” I shouted to Steve as I rushed toward the beam-engine area.

“Good,” Steve shouted back. “I’ve been increasing the flow of the Evan; that way we can get into a bubble a bit faster than normal.”

I stopped quite far from the actual engine; it was usually very hot right around there, and I couldn’t deal with the extra heat right now. As it was, my hair felt matted to my head with sweat. I ran my right hand over my head, and sure enough, it came away wet. “I can’t believe this shit’s happened—and over a fucking stone! But, listen up: I need someone to get a small flight capsule from the storage closet. I’ve got an idea,” I said, my eyes on Gary as he came up beside me.

*

The next fifteen minutes in engineering were among the most nerve-wracking minutes I’d ever experienced on my ship. I kept thinking of what could happen, of how I and my crew could be killed if the other ship hit us so hard that the shields failed and then another shot pierced the Demeter’s hull; already Steve had found a slight drain on the exterior shields. The reactor had also not been running when all this shit started—and there was no time to get it up to peak-power now: more fuel rods needed to be reloaded into the shafts, yet every available person was rushing around getting the beam engine prepared, or taking care of my special capsule….

When it was almost ready, I had Karen set up a communications link from a computer terminal in engineering.

She, Gary, Shirley and I stood by that terminal while Steve worked at the main computer terminal for controlling the beam engine.

There were several series of red and brown mobile torso straps that hung from the ceiling around engineering, so when flying was too turbulent, the engineering crew could still work without excessive danger. Someone lowered the straps now, and all of us in the room quickly strapped into nearby ones and locked them into their floor junctions.

I told Karen to open the communications-line to the other ship, which immense green structure was visible on the tabletop viewscreen beside Karen’s keyboard.

“This is Captain Zarro,” I said over the line now. “The capsule’s ready. Are you?”

“Just send it over toward my port side,” the man on the other ship said in his smooth way. “This took far too long. I am beginning to lose patience.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want that to happen,” I said in a voice that matched his smoothness. “But won’t you even tell me your name, so I know who I’m doing business with?”

“I’m Claudius,” he said. “That’s all you need to know. The capsule?”

From behind the other computer terminal, Steve gave me a quick thumbs-up. And then Karen nodded at me once, her blue eyes finally locking onto mine.

“Do it,” I said, and her fingers immediately pushed the blue button on her keyboard.

On the tabletop viewscreen, the image was now split between the green ship and a camera view of the back of the Demeter, where a small, white, rectangular box suddenly appeared and then rushed through the black of space, toward the other ship. About halfway there, the box’s dimensions quickly expanded until the whole thing turned into a blast of light.

“Now, Steve!” I yelled. “Hang on, everyone!” I glanced at Shirley beside me, who was so pale she looked like she was on the verge of passing out.

I grabbed one of her hands and squeezed, just as the force of the extreme curon change in space-and-time shook the ship and we all swayed toward the sides of the Demeter; outside the ship, the silvery curon beams were rushing out the back nozzles then curling around to encase the Demeter in a protective shell.

We were finally in our own space, isolated from normal space, and we could travel at superhigh speeds now, in time with the Earth’s time; curon bubbles effectively mitigated time dilation.

Like with many ship designs today, the Demeter’s curon engine was used for both bubble-creating and propulsion. But the Demeter wasn’t always flying at high speeds; at moderate speeds, the beam engine was only on a low setting, so if we were inside a bubble then, we could easily get communications across the field-barrier and normal space would appear normal to us from inside the field.

However, right now, the curon engine was on the maximum bubble setting, and things on the viewscreen looked anything but normal: there were random pockets of kaleidoscopes of color and random pockets of empty black. Sometimes the various shapes were going very fast; other times they were going very slow. But they were always going. There was no “stand still with respect to local space” evident out there now; we were space, and it and we were always moving.

“How are we doing?” I asked loudly, staring at my strapped-in crew around the room.

Steve flashed me two thumbs-up signs; then I exhaled loudly and let go of Shirley’s hand. “You all right?” I asked her.

She nodded at me now, a little shakily. “But I—I don’t know what to say….”

“You don’t have to say anything. I can see on your face that this wasn’t the kind of exciting adventure you were expecting on here.”

She laughed gently, and I felt something loosen along my hips: Gary’s hands. He had held me the whole time I had held Shirley. At the thought of his caring behavior toward me, I felt a pinching feeling around my heart. And I also forgave him for what had happened on the bridge: I knew he was probably worried about me more than he had been thinking of anything else, and worrying about others sometimes makes you say and do stupid, unlike-you things.

I turned my head toward over my shoulder and flashed him a small smile as I undid my strap.

*

Though I remained in engineering for a little longer, I couldn’t remain that long; I felt completely exhausted.

Thankfully, Chen and Pete quickly confirmed with Steve and Karen that there were no signs of that warship in our curon bubble. I listened to the four of them talk all-things-Demeter over the intercom.

Then Shirley turned to me; she had a smile on her face. “What did you use before in the capsule—what happened with that ship?”

“I had a photon flare inserted in the capsule—spaceships use them if they’re dead in space. The flares have power packs inside, but I had a little something extra added to it so the flare would explode bigger and faster, and give off more light than normal—it was my magician’s poof! of smoke.”

“It was also a great idea!” Shirley said.

“Yeaaaahhh…” I replied, on a big yawn. I covered my mouth with one of my hands. Then I removed it to call to Steve: “Where will we come out and when?”

“In about three-and-a-half hours,” Steve said, “we should emerge in the far end of The Alexi Layer.”

“Crap,” I said, almost a growl. “That’s days away from Keron-3. Guess I was right earlier when I said we wouldn’t make it there on time.” I clicked one of the engineering intercoms for Chen and Pete on the bridge. “Whichever of you will be up for the rest of the night—and I only want one of you to, the other must get some sleep—make sure you send a message later to Keron-3 that we won’t make it on time. I’ll send them a new estimate when I reach a spot where I feel I can give a good one.”

“All right, Lydia,” Chen said, fatigue lacing his words.

“Get some sleep!” I told him before I clicked off with the bridge.

Steve called to Shirley to come closer to the beam-engine area, and my eyes searched the big room, for where Gary had disappeared to. My eyes found him over by his old office in the huge room.

I waved at him, trying to catch his eye. He walked toward me in his red pajama pants, and I really liked the way they looked on him; the bulges of his firm thigh muscles were clearly visible….

“You look really tired,” he said to me when he reached me.

“I am—no lies! I’m going to take a nap.”

“Lydia, I’m switching with Steve. I got some sleep tonight; he didn’t. Karen and I are gonna handle the bubble exit.”

I nodded. “I think that’s a good idea—I mean if you do, if you’re up to it.”

His mouth turned into a lightly laughing curve. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I wasn’t up to it.”

“I know you though, Gary: you’ll forget about yourself because you want to do the right thing; you want to make sure everyone’s happy and safe.”

His nod at me now was slow and soft. “We’re a lot alike,” he said.

Then I took one of his hands—and squeezed it tight in one of mine.

*

My feet dragged as they finally pulled my body up my ship toward my cabin. When I got there, I stripped off my clothes, jumped into my shower, soaped and rinsed myself, then sloppily dried myself. Then I crashed down onto my bed completely naked. Then I remembered that stone.

Before I went to bed earlier, I’d put the stone in my safe. But, after everything that had since happened because of it….

Moving with some difficulty, I got off my bed and shuffled my tired bare feet over to my safe. I removed the stone, located my belt, slipped the stone inside one of the pockets, then laid my belt onto the black nightstand beside my bed.

I finally plopped back onto my mattress and almost immediately fell asleep….

…I woke to Gary’s voice saying my name, from over the intercom. I wanted to groan about having been woken up, but I was too weary to groan.

For the second time that night, I moved over to the intercom and checked the time: at least I’d slept almost two hours.

“What’s up?” I asked Gary now.

His reply came fast: “I need you to come down to engineering.”

I sighed, loudly.

*

Dressed once again, I charged down toward engineering. The stairs and decks were empty. My heavy footfalls sounded like I was galloping and I probably was—in frustration.

But the halls and decks were noisy now for another reason: something was clearly wrong; I could hear and feel the Demeter shimmying too much. If Shirley was still awake, she must have been having a ball with this motion.

When I finally walked into engineering, Shirley was no longer there, but there were quite a number of my other crewmembers inside; most of them were at the back part of the long room, behind the reactor and the beam engine but in front of the partially-clear wall that housed the start of the pale-gray aft nozzles. Behind the wall, the white floor there gradually curved upward, till it locked the rest of the fixed part of the nozzles within a back air-locked compartment that was really part of the ship’s belly.

The nozzle area inside engineering was protected by a field that extended to encase the beam engine on the right; the shield-field was often set so that matter and energy could flow to the space around the engine, but high-speed curon and other particles, and high-energy wave-based radiation couldn’t get across the shield from the engine.

Nevertheless, my crew would often be going back and forth in that area, so the shield would have to be lowered then, which meant that excess heat would escape and usually make it quite hot near that more protected space.

I was sighing as I began walking down the room toward my crew, but I didn’t go all the way down. I stopped near the narrow, gray front of the beam engine, still remaining outside the shield boundary. I hated going too far back in engineering because it could also get quite noisy there.

From that back area of the room, Gary’s eyes caught mine, and I lifted my eyebrows in a questioning motion as he, Karen and Sam finally moved my way. When they reached me, they all looked at me in unison through long faces. …Okay, this was not promising….

Gary finally frowned more obviously. “Lydia, unfortunately, the rupture on Nozzle 2 has spread and now there’s a crack. The fracture rating on the material can’t handle a crack this big; soon it’ll be flirting with a loss of material. I was afraid an expansion would happen after the rupture. The forces of the entry into the bubble-state made the damage worsen. I’ve closed the flow to Nozzle 2 and retracted it, but the damage has been done.”

“Fucking great!” I said. “So what the hell should we do?” I looked from one to the other of my crew.

Then Karen spoke: “Well, the good news is: we can repair it. I’ve already started giving out tasks for that, and Sam’s going to oversee it. This isn’t the first time the ship’s had a nozzle rupture; tiny ones happen occasionally from normal operation. But, we can’t start the welding repair till we leave the bubble, kill the engines, and detach the engine-joints to Nozzle 2. A big problem with running as we are is: the more strain we put on Nozzle 1 with this imbalance, the more we risk that one developing some other problem. We can fly backwards, Captain, but there’s only the one nozzle in the front, and I think you know it’s not enough for maximum speeds, especially when the primary engine from that direction would be the zenite one.”

“Can this debacle get any worse?” I said now. “You have an estimate on the repair-time involved?”

Karen’s sharp blue eyes shifted toward Gary now, and he raised his brown eyes toward the ceiling, as if he were trying to remember something. “I think it’ll take us several hours to weld up the crack and temporarily patch the liner. Good thing we noticed the worsening crack before we continued on at maximum in the bubble—the crack probably would have gone even higher up the nozzle, and we wouldn’t be able to fix it from inside; we’d need to dock somewhere and extend the nozzle to the ship’s exterior for repair. Right now, the crack is short enough that it’s still outside where the nozzle parts slide together. You can’t risk welding one segment when another’s been retracted to against it. You might fuse both together then.” Gary sighed. “Luckily, we saw the problem in time. But Steve’s going to have a hell of a finicky, dirty job to wake up to.”

“Wow, this certainly is fucking great for everyone,” I said, unable to think of anything more than my need to vent. But at least my outburst helped wake me up.

I was breathing hard: I couldn’t believe how much bad luck and bullshit had happened in such a short period of time. Why did the universe always seem to compound problems from the seed of an initial problem? It would be great if you could just fix one thing before another thing breaks; at least then you’d feel like you were ahead sometimes.

But now I was behind in both the damage to my ship from that Claudius asshole and behind in the money I’d be out, thanks to the imminent repairs and the materials involved in making the repairs….

“I think,” Gary said to Karen, “you should pull us out of the bubble in fifteen minutes. We’re short of where Steve wanted us to be. But I think it’ll be all right—I mean I hope it will….” Gary sighed now.

“You know, I can’t believe this is happening all because of this fucking thing.” I pulled open my belt pocket and yanked out the firestone. The hot way it looked juxtaposed with the cool way it felt in my hand was still so intriguing. But, though I still found the stone beautiful, I also realized that it was a dangerous beauty. And for all I knew, considering I kept carrying it on me and touching it, the thing was such bad luck, maybe it would wind up being bad for my body too. Since no one understood it, maybe no one knew all of its effects.

“Suddenly,” I said in a loud quick voice, “I despise this fucking thing and everything it’s done.”

Without even giving it a first thought—forget about a second—I raised my arm and furiously flung the stone as hard as I could away from me. It quickly connected with the black, bottom casing of the beam engine, causing a shockingly bright-white flash there, right before the big room around me turned to a deep black.

*

Totally startled now, I stood in the dark with my mouth dangling open.

“What happened?” someone shouted—Shirley’s voice. She’d shown up in engineering while I was in my angry fit and I hadn’t even noticed her.

“Apparently,” I said toward where her voice seemed to have come from, “the power’s out.”

Some heavy distressed breathing around me—then another flash of light, this time from one of my crew with a large flashlight—Sam. The beam that extended from his arm moved around the room, apparently in search of a computer. Someone rushed to a terminal now—Gary—and my fingers fumbled with my belt and the communicator there.

“Pete,” I said, “can you hear me—is this working? What happened?”

“Was just about to contact you and ask you that,” Pete said fast in a shaky voice. “I’ve lost my panel here.”

“Everything in engineering is down—Gary, Karen?”

“Hang on,” Gary said. The screen in front of him was flashing to life; then, slowly, the electrical power came back on around the room. “There was a weird—I don’t know how to describe it other than as a weird electromagnetic quake. The sensors are showing it simultaneously affected every electrical machine on the ship.”

“Great. Yet another problem,” I grumbled.

“Actually, Lydia, it’s not the biggest problem.” Gary thrust one of his hands toward the viewscreen beside the computer. “Look at the view from the outside sensors and cameras.”

I moved over to him and did what he said—and saw that the screen was filled with pure black.

I groaned. “I should have expected that: now we’ve lost the cameras.”

Gary’s head shook fast, then turned toward me, his eyes locking onto mine, and I saw something blossom in them that I really didn’t expect to see: fear.

“What’s wrong?” I asked fast, moving even closer to him.

“What’s wrong is…I don’t know where we are. We’re not in space anymore.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about…” I finished, my voice fading away. I was looking at the screen again, on the sides where there were normally numbers listed about spectral data, mass data, thermal data, etc.—except, now, all the number sections were blank. I sighed hard. “So the computer must be fucked too.”

“That’s the simplest explanation, and normally I’d say you were right. But, look at this….”

Gary switched the computer to display the feed from two of the cameras on the Demeter’s back end, which cameras normally produced a view of the pale nozzles protruding there. On the right side of the viewscreen now, there were the usual readouts from the engine feeds, and I could hear the usual mechanical noises and whirrings in the room, so I knew that at least one of the engines was still running. Yet, as far as was visible to the cameras, though I could clearly see aft Nozzle 1, there was no energy, no matter, no exhaust coming from the nozzle. It was just black beyond there.

I didn’t know what to say, except the simplest explanation again: “We must still have electrical outages, and the camera view is probably missing pixels of data. Run a diagnostic.”

“I’m already doing it,” Karen called from another computer terminal, and there was an obvious shake in her voice.

I turned to Gary, to look him right in his eyes. “What do you really think is going on, Gary?”

“Well, it looks like we’re in a void—similar to the normal ones in space, only with this one, I can’t get any readings on any dark matter or energy or forces, not even any gravitational effects, including any spacetime-bending generated from us. Yet what we’re in seems to be immediately sucking the beam-engine exhaust-stream away, or outright making it disappear. And, as far as I can tell, we’re just not moving, though it seems impossible to get a clear reference-frame position here. I only have the void to judge by. That could be moving inside something else; we just don’t seem to be moving relative to the void.…”

In my mind, I scrambled to remember what had happened right before the power went out—but Shirley suddenly came up beside me, which reminded me of the stone.

“Gary,” I said, “could we somehow be inside that actual fucking stone?”

“No,” Gary replied, his eyes falling on Shirley. “I think we’re inside the actual fucking well.”

*

“But Gary—” I said a moment later “—the infinite well’s just supposed to be a theory, or maybe it’s even a myth. No offense meant to you, Shirley, but, here’s the thing: I had Chen search the computer’s database for that planet the bartender mentioned—Rintu. It’s located in a gravity cloud, and it’s full of monks who play with their stones.”

Both Gary and Shirley laughed loudly, but it sounded like nervous laughing all the same.

I pulled a half-silly, half-mocking face, then quickly punctuated that with a smile of my own. “Chen never said the monks are all males, but I couldn’t help making the joke.” I ran my fingers through my sweaty-again hair. “I really don’t want to deal with this. I’m inclined to just get the hell out of here, drop off the stone at Rintu, and let it be someone else’s problem. To think I intended to put the damn thing on a chain and wear it as jewelry.” I sighed at where I’d flung the stone. I couldn’t see it anywhere, but then I had much bigger problems now.

“Captain Lydia,” Shirley said, “even religious myths are occasionally based on fact, and this myth apparently is. Wherever we are, if it’s an energy well—it might be converting our exhaust into the energy form it uses—a form the Demeter’s equipment can’t detect. But it’s nevertheless there. Actually, I now think the stone doesn’t seem to be a bucket; it’s more like a navigation key that brings a ship to a well and maybe gives the ship’s structure access to the energy inside. Maybe the ship is like the bucket then—I’m not sure! But, somehow, when you threw the stone or the way you did—that led us here. Don’t forget: we had the curon engine running and we were inside a curon-induced space. Maybe that combined with the stone somehow, and that led us here when this ship really isn’t supposed to be here.”

What Shirley said was fascinating, but no matter how fascinating the problematic situation I was in might be, I was still in a problematic situation. “Well, what the hell do we do now? We can’t move. Are we stuck here for forever?” I whipped my head toward the beam engine again. “We’ve got to find the stone—can anyone see it? Gary, Karen—I think you should run more analyses on both that and the space or the well or whatever—do it all now. Maybe you’ll notice more about what they both are when they’re closer together now.”

“That’s a good point,” Gary said. “Karen, you and Shirley take care of looking for the stone and running further tests, and I’ll keep running systems-checks here; then Steve can take over in an hour. If we work together, we’ll crack this.”

“I hope,” I said in a low voice.

*

Half an hour later, we still hadn’t found the stone, we were still stuck inside the weird void, and I was screaming at myself inside my head—over my stupid impulsive anger, which had clearly gotten me and my crew into a dangerous situation. But my crew—they were dealing with this better than I was, or at least if they were very worried, they weren’t showing it, or maybe they were too busy working to show it.

 Turning off the curon engine and the reactor was one of the first things they had to do now; the engines had lost effectiveness in propelling the ship because thrusting and bubble-creating apparently weren’t possible in this void, and, from inside the Demeter’s belly, Steve would soon be starting on making the repairs to the ruptured back nozzle.

I felt afraid now that turning off the beam engine might push the ship into some other strange place. I also felt afraid that the void’s existence could possibly be dependent on the beam engine’s running, but Shirley, Gary, Steve, Karen—they all thought that we had to take the chance that our presence here wouldn’t change in a dangerous-for-us way once the beam engine wasn’t operating.

As several of my crew began turning off that and the reactor, a few others began putting the zenite engine fully online and switching the ship’s settings to using only that engine to power our internals, which engine’s exhaust they set to flow out the Demeter’s front nozzle only.

I stood in the middle of engineering now, watching Sam at one of the beam-engine control terminals. His gray-haired head and his shoulders in his white shirt were slightly bowed toward the screen, and his trembling long fingers hovered nearby; he was about to push the final buttons to turn off the engine.

His wary brown eyes shot in my direction right before he said, “Here goes!”

I watched every move his fingers made at the buttons, my spine straight and tense as I waited for what would happen next….

Nothing happened next. There was no change to our status in the void; we were “safe” still.

Sam’s posture inside his white shirt jerked downward in relief.

I exhaled a huge breath; then I frowned heavily. “A part of me was hoping turning off the engine would free us from this space. But that would be too easy. Anyone been able to find out anything more about the void’s properties? Has anyone found the stone yet?”

The damn thing had turned out to be not only a pain in the ass, but also an elusive pain in the ass. It couldn’t have just disappeared. On the other hand, given all the weirdness attached to it….

I was looking at Sam again; he was very experienced in space so was usually quite unfazed by events on my ship. He also tended to freely offer the rest of us guidance when we needed it. Yet now, he only stared back at me in silence, his lined face curving in a way that suggested he was feeling as confused as I was feeling.

Gary passed near me as he walked up to one of the computer terminals. “Karen’s looking over the camera and sensor data—we should be able to find the stone…. Lydia, I think Shirley’s descriptions have almost all been right on the money. That electrical quake when the lights went out? We’re still getting that happening, but on a much smaller scale and on the exterior of the ship, which keeps making the shields have these weird fluctuations in energy level; it’s almost like there’s a vibrating fluid out there, sliding over the hull, probing it. Maybe it’s looking for some kind of connector, or maybe it’s the normal way the void works. If there’s an energy supply here—some type of alien technology—it could be automatic. Like you pull into the spot, the spigot opens and the energy is transferred to you.”

“That sounds like a very high-tech gas station,” I said.

Gary nodded, slowly.

“And now we’re stuck inside it, with no car that can use that type of fuel.”

Gary frowned now, worry deepening the soft brown of his eyes. And I suddenly realized how messy his hair was—and that he’d never changed out of his pajamas.

“I imagine,” I added now, “that if you, a human, could develop a ship to access this, that would give you an immense, maybe limitless supply of energy to do whatever kind of ‘work’ you want with it.”

Now Gary’s red-covered legs nervously shifted as he sighed. He began punching at the computer keyboard, and a line of sweat slid down his forehead.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You’re thinking: what have we gotten into here, and how will we get out of it?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Gary said, one side of his mouth finally shifting upward.

*

“How the hell can we ever get out of this void when we don’t even know what it is?” Chen asked in an alarmed voice, his dark eyes darting around at the rest of us in engineering.

I had called just about everyone in charge of every area of the Demeter—and Shirley—to down here, so we could get some ideas critical-mass going. Steve wasn’t here though; he and Sam and a few engineering technicians had disconnected the engine-joints to the ruptured aft nozzle, and they were now making the repairs to the nozzle inside the ship’s belly.

May was with us in engineering too—not just because she was in charge of the cargo bay, but also because I figured she and Chen might want to form an opinion together on our next steps….

“We’ve all been guessing here, Chen,” I said now. “That’s all we’ve got. But I really think the first order of business is: find the stone I stupidly threw. Karen’s running scans inside here, but the sensors got messed up by the ship-quake, and the camera data got corrupted. She’s cleaning it up. Hopefully, if the stone’s still in one piece and is still here…well, hopefully I can reverse this then.”

There were a few nods around me, and Gary said, “I’ve been thinking about your gas-station analogy. Maybe it’s possible to back out of this ‘station’ without filling up. Maybe you don’t have to fill up in the void. It’s waiting for some kind of signal or move or for the proper ship’s exterior to show up—I don’t know. But maybe we can just leave, provided we get the portal to here back.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand where it could have gone. If we can’t find it in the nooks and crannies around here, I guess we’re doomed.” I probably shouldn’t have said that: the postures of my crew visibly tensed, and Shirley began twisting her hands together.

She had been so enthusiastic about coming onto my ship, but I could tell that a lot had changed for her since: her dark hair was knotted and there were worry lines around her mouth.

I felt bad for her. I felt bad for us all.

*

“Captain, I think I’ve located the direction it went,” Karen said several minutes later. She was at one of the computers, and that same group of us had been standing together in the room, still trying to figuring out what to do. But now we all walked over to Karen.

On the wide viewscreen beside her keyboard, there was an enlarged camera view of my crazy arm from when I’d thrown the stone as if I were pitching in a ballgame. Karen let that footage run till the room around my form went black; then she rewound the video and slowed it, and I saw that shocking flash of light against the beam engine again, only of course the flash lasted longer this time.

From behind me, Shirley said slowly, “I wonder if the curon field activated the stone? I remember Steve told me the engine has to be shielded because there isn’t always 100% containment of the curon stream, and, before, I noticed an open container of Evan and some curon and ion pads stacked along that side wall.”

“We’d just reloaded Evan into the engine’s shaft,” Karen said. “We needed more juice than we planned because we had to make the locked curon bubble.”

I touched the computer screen with a forefinger, circling one spot on the dark image of the room. “Karen, can you rewind and blow up that area more, then replay it even slower?”

She did as I asked, and, this time, I noticed something different: after the room went black, for an instant—which would have been an even shorter instant when it happened at the speed of real life—there was a small spot of blurry red between the curon casing and the gray wall on the right side of engineering. But the red spot disappeared mid-air.

“The stone must be somewhere around there,” I said.

Karen threw up her hands a little. “We looked there five times.”

I sighed. “Maybe something’s happened to it that’s made it less visible.”

Apparently, I was increasingly “getting” the nature of the firestone: we found it a few minutes later, right in that area where the red spot of light had been, and, indeed, the stone didn’t look the same. The shape of it seemed exactly the same, but it had shrunk to a quarter of its previous size and was mostly a dull gray now, with little flecks of brick red that shimmered occasionally, as if the mechanism was idling. But, overall, the stone was now almost the exact same gray color as the base seam of the side wall and floor—little wonder no one had noticed the stone lying against there.

My hands covered in protective white gloves now, I picked up the stone from the floor. “What the hell happened to it? It looks like a shriveled seed.”

Karen moved closer to me. “Maybe it’s spent, or waiting to repower so it can be used again once we leave.”

“Let’s hope we leave,” I said in a dry voice. I glanced at her and the others. “Well, what do you all think? Should I try throwing it at the engine again? I can’t speak for any of you, but, we’ve already gotten a bunch of data from it since we’ve been in here. I’d rather not remain any longer. Whatever it is, whatever this place is, I think I’ve learned enough.” With my free hand, I clicked the communicator on my belt, setting it to broadcast my words ship-wide: “We’re going to attempt to get out of the void. Everyone stop all unnecessary work and get strapped in somewhere.”

I strapped myself into a ceiling-to-floor strap and stood in front of the curon engine; my heart was going crazy now, and my chest felt slick with sweat. What I was about to do might kill us all….

I looked around me, back toward where several others were strapped-in: Gary, Karen, Shirley—and Steve too, because he and the others had to abandon the nozzle repair and secure themselves.

My eyes lingered on Gary’s face one last time; he smiled at me then, his mouth and mustache moving a little hesitantly. I could see in his eyes that he wanted me to throw the stone, but he didn’t want to be the one who had told me to do it. He was afraid of the unknowns here…we all were.

I turned back around, took a deep breath and flung the shriveled stone toward the beam engine. The stone hit the black casing and fell to the floor. Then nothing. No changes. No power outage. And when I turned around now, I saw that the black of the void was still there on engineering’s computers and viewscreens.

“Shit!” I said, spit flying out my mouth.

However, almost immediately, I smacked my forehead hard. “Are we stupid or just so frazzled? These aren’t the same conditions as before! We had the engine on then.”

“Duh-uh,” I heard Gary say from behind me, and I couldn’t help laughing.

My strap’s swiveling attachment to the overhead bar and floor track was long enough that I could move quite far without undoing my strap, so now I rushed forward to look for and finally pick up the shriveled stone.

“Karen,” Steve said, “when the captain moves back behind the shield, wait two minutes, then fire up the stream on low to the top port nozzle. Captain, I think you should move farther back than normal outside the shielding point.”

I did what Steve said—I knew that when you initialized a curon stream, the particles behaved more randomly, and given what we’d experienced with a power failure before, it was possible the shield wouldn’t work properly—not that a slight curon release would kill me, but it would give my body a jolt of energy I didn’t particularly want.

“Ready to initialize,” Karen finally said in an abrupt and wary way. “Everyone in engineering prepare again, for any bucking from…whatever might happen.”

I finally heard the normal, rhythmic whirring that indicated that the curon stream was active; I waited a few moments; then I raised my arm as far back over my head as I could and aimed the stone for the same black part of the engine—the firestone crashed into it and then—black. No lights in the room.

Except, this time, I had seen the glow of the rock as it made an arc toward the gray wall. I rushed in that direction just as the lights came back on.

“We’re out of the void!” Gary said in a voice that was both relieved and pleased.

“We’ve actually wound up quite near The Alexi Layer,” Karen said. “It seems we remained on almost the exact same trajectory after all.”

Gary spoke again and his voice sounded louder to me now; he had unstrapped himself and followed me toward the side-wall. “The void space apparently moves with the user. It’s a subset that doesn’t affect the larger set of your location in normal space. We were right inside there the whole time, as if we were still in a curon bubble, finishing our path in normal space…. Wow, that looks back to normal too.”

He was talking about the firestone, which was in my right hand again, only this time I’d removed my glove. Against my skin, the stone felt like a familiar friend with its cool-feeling exterior, yet there was that same visual heat from its red fire. I hated what the stone represented; I hated what it had done, but, I couldn’t help feeling beguiled by it all the same.

“This thing’s got the stench of a bad relationship that you know is terrible for you but you can’t stop craving anyway,” I said.

I heard Gary’s loud laugh.

*

All things Demeter began going back to normal now. The ship was still hobbled because there was only the one functional exhaust nozzle at the rear, but my crew quickly went back to work on fixing that situation, while we remained “backwards” and as “motionless” as possible in space: occasionally we would use the zenite engine to push exhaust out the front, which would help push our back end toward our new destination in the layer we were now in, The Makron Layer. Flying this backwards way for an extended period of time always threw me off, but there was no choice now.

Though the void issue had been solved, there was still the other issue: we were back in normal space now, which meant a possible threat from that damn Claudius and his damn warship.

Luckily, my crew and I weren’t in The Makron Layer for long when the Space Force got back to us.

I was sitting behind my desk in my office then, just taking some time to think about what to do next, when Pete intercommed me over my desktop communicator that the Space Force was on the communications-line. I used that same desk intercom to link up with them now.

“Space Force to Demeter,” a brusque voice said over the line. “We received a distress call from you, but then we lost your location.”

“This is Captain Zarro, and, uh, we did get lost. We also lost the pirates on our tail then, thankfully.”

“We read your current location, Demeter. Do you require assistance?”

“Actually, we’re okay now. We’re having a nozzle problem and we can’t easily fly through to The Alexi Layer, so we won’t risk it. But, we should reach Makron Station in about five hours. We can refuel there—we’re low on fuel….” I didn’t finish my sentence because that void was in the back of my mind, the power behind that space, how maybe it shouldn’t be used—or intimately known—by anybody. It was too late for that with respect to my crew, but, as far as everyone else—I could control that more.

Or, maybe I was worrying for nothing: clearly, people had known of the firestones before I’d found mine. It was also possible someone had gotten as far with a stone as we on the Demeter had, but that other person had squelched the how of it, for the obvious reasons.

At the same time, though others already knew of the stones, that didn’t mean I should broadcast any new information about them with a megaphone….

“Captain Zarro,” the Space Force guy said now, “let us know straight away if the pirates show up again. Can you send us the data you have on their ship and your encounter?”

“Sure—I’ll send it over. Give me fifteen minutes for my crew to collect it.” And for me to explain to my crew what NOT to reveal to the Space Force.

*

When I was finished with doing all of that, I sent a message to Keron-3, which actually wound up being one of the few good experiences to happen lately: Keron-3 responded that if my shipment to them was a few days late, that would be fine.

The representative from Keron-3’s Space Entry told me: “It was more on your end than ours that you got it here when we scheduled it for.”

“Oh—all right,” I said. “Very good then! But, I’m wondering if your grace period can be extended to at least a week? I’m hobbled right now and have to dock for refueling, then do a few other things. So is that new schedule acceptable to you?”

It was indeed acceptable to them, and we ended our communication a moment later.

I remained at my desk, thinking more on what I and my crew would do in future; I chewed on a hummus sandwich from the food-stash I kept in my office refrigerator. Thanks to all of the stressful shit that had happened, I was starving now—starving and tired….

I yawned around my last bite of my sandwich, closing my eyes. When I opened them again, Gary was standing in the doorway to the hall. I waved for him to come in, feeling my heart jump in my chest at how pale and exhausted he looked.

“You need sleep!” I said fast.

“Don’t I know it…you wanna come with me?”

“I sure do,” I said, standing up fast and wiping my hands on a cloth napkin.

Then I walked around my desk, grabbed Gary by one hand, and pulled him into the hall.

We moved along the bridge-deck like that, holding hands, and I didn’t care who saw us.

I kept yawning as we walked; Gary’s face had a dark shadow over where he was normally cleanly shaved, and his mouth tiredly dangled open. Clearly, we’d both had enough today.

When we finally walked into his cabin on the first quarters-deck, I intercommed Chen and told him that Gary would be off for four hours and I would be on again in three hours. “Only wake me if there’s an emergency—I mean another emergency,” I finished in a dry voice.

*

I didn’t sleep long enough, but, for those few hours I did sleep, I slept deeply, probably because of Gary’s warm presence beside me….

I’d stripped down to my underwear and so had he, but when I woke up, I inadvertently woke him up, and it wasn’t long before something else had woken up, too.

We didn’t have much time, but, fortunately, quickies didn’t take long. I grabbed his warm erection in my hand, and we were soon making a quickie happen, with me passionately bouncing on him as if I’d had ten hours of sleep in the last twenty-four hours instead of barely five.

I felt in pretty desperate need of something solid to hold onto now, something sure, something uncomplicated, and I saw now that Gary had always been all of that for me, whether as my friend, or my lead engineer, or my science right-hand, or my lover….

Afterward, I used his shower, got dressed, kissed his smiling mouth goodbye, then went down to my bridge.

“Where is everybody—Steve?” I asked Chen as I walked over to him.

He was in his red chair and his head turned up toward me. “Steve said he’s done with the welding, but Nozzle 2 won’t be ready for use till after we hit Makron Station and get the nozzle inspected in their shop.”

I nodded now, my mouth twisting, in resignation. “I figured that.”

I walked over to the panel beside my chair and pushed the intercom for ship-wide announcements, but I deleted Gary’s room as an announcement destination right before I said: “We’re still proceeding to Makron Station, and I’ve made a decision: all temporary crew will have to disembark at the station. I’ll pay you the balance of what I agreed would be for your full contracts. And you need to respect certain things about the past few days, which I’ll explain shortly in the cargo bay. Finish what you’re doing and come straight to there. Thank you all for the excellent job you’ve done.”

*

“This isn’t fair, Captain, and I’m really disappointed,” said Brayburn, one of the Demeter’s temporary crewmembers.

Brayburn had been working in both my dining room and my cargo bay. He was an older man with messy, graying dark hair and bloodshot eyes, and his mouth sagged at me now, in disappointment. “I really thought I’d be on here for four months while you’re in space. Some of us aren’t exactly hot property anymore; we can’t get work so easily. And…I like your style. This isn’t like the other ships I’ve worked on; you don’t work your temporary crew like they’re expendable.”

I flushed at his compliment—and because I felt pretty bad now about practically throwing him and the dozen other people in front of me off the Demeter. But, everyone on the ship had been directly exposed to what the firestone did and where it led to. I had to try to minimize any further damage in future, and reducing some of the people on here during the near future’s events would probably minimize that damage.

At the same time, while I had intended to swear the temporary crew to secrecy for once they left the ship, I wouldn’t be able to watch if they were really complying.

I looked from one to the other of the eight men and five women in front of me, including that slow wide guy from the cargo bay yesterday, who, though he was slow, did actually wind up being quite competent. And competence was one of the most important qualities for a person and a crew to possess in space: the margin of error in operation you’re allowed is typically really small, or else quick death could result.

I continued looking at the wide guy and the others as I said, “I didn’t realize any of you liked it here so much. I’ll be honest: I’m stuck in a difficult position now; you know what we’ve seen. I think you can imagine what could happen with that in future. I’ve gotta do more with respect to this, and I don’t think I should bring you with me. There are risks too—”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Captain, but don’t you think it’s up to us if we want to take risks?” one of the other cargo crew said—Nellie. I knew she had been a medic on a private cruise liner for years, and a medic was something I’d never really had on the Demeter. A few of my crew, like Sam and Matt—they knew first aid, so they would always help out if an emergency came up. And I got so much work so frequently that my crew and I were never that far from a civilization with doctors.

But, I could still probably use Nellie on here. Considering the way her narrow flat cheeks had flattened even more during this meeting, maybe she had been hoping that I would realize her usefulness and then her temporary state would turn into a permanent one.

“Look,” I said now, straightening up more, “how many of you want to stay here permanently? I’m getting the feeling that at least some of you do.”

“Actually, Captain,” Brayburn said, “we’ve been discussing this, and I think we all agreed that we’d like to stay on here as long as we can. But I won’t speak for everyone. Any objections to staying? Speak up now.” He looked around at his comrades. Several shook their heads “no” in response, and none said they didn’t want to remain.

My mouth twisted in a lopsided way, and I grunted a little, in surprise. “I honestly didn’t think you’d all want to remain. There are so many businesses doing what I do! And then the UPG and ICFC shippers—I’m shocked you’ve been thinking of staying here.”

“It’s what Brayburn said,” Nellie replied. “You really care about your crew.”

“Yeah,” a few of the others mumbled.

Brayburn smiled at me a little, which made his face look younger. “It was clear the other night with the wedding party: you said we all could come, the whole crew, even us temporary folks. And you footed the whole bill. Some of us felt a little guilty about that. I feel a little bad now—pushing us onto you if you don’t want us….”

It seemed there was a lot of feeling bad going around right now. Would offering all of the temporary crew a permanent position be the best solution? Keeping a twenty-five-percent larger crew long term would significantly lower my profit if I didn’t get a significant increase in the number of shipping jobs, or a significant increase in my usual rate for shipping. I also didn’t like feeling as if I had to keep this current crew of mine forevermore. What if some of them—some of us—wound up disliking each other at some point?

I was feeling a bit trapped now—effectively blackmailed by recent events. This type of issue had never come up for me before.

And I realized now that the past few days had really been life-changing in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted my life to change.

*

Ultimately, I saw that I didn’t have any choice: I had to keep all of the temporary crew on my ship, at least it seemed that way because I still didn’t know enough about the other issue…. It was so confusing and so frustrating, and I didn’t have the time to think on it anymore right now: we were finally approaching Makron Station.

I was strapped into my captain’s chair as the Demeter neared the station’s docking area. I was also on the communications-line with the station’s Space Entry, asking them to give the Demeter one of the private internal hook-ups and to not show the ship’s name on the docking roster, which rosters space stations often listed on public-event terminals.

“I had a problem with another ship,” I said to Makron’s Space Entry. “I can give you a Space Force reference number—you can confirm with them.”

“It’s all right,” the woman from Space Entry said in a quick voice. “You’ve been here many times, Captain Zarro. You’ve never created any problems, and you’ve always paid all your fees; you have a good reputation and standing here.”

I smiled a little. “Well, that’s certainly nice to know…. Can you send me which hangar now?”

Chen took care of receiving the data for the private landing, and I sat back in my chair and sighed, slowly rubbing my fingers across my eyes and forehead, and feeling worried. Landing at Makron Station wasn’t as stressful as landing on a Cardoon, so I wasn’t worried about that: I was worried about days from now….

Gary walked onto the bridge. He was in normal, not-pajamas clothes now—a pale shirt and dark slacks. “Where are we?” he asked as he walked fast toward his station. “I overslept.”

I smiled at him. “You needed it…. Chen, how are you doing—and May?”

“We’re all right. We’ve just been…” his dark eyes strayed my way “…well, we’re wondering where we’re going next. You haven’t said.”

“I hadn’t totally decided on that till about half an hour ago.”

Gary was flashing me curiosity-filled brown eyes. But then he pulled them away when he had to make an adjustment to the Demeter’s angle of entry toward the Makron hangars; they weren’t in separate compartments the way the hangars on a Cardoon were. Makron Station was big and block-shaped, and the hangars inside were common areas, where ships rolled into parking spots, almost like an airport inside a space station.

 However, there were some private, shielded parking spaces reserved for government ships, and if a space was open and no reservation had been made by a government, anyone could fill the spot. For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to be parked near other ships; I also didn’t intend to stay long at the station and draw attention to myself or for any of my crew to do the same. I had lucked out today in getting a private space, and I intended to keep my luck going.

Using the intercom beside me, I contacted engineering. “When we’re stationary, I want the whole crew on onboard status, including your crew, Steve. The first thing is the inspection by the shop mechanics and making any further repairs on the nozzle, if necessary. The next thing is buying more food and Evan. And lastly is the cannons. Have a look there, just you alone, Steve; tell the Makron mechanics that the sensors there shorted out—just say whatever. Do as much as you can to check if the cannons would work without looking like you’re checking for that.”

Both Gary’s and Chen’s wary eyes were on me now.

*

Thankfully, things went quite smoothly at the station: we got the necessary deliveries of food and fuel; my crew remained on the Demeter, and Steve did what he had to do. We wound up staying at Makron only an hour longer than I had planned, and mostly because this layer had been having problems hooking up with the ICFC today, so there was a delay in my payment reaching the station.

Throughout all of that, I never left my ship. Evening finally came, including with respect to this station’s artificial rotation and this solar system’s sun, and I didn’t want to be walking the station’s halls, considering what happened the last time I’d walked a station’s halls….

As soon as Steve felt confident in the nozzle repair and my money reached the station, we left it.

Our flight across The Makron Layer went well; the nozzle was working fine again, and we eventually passed quite near one of this layer’s most beautiful sights: the remnants of a hot nebula—“hot” because the red and orange globules glowed like hot coals and were backlit with the bright white given off by clusters of numerous stars.

 Sitting in a brown booth in the Demeter’s dining room now, I watched the viewscreen on the opposite wall, which view was filled with an enlarged, real-time image of the hot nebula. The Demeter was currently flying on a low setting because I’d told Gary to grab more careful pictures and video of the nebula than we had in the past. The nebula’s fire reminded me of something….

I no longer wore it on my body. It was inside my room-safe again. At the thought of it in there now, at the thought of all that power, my face felt far too flushed. The stress of everything over the past few days probably wasn’t doing much for my blood pressure.

My head turned to the other side of my booth table, where Geena had just sat down.

Geena and her cousin, Bill, had been working for me on the Demeter for years, and, today, Geena’s curly golden hair looked even more golden than normal beneath the room’s yellow lighting. She smiled at me a little as she said, “You haven’t stayed in here eating for so long in—well, I don’t remember when the last time was.”

“You never need me giving you more work,” I said as I lifted my blue fork from my half-empty plate. “And now you’re even busier because of the extra crew to feed.”

Geena glanced over her shoulder at one of the brown booths farther down the room, where a few of the temporary crew were eating and talking. Nellie was there; she caught my eye and raised a glass toward me. I nodded at her and smiled a little.

“Actually,” Geena said to me now, “Brayburn’s been very helpful around here. It’s a case of: Bill and I didn’t know we needed an assistant till we actually got one.”

“So then it’s good that Brayburn’s staying on,” I said, but Geena must have heard something in my voice that I hadn’t realized was there.

“You seem worried about them,” she said flatly, but in a very direct way that was very typical of her—and that I always really liked.

I shook my head from side-to-side now, swallowing a mouthful of salad. “I wouldn’t have hired them if they didn’t have a good work history. They’ve all done well so far.”

“So then…what?”

“Well, the more people that are on here, the more people I have to worry about if something goes wrong.”

“Yeah…it got hairy with that other ship.” Geena’s brown eyes locked right onto mine. “I heard about the stone.”

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Who hasn’t by now?”

“Yeah, but someone said before that it’s linked with Rintu, and I know some things about that planet.”

My gaze snapped right to hers. “Like what?”

“I had this friend who was obsessed with the place—he went looking for it and disappeared, like plenty of people do in the galaxy—they quickly tire of where they are, and then they’re soon off to somewhere new where the pastures seem greener. But, I always thought Rintu must be where he disappeared to. The rumor is that they’re secretive there and the planet’s shielded, by both a gravity cloud and their technology. Some say their technology made the cloud. They don’t just let people come in there, you know.”

I didn’t respond right away, and Geena kept talking. “You want to go there, don’t you?”

Slowly wiping my mouth on a cloth napkin, I nodded at her and finally spoke: “How did you know?”

She leaned back in her booth seat, her head tilting to the side, her long blonde curls shifting. “When you’ve been feeding someone for years, you learn their patterns of behavior.”

My fingers played with my blue fork, pushing around the last bit of my salad. “I told Gary I intend to go there. He said that going is right thing to do, but maybe sometimes you shouldn’t do the right thing—like it’s not your problem, and it might hurt you more than it’ll help others.”

“Can you safely get rid of the stone another way?” Geena asked me.

“And that is the crux of the problem,” I said, pointing my fork in her direction.

*

A little later, on my way out of the dining room, I ran into Shirley.

She had been walking into the room, but I immediately pressed a hand to one of her bare forearms and asked her, “How are you doing?” She was wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt, but her sleeves were sloppily rolled up to her elbows, and her face looked as flushed as mine felt.

“Oh!” she said now. “Thanks for asking, Captain Lydia. I’m all right—I got some sleep. Now I’m just—I’m just still trying to process everything.”

“Yeah, a lot of us are going through that now.”

“I just want to remain helpful, if I can….”

“Actually, I meant to ask you about that museum opportunity: do you think the station’ll be pissed that I seduced you away from there, and then they’ll bump me out of the job?”

Surprise lit up her blue eyes before she shook her head rapidly, her dark hair bouncing with her motions. “Oh—no. I doubt it. Yours really was the lowest bid on the job, and the station cares far more about money than it does about me or anyone else. I bet they’ve got me replaced already—there are waiting lists for positions there. But, really, I wouldn’t worry about that museum job. …On the other hand, if you lose it because of me, that would certainly stink!”

“But, Shirley, I only got it because of you. I should have thanked you more for that. Really: you definitely win some and lose some out here. I think you’ll see that, the more you’re with us. It got off to a rocky start—really rocky. But, I hope it gets better for you. If you need anything specific, don’t hesitate to ask anyone.”

“Thank you, Captain Lydia!” she said fast, and I really liked how she always tried to take a middle path between the formal and the informal.

I smiled at her; then I continued down the hall.

*

My engineering crew calculated that it would take over two days for us to reach the layer where Rintu supposedly was. I spent those two days resting more, and dealing with whatever issues came up with both my crew and my ship—minor things, fortunately; at the same time, everything suddenly seemed more than minor when you were headed for a place you’d never been to, containing people no one really knew, where you had to drop off a stone-mechanism that could be used to gain an incredible amount of both political power and fire power.

As far as my ship’s computer records could tell, Rintu hadn’t actually been reached by anybody in many years, ever since the gravity cloud in that layer had expanded and surrounded the area around Rintu. It was also the only planet in that layer, and it circled a star very similar to Earth’s star.

As the Demeter got closer to the Rintu area, my anxiety intensified; so, apparently, did the anxiety of my crew. Though they kept working, things were more silent than normal around the ship, and even the dining room became a ghost town.

On the second evening, Gary and I were sitting together in the dining room having coffee when his eyes roamed over the empty tables and he said, “Where is everyone? Even Geena’s not here.”

I frowned down at my coffee mug. “I think they’re all afraid of running into me, that I’ll notice what they’re thinking on their faces.”

Gary flashed me curious eyes now.

I exhaled hard. “They think we shouldn’t be going to the planet. They agree with you.”

He didn’t respond; he took another sip of his coffee, his narrowing brown eyes considering me over the steam coming from his white mug.

“Gary, I really don’t think I have a choice here.”

“I know,” he said, lowering his mug to the table.

“I can’t just toss the stone into space; that might be how it got to me in the first place. The previous owners—they were independent haulers, but they were explorers too. And they had a deal with the GES.”

The Galactic Exploration Service would sometimes hire people to do jobs the Service didn’t think were significant enough for their science members to do, and, apparently, this hiring had happened with the Demeter’s previous owners. That crew must have located the stone and placed it in that table, and then, somehow, they forgot about it. However, prior to that, the stone had wound up somewhere to be found by a human….

“Gary, I keep thinking about what you said—about the aliens or whoever—if they created the stones and wells, why aren’t they still using them? Are they an ‘obsolete’ technology to them now, and if they are obsolete, I wouldn’t want to meet the species that created it. They must be massively powerful.”

 “It seems likely that the aliens don’t exist anymore,” Gary said. “Or maybe they moved so far ahead of even that technology, they advanced so far intellectually that they just abandoned the old technology to pursue something else. Like they effectively became immortal, and they lost the ability to see the wells could lead to dangers for mortals.”

For a long moment, I stared down into my mug and thought about Gary’s explanation. But the stressful events from the past few days finally began flashing through my thoughts. “I really am concerned and I want to get rid of the damn stone, but I’m also not suicidal.” I raised my eyes to Gary’s. “If you think we can’t make it through the cloud, we’ll turn around.” My eyes were asking him for something, some confirmation…but I didn’t get any. There was a twitching, unsure look around his brown eyes, but I couldn’t tell if that was toward what we were about to do with Rintu, or if he was unsure about how to make me feel better.

When he still didn’t respond, I decided to be more explicit. “Do you think we can make it through the gravity cloud or not?”

He sighed hard, lowered his head and passed a hand across his forehead. “I just don’t know. The other gravity cloud, the one in The Mearden Solar System—that’s been extensively explored. But it’s not the same as this one: with the Mearden one, we’ve isolated clear patterns of motion; with the cloud we’re headed to, we’ve got minimal data on it from an internal reference frame. As far as I could find in the computer’s records, only two ships have ever gone inside the Rintu cloud, but only briefly because it was so dangerous in there. Probes people have occasionally sent in stopped sending data back not longer after they went in, and then the probes never came back out. And there’s nothing like this cloud anywhere else humans have been. We’ll have to see if we can get a better read on what the conditions are once we get closer to there.”

Before I’d spoken with Gary, I too had made a detailed study of the computer’s data on the gravity clouds, so I knew that, as far as humans had been able to tell, Rintu’s gravity cloud was like a maze of random gravitational interactions that didn’t follow any consistent physics.

Humans had recently learned that how gravity functioned in the universe wasn’t an either/or situation; gravitational effects could result from more than one cause. There were both particles that led to a gravitational effect, gravitons; and there was spacetime-bending by masses, which bending might or might not be independent of graviton interactions. How gravity worked and which mechanism was more important depended on the particular physical situation in question.

However, the Rintu gravity cloud apparently wasn’t organized in the same way normal spacetime seemed to be organized, and particle interactions inside the cloud weren’t reliable: in the cloud, mass didn’t necessarily curve spacetime toward it; spacetime could also curve more readily from larger masses toward lesser masses, or even toward no masses.

I was no hotshot expert pilot, but even I could tell there would probably be no easy way to steer a ship in a gravity cloud like that, and by simply going in there, a person would be risking her life: if there were large masses around, she might crash right into them even as she moved away from them….

Gary was talking again. “I’ve been thinking: in the cloud, we’ll have the shields on maximum of course, and now that we know the cannons are working, if something’s coming at us, we could fire at it to break it up as a last resort. But, we probably shouldn’t even try to steer. We should enter the cloud and see where it takes us. If there’s any truth to it being a technology that the monks made, maybe we should go into the cloud with our heads bowed, letting that area of the galaxy take the lead.”

I slowly nodded at him then, and we remained there in the dining room till late, tossing around even more ideas.

I went to sleep that night with him beside me physically and on my mind mentally. On my ship I had the combined intellects of both science and engineering people I really respected; if we were all scientifically determined to reach Rintu, maybe that would be enough to get us there.

The problem was: sometimes things seem so easy before you actually have to do them; pitfalls aren’t as visible then. Just the thought of falling into any traps now really scared me….

And that was why when the moment arrived, when we were finally near the gravity cloud, traveling right outside what seemed to be the boundary of the apparent forces at work inside, I lost a lot of my prior nerve: I told both Gary and Shirley that I didn’t think we should go very far into the cloud.

My right hand was on the soft top of my captain’s chair; my left was stretched out, palm up. I was standing facing Gary at his science station; Shirley stood to the right of him as she got to know a smaller science panel.

And now I said to both of them, “Chen did some more digging on the computer, and the point where the probes disappeared in the past seems to have a clear location and is a relatively short distance inside the cloud’s edge. I think we should keep to the outside of that inner boundary.”

Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Chen turn toward me from in his chair. Today he was wearing a shirt that was almost the same deep-red as the chair, which seemed fitting to me for some reason.

“Captain,” Chen said now, through a heavy frown, “what if we’re getting this backwards? Maybe when the probes people sent didn’t make it back from the cloud, it was because someone took them—or was able to take them once they passed that inner boundary. Maybe going to beyond that is precisely where we need to go to reach Rintu.”

“It’s a possibility,” Gary said, looking at me with sharp brown eyes.

I nodded fast at Chen. “That’s a good point—and maybe that’s the key: not going to Rintu, but being taken there. If we’re wanted, I mean. I’ve prepared a message to the planet—I wrote it out, so I can speak it exactly the way I planned. I’ll send it as soon as we enter the cloud….”

“I wonder, though,” Shirley said, her voice slow and thoughtful as she stared up at the ceiling. “Maybe any signals we send would somehow get distorted into gibberish because of the physics inside, if it’s indeed as odd and chaotic farther in as people claim. It’s hard to say: it could be something internal to that space is making it seem like it works differently than it actually does—maybe there’s extreme distortion from numerous points of gravitational ‘lensing’ effects, like a fun-house hall of many mirrors with clear lenses in place of the mirrors.”

Her head turned my way briefly; then she went back to looking down at her panel. I frowned a little at the top of her dark-haired head. “So,” I said, “do you think we shouldn’t go in at all and should just send another probe—do all of you think so? I could attach my message to the probe. Shit, I could stick the stone in the probe, just like I did with the photon flare for Claudius.” I stopped talking abruptly. I really didn’t want—or mean—to bring up that incident: my crew and I were even farther from help here than we had been when Claudius assaulted us. Even though I was quite confident my cannons were working properly now, running into Claudius again would still be worse than bad. I certainly couldn’t afford anymore damaging incidents to that aft nozzle; I knew my crew had expertly repaired the crack there, but, I’d had problems with that nozzle before. And by now, considering that materials are never quite the same once there’s been a loss of physical integrity somewhere, that aft nozzle could probably use a complete replacement….

No one on my bridge had responded to my question about the probe, but it probably wasn’t that they were ignoring me; Gary and Chen had been coordinating an adjustment to the engines with Steve. And Shirley seemed to have gotten lost in the tech-world of her panel; I’d never seen her face so straight and her mouth so flat. This must have been her professional science-face, and I was glad she was finally showing it in a clear way on here: it made me feel better about what we were all about to do.

I walked around to the front of my chair and glanced down at the numbers on my silver panel, then pushed an intercom button to broadcast ship-wide. “I’ve finally decided to go into the gravity cloud for sure. We should reach one of the ‘edges’ in about 20 minutes. All crew should be awake and alert and ready to adapt to possibly chaotic conditions. I’m sorry for this burden on all of you.” I closed the line.

My panel indicated that the Demeter’s cameras were finally getting clearer views of the cloud. I enlarged the images on the bridge’s front viewscreen, and my first thought about the cloud was that the blurry exterior was similar in appearance to many nebulae. However, the gravity cloud had a more defined shape; while the boundary it made with the space around it was bumpy with perturbations, the cloud’s overall shape was essentially ellipsoidal.

The cloud was big, its long axis seemingly equivalent to about 2 AUs, and almost the whole area was full of random swirls and jets of amorphous particles of various colors. It looked like a permanent party of kinetic energy was going on in space here, but I knew that was probably far from the truth.

“This is definitely one of the most exciting images I’ve ever seen in space,” I said.

There were murmurs of assent around the bridge—

“Lydia,” came Steve’s abrupt voice over the intercom speaker, “I’ve just noticed an intermittent unusual decrease in the mass-flow rate in the zenite configuration. I’ll need to take the engine offline to check that it’s not a permanent decrease because a structural problem has developed.”

“What?” I said, my pulse hammering through my body. “If we’ve got no zenite for backward movement, we’re hobbled—and right when we’re going into a gravity cloud!”

“I know,” Steve said. “But, if necessary, we can reverse some of the beam-engine flow and divert that exhaust and some from the reactor up to the forward nozzle through the longitudinal belly nozzle.”

“But, Steve, if I remember correctly, we had to do that once years ago—and we couldn’t get as high a thrust….”

“That’s correct,” Gary cut in. “There’s a loss of efficiency in that direction, which translates into a lower maximum thrust.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” I said. “Is the universe telling me I shouldn’t go into the cloud after all? Every time I finally decide one way, I’m yanked back! First the universe conspires to force me here; now that I’m here, it seems to be preventing my going in.” I was sitting in my chair now, and I glanced over my right shoulder at Gary. “Do you think having no forward zenite exhaust might not matter? What about your plan to avoid steering and navigating—did you discuss it with Chen and Steve?”

Gary’s nod now was quick and sharp, and encompassed Chen too. “Obviously,” Gary said, “if we see something coming at our nose, instinct will make us want to move out of the way in the opposite direction, no matter what our plan. But, getting out of the way of anything will definitely be harder to do now without the zenite engine; navigating will probably take longer.”

Sitting forward now, I pressed my elbows on my front panel and my hands to my forehead, rubbing there quite hard, as if the motion would give me an idea for a way out…it didn’t. I felt stuck.

I grabbed my chair’s strap and pulled it across me and locked it; then I made a fast ship-wide announcement that everyone should do the same strapping in.

“We’re going in no matter what,” I said at the end of my announcement. Then I linked my intercom with engineering only. “Take the zenite engine offline, Steve, but there’s no time to work on it now. I need you and Karen at full awareness of what’s happening outside the ship.”

“You got it, Captain,” Steve said.

We remained on course for the cloud; over the intercom, Gary, Karen, Steve and Chen discussed where they thought the best spot to enter the cloud was.

And when they had finally decided on something and the Demeter’s nose was finally on the cusp of the cloud’s boundary, I said, “Here goes!”

My eyes were glued to the viewscreen as the front of the Demeter slid into the cloud. It was darker inside than it looked from outside, and it was a creepy darkness inside, not a cozy one.

“What’s going on?” I said. “I thought it would be more colorful in here. Where are all the chaotic motions….”

As if my words had called them to life, there was a sharp shot of something on the viewscreen—a flash of steely gray color and bumpy texture, and it was headed right for the Demeter.

“Gary!” I shouted.

But it was too late for us to react in any other way: whatever the gray form was, it easily slid over the shell of the Demeter and jerked the whole ship to the right in one massive motion.

“Shit! Any damages?” I asked engineering.

“None that I can see,” Karen said fast. “It was more like a gravitational wave of the space here rather than like a matter wave moving separate from the space. The gray wave actually seems to be carrying us now like a surfboard.”

The image on the screen rapidly changed to a state that looked more like the cloud’s exterior. Waves of colorful particles—or what looked like particles—they suddenly appeared and the Demeter lurched again, to the left this time, as if the gray “surfboard” had instantly dropped us somewhere, though this new place didn’t look any different than where we had been, as in: this new place didn’t look any less chaotic.

I sat forward in my chair, my strap pulling across me tighter. “Chen, Steve—has the computer found any non-random motions in the numbers?”

Before Chen could get more than a “no” out, the Demeter jumped again, backwards. I was thrust even more forward in my chair, then back again, and this seeming dance with the sea of space went on for a few minutes more, with no break.

I finally heard Shirley’s moans. When I glanced over my shoulder, she had turned into an extremely pale, shaking form inside her brown chair. “Shirley, are you all right!”

“I shouldn’t have eaten anything earlier,” she mumbled now, one of her arms wrapped across her white shirt, over her stomach.

“We’re all feeling that way,” Gary said, his voice dry and tired.

I turned back around to my panel, feeling my own stomach contents rising too high. “Ugh…we were so worried about the ship, but how long can our bodies last like this? Why aren’t the internal dampers and gravity adjusters helping us reach an equilibrium faster here?”

Steve’s deep voice had a slight shake to it when he responded to me: “I think whatever’s happening, whatever we’re feeling—it’s outside the scope of any of our damping mechanisms; the forces from out there aren’t normal ones. I can’t negate them. I’ve been trying.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to start broadcasting my message. Let’s hope I don’t throw up during.”

My fingers frantically worked at my front panel now, trying to find my file with the speech I’d written for Rintu—trying and not succeeding. But, really, I was too stressed-out now to bother with my prepared statement anyway.

I banged open a communications-line, set it for no particular direction, and began talking. “This is Captain Zarro of the Demeter. I’m trying to reach the planet Rintu.”

I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, but I hoped more than nothing would happen. Unfortunately, exactly nothing happened, except colorful weird shit still kept flying toward the Demeter and away from it, carrying us along or scaring us into trying to move away. But, so far, the ship’s shields had held, and the ship hadn’t gotten anything more than several very shallow gouges in the outer hull, which I still wasn’t crazy about….

Now I said to my crew, “I’m going to try again—where do you think the center of the cloud is, Chen? Can anybody determine that from where we are now? If you can, point our nose in that direction….”

It took my crew a few minutes, but they finally did as I asked. Then I said over the communications-line, “This is the Demeter. I’m Lydia Zarro, the Demeter’s captain. If anyone is there on Rintu, or wherever in this cloud, I just want you to know one thing: I have one of the stones, and I’ve used it.”

An instant after my statement, there was a change outside: a complete cessation of motion on the starboard side of the Demeter. A long, black, tube-looking space suddenly appeared there, and it seemed to extend far into the distance.

My heart was pounding so hard, it was shaking my chest. I pressed a hand there, as if that would quiet my insides. “Gary, are you reading anything about that black area?”

“Yeah. I’m reading a completely docile space. No apparent forces. It looks like heaven compared to this other shit we’re in.”

I grunted, then said to engineering, “Turn toward the opening. This seems to be what we—I came here for.”

We entered the strange void slowly now, and it really was like the complete opposite of the kinetic exterior. Here in the black, there was no motion, there was no light; there was just an endless tunnel, that led to who knew where.

I licked my lips and the others on the bridge flashed me jumpy eyes. They did their job; I did mine. But there wasn’t that much to do, except keep going forward, and then even that became irrelevant when forces—or something—finally began pulling the Demeter down the tunnel.

Then slowly, very slowly, the appearance of the tunnel changed; it brightened into a charcoal gray, then into a silvery gray; then it brightened even more till it finally became a misty, pale gray mixed with an earthy reddish glow, as if we’d just flown into a dust storm on a sunny day.

I frowned. “Great. From dark to light but we still can’t see anything.”

I was about to add something else when a strange, wind-like sound came over the communicator—and then a voice, a normal voice, a human voice, probably a woman’s voice. The voice’s vibrations were authoritative and husky, and slightly accented as it said, “Captain Zarro, turn off all of your engines. We will pull you in.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“We are The Keepers Of The Tasui. A smaller number of us are humans who came here to Rintu; we now represent The Keepers to other humans, the few times we’ve let them in here.”

I couldn’t help the dryness in my tone now. “I feel honored that I’m one of them, but, to be honest, I’m not happy to be here. Who are the Tasui, and how are you talking to us? There’s no indication on my panel of anything incoming.”

There was a long pause. Then: “Demeter, you must completely shut down your beam engine—we’re reading a minute flux of curon particles.”

From inside engineering still, Steve said to the woman, “It’s never an instantaneous shut-down—but how the hell did you read the flux? I can barely sense it on this end, and I only see it now because I looked for it after you pointed it out.”

Just like the Keeper people hadn’t responded to my last question, they also didn’t respond to Steve’s question.

I felt annoyed, but I didn’t get a chance to express that because the woman said, “In sixty-five seconds, you will begin traveling over Pruveria, the capital of Rintu. Shortly after, we will pull you onto an elevated platform. Do not attempt to leave your ship until we say you can.”

“Bossy,” I mumbled, my eyes on the viewscreen again, which view rapidly changed from earthy red to bright red, then to bright orange—and such a shocking orange that at first I thought there was something wrong with the bridge viewscreen. “Yikes,” I said as I yanked my eyes from the view. “That orange is extremely bright.”

“It is because of the sun and Rintu’s atmospheric composition,” the woman said. “We will provide you with special glasses when you get here.”

“I just thought of something: how the hell do you even have sunlight when the sun here’s outside the cloud?”

There was no reply.

I sighed, glancing over my shoulder at Gary, who shrugged at me, then added a small warm smile, then finally shook his head. He looked cute standing there and apparently feeling as confused as I felt….

I turned back to the viewscreen; the density of the planet’s atmosphere had decreased, visually at least. I magnified the view, and the misty orangeness soon began dissipating even more, revealing huge, black spires that towered over mottled red ground below. Dots of orange light glistened on the hexagonal and rectangular black columns as they rose high over the red earth and over each other, almost as if they were in a contest to see which one could reach the stars first. One by one they were stacked, well into the distance.

“Wow…that’s an incredible view,” Shirley said from behind me, and I nodded fast without turning to look at her. “How were they able to lay the buildings in the way they did? There’s barely any ground between many of them. I think they look crystalline, as if they’ve been twinning!”

I hoped the woman from Rintu would jump in and give Shirley more information, but there was no reply from the Rintu end.

I glanced over my shoulder toward Gary again. “What are your readings showing?”

“The buildings are mostly made of a compound neither I nor the computer recognize,” Gary said. “But there’s some onyx mixed in and lumenite. At least some of the orange glow apparently isn’t sunlight but is a luminescence.”

“That sounds familiar,” I mumbled.

The women’s voice came into the Demeter again, and I sat up straighter in my seat as I listened to her. “You will be landing on a red platform in less than a minute. You won’t have to do anything; your landing will be soft. Remain inside till I contact you again.”

Now I asked her, “Shouldn’t we put down the landing gear?”

“If you like, but it isn’t necessary.”

“Just put it down, Chen,” I said.

His head jerked a nod at me.

Up ahead on the viewscreen, a large red platform suspended between two relatively short black columns came into view; the Demeter was pulled in that direction till it was finally over the platform. I realized then that the landing area was a lot bigger than I’d originally thought; the red plane actually connected more than two columns.

The Demeter slowly touched down, then slid along the platform, but I still felt nervous: what if we kept going, right over the edge? Though we didn’t seem to be in the highest part of the city, we were still quite high….

“Captain?” Steve said from down in engineering, and, considering the cautious rumble of his deep voice, he must have been thinking the same thing I had been.

“If we don’t stop soon, just start braking,” I said fast.

“I’m going to in about ten seconds,” Chen said.

“We’ll count down,” Gary added.

“Ten,” I said. “Nine—”

The view outside suddenly stilled because the Demeter had finally stopped.

I unstrapped from my chair and stood. I turned around to face the others and clicked on the intercom for ship-wide. “This is the captain. Apparently, we’ll be invited outside and to—to somewhere. Whoever wants to go, get ready. Also remember that we’re guests here, and there is no known protocol. Just let me do most of the talking.”

*

A few moments later, I was rushing through my ship, toward my cabin. When I got there, I opened my safe and pulled out the stone.

My heart was dancing around too hard as I paused to stare down at the stone. It was still so beautiful, and I still hated to part with it….

No turning back now. This had to be done.

*

Only a few of my crew wound up wanting to leave the ship, which was actually a good thing because the kind of reception we would get from the Rintu people still wasn’t clear. Plus, things still always needed to be done on the ship to keep it functioning…or not.

I was walking toward my bridge when Karen contacted me over my belt communicator. “Lydia, we’ve got a major problem on the ship—it happened all at once: all ability to store, record and read data is now gone. We can’t get any scanning, recording or logging device or computer terminals to work on this issue. Everything’s reading no power or a black screen then.”

My face turned red. “That can’t be,” I said. But I knew it probably could be.

I rushed onto my bridge, which was empty now; my three bridge companions from before all wanted to leave the ship and had decided, at my urging, to change their clothing to more formal attire, which I had done too; a dressy purple blouse covered my torso, and a long, black, satiny skirt over black boots covered my bottom half. My skirt shimmied along my legs as I quickly moved toward my chair.

“Captain?” came Karen’s voice again over my belt communicator.

“I’m here,” I said to her, but over my bridge intercom now.

I glanced at my front panel, did some finger-work there—and confirmed what Karen had said. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her—far from it. I didn’t trust the equipment on here, the set-up, the situation.

I straightened and said loudly, “This is Captain Zarro again to The Keepers. Have you done something to my ship? We can’t use any of our recording equipment, and why are our databases down?”

That same voice from before now said, “I am Kostas. You will not be allowed to record and research anything while you are on Rintu.”

“And what about our minds? They record too.”

“We will discuss that later,” Kostas said, and I could tell by the brusque way she’d spoken that the conversation was over from her end.

But that didn’t mean I had to comply. “You know, our needing to use recording equipment isn’t about you crowd. It helps us operate the ship and find problems by looking over its history! I am here at personal risk to me and my crew. You could at least discuss things with me before you do them. So far, I’m not impressed with the high-handed way you crowd do things.”

I didn’t expect a response, and I didn’t get one.

Nevertheless, I felt a jolt of anger move through me, especially because it was very clear now that I no longer had control over my own ship.

*

A little later, my crew and I got another verbal message from Kostas, saying we could leave the Demeter, which hatch we should leave from, and where we should stand once we’d left.

“These people are control freaks,” I said as I moved toward my ship’s cargo bay. Gary, Shirley, Chen and Geena were beside me. We were on our way to pick up May.

“How are you doing?” I said to her when I finally reached her desk area, where she was sitting behind her large computer monitor.

“I’m all right, Captain. But—” she passed a hand across her forehead, her dark eyes rolling nervously as she stood up “—what about my work? I can’t access some things now! I was in the middle of doing some calculations on the expected mass loss after the Keron dropoff, but then we suddenly lost recording power. We’ll have to go container-to-container and add up the amount of mass listed by the suppliers, which sometimes isn’t correct. I’ve lost our own measurement records!”

I waved a careless hand and took her bare forearm in my other hand, gently urging her away from her desk. “We’ll worry about that later. We’re all equally screwed here on that score. Geena’s left Bill and Brayburn to hand-calculate an overdue tally of the dry-pantry’s enormous stock—and how much pasta and sauce to make later. By the time they’re done with their work, maybe we’ll be lucky if we’re served a forkful each of pasta tonight.”

I heard Gary laughing from behind me. I jerked my head over my shoulder to smile at him—and admire him. He was in a beautiful royal-blue shirt and black pants, and he’d brushed his brown hair till it curled in thick waves around his face. He looked great. I wanted to say so to him, but now wasn’t the right time….

“Here goes,” I said as I walked out the cargo-bay hatch and down the Demeter’s ramp. I finally hit the red platform floor; it was very shiny, yet, curiously, it wasn’t slippery—which made sense because the Demeter would have had difficulty being pulled to such a quick stop on it. There must have been some non-frictional force—a field or some unknown type of force emanating from inside the red material—that was keeping everything upright and clinging to it, including my booted feet.

I walked toward the shiny, black, column-like building that was perpendicular to the Demeter’s ramp; Kostas had indicated that my crew and I should walk that way, and doing that now brought us closer to one of the platform’s side edges.

I could see out and across and beyond, to far in the distance, to the planet’s misty horizon. According to the Demeter’s computer records, before the expansion of the gravity cloud, Rintu used to be a flat, featureless, yellowy colored place, but now it was just gorgeous—especially the juxtaposition of the tall, glowing dark buildings with the pockets of larger areas of bright red earth in the distance, and then that brilliant orange atmosphere….

I suddenly remembered what Kostas had said about eyeglasses. Yet the atmosphere now didn’t seem as bright as it had seemed on my bridge viewscreen.

I said that out loud to my crew beside me, but I heard Kostas reply, “There is a field here on the platform that’s keeping us partly indoors. If we ventured away from these structures, the atmosphere would become brighter.”

My head had jerked toward where her voice seemed to have come from: the large black doors at the bottom of that black building were open now, and a bunch of people in orange clothing were walking through the doorway and stepping onto the red platform.

One person among them was wearing a long, hooded, orange robe, which looked serene and stately; the rest of the Rintu people were wearing utilitarian-looking orange jumpsuits and carrying what seemed to be glowing electronic devices.

“They look like monks about as much as we do,” I mumbled to my crew.

“We are workers,” Kostas said, and because the Rintu people were closer now, I could see who her voice had come from: one of the people in the orange jumpsuits. Above her orange-covered shoulders, her crown of hair was dark, thick and wavy, and her tall form walked in a very alert yet somehow graceful way.

Apparently, Geena could see the Rintu people better now, too. “Jim!” she said in a sharp happy voice as she stepped forward on my left. “I can’t believe it—you made it here!”

One of the people—Jim—nodded slowly now. He was really tall and quite slim, with very short dark hair, and he didn’t look too friendly. Or maybe he was just very distracted by whatever he was doing with the silver device in his hands.

We had all closed most of the gap between us, and just about everyone in the Rintu group remained in a line parallel to me and my crew, except Kostas.

She stepped closer now and said right to me, “Show us the stone.”

“You’re not very polite, are you?” I replied on a slight sneer, but my fingers did reach down for my belt and open the pocket with the stone inside. I removed it and held it out toward Kostas.

She stared back at it. Then she said in a flat voice, “You have indeed used the stone,” her dark eyes finally traveling up to mine. I couldn’t read what was buried in her gaze, but I could see some of the others behind her frowning as they used their devices.

I glanced between them and Kostas, my eyes finally remaining on her dark ones. “So is that a problem? I didn’t intend to use the stone. It was an accident. Frankly, I wish I’d never found the goddamn thing.”

“You have used it and handled it a lot. It is coded to you now because you are an organic lifeform, and it is intended for organic lifeforms to control it. Though, of course, you don’t have the right ship to make use of the form of energy it leads to.”

“No kidding,” I said. “So take it back already.” I pushed the firestone forward more.

But Kostas only slowly shook her head from side-to-side. “We can’t do that. It would be meaningless.”

“Would you please stop talking in cryptic sentences and just tell me what the fuck is going on—what am I supposed to do to get my normal life back? I came all this way—now you tell me I can’t give you the stone—so then it seems I’m stuck with it!”

Kostas’ head shook again and her voice was quicker this time, like a normal human’s voice: “I didn’t say that. But only you should handle the stone now.”

Based on every part of her face and body I could see, Kostas was human. And yet, there seemed to be something else going on with her—or maybe she was somehow taking orders; I got the feeling that she was taking them from the robed person behind her. The person’s bright orange robe almost completely covered her. I could only see a hint of slightly golden chin-skin beneath the hem of her big floppy hood….

“Who are you there in the robe?” I asked baldly now.

Kostas looked over her own shoulder, paused a moment, then nodded at the person in the robe, before turning back around. “Thura is a Keeper.”

“Why is she covered so much? I can’t see her face.”

A few of the workers glanced up from their devices and looked right at me. Then Kostas spoke again: “The Keepers are humanoid in shape, but they aren’t exactly like us humans. We always think it best to just communicate for them with other humans.”

I frowned at her and Thura, and though Thura’s face was covered, I had a feeling she saw every single thing happening, and every single person standing before her. “How are you communicating with The Keepers?” I asked Kostas.

“We human workers have a neural link with them, and they have another kind of neural link with each other.” One of the workers moved closer to Kostas to speak near her ear, which words of his I couldn’t hear.

Kostas finally straightened up more and looked at me and my crew. “We suggest you rest for an hour or two now. Soon it will be time for us all to make the journey.”

“What? What ‘journey’?” I asked fast, frowning still, a little heavier than last time. “I don’t have a neural link with you. Could you clue me in, please?”

Kostas raised a straight, imperious, orange-covered arm and pointed it to over the edge of the platform, toward the planet’s horizon. My eyes and my crew’s eyes all followed her hand, which appeared to be pointed at a single, enormous brown mountain that towered over everything around it.

Kostas lowered her arm and finally explained, “The Tasui is the cumulative history of technological inventions. We Keepers are particularly interested in the technologies of one particular species who no longer exists. The stone, as you and other humans have guessed, is one of their mechanisms. It was used to power their ships; they would use a stone to pull a ship into a corresponding energy well and charge up automatically from an infinite supply of a pure type of energy.

“Even the most powerful lifeforms can make mistakes, but not all of them learn from their mistakes. This particular lifeform—instead of learning, it tends to physically evolve from its mistakes, and sometimes into a being with even more power, rendering its prior lifestyle obsolete. The Keepers are dismantlers of that lifestyle, as well as the lifestyles of many other species. The Keepers record, remove and recycle remnants of civilizations, to protect lifeforms from any unused but possibly dangerous inventions; we log the history of the many technologies that have existed, both the bad and the good. The Keepers have been doing this for millions of years.”

“Millions?” Gary said in an astonished tone from beside me. “Then why are the stones still around—and especially the wells?” 

Kostas frowned a bit, her eyes shifting away from me and my crew, and into the distance, toward that big mountain. “The wells are a more complicated problem. They probably can’t be dismantled—at least we haven’t figured out a permanent way to do that. But since they can only be accessed via the stones, since the wells are technologically inert to other known inventions, our focus has always been on collecting all of the stones.

“We estimate that there were about 70,000 stones loose in the universe; about 200,000 years ago, they were ejected from an explosion at the space-facility where the species made them. We’ve recovered all but a few hundred of the stones.

“The problem is: this universe is a vast one, and it contains many different kinds of energy, matter and forces. The presence of the stones can be masked by an enormous number of combinations of materials and scenarios, some of which we probably haven’t even discovered yet. And cleaning up the stones is also only a tiny part of our tasks. There are many more things to be done.”

“You keep saying ‘our’ and ‘we’ a lot,” May pointed out now.

Kostas slowly turned to her. “In scenarios like this, I don’t feel separate from The Keepers.”

My head shifted toward my left, and I saw a look pass between Geena and Jim—an awareness from her but more a lethargic consideration from him.

Now she spoke to him, in slightly tremulous words: “Is it still you, Jim? Do you remember—me?” I had a feeling she had almost said “us.”

Once again though, Jim didn’t say anything. He just slowly nodded.

I let out a hard breath, my head whipping back to Kostas. “This is a lot to take in. How the hell am I supposed to go on a trek now? And, by the way, I’m not going alone. I want to take some of my crew.”

A casual shrug from Kostas, as if I’d just ask her what brand of coffee she liked best. “Whoever of you wants to go may go, but it’s best to keep the number of you small. I approve of everyone standing here right now.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said, pulling a sour face at her, which she didn’t seem to notice. “So how does this supposed journey work?”

Her tone was matter-of-fact now: “The others you choose to bring with you and those of us who come too, we are largely irrelevant. You, Lydia Zarro, have handled the stone so much that you’ve become its temporary keeper. You must decommission the stone. That requires a trip to The Hall Of Devices. It will take at least a day. We must go on foot up that very tall mountain beyond; it is a trek through a series of various fields that will make the inner workings of the stone accessible while it’s outside its corresponding well.”

Breathing hard now, I jerked an arm toward that mountain. “But I don’t want to go traipsing up a mountain. I want to drop off the stone and go back to my work. I don’t understand why you can’t just decommission the wells.”

Kostas shook her head from side-to-side very fast, in a very human way. “As I’ve said, that’s not possible, partly because the consciousness of the creators is no longer within our reach, and they might not even remember how to dismantle the wells anymore, assuming we could make them aware of us and the wells again.

“But, even if we were able to figure out a way to remove or turn off the wells, we are quite sure each of those absent-of-energy spaces would cause a singularity to develop. Then there would be a cluster of new, massive singularities in this universe, the results of which we could not predict.”

My voice was louder now: “Maybe the creators should have thought of that before they built the wells!”

“Technology is a double-edged sword,” Kostas said, “as human civilization has learned.”

“Only some of us have learned it. Really, my being here has shown that we haven’t learned much at all. Certainly, if we had stayed on Earth, we would have never found any of the stones.” I looked at Kostas more directly; then I looked at Thura behind her. “I know many other animals use technologies. I think the kinds and the amounts are the biggest problem with humans. Thankfully, we’re much more careful about it now. But, there are pockets of people left who just don’t give a shit about what they use up and what they damage—” I thought of Claudius again; then I felt my face turn red, which made me instantly shut up. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Gary’s head whip toward me. But I only shook my head back at him, letting out a sharp breath.

I turned to Kostas again. “Can we please just get on with this now? What do we do next?”

*

What my crew and I had to do next was change into other clothes—Rintu work-clothes.

“At least we don’t have to go up the damn mountain while wearing robes,” I said to Gary as I adjusted my red captain’s belt over my new, orange, Rintu worksuit.

Gary and I were in my cabin, and he was dressed in the same orange get-up, which at first sight looked odd on him; I couldn’t recall ever having seen him in that bold color.

However, upon further head-to-toe inspection, I realized the suit made his skin look warmer-colored and his eyes deepen into a smokier brown.

“You look hot,” I said suddenly.

And he laughed. “I was thinking the same about you.”

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t think my yellowy skin looks good against pumpkin hues.” I glanced at the time on my wall intercom panel. “Shit—we’re supposed to go out there soon. Is all of this a mistake?” My head slowly turned Gary’s way.

With his warm eyes right on mine now, he walked closer to me. “I don’t think it’s a mistake. …I love you.”

“What—what?” I stared up at his face; he’d never said those three words to me before this moment, and he sure picked an odd moment to finally say them.

His mouth twisted a little now, in a naive way. “Like you didn’t know?”

“I thought…well, I don’t know. I guess I thought this was still pretty casual.”

Now his mouth straightened, and the warm shine that had been in his eyes a moment before quickly dulled. “Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know—I mean…I mean, oh, I’m just so confused by so many events lately.”

“I can see that,” Gary said.

I couldn’t quite verbally respond with what he wanted me to say, but I did reach forward to kiss him softly on the mouth. When I pulled back, I said, “It’s hard sometimes—trying to maintain my captain’s status, but being a human being at the same time. When I was in training in that private academy years ago, they didn’t discuss the psychological side much. But, I do love being with you….”

Gary grabbed my right hand now, his warmth completely covering me there as he smiled.

*

While Gary, Shirley, May, Chen, and Steve and I would be scaling the Rintu mountain, the rest of my crew would either be remaining on the Demeter, or going on a brief, invited tour of Rintu’s Towers Of Technology, which was what The Keepers called the black buildings in Pruveria. At first, Geena had said that she was interested in going on the trek, but right before I left the ship, she told me she wanted to take the Towers-tour instead; I suspected the tour wasn’t the real reason she was staying behind….

 My five crewmembers and I were finally standing outside the Demeter; I looked over that side edge of the platform, toward where the immense brown mountain waited. During past jobs on different planetary landscapes, I’d occasionally had to walk over small hills. But I was no athlete. And the orange worksuit I was wearing wasn’t exactly comfortable because it was too stiff. Fortunately, the workers had given us the special clear sunglasses, which I and my crew put on now; the Rintu people were supposed to supply us with whatever we would need to make the day-long climb, so I hadn’t brought anything other than my belt.

I pushed the button on there that would connect me with my ship. “Karen, remember: Kostas promised the line will be open the whole time. You’re in charge. You need or notice anything you don’t like or you think I should know, contact me right away.”

“You got it, Captain,” Karen said. “I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will,” I said, before closing the line.

I turned to Gary, then to that same black building from earlier, where no one was waiting. “I guess we should go knock on the door now. We’re on time; they’re not. This isn’t promising….”

As if the Rintu people had heard my statement, the big black door opened and a dozen workers walked out. They were still in orange and they were still holding devices in their hands, but this time they were carrying black packs on their backs.

I walked in their direction, pointing my right thumb toward the mountain. “How will we get over to there?”

“We will fly,” said one of the workers, in a very deep, very resonant voice. He was short and broad, and his dark hands were busy punching the buttons on a small gray box.

I heard the soft whir of something, as if the wind had gently shifted, and when I looked to the left of the platform, I saw a large red disk floating in the orange sky. The disk glided toward the platform as if it had all the time in the universe to get here.

I heard Kostas’ voice coming from somewhere: “We are ready to make the journey.”

…The next thing I knew, I was inside a very streamlined space, with my crew around me looking as dumbfounded as I felt.

“What—what just happened?” May asked, staring toward a wide, clear window, where there was a lone red chair, which Kostas was filling.

She adjusted a lever on the black, electronic control-panel before her. “I moved you inside this ship.”

May frowned at her. “But I don’t remember that happening.”

“It happened so fast, you can’t remember it, at least consciously,” Kostas said.

That same short worker from before walked up to her and mumbled something; apparently, he and the other workers had been transported to here too.

Kostas’ long left forefinger pushed a button on her controls as she said, “You and your crew may remove your glasses now, Captain Zarro. Everyone, please be seated.”

The workers sat down in the line of white chairs along the wall opposite to me and my crew, and I fell back into one of the white chairs behind us, along the right side of the bridge. Chen took the seat to my right, and May took the one beside him, near the front window. Two straps automatically closed over their torsos, and another did the same on my torso.

“If we’re going to fly, why can’t we just fly up the mountain?” Chen asked then, his head turning toward Kostas.

Her slender hands moved deftly over her electronic panel. “This ship is not equipped with the proper staging technology to deactivate the stone. The stone is a nested structure the way an onion is nested, except the number of layers in the stone are the number of layers inside a typical onion raised to the fifteenth power.”

“Christ,” I said, glancing at my crew. Gary was seated on my left; beyond him, Steve’s straight, waiting face indicated he seemed to be carefully taking in the whole experience; Shirley, however, was frowning in the seat beside him, which made me frown too, in worry.

“What is it, Shirley?” I asked now.

“I’m just wondering if I should have stayed on the Demeter.” Her eyes were on the front window, where the view rapidly changed from the red platform and black buildings to a superfast whir of orange.

I felt my stomach lurch. For years I’d been living most of my life on a spaceship, but there was something particularly unnatural about the way this Keeper ship was flying; my face began to sweat.

“With the high speed we seem to be going, why aren’t we at the mountain yet?” Chen demanded, his voice sounding strained, which was an unusual sound for him. I knew he had been flying in ships since he could walk: his parents had been in the Space Force; he’d lived a good deal of his life on ships with them. But I’d never seen him looking as uncomfortable as the way he looked now; he had just removed his glasses, and his mouth was trembling as if he felt very nauseous. When he finally pressed his face into his hands, I laid a hand on top of his head, trying to comfort him. He was my friend and I hated seeing him like this. I was about to yell at Kostas—

But then she glanced over her right shoulder, at Chen. “Where the mountain appeared to be while we were on the platform is not where the mountain actually is. When The Keepers found Rintu near the small gravity cloud, they expanded the cloud and terraformed the planet into different dimensions. Rintu is not the barren normal planet it used to be before The Keepers began using it as a base in this universe.”

I couldn’t help the sourness in my tone now. “You keep saying ‘this universe,’ as if there’s more than one.”

“There is. The creators of the stone now live in another universe, which we will not be going to, at least not exactly.”

“I wish your words came with a decoder,” I snapped. “Dealing with all of this is exhausting. We shouldn’t have to squeeze every bit of information from you as if we’re squeezing hard dry lemons.”

Shockingly, Kostas belted out a laugh. “It’s been years since we allowed anyone new into Rintu, and once they remain permanently, they change. I’ve forgotten how entertaining being around normal humans can be.”

“I’m glad you’re having a good time at my expense…not,” I said now, my eyes shifting to out the window. But they didn’t remain on the view for long because it still gave me such a discomforting feeling.

I looked to my left, at Gary. He had been very silent for a while, and now I realized why: he’d fallen asleep. As I watched his head lolling backwards against the top of the white seat and his mustache and bottom lip fluttering with his breaths, I couldn’t help laughing a little. Then I felt bad about laughing: all of us on the Demeter hadn’t been getting enough sleep; nor had we been working normally spaced shifts. This had clearly taken a toll….

I turned back to Chen—May had taken over there; her left arm was wrapped around his shoulders now. Her usually warm-toned skin was tinged with a pale gray—apparently, she wasn’t exactly well enough to comfort Chen, but she was doing it anyway.

“Why the hell is this happening?” I asked. “This flight doesn’t feel right to our bodies.”

“This universe is a lot more vast than humanity believes,” Kostas said. “The history of the many species in the beyond, of their cultures and technologies—this is an enormous amount of data of numerous kinds. It cannot be housed in normal spacetime. The Keepers are their own separate species too, and they’re the perfect ones to know how to house the data for maximum efficiency. The Keepers don’t completely exist in any one position at any one moment. They’re used to variations in that, and their technology on this planet, like this ship—it’s not meant for normal spacetime.”

“Well,” I said, “that definitely explains why we’re feeling so disoriented here.” My gaze now passed over the other Rintu people seated on the ship; they were all wearing orange worksuits, and, as far as I could tell, they were all human. “How come there are no Keepers with us?”

“The necessary Keepers are already at the mountain,” Kostas said.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” I said in a low voice, sitting forward in my seat more. “Have The Keepers logged the history of humanity’s inventions—our technology and technological behavior?”

An obvious hesitation, which was punctuated by a brusque, “Yes,” from Kostas.

“So what did they have to say about us…actually, scratch that. I probably don’t want to know. It’s probably nothing too good.”

Kostas didn’t reply, but I had a feeling her silence was an agreement with my last statement.

 I sighed now. “So, where do you come from—I’m assuming you’re from Earth? Though you do have an accent I can’t place.”

“Yes, I was born on Earth. My name there was Ilona Kostas. I’m from Greece.”

“I’ve never been there. Do you miss it?”

Another silence, longer than the last one. “Sometimes,” she finally said. “We should reach the mountain in a few hours. I suggest you and your crew take a nap—it will make it easier to deal with any dimensional sickness.”

“Yeah, whatever you say—you try to sleep when it feels like you’re being smushed around with a rolling pin….”

“You forget that I was once in the same position as you.”

My eyes jerked toward her. “You used a firestone and had to decommission it here?”

Her head shook from side-to-side, her dark hair shifting across her profile. “No. My ship had an accident while inside a curon bubble—and I wound up stranded in the Rintu gravity cloud, luckily. When The Keepers rescued me, I found a new home. I’d been working for the Galactic Exploration Service for years. I was tired of roaming. I always loved history, so this seemed a perfect match for me.”

“What about everyone else here?” I said, looking around at the workers again, most of whom were either busy with their little devices or sleeping, which sleeping all of my crewmembers were now doing, including May.

“I think you should sleep,” Kostas said to me.

I exhaled a hard breath because she and the other workers had ignored my question, but then I found that my eyelids did feel so damn droopy….

When I woke up later, the ride in the disk-ship didn’t seem as sickening to my body, maybe because the view out the front window had slowed. I could now see vertical forms inside the blurry orange atmosphere; apparently, the ship was flying quite low.

I had scrunched back in my chair while I slept, but now I sat up straighter. “Are we almost there?”

Kostas’ gaze slid my way as she nodded.

My crew began waking up—Gary first. “Where are we?” His eyes shifted between me and Kostas, but I only jerked a hand at her.

She went back to looking out the front window and manipulating the ship’s controls. “We’re approaching the spatial fields of The Hall. We should land in about four minutes.”

“What time is it?” Gary asked, looking at me again.

I glanced down at my belt’s time-readout. “We’ve been on here a few hours, Sleepyhead.” I smiled at him, and his right hand slid over my left thigh—first to squeeze there, then to rest there. My other crewmembers were awake now, but I suddenly didn’t care about Gary’s familiarity with my thigh in front of them….

“We will be landing in 90 seconds,” Kostas said now.

Feeling my pulse speed up, I jerked forward in my chair, and Gary removed his hand, to run his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair.

I looked around the ship. I looked at Shirley and Steve first, found them talking quietly to each other. Then I looked at the workers and realized that most of them had been on the platform earlier. “How many humans are living on Rintu?” I asked no one in particular.

“There are sixty-six of us,” that same short guy from before said, his dark eyes shifting up to my face, then over to the front window, where the view had really slowed, but which “view” mostly consisted of the one brown mountain.

“That looks massive!” I said, my mouth remaining open afterward in awe. Now that I was closer to the mountain, the unusual “earth” it was made of actually looked multicolored and quite smooth, as if someone had dropped an enormous hunk of granite onto Rintu’s surface.

The ship slowed down even more till it began kicking up the ground; red dust flowed upward in powdery streams out the front window. Our descent onto the planet’s surface seemed effortless, though, and Kostas was soon telling me and my crew to unstrap and put on our glasses again.

I quickly did both things and stood. “Let’s get this show on the road—or, I guess I should say, on the mountain.”

Someone had opened a big hatch on the back end of the ship. I moved closer to there, but Kostas suddenly walked around me and down the black ramp connected to the hatch.

I followed her—only to stop short when I reached the red ground.

Kostas had parked the ship quite close to the mountain, and now that it was looming over us, I realized that the hunk of speckled earth or stone—whatever it was, it now looked much higher than from on the platform earlier. I couldn’t even see the top of the mountain; it was an almost completely vertical rise toward the orange sky. “Oh my god, how the hell will we scale that?”

Kostas lifted her head toward where I was staring. “We will be walking up trails on the other side. They are carved into the fixture—”

“Fixture—that’s a good description of it! It looks like someone moved it here.”

Kostas didn’t reply to me. She turned to the other workers as they and my crew disembarked from the red disk-ship. “Have you finished with the calibration?” Kostas asked the workers. “Upal is awake and waiting for us on the first level with the scale. He was having some trouble with the attached specimen plate.”

Three of the workers nodded at Kostas’ words; apparently, they had been working on their calibration together because they now had their devices pointed toward each other in what looked like an equilateral-triangle shape.

“We’re getting a bit of interference,” one of the workers suddenly said, and her green eyes looked right at me when she spoke.

I glared back-and-forth between her and Kostas as I said, “What—what?”

“You are wearing an electronic device with a scandium core that’s turned on,” the green-eyed worker said to me.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s my belt. My link to my ship, where I’m the, uh, captain, you know?” I turned to Kostas. “You told me it would be fine if I kept in contact with my ship.”

Kostas’ lips pursed, apparently at my statement. “That isn’t entirely accurate. If you want to send one last quick message now, that will be fine. But we must be here overnight, when Rintu’s two moon-engines will help fire up our power. And no other technology can be on around here then.” She shook a careless hand at one of the dark buildings in the distance; there were no structures anywhere near the mountain, which, again, was contrary to how this space looked from on that red platform. Now Kostas said, “Even all of the buildings in a particular zone in this area will have to stop the work they do. All power will have to be diverted to this mountain.”

“So much rigmarole for a damn stone!” I said, punching at my belt communicator. “Karen, there’s a problem. I won’t be able to contact you till….” My hard eyes turned to Kostas.

“In the morning should be okay,” she said.

“Till the morning,” I said to Karen. “Is everything all right there?”

“So far,” Karen said. “A few of the crew are on that tour; they’re supposed to be gone two hours. But do you want me to call them back sooner?”

“No.”

“Lydia and Steve—I’ve been working on the zenite engine more—trying to find where that mass-flow problem developed. I know you made progress there, Steve, but now it got cut short by your trip.”

“So did a lot of things,” I said in a dry voice. “Well, I think you can handle things there for one day, Karen. But if you all find that you can’t, maybe you can ask for help from this crowd on the planet.” Now I raised a sharp eyebrow at Kostas.

She nodded my way. “Yes, that would be fine.”

“Just contact the Rintu people if necessary, Karen. And make sure you switch off with Sam when you need it and get some rest.”

“I will, Lydia—thanks!”

 I smiled a little. “Well, this is good-day then—and good-night. Take care.” I clicked off with Karen, disabled the link and everything else on my belt, and looked up at the sky, trying to determine how much longer the daytime would last. I finally asked Kostas about it.

“Most of the time, it probably won’t seem like any specific time when we’re on the mountain,” Kostas said, her eyes up on the sky now. She pointed upward, both to the left and to the right of where we were standing. “The String moon will be there, and Bracken moon will be over there. They and the mountain will make a perfect triangle, which will illuminate this place, which is a convenience too, so we don’t fall off the mountain.”

“Great. That sounds promising. So now you’re saying it will be dangerous on there?” I glanced around at my crew and their suddenly-wary faces.

 “We’re saying to just follow our instructions,” the short male worker said, and then he nodded at Kostas fast.

“Yes,” Kostas said, “Devin is right: you must follow whatever we say. And, now, we must start.” She turned around and began walking over the red earth.

The orange worksuits we were all wearing had orange boots attached, but, as I followed Kostas over the bumpy earth, it became very obvious that there wasn’t enough flexibility in the suits or the boots.

“These boots and suits seem kind of stiff,” I mumbled.

Devin threw me a dark-eyed glance. “They are equipped with the necessary technology to keep us connected to the various spaces we go through on a daily basis, and that you will go through today.”

I glanced at him now. “Does any of this technology and the dimensions here do anything to our bodies? I’m starting to feel like the olden days of space travel without gravitational support—the health effects then—”

Devin shook his head fast, but Kostas spoke now: “Don’t worry about any of that. The Keepers will take care of everything. I’ve been living and working on here for decades, and I’m healthier than ever.”

“That’s good to know…I think.” The right side of my mouth curled.

Kostas pointed toward the base of the mountain, where there was a sharp, dark curve in the structure. “We will ascend those black stairs.” She glanced over her shoulder at me and my crew. “If you can’t keep up with the pace of us workers, let us know, and we’ll pause. Though we shouldn’t pause for too long ever.”

I groaned a bit, but I kept walking. I had never gotten an explanation from the workers on how the sun could be shining in the sky when the planet was surrounded by an enormous “cloud” structure, but however the sun was here, I began feeling sorry it was here; it beat down hard on our bodies, and to me it felt hotter than any other sun I’d met up with in my lifetime.

When we finally reached the mountain’s wide black steps, I wasn’t walking up them for even a minute before sweat began making my worksuit’s underwear and bra-panel stick to my body, and I had to wipe my right hand across my forehead to pull away the wet there; it had started dripping beneath my glasses. “Whew—I hope you crowd brought water!”

Kostas looked over her shoulder at me, then said, “Devin.” He slid his black backpack off his shoulders and removed a perfectly cylindrical white bottle.

I stared down at it as he handed it to me. “You all can’t have enough water in there for everyone for the whole trip.”

“Don’t worry,” Kostas said.

“You keep saying that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“I’m dying of thirst here too,” Shirley said.

And then I heard Kostas sigh, which surprised me because her face was glistening with sweat too. Maybe she had been around The Keeper crowd too long and was now out of touch with humans and her own humanity….

I decided to say that to her, and she quickly flashed me wide dark eyes. But she did finally say, “We’ll take a ten-minute break before we really begin our ascent. You may all sit on the stairs and have water.”

“Very magnanimous of you,” Chen snapped, which was unlike him. I turned my head toward behind me and saw that, beside him, May looked even more uncomfortable in the heat than the rest of us.

My head whipped back to Kostas. “You could have at least given us short-sleeved orange suits!”

Kostas flashed me those wide eyes again. “All of the worker suits are long-sleeved.”

I flung a hand at the general area of the planet. “You’ve got all this advanced technology and knowledge, but you can’t make a worksuit more thermodynamically comfortable? You don’t seem to notice your surroundings as an animal anymore.” I opened the cap on the white bottle and chugged at the liquid inside. When a little spilled onto my hand, I realized that the liquid wasn’t normal water; it was a weird bright blue, but, thankfully, it was also cold and very refreshing. I plopped my ass down on one of the steps, and Gary moved to sit beside me.

We shared my bottle of blue water, and he said near my ear, “You’re right about them—they are out of touch. Maybe it’s necessary for them to do their work. I know you hate that Babs left, but I don’t often miss being in engineering: sometimes working down there, having to be ‘on’ all the time then, I would forget how to not be on.”

I nodded at him and drank more of the water, staring out at the land around us. It looked different from this angle; the atmosphere wasn’t as hazy. But I was still getting that weird, disoriented feeling inside my mind and inside my vision, as if I were looking through a scope, and there were things out there that I couldn’t quite locate in my field of view but knew were there anyway….

The stairs weren’t covered overhead; I continued baking in the sun. I started to get up and Gary helped pull me to my feet. I smiled up at his face then, wanting to kiss him, but our sweatiness….

I glanced up the steps, at where Kostas was seated alone on one of them. Then I said, “Let’s just get going again now. Is there an indoor part of this trek soon?”

Kostas rose. “Yes. You’ll have to remove the stone then.”

“Gladly,” I said as I began walking up the steps again, handing Devin the empty water bottle as I passed him.

The mountain turned out to be not as straight up as I’d thought when I’d viewed it from on the ground. Apparently, that view had either been a distortion, or the mountain’s overall shape wasn’t symmetrical; we now had to wind around the mountain, in a curving arch of stairs; then we had to wind at an angle away from that curve.

We did this same motion for what seemed like hours, and, as we went farther up, so, of course, did the ground seem to go farther down. I began avoiding looking over the edge of the stairs, but I still felt so lightheaded.

Just when I was about to say that, Kostas said over her shoulder, “We’re almost at the first level.”

“Only the first—and this high up!” May said in a frustrated voice.

She was behind me, and when I turned my head toward her now, I made sure to do that inward, toward the mountain; otherwise, I would have seen how high up we were….

“How are you doing?” I asked May.

“My feet are starting to hurt. These boots are about as comfortable as the rest of the suit.”

“May’s right,” Steve said. “Have your feet changed shape on this planet? I’ve been in much better designed spacesuits, and I was fully covered then. You said to me before that this is a smart-suit, a machine, so where are the controls? I’m an engineer and I feel like I should be able to engineer my own frigging suit.”

“You wouldn’t be able to understand the controls,” Devin said from the same step Steve was on.

Steve’s head spun toward him as he said in an annoyed tone, “Excuse me?”

We had all kept moving up, and Kostas was at the very top of us, alone on a step. She turned around to face us now. “We don’t have time to explain the controls. The workers are taking care of your suits with their devices.”

“Well, they’re not doing a very good job,” Shirley snapped, pushing her dark hair away from where it was sweat-plastered to one of her cheeks. “I thought we weren’t the first to make this trip—why weren’t you more prepared to make it comfortable for us?”

Kostas’ dark eyes fell on Shirley. “You are the not the first humans to find and use a stone, but you are indeed the first to make this trip, outside of the working members of this planet.”

“O-oh,” Shirley said in a breathless way, her blue eyes widening. “Well, I guess that’s something exciting then—being a first. I’m sorry for complaining—”

“Don’t apologize to them, Shirley,” I said. “I know I’ve been griping a lot, but I don’t care. A new adventure or not, I’d rather we all live through it and come out as healthy as before.”

“You will live,” Kostas said, turning back toward the rise of the stairs. “Another few dozen steps, and we’ll enter the first level.”

I groaned, but my uncomfortable booted feet continued their journey upward. The stairs eventually turned inward more, toward where the “center” of the mountain’s shape seemed to be—at least where it seemed to be at this moment: unless I was going crazy, the mountain’s shape had changed….

There was a stone overhang on the left side of the stairs now; Kostas disappeared into the dark opening beneath the overhang, and Gary and I followed her into a cooler, interior space. It was quite dark inside, but a golden light was coming from somewhere on the right. Kostas’ orange-suited figure moved in that direction, and Gary and I followed her again. I heard the others come up fast behind us, as if they’d fallen very behind and were trying hard to catch up, but my vision was focused forward on the gradually lightening room-like space we were now moving in.

On the left, a massive stone table stretched back into the darkness, and a bunch of devices made of what appeared to be stone and shiny black metal were spread out over the table’s top. Kostas moved to near there, and a person came out of the shadows—a robed person, a Keeper, whose face was almost completely covered. There seemed to be a brief pause among all of the people in the room; then The Keeper’s robed head nodded at Kostas.

“Upal normally resides in the mountain,” Kostas said as she turned to face me and my crew. “He must remove his robe in order to work. Prepare yourselves now.”

“What the hell do you mean?” I asked.

And it wasn’t long before I got a visual answer to my question: Upal’s orange robe slid down his body, which I now saw was indeed humanoid in overall shape, but his individual parts—they chaotically flickered on and off; one instant they were here, the next instant they were gone. And when his parts were on, a circulatory system was visible inside them. In fact, everything was visible, including what looked like five wildly pumping small hearts scattered around his torso and something brown moving through what appeared to be his lower intestines….

He was a horrifying, physically discomfiting sight. I had to look away. So did the rest of my crew. I heard sharp breaths being sucked in behind me.

“What is happening with him—” someone gasped—it sounded like May.

“He is not always here,” Kostas said, which wasn’t a detailed-enough explanation for my tastes. But I was so horrified by Upal’s appearance that I felt unable to speak and ask Kostas for more information. That the dimensional sickness seemed to have come back as soon as Upal had taken off his robe wasn’t helping matters. The dark walls in the big space around me seemed to be constantly changing shape—I struggled to get a bearing somewhere—finally felt Gary grab my left elbow hard.

“You’re falling over—” he said “—are you all right!”

“Not really….” I had closed my eyes, and now I took a few deep breaths. “Don’t you feel the changes here?”

“Yeah,” Gary said, “but I wish I wasn’t feeling them.”

When I opened my eyes and looked up at him now, he was clearly avoiding looking at where Upal was, just like I was avoiding it, and when I turned toward the rest of my crew, their heads were facing down and away….

I heard Kostas’ firm voice. “Upal needs the stone now.”

I groaned, my fingers fumbling with my belt pocket and finally yanking out the stone. “I’m going to need to eat something soon—the walls look like they’re moving. I’m feeling so nauseous….”

“We will give you food, but Upal must place the stone on the scale straight away,” Kostas said, and out of the corner of my right eye, I saw one of her hands jerk toward the big table.

The stone felt cool in my palm, like always, and there was something so comforting about that now. I felt a stab of depression that at some point soon, I wouldn’t be able to feel that comforting sensation ever again.

I shuffled toward the table, carefully avoiding looking at poor Upal, who, for all I knew, was the most beautiful member of his species. But, to us, to the human species, he contained aspects of a humanoid that humans did not want to see while those aspects were in operation.

However, the difficulties I was having with his appearance weren’t only because of his internal organs—his temporaneous nature was just as bad; his appearance and disappearance constantly reminded me of how fragile physical existence could be.

A part of me couldn’t help feeling sorry for Upal, so, as I laid the firestone onto the table, I glanced in his direction but not quite at him, and smiled a little. “Here,” I said, and an instant later I felt something touch my hand—but it was so fast and so light, I thought I had imagined it. Or maybe it was just the wind coming in from outside. It apparently had strengthened, and the air in here had grown dustier. Could there be a storm coming….

“Upal says to not worry about him and to step back from the table,” Kostas said.

I did as she said. “How—how did he know what I was feeling?”

“He touched your hand,” Kostas said.

I wasn’t sure what to think about touchy-feely behavior from The Keepers, but, as far as I could tell, their touching me hadn’t done anything negative to my body. I did, however, feel bad for my thoughts about Upal’s appearance. I hoped I hadn’t hurt his feelings….

“The Keepers don’t feel things the way humans do,” Kostas said.

My head shot toward her. “Are you reading my mind now too?”

“Upal has set up a neural link with you.”

“But I didn’t give you permission to do that!” I said, my head spinning toward Upal, then regretting that spinning, once I caught sight of him. I whipped my eyes away.

And Kostas said, “The link is temporary and necessary to scan for any residue from your interaction with the stone. You have formed an attachment to it.”

My face was flaming: what else had they sensed from inside my mind or my body? I was also embarrassed at my emotional response to a stone—embarrassed in front of my crew, in other words. Now I said to Kostas, “You can read my thoughts, so why can’t I read yours?”

Kostas turned toward me more. “We cannot allow that. You are only here temporarily.” Her head swiveled back toward Upal, and I marveled at how she appeared to have no problem looking right at him for long periods of time. Going on the motions of both of their heads and their bodies, they seemed to be having a conversation now without actually having one.

Kostas’ dark-haired head came my way again. “Upal thinks that if he sends something to you over the link, it might help with the dimensional sickness. We are a little perplexed that you’re all having so much difficulty. Shirley is on the verge of vomiting.”

I spun around and saw Shirley hunching over against one of the dark walls. Steve was standing beside her, and one of his big palms was pressed to her upper back—she jerked forward even more and threw up—repeatedly, as if everything she had in her stomach decided to make an appearance now.

I jerked a hard hand at her, then at Kostas. “Help her, for chrissake!”

An instant after I said that, I felt something happening in the center of my brain—I felt a tingling there, as if a feather were tickling my gray matter.

The tickling sensation expanded downward, toward my stomach. It seemed to be stroking me inside there, soothing it, and going on the looks on my crew’s faces, including Shirley’s, they were all experiencing the same soothing feeling.

“That’s better!” I practically cried in joy now, because, suddenly, this place didn’t seem so discomfiting, and neither did Upal. I realized then that there was beauty in his anatomy, almost as if I were completely and truly looking at an Earth ocean for the very first time, because I could now see the physical motion of the tides via the lines of force connected to the Moon. To see the beauty beneath a body, you just need to put on the right kind of glasses….

I remembered that I was still wearing the actual glasses the workers had given me. I took them off now. “What’s happening? I feel different. It’s gotten dustier in here, but it’s not hampering my vision.”

Kostas moved closer to the big stone table, but not quite up to it. “Upal is coordinating your normal dimension better with the various dimensions of the surroundings here, but this will not last once we leave this level and go outside. If we keep the neural link with you up the mountain, it might interfere with the decommissioning.”

“Too bad,” Chen said in a deflated voice from nearby. “I think I could get used to this.”

I nodded rapidly at him.

“Can I have something to eat, please?” Shirley asked in a small voice. “Unfortunately, the taste in my mouth is still terrible.” Her back was pressed against the wall now; her face was flushed and tilted away from Steve, as if she were embarrassed that he was seeing her so sick.

I turned back to the table, where a metallic-looking object was suddenly sparkling into life in front of Upal. Several workers suddenly rushed past him, toward the darkness in the back of the room—yet with my new “eyesight,” I could see more shapes in the dark, could see what seemed to be huge cabinets, which the workers now opened. The cabinets apparently contained supplies, maybe for Upal to live here….

The workers soon returned and held out irregularly shaped black boxes toward my crew. Devin finally handed me one, and when I opened it, I found a container of that bluish fluid and a clear bag of fluorescently-bright red crackers. “Um, these look beautiful, but are they safe to eat?”

“I eat them all the time,” Kostas said.

I shrugged, then bit into one of the crackers. It wasn’t bad; at least it was sweet.

I laid my box on the floor, and when I straightened up again, what was happening on the table caught my eye: Upal’s fingers had pinned the firestone onto an elevated, bronze-looking plate; his fingers were flickering-moving in and out of this dimension, but they didn’t seem to be flickering as much they had been before my neural linking.

Something different also happened to the stone now: a sharp, airy hiss came off of it, as if a door inside that hadn’t been opened in eons had finally been opened.

“Upal has permanently initiated the stone’s decommissioning,” Kostas said in a firm voice. “We must get back to walking upward.”

I felt a little disappointed. “What about the mind-link—once it goes, will we get it back again later?” I had felt mad that Upal had done the link with me, but now that I’d had it, I didn’t want to lose the damn thing.

Kostas’ dark eyes glanced at me. “When we reach some of the other levels, if you’re all still feeling unwell, we will initiate the linking again. But we lose time then, so just try not to feel so stressed by the journey. That isn’t helping your physical states.”

“It works both ways,” I said. “Our bodies aren’t used to what’s going on, and that’s affecting our heads.”

Kostas nodded at me a little, and Upal left the table and came closer to me. He stopped less than a foot in front of me; this close, I realized that his head and face weren’t as transparent as the rest of him, but his circulatory system was still visible everywhere, and his body shimmered as if streams of liquefied opals were running through his veins.

I felt tears fill my eyes now; then I felt Upal raise one of his strange hands and gently touch the inside corner of my right eye.

“What is he doing?” I asked softly.

“He has never seen a human cry,” Kostas replied.

Upal’s hand was still shimmering against my face, and his strange, colorless eyes were flashing into nonexistence then back into existence quite rapidly. “Does the crying look interesting to you?” I asked.

And Kostas said, “He’s not sure he understands it. The Keepers have existed with a very purpose-filled existence for so long. They are required to do their work at various bases around the universes. They usually live alone, because their appearance is so difficult for others to handle, even for each other when they’re very young. It took me years to be able to watch them work for several minutes at a time without looking away.”

 Upal’s hand had left my face, but where he’d touched me felt warm now. And his chaotically changing head still seemed fixed in my direction.

“How many of you are there?” I asked. “Do you have children?”

“Though The Keepers sometimes have sexes, they are predominantly asexual. They bud,” Kostas said. “There are an unknown, possibly uncountable number of Keepers because the different sects work in different universes. They do not often get into contact with each other.”

“You seem to lead lonely lives,” I said in a quiet voice. “You remind me of bees a little, including you human workers. You’re part of this ‘hive’ here, but do you really interact that much with each other personally?”

Behind Upal, Kostas’ hands were dangling at her sides, and she seemed to be blinking kind of fast now. When she spoke again, her voice was slower. “We do have the mind-link with each other. But some jobs are so important that they are their own reward. The individual doesn’t need anything else.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve felt that way about my shipping business at times; still, at other times, it’s not nearly enough.”

I felt a motion from Upal—as if he’d exhaled at me—a light, crisp little wind. I liked to think that it was a sigh of agreement, but then if it had been, that might mean Upal was sad inside. And I didn’t like to think of his being sad. “Will we see you again?” I asked him now.

He seemed to flicker faster than normal.

“He will try,” Kostas said.

And then Upal moved away from me and to the table again, where he gestured toward the stone, then toward me.

I moved closer, but I stopped abruptly before I reached the stone. “Whatever you did to it, could it hurt me? Kostas, you mentioned the layers of an onion—and I guess you’ve peeled one off now. And, well, onions often make you cry.” I glanced at Upal, then at Kostas.

“Other than being coded to you for your use, the stone is still inert to you,” she said. “The creators of the stone did have the foresight to see that other organic lifeforms besides the creators could get hold of the stones. They aren’t able to do anything directly to any substances but ships. The stone pulled you inside your ship into its well, but you and your crew were still kept away from the energy inside the well.” Kostas quickly adjusted the long sleeves on her orange suit. “It is time to keep moving. Please pick up the stone, Captain Zarro.”

“Call me Lydia,” I said, without intending to say that. “Can I call you Ilona?”

Kostas shook her head “no.” “I’ve never really gone by that name as an adult, so I’d prefer that you didn’t use it.”

I shrugged; then my fingers gingerly touched the stone—it didn’t dangerously zap me or anything, but it did feel much warmer than it had—maybe the neural link was responsible somehow. I sighed a little as I took the stone in my palm. “I wish I had the kind of mind that could understand a lot more of this.”

“You’ve been given the mind you’ve been given, and it’s a good one,” Kostas said, making me blush and wonder if that compliment was meant from her or from Upal, or maybe from both.

“Captain Zarro,” Shirley said from on my right, looking at both Upal and Kostas, “I’m a mess, including the front of my worksuit. Please tell me I can clean up somewhere before we go….”

“And I have to piss,” Gary said bluntly.

“Come to think of it, me too,” I said. “We all need a bathroom break.”

Kostas called to Devin, and he motioned for me and my friends to come with him.

We followed him into the dark back area where the cabinets were; he turned on an overhead light, revealing a wide space with a long, waist-high sluice area filled with what looked like normal water. A large round drain covered in a metal grid was fixed into the room’s gray stone floor.

Devin opened one of the wall-cabinets and pulled out an orange worksuit, presumably for Shirley.

“Um,” I said, “we don’t want to go to the bathroom in front of each other.”

Devin motioned to the right, where there was a large doorway in the dark wall. “Three private toilet compartments and shower stalls are in there, or you can wash using the waterfall and sprayer here.”

I was standing near the moving trough of water now; I put my hand inside the slightly cool fluid, and it felt nice and fresh on my skin.

“All right—this is good,” I said, splashing a little of the water onto my face.

*

When we were all done using the somewhat crude bathing and bathroom facilities and Shirley had changed into a clean worksuit, my crew and I went back out into the big room.

My black food box was on the floor where I’d left it; I grabbed the bag of crackers and the bottle of blue stuff. My orange suit contained a few sealable pockets on the legs and torso, so I stuck the bag of crackers and the bottle into them, my head slowly turning around the room as my eyes searched it. “Where’d Upal go?”

“Upal requires a lot of sleep,” Kostas said as her fingers adjusted one of the sleeves of her worksuit. “And we must get going on our journey now.”

She walked across the room fast, and I was frowning as I followed her toward where the outside of the mountain waited.

*

We continued rising.

Unfortunately, my crew and I did indeed lose the mind-link, and there was indeed inclement weather outside—like, really inclement, like, the winds-are-too-fucking-fast-for-safety inclement.

“What the hell is going on out here?” I finally asked, a lock of my hair flying into my mouth.

Kostas was on the step above mine, and the wind was whipping at her orange suit so hard from on the right that the fabric was plastered to her there and billowing on her other side. “Some of this is normal—these are the air currents in this part of this planet and in this dimension. The rest—the forces are part of the stone-process, and there’s other dimensional interference—”

“Well if it gets any stronger, we might fall off the side!” I said. And of course the “side” was increasingly getting higher and more dangerous—so high and so dangerous, I hadn’t been able to look over it in a long while. We had been walking for a much longer while. “We’ve been going up for forever now. When is the next level?” My head shot round to the others behind me, who were also struggling with the wind and who had taken to occasionally clinging onto each other as they climbed the stairs. Gary had moved up to the step behind me—to help Steve help Shirley, who really had been having a difficult time this whole trip.

“Maybe we should go inside for now,” Kostas said. “It will make the whole process even longer, but we will temporarily use one of the internal stairs.”

“Great idea,” I said in a sarcastic voice, my hair still whipping around my head.

 Kostas moved to the left, but there was no doorway in the dark stone there; there was, however, a white dot on the stone. When she pushed the dot now, the stone around it simply dropped away into nothingness. She motioned for me to go inside.

“Let’s go!” I said as I rushed through the new doorway.

My crew followed me, and then the workers and Kostas came in behind us. The space we were now in wasn’t as big as Upal’s space, and there was more than one robed Keeper inside here.

Kostas said that we could rest for a few minutes; then she disappeared down a corridor with one of The Keepers.

Gary and I sat together against one of the stone walls, and Shirley, Steve, Chen and May did the same farther down the wall—and, strangely, several of the workers sat down in front of them. They all began talking—about what, I didn’t know. The workers never seemed to have much to say to anyone, except for Kostas….

I felt Gary touch my left hand; I turned my head and smiled at him. He leaned forward, his lips finally pressing to mine. We were both kind of dusty and our hair was a mess, but he felt nice and solid when I slid my hands up his arms to over his shoulders and kissed him back. His mouth was warm, and it started making me warm.

I pulled back a little, said in a low voice, “You know, I wish they could give us that mind-linking ability, and you and me could get it on then—I mean, like right now.”

Gary laughed, quite hard. A few of the others looked at us, but they were far enough away that they’d probably only heard his laugh and not what I’d said.

Gary rested back against the wall and pulled out one of those red crackers: I wasn’t the only one who’d saved the food from before.

I looked around the huge room, where The Keepers seemed to be busy doing nothing. A few of them removed their robes, and they looked over at me and my crew then. But I had grown slightly used to the discomforting Keeper appearance; maybe the mind-link had a more permanent effect than Kostas had indicated—or even knew herself.

Now that I had seen more than one naked Keeper, I realized that they hadn’t all been created the same. The ones in this room had a larger stature than Upal, and this group weren’t quite as open to me and my crew as Upal had been; if Keepers each had individual personalities, maybe their hive ways weren’t as hive-ish as they seemed. Or, possibly, though The Keepers were much more powerful than humans, working with humans on Rintu here had affected at least some of The Keepers.

I liked to think that Upal would remember me in future when he was going in and out of wherever he was going, though I knew I was probably wishfully thinking.

*

My crew and I weren’t in that room for long before Kostas and the other workers began guiding us up a narrow stairway; we walked up those steps for a while, till we reached another level, which looked similar to Upal’s level.

There were two Keepers here and they had to insert the firestone into some kind of polishing machine—at least when the stone came out of it, it was shining brighter than ever, so bright that my eyes had trouble looking right at it, glasses or not.

Kostas must have noticed my discomfort. “An important layer has been newly exposed after lying dormant for thousands of years. It will fade in intensity.”

“I hope so,” I said as I put the stone back into my belt pocket, at the urging of one of the Keepers and her strange, it’s-here-it’s-not-here arm.

“Now what?” I asked Kostas.

Gary was on my left and he suddenly—and loudly—yawned. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I’m rapidly running out of energy.”

Kostas exchanged a few glances with one of the Keepers. When Kostas’ dark eyes swept back my way, she said, “The process already got interrupted for too long when we left the outside before, and we are not quite where we need to be at this point. We must go to the next level shortly, because of the energy state of Rintu’s moons. After that, you can rest for a few hours.”

“But what about the storm?” I asked.

“It has died down,” Kostas said.

*

As soon as I stepped outside again, I thought that there was no way Kostas should ever get a job in weather forecasting: though the wind had died down some out here, a mist had begun slapping at the sides of the mountain. I still couldn’t look over the steep side, but even if I could bear looking, night had now fallen, so I probably wouldn’t have been able to see far.

Nevertheless, I could tell there was a new mistiness because of how wet the doorway I’d just walked through was. I gingerly stepped onto the wet platform outside the opening, but the stiff worksuit boots on my feet weren’t exactly a good match for damp stone; my footing was far too wobbly.

“We can’t safely walk up this!” I shouted through the misty wind.

Kostas was frowning when she walked out the doorway with Chen and Steve. Then she said, “We should be fine in the suits.”

“What are you—” I began, but I never finished asking her what she was smoking because the wind picked up behind me, and then I felt it push me aside as if I were a light leaf.

Screaming now, I crashed right into Chen, and then I felt my feet really sliding—along the platform to pull me right toward the edge and then over it till I was soaring through the wet black of the Rintu night….

*

I did not land where I thought I would land; in fact, I had no idea where I’d landed. I also had no idea how I was still goddamn alive.

I woke with my eyes closed and an intense heat pounding down on my face. My arms and legs were splayed out; I was on my back….

“Lydia…” I heard someone say.

I opened my eyes to find Chen staring down at me. He had tiny flecks of something red in his dark hair; his orange suit was torn, and he was sitting with his legs to one side, his left arm nursing his right. “Lydia, are you all right?” he asked me through shaking lips.

My head felt like it was spinning in a lopsided way, but I managed to sit up more. “What happened—are you okay?”

 “My forearm,” Chen said, a wavy expression around his mouth, which expression I now recognized as pain. “The sandy ground’s really soft here, but I must have hit my arm on the rocks over there because I woke up right near them. I’m pretty sure my arm’s broken.”

“Shit!” I said, fully sitting up as my eyes latched onto the arm he was nursing. His sleeve was torn there and I wanted to closely examine beneath it, but I was afraid that if I touched him, I would hurt him. “Did any bones break through?”

His head shook rapidly. “No, thankfully, but it still hurts like hell.”

“I’m so sorry, Chen—I’m sorry for everything.”

His head shook fast again, as if to say I shouldn’t worry. But then he told me, “I don’t know where the hell we are,” which of course did make me worry.

I turned my head and focused on our surroundings. The land here was covered in a red sandy soil, similar to Rintu’s landscape. But, the atmosphere here was more yellow than orange, and the land was rockier; nearby, behind Chen, a bunch of enormous red rocks lay scattered over the ground.

My body felt too stiff and a little achy, but I managed to rise to my feet to get an even better look around.

Then Chen said, “I woke up right before you. I wondered where everyone was, but I guess they’re just not here.”

I could have sworn I heard worry about May in his voice. They were still in the honeymoon phase of their marriage, and what a disaster this trek had been for them. I should have never agreed to their going up the mountain….

“Chen,” I said fast now, “do you feel something—like a vibration from the ground?”

A pause between us. Then he said in a low voice, “Yeah….”

An instant later, something small, fast and pale shot around the edge of one of the large red rocks, making both me and Chen jump. But, when the pale thing finally stopped nearby, I realized it was just a human—or maybe a humanoid would be more accurate. It had the features of a human child, except there was a bright blue ring around its red irises and a thumb on both sides of its two hands—and who knew what else might be different on the rest of its body, which was covered in a red jumper.

“Hello!” I said to it fast.

But there was only a barely detectable response, a small smile and a chirping sound, like from a bird—

A louder noise suddenly—a rumbling, and then something—someone came from around the same big rock and ran toward the pale little person.

But this someone looked like the complete antithesis—because this someone was HUGE.

Immediately I jumped backwards, and so did Chen, even though that jostling must have majorly hurt his arm.

However, I quickly realized that the huge red humanoid barreling toward us had really been barreling toward the little person. The bigger humanoid looked at me and Chen with its completely black eyes, then gently picked up the pale person in its huge hand, closing its six fingers around the little body, before finally continuing to run across the red sand.

Chen and I stared after them, both of us breathing hard in fear and shock.

“What the fuck were they?” Chen asked in a rush.

“I don’t know!” I said, unable to help the laugh that escaped from my lips. “Shit, what the hell is this place? It doesn’t feel right. We fell over the side on Rintu—”

“Yeah, but it seems we landed somewhere entirely different,” Chen said on a frustrated sigh.

*

In situations like the one I found myself in now, survival was the first order of business.

As soon as I recovered from the weird encounter with the even weirder humanoids, I asked Chen to let me see his right arm, and, going on the patchwork of bruising and degree of swelling I found there, it certainly looked broken.

We were lucky I hadn’t broken something too. We were very lucky we hadn’t died…or, for all I knew we were dead, and this was some weird kind of nirvana or heaven or something: we remained in that same area where we’d landed, and we periodically saw more creatures, though not necessarily humanoid ones. But, every creature we did see was very active and very boisterous, running across the red sand, playing or doing who knew what.

It seemed Chen and I had woken up in the middle of a damn highway in another dimension.

However we had arrived here, and wherever “here” was, Chen’s orange sleeve had been torn almost half the way off, so my two good arms and his one good arm now worked at tearing off the rest of his sleeve and making a crude sling with the material, which was no easy feat because the material was difficult to tear and tie.

We did the best we could to set his arm in a comfortable position in the sling. I tied the end of it to one of the tabs on his suit; then I told him to sit in the shade of the rocks.

I stood up and gazed around the area more; there was a lull in the “traffic,” so I used that time to try to visually locate water and plants we could live on, though who knew if anything here would be safe for us to consume.

Unfortunately, from where I was standing, I couldn’t see anything even resembling either water or plants. A full bottle of that blue liquid was thankfully still in my suit; so were most of my crackers, though they’d been crushed into bits inside the bag. Chen had told me that he had half a bottle of the liquid left in his suit, but the supply in both bottles wouldn’t last long—

I remembered my belt, which was still on my middle—unfortunately, it was either damaged or just incapable of working in wherever we now were, because when I repeatedly tried to turn on my belt’s scanning device and every other function, nothing happened.

I sighed, feeling sweat snaking along my scalp and down my neck; the sun above was an annoyingly hot presence. “I think we should drink a bit of the fluid. If our brains get too dehydrated, then we won’t be able to think straight.”

I walked over to Chen, and we removed our bottles and took some sips of the blue drink. For the first time, I realized that it was actually quite good-tasting; it had a delicate, sweet-and-sour aftertaste. But, I doubted the liquid would keep us hydrated for long.

I gazed around, with bare eyes: somewhere along the way here, both Chen and I had lost our glasses, not that the Rintu glasses would have necessarily shielded our eyes from this atmosphere….

I thought of the others; I had been avoiding thinking about them. For all I knew, they had fallen somewhere too and were now dead. Gary….

My heart seemed to collapse inside me and get lost in there. I felt both incredibly sad and incredibly numb. After all the things I’d seen and done in my life in space, would it amount to this—dying in some oddball place that would barely acknowledge my existence? The other creatures here—they did not seem to want to interact with either me or Chen, even while they seemed to be looking right at us.

“…Lydia, I’m feeling sleepy….”

My head spun toward Chen. “Do you think you hit your head when you fell—are you concussed?”

His head shook from side-to-side now, faster than I would have liked it to shake. “It’s just the heat.”

“Whatever—don’t move so fast. You need to rest. You might be in shock a little. Your break doesn’t look that bad, but a broken bone’s still a bad injury from the body’s perspective.”

His dark eyes were on my eyes. “Did you get anything…on your belt?”

Frowning, I slowly shook my head. But then I quickly straightened up more. “Stay right here. I’m going to look around, beyond the edge of the rocks, where everyone seems to be coming from.”

“Be careful,” Chen said as I walked away.

*

Because the “highway” had quieted so much, I took a chance that moving onto it now would be safer.

I carefully turned around the edge of that crop of big rocks, but not carefully enough: another massive creature rushed out from beyond there and only just missed hitting me—or stomping on me. It had two tall blue legs and two big blue feet, and it seemed to almost lose its balance as it turned back around to look at me, its about-face instantly spewing a massive puff of dusty red dirt into the air around me.

But at least for the first time here, a lifeform seemed to really notice me. This one had a wide golden “face” made of two sets of two pale-blue eyeballs with white dots at the centers; the eyeballs were arranged in a square formation on a roundish golden body that looked like an egg on blue stilts. The creature’s high center of mass probably made its stances and motions unstable. But, its four eyes seemingly had no problem staring right down at me from its great height.

I tried smiling up at it, but the massive legs only slowly folded, till the egg-body was covering them and resting on the red ground.

“I’m looking for water!” I shouted toward the creature, though I couldn’t see anything on it that I’d call ears.

The creature looked perfectly content to just rest on the ground and stare at me.

I automatically tried broadening my smile, but that didn’t do anything to change my interaction with the creature either.

I sighed, wiping a hand across my sweaty forehead and glancing to my right at where the egg-being had come from. But the highway was so dusty and the sun so bright and hot—I just couldn’t see very far. If I kept walking that way, I’d have no way of seeing anything about to rush toward me. As it was now, I was a little too far in the road—what if something else ran out—

As if I were goddamn psychic, I heard a sharp growl, and then there was a rumbling, and then yet another massive creature charged out of the road’s red dust.

I screamed and jumped back toward the rocks. The big-egg-being quickly got up and oddly started running in place, sending more dust whipping into the air, which the roaring, running creature noticed. It came to a sharp stop; it looked like a giant, olive-green reptile from on Earth, but long, silky magenta hairs, similar to a horse’s mane, covered the back of the creature’s head and neck.

So much incongruity was making my head spin, and all of the dust in the area began making me choke. Then, a moment later, the dust got sucked away from me—I felt it—a big wind pulling and collecting—the horse-thing had apparently done it, through the two, perfectly circular nostrils on its narrow green face. But it seemed the big-egg-being was instructing the big-horse-being to collect the dust: going on the way their faces/fronts were vibrating toward each other, they were having some type of conversation.

“Thanks,” I said loudly toward both of them, though I knew they probably had no idea what I was saying.

Still, I was desperate here, so I decided to take a chance. “My friend—his arm is broken and he might have a concussion.” I tried gesturing toward my left arm and toward the bend around the rocks, but neither creature seemed to notice my efforts; they were still having—whatever they were having together.

I glanced down the road yet again, in both directions, but moving along it was still too scary. I’d try another direction—after I checked on Chen again.

The two mammoth beings seemed quite enamored with each other now, so I quickly slipped away from where they were and ran back the way I’d come.

*

I was out of breath and my heart was pounding hard by the time I reached Chen again. Then my heart pounded even harder when I found him right where I left him but far too pale now and only barely conscious.

“Chen!” I cried, getting down on my knees and wildly looking around us for something I could use to help him. But there was nothing to use in this barren place.

Tears pounded behind my eyes, but my mind struggled to suppress them because shedding them would only waste the water in my body.

I remembered the blue water; quickly now, I removed my bottle, stuck the opening against Chen’s closed mouth and poured a little of the water onto there.

Chen finally woke up more, licked his lips and mumbled, “What’s goin’ on?”

“What’s going on is that you’re more badly injured than you think!”

“I’m fine…” he said, trying to sit up against the rock behind him.

But I held him down. “Don’t be stupid—what the hell are you doing?”

“Umohhh…” he moaned “…watch my arm….”

“I’m sorry!” I said nervously, glancing down at his crude sling. Then my eyes shot to my right; it was a direction I hadn’t gone in yet, but it didn’t look to contain anything except an endlessly long, flat red plain, which was where some of the creatures had disappeared down. “Shit—what the hell are we doing to do? Why isn’t anyone coming here to help us?”

“Lydia,” Chen said suddenly. But I didn’t turn back around to him till he said, “Lydia,” in an even louder voice.

When my head whipped toward him, his frightened dark eyes were staring behind me and to my left.

I spun around on my knees—and finally saw the big-egg-being standing nearby, watching us. “Oh!” I said, feeling relief wash over me. “That’s just a friend—sort of.”

“A friend?!?” Chen asked in an astonished voice. “How long have I been out—that you made friends….” His voice faded a little as if he were passing out, but when I whipped my eyes back his way, I saw that his chin was just scrunched up because he had been looking down at his sling and readjusting it.

“I wasn’t gone long,” I said to him now, jerking a thumb over my shoulder. “But that thing noticed me and made another thing notice me—it’s a weird story that I don’t feel like going into now.”

“It looks very comfortable there,” Chen said, glancing behind me.

When I looked at the golden egg again, it was resting on the ground, just like it had rested earlier. “Chen, I’ve been thinking that the road might be an entry to here, though it seems we didn’t get here that way.” I frowned heavily. “I wish I could follow it down—maybe it would lead to out of here. But I can’t see very far along it.” My eyes moved toward that long red plain again. “There seem to be weird distortions in the shape of the land here, or maybe just the heating from the sun’s doing it, as usual in many places—but how can I know which thing is responsible? We have no information and can barely communicate with anything here that might have any information.”

Frustration turned into tears in my eyes, which blurred my view of the plain even more.

“I really need some more water—or whatever it is,” Chen said.

Standing up now, I grabbed my bottle from the ground. “Take it.” I opened the top, but because I was still so upset, my hands shook and accidentally spilled a little of the blue fluid onto the ground. “Shit!” I said loudly as I handed the bottle to Chen. “Just what we need.”

“Lydia,” Chen said fast, “your friend is moving—toward us.”

I whipped around and saw what Chen meant: the egg-being was standing again, its golden body sort of rocking forward in our direction, which reminded me of its “discussion” with that odd reptile-horse.

“What—what?” I said, throwing up my hands.

The egg-being’s blue feet shuffled a little, till the legs and feet twisted around, but the golden body was still turned a bit in my and Chen’s direction.

Chen said to me now, “Does it want you to follow it?”

“Yeah, it seems like that.” My heart was galloping, but I wiped my hands against my thighs and remained where I was standing. “How do I know where the hell it will take me?”

“You don’t know,” Chen said. “But, it might be a better place than here.”

*

Chen was right: I decided to follow the golden egg and its spindly blue legs down the highway. The road had grown very quiet anyway, with only a rare crazy animal running down the highway’s length, which was the same direction the egg now took me.

The landscape in this area didn’t look any different from the area where Chen and I had been staying, but the air here seemed to be colder—or maybe that was the night coming in: the sun was no longer high in the sky.

The egg and I walked for quite a long while now, but I began tiring of the same-old view—and I began worrying about Chen more.

“Where are you taking me?” I finally shouted at the golden egg. But it didn’t seem to notice me. Had it forgotten my existence the way all the other beings here tended to forget me? Maybe I had followed the egg for nothing!

I felt like screaming, but I decided to remain with the being for a little longer; then I would hightail it back in the other direction….

The egg finally slowed down, and I spotted something different in the distance—it stuck out of the landscape because it was such a bright clear blue.

I began running now; I had a good feeling…which totally paid off because when I reached the enormous blue area, I realized it was a watering hole—which “water” looked exactly like the bottled blue stuff The Keepers had given to me and my crew.

A myriad of colorful lifeforms filled the area around the waterway—including the lifeforms I’d been watching running by all day. I spotted a relatively empty area along the edge of the watering hole; I ran there and stuck my right hand in the water. When I lifted my wet fingers and took a sniff, the water smelled the same as the bottled water. Should I risk it? I had no choice. Right now, Chen needed water even more than I did, so I had to test it on me….

I took a lick of the liquid off my palm—and still noticed nothing different.

I sighed in relief, hoped for the best, and quickly filled my bottle all the way up.

As I drank, I stared around me; the golden egg had parked itself pretty close to me on the watering hole’s edge. And I realized then that the egg did have other body parts, including a mouth: it had been retracted or hidden on the bottom of its body, but now an enormous, blue, tongue-like appendage projected out and down off the golden skin and lapped at the blue waterway below.

If I wasn’t so frightened and tired and confused still, I would have loved to stay here for the rest of the day and night, so I could watch all the wacky lifeforms drink and bathe and play. But, that “night” word was the problem: the sky was getting progressively darker.

I refilled my bottle; then I straightened up and began walking back the way the egg had brought me. When I passed behind it, I hesitated, wondering if it wanted to come with me. But it was still busy drinking, and, considering how much fluid it would need to fill its enormous body, it would probably be here for a lot longer than I could stay.

*

I walked back quite fast toward where Chen was; the highway was almost totally empty now. I saw only one other being rushing down it as I neared that familiar area of big rocks, but the being was smaller than I, so I was able to easily avoid it.

As I approached where I’d left Chen, I lifted my bottle high and shook it. “I found more of that water, Chen!”

“Great,” he said, trying to smile—and “trying” because the motion didn’t exactly work. Normally he had a great open smile, but pain was still evident in his face now, which tightened his motion.

And now I felt my face deflate. Finding more water had seemed like a big victory, but it really wasn’t a win in any war for survival here; the water was just a small battle won.

“How are you doing?” I asked Chen as I quickly knelt down to him and handed my bottle to his good arm.

“I’m hanging in there…but hasn’t it gotten a lot colder as it’s gotten darker?”

He was right. Before, I didn’t want to think about the temperature change that much, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The orange suits were all we had for warmth. So far, we’d only been in warm spaces while wearing them; I had no idea what they would do for us in cold spaces….

Chen had been drinking from the bottle, but now he pulled it away from his mouth to say, “Look who’s back?”

I didn’t need to turn around to know who he meant, but I turned around anyway and immediately saw that the egg looked different now against the darkening landscape: there was a yellow glow around its body, almost as if it had a light source inside.

The four blue eyes seemed to be fixed on me and Chen, and the two legs were moving quite slowly as the being came closer, which was still scary because the egg was so large. Both Chen and I flinched, and Chen tried to get up, apparently afraid of being crushed against the rocks. But the egg suddenly slowed even more, its legs bending a lot as it moved, till it was practically crawling.

It finally stopped several feet from us, and when it did, I felt something new coming from the egg: a flowing warmth.

I couldn’t help smiling. “Now ain’t that something: being warmed by an egg.”

I heard Chen’s light laugh, and when I turned around, I saw that he had finally managed a smile through his pain.

*

The night fully came and the golden egg wound up being the only source of light around. Its light did grow dimmer, maybe because it had fallen asleep: its eyes had lost their luster and they just stared in my direction now. Though I hoped the loss of luster wasn’t because of death….

I didn’t like to think of that word; I was still so worried about Chen. We were both lying on the ground beside each other, within the warmth of the golden egg, which heat bounced off the rocks and came back our way again.

But, when I tried moving from that small area, it was freezing cold outside. I’d been needing to pee for hours, and I didn’t want to do it in front of Chen.

He finally fell asleep, which sleep he needed, but it still made me nervous because maybe he wouldn’t wake up again….

I moved toward where the edge of the warmth seemed to be; then I unsnapped the connectors on the hips of my worksuit, pulled down the pants and underwear, and squatted over the earth. My face felt flushed: I hoped all evidence of my piss would be gone soon, so Chen would never notice it.

I knew I was being stupid; I had bigger problems: Chen and I still had some of my crackers left, but then what? The watering hole was nice, but I’d still seen no plants around. Maybe there were some plants in an area I hadn’t seen yet, but I despaired that maybe the other animals here didn’t need food to gain nutrients, so this planet hadn’t been equipped with any plants to eat. The animals here seemed to be peaceful and nonviolent; I knew some species in the universe could indeed absorb nutrients directly from soils and atmospheres, and even from space….

I sighed as I stood up; a cold gust of air hit my bare ass, making me spastically shiver. I whipped up my pants and closed my suit, then rushed back to where Chen was.

I hovered over him for a moment, placing my hand above but not quite onto his slightly open mouth, and feeling a rush of relief as his sleeping breaths touched my skin.

When I finally pulled away from him, I fell back onto the ground—and almost immediately fell asleep.

*

Once again, I woke to heat on my face. This time, I immediately sat up; I exhaled in relief when I saw Chen was sitting up too, his good arm sticking cracker-bits into his mouth.

He lowered his head in a little rueful motion. “Sorry, I had to take them from your stash—I’m starving.”

“Don’t apologize. You need it more than I do.” No matter that I’d said that, I knew I wasn’t being realistic: I felt lightheaded, and I suspected the heat wasn’t the only thing responsible.

My head turned to look around me, but I couldn’t locate the golden being. “When did the big egg go?”

Chen shrugged and shook his head. “Dunno. It was gone when I woke up.”

“Have you seen any entertainment along the highway?”

“Actually, no. It’s been quiet. I wish it wasn’t so hot though. It seems hotter than yesterday.”

I looked right at him. “Do you think you’re up to walking? We could go to the watering hole. We’re probably both dehydrated. We really should go.”

Chen quickly ate the last of the cracker bits in his hand. “I agree. I’ll be fine.” He started to rise, but I grabbed at him to help him. “This feels strange,” he said. I frowned in confusion and glanced at his face. “We’ve never been in a position like this. I feel bad that you’ve got to nurse me here. It doesn’t seem right, Lydia—Captain.”

I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t worry about who I am and who you are. I know you’d do the exact same thing for me.”

He nodded at me fast, and I patted him on the back as he finally stood.

*

When we got to the watering hole, it was as busy as the day before. It seemed the highway had been quiet today because the heat was keeping all of the lifeforms around this area.

As soon as Chen and I reached the waterway’s edge, I bent over and stuck my whole head inside the cool blue liquid; then I helped Chen do the same. When I lifted him back up, we sat down on the ground near the water.

Our wet heads dripped blue down our necks and into our worksuits. And my long hair held even more water than his short hair. As I spoke now, my fingers kept trying—in vain—to keep my hair out of the neck of my suit. “When you have access to the basics all the time, you don’t appreciate how damn much they matter. I wish I had a towel.”

“I definitely know what you mean,” Chen said. “My arm doesn’t feel as comfortable anymore—I think I need to adjust the sling. Could you help me, Lydia?”

“Of course!” I moved closer to him—and watched him grit his teeth at the pain I was causing him even by just gently pushing the sling along his arm to a different spot. His arm still looked really bad: it was just as swollen and the bruising had darkened, though that tended to happen with bruises. “I wish I knew medicine. That temporary crewmember—Nellie—she used to be a medic. I wonder where they all are now.”

“I’ve been trying not to wonder,” Chen said in a grim voice.

I looked at his face, saw his twisted expression. Getting close to people and losing them was a particular problem of Chen’s: his younger brother had died of an illness when Chen was ten, and then when Chen was twenty, both of his parents died in an accident while on a Space Force mission. Chen had already been living on his own by then, but that hadn’t made the loss hurt any less; he had been close to his parents. And now there was his marriage to May….

I was still looking at him. I sat up straighter suddenly and said in a firmer voice, “I’m going to get us out of this.”

His dark eyes snapped right to my eyes. “How, Captain?”

“I…I don’t know,” I said, instantly hunching back down, in defeat. “It’s so frustrating and, again, it’s all because of that damn stone. It’s still there in my pocket. I feel like it’s mocking me.”

Chen sighed, his good hand gesturing toward the water. “Maybe we should drink up, then fill our bottles and go back to—to whatever it is we have there. If we wait there, maybe someone will come pick us up.”

*

No one came to pick us up.

Chen slept, and I paced; then I took a long walk down the red plain—where I finally located a large copse of trees with strange red fruits. They were covered with spiny, pinchy hairs, but, thanks to a sharp pebble I found on the ground, I was able to cut open one of the fruits—the juice that shot out was an icky, rusty yellow color, and I almost threw the fruit on the ground.

My good sense got the better of my limbs: I lifted the fruit to my nose and took a whiff. As far as I could tell, it didn’t smell rotten; then again, it didn’t smell good either. Then again again, I had no choice but to try eating it.

When I finally got back to where Chen was, he was still sleeping. A jolt of nervousness shot through me at seeing him lying there on the ground, but it really did just seem to be the heat making him sleepy, because I also felt sleepy now and I didn’t have a broken arm.

Chen suddenly woke up and raised his dark eyebrows at me as he mumbled, “What you got there?”

He sat up, and I handed him one of the small fruits, which I had sloppily peeled. “It’s not very appetizing looking or tasting, but I licked its sour juice a little while ago and I’m not dead. Yet.”

“Thank the universe,” Chen said.

And, for some reason, I started laughing. Then I couldn’t stop laughing.

Chen’s head twisted on his neck uncomfortably.

I knew what he was thinking. “Yeah,” I said, laughter still in my voice, “I’m finally losing it.”

“It’s the heat,” Chen said. “We probably need even more water. I wonder what happened to your golden friend.”

“I’ve been wondering that too,” I said on a sigh, staring at the highway. “I thought I’d find it at the waterway.”

Chen lowered his head and sniffed the red fruit. “I guess it doesn’t matter, but we’ll probably need it to warm us again tonight….”

“Tonight—tonight! Another fucking night we’ll be stuck here. I get so upset when I think about it!” My fingers fumbled with my belt, whipped open the pocket where the stone was, and grabbed it. I glared down at its defiant fire inside my palm. “Maybe I should try throwing it again—maybe the thing will finally break and someone in the universe will hear it—who knows? Fuck you, goddammit!” I said. Then I raised my arm and flung the stone at the rocks to my right.

Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw Chen flinch at my wild behavior, but what else was there for me to do now but rage? What if we wound up being stuck here forever? It wasn’t the worst place in the universe, and Chen was a good friend of mine. But, I had other good friends, and I missed one of them the most of all….

The firestone didn’t come through for me. It didn’t do anything, except fall right down to the red earth as if it had no power at all.

And now I despaired that nothing and no one would have the power to get me and Chen out of here.

 *

The day wore on and it seemed to last forever. Chen and I alternately slept and talked about this and that and everything and nothing. I had trouble focusing on our conversation; though I had slept some, I was tired all the time now. I knew I needed more water, but I didn’t feel like walking all the way to the waterway again….

“I’m so tired,” I said to Chen late that day.

“It’s getting darker fast,” he replied, his voice low.

“And then what, Chen? Where is the golden egg? Yesterday it didn’t seem to want to leave me. Did it go off me already?”

“Maybe it’s not you,” Chen said slowly, as if he were carefully thinking about what to say. “Maybe it’s this dimension, or whatever it is. Maybe things don’t invest much in each other, like they’re just passing through, or looking for their own separate spaces here.”

I stared at Chen. “I can’t understand living like that, can you? We’re always sharing space on the Demeter, and it feels right.”

“I know,” he said, and there was a somber rumble to his words, which made me feel sorry that I’d mentioned our lives on the Demeter. His expression seemed about to become a sad one, and I really couldn’t bear that sadness right now.

I turned away—and finally noticed there was a light spot moving down the darkening highway. The light was quite far away, but it looked like that special shape….

It was that special shape, and it grew larger fast because it was moving fast; I felt my heart soar at that warm light.

When my huge golden friend finally stopped nearby, I cried, “I’m so glad to see you!”

The blue eyes and golden body seemed more agitated than normal, as if the being were trying to do that communicating-dancing with me, but I really had no idea if that was the reason for the egg’s agitation; for all I knew, it had bad gas.

The only thing I was sure about now was: Chen and I needed the egg-being’s closeness and especially its warmth. It was almost completely dark, and I could feel the shockingly cold wind coming from the plain and trying to climb into the neck of my worksuit.

I rushed forward toward the egg more, feeling Chen behind me doing the same. We stopped inside the warm area around the egg, and I couldn’t help sighing.

“I’m so tired,” I said to the egg-being, as if it would reply to me, but, of course, it did not.

I sighed again as I stretched out on the ground and closed my eyes….

…When I next opened them, it was still night, and I was caught in a dream: Upal was standing over me, flickering in and out faster than ever…but then the flickering suddenly slowed and I realized I wasn’t in a dream.

I shot to a seated position. “Omigod—Chen!” I cried. “Upal’s here.”

I never thought I’d be so happy to see someone so difficult to look at, but I felt ecstatic now. Behind Upal, the egg-being was standing up now, and it seemed to be staring down at the three of us….

Suddenly there was a shift around me—no, it was in me, in my head; it was Upal. I could feel a gentle voice touch my mind.

We Keepers are very happy we have found you. We lost you for days….

“Days!” I thought I said out loud. But I had actually said it in my head, and I saw Chen’s head sharply turn to me: he’d heard what I said. Apparently, Upal had linked all of us together; it seemed that The Keepers didn’t have the physical ability to make sounds of communication, or at least any that humans would understand.

Where are my friends? Where are the workers? I thought now.

Your friends are back on your ship. Kostas is on the way from an entry point to here. We will take you back to Rintu. Upal’s strange eyes fell in Chen’s direction, and I wondered about Chen’s arm again—I couldn’t hear or feel any of his pain through the mind-link. But then maybe Upal had been blocking Chen from feeling pain….

I lifted a hand toward my egg friend. “It helped us,” I said out loud. “It led me to water and kept us warm at night, but what’s it doing in this place?”

As if on cue to answer my question, Kostas showed up.

Apparently, it was later in the “night” than I had thought; the sky was lightening now, and Kostas’ tall silhouette appeared on the red plain and began moving our way fast. She held a small black device in her hands, and when she reached me, she said, “Some creatures have difficulty in other environments; when evolution makes mistakes, the creatures are brought here so they can live better lives.”

“That’s terrible!” I cried. “This whole time I’ve been here, this is like a zoo!”

“No,” Kostas said fast in quite a loud voice. “It is a choice of theirs. It is a sanctuary here. Some have been persecuted elsewhere. This is freedom to them. They are also free to leave. But almost none have ever chosen that. Now we—we must leave here soon.”

Only a short time ago, I had been desperate to get out of here, but now I felt a stab of ambivalence—and a pang of sadness, mostly about the cute big-egg-being; it was still waiting there patiently, its weird blue eyes seeming to never waver from the four of us. Could it hear us? Could it understand anything—had it understood? I would never know. I would never see it again. But, as long as it and the other beings here were happy—and they seemed to be happy—that was what really mattered….

Upal’s voice touched my mind again: Do not feel sad for the Lamren. The Lamren are the caretakers here. They are also one of the creators of this place. This Lamren, Settaly—he did not know you would be arriving here. That was an accident. There was a break in the primary dimensional stream on Rintu. We had a brief power loss just as you and Chen fell over the mountainside. It took us time to isolate the general area of your location and the stone’s location. Then we had difficulty pinpointing the exact place. Settaly had never seen a homo sapiens. We finally found you because he sent out an emergency message about two small squeaky hominids.

I heard Chen burst into laughter behind me, and I couldn’t help flashing him a smile over my shoulder.

I turned back to Upal and Kostas, who was right beside Upal now. “Well,” I said, “I’d much rather have fallen into here under Settaly’s patient care than be dead.”

“You would not have died anyhow,” Kostas said.

“That’s what you told us once before, but look at Chen’s arm!”

“I said you would not die. I did not say you couldn’t be injured,” Kostas said in her blunt way. “Chen, Upal is injecting a pain-relieving signal into your nervous system. We will give you more medical treatment when we get back.” Kostas spoke through her mind now. Upal, I’ve located the stone on my device. It has diminished in the YZ-direction, now that it fell through the dimensional rift along a YZ-path. The stone isn’t with her now though.

Kostas stared at me, and I felt my face grow very hot beneath her glaring dark eyes. “I couldn’t help throwing it. I was angry. And I was hoping for a way out of here.”

“Please collect the stone,” Kostas said. “It is about fifteen feet behind you, a foot away from that large rock with the flat face.”

I was sighing as I trudged over the ground to the spot Kostas had described. I picked up the firestone and stuck it back into my belt, but I wasn’t so mad at it anymore: sometimes in life, you just have to do things even though doing them really stinks. This was one of those times.

*

A few moments later, I learned from Kostas that Settaly could speak over the Keeper mind-links, but he hadn’t spoken yet out of respect for The Keepers.

Kostas said to me now, “He can speak to you through Upal, if you’d like.”

“Yes, I’d like that! I want to say goodbye at least.” I looked over at Settaly, who had moved a bit closer. Can you hear me, Settaly?

…Yes… came a soft, almost-hiss.

I want to thank you for taking care of us—and putting out the word that we were here!

…It is my job, but you are also funny humanoids—the way you move your limbs. It is entertaining to the Lamren. We get something pleasant from this sanctuary because there is always more to learn. We meet many kinds here and offer many more a place. If you want one here someday, you will have one….

Thanks! May I come visit again—is that possible? I glanced between Upal and Kostas.

“We’ll have to see,” Kostas said out loud in a dry voice.

I turned back to Settaly. If I never see you again, I hope you have a happy life!

…My life is most happy. Thank you for wishing me happiness….

“Goodbye, Settaly,” I said out loud, but I wished I could kiss him. The others must have mentally heard my desire.

Settaly can come down to ground, Upal said.

I rushed toward my golden friend now as he lowered himself to the red earth. Then I flung my arms against him for the first time, my hands finally feeling how soft and cool his shining golden skin was. His flesh had the springiness of a big balloon, and I found the presence of that silkiness against my palms really comforting.

“I can’t help crying,” I said out loud.

…This place has that effect on hominids. …If I could cry, I would be crying now too… Settaly said.

And my arms pressed around his skin tighter.

*

Chen finally came up to Settaly to pat him with his good hand and say goodbye too; then we walked away and turned back around, and I watched Settaly’s golden shape fade as we faded away from his dimension.

Upal, Kostas and Chen and I were now inside some kind of strange space—I felt both its presence and its absence around us. I also felt acutely aware of the others nearby, especially Chen.

I said inside my mind, I think the water helped keep me and Chen going. If it wasn’t for Settaly….

The crystal water, Upal said, is high in vitamins and minerals; it is naturally available in many other dimensions. Most of our food on Rintu comes from other spaces. Rintu’s natural landscape has proven quite infertile. It will not support the growth of microorganisms the way many other soils will. We have not figured out why yet. It is not that important to us. We are never stranded in one place the way many lifeforms are, though our incessant motility can be inconvenient for us.

Strange how, compared to humans, things were quite the opposite for The Keepers: their frustration was that they always seemed to be “stuck” into being in too many places, and the human frustration was that we always seemed to be stuck in too few places. After all, that was a big reason why we’d ventured out of our home planet….

I wondered where the four of us were now: in my mind, I was hearing strange echoes of clanging sounds, but I couldn’t see anything—not even black because that color was still something. It felt like my eyes weren’t working….

Chen must have been feeling the same. Where are we—I can’t see suddenly!

We are crossing through different dimensions and dimensional streams, Kostas said. It normally takes more time, but I am trying to do it fast because we have lost so much time….

What will happen when I get back? I asked.

When you fell through and then into other dimensions, the stone at that point wasn’t as inert as it used to be. Fortunately, we don’t have to start the decommissioning from scratch. Beyond the first level of the mountain, with every foot we rose vertically, we opened another segment of the stone’s layers. But when the stone was exposed in the Lamren dimension, it corroded a much larger segment of the layers. We can pick up much later in the process than where we left off—quite near to the top of the mountain.

Great, I said, intending to smile along with the word. But I found I couldn’t feel my face. Unfortunately, that dimensional sickness was suddenly rearing its ugly spinning head again.

Oh, I moaned, I ain’t feeling too well.

Me too, Chen said.

We are almost there, Upal replied. I see now that two of your friends are waiting for you.

Who… I asked, but who they were was who I should have expected them to be.

However the four of us had traveled, we now wound up appearing in Upal’s space. I could see May and Gary standing by Upal’s big stone table.

I had never been so happy to see Gary as I was at that moment, and he seemed to feel the same; he rushed up to me and crushed me in a huge embrace.

Behind him, May was crying a little: her eyes were on Chen’s broken arm….

She ran up to him just as Gary said to me in an anxious voice, “What the hell’s happened to you two—you’re a mess!”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I said in a dry voice.

Gary pulled back a bit. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know—I was just teasing you. I’m honestly completely exhausted right now—too exhausted to talk about everything. But—the Demeter?” I asked fast.

“We’ve been holding down the fort, which wasn’t easy when we were all worried sick, especially me and May.” I could see the worry on both of their faces, and it hurt me to see their discomfort piled on top of the confusing shit I’d been through. Throughout the whole ordeal, a part of me had been hoping that everything back here on Rintu had been going perfectly….

“It’s been hard to know what to do,” Gary said to me now. “You’ve been gone for almost eight Earth days.”

“Eight? Crap!” I said, frowning heavily. “Upal did mention something about days, but I thought only two….”

It is the nature of traveling, Upal said. Time is often not the same across or between dimensions. It is similar to relativistic time-dilation effects.

“I can see that,” I said out loud.

But Gary frowned at me as if I’d uttered a non sequitur, which I apparently had uttered from his perspective.

“I’m hooked up with Upal,” I said to Gary now, poking a forefinger against my head.

Gary nodded slowly, before frowning over at Upal and Kostas. “They couldn’t tell us much because they didn’t know much.”

I knew I looked a mess now, with my blue-stained suit and my dirty-with-red-dust hair, but Gary looked even paler than I felt. And May—her head was pressed forward to Chen’s, and I could see he was trying to calm her down; going on the sad expression on her face, she was very upset.

“May,” I said fast, “don’t worry—The Keepers will treat Chen’s arm and anything else.”

I turned a frown onto Upal and Kostas. And Kostas said, “You actually could have made an adjustment to the other sleeve of Chen’s suit to provide emergency medical attention, but we neglected to explain how to use the sleeve-controls.”

“No kidding!” Gary snapped in her direction. “And we asked you to show us that day up the mountain.”

“We—The Keepers are very powerful, but we are far from perfect,” Kostas said in a dry voice. She glanced at Upal, who seemed to be fading out more than normal, including his intestines, which interrupted view I was thankful for.

“Upal must get some rest, and we must get back to the trek now,” Kostas said in a quicker voice.

“What?!” I said, turning to fully face her. “I only just got back. And I don’t even understand how we can continue now. You said something once about needing the moons in a certain position, but haven’t we lost that by now?”

A sharp nod from her at me. “That’s correct. But we will instead be diverting the power from other Keeper tasks here. It is an inconvenience to the other work The Keepers must do. But the rest of the decommissioning process would go even faster if you could you make the trip up more steps on the outside again. Do you think you will be able to?”

“Probably—after I get out of this stinking suit and get in some hours of sleep-time!”

*

They gave me the time, though I had to spend it sleeping on a big gray cushion in Upal’s space. But at least Gary was with me; he seemed to not want to let me out of his sight now.

I slept with the warmth of his body and arms around me the whole time, but when I finally woke up, he’d already gotten up.

I went to use one of the toilets and showers in the bathroom area. In a cabinet in the room, I found a long white robe and slipped it on. While I had been sleeping, the workers had cleaned my captain’s belt; I wrapped it around my waist now over the robe; then I walked into the communal washing room. Gary had been waiting for me there. He’d slept in his normal clothes, but one of the orange suits covered his body now.

Before I’d gone to sleep, I made sure that Chen was getting his arm treated. And now Gary told me that Chen was doing better, so Kostas had brought him and May back to the Demeter.

I was very glad about Chen’s improvement, but, upon hearing Gary say my ship’s name, I felt worry pinching at the back of my mind. I had to continue the journey up the mountain. When would I see my ship again….

I said this to Gary now. I had just used that sluice-like mechanism and the attached sprayer to take a drink and to wet my still-too-tired face; the water was trickling over my eyes, obstructing my view of Gary’s face.

But I heard worry touching his voice when he spoke: “Lydia, I didn’t want to say anything about it before because it would have been too much right when you got back. But, Geena’s saying she wants to leave the Demeter and stay here on Rintu.”

Blood shot into my face as my mouth dropped open. “What? Not again!” I said, immediately thinking of Babs. “And now I can’t go talk to her! By the time I get back there again, who knows what a mess everything will be? Everything I’ve worked for…. Every time I turn around now, it’s like everyone wants to leave.”

“That’s not true,” Gary said. “Look at Shirley—she says she isn’t going anywhere. Even through the problems, she still finds it ‘exhilarating’—her exact words. And what about the temporary people who asked to be permanent? They’ve been working out well, by the way—and, the Rintu workers helped us with the zenite engine. Steve and Karen have got it working perfectly again.”

My mouth twisted a little. “Well, at least that’s something—but, no offense, I’m not on there now, and it’s not good for a crew when the captain’s been gone a long while. It’s not that I don’t trust them, especially you, but I wish I could go back now before I go up.” I rubbed at my forehead and pushed a strand of wet hair from my eyes. “And what you said about the temporary crew—they only just got here. Apparently, my real trouble is retaining people over the long term.”

Gary grabbed one of my hands. “No. These things happen. You’ve just got to accept that people will come and go sometimes.”

My eyes shot up to his and my lips shook when I said, “What about you? Will you be leaving next?”

“No way,” he said fast, his brown eyes firm, his hand tightening on mine. “In fact, I told Kostas I’m going back up the mountain with you, and I want a tether attached between the two of us.”

I couldn’t help laughing. I watched a warm grin spread over Gary’s face now—and I realized anew that it was a face I’d been missing oh-so-very much.

*

Although telling me bad news about the Demeter was the right thing for Gary to do, I continued to feel upset over that bad news as a worker helped me adjust a clean worksuit on my body. Another worker had taken Gary to get some food for me, but my mind wasn’t focused on food or getting dressed.

The worker with me looked young, and he had a soft, almost whispering voice; you really had to pay attention to hear what he was saying. And I really wasn’t paying attention. I kept thinking that I had to go up the dangerous mountain again—what if it took longer than The Keepers thought—and what if I fell again? I knew I didn’t die the last time, but I still didn’t trust Kostas’ reassurances that I wouldn’t die this time….

The young worker had been saying something and gesturing toward the right sleeve of my suit.

“What?” I asked him on a frown.

And in his whisperish voice, he replied, “Kostas told me to teach you how to turn on and adjust the emergency life-support controls. Each sleeve has the same controls. And I was explaining to you the sequence to press—can you feel the slight ridges in the material here?”

“Oh—yeah.” My left hand was rubbing over the fabric—on a spot I’d noticed before, but I had no idea then that the spot had a purpose. “In all the moving around, I must have touched these spots on my other suit and that never did anything.”

“You must push one of the bumps on the shoulders first—over here,” the whisperer said, his fingers pointing toward where a damp lock of my hair had fallen.

I sighed hard. “I really wish someone had told me this sooner.”

His head lowered in a shy way, which made him look even younger. “There’s a lot to do here, and things get missed. Your arrival was not expected.”

“Dropping Into Places Uninvited seems to be my middle name lately,” I said, my eyes rolling toward the dark ceiling.

And I could have sworn I heard the worker whisper a laugh.

*

When I was done getting dressed and testing out my minimal knowledge of the orange suit, I found Gary in one of the other segments of Upal’s space. The tall, bronze stone walls in this huge hexagonal area looked perfectly flat, and as Gary and I sat on cushions on the floor and ate oddly salty but juicy yellow fruits, Gary told me that Upal had shown him what the walls contain.

Chewing now, I raised my eyebrows at Gary.

“They let me come onto this level every day for any first-hand news about you,” Gary said. “Kostas flew me here and we took an internal elevator up. This room’s a kind of live-library. I watched Upal while he searched for you and Chen—of course so much information came up and in languages I couldn’t understand. One of the workers was here and he explained a little of the science. But, watching Upal work with the information was fascinating. There were maps—I think I started getting a feel for them, their overall organization. Then yesterday Upal suddenly linked up with my mind, to tell me you’d finally been found in another dimension.”

Swallowing the salty juice in my mouth, I wiped my hands on my suit as I glanced at Gary’s suit. “Gary, did they show you how to use the suit-controls today?”

He nodded fast. “Some of them. The rest they said would take too long to understand.”

Silently at first, I stared into his brown eyes. “You don’t have to do this, you know. A part of me doesn’t want you to. What if you fall?”

“Then I’m taking you with me. Kostas is literally bringing me a tether.”

As if she’d heard us talking about her, she appeared in the doorway to the big room; she held a small, square mechanism with a white rope coiled around it. “Please finish your meal. We will need to get started within half an hour.”

I unfolded my legs and stood up, adjusting my red belt around my middle. “How long will this take—can’t you at least give us a timetable?”

“It will probably take about eight hours. We will ride the internal elevator to three levels before The Hall Of Devices. Here is the tether. Put both rope-hooks onto the torso tabs of your suits. I’ll make adjustments to your suit-fields to hold the tether better.”

She came toward me, but I shook a hand at her. “Show me how to do it on my suit. I’m tired of the loss of control here.”

“All right.” She came closer and motioned with her fingers for where Gary and I needed to work the shoulder and arm controls. Then Gary hooked up the ends of the tether. I felt dubious that we’d be able to do anything with the suits, and my feelings must have been visible on my face.

Kostas’ eyes were on mine now, and her mouth looked softer than normal. “I do understand everything you’ve been through is hard. I don’t think we’ve ever thanked you, which was a bad oversight. I’m thanking you now.”

“Well, that certainly helps,” I said, offering her a smile, though a slightly lopsided one. “I just wish Chen didn’t have to break an arm—”

“It was only a single fracture, and it should be healed within two weeks. The medicine The Keepers have is just as much a physics as it is a biology as it is a chemistry. There is no separation. It is all one science.”

Gary’s brown eyes seemed to light up in her direction now, and he snapped his fingers. “That was the feeling I got in here.” He turned to me. “A worker—he mentioned that thermal vibrations would look different from different reference frames, so Upal was looking for evidence of the pattern of your DNA vibrating, but he had to check a high number of different speeds. He said that was why the search was taking so long. He seemed to be searching for you in such a fundamental way; I wondered how the hell he would ever find you. For example, at the tiniest of subatomic measures, there are often no clear tags making distinctions between ‘boundaries’. And at extremely high speeds, the same thing probably happens: the organizational structure of DNA wouldn’t be easily observable. The error’s so great that your DNA could be anyone’s DNA then. Everything bleeds together then.

“But, I get the feeling that when I say ‘DNA,’ that’s not the same way Upal looks at DNA. Is that true?” Gary frowned a question at Kostas.

And she nodded when she replied, “Everything in this universe is really the science of velocity, energy, time and pieces—this is the way The Keepers manipulate the universes. Similar to a computer with bits and bytes, all things can come down to ones and zeros. Certain pieces are on or off, and extremely high numbers are added together from those ons and offs to create the larger picture that you perceive.” She looked at her orange sleeves, as if she was looking at a readout, but I saw no readout there, and there wasn’t any on my suit-sleeves either. But maybe readouts actually were there; I just wasn’t intimately linked with Keeper minds so couldn’t see the readouts. For the first time, I saw how interesting Kostas’ job and her very existence might be….

“I don’t have time to explain anymore than that,” she said now, “and we aren’t allowed to share everything. Just like with the stone, some things are better off only being in a limited number of hands and minds. Now, it is really past time for us to go.”

*

This time up the mountain, my mood wasn’t the same—and not just because of the disaster last time, but also because of what Kostas had said: something had shifted inside me toward this place and toward what I was doing. Clearly, an intimate connection with this planet wasn’t something The Keepers normally allowed. But, they had allowed it with me, and with some of my crew….

I turned to Gary beside me; we were inside a round, golden elevator with Kostas, Devin and two more workers.

Gary and I were wearing the special sunglasses again, and he smiled at me a little beneath his. “You okay?”

I nodded, but a little too slowly, and his smile turned into a frown. “I want to do this,” I said then, “but my heart’s still going a mile a minute. I feel like my feet will slip as soon as I get out there.”

“It was wet last time,” Kostas said.

And Gary curled a hand tightly around my left hand. “I’ll hold onto you as we walk out.”

The wide gold doors opened, and an orange-ish sky filled the space between. Kostas and two of the workers stepped out into the orange.

I had trouble moving my legs at first, but Gary’s warm hand lifted my left hand toward outside. The tether gave us a maximum of about ten feet between us. I kind of wished that length was shorter….

Taking a deep breath, I carefully shuffled my booted feet toward the opening; then I finally lifted them a bit higher and stepped out onto a small stone platform. Up here, the platforms and steps were lighter colored, which made them easier to see, which I was thankful for. There was also a brown railing attached to the wall to our left. “Why didn’t you have this farther down?” I asked Kostas as I grabbed onto the railing.

“There are controls on the railing,” Kostas said. “It is not meant as a safety rail only.”

“Oh!” I almost whipped my hand from it, but then the solid feeling of the brown metal beneath my hand was helping to center me….

“Do not worry,” Devin said from behind me, “you are free to use the rail for leverage. You don’t know how to work the controls.”

“What else is new,” I said.

Just like last time, I avoided looking over the edge as we ascended the stairs now. Strangely, breathing the air up here seemed to be easier than breathing the air down below, which was usually the opposite case for an atmosphere. The Keepers must have increased the density of the air around the mountain up here, but I didn’t ask Kostas to confirm that. This time going up, I wanted to pay attention more and talk less—not just for my and Gary’s safety, but also because I’d never get to do this again.

The sun shined down on us as we slowly but steadily climbed the stairs. I made some adjustments to my suit using my sleeves, and my efforts worked; my boots seemed more responsive to my feet this time. I could see now that our first time up, we really had rushed into doing this. But I could also see that this wasn’t something you wanted to put off for too long.

My having gotten lost in the Lamren dimension really had made everything clearer. Who knew if there might be unintended consequences because of the existence of the firestones? They were something that probably should have never existed, but, the fact was, they had been made. And the remaining ones needed to be unmade.

We kept rising for hours; we took two breaks so the workers and Kostas could manipulate the railing, and so we all could sit on the stairs and drink and eat. We also took two longer breaks when we went inside again, where we met with Keepers who had to manipulate the stone further.

When we finally walked outside again for the last time, I looked down at the stone in my hand: the closer we had gotten to the mountain’s top, the more I noticed changes in the stone. By this point in the journey, the reddish fire had died quite a bit, and though the stone was still beautiful, it looked more like a normal gemstone.

I didn’t know how to feel about the firestone’s new inertness; I was, after all, watching the death of something extremely powerful.

I sighed as the six of us began the final part of the trek upward. We were so high now and visually the atmosphere had grown so dense that I couldn’t see the surface of the planet when I dared to look to the right or the left of me: a few hours ago, the stairs had changed; they sometimes backtracked into zigzagging and crossing over other sets of stairs. The mountain was maze-like now, and I felt sure that if Gary and I hadn’t had the workers showing us the way, we would have gotten lost up here….

Kostas finally slowed down in front of me and Gary; we were holding hands at that point, and he squeezed my hand tighter. We both could feel it: we had reached where we needed to reach. The mountain still kept going above us, and now that I was up here, I could see that it apparently had no end. But, our end was here.

“It is time to enter The Hall,” Kostas said. Her eyes fell right on my face. “We are in a protective field here. Remove your glasses and follow my instructions when we get inside.”

I nodded fast as I took off my glasses and stuck them into one of my suit’s pockets. I watched the workers manipulate the railing to my left; we were facing in our original direction now. An opening suddenly appeared in the stone wall beside the railing, and I took two steps in, following Kostas.

At this point, I had no expectations, except that I would see something that looked like Upal’s space and the mountain’s other indoor levels. However, that wasn’t anywhere near what I now saw: what was before me defied explanation, because, inside this area, there were no walls; there was no floor.

Gary and I had stepped into a space that apparently had no boundaries.

“Omigod!” I said, feeling my head spinning, as if I were falling or would be falling at any moment. Gary and I clung onto each other, neither of our brains understanding the area. There were pinpoints of colorful light around us, almost as if we were among the stars. But the areas around the lights were full of strange floating shapes that appeared then disappeared and appeared again, just like the bodies of The Keepers.

“What the hell is this—we’re going to fall!” Gary said.

The workers rushed over to the two of us and manipulated our sleeves. But Gary and I had to close our eyes. Though we were used to being in space, we were usually inside a ship then. The area around us now was supposed to be inside a mountain; my knees were shaking, yet I couldn’t feel my feet slipping along anything. I was floating in a bottomless, unknown ocean….

I felt Gary’s hand trembling on mine. Then I heard Kostas say, “I can’t entirely explain where we are to you, but you will not fall. There is nowhere to fall. There is nowhere. This is only a repository for devices. They are in separate areas so the ones that can’t be completely deactivated won’t somehow activate each other. You must move to where you need to place the stone. If you feel you won’t be able to navigate here, we might be able to use a control to pull you along using the tether. But we would have to disconnect the two of you for that.”

My eyes were still closed, but I risked opening them when I said to her, “No! I’m not leaving Gary. He goes where I go.”

A worker was on my left side, touching my sleeve; Gary was on my right, and I watched his eyes finally open again. His skin was too pale, and I could hear how hard he was breathing. “This is so dizzying,” he said then. “It’s worse than being in space. How the hell can we even move to navigate?”

“We are making adjustments to your suits,” Kostas said. “You’ll be able to glide as if you’re skating along a surface.”

“What surface?” I said. “There’s nothing here.”

“There are discrete, fixed levels of energy, similar to the way atomic orbitals are structured. You will need to stay at a specific level and not jump to any higher or lower ones. If you do, it won’t hurt you, but it will take time to come back down or go up, and  then move to the proper section where the stone must be placed. I and the other workers trained for a long time to be able to work in here when necessary. You have had no training. I’m sorry for the physical discomfort.”

“I’ve connected them to Level 124960adx,” Devin said now in a sharp voice.

Her left hand on her other sleeve, Kostas turned away from me slightly. Then she pointed her left hand ahead of her. “Lydia, Gary, do not manipulate your sleeves. Just push your torsos forward in that general area; the shift of your body mass will give you momentum, and you should remain on the correct energy level. The tether unfortunately might also give you some angular momentum. But, again, don’t work your sleeves.”

Both Gary and I took deep breaths and looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “here I go….”

I thrust my torso at where Kostas had pointed, and I could feel my feet lifting behind me; through the tether, I could also feel Gary swinging near what seemed to be the area behind me—swinging wildly. “Gary!” I shouted, trying to turn my head, but I couldn’t seem to get it to truly face behind me, wherever “behind me” now was.

“I’m all right! I’m all right,” Gary said. “Just, wow, when Kostas said angular momentum, she wasn’t kidding. Even without that, how long can we move through this and not get a really bad case of motion sickness?”

“That is the question,” I said.

I continued floating in the nowhere space around me, waving my arms as if I were swimming, and somehow I was continually propelled forward. I passed the shapes and shadows of incredible-looking inventions, some of which appeared to be organic, slimy even. “I don’t want to know what the hell that is,” I said about a particularly scary-looking, multi-legged…thing.

I heard Gary’s laugh coming from behind me. I also heard Kostas’ voice coming from somewhere, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. She must have been talking to me in the same way she had talked when I first heard her voice from on the Demeter. She said now, “There should be a wall with an electronic-looking configuration coming up soon on your left.”

“And you expect me to be able to tell what the hell it is among all this?” I said on a frown, my eyes beginning to search around me for the wall. “Why couldn’t you come with us?”

“I intended to come with you, Lydia, but you refused to go without Gary. Only two humans can be in there at a time. Only a few more of The Keepers at one time. We cannot mess with the energy levels, for fear of ruining the set-up where everything is protected.”

If I could have stopped short now, I would have. But I could only grunt and grumble. “You mean we could fuck this space up—and release or even reactivate something? That’s just great! You send us in here when I don’t know where I’m going and what I’m touching.”

“Try not to touch anything,” Kostas said, “but, if you do, we’ll deal with that when it happens.”

As if our conversation made it happen, I felt an odd, cold current of something coming my way inside the weird sparkliness this area was, so I tried to move out of the way—but I misjudged where I was pushing myself. I began sliding sideways, on course to hit what looked like two silver spheres attached by a silver triangle at the center.

“Shit!” I said as I kept moving toward the structure, and I could feel Gary trying to pull back on the tether so I wouldn’t crash into the device. “I’m going to hit some silver spheres—a triangle!” I shouted.

“Dammit,” I heard Kostas say on a groan.

Her swearing surprised me, but I was more concerned with what my smashing into the silver contraption would mean….

My body finally connected with it, and Gary said, “Whoa.” He was still struggling with the tether, but at least he’d made some progress: I didn’t hit the device as hard as I had been on course to do. My body only slid along the surface of one of the big spheres—not that I felt my body sliding. I could only see it happening; there seemed to have been no pressure on my suit.

“What the hell did I just touch—Kostas?”

Her voice was dry now: “I am making an adjustment because of what you just touched.”

“Well, sorry, but how the hell am I supposed to know what’s what here? You know, I’ve gotta say what I’ve been meaning to say for a while now: your system SUCKS! You should find another way to deactivate the stones—you shouldn’t need me…. So, are Gary and I still on the same correct level here or what?”

“Yes,” Kostas said. “Keep moving where you’re going now. That wall with the electronic configuration should be coming up, though a bit farther to the left than before.”

I finally saw what she meant: the wide obstruction was a dark-green color, and there were lit-up white arcs and dashes scattered over the front. “I see it!” I said, flapping my arms to push me closer to it. “But I’m going to crash into it!”

“That’s what you need to do. Grab onto there and I’ll tell you what to push.”

I seemed to suddenly accelerate. “Oh shit!” I screeched, as the wall quickly grew wider in my vision. But when I collided with the surface, it apparently wasn’t with much force, or at least there wasn’t much of an opposite reaction: I was able to easily grab onto two hand-sized holes in the wall, and Gary gently soared to my right side.

“We’re here!” I said.

And Kostas replied, “You need to locate the section where two arcs curve toward a star shape—but don’t confuse it with the two arcs that curve toward a diamond shape.”

I saw what she meant: the two spots looked similar enough that a person could easily make a mistake if she were in a rush, which I was, but I was even more afraid of screwing up….

Fortunately, I didn’t screw up. Kostas gave me more instructions about the wall, and then she finally told me that I’d done everything correctly there.

Both Gary and I sighed in relief, and I couldn’t help laughing a little at how nervous we both were. “We should be excited!” I said to him now. “How many people get to do this?”

“It really is an honor,” Kostas said.

“Well, I guess I can finally see that!” I said, glancing around the area Gary and I were still floating in. There was more light here, and the suspended shapes nearby seemed to be moving slower. “It doesn’t seem as confusing around here.”

“Where the stone must go is in an even calmer space,” Kostas said. “You are almost there. You must move to behind the green wall.”

A moment later, I tried to do exactly that, but the tether didn’t want to obey my body’s orders, or Gary’s, and we went soaring off to the right, too far past the wall.

My arms instinctively flailed at the nowhereness around me, but I couldn’t get any momentum back toward where I needed to be. “Kostas—I overshot the damn spot! We’re moving faster again—”

“Oh dammit,” Kostas said quickly. “Hang on….” A pause from her, and I could feel sweat sliding over my face and falling off of me, to…wherever….

“Lydia,” Kostas finally said, “I have checked my map, and, unfortunately, I cannot see a way to get you back to that wall without diverting you elsewhere first. But going that way will take a while—”

“How long?” Gary asked loudly.

“In normal time, about an hour and a half.”

“What!?” I yelled. “Gary and I can’t stay in here like we’re just relaxing on a coffee break. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“I know,” Kostas said. “I have contacted Thura. She will know more. She has just entered the mountain. It will take her ten minutes to get here. Will you be all right till then?”

“I don’t know—you tell me! I think we’re headed for a bunch of cylindrical shapes—I can’t tell for sure because they’re shadowy. But I’m going to hit them head on—”

“That should be fine—they are in an inert state.”

“Well, how do you know they won’t be inert once Gary and I smash into them?”

As I got closer to the shapes, I saw them more clearly: they were a very-matte pale gray, almost chalky-looking, which flat sheen was unusual inside this even more unusual space.

“I think you should be fine,” Kostas said, just as my right shoulder hit one of the cylinders.

Kostas was right: nothing happened to me or Gary. But something did happen, to the cylinder: it began to disintegrate, the chalky consistency turning into a pale light dust and floating away into the nowhereness.

“Omigod,” I said through my stunned mouth. “The cylinder just faded away—now we’re headed for the next one—I’m destroying the place!” I had thought my only worry in here would be my safety, but now I saw how fragile this Hall collection was, and, for all I knew, I had just destroyed the only technology left from an extinct civilization.

I could feel Gary yanking at the tether to try to shift us in a new direction—but it was no good—whoooosh-bye-bye went another cylinder as Gary crashed into it.

“Crap!” Gary said, and when I turned my head toward him, I saw how ashen-colored his face was.

“You look terribly pale!”

“I feel terrible…. I was never bothered much by motion sickness—till now.”

“No—you won’t—” I said, but, yeah, he would. An instant later he puked a long stream of liquefied food, which floated into yet another cylinder, making that one collapse too; then his stomach bits floated farther down into The Hall, to possibly hit who knew what. Now we were polluting the goddamn place!

“Gary’s sick! Would someone please get us the hell out of here already?”

“You cannot leave,” Kostas said. “You must finish, Lydia. I will ask Thura to remove Gary…. Here she is.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Gary mumbled in a weak voice, but one of his hands was rubbing his worksuit over his stomach—and his face turned a sickly yellow-gray as we continued floating through The Hall.

“Yes, you are going somewhere,” I said to him. “I’m still your captain….” My voice faded—I spotted a Keeper soaring quite quickly toward us—Thura. I’d never seen her whole face and body before, but I did recognize the golden sheen of her chin. She wasn’t wearing a robe now, and her strangely flickering Keeper’s body fit into the background here so well; it seemed The Keepers had designed this place based on their own anatomy.

It also seemed that Thura had set up a mind-link. In my head, I heard her say, I will take Gary back.

“No!” Gary said out loud, to me. He had managed to shorten the tether by bunching it up, and now he was floating close beside me on my right. “Please let me stay, Lydia. I don’t want to leave you. I should have been with you when you fell! Maybe you could die in here….”

Lydia will not die, Thura said. I will work your sleeve controls, Gary. It will make you more comfortable.

“Yes—please,” Gary said fast, and he looked at me when he said it.

I sighed hard. “All right. But if you throw up again, you’re going back!”

He nodded at me, and Thura came up on his other side and grabbed onto his right arm, which slowed both me and him down, almost to a stop. Till that moment, I hadn’t realized how weird moving in The Hall had felt to my anatomy; that I hadn’t gotten sick like Gary was really surprising. But then by now, I’d done more traveling through and existing in different dimensions than Gary had, so maybe I had begun acclimating….

I have adjusted your worksuit settings, Gary. I have also given you a neurodigestive calmative. Do you feel any better? Thura looked at Gary with her crystal-like yellow eyes. She had more gold and yellow parts than the other Keepers I’d seen….

She had also heard my thoughts. Our colors change with age. I am older than the others here.

“How old are you?” I asked.

I cannot explain that. You would not understand because you are not a Keeper. Aging is not only with time the way it is in your normal dimension.

“Whatever you gave me seems to be working,” Gary said to her now, and his voice sounded more like his normal one.

I grabbed onto his arm. “Are you sure?”

He nodded at me fast, his mustache tilting around his small smile.

I looked at Thura and thought, Can we get going again?

Yes. Kostas was right about going this way taking long. But Kostas is not familiar with the entirety of The Hall. I will guide you to and through a shorter route.

I don’t understand why you didn’t do this from the get-go, I thought.

The three of us were floating together now, but Thura’s strange, shifting anatomy was slightly ahead of me and Gary. I didn’t feel a pull; nevertheless, I got the feeling that she was somehow sharing her momentum with us.

Her head turned slightly, in my direction. Because we go to so many places, we must be in a sleeping state often. The Hall Of Devices is particularly exhausting for The Keepers. Our bodies are visiting so many different levels and the histories of so many places as we pass through. I will be exhausted for a long time after this.

“I—I’m sorry,” I said fast.

“No—it’s my fault,” Gary said. “If we weren’t tethered, you would have had better control in here.”

Not necessarily, Thura said. Your more complicated shape together moves differently through here. Lydia probably would have been moving faster. She might have done even worse damage.

“So then it is good that I’m here. See? You need me.” Gary pulled an I-told-you-so face at me, and I couldn’t help laughing a little.

In a moment we will go around a sharp bend in the spacetime of this area, Thura said. Try not to resist your surroundings then.

“What do—” I started to say, but I never got to finish my statement because we reached the bend, and then everything around me seemed to slip into a rapid chaos of abstract forms and colors and the three of us bending and jerking around like organic flotsam.

Oh no! I thought. We’re being torn apart! We’re dying—Gary—

I’m here…I think. I was….

Youuu stillllll arrrreeeeeee, Thura said, her voice seeming to extend throughout the universe and into my body, shaking me inside. Reeeelaxxxx your body. Dooo not flail around, Lydia. You make the jouuurney loooonger then.

I tried to calm down, but it wasn’t easy; I watched an oddly bent Gary grope with two extremely long arms around the universe and then finally grab onto my right arm. His warm hand tightly clasping mine gave me something to focus on—not that I could see his hand very clearly because, visually, both of our hands had mostly faded away. But I could still feel the silkiness of the hairs on the back of his hand and the wonderful hard musculature of his fingers….

We slowed down now, in a space that didn’t contain as many disjointed shapes or isolated lights. Here the lighting was golden, steadier, more comforting. The three of us began looking like our normal selves again, and we moved past what appeared to be dark shelves with inanimate objects on top; then we passed amorphous mounds of matter floating free in the golden light.

I stared around me. “There seem to be organic things in here. Were they alive once?”

Some of them, Thura said. A long time ago. We did not harm them. They stopped working. They could no longer be revived.

“But I thought this place was only for the technologies species create.”

Some technologies are in the form of life created.

“But that seems cruel!” I said. “Like slavery.”

It has happened in the universe, unfortunately. If we keep that knowledge in the history here and elsewhere, then others will always have evidence of the negative results of bad behaviors and will hopefully not repeat them. We Keepers feel we must catalogue everything, no matter if some of it saddens us.

I looked at her flickering profile. Do you get sad?

Yes. Frequently.

Her answer surprised me—and saddened me. I didn’t know what else to say; I didn’t know if I should ask her more questions or never ask her anything again.

A silence seemed to pass between the three of us as we kept floating through this archive of weirdness. It was a fascinating place, and I’d never seen anything like it before. However, that it existed troubled me; it always troubled me that life could be unkind to other life. It also troubled me that the remnants of so many powerful, strange and unkind technologies were all sitting in “one” place….

We have reached the space where you must insert the stone, Thura said, and then the three of us slowed down to a stop.

In front of us there was a silver container with a hexagonal front opening that gaped pure black. The top of the container was connected to a gossamer white string that seemed to lead up to nowhere.

You must insert the stone into the opening, Thura said. I am detaching the tether. I will hold onto Gary. He and I will pull back.

I glanced at her. “Why?”

We cannot have any confusion around the stone. The entry into the opening must remain purely you, Lydia.

“‘Purely You’—that sounds like a perfume, but I have a feeling that’s not what you meant.” I fumbled with my belt pocket and pulled out the firestone, my mouth immediately gaping down at it: blood-red cracks with dots of black inside had fractal-like fanned out over the surface, and a powdery, unattractive film clouded the bits of smooth area between the red cracks. “Christ, it looks like crap now!”

It is at the end of its usefulness, Thura said.

“Goodbye…you pain in the ass,” I said to the stone, hearing Gary laugh from behind me.

I moved forward toward the silver container and slid the stone into the gaping, dark space.

We must move now, Thura said inside my mind, but in a quicker than normal way for The Keepers, which alarmed me. But when I turned my head to look at her, I found that she wasn’t there, and neither was Gary.

Uh-oh.

“Um, hello,” I said, my lips vibrating with fear. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Somewhere in the core of my body now, I felt a tingling start and then expand to my extremities, till my both my bare fingers and my feet in my boots were shooting what looked like the same blood-red color from the firestone.

“Shit!” I screamed. “I’m bleeding—where am I!”

I heard Thura’s voice coming to me as if from far away, but now her voice also seemed to be originating from outside a mind-link….

“Lydia, you are being detached from the stone. Gary and I had to move to another level temporarily. We will be back….”

“You better be!” I watched in horror as more of that bloody fluid left my extremities and disappeared into the silver container’s black hole, but, somehow, that “bloodletting” made me feel better, more alert somehow, not so mentally dragged down by the pull of everything around me.

Until that moment, I’d never realized that the stone had apparently done something to my physiology; it had been a subtle change, but a change nonetheless. And now I finally understood why I had to be the one to bring the stone here.

*

A few moments later, my bleeding finally stopped and the dark hexagonal hole in the silver container closed up, till the whole was a completely smooth, silvery surface.

I could now hear soft, ocean-like sounds coming toward me from behind me. The sounds soothed me…. Oddly, the sounds had been coming from Thura and Gary moving back my way again.

Thura finally said, It is done. Thank you to both of you for your efforts. You are free to leave Rintu whenever you like.

“But—” I began to say, but I never got to finish my statement because the appearance of the space around me and Gary instantly changed. One moment it was there; the next it was gone, and we were standing outside the Demeter on that red Pruveria platform.

“Christ, they got rid of us fast!” I said to Gary.

He frowned back at me, but before he could respond, I spotted Steve rushing down the Demeter’s gray ramp.

When he finally reached me, his big hands grabbed one of mine and shook it, and there was a grin on his broad face. “It’s good to see you, Captain, Gary! Damn, was everyone worried—it’s been over a week since you disappeared, Captain.”

I sighed at him. “I know. Has my ship fallen apart without me?”

“No! We’re doing great—Shirley’s doing great—she’s been hanging around inside engineering a lot, and I think she’s learned quite a bit about the ship. The temporary crew’s been working hard too. Really, everything’s fine, Captain.”

“Actually,” I said in a slow voice, “that kind of depresses me.” I was staring over at that black building. Part of me expected some workers—especially Kostas—to walk out the door and say goodbye to me. However, the door was closed, and I had a feeling I just wasn’t wanted around here anymore, probably because I just wasn’t needed anymore….

“Lydia,” Gary said, “why are you depressed? You’ve been wanting to get the hell out of here since Day One. Now we can. Let’s go!”

My head jerked toward him; I saw the perplexed twist of his mouth and brown mustache. “Of course you’re right,” I said now. “But what about certain things—like Geena?”

Steve nodded at me fast, his dark hair shimmering a slight orange tint in the atmosphere here. “Captain, Geena told me she wants to talk to you as soon as possible.”

“Is she on the Demeter?”

“At the moment,” Steve said.

*

When I finally stepped onto my ship for the first time in days, I immediately began rushing through it, toward my bridge; I stood alone in the center of the wide, familiar space for a long moment, till Steve and Gary walked in.

“How is Chen doing?” I asked Steve.

“He says he’s all right. He’s been resting in his cabin. There hasn’t been much to do while we’ve been on land here.”

“Well, soon we won’t be—but I’ll have Pete take over the piloting.”

“Actually,” Steve said, “his old back injury’s flared up again. He’s mostly been in his room for a few days now. The workers gave him something to help, but, surprisingly, it didn’t work.”

“Well,” I continued now, on a slow frown, “I guess I can take over the flying, with help from you and Gary. I’d like to get going within a few hours. We’ve got to fly through the gravity cloud again, though you’d think they’d make it easy for us, considering everything we’ve been through. I know the zenite engine’s online and okay now, but how about the beam engine?”

“I’ve got both ready to go,” Steve said in a sure voice. “Karen and I have had all week to get everything better than up-to-snuff. We don’t often get that long to work on problems, Captain. We’d love it if we did.” He grinned at me.

And I laughed under my breath. “I’m sure you would.” I glanced at Gary, who was standing near his station now. His face and hands looked pretty dirty—so did mine—but I wasn’t going to stop him from doing work if he wanted….

“I’m checking on the shields,” he said, his eyes looking down at one of his panels. “While you were away, Lydia, I kept running tests, trying out a new pattern for the damping circuitry. I think it should make the effects of any cloud-forces that jostle us last for a shorter period of time.”

“Great!” I said. “That sounds promising.” I glanced at my chair, at my electronic panels there, at my empty black seat; to me at least, it seemed to have been waiting for me. If so, it would have to wait for me a little longer, till after I got washed up.

I finally let out a tired sigh and said, “It feels so good to be back in territory I understand.”

*

A few minutes later, the three of us left the bridge, and as we were walking down the hall outside, we ran into Shirley.

She stretched out a quick hand toward me. “Oh—Captain Lydia—it’s so great to have you back!”

I grinned at her. Then I shook a thumb at Gary and Steve beside me. “I hear you’re a real trooper, Shirley—you haven’t let anything that’s happened on Rintu faze you and you’re going to stick with us. Is that true?”

She blushed, right up to the dark roots of her dark hair, and her blue eyes whipped between me and Steve. “I didn’t realize anyone had been talking about me.”

I laughed a little. “That’s what happens on a ship, especially this ship. I want people to communicate as much as possible; then we’re comfortable around each other when emergencies come up.” My eyes studied Shirley more closely: she looked really nice today in a softly draping blue dress, and I suddenly realized that she was often dressed nicely. She probably owned mostly fancier clothes because of the office job I’d robbed her from.

Her attractive appearance made me think of my own disheveled one, which I didn’t care to have in front of any of my crew. I glanced down at my clothes—and remembered that I was still wearing the orange worksuit.

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad to finally be leaving this planet, but, I’m going to miss it all the same. It is…interesting on Rintu.”

“I know what you mean,” Gary said.

“It’s strange about the orange suits—did you give yours back to the workers?” I asked, turning to both Steve and Shirley.

Both of them quickly shook their heads “no.”

I frowned, looking down at myself again. “I can’t believe they didn’t want them back.”

“Momentarily, all of the suits on your ship will disintegrate into mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor,” came Kostas’ voice.

I shot a disturbed look at Steve and Shirley; then I spun around toward where the hall stairs were. “Shit—we’re still wearing the suits, Kostas. And now you’re going to pull off my clothes in front of my crew—is this the goodbye you give me? No one even saw us off the planet.” I rushed into the stairway then up the stairs and finally into my cabin.

Gary ran in behind me, then swiftly punched the button on the wall to close the door.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t formally say goodbye,” Kostas said now. “I have other work I must attend to. We are behind because of the problems with decommissioning the stone.”

I watched Gary strip off his worksuit. And I said to Kostas, “Well, I’m sorry I caused so much inconvenience. What am I supposed to do now—can I just lift off?”

“Yes. Whenever you can go, go.”

“Geez, can’t wait to get rid of me, huh? I thought…I kind of thought we made somewhat of a friendship here…. But I never will get to see Settaly or even Upal again, huh?” My shoulders drooped.

“No,” Kostas said now. “There can be no relations because you are not a worker here. You know from first-hand experience what is at stake, how important our work is. You must become a worker to continue to have contact here, as Geena intends to do.”

“Hang on a second there: I haven’t spoken to her yet. You’ve robbed me of some of my agency since I set foot near this place. You’re not going to rob me of my crew too. I wish I could fucking click off with you on that dramatic note, but you’re still in control here because you can drop in whenever you like. Go away now. My boyfriend and I want to get undressed and wash up after this madness we’ve been through!”

“As you wish,” Kostas said.

*

Gary and I really were filthy; he, partly from having thrown up; I, from all of the sweating and “bloodletting” I’d been through. There was no evidence of that “blood” on me now, but my mind somehow still felt the fluid….

Gary and I finally jumped into my silver shower stall together, and as the water rushed over us, it helped me center my mind on the near future. I was exhausted, but I was lucky too—I was lucky I had someone like Gary to support me, and that I had my crew to do the same.

Whatever had been neglected while I had been away, we would fix it now because fixing things was what we did.

*

Gary and I spent extra time in my shower stall, but not cleaning ourselves….

When we were done with that not-cleaning, I got dressed and went straight to the dining room. I found Geena in there; she’d been talking to both Bill and Brayburn. Her brown eyes lit up when she saw me, but I wasn’t exactly in the wonderful mood she appeared to be in. I wasn’t mad at her; I was disappointed.

Before she could exclaim more than a “Lydia!” I said to her, “So what’s this I heard about you leaving?”

Her smile deflated, and I could tell from the downward shift in her eyes that she did at least feel bad about abandoning here.

“It’s actually not totally unexpected,” I added now.

I flashed an arched eyebrow at Bill and Brayburn, as if to say I wanted to talk to Geena alone. But she waved off that situation, then said to me, “They know about me and Jim.”

I nodded, slowly. “I could tell that you were once involved, but I don’t see why you took to this place, and so fast. It’s all because of him?”

Geena’s head shook at me quickly. “No—you’re right. It’s not.” She walked away toward the booth-tables farther down the room and sat in one of them. I followed her and took the seat across from her.

“The thing is,” she said now, “this planet really does seem exciting. And when things come up on the Demeter—exciting things—I’m always stuck in the background, stuck inside the ship. Sometimes just being in charge of the ‘kitchen’ seems so, well, typical. I just wanted to be involved in more important matters—”

“That’s the issue? Why didn’t you ever say so? I could give you another position on here. You started off in the cargo bay—I could move you there again, especially now that Bill’s got Brayburn. And I’m sure May could use the extra cargo help.”

Geena shook her head fast again, her blond curls bouncing on her shoulders. “I don’t want to change to there—it makes it look like working in here is a crappy job—it’s not! It’s great, actually, because you let me control the whole show.”

“If it’s so great, then why are you leaving?” I glanced over at Brayburn and Bill, who were talking to each other and writing things down on a large electronic ledger. I wondered now if people leaving my ship would become a contagious phenomenon. I didn’t express that thought to Geena, however: it wouldn’t be her problem; it would be mine.

“You know,” I said to her, “what we eat and that we eat is one of the most important things on here. Maybe I should have said that to you sooner.” I sighed, feeling defeated by everything that had happened lately. But I still looked Geena right in the eye when I spoke now. “If you really want to go, of course I can’t stop you. I’ll deposit what you’re owed in your ICFC account, though it doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to do anything with money here. But, Geena, I really am sorry to see you go.”

I stood up, glancing at the two men again. “It seems like they’ll be able to handle things here, so I’ll just wish you good luck.” I smiled down at Geena now, watching her face as she smiled back at me.

*

I was on the bridge later when Steve contacted me to tell me that Geena had finally left the ship. My heart began pounding a little too hard.

“Well, I hope things work out for her,” I said to Steve over the intercom.

I was alone on the bridge. I had just been to Chen’s room to check on him, but May had answered the door and told me he was sleeping, thanks to a painkiller/sleeping-pill combo the workers had given him.

I wanted to talk to May more, to ask her about herself, and about her and Chen, but she smiled at me so sleepily then, and I got the feeling that she was more overworked than normal, now that Chen was somewhat incapacitated.

I told her that what I wanted to discuss with them could wait; then I left.

I was sitting in my captain’s chair now, about to plot a lift-off course with Steve’s help from down in engineering. I began thinking about May and Chen as a couple again. I was thinking that what had happened to Chen might create further problems on my ship, as in, more people wanting to leave my ship….

“Plotting a flight path is going to be hard,” Steve said suddenly, breaking me out of my thoughts. “We’ve recorded a little because I’ve been writing things I remember down. But, we still don’t have any extensive info from our cloud entry and the Rintu landing. The people here never put it back.”

“Shit,” I said, “I totally forgot about that!” I opened a communications-line to broadcast to the exterior of the Demeter. “Kostas, are you there? What about lifting off from here? You removed all of our data!”

“I will send you fresh information,” Kostas said over the line.

“Very kind of you, considering you want us off here so badly.”

There was a pause, which I thought was something to do with the line. But then I heard Kostas say in a slow, low voice with a slight tremble to it, “I never said that. I regret we couldn’t talk more. It is the essence of my worker life here.”

“Well, the essence of my life on this ship is that we need our data. How we’ve been treated here isn’t fair. I’m signing off with you, even though I can’t because you’re the one who controls that. Just send me the numbers to leave now. I want to lift off in about twenty minutes.”

“Very well. Here are the data—it is everything you will need. There is no need for you to calculate anything. It has all been done. I wish you luck in future, and we Keepers thank you again for your conscientiousness in helping us.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound very friendly. I looked down at my silver panel. “Steve, the data-systems are up again, and I just got a boatload of data. Did they really send everything?”

A brief pause. Then Steve said, “Yeah—it looks like I don’t have to do even one calculation till we get out of the cloud. I could get used to that!” Steve was laughing.

And I was smiling as my eyes finally moved up to the front viewscreen. I turned it on and saw that same shiny black building out there. I could also see Geena and Jim walking inside through the doorway. I could have enlarged the view to take one last close look at Geena…but I decided to leave her to her own privacy; my clinging on to everyone on here probably wasn’t the best attitude for a captain to have. People come and go in space. I needed to get more used to that….

My head turned just as Gary walked onto the bridge.

He grinned at me. “I’ve gotta say: it’s really good to see you back where you belong! Are we almost ready?”

“Yeah—Kostas sent us everything we need, including a navigational path through the cloud. We can just coast up and out. Steve’s ecstatic.”

“So am I—or I mean I was an hour ago,” Gary said, and he was grinning at me a little crookedly—salaciously in other words, apparently referencing what had happened between us in the shower.

I looked at him sharply, then mouthed, The intercom line’s open!

Gary began laughing, and I shook my head at him on a smile.

“Karen’s priming the zenite engine,” Steve said now from over the intercom. “And I’ve got the curon stream ready to go—where are we off to next, Captain?”

“I think we’ll head to Keron-3—finally! I’m assuming from the numbers you just entered that The Keepers supplied us with more hydroambin and Evan fuel—how they did that, I have no idea.”

“They told me they had a supply set aside from the humans who’ve come here—from what they had leftover in their ships,” Gary said.

“Well, whatever the case, as soon as we’re free of the cloud, Karen, send Keron-3 a message that we’re on the way.”

“You got it, Captain!” Karen said in an excited voice. “It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back,” I replied.

*

All of the numbers Kostas had given us wound up working out perfectly; the Demeter sailed through the gravity cloud as if the ship had been built to expertly ride the cloud’s waves. Gary’s adjustments to the shield circuitry had probably helped there too. Still, I barely felt even the caress of a force on the ship’s exterior, and no matter how great Gary was at his job, he couldn’t defy the laws of physics by himself.

I felt very happy that The Keepers had given us such a comfortable send-off. For a wild instant, a part of me wished I always had them around to escort me across the galaxy.

“We’ve just crossed the apparent boundary of the cloud,” Karen suddenly said, and I sighed in relief.

Everything I and my crew and my ship had been through was suddenly a part of our past. I no longer had the worries of the firestone weighing me down. I was free to get on with my normal life as captain of the Demeter, shipping goods across the galaxy….

Smiling now, I unstrapped from my chair, stood up and moved toward the pilot’s panel, to make a more direct adjustment there; however, in the space of an instant, everything got turned upside-down once again as I was flung onto the floor by the force of something striking the Demeter extremely hard.

“Lydia!” Gary yelled as he began rushing away from his station.

I shook a hand at him, stopping him in his tracks. “No—stay there—what the fuck was that!”

“We’ve been hit,” Karen shouted. “It’s that ship again—Claudius!”

“Shit!” I said, rushing to get up from the floor. I threw myself at Chen’s red chair and slid inside it, my hands scrambling to strap myself in. I pounded at the intercom on Chen’s panel. “Everyone get strapped in—we’re under attack—again! Steve, ready the cannons!” My heart hammering inside my chest, I clicked off the ship-wide broadcasting, my eyes finally locking onto the menacing green warship on the front viewscreen. I said to Gary now, “He must have been waiting around here for us, goddammit.”

“Other people know where the cloud is and that the stones are linked with Rintu. That’s how we knew where to go, too,” Gary said. Then the frown on his face deepened. “As bad as that jolt was, it would have been a lot worse considering the power of what he hit us with. My improvements have been holding, but if he keeps hitting us….”

As if Claudius wanted to prove Gary’s statement, on the viewscreen, another of his red, comet-like pulses flew from his ship toward the Demeter’s ass.

“More incoming!” Steve shouted.

My head whipped toward Gary. “Respond, Gary!”

“I’m on it,” Gary said fast.

And on the pilot’s panel in front of me, I saw both the force of a second hit on my ship and the force of my ship’s aft pulse cannon explosively releasing its contents; the Demeter jerked forward from the reaction force of that combined with the force from the warship’s second blow.

I was pushed around hard in my chair, and it felt as if the room were suddenly spinning around me. My eyes struggled to remain on the panel in front of me and read the numbers there. “We’ve got too much torque around the long axis!” I finally shouted.

“I’m on it. At least the cannon worked and we hit the fucking bastard,” Gary said, his voice sounding really strained.

Gary and Steve quickly got us flying more evenly again, but I could see on my panel and on the viewscreen that Claudius’ ship had only barely been damaged by my blast and had subsequently sped up, so it had lost no ground behind me.

I was about to tell Steve to start a locked curon bubble, pronto, when I saw the pilot’s panel flash that there was a message coming in.

Automatically I pounded the communications-line open—then I spat, “What the fuck do you want, you psycho.”

“You know exactly what I want,” Claudius said in his smooth, accented way.

“Hey, scumbag, for your information, I don’t have the fucking stone anymore.”

There was an obvious, quite long pause. “Well, that is unfortunate,” he finally said, in a less smooth voice. “Nevertheless, you’re very knowledgeable on this matter now, and that makes you and your ship equal in value to the stone.”

I sat there with my lips trembling, because…he was right. I saw now how naive I had been earlier: there was no escape for me and my crew. Claudius probably wasn’t the only one in the galaxy after the firestones, and who knew if he told anyone else about my having possessed one. And now word might get out that I had been in contact with Rintu. Hadn’t I kind of admitted as much when I said I no longer have the stone? But then what else could I have said or done? I was stuck being fucked here somehow, no matter what I said or did, no matter what happened next.

At the same time, once again I saw that Claudius probably had to keep me and my ship and crew alive to get all of the information he wanted.

But, if nothing else, at least this time I was more prepared for the danger.

“Scumbag,” I said in an angry voice now, “I’m not going down without a fight.”

“As you wish,” Claudius said, firing at us again an instant later, except this time, as I had been talking to him, Steve and Gary had readied the aft cannon again, and with their second blast, they managed to intercept Claudius’ pulse and interfere with its trajectory.

“Yes!” I shouted as the pulses met and exploded in a white sphere of fast-moving waves and particles between the two ships.

But, though my ship hadn’t been affected by the forces of the blasts, neither had Claudius’ ship been affected. He recovered quickly from my interference and shot two more pulses my way. One missed my ship but the other struck toward the Demeter’s back again, along the starboard side. I heard the massive shake of my ship’s hull, and then May shouted over the intercom that the cargo-bay wall had cracked and damaged some of the cargo.

“Get out of there!” I shouted at her. “I don’t give a shit about the cargo!”

“Captain—” Chen’s voice “—we’re coming up there.”

“Hurry!” I said. I hadn’t even known Chen was down there, but I hoped he didn’t break his other arm on the way up here. I was about to tell him to just get strapped into one of the hall wall-straps when I thought of something else.

My head shot in Gary’s direction. “Even with your damping modifications, how long can we last with that ship pounding at us?”

“Not long,” Steve’s deep voice cut in. “And now I can’t safely make a curon bubble: there’s been damage to the heat exchangers inside the beam engine. The first shot somehow got into Nozzle 2 and—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his response, but then his response soon became irrelevant: Claudius fired at us again, and now there was yet another hit to that same damn aft nozzle, only this was the worst hit that nozzle had ever taken; I could feel the immense damage done as it shook the ship, sending the strongest single wave of vibration through the ship’s chassis I’d ever felt in all the years I’d been flying it.

“Holy shit!” someone practically screamed. Steve. “We just lost most of the nozzle.”

“No! Goddammit!” Blood was pounding in my face, and my mouth gaped in shock. “This psycho’s gonna kill us all. What the hell can we really do?” My head spun around toward Gary, and I could see the sharp light of fear brightening his brown eyes.

I turned back around and looked up at the dark-green ship looming on one corner of the viewscreen. Then I said, “There’s no choice: I’ve got to go over there.”

“No!” Gary shouted. “Are you crazy? We’ve got the cannon ready to go again!”

“What good is that? We damage him and then he damages us worse. We can’t win that dance.” I pressed two fingers on the panel-button to open the line with Claudius again, but only an instant after I did that, I noticed a sphere of brightness in the corner of the viewscreen, where the warship was.

I switched the camera view to put that brightness in the center of the screen, and that was when I saw the massive, dark, irregularly shaped silhouette rising behind the green warship as if it were a whale rising above a tiny dinghy. The dark shape had a familiar, jagged edge on top, and the whole structure was so huge and had appeared so quickly that it could have only come from one place: Rintu.

My mouth dropped open; it seemed that a chunk of the planet’s buildings had been lifted right off from the surface.

Kostas’ firm voice suddenly began echoing louder than ever throughout my ship. “We are The Keepers Of The Tasui. We have just run a complete scan of you and your ship, Claudius Fentimani. There is zero probability that you could defeat us in battle. There would be no battle. There would be instant death, for you.

“We have locked your ship into a gravity field. You have two options: you can either wisely leave this layer right away when we remove this lock on you, or else we will annihilate you. If your ship or crew ever unwisely return to this layer in future, the instant you cross this layer’s boundary, you will be given the same two options.”

There was a long pause now, during which Gary and I breathed hard in each other’s direction.

Then I heard my communication-controls beeping; Claudius was contacting me again. I opened the line.

“I accept these…terms,” Claudius said, a sneer behind the last word. “I will leave now. But I am sure we will meet again, Captain Zarro.”

I watched his ship finally slide away from the Keeper-ship, then quickly initiate what looked like a curon bubble: a silvery field of curves and spires grew to surround the warship’s green shell, and then an instant later, Claudius and everything he represented was gone.

Unfortunately, he’d left behind a mess. For me.

“Your ship has sustained severe damage,” Kostas said now.

“No shit,” I replied. “My ship is half in pieces.” I felt on the verge of an angry explosion of expletives—and tears.

“The damage can be fixed,” Kostas said.

“Easy for you to say!” I shot back. “The closest space station is days away—like we can even make it there this year when we can’t create a bubble or travel at high enough speeds to an exit flume when we’re missing a nozzle and our center of mass is screwed up—”

“I meant,” Kostas said, “that we can fix your ship.”

My lips were twitching, in surprise, though they really shouldn’t have been.

“Allow us to do the work,” Kostas said.

I nodded and when I realized she couldn’t see my nod, I was about to speak—but of course she had seen my nod somehow.

“We will begin the work at once,” she said.

As I had been speaking with Kostas, my crew had been talking back and forth over the intercom system—Steve, Karen and Gary, and several others had been contacting each other from different parts of the Demeter as they assessed any interior damage especially. However, all of their chatter suddenly stopped; there was a change on the city-ship on my viewscreen and probably on all of the other viewscreens on the Demeter: a deep, matte-black hole on the Keeper ship suddenly appeared. Spots of flickering light soon dotted the black, which bright spots increased in size as they soared closer to the Demeter, before finally turning into familiar silhouettes.

 I enlarged the camera view and watched the sparkling Keepers soaring through the cosmos toward my ship.

Then I said the most obvious thing: “But you’re not wearing spacesuits.”

“You know that The Keepers are not human,” Kostas said.

I grunted, and then my eyes remained locked on the strange, mobile, constantly altering bodies flying through space toward the Demeter.

I switched to viewing from the Demeter’s central aft cameras as the Keeper bodies flew in an arc toward the aft area. The Keepers didn’t even have any equipment with them—oh. A narrow yellow beam suddenly appeared; it was coming from their ship, and now my eyes remained fixed on both the viewscreen and on my panel as the sensor numbers on the aft damage slowly began changing.

I said to engineering, “How’d you like to have that tool to use on this ship? You could spend half your working time jerking off instead.”

I heard laughter coming over the line. “You took the words right out of my head,” Steve said.

I was smiling as I clicked off with engineering and clicked to elsewhere. “Chen, where are you?”

“I’m right outside the bridge door. What the hell happened?”

“Everything happened,” I said, turning toward the open doorway. “Be glad you didn’t have to witness it from up here.”

Chen and May rushed onto the bridge. She was holding his good hand and arm, and my eyes roamed over the silvery, robotic-looking forearm cast The Keepers had attached to his bad arm.

“I’m glad you’re both all right,” I said to Chen and May now.

“So are we!” May said, her dark eyes opening wide at me. “But we lost some of the Keron cargo—”

I shook my head at her. “Nothing we can do about it now, unless The Keepers can fix it, but I don’t want to bother them with that. There are more important things.” I clicked the intercom for Steve again. “How’s the beam engine?”

“It’s going to take a few hours to replace some joints in the heat exchangers,” Steve said. “They got fried by a chain reaction from the warship’s pulse. It’s a good thing we didn’t get fried in here.”

“You’re certainly right about that.” My heart was still pounding hard. I thought of The Keepers again. “Kostas, why the hell didn’t you help us from the get-go—you must have been monitoring outside the cloud that you showed up at all.”

“Yes, we had been monitoring there, including monitoring you, but we do not maintain a policing presence beyond the cloud. We had observed Claudius’ ship enter this layer twice over the last week. But he left not long after. Today, he must have been waiting inside a curon space. We only left the cloud because he fired on your ship. It took us time to prime one of the city’s engines and get here.”

“That was incredible—I had no idea your cities had spaceflight capability.” I frowned heavily now, looking over at Gary, who actually gave me a thumbs-up, though not with respect to my frown.

He said fast now, “The sensors are showing an almost complete re-attachment of the original nozzle material at the break in the nozzle.”

“Great,” I said, smiling at him. But then my frown quickly came back. In so many ways, I just didn’t see much to smile about, especially because I suddenly realized that Claudius would probably think I was even more valuable, now that The Keepers had come to my rescue.

“Kostas, are you there still?” I asked in a loud voice.

“Yes,” Kostas said.

“I’m never going to be safe again from Claudius. What the hell will I do from now on?”

“I believe you will be fine,” Kostas said, her voice firm and sure.

Chen had just walked up to me as I sat up straighter in his chair. And now I said to Kostas, “Oh, you believe it, so therefore it is true? I know people like Claudius; you, apparently, do not. Or the human part of you has forgotten his kind: he will not give up! And who knows who else he told about all this?”

“He may tell whoever he wants. He will have no evidence. The universe is full of myths, and many of them could never be proven to be true. But even if someone found a way to try to verify them someday, many of those myths would only turn out to have been false.”

“But, Kostas, he does have evidence—from this whole encounter. Obviously, I’m not letting some asshole thugs push me out of my lifestyle and the business I’ve built up. I’ll still be out here. But, I really hate that things will have to change now. Maybe I should have changed them sooner. Maybe I’ve been too naive all these years. I guess I was lucky I didn’t have any major problems with criminals sooner. But the galaxy as a whole has been having more problems lately, including with piracy. I should have accounted for this a while ago.

“I’m not a general, but it looks like I’ll have to find one—and I’ll have to purchase some type of weapons-array to outfit this ship more. What choice do I have?

“I’m not gonna let that Claudius asshole turn me into a war-monger. But, forearmed is still forearmed. At least he wouldn’t be able to push the Demeter—and us—around so easily.” I was frowning again. “But, even if I do all of this, what if it isn’t enough? What if he tries again and I can’t succeed against him and people like him? What will you, The Keepers, do for me?”

“We have interfered enough,” Kostas said. “We should not interfere to a further degree.”

“Shouldn’t or won’t?” I replied. “This just isn’t fair: your kind didn’t think this through. You should have been more circumspect—the species out there—they’ve created extremely powerful technologies, and they’re not always cleaning them up! Now humans can access some and can’t turn them off even if they are responsible humans.

“It’s up to you to fix this, not me. I did the responsible thing coming here and bringing the stone back. Now I get burned even more? Can’t you at least give me some way to contact you if I’m bothered again?”

There was a long pause, during which I sweated badly as I waited for a reply. My crew around me watched the viewscreen, where the Keepers were finishing re-attaching my starboard nozzle, using their beam of yellow…whatever.

The tension in my head was so heavy that it felt like my head would fall down and crush the rest of me. When I could no longer stand waiting to hear back from Kostas, I said loudly, “Well? After everything I just said, you have nothing to say, Kostas?”

“Yes,” Kostas finally said, “I have something to say: we have an idea.”

*

Their idea was: Geena would come back onto the Demeter—and I would accept Jim’s being on here as a part of my crew—or at least that it would be Jim was my idea. Kostas had offered the company of a worker, but given that Geena knew Jim, I figured she might have more insight into him as a human, which might give us more insight to him as a link to The Keepers, too.

I said all of this to Geena; Kostas had done her dimensional-transporting trick and had instantly transported Geena and Jim into the hall outside my bridge. But, at the moment, Jim was down below, taking a look at the cargo-bay damage.

Geena was standing beside me now; Chen was in his seat, doing a little work on his panel with his good arm; May was beside him in the navigator’s seat; Gary had taken a bathroom break—and I was sitting back in my captain’s chair, trying to catch my breath.

Geena stared down at me. “Lydia, I wanted to say thanks—and that I’m really sorry for everything. I feel terrible that I made you feel bad, like I ruined our working relationship. But thank you so much for accepting me back.”

I looked up at her. “Aren’t you sorry to be back?”

Her face flushed. “No! Of course not.”

“But, Geena, you said you wanted to be a Rintu worker.”

“Well, Jim told me I might be able to train for that on here.”

I was frowning now as my eyes shifted to the viewscreen again, where I could see the dark silhouette of the Rintu city-ship behind the Demeter’s aft nozzles. The Keepers had finished the work on repairing my ship, but, apparently, they had no intention of leaving just yet.

“Here’s what’s really worrying me now,” I said. “Claudius apparently had information on the stone, and now he has information on his visit here, too.” I had really said this bit to Geena, Chen and May, but before they could reply, Kostas did.

“There is no need to worry: when we took over your computers that first day and when we entered Claudius’ ship before, we removed all pertinent information about the stone and your experience in the well from both of your ships’ records. And we will remove everything from since then before we depart now. You and he could talk to people about your experiences all you want, but there will be no useful, detailed physical information that can be confirmed by anyone, including by you.”

I was doing that bottom-lip-dangling-in-shock thing again. I felt both burned and used. I wanted to spit and rage at Kostas…but I had seen first-hand the ramifications of the wells and the many contraptions in The Hall Of Devices. I had seen another dimension with species living in harmony who deserved to be left alone and inaccessible to those they didn’t want there.

And now I also saw how the myths and bits of info about the stones and wells had probably come about in human science: it must have happened long ago. After all, I hadn’t been the first among humanity to access a well; though that person hadn’t actually done the trek up the Rintu mountain, that person’s collision with a stone had still happened. Yet there was probably no real information on that person left outside of Rintu. So the occurrence had since been turned into myth.

“Well-well-well, that’s very friendly of you to delete everything without asking me,” I said to Kostas finally, but there was no real bite behind my words. “I get the feeling you’ve done this to others before.”

“Yes, once. He did not have to make the journey because he had not connected up with a stone as strongly as you had. His stone had also been slightly damaged in the original explosion, so it wasn’t working exactly as it should have been. He was lucky to find a way out of the energy well at all, as you were lucky to do the same.

“However, Lydia, we have now considered many of the things you have said over these past days, including today. We now believe our isolation is only drawing more attention to us and making us look like an intriguing place to visit. This isn’t the first time someone has tried an attack on or near Rintu. It was never successful, but it is possible that, someday, we will fail in protecting all the work we do.

“Many more stones—and other things—are still out there. It might be to our and this universe’s benefit that we have eyes among the stars, human eyes, looking out for what else could cause problems and letting us know of any abnormal sightings; hence, our decision to let Jim become a part of your crew. As I, Kostas, have said, Jim is equipped to maintain contact with us, which will be to our benefit—and yours.”

“I see that,” I said, “and I appreciate your position. I just hope it works out to both of our benefits. Will you—and Jim—promise to let me know if there’s something I should know?”

“Yes,” Kostas said.

“Well then, I guess that will have to be enough.”

*

“Why are you frowning?” Geena asked me a little later.

She was still standing beside my chair; Steve had just contacted me to tell me that The Keepers had somehow fixed the beam engine’s heat exchangers too, without ever coming inside engineering. I was dubious about that. They probably had been inside engineering; it had just happened so fast that my crew was unaware of it. This was part of what was making me frown. The other part was….

I looked up at Geena. “I have to be honest and say that I’m just not crazy about a worker being a part of my crew now. How do I know The Keepers won’t be spying on me every two seconds? I need to be able to run my ship the way I see fit.”

Geena nodded down at me. “I can understand that—why don’t you tell Jim that?”

“I kind of figured Kostas has already let him in on our conversations.”

“You have figured right, Lydia,” came Kostas’ voice. “You will have complete autonomy, I assure you. Jim will only be a guide if necessary and a go-between.”

“Will I…hear from you again, Kostas—from any of you there that I’ve met?”

“As I’ve told you before, Lydia, I’m afraid that’s unlikely. We are always busy. And if you don’t hear from us, it is probably because no news is good news.”

“Okay,” I said on a sigh now, rubbing my right hand along the soft cushion on the arm of my chair.

“This is goodbye, Captain Zarro,” Kostas said. “We have finished the repair work on your ship, and Jim has sent us the data on a scan he’s just done of your systems affected by your battle with Claudius. All of your systems are now in proper working order again.”

“And you’ve also removed the rest of my recorded data related to you and your repairs here, huh?” I said in a dry voice.

“Yes. Goodbye again,” Kostas said, but, this time, I only nodded at the viewscreen. I knew that she could probably see my nod anyway.

I continued watching the screen; I saw the fading away of the huge city-silhouette there, the retracting backwards, toward where the edge of the gravity cloud was visible.

“That was some ship!” I heard Shirley say. She had just walked onto the bridge. I nodded at her as she moved behind one of the science panels beside Gary’s usual panel.

I turned back to Geena and gave her a smile, albeit a tired one. “Why don’t you go check on your comrades in the dining room? I think we could all use a good hot meal soon.”

Geena grinned down at me. “Absolutely, Captain—I’ll see you later!”

I watched her back as she walked away, my eyes finally falling on Chen and May. I probably should have had Pete come down here and take over for Chen for a little while at least. But, it was also probably best if Pete remained in his cabin for another day. Really, both men were hobbled….

May got up from the navigator’s seat and came toward me. I smiled at her as she said, “I heard Steve say we can leave whenever; I want to do a quick check on the cargo bay first. Jim just sent Chen a confirmation message that the cargo-bay wall’s been fixed—though not the damaged cargo.”

“That’s fine, May—go. I know you want to take over there.”

She laughed at my statement. “You’re right.”

“Aren’t I always?” I said, grinning at her.

*

Of course I wasn’t always right; she knew it and I knew it; so did Gary, Shirley and Chen know it, and everyone else for that matter, I was sure. None of us were always right, and sometimes things went wrong. But I was glad that when they went wrong, I had people beside me I trusted who cared about me and my ship, and cared about each other.

We flew away together now, away from everything-Rintu and The Keepers, and everything I’d seen and done. The Demeter was working perfectly, and when we were finally inside a curon bubble, heading toward the layer where Keron-3 rotated, my mind began to wander over the recent past.

I remembered back to the beginning, to when I first found that stone, and to when Chen and May were so happy during and after their marriage. So much had happened since. I wondered if anything else had changed since….

From in my captain’s chair still, I looked at Chen. I began feeling sad again, about his arm and all the pain he had been in when we’d gotten stuck in that strange dimension, with creatures that a part of me still missed.

“How are you doing?” I asked Chen now. “I haven’t had a chance to ask you—it’s been so hectic since I got back.”

Chen tossed a sideways smile at me. “I’m fine, Captain.” He lifted his robotic cast. “It’s taking some getting used to, but at least I can move my hand now without being in agony. The workers said I can remove the cast in nine days. You think that’s true?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. Then I sat up a little straighter. “There have been so many changes on this ship lately; yet we didn’t even get a chance to change your room to the junk room. I’m really sorry your honeymoon got ruined.”

Chen waved his good arm my way, in a don’t-worry-about-it fashion.

But I still said, “Chen, what about the near future—I’ve been wondering about it, about what you’ll want. I don’t have much to offer you on here. There’s certainly more elsewhere.”

Chen’s mouth dropped open as he turned to me, and his dark eyes shifted a little warily toward Shirley and Gary at their science panels. “Captain, are you saying you want me to leave the Demeter?”

“What?” I practically screeched. “No! I’m saying the opposite: that maybe YOU will want to leave.”

“Lydia, if you mean it’s up to me and May, believe me, we’re not going anywhere.”

My eyes slowly widened at him. “But I thought—well, especially after what happened to your arm, I thought you might want to quit being on here. You’re married now. Will you be having kids?”

“I don’t know yet, but even if we do, we can raise them on here—if that’s okay with you.”

I was very surprised at his response. I was also very glad about it. Nevertheless, I wanted him and all of my crew to remain as my crew because they wanted to. I saw how important that was now. I saw that because of my own issues over feeling abandoned in my childhood by parents who had dropped me off to be raised by others, I had expected too much from my crew who, though they were a daily part of my life and dreams, still had their own lives and dreams.

“Chen,” I said now, “are you sure a life in space would be the right one for kids—”

“Lydia, I was raised that way, and I think I turned out fine,” Chen said on a smile.

“More than fine!” I said on an even bigger smile. “Still, you were on Space Force ships. That’s a whole other lifestyle.”

“This place isn’t that far removed from the Space Force, with the organized way you run it. Only this place is even better. My dad used to complain all the time how he had to stick to authorized settings on his pilot’s panel. But you let me authorize the settings here. And May—she told me earlier today that she can’t even remember the last time you gave her a real order about anything in the cargo bay. Why would we ever want to work anywhere else?”

I felt tears in my eyes now; I turned my head around my bridge, finally looking at Gary and Shirley. They had surely heard my conversation with Chen, but they were being professionals about it; they were sticking to doing their work, or, for Shirley, learning what her work in future would be.

And Gary—I could always count on him to do the right thing by my ship and by me. He looked at me now, his mustache widening across his face as he smiled my way.

My eyes shining at him, I slowly, gently nodded, trying to tell him with my gesture and expression what I’d never told him in actual words.

Then I finally turned back to the front viewscreen and my panel.

I pushed some buttons that needed pushing. I listened to the chatter from my crewmembers over the intercom. I watched Chen’s familiar form out of the corner of my left eye; he looked happy, as if he was right where he wanted to be.

I had thought that everything that happened lately would make me and my crew drift farther apart, but, amazingly, the opposite happened. And I saw now that maybe finding the firestone had been a good thing after all.

Omnivelocity

When my crew and I delivered a massive amount of coffee beans from Earth to Makron Station, I didn’t know then that the delivery would be a bad mistake.

I had been on a much-needed break on Earth when Makron offered me the job, and the timing of the delivery seemed particularly convenient for me and my crew: I had a delivery already scheduled that happened to be along the usual route I took to Makron; and Babs, my former science crewmember, was on Makron now and had asked me if I could pick her up. I would never refuse her or any of my other absent crewmembers a ride on my ship. The Demeter could probably comfortably hold a hundred people, and I had less than seventy working for me now.

When we finally docked the Demeter inside one of Makron’s communal hangars, I went straight down to my ship’s cargo bay. The air inside held a pleasant twinge of earthy coffee scent, but my nose didn’t linger on it; nor did my feet in my boots. I rushed across the bay, down the long gray ramp outside, then into the Makron hangar.

There were quite a few other ships parked inside, but the overall space was still broad and bright, with its silvery fittings and its hard, silvery floor. My boots made an annoying tinny sound as they clicked on the floor, but I was in a rush to get my paperwork done in the station and to meet up with Babs.

As I walked, I thought I probably should have taken a few of my crew with me, especially Gary, but he’d been up late the night before and was now in his cabin taking a much-needed nap. Shirley was working on a project down in her office on the engineering deck. And Chen was on the bridge, plotting a course to our next possible job—“possible” because it was a job I wasn’t sure I wanted to take. The opportunity for that delivery from Barton-2 had come up while I was doing another job on Cardoon Station Twelve—making a delivery of a museum exhibit to there, which job wound up being a strenuous, tedious one, and ultimately facilitated my ordering my whole crew—including me—to take a break from doing any work of any kind while on Earth. We had all gotten far too exhausted, especially from certain recent events from before then, especially from our interactions with the Keepers and their workers, one of whom was still on my ship….

As usual, I sighed inwardly at the thought of Jim. If I had thought Kostas was humorless, that was only because I hadn’t gotten to know the uber-humorless Jim then. He had been on my ship for months now, and I still hadn’t gotten to know him. And his efforts to train Geena as a worker and his response to her as a person—those were more things that made me sigh, and get a little mad, too.

I could have asked Geena to come with me to greet Babs today, but the real reason I hadn’t asked anyone was because I preferred going to see Babs alone; I really didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of any of my crewmembers if I got emotional around Babs. That she’d left my ship to stay on Genteran still bothered me whenever I thought about it, and so much had changed since she’d left—I honestly couldn’t wait to tell her about it, at least about some of it. The rest I wasn’t sure I should share—that depended on how long she would remain on my ship….

When I finally reached the area where the Makron cargo and other offices were, I had to rush from one to the other of them as I dealt with the finicky paperwork side of the coffee delivery: Makron was very particular about the coffee its restaurants used; the brew had to taste just like Earth coffee so required Earth-grown beans. And a delivery of coffee also required a lot of paperwork verification, communications back to Earth, tests on bean samples, etcetera.

When I was done with dealing with most of that, I used the communicator on my red captain’s belt to contact May in my cargo bay.

She answered almost immediately in a juiced-up voice: “We’re ready to go here, Lydia!”

“Great,” I said on a smile. “I’ve just gotten paid for the shipment, so, as soon as the Makron cargo-manager reaches the ramp to run the tests on the sample-barrels, you can start moving the rest of the barrels forward inside the bay. About how long do you think unloading will take?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” May said. “That one loader is still glitching—I’ve had Steve take a look at the wheels, but he can’t find a specific problem. He says it’s just general mechanical aging.”

“What else is new with the ship?” I said on a sigh.

*

I was supposed to meet Babs in the station’s commercial mall, and when I finally walked into that wide-open area, I spotted her almost immediately: she was sitting on a silver barstool at a long, metallic bar stand, sipping on a tall drink. The familiar, sleek cut of her black hair near the glass gave her away.

“Babs!” I said, waving excitedly at her.

She abandoned her drink and rushed up to me, grabbing me into a strong hug. I winced a little; she had quite muscular arms and legs, and I didn’t.

“I’m glad you contacted me!” I told her. “You should have done it sooner.”

Pulling back from me, she rolled her brown eyes and adjusted the hem of her gray blouse. “I didn’t want to burden you, especially with my break-up. What a disappointment—I thought Derry and I were in it for the long haul. Then she leaves Genteran within only weeks. She really can’t handle a life off the Earth—I see that now.” There was a frown on Babs’ face, but I noticed that her dark eyes looked a bit too glossy.

I couldn’t help frowning too. “I’m really sorry it didn’t work out, but I’m curious about why you didn’t stay on Genteran anyway—I thought that, for you, it was about the science there. The Ghost especially.”

Babs began walking back toward the bar and her drink; she picked it up and asked me if I wanted one, but I declined. I actually had to pee badly, and I still wasn’t done with the office work at Makron….

Babs was talking to me again: “Let’s just say I didn’t get much of anywhere, except I moved around in circles a lot. The materials-position didn’t pan out. And the many Hash-huffing deadheads on Genteran were no help at all in tracking the Ghost species. The rest of the people—like Cambridge—he found a few more people interested in helping me, and I finally got more data on sightings in two other areas of the planet. But I couldn’t get transportation to one area, and the other—by the time I got there, the planet’s surface outgassings had apparently reacted with the Ghost’s chemical trail and masked it. It’s like it really was a ghost, and it vanished into thin air.”

“Well,” I said, standing beside her at the bar now, “at least you’ve got all the data on it from our interaction on the Demeter.”

Babs nodded and finished up her drink, finally wiping her mouth with one of her hands. “I know,” she said, shifting a bit on her barstool. “But, well, I had more aspirations. I thought I was on the brink of discovering something in science; instead, I rediscovered what a pain in the ass science is. You work for years, and then maybe you find out something you and others never knew before. Then ten-minutes later, that something is overturned by new findings, and you’re back to square-one again.” She let out a tired breath, and her head turned my way, as if she were waiting for me to speak.

I did speak: “So, what will you do now? Where are you off to?”

“Where are you off to?” she asked, a curt laugh punctuating her question and making it sound as if her statement had more than one meaning.

I smiled a little. “Things have changed on the ship—I mean, wow, have they changed. It might feel uncomfortable on there for you.”

Babs shook her head from side-to-side. “I’m not sure I’d care, Lydia. It’s surely better than moping around here. I did need a break, but now I need to start working again….” Her brown eyes studied my face. “You keep mysteriously mentioning changes on the ship, but you never say what they are.”

“Well, for one: I got another science person after you took off, damn you, Babs.”

“Shit—you replaced me already!”

I rolled my eyes and clucked my tongue. “Hardly. You two are both great, just in different ways. I think you’re better at discovering; Shirley’s better at any actual exploring. She wound up being more hands-on than I thought. She’s gotten cozier with both Karen and Steve, and I think she leans more toward engineering than science. I’ve got her on the bridge now as a go-between. She fills in the gaps of what Steve and Karen would say, so I don’t bother them every two seconds. Shirley’s still in training somewhat, but, really, she’s doing well.”

“Maybe she can deal with the other crew better than I could, with my tending to be The Bossy Scientist.” Babs was laughing again. “I’m sorry for how that sounds: you know you’re all my people and a part of me never really left.”

“Don’t get all metaphysical-mushy on me now,” I said.

Her quite-hardy laugh erupted again. “How’s good-old Gary? Still stubborn?”

I flashed her ironic eyes. “I don’t see him like that anymore.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing how different people look once they’ve taken off their pants for you.”

I was the one laughing hard now.

Babs straightened against the bar, her legs in her gray pants finally sliding off the bar seat and her smile finally fading. “I guess there’s—well, there’s no place for me there anymore….”

My eyes widened. “Who the hell said that? There will always be a place for you on my ship,” I said, and her smile at me was so wide then, it really was a grin.

“What about more than me?” Babs asked now, her eyes staring off into the distance beside me.

I frowned and said, “What?”

Then I heard someone—a male—say, “I paid off my room, Babs—did you finish with yours? Is this working out?”

I turned my head in the direction of the voice—and spotted Cambridge walking toward me and Babs. There was a lopsided grin on his dark face, and he was wearing a sharply cut gray dress shirt and black pants. He looked really nice, and my mouth dropped open at his being here and not looking so Genteran-official and so Genteran laid-back.

“Cambridge!” I said. I was smiling, but my smile faded as I remembered what he and Babs had just said. My eyes shot back-and-forth between them while I waited for them to say more.

“Captain Zarro,” Cambridge finally said, “how’s the reactor I sold you working out? You were a dream to deal with. The commission I got really helped me—not just financially, but helped me see I was wasting myself on Genteran.”

I didn’t know how to respond to his statement, so I didn’t respond. And his smile faltered.

Babs jerked a thumb his way. “We came here together—or, really, we fled Genteran together. Cambridge has welding experience, you know. He wasn’t always the boss of a bunch of deadheads.”

Cambridge laughed. Then his smile faded and he turned away, toward the bar. “I lost my son years ago. When I started working with Babs, chasing the Ghost, I finally realized I was hiding out on Genteran, hiding from living.” With a flick of his gray-covered wrist, he caught a bartender’s eye. My eyes quickly shifted to Babs, then back to Cambridge as the bartender handed him a small drink.

I finally said to him, “I’m sorry about your son—that must be hard to deal with still.” Cambridge was looking down at his drink, but he nodded slowly now. “About the reactor you sold me,” I continued, “it’s top-notch. But, other things on my ship are different now too.” And those other things were what was still bothering me about permanently taking on any new crew, or even any old crew. Babs was smiling at me, quite eagerly, and now I sighed and decided to be more up-front. “Matt in the cargo bay—I bought two small weapons-arrays from Keron-3, to replace the Demeter’s old tail and nose cannons. Matt helped me choose the arrays, and, fortunately, I haven’t had to actually use them. But, Matt patrols the ship, like now at the station, in the cargo bay and in the hangar….”

“Huh?” Babs asked me, her smile turning into a perplexed twist of her mouth.

“We’ve had problems,” I said now. “There are dangers. There is someone—” I shook my head hard “—well, I don’t want to go into it now, but, suffice it to say, piracy is more of a problem out in space than I thought. And some pirates are more persistent than others.”

“That’s a shame,” Cambridge said, slowly shaking his head and sipping at the drink in his hand. “How can you do business if you’re always worried about someone bothering you?”

I nodded rapidly. “That’s the problem—in a nutshell. I’ll never stop going out here as long as I keep wanting to. But, for months now, things have been changing. I feel like my ship isn’t the same—not to mention the increasing technical problems….”

“Can’t you keep making repairs and replacements?” Cambridge asked.

“Sure—I’m planning on doing an overhaul of the zenite engine by next year. But, everything costs money. I do make good money, but, again, I’ve had to take on even more crew—and now the pie keeps getting split among more people.”

Cambridge waved his free hand at the air. “I’ve saved up for years because all I did was work. I own nothing; I have almost no expenses. I’m not that concerned with money anymore.”

“Neither am I,” Babs said. “I never was, which I think you know, Lydia. Very honestly, the thing is: Cambridge and I have nowhere else to go. That’s our problem, in a nutshell, too.”

*

I didn’t know what to say to Babs and Cambridge about what they seemed to want, and I had to go back to the Cargo Office now. I told the two of them to go to the Demeter, and I said that we’d talk about everything later, over dinner.

My face felt flushed as I moved through the station; I was both hoping what I had to do in the cargo office wouldn’t take too long and yet would take too long. I wanted to delay having to face people; I was particularly worried about disappointing Babs and Cambridge in some way, either by not having them become a permanent part of my crew, or by having them become a permanent part of my crew.

I groaned as I stepped over the threshold to the Cargo Office: I was so tired of having to make so many not-really-choices choices lately.

*

Makron Station could be an annoyingly anal place about their paperwork, so I wound up having to do lots of bullshitting with people and running from office to office in order to finish up with the station, which took longer than I’d planned.

I was finally standing in the middle of Makron’s Space Entry office, feeling out of breath and taking a much-needed deep breath, when I got a communication from on my bridge.

My hand went to my red belt’s communicator as I said in a rushed voice: “Yes, Chen?”

“It’s not Chen. It’s Shirley. Captain Lydia, there’s a problem—with Chen!”

*

I moved as fast as I could through the station toward my ship; then I rushed across the hangar and finally up the Demeter’s long ramp, passing between two large red barrels full of coffee beans.

Shirley had been waiting inside the outer cargo-bay hatch, twisting her hands together.

“What do you mean there’s something wrong with his arm?” I said to her in a rush as we charged across the bay now.

Her blue eyes shot my way, and her voice shook when she spoke: “There’s something there—a spot from his elbow downward. He noticed it when he was working at his station. Nellie couldn’t figure out what it was, so she asked Jim to look at him. He’s meeting us there.”

“The goddamn Keepers,” I said, grinding my teeth together. No matter my sudden irritation now, I actually liked the Keepers and saw the importance of the work they did. However, so far, my and my crew’s interactions with the Keepers hadn’t led to anything really good for us, even if our interactions might have helped the universe.

Sometimes I felt as if I’d lost my way as just a business person trying to forge a future based on what I was earning out in space. I wanted a pleasant, mostly fixed-location personal life someday. But, lately, it was looking as if that state would never happen for me; I only rarely got to use my house on Earth, and even more rarely my cottage on Pink. Some days I just felt so damn tired of having to do things for the benefit of others—

I reached my bridge—my eyes immediately falling on Jim’s tall form. He was standing near Chen in his red pilot’s chair and running a small, silver Keeper-device in the air over him. Chen’s face was flushed, and as soon as he spotted me coming his way, he began to jump out of his chair.

Jim silently held down Chen’s right arm and said in a cold way, “I told you not to move.”

“Great bedside manner!” I said as I walked up to Jim.

His gray eyes snapped toward me as he released Chen’s arm. “I’m not a medic.”

“Nooo kidding. But if what’s going on made sense to us humans, Nellie would have fixed it.” Though Nellie had originally been a temporary hire, she wound up being more useful than I’d originally thought she would be; her training as a medic had been quite broad. Still, that training hadn’t prepared her for this—it seemed that no training could when it came to the Keepers….

I was staring down at Chen now; he was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, and, below the sleeve on his right arm, where the crease of his elbow to the bottom of his forearm should have been skin-colored, it was now patchy-looking with the color of nothing….

Uh-oh.

Chen’s too-bright brown eyes were right on my eyes as he said in a shaky tone, “Looks familiar, huh?”

My eyes shot up at Jim’s straight face, but he was reading something on his device’s readout.

“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded toward Jim. “What’s happened to him? His arm was supposed to be healed!”

“It is healed,” Jim said in his noncommittal, dull way.

Nellie suddenly walked onto the bridge and right up to Chen. Her flat cheeks looked flatter than ever; in one hand she held a medical scanning device she’d picked up on Keron-3; she pressed her other hand onto Chen’s right shoulder. “Captain,” she said, “I’m sorry I stepped away—had to use the bathroom. But this is my third scan, and the scanner still says part of his arm isn’t there. He’s missing bone cells, muscle tissue, axons—”

I turned hard eyes onto Jim.

And Chen said, “I thought I saw something on my arm when we were on Earth, but then the spot went away and I forgot about it—till before. I was entering the numbers Steve gave me on the fuel status for the engines, and, suddenly, I couldn’t feel part of my arm; then I realized it was sparkling….”

As Chen spoke, my eyes remained on Jim, who finally sighed and lowered his device. “I have sent my scans to Thura on Rintu. She’s done a more complete analysis of my information and has concluded that, somehow, non-human matter has become incorporated into Chen’s appendage.”

“Nooo kidding,” I said to Jim again. “We know that already!”

“Well,” Jim continued in a cold tone, “I’ve also run a scan of your computer’s bio information about Chen—he gave me permission to do this. Chen, I’m now concerned about something you listed on your application here from when you were hired. You were raised on Space Force ships. You injured your arm then, as a small child. There was a gash.”

Chen’s face turned really red, and his lips fell open; they began trembling. “Geez…I totally forgot about that—both the incident and that I listed it when you hired me, Lydia.”

“Where were you when the gash on your arm happened?” Jim asked Chen.

“Hmm…if I remember correctly, my parents were stationed on Starlight Station in The Regal System.”

Jim’s gray eyes jerked to Chen’s brown ones. “The Regal System is an isolated area in The Nebulaic Layer. The Keepers have always avoided The Nebulaic Layer; it contains pockets of strange ‘shiftable’ matter that can combine with organic material and produce unpredictable results—especially when exposed to Keeper genetic material. Unknowingly to you and your human medical people, your gash back then had absorbed some shiftable matter.

“It apparently remained inert for many years. But when you accidentally fell from Rintu and through dimensions unprotected, and then broke your arm, that set up a worse injury than you realized—because it injured your arm on a genetic level, and then your cells reproduced very fast to make repairs, and the shiftable matter got activated. We’re sorry we didn’t detect it when we put on the cast. The matter was buried deep within the inflammation, and we simply weren’t looking for it.”

I was frowning now—and feeling pangs of sympathy-pain in my chest for what was happening to Chen. “But there’s something I still don’t understand: Chen’s broken bone didn’t break through the skin, so how did the Keeper DNA or whatever get incorporated into his anatomy?”

“Oh,” Jim said, “the Keeper cast does indeed mingle with the circulatory system in order to work.”

“Well, that stinks. I mean it’s good that it does because it heals fast, but, duh, you should only use the casts in isolated places, cleaned of Keeper material.”

There was a lopsided twist to Jim’s mouth now. “It’s impossible to ‘clean’ an area of Keeper genetics if the Keepers are around. They can go in and out of the local space, so can any remnants of their skin cells, etcetera. An area may look empty of Keeper matter; then an instant later, the matter’s there.”

“Then maybe we shouldn’t be interacting with each other!” I said in a rush, suddenly realizing that the Keepers could be dangerous to be around, and not liking this realization.

“This is space, as you well know,” Jim said now. “Creatures meeting other creatures, especially from other universes—anything can happen, as we’ve told you. We’re all doing the best we can under unusual circumstances. But it’s too late to turn back the clock on humans and Keepers meeting each other.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening: when the Keepers had put the robotic cast on Chen’s arm, they told him his arm would be whole; they just neglected to tell him his arm wouldn’t be wholly human. Or, were the Keepers just not as powerful as I had thought, and so they couldn’t always see where they might make mistakes?

My lips shook when I spoke again: “What the hell is Chen supposed to do now that you crowd have disabled him?”

“I don’t want parts that might be elsewhere when I don’t know what the hell they’re doing there,” Chen said now, and I could tell by his shaking voice and his lowered head that he was on the verge of tears he was too embarrassed to shed. There were a dozen of us on the bridge now—word had spread among the crew about Chen. And I didn’t want him to be embarrassed on top of the physical problem he had to deal with now.

I turned to face most of the others. “I appreciate that you’re concerned about Chen, but we’re still unloading the shipment here, and I know you all have work to do. I’ll—I mean Chen will let you know what’s going on.”

Everyone except Nellie, Shirley, Jim and Chen began leaving the bridge. I smiled at my other crewmembers as they walked away, but as soon as they were gone, my smile collapsed.

When Chen had spoken before, I could see on his face what he was really afraid of, and that was the same thing I was really afraid of: someday, would Chen entirely stop being a human? Would he turn into a Keeper somehow, or some strange mutant of a Keeper? I certainly had no answers to that question, and I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted any answers the Keepers could give us on the issue. It was also possible that they, too, wouldn’t even know the answers to those questions.

Unfortunately, whatever information they did have, Chen and I needed to know it. I turned to Jim and asked him, “How bad will Chen’s arm get? Tell us the truth. Will the foreign matter spread on his body?”

Jim shook his head from side-to-side fast, his short dark hair jerking around. “It won’t spread; it’s not an infection. It was absorbed where there was injury and inflammation.”

Chen’s right hand now pressed against the metal frame of his pilot’s panel. “I don’t know…it feels like it’s affecting my fingers.”

Jim watched Chen flex his hand and then manipulate his panel. “Your fingers are attached to your arm, which is attached to your shoulder, and so on. All of the body’s parts are connected.”

I was angrily grinding my teeth again. “The point is: will it or won’t it debilitate him?” I asked Jim.

But it was Chen who responded: “Actually, Lydia, to be honest, I think my fingers are moving a bit faster.”

My eyebrows shot up.

And Jim said, “That makes perfect sense. The shiftable matter is more responsive and requires less energy expenditure to work. And especially because of the Keeper genetic material, your nervous system will be able to fire faster over the area where your arm is.”

“But where is his arm? It’s not always here!” I said, but then I instantly regretted my words when I saw the depressed, shrinking look on Chen’s face.

I was still struggling to believe what was happening: when Chen and I had gotten stranded in another dimension and he had gotten hurt there, that wound up an even weirder experience than I’d thought. What the fuck was next?

*

I finally said to Chen that he should go rest in his and May’s apartment on the first maintenance deck; Chen left with Shirley and Nellie a moment later. Then I spoke with Jim, alone.

I fell back hard into my black captain’s chair and said, “Chen has only recently gotten married. He’s my friend and my primary pilot. If you tell me there’s nothing you can do for him, I’m going to kick you off this ship. What the fuck are you here for?”

“Just to keep an eye on things,” Jim said in his flat way.

“As in, keep an eye on us and on what we know?”

His head shook, slowly. “No. That’s not true. I really am sorry for what’s happened to Chen.” Jim looked down at his device again. “We’re working on coming up with options as a treatment—”

His voice broke off because Geena had just walked onto the bridge. She hadn’t been here before when the extra crew had shown up to check on Chen.

“What’s going on?” Geena asked now, her blond-haired head shifting back and forth between me and Jim. “May was flying up the steps, crying. I ran into Shirley and she told me Chen’s been injured.”

I shook my head fast. “He’s not injured. He’s developed a problem with his injury from our Rintu trek.”

Geena’s mouth made a large O, and her brown eyes fell on Jim again, and softened slightly, as they would usually do when they were fixed on him.

Inwardly, I sighed and groaned; outwardly, I told Jim to keep working on Chen’s problem. I wanted to speak with Geena alone, and I was hoping Jim would get the message in the hard eyes I turned on him now.

However, he didn’t budge from near my chair. Instead, he said, “I’ve told you that I lost contact with the Keepers for weeks. That I got in touch with Thura today is good timing.”

“Isn’t it,” I said, my voice coming out a little suspicious-sounding.

An abrupt sigh from Jim now. “They were doing legitimate, very important work elsewhere while we were on Earth. I do not maintain constant contact with them.”

“Well, maybe you should. Maybe then someone would have noticed what was happening to Chen’s arm.”

Since Jim had come onto my ship as a crewmember, he’d stopped wearing an orange worker-suit and had started wearing normal human clothes—and now his back in his brown shirt straightened. “Having Keeper material inside you is an honor.”

“I think the jury’s out on that, and it’s Chen’s right to determine if there’s any ‘honor’ in this. Now,” I said in a harder way, “I need to speak to Geena, alone.”

Jim nodded, but, I thought I saw a small frown around his mouth as he walked off the bridge—and I realized then that he had barely looked at Geena the whole time the three of us had been speaking.

When I turned back to her, I could tell by her drooping shoulders that the conversation had upset her. Unfortunately, I had to query her now anyway. “Do you think Jim’s telling the truth?”

Geena’s brown eyes shot to my green ones—and then her head jerked into a nod, her messy blond curls shifting up and down against the collar or her white shirt. “He was never a dishonest person, and I don’t get that from him now either.”

“Neither do I, unfortunately,” I said on a frown. “I wish he was lying about Chen’s arm, and it would just right itself back to being human. I suspected that what happened on Rintu wasn’t over yet. That would have been too easy.”

Geena’s eyes seemed to have slipped back into herself, and her mouth sagged a little, from the weight of disappointment, apparently.

I couldn’t help frowning again. “The worker training’s not going well, huh?”

She pressed a hand to her forehead. “He’s pretty much stopped bothering training me because I suck at it. There are too many distractions here, and he’s not a trainer. He told me he’s really just responsible for representing the Keepers to other species—he’s like a diplomat—”

Geena stopped talking because my loud bark of laughter interrupted her. “If I ever wondered whether the Keepers have common sense, I now have my answer. Who put him in charge of socializing with others?!”

Geena was shaking her head and rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “He said Kostas did.”

Now it was my turn to shake my head.

“He does make me wonder sometimes why I ever got involved with him. But I’ve known him for so long—at least I knew the Jim he was before all of this.” Geena spread her arms, then dropped them, seemingly in defeat.

I felt bad for her; I felt really bad for May, who was no doubt upstairs with her husband now. Her husband and his non-human arm.

I closed my eyes and sighed, but Geena wasn’t privy to my thoughts; she apparently thought I meant my sigh only toward her situation with Jim. “I’m sorry, Lydia—” she said now “—I feel like I’ve made extra complications on here—drama—”

My eyes snapped open. “Don’t worry about it. It hasn’t affected your doing your job, or my opinion of you. You have enough to worry about, between the dining room and dealing with Jim so much directly.” I looked at her eyes more closely. Then I said, in a softer voice: “Sometimes in life, you just can’t get everything you want.” Her eyes closing now, she nodded, soft and slow. “The universe is so big,” I continued, “and there are so many other men out there….”

Her eyes opened. “I know, but I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’ll be forty in a few years. I’m too old to keep up the pace of doing one-night stands around the galaxy.” She twisted her hands together. “When I saw him again on Rintu—I don’t know. Something happened. That I lost him hurt more now than it did then.”

“Hindsight can do that. So can nostalgia, especially in middle age. I still think you should look elsewhere. Maybe what you’re feeling isn’t as real as you think. I feel really bad that you’re kind of forced to deal with him now, because he was kind of forced to come onto this ship. But, well, maybe that’s changed—is he contributing anything here? Do you think so?” Several expressions whipped across Geena’s face—expressions that contradicted each other. I raised a quick hand, said, “No, don’t answer that. I know you can’t easily do that. Tell you what—I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but both Babs and that guy Cambridge from Genteran Station are on board. The cargo crew should be done soon with the delivery. I thought maybe you could get dinner on the tables for right after that—can you?”

Geena straightened up and smiled a little as she said, “No problem, Captain.”

*

“I take a nap for a few hours and all hell breaks loose,” Gary said to me later.

We were in his room on the first quarters-deck; my room was down the hall, and the quarters here were in a separate wing from the dining area. Both wings ran along the center of the ship because parts of the long side edges of the Demeter were blocked off behind walls and fields: those areas housed the top retractable nozzles at the front and the back of the ship, which nozzles extended from engineering upward.

The night before, Gary had been up late fixing our new reactor-bot in engineering; the bot wasn’t made as well as the one we’d lost on Genteran, so he had been working on overhauling nearly all of the new bot’s programming.

No matter that he had gotten more sleep today, his face still looked tired to me now, and when he’d just finished showering, which should have perked him up. He moved over to his closet to pick out a change of clothes, and I walked into his bathroom to pee in his toilet, and wash my hands and face at his sink.

When I finally walked out into his bedroom area again, he was dressed in a cream-colored fitted shirt and brown jeans. I sighed as I looked over his body—and as I remembered that I was going to the dining area in my wrinkled shirt and leggings. I wasn’t in the necessary state of mind to change my clothes….

Now I told Gary, “What you said before—I wouldn’t characterize today as a hell for everybody. But it is for Chen and May, yeah.”

Before I had come up here, I talked with May in the cargo bay; her eyes were red from crying then, but, true to her competent form, she and her workers had made such great progress on the unloading that they were done in record time—which meant we could lift off very soon. However, I decided not to do that for two reasons: I wanted everyone to have a pleasant, non-vibrating dinner in the dining room, and I still hadn’t decided what to do about Babs and Cambridge.

On my way up from the cargo bay, I ran into Karen, who told me she’d finished working on repairing the vacuum-like device that was used for flushing the curon engine. Since then, she’d been keeping Babs and Cambridge company in the lounge near the dining room. My crew and I rarely used the lounge because most of the time we would gravitate to nearer the food. But now that there were more people on board than normal, spending more time in the spacious lounge made sense….

Gary and I finally left his room and walked to the lounge; I stood in the doorway, looking inside the big round room. It was decorated in mostly silver, white and black. It was more modern-looking and therefore colder-looking than the dining area, but when the lounge was filled with people, as it was now, that certainly warmed it up; it seemed that half my crew were here—to see Babs, apparently.

She was sitting at a round table with a bunch of the crew, and, going on her flushed, surprised face, she hadn’t expected such a warm welcome.

As Gary and I stepped into the room, Geena came up behind us and said, “I’ve retracted the booths and set up three long tables in the dining room, so we could all sit together, Captain. I think that would be a good idea.”

“So do I!” I said, turning around and smiling at her.

*

With most of the dining-room booths pushed out of the way and into the walls, the dining room looked like a big long hall—with three tables in a line down the center of it. The tabletops were covered with dinnerware and silverware and a bunch of centerpieces, containing whole fruits and edible flowers.

I smiled at my crew as they began to fill the seats; Shirley sat between Babs and Cambridge. Shirley had been in the lounge with them, and, apparently, she still couldn’t stop talking about her trip to Earth. She’d been doing it ever since we’d left there.

“It was amazing!” she said to Babs now. “A little sad too—the way other animals are usually living on separate acreage from humans because many humans had behaved terribly to them.”

“It’s better for everybody,” Babs said. “The people on Earth can make environmental repairs without disturbing even more sensitive areas where other animals are breeding.”

Shirley nodded at her. “That’s one good thing about space travel: we’ve been able to expand into places where there was no life. Maybe it’s more environmentally responsible. At least I like to think so—assuming we haven’t been disturbing anywhere’s evolution—like we’ve prevented new life from developing,” Shirley finished, her mouth finally becoming a crooked line across her face.

“We’re doing the best we can to live better now,” I said, sitting down to the right of Gary and across from Babs. “We’re clearly not the only species who migrates to other planets. That seems to be a habit of living things when they have the technology to do it.”

“Will Chen be eating with us?” someone asked from one of the other tables. I raised my head to look over my crew, but I couldn’t see who had spoken. Several conversations were going on around the tables now, and Geena and Brayburn were laying platters of food and drink onto the tabletops.

I grabbed a bottle of wine, opened it and poured some for Gary, then for me. My hand shook on my narrow blue glass as I sipped the sweet dark liquid. It made my tongue tingle, and I took a deep breath as I lowered my glass to the table.

“Chen!” several people suddenly said in a happy way, and my head shot to my right, toward the front area of the dining room, where Chen and May had just walked in. May was wearing a dark jumpsuit and a small smile on her face; Chen had changed his shirt to a long-sleeved black one, and the smile on his face was a shaky one.

I got up from my seat fast, rushed over to one of the vacant chairs, then brought it to the front short end of my table, perpendicular to my seat; Gary took a cue from my behavior and got another chair for May to sit beside Chen.

“Hey, thanks,” he said to Gary, Chen’s shaky smile widening.

My crew grew quieter while Chen and May sat down, but someone finally turned on music with a driving beat, and I could both hear and feel the room relax again.

Back in my seat, I smiled at Chen and quickly squeezed his left hand with my right. “I’m glad you came down—the wine’s great, by the way.”

“Good,” Chen said, “because I really need it right now.”

I nodded fast at him and poured him a glass of the wine, struggling to keep my hand steady; I really didn’t want him to see me shaking. Unfortunately, he did.

“You all right, Captain?” he asked me on a frown.

“Oh,” I said, waving at the air as if nothing was going on with me. “I just want you all to enjoy this. We don’t often get a break to all sit together!”

A bunch of my crewmembers lifted their wine glasses my way and said, “Cheers, Captain!” And I smiled and laughed.

May was smiling, too, as she pulled apart a piece of bread over her dish. “Matt should be here shortly. He wanted to make one last pass over the hangar before he locked the bay door.”

Babs raised her head and looked at me. “Oh—Lydia—Cambridge and I didn’t get our bags from the lockers in the station.”

I shook a hand at the air for the second time that night. “Don’t worry—Matt can let you out after dinner to go get your stuff. But there’s really no rush because I’ve decided to stay the night here.”

“When did you decide that?” Gary asked me.

“Just now,” I replied, tilting my glass toward him, then toward one of the full wine bottles. “No flying tonight. We’re too busy enjoying ourselves.”

Babs sat forward toward me. “Thanks, Lydia—for everything!”

I was smiling widely now. “You’re welcome. You and Cambridge can stay for however long you want to work here. I’ve just decided that too,” I said, surprising myself, yet somehow feeling that taking on these two both new and old people was the correct thing for me to do.

“Cheers again, Lydia!” Cambridge said on a grin before he drank from his wine glass.

“We’ll work out the details tomorrow,” I said, smiling back at him. “I need to let the two of you in on some important things, but no more work-talk now—ah, here’s Matt. Everything all right?”

“You bet, Captain,” Matt said, grinning, as he sat in one of the free chairs at my table. He was quite tall and really large-framed, and the seat was too small for him to be comfortable.

I called to Geena, asking her if she could bring him one of the armchairs from the lounge.

As Geena walked out of the room, Karen walked in, and her blue eyes were shining tonight. Steve came in behind her, carrying the armchair for Matt. When Steve slid the chair over to him, Steve’s head turned toward Shirley, but there was no room near her. The two of them often ate together—

A fork dropped to the floor near my legs—Chen’s fork.

Chen was right-handed, but tonight he had been eating with his left, good hand.

I picked up his fork from the floor, and as I straightened up, I leaned near to him and asked, “Your hand okay?” I didn’t have to say which hand.

He nodded at me fast. “I’m just—I’m just trying out using my left hand more, like when I had the cast on, just in case….”

I saw something in his eyes now: worry. “You’re not going to lose the use of your right arm. I won’t let that happen. But, Chen, I’m thinking that maybe we can drop you and May on Aper-Minor for a rest—or maybe back on Earth.”

He laughed a little. “Captain, again it feels like you’re trying to get rid of me!”

I rolled my eyes. “Come on now. I want you to be comfortable—that’s all.”

“I think I’d just like to keep working, you know? I don’t want this to mean that much.”

I flushed at his words: I had done the wrong thing. I had been trying to accommodate his new problem, when, clearly, he just wanted to forget about it.

I nodded at him now, managing a small smile; then the awkward moment between us passed, and everyone at the table, including Chen, began to enjoy the dinner even more.

*

When the dinner was over, it was still pretty early. Babs and Cambridge went back into the station to get their bags, and most of my crew either remained in the dining room using the eating tables as game tables, or they went into the lounge to chat, watch movies and have coffee.

I, however, was standing in the lounge yawning, but I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to go into my cabin and shower, then spend quality time with Gary….

When I had finally finished showering in there, I walked out into my bedroom, where Gary was waiting on my bed—a naked Gary, in other words.

I hadn’t drunk much alcohol at dinner because I didn’t want to be out-of-it bombed now. I wanted to be close to Gary. No matter the great dinner we had just enjoyed, I had been feeling a bit raw all day….

I slid onto my bed, on top of Gary. The hairs on his chest tickled my skin, and I laughed a little, then wrapped my arms around him. “You sexy hairy beast, you,” I said, feeling his rumble-of-laughter response.

I slid higher up along his body, finally looking down at his face, at his thick mustache and his smiling, wide mouth beneath. His lips were flushed; so were his cheeks, probably from the wine.

One of his hands slipped behind me, then moved lower along my back, to right above my ass….

“Captain Zarro, you should have never gone to Makron Station,” a loud familiar voice suddenly said.

Gary’s hand jerked away from me as my whole body jerked away from him and I sprung to a seated position on the edge of my bed, my heart wildly banging around inside me.

Then I said through a shaky breath, “What the fuck—Kostas—what the fuck are you doing talking to us! And who the hell are you to tell me where I shouldn’t go?”

“You misunderstand me,” Kostas said in an urgent tone. “I am saying you should not have gone there because you were supposed to go somewhere else.”

“What—how do YOU know? And where the hell are you?”

“For weeks in your timeframe, we were busy elsewhere and we were unable to contact Jim to tell him what to avoid. We did not even see it then because we were focused on that elsewhere. When we finally realized what had happened, we immediately started working on what to do next.”

Gary sat up beside me. “Could you fucking clue us in on what your coded, murky language means? You’re talking as if you know where we’re going next—as if you know the future.”

“Do you know the future, Kostas?” I asked.

There was a pause, a long pause, during which Gary and I breathed hard at each other’s faces, though not from sexual arousal: I suddenly remembered back to months ago, and Kostas’ surety then that I and my crew wouldn’t die on Rintu….

“This isn’t something I’m authorized to discuss in detail,” Kostas finally said now. “But the future isn’t necessarily something specific. The Keepers have a technology that analyzes the many paths available at specific points in space and time related to each individual. We can see where your path will interact with other places, times and paths.”

Now I said, “Thanks for the explanation, but can’t you ever just say things straight? The Keepers do have a crystal ball; it’s just not a perfect one.”

“Yes, all right, Lydia,” Kostas said. “Think of it the way you want. But the point is: you’ve made a mistake. And if you continue on with your current path, it will mean disaster. For you.”

I could feel my heart drop down in my chest at her words, and Gary’s brown eyes shot to my face as he grabbed one of my hands.

Kostas continued: “Aside from Jim’s presence there, we regularly keep an eye on you and your ship when we are focused on, or are in, this universe—but we finally saw that the Demeter hadn’t gone where it was expected to go. You were supposed to pick up your friends in The Cameron Layer.”

Because of what Kostas had said before about my mistake, my lips shook badly when I spoke now: “We—we have a possible job to do there—on Barton-2, but I—well, it’s a lot of work, and I hadn’t decided to take it yet….” My eyes widened as I remembered something. “Actually, Babs was going to hitch a ride to Barton-2 on a cruise-liner. But then when the Makron job came up, I contacted her back and said it would be easier for me to just pick her up here.”

“You should have gone straight to Barton-2 from your last job, Captain Zarro,” Kostas said in a hard voice now.

I felt my face turn very red. “Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that? So what am I supposed to do—should I leave the station now? But nearly all of us have been drinking—”

A sharp, loud sigh, and then a, “This is a damn mess,” from Kostas. “And now we are forced to take care of it. However, we believe we’ve come up with an effective solution—something we should have thought of sooner, and maybe something we should have seen in all of our searches. But not all of the information comes up at one time. In fact, it’s possible that, had we done the search on your path weeks before, we wouldn’t have seen that you should have gone to Barton-2. So maybe this is a situation that is ultimately out of the control of the Keepers.”

“I thought you crowd could gain control of anything,” I said, my voice quite dry.

“What on earth gave you that idea?” Kostas replied now, almost a snap. Her voice sounded more worried than I’d ever heard it sound, and that made me worry, a lot.

“Before,” I said, my lips shaking again, “you sounded as if we—as if we’re going to die.”

“It does look like that will happen—or at least it would have happened had we not intervened.”

My pulse pounding through my body, I jumped off my bed and ran over to my black dresser to pull out clean clothes and yank them on. I watched Gary as he grabbed his clothes from the floor and sloppily began dressing in them.

Our eyes kept darting toward each other—in nervous tics, and his face was a dark red. I felt so sad suddenly, over our aborted romantic evening. How the hell had it come to this?

We would have died kept going through my head as I searched my room for where I’d dropped my red captain’s belt.

Tonight, I had not known that I was so close to death while I was enjoying living so much with my crew. Life just isn’t fair!

*

When Gary and I were done getting dressed, we rushed out of my room and into the hall—and almost crashed into Chen and May. Their surprised faces spun toward me and Gary. And then Kostas’ loud voice came into the hall, and I watched Chen’s and May’s faces fall so far, I felt a pain in my chest over their distress.

“I have contacted Jim directly,” Kostas said. “Get your crew together and we’ll discuss this further. We don’t have much time though. You must get going.”

“What?” Chen practically screeched. His eyes shot to mine. “Does she mean fly—now? I had four glasses of wine—”

“Chen, this is an emergency,” I said fast as I rushed across the hall toward the stairs to the bridge deck. “We’ve got no choice. If you’re not up to your job on the bridge, don’t worry—we’ll—we’ll find someone,” I said as Gary and I ran into the stairway, but I had no idea who I was supposed to find.

*

When I reached my bridge, I immediately saw what Kostas’ idea on the subject was: Jim was sitting in Chen’s pilot seat.

“What the hell is this?” I boomed as I walked up to Jim.

His head jerked my way. “Kostas told me to be prepared to fly. Although I am no expert. I was never a pilot.”

“So her bright idea is for you to fly my ship? Get up—let me sit there.”

“No,” Jim said, shaking his head.

And I felt my blood rise all the way up to my scalp. “Excuse me?”

“This is no time to argue. You’ve all been drinking tonight, and I haven’t been. You didn’t even invite me.”

I glared down at him, saw the quick shake of his bottom lip, which suggested he was annoyed, or maybe even sad. I found the latter hard to believe with respect to Jim.

“Everyone was invited,” I said to him now. “That you didn’t come to dinner was for your own reasons. Don’t push it on me—christ, I can’t even believe I’m having an inane conversation about etiquette after what Kostas told me in my cabin—”

“What did she say?” Chen asked as he rushed onto the bridge. His head turned toward his seat, his eyes spotting Jim, then widening—in anger.

I shook a hand Chen’s way. “Just leave it for now, Chen. Get on one of the science panels and sound the emergency take-off alarm for the next fifteen seconds. I know everyone will be shocked, but shocked is better than worse than shocked.”

Chen did as I asked; then I pushed the intercom on Chen’s panel in front of Jim. “This is the captain. I’m sorry for the alarm but we’ve been contacted by Kostas, so we’ve got to change our plans. Karen or whoever is capable—someone needs to contact the station and ask for an emergency departure—ask nicely, I mean. I’ll pay whatever, if they charge an extra fee.”

I clicked off the intercom and looked down at Jim’s face. One of the devices he often had with him was blinking in his hand now.

“What’s going on there?” I asked him, my eyes then moving to Gary, who was practically running toward one of his panels. Then my eyes latched onto Babs and Shirley as they both walked in. Shirley went straight for her usual science panel beside Gary, but Babs hesitated by the door to the hall; her head suddenly lowered, almost as if she’d rushed into here on instinct but now felt like a fool….

“Babs,” I said, “why don’t you take the navigator’s seat and see what you can call up on that panel? I have a feeling we’re going to be getting orders soon….”

I was right: some numbers showed up on the navigator’s panel, and I watched Babs’ dark eyebrows wrinkle and her mouth drop open as she stared down at the panel. Then she said, “Huh?”

“What is it?” I asked her fast, moving closer to her chair.

“We got a sudden transmission from—from somewhere. I’m a little rusty with the computer, but the coordinates inside the message seem to be indicating we need to go to The Alexi Layer—to where the nebula there drops off into a dead end.”

From the back of the bridge, Gary said, “What? That area’s off limits. There’s a torsional anomaly there that would twist the ship apart—”

“That’s exactly where you need to go,” Kostas suddenly said into the room.

“Like I said, it will destroy us,” Gary said in a crabbier voice.

And Kostas replied: “I think that, at this point, you know better than that, Gary.”

“Not after what you said in Lydia’s cabin! How do we know this won’t kill us?”

“You need to trust us,” Jim put in now.

“Why should we?” I snapped, and I would have said more, but Karen had relayed my request to the station—and now she told me that Makron had given us lift-away permission.

Unfortunately, the communal hangar area the Demeter was in seemed more crowded with ships than it should have been, so my crew and I now had to drive the Demeter around on its landing gear very slowly to get out of the hangar without damaging the ship; we weren’t allowed to have the exterior shield-strength at maximum till we were well away from the hangar’s insides and from the tractor beam that finally moved us out of the hangar.

By the time we had disconnected from that, my fingers were shaking, Gary was sweating badly, and Jim looked like he wanted to be anywhere but where he was.

Chen had been strapped into a seat over by Shirley, but he must have noticed Jim’s discomfort. “Can I have my fucking station back now?” Chen snapped.

“Yeah, I think so,” Jim said as he unstrapped from Chen’s red chair, shot up from it, and sighed in relief.

I was in my black captain’s chair, sweating quite badly myself. “Now what?” I said as I watched Chen sit down in his chair.

Jim strapped into one of the free chairs at the back of the bridge and began working at his device again, pushing some buttons there. I was hoping he would illuminate the situation. He didn’t.

I groaned. “Kostas, are you there, for chrissake? We’re coasting away from the station. Should we book away at high speed though?”

“Do whatever you would normally do till you reach the coordinates I sent you; just make sure you set a locked curon bubble for the torsional anomaly as your destination.”

From behind me and on my right, I heard Gary groan; from on my left and on Chen’s left, I heard a small laugh. My eyes whipped to there, and Babs grinned at me and jerked her head toward Gary. Then she slowly shook her head as a little laugh burst from my lips. I could tell she was saying that Gary was still his same-old stubborn self, but, she had no experience with how aggravating dealing with the workers and Keepers could be….

Shirley suddenly said to me that not enough of the crew felt capable of flying the ship now, emergency or not, so a skeleton crew was working in engineering. “Steve drank too much and he’s asleep in his cabin,” Shirley added, and when I looked at her face, it was very red. My eyebrows knitted together as I remembered they had both left the dinner earlier than everyone else, and Shirley had sort of been holding up Steve’s big body then….

I shook my head at that thought; I had more pressing concerns: Karen had sent some numbers to my panel, and the ship’s computer analysis of the numbers showed that we couldn’t work up a strong enough curon stream for another hour, especially because the bubble we’d need to create would have to traverse a space flume to get to The Alexi Layer, which more complicated path would require even more energy than normal.

Now Karen said over the intercom, “Sam finished the rest of the engine-flushing once I fixed the vacuum, but now we need more time to prime the engine for such a strong bubble. I’m—I’m sorry, Captain.” I could tell by the shake in her voice that she felt like she’d fucked up.

“It’s not your fault,” I said to her fast. And then to Kostas: “If you’re there, Kostas, we can’t make a locked bubble to go straight to The Alexi Layer for another hour. Will we be…safe till then?” Everyone on the bridge turned my way now, even Jim. Gary knew what my words meant, but I wasn’t about to illuminate everyone else. My crew needed to do their jobs; I saw no point in making them even more nervous than tonight’s events had already made them.

Fortunately, Kostas never replied to my question, which I really shouldn’t have asked; I hadn’t been circumspect enough, especially around Chen, and now I’d probably made the situation even more tense. But, I was only human too, and, ever since Kostas’ revelation in my room, a dread-of-death feeling kept popping up inside my head, as if the death-boogeyman was constantly right around the corner now, so I should be second-guessing every move I made….

I rubbed at my forehead. “Dammit. On top of everything, I’m getting a headache.”

“Join the club,” Gary said.

“Yeah,” Chen put in on a groan. He was punching at his panel-buttons—quite fast actually, as in, weirdly fast, with his supposedly bad, Keeper-tainted arm and fingers.

My eyes widened at his weird motions. “Chen—are you doing all right?”

“Not really—I mean no and yes. Look at my hand!?”

“I am looking at it,” I said.

“If it keeps it up, it’ll be moving faster than my brain. And we definitely don’t need that happening now.” He sighed. “Gonna switch to my left hand.”

Karen contacted me again to tell me she was pushing the beam-engine priming hard and she could probably get us up two notches in the speed department by traveling in a weak bubble. “We still can’t make a strong enough bubble yet to punch through to The Alexi, but, I think we can hop into a strong locked one from the weak unlocked one, using the momentum of one curon field to jump-start the next one. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve heard others have done it.”

And now I thought, But would it kill us—would this be it?

I didn’t say that to Karen, however. Instead, I told her to get the curon engine ready for the maneuver she’d described.

Then I made another announcement to all of the Demeter’s rooms, including Steve’s room: “We’re going to skip through space using a chain of curon bubbles. We’ve never done it before, so, PLEASE, everyone, get strapped in now.”

Everyone on the bridge did as I said, and, quite soon, Karen was slowly counting down to the weak bubble entry. Once we entered that and the wild silver beams of the bubble space were filling the bridge’s front viewscreen, Karen alerted me that we’d be skipping into the locked bubble in two minutes.

“I hope this works,” Babs said from in the navigator’s seat still. Her head shifted my way, the corners of her mouth slightly turning down. I could tell by the ambivalent expression on her face that she wasn’t looking forward to the jump; nor was she so comfortable on my ship anymore….

Ten-seconds left till the jump into the stronger bubble; my head shot over my right shoulder toward Gary, and his eyes rushed to meet mine. Then the Demeter lurched hard and my head immediately spun toward the front viewscreen and the various angles of the camera views now displayed there.

Typically, when we initiated a strong curon bubble on its own, the space outside would get brighter from the arcing beams as they encased the ship. However, this time, as soon as the Demeter jumped from such a weak bubble to such a strong bubble, the space outside went through a moment of such shocking brightness that I thought we were in the middle of an explosion.

Someone on the bridge yelled something in fear—and Steve’s voice came over the intercom: “What da fuck is happening out there!”

My eyes had been glued to the screen, but I yanked them away to look at my panel and see where Steve had contacted the bridge from: in his room. “Just go back to bed!” I told him.

“I’m in bed. My head’s spinning and we’re in white outside—”

“Steve,” Karen said fast over the line, “I’ve done a skip from an unlocked weak bubble to a locked strong one—”

“Holy shits,” Steve said in an astonished slurred voice, and I heard Gary laugh.

“We made it—we’re fine, Steve!” Karen said now, and there was an excited lilt to her voice, as if she felt very pleased with herself.

“Well, all right—wake me if we’re dead soon—bye,” Steve said.

I glanced over my shoulder at Shirley, whose face was very red again, and she seemed to be avoiding my eyes….

I looked back at the viewscreen: the view had calmed down, had darkened a bit. I could have changed the camera settings to mitigate the bright beams in the view even more, but I usually tended to let the bubble-view do its thing; I had grown somewhat used to disturbances in the appearance of space—

“Excellent work,” Kostas’ voice suddenly said. “You’re exactly where you need to be.”

“How are you talking to us as clear as ever while we’re in a locked bubble?” I asked her.

“Do not worry about that. We’ll discuss more later. Right now, make sure you and your bubble maintain your current speed, and prepare to leave the bubble in six minutes and thirty seconds—I’ll send you a countdown signal.”

Karen spoke, and there was an unsteadiness to her voice now: “I don’t know what you mean: cut off the curon stream at that instant, or begin cutting it off before that deadline so the stream stops at that instant?”

“The latter would be best. You do have some wiggle room. I’m trying to get you as close to us as possible without your overshooting where we are. We’re in the middle of a delicate job inside the torsional anomaly; we’re removing a device that we don’t want to affect, so we must remain stationary with respect to the anomaly. If you overshoot where we want you to go, you will be on your own to get back here, and that will waste more time.”

“Talk about pressure,” Karen said over the line, her voice sharper than normal. I could have sworn I heard her breathing too hard.

“Just do the best you can, Karen,” I said fast. “If you can’t make the cut-off, we’ll deal with any consequences later.”

“Damn,” Karen said now, “we’ve used up a lot of fuel so far—even more than I thought we would. We’ll have enough to make it there, but what about after….”

“Don’t think about it now. Just carry on till the countdown,” I said, taking my fingers off the intercom—and taking a deep breath. My hands were shaking like a flesh earthquake, and I had a pain in the center of my forehead.

I was rubbing there when I heard Kostas’ voice again: “Captain Zarro, I’m happy to tell you that the threat from the mistake has passed.”

Several heads on the bridge whipped my way.

“What threat—what mistake?” Chen asked quickly.

“What are you referring to, Kostas?” Jim said in a wary, unlike-him voice.

“Captain Zarro needed to hear what I said, but we will not waste time discussing this now,” Kostas replied. “I am sending some instructions to your device, Jim, for when you reach the anomaly. You will guide Captain Zarro and her crew.”

“To where?” I said, my hands grabbing the arms of my chair tightly. “I hope you’re not going to tell me we’ve got to climb another mountain.”

“No. No mountains,” Kostas said. “Pay attention to the countdown signal, please.”

“I’m on it,” Karen said. I had just opened the intercom line again and, this time, I left it open permanently, at least for now, so everyone could just talk back and forth whenever. However, I never preferred loud noises and lots of talking on my ship or anywhere else while I needed to do something that required focusing; nor did I think that type of the-line’s-always-open set-up was good for my crew. Sometimes, in the quiet was the best way to work.

 “Two minutes, Captain, and the stream will stop—oh, Steve just walked in,” Karen said now.

I sighed. “I told him to stay in bed—he’s really drunk!”

“Frankly, Captain, drunk or not, I’m glad he’s here. There was just me, Sam and Cambridge.”

“The three of you handled the curon skipping alone?!”

“Captain Zarro,” Cambridge said over the line now, “I was just offering moral support. I came down to check out engineering’s set-up just as the shit hit the fan.” There was a humorous note in his voice. This seemed to be a weird moment for anyone to feel like laughing, when we were on the verge of potentially who-knew-what. However, I, too, needed the levity now.

“It’s hit the fan before here, and it probably will again—the workers are around!” I couldn’t help laughing now, and everyone else on the bridge laughed too, except for Jim. He was staring down at his device.

“You never told me much about them,” Babs said now, looking at me.

“We will—don’t worry—or maybe you’ll learn on your own soon…. I see the numbers, Karen.” I adjusted the intercom to make sure every single area on the ship was accessible, including all of the bathrooms. Then I said, “We’re leaving the curon space and entering the torsional anomaly—stay strapped in, everybody!”

The scene on the front screen rapidly changed from a silvery, striated image to a cloudy, damp-looking space, as if the Demeter had just sailed into a fog over an ocean.

“Excellent,” Kostas finally said. “Your curon stream is off, and so are your other engines.”

Karen said now, “I anticipated you’d want us to turn off everything, Kostas, based on what happened around you in the past.”

“Excellent,” Kostas repeated. “You’re learning. Your ship’s momentum from the bubble is quickly dissipating, due to the superfriction inside the anomaly’s particulate-heavy space. You will come to almost a stop near us, and then you will be locked into our gravity field.”

I squinted at the screen and began enlarging some of the Demeter’s camera views, but every single one only showed the same foggy view of the exterior. “Where the hell are you, Kostas?”

“We’re inside the ‘anomaly’ with you. As I tried to discuss with Gary—and as I’m telling you now, the anomaly is a cloaking field. Your ship and ours are invisible to outsiders now.”

“But the UPG reported extensive damage to one of their ships when it actually penetrated the anomaly years ago,” Gary cut in.

“I never said we Keepers are the only species who use the anomaly. But, you need to ask what, exactly, the UPG ship was doing in here when it had an accident.”

Gary was frowning, and his voice was slower when he spoke this time: “That’s a good point. Well, were you speaking rhetorically, Kostas, or am I supposed to ask YOU what the UPG was doing?”

“They were testing a weapon,” Kostas said. “Their test didn’t go the way they planned.”

“I think I know the incident you’re talking about,” Babs said in an eager voice as she snapped her fingers and glanced at Gary. “Parts of the ship’s tetroxite shell were literally sheared off, and other parts were melted, and then the molecules in the melted areas bizarrely reformed into a type of radioactive substrate that gave off extremely high-energy deformed neutrons. But, as soon as the ship managed to get out of the anomaly, it was as if the radioactivity never happened. Analyses of the reformed material afterward showed no physical evidence of any prior radioactive decay. But the damage to the ship was still done.”

“I don’t know,” I said in a slow voice now. “That sounds like someone used a weapon on the ship.”

“Or maybe like someone stupidly, accidentally used a weapon on themselves,” Jim put in.

“Did anyone die?” Shirley asked. “Deformed neutrons can kill instantly. And you said the hull was pierced, Babs.”

Babs turned her head over her shoulder, then shook her head at Shirley. “You’d think there would be casualties, but I really don’t recall what happened to the crew.”

“Well, I’m assuming we won’t suffer the same fate?” Shirley asked, a tremor in her voice punctuating her question. “Captain Lydia, Kostas said something about a mistake before—”

“Captain Zarro,” Kostas cut in, “you will see our ship, the Monument, coming up on your starboard side.”

“I can’t wait,” I said in a slightly sarcastic voice, but, a moment later, I was feeling stupid over my sarcastic tone because I finally got my first glimpse of the Keeper ship.

It wasn’t the same ship I’d seen the last time I’d met up with the Keepers in space: this black ship was more streamlined and even more massive; there were several large areas of sparkling, silver-and-white, pattern-like streaks on the black, and the ship was so long, the Demeter’s computer couldn’t even detect where the Keeper ship’s shell ended in the far distance, though maybe the anomaly’s particulates were interfering with the Demeter’s equipment.

“Oh my god—that ship’s fucking incredible!” Babs said now, and she said it so fast and hard that spit flew out of her mouth. “Oh my god—the ship’s so incredible that I’m foaming at the mouth!” she added, and everyone on the bridge laughed. Well, maybe Jim didn’t laugh….

As if he knew I was thinking about him, he spoke now: “Kostas had to go do something, so she sent me the information you would understand about where we must go. You will be docking inside the Monument’s port side—”

“Hang on a second—what?” I said fast, twisting around in my seat to look at Jim.

His eyes rose up from his device to my eyes. “You will be journeying with us.”

“I don’t like the familiar sound of that,” Gary replied, his eyes locking on Jim.

But Jim only shook his head. “Don’t worry—it’s not what it sounds like.”

“Yeah,” I said, “in reality, it’s probably worse. I thought we were just coming here to talk, and maybe you crowd could lend us some weapons by now. Do you need a planet to fall on your heads—do I? You implied we’re under threat again. So help us out, in a real way, finally.”

“As you know,” Jim said in his Jim-dull way, “the Keepers are not a war-like species. They—we primarily take care of the Tasui. We document history, both in the past and in the present. But we sometimes must intervene, especially if we’re asked.”

“Intervene in what?” I said on a frown.

Jim seemed to straighten in his chair. “I am sending Karen the necessary information for where and how to dock inside the Monument. We will explain more inside.”

“Goddamn you people,” I growled. But then my anger quickly deflated some. “Karen, just do what he says. What choice do I have? They, well, they scared me into coming here, and now I guess I’ve got to see it through.”

The instructions Jim sent to my ship indicated we had to move toward one of those patterned areas on the Monument’s dark hull.

“Because you are inside our gravity field now,” Jim said, his eyes on his device, “you will only need the proper velocity direction to take you to the door. It will be opening in ten seconds.”

The spot on the Keeper ship did as Jim said; golden light spilled out the huge doorway, which light reminded me of the Keeper areas inside the Rintu mountain. The Demeter slowly closed the gap with the Monument now, but I couldn’t make out any forms inside the golden opening, even when I enlarged my front viewscreen’s image.

“It doesn’t look very interesting inside there,” I mumbled.

“Lydia,” Gary said in one of his sudden, something’s-wrong voices, “the sensors are showing a loss of integrity in the Rodrum Barrier in aft Nozzle 1. One of the electromagnetic connectors seems to have developed a tear in the circuitry.”

“Well, that’s just great,” I said. The Rodrums protected the ship’s engines—and the ship, period—from backflow through the nozzles when the Demeter was traveling in an atmosphere at low speeds or was idling. And I really didn’t need anymore goddamn issues with backflow, especially when we were flying in a particulate-heavy area—

“Jim,” I said, my head whipping in his direction, “did this anomaly area damage my ship?”

“We will be out of this space in a moment,” he said.

“That does not answer my question.”

Unbelievably, Jim blushed. “I don’t have an answer to your question. I am on my own at the moment because both Kostas and the Keepers are busy with that device. I was not a space-faring person when I set out to find Rintu years ago. I was dropped into the gravity cloud in an emergency pod by the ship I hired to take me there and drop me there. I am not a very technically proficient person outside of doing things like manipulating my worker-suit and the Keeper-devices I’ve learned to use.”

“So, you’re telling me we’re supposed to land inside the Monument, but you don’t know a damn thing about my ship—and the Keepers aren’t helping you with the Monument right now?”

Jim lifted his device toward me. “I have the information on here Kostas sent me to give you.”

“Captain,” came Steve’s voice, “we hear what’s happening on the bridge, and I can’t get anymore data than what Gary said about the Rodrum—I don’t know if it’s my fuzzy brain from the booze or what. But when we dock inside, I’ll disconnect the nozzle from the engine-joints and visually check it out.”

“I do believe that won’t be necessary,” Jim said.

“Jim,” Karen cut in over the line, “what are we supposed to do next here?”

“As far as I can tell, you are exactly where you need to be to enter the Monument.”

Jim’s “as far as I can tell” was apparently not that far, because as the Demeter finally nosed its way into the golden Monument space, I heard a loud craaaaaaack.

I nearly shot out of my seat, half in fear, half in anger—I wasn’t sure which I should feel—

“Was that you or us?!?” I demanded in Jim’s direction.

“It was you,” Jim said, in a very small voice.

“Dammit,” Steve said over the intercom. “We’ve got damage to the hull, over where the forward weapons-array protrudes.”

I threw up my hands. “Ah, more great stuff! More great timing!”

Karen’s voice: “Captain, look at the view—we’re in all the way now, and we’re slowly being turned around.”

“Just don’t work any of your equipment right now,” Jim said, but I felt really dubious about anything he could say about landing in the Monument.

“Keep a close eye on the numbers till we’re 100% still inside here, Karen,” I said fast. Then my eyes fixed on the viewscreen.

Now that we were inside the Monument and we didn’t have the anomaly’s matter clouding our cameras, the Keeper ship’s interior space looked even brighter. It also looked bigger—a lot bigger. The area here was very level and it apparently stretched far into the distance both behind and on the left side of the Demeter. The hangar wall on the right side appeared to be half-stone and half the same shiny black building-material that was common on Rintu. It definitely looked like we were in another of the city-ships from there.

I asked Jim about that, and he replied: “Yes, we are. This is one of the largest we have. And you are the first non-workers to be inside it.”

The Demeter finally stopped. And I quickly undid my strap and stood up to face Jim. “Thanks for the honor, but once again I’m screwed here.” My hand shot out in no particular direction. “Will you use that yellow beam-thing of yours to fix my problems this time? I’ve got an outer-hull breach and part of the forward weapons-array has been CRUSHED—I only just bought the fucking thing!”

“I can’t answer your questions,” Jim said in that small voice again. “But you are here now, hopefully for a time. I misspoke before: you have a choice here. I didn’t mean to suggest we will be forcing you to do anything. Though we do need you to do something.”

I didn’t know how to respond to his semi-conciliatory mouthful, and my other crewmembers on the bridge and around the ship were now discussing what to do about the damages….

“You know what, Lydia?” Babs suddenly said, sounding a bit out of breath. “I see why you were reticent about my coming on here again. You were right; things have changed. And in such a bizarre way.”

“Yeah!” I shot out now, shaking my head and sighing.

*

My crew and I finally had a few moments to catch our breath; Jim told me the workers needed a bit more time to prepare some things on the Monument. I shrugged at Jim, but my mind was on the state my ship was in, the broken state, which had unfortunately become a much more common occurrence lately.

I was still on my bridge now, but I was coordinating with Karen and Steve down in engineering on the damages—and trying to answer any questions my crew had, including from Cambridge, who had joined us all on the bridge.

“I don’t think I’ve had this much excitement since the last time I was on Diamond ten years ago!” Cambridge said. “Do you crowd always have such strange stuff to do?”

“Um, yeah—lately,” I said in a dry voice.

“I’m trying to get a reading on the glossy black material out there in the hangar,” Babs said, from the navigator’s seat and panel still. “But there’s a substance I can’t understand interrupting the molecular structure of the lumenite—at least I think it’s lumenite—”

“Don’t frustrate yourself, Babs,” Gary said. He was standing beside me now; I was in my chair. “On Rintu, I worked on that for days, and every time I thought I came up with the answer, I’d then get data that negated it.”

“Well,” Babs said on a frown, “maybe the mysterious compound changes composition.”

Gary pointed a forefinger her way. “Exactly.”

Kostas’ voice again: “Captain Zarro, please have all of your crew exit your ship. Jim, lead them to the small meeting room. Devin is opening the door now.”

On my front viewscreen, a small, bright, rectangular spot appeared on the hangar’s massive side wall.

“My crew and I will be there in a little bit,” I finally said to Kostas.

*

My “little bit” wound up being more than a little bit because some of my crew were worn out from our emergency exit from Makron and from our stay on there—like Matt, who uncharacteristically said to me, “I’m too tired to deal with worker bullshit now.”

I had gone to get him in his cabin, and he was still in his pajamas. He was so beat that he’d slept in his cabin wall-straps through half the emergency flight from the station, and he hadn’t even had any booze at dinner. However, he had been on alert all day at Makron Station; that must have taken a toll: his big body was slightly hunched now, his eyelids slightly puffy.

I patted him on his back in a sympathetic yet vigorous way as I coaxed him toward his cabin door. “Matt, we’re all beat, but you know how it goes with the Keepers. We’ve got to go out there now.”

“In my PJs?” he crabbed.

“Yeah, in your PJs.”

*

Every member of my crew finally made it down to the cargo bay; then May punched the wall-controls to open the inner and outer doors. Chen and Jim moved to beside her, and the three of them walked out of the ship and onto the ramp; everyone followed them, including me. Babs and Cambridge were behind me, and they remained behind me as we walked across the flat expanse of the Monument’s hangar, then through the doorway into the “small” meeting room, which looked as big as an auditorium.

The golden lighting here was very strong, as if a sunny day were locked inside the space, and on the right side of the room at the front, there was a lit-up console, which the worker Devin was operating. He wasn’t wearing an orange worksuit, however. Neither was Kostas when she walked in from a doorway near him. They were both wearing worksuits that looked like the same shape and fit as the orange ones, but these suits were red-wine colored.

“What’s with the new suits?” I blurted out, my voice slightly echoing in the cavernous space—though I thought that the wine color of the suits was definitely an improvement for human skin tones, and the color looked especially regal on Kostas’ tall, straight posture.

“Hello again, Captain Zarro and everyone else from the Demeter,” Kostas said now in a serious voice as she stopped at the head of the room, quite close to where Devin’s quick, dark hands were moving over that console. “Based on some of your complaints and on some new functions we wanted to introduce, we’ve created this new suit design. Devin and I have been testing it. We’ve used a different material, one that’s more flexible.”

“Kostas, when the orange suits disintegrated on my ship, they left puddles of goo on the floors, but then the goo quickly hardened into flat plates.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, meaning it for Jim. “Jim collected all the orange plates; he’s got them in his cabin.” I looked over my shoulder for him, but my eyes couldn’t locate him in the crowd of my crew. A few of my crewmembers smiled at me, including Gary.

I smiled back, my eyes lingering on his face, till Kostas said, “The orange material is from another galaxy, as is this red material. We will recycle the orange plates for another use.” She seemed to straighten up even more. “Now, we must get started. Oh—thank you for coming; I wanted to say that before we got started. I am improving in my interactions with you, I hope.”

I almost laughed at the mechanical way she’d said that, but her thank you was definitely better than the way she’d talked the first time I’d met her. So I smiled at her now.

She glanced at Devin. “Devin?”

“I’ve got the images loaded,” he said.

Kostas moved to the right side of the room even more, and the dark plane of the wide front wall suddenly brightened as the strong golden light above us dimmed.

My crew behind me were very silent; I wondered if some of them were sleeping. I hoped not, but I didn’t look at them again. I wanted to give my complete attention to the front of the room….

Moving images suddenly sprang to life on the wide wall, and those images made me and a bunch of my crewmembers catch our breath.

My eyes roamed over the vast collection of large, sparkling, planetary spheres floating in the cosmos on the wall; between the spheres, there were bright dots and threads of connecting matter, which seemed to be holding the spheres up in a framework in the black of space. There must have been thousands of spheres, and as I watched them, it seemed as if I was moving past them, through the overall structure, while the spheres somehow kept disappearing into the distance, kept getting smaller and smaller, till they were just points of light and the framework was no longer visible.

Now Kostas began, “You are looking through an area of this universe that humans have never accessed; you probably would not be able to access it with only human technology. Accessing it is a lengthy, staged process even for the Keepers. This area is inhabited by various species who are hard to understand and difficult to deal with….” I had to hold back a laugh at this point: the words “pot-meet-kettle” were going through my head. “…One of these species has been at war with its own kind on its own planet for many years,” Kostas continued. “It is not a conventional war by human standards. This is literally a war of words, but it has physical consequences, especially as territory and other goods are often turned over by the loser of each battle, assuming a battle ends, and some battles there don’t end.

“Unfortunately, the situation there has been escalating for some time, but it’s been a slow, predictable escalation—”

“Hang on a second—I’m confused,” I said on a frown. “What does all this have to do with you Keepers? Why do you bother with things in the present? Jim also mentioned you do this sometimes, but doesn’t that interfere with your archiving work?”

Kostas nodded, quite fast. “Most certainly. But some things are so important that we must take action, especially if we’re asked to intervene. We don’t prefer this, we don’t prefer altering live history, or any path, like we had to do in your case,” Kostas finished, looking right at me now. “However, based on our analyses of the future in our path-library, if we do not interfere here, we are quite sure there would be a war-caused event that would lead to the collapse of the interplanetary framework pictured on the wall, which collapse would be so catastrophic that spacetime would begin vibrating, causing massive, destructive waves that would reverberate throughout this universe, especially in the layer the Earth is in, as this interplanetary framework is connected to that layer. Now do you see how important dealing with this problem is?”

No one from my ship responded—maybe because all of our mouths were dangling open. My heart was pumping much too hard; I felt someone grab my right hand—Gary. His brown eyes softened at me, but his mouth below was curled into a sad expression.

 “Months ago,” Kostas continued, “we had examined your likely future path again and saw an intersection with the warring species, but the intersection was not supposed to happen till years from now. However, something has changed, and had you not come here today, the catastrophic framework collapse would have definitely happened, and in a much shorter period of time. That you continue on the current path you’re on is very important to the future.

“We workers have less than six weeks to solve this crisis and train you and your crew as if you are workers, so you can help us address this issue with more knowledge and experience.”

My mouth fell open again. “How long did it take you to train?”

“Several years—”

Loud groans from me and my crew. Then I said, “And you expect us to do it in weeks?!”

“You did not let me finish my sentence,” Kostas said on a sigh. “I am a full worker. You will be using worker tools, because I’m assuming you do not want to be full workers. You don’t need to know so much, at least not yet, if you won’t be remaining over the long term. And you will always have us full workers and of course the Keepers around while you’re training. You will not be here alone now.

“We Keepers have also decided that we want to acquire more people—more humans we trust—to learn what our work is, in case we should fail someday or evolve away from what we do. Then there would at least be an outside record of the steps that can be taken so others can continue to do our work.”

My astonished eyes were fixed on Kostas’ face as I said, “I’m honestly beginning to question your grasp on reality…. What can we really do? According to you, it would take years for us to reach your level, and then it would only be subject to human abilities still.”

“There are many things that need to be done,” Kostas said, “and there are possibly many ways to do them. Just like beings evolve, so might the notion of what a worker is, and what a worker does, also evolve.

“But let me take one step at a time. I’ve gone too far ahead because I’ve been talking about two separate issues: One, the specific case of the current problem we need your help on, and, Two, our relationship in the long term.

“Let’s focus on the current problem. Don’t worry too much about the future, especially its specifics. Just be aware of the importance of the future. I think that should be enough to help you make the correct decisions in it, decisions that will be best for everybody, including you.”

“Well,” I said, “right now, I need more specifics about what you want me and my crew to do.”

Kostas’ dark eyes seemed to pierce my face. “We all must move forward as soon as possible to address this current threat. Part of that will be your making a decision now—to come with us.”

A majorly loud silence fell over the room—like, everyone-was-holding-her-fucking-breath loud.

When I spoke now, my voice came out a bit squeaky. “Come with you—how and to where? While I don’t have any jobs planned for right now, something could come up—”

“Never mind jobs on your ship. You must remain on our ship,” Kostas said.

“Hey,” I said now, my face hotly reddening, “what the fuck are you talking about—especially with that MUST. I don’t MUST do anything with you. How many times have I been over this, including with Jim?” I glanced over at him—shot an angry look over at him really; he had finally appeared, and he was standing not that far from me. “He hasn’t told you that?”

“There’s no need,” Kostas said. “We know how you feel about interacting with us. I don’t blame you. There are risks, but there are also rewards. What if I told you you’d get to see Upal and Settaly again?”

My heart was pounding too hard for comfort. I blinked, finally letting out a hard breath, through my nose. “You do know how to be persuasive. But are you just bullshitting me? You once told me I wouldn’t be able to see them again.”

“Things would change if you were working with us on a more permanent basis, but I’m getting ahead of the issue again. A problem we believe you now have is: how long do you think your ship will last, given the amount of work you get across the galaxy? It seems to me—and probably to you if you admit it—that you haven’t really planned for that. Can you afford to buy a whole new ship? If you work with us, you won’t have to.”

Kostas flicked a hand toward Devin, and he manipulated his console; the images on the wall dropped away till the wall looked back to normal, and the golden light above us strengthened again.

Kostas walked to the middle of the wall, then turned to face me and my crew. “And then there is this other problem: the universe where the Keepers originated from is connected to this universe. And one of the entryways from there is near The Reimark Layer.”

My eyes shot toward Kostas’ eyes as I began to see where she had been going with all of this. And on my right, Gary’s feet in his brown shoes nervously shift around on the gray floor.

“Not all sects of Keepers agree on how Keepers should lead their lives,” Kostas said, her voice containing a slightly dry tinge. “And, though it is hard for us to admit it, the truth is that there are rogue Keepers.”

“Well, that’s awesome,” someone said. It sounded like Steve’s deep tones, but I was too stunned by Kostas’ words to turn around. It didn’t help that when she moved her hands now, I saw that they were shaking a little.

She sighed now, a long drawn-out sound. “Captain Zarro, had you gone to Barton-2, a crewmember of Claudius’ ship would not have spotted your ship at Makron Station, as he has indeed done. And then Claudius wouldn’t have used a certain device he now possesses to scan the area…and then he wouldn’t have found Jim on your ship. All workers have a Keeper chip inserted in their anatomy somewhere, especially to more readily accept Keeper mind-links. Some devices from other places in the universes can detect Keeper materials.”

Jim’s mouth had fallen open at Kostas’ words, just like my mouth had. Apparently, even he hadn’t been told about everything that was going on, including, it seemed, the part related to his existence and possible welfare.

I said fast to Kostas now, “So that’s when my crew and I would have died.”

I probably shouldn’t have blurted out that whopper; the room erupted—my crew gasped in shock and started shuffling around.

Shirley yelled, “What?!”

And someone else said in a nervous voice, “Can we go back to the Demeter now and get the hell out of here?”

“Please, everyone,” Kostas said, her voice loudening, “let me explain: when you left Makron, it seems Claudius would have kidnapped Jim and destroyed your ship. But, we’ve intervened and prevented that from happening, which was not as difficult as it seems when the kidnapping wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, at least that appears to be the case.”

“What do you mean ‘appears to be’?” I said in a more alarmed voice now. “Can it happen later than you thought—Claudius knows Jim was on my ship—can he find this ship now? Could Jim be tagged somehow?” I glanced at him again, saw that his mouth had clamped shut and his eyelids were weirdly twitching. Geena had also moved to stand on his other side. And her open mouth trembled….

At the front of the room, Kostas was frowning. “We’ve found no evidence that Jim has been ‘tagged,’ but, we can’t completely discount it, considering we now know Claudius has at least one device he shouldn’t possess. It’s possible he has more.”

“How the hell did you let this happen!” I said in a harsh voice, harsh because I was worried and angry at the same time, though not really at the Keepers—but at that scumbag, Claudius.

Kostas’ frown deepened. “How many times have I indicated that we can’t control everything?”

“And what, specifically, do you want us to do?” Matt asked from somewhere in the room.

“We want you to become part of the crew of this ship,” Kostas said simply.

“What?!” one of my crewmembers said.

“Hell no,” said another.

Then Sam said on a weary, long sigh, “I’m too old for all this.”

“No one is too old for anything,” Kostas said. “This is especially the case inside the worker-suits: the longer you’ve been wearing them, the more they slow down the aging process. As you know, they are capable of giving medical treatment. You just need to know how to work the controls. You’ve had a little taste of that on Rintu. Getting more than a taste, again, takes time. It is your choice what to do with your time.”

 Matt spoke up again: “This is all well and good, but, newsflash: some of us have family and friends elsewhere. I want to see my mom again on Diamond.”

“We never said you would be unable to talk to other humans again, especially if you don’t actually become full workers with us. But how much of a change would more permanently remaining on here really be? You’re all out in space on the Demeter for most of the year. You don’t see your relations then.”

I had to admit, Kostas had a point there. Although it did sound like she was saying my crew and I would have to remain as a part of the Monument’s crew for the rest of our lives….

Kostas stepped closer to us. “We must work together at least temporarily on the current issue of the potential framework collapse. You don’t have to make a decision about a permanent presence on the Monument yet. But, please understand that if you choose to not work with us over the long-term, we will have to block some information inside your minds.”

There were sharp intakes of breath around me.

“Crap,” I said, my face flushing—not that I hadn’t expected what Kostas just said. The Keepers had certainly had no problem wiping information from my ship before.

“You know what?” Gary said now. “I don’t relish the idea of becoming an automaton like you crowd. Sorry for the insult, but I don’t really want to be a worker. I want to be part of a normal spaceship crew.”

Kostas’ dark-haired head nodded fast. “But you will be; only the ship you’ll be in won’t be normal. As I’ve said, you will not really be workers on here. You will be you, but you’ll have daily interactions with us automatons.” There was something in Kostas’ voice; she had visibly directed it at Gary, but I got the feeling she was also talking to herself.

And I wondered then that if we normal humans and the worker humans spent more time together, maybe we normal humans wouldn’t be the only ones learning things.

“We need some time to think about all of this,” I said now, exhaling loudly. “We’re exhausted—this has been a completely crazy day for us, don’t forget.”

Kostas took another step closer to me and my crew. “Of course, but I do believe that once we show you more of the Monument, it will make your decision-making easier.”

“You mean that once we see this fab ship, we’ll be more likely to wanna remain on it?” I said.

Kostas’ mouth twitched, as if she was on the verge of laughing. “You know us well,” she finally said.

*

Really, though, we didn’t know the workers and the Keepers well, and maybe that was indeed a problem: as my crew and I began walking out of the meeting room toward the hangar, Kostas stopped us and said she wanted to take us on a tour of the Monument right then. And I decided to go on the tour.

I had to make extremely important decisions now, and I hated basing decisions on too-little information; going on a tour of this place would probably yield me more information.

Kostas used a control on the meeting room’s right side-wall, and the wall parted. My crew and I followed her through the opening and into a small space containing stone furnishings and dark cushions arranged in a large circle on the floor; then we moved beneath an archway and into a long, narrow hallway. It was darker in here and, for some reason, I suddenly remembered the Demeter’s damages.

“Kostas,” I said, “whether we stay or not, what about my ship?”

She glanced over her shoulder at me. “What about it?

“You know, the damage? Or do you not know?”

“I know about it,” she said. “We’ll deal with that later.”

“But I’m aggravated here—you gave me and my crew bad instructions through Jim—I don’t know what happened, but one of the weapon-systems I just bought is damaged now, and you say Claudius is after me again. Why didn’t you make sure my ship was safe—or did you damage it on purpose so we’d be stranded here?”

Kostas stopped walking so fast that I almost bumped into her.

She turned around. “I didn’t realize you had such an active imagination where we’re concerned. You are entirely misconstruing the situation here.” She sighed abruptly, and her dark eyes seemed to lose focus. “Yes…I agree, Thura.” Kostas’ eyes whipped to mine now. “Change of plan. Back up, everyone, into the previous room, and we will head in another direction.”

“Why?” I asked her as she passed me. I followed her and my crew back through the arched doorway to the room with the cushions, and then Kostas rushed around the crowd of us, so she could lead us through another doorway to yet another cavernous room.

This one was emptier than the cushion-room, however, with only one table and a few cushions on the floor in here—ah, someone must have done something from somewhere to change the space because the wide wall in front of us began sliding along the floor. I thought we’d find another room beyond the opening, but what we actually found was a gigantic view of space, as if the Monument had just been opened to the outside.

I stumbled back from the view; so did my crew. For a heart-pounding instant, it seemed we’d be sucked out.

“How did you do that?” I said, spit flying out my shocked mouth. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

Kostas flashed me a twisted mouth. “Dramatic as well as imaginative.”

She turned back to the opening, and my crew and I quickly calmed down: clearly, if we had just been exposed to space, we would have been dying by now. But we were fine.

“Give us a closer view, Devin,” Kostas said, although I couldn’t see Devin anywhere in the room.

I did, however, see something else: a jagged bright spot on the right side of the view of the cosmos. As I stared at it, the bright spot suddenly expanded to fill most of the wall, revealing that the spot was actually a massive, cubic structure. It was a powdery gray color, and there were deep, uneven grooves over its surface, as if someone had been maniacally carving up the giant object with a spoon. The view suddenly moved into a close-up shot—there was movement on one edge of the cube’s front, and then the sparkling silhouette of a Keeper became clear.

“You complained about your ship,” Kostas said, “and I’m sorry for the damage landing in here caused. But there was zero subterfuge on our part. We simply messed up with the numbers we gave you because we’ve been distracted by something else. This—” her hand jerked toward the opening “—is what we’ve been distracted by.

“The device you’re looking at is an old weapon. We towed it to inside the anomaly so we can take it apart without being observed. The weapon will no longer work—as a whole, I mean. But the parts—the parts can be used to make other weapons. We must carefully dismantle the cube down to its atomic components by hand, because if we use more advanced technology on it, we’re afraid we might lose control of it and it will begin spinning away from our grasp and into another dimension. Though the cube will no longer work as a whole mechanism, it still has a massive amount of energy locked inside, some of which is what we Keepers call ‘pure energy’.

“Dismantling the structure will take us a few more days. You can see one Keeper working on it there, but, right now, the cube is actually inside a complex dimensional field, and there are about three-thousand Keepers going in and out of it.”

I couldn’t take my eyes from the scene out in space. “I hope you Keepers won’t be putting the remnants of this in The Hall Of Devices.”

Kostas tossed me a look. “Of course not. We’ll be recycling the atoms.”

“Into what?” someone asked.

“Into energy. The atoms are not a normal form of atom, and they will still possess nearly all of the energy of the former cube, but the energy will be dispersed among various containment fields so will be safe to be around. We Keepers can disassociate matter of any kind down to its most fundamental components at the smallest of measures, and we can obtain enormous amounts of energy that way. This is how we power many of our structures. But, we’ll discuss more of that later, once you hopefully begin training here. Devin, close the opening.”

When the view of the cube began fading, I sighed, feeling a bit disappointed. Then I began thinking about that training word….

“So, are you going to take us on that tour?” I finally asked.

And Kostas replied, “I wondered if seeing the cube might be enough for you to get the picture.”

“I’m starting to,” I said, frowning slightly, but to myself really.

*

Kostas had made the correct move in showing me the cube: my first glimpse of it had somehow changed something inside of me; or, at this point, I was so worn out by recent events, I was too tired to fight anything anymore.

I asked Kostas to take us on a tour of the Monument later. “We really do need to get some rest,” I said.

Kostas led us back toward the hangar now. As we moved, from on my left, Chen said, “So, Kostas, how big is this ship really? It seems like you barely took us anywhere.”

“You’re correct,” Kostas said.

I glanced at Chen, my eyes falling on his right arm. His dark sleeve covered the area, and I realized now that I’d totally forgotten about his problem. It was on the tip of my tongue to demand more answers from Kostas about that, but the rest of my crew was here, and I didn’t want to embarrass Chen.

Gary came up on my right side, very close, and he must have seen something in my profile. “What is it, Lydia?” he whispered. “You look confused.”

“Aren’t you?” I asked him.

A sigh was his only response.

*

When Kostas and my crew and I reached the hangar where the Demeter was, I turned to Kostas and said, “There’s something I don’t understand: I know you were busy elsewhere, but why the hell didn’t you just pull my ship in with a tractor beam?”

“Actually, our gravity field did do some of that, but, in our distraction over the cube, we neglected to adjust for the size of your ship. It’s not something we’ve ever needed to do: we have other ships inside this one, but they are quite small. We do not entertain company here. We have never before accepted occupied alien crafts into our city-ships.”

“Thanks for calling me an alien, Kostas,” I said, my mouth tilting into an ironic slant.

Her head turned my way more. “You know that I’m often speaking for the Keepers.”

“I was actually trying to make a joke and lighten the mood between us.”

Her head slowly nodded at me now, the dark waves of her hair shimmering like satin in the golden light from above…. I lifted my head toward the light now, but my eyes couldn’t seem to pinpoint a light-source inside the murky field of yellow above us.

I shrugged, my eyes finally turning toward Babs, who was standing on the Demeter’s ramp with her gaze focused on Kostas—like, really focused on her. Babs’ lips had fallen open. She must have noticed I’d been watching her: she quickly moved her eyes to another part of the mammoth hangar.

“Well, we’re calling it a night,” I said on a sigh, turning back to Kostas. “I’m sure you’ll be here in the ‘morning’.”

 “Yes,” Kostas said, nodding.

*

“What an insane day,” Babs said to me when we were in her new room on the Demeter. “Even when I was running around Genteran chasing the Ghost, I could go back to a station and things would be normal there—of course they were boring, too.”

I smirked. “Yeah, we haven’t had the boring problem on the Demeter in a long time.”

“Lydia, it looks like we’re all at a major, MAJOR crossroads here,” Babs said. Her two beige travel bags and her silver suitcase were on the bed, and she was removing clothes from the bags and stuffing them into the brown dresser on the side wall.

There was an easy chair with soft, red upholstery near me. I fell back onto that comfortable cushion, finally pressing a hand to my forehead. “I can’t speak for everybody on here. I don’t even know what to say to Gary about this.”

“I’m almost positive he’ll go wherever you go. I honestly don’t know how I didn’t see it sooner: you and Gary are meant for each other. I really wish I could find something like that,” Babs finished, and the sad tinge to her voice pulled my eyes up toward her.

“Babs, there are billions and billions and BILLIONS of people in the universe now. And half of those people are women.”

“Yeah, but the problem is: most of them are straight. It’s harder when you’re not; right off the bat, the odds of your finding someone really compatible with you are smaller. There are a smaller number of possible personalities who’ll fit with yours. If you’re an oddball person and gay, your pool of mates to choose from winds up being pretty small. When relationships break up then, you don’t know if you’ll ever be in another one again.”

“Babs, everyone has that problem.”

She had been placing a t-shirt inside the dresser, but she nodded tiredly now. Then she walked back to her suitcase and removed a small, clear container. At first I only glanced at it, but something green inside it was shining so brightly that my eyes went to the container a second time and finally saw what looked like elongated pellets inside. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh,” Babs said, moving the container till it was closer to beneath the central track-lights on the ceiling. “These are stool samples from Genteran.”

My eyes widened. “Babs, you crazy lady, are you telling me you brought the turds of Genteran’s Ghost onto my ship?”

Babs cringed—then she laughed, loudly, and lifted her container a little in my direction before placing it on top of the dresser. “You’re gonna complain about that when we’re sitting on a city-ship with a bunch of monotone humans speaking for a race of sparkly aliens who want us to save the universe from a collapsing framework in space?”

“Well,” I said, “when you put it that way.” I rolled my eyes now, punctuating the motion with a slow head-shake. “The Keepers and the workers are truly unreal. And now they want me of all people to join them. You’re right: things can’t get any stranger at this point.”

“I must say, though, that Kostas—wow.” Babs sighed as she sat back on the edge of her bed. “What a gorgeous head of hair, and those cheekbones and eyebrows—she looks like an ancient Greek god.”

I just stared at Babs for a moment, because the person she had described didn’t seem like the Kostas I knew. But then, duh, I didn’t really know her.

I did know Babs, however. “Well,” I said again, “I must discourage you from any sexy thoughts there, Babs. It’s bad enough that Jim has driven Geena up a wall. If you know what’s good for you, don’t get involved with a worker—if they would even get involved with you. Of course that’s yet another reason why I don’t want to become one of them.”

“Me either,” Babs said, and she sighed again, running the fingers of both of her hands through her bob of dark hair, then over her temples, as if she had a headache.

I jumped off my chair. “Babs, it’s time for me to leave you alone. Get some sleep. I’ll know—and figure out more by morning.”

*

For once lately, a prediction of mine was spot on.

Gary spent that night with me in my cabin, and we talked for hours, hashing out the potential difficulties in whatever direction we now chose to go toward the future. But once I fell asleep and had slept for quite a lot of hours, I felt as if I could make a decision with a clearer head—and I felt like making a decision. I only hoped my crew felt the same.

As soon as I showered and got dressed, I went to my bridge and called everyone down to the cargo bay. However, right before I was about to leave the bridge, I walked back to my chair and turned on the front viewscreen.

I looked out at the hangar; it was still huge, it was still golden, and, as far as I could see, my ship was still the only one in the area.

When I finally walked out the bridge doorway and into the hall, I wondered if my looking at the hangar was because I had been hoping that yesterday had all been a dream, or if I had been hoping it wasn’t.

*

“I’m sorry, Captain, but I want to leave,” one of my crewmembers, John, said in a firm voice when we were finally inside the cargo bay.

I had hired him as a temporary worker before the Rintu trek; then I’d had to make him permanent. Now, he didn’t want to be a part of my ship at all.

He had been doing odd jobs in engineering; fortunately, Cambridge had joined my crew now, so I wasn’t worried about a loss of technical workers getting jobs done.

Still, John’s not wanting to stay on my ship bothered me—though this time I wasn’t bothered by a very personal attachment being broken up; John hadn’t been on my ship that long.

But, basically, I just never wanted a flow of people away from my ship for any reason. Once you’ve been inside one place for a long time and you’re completely dependant on it for your survival, you do develop a certain rapport with the others around you. When you lose some of them, the results of the equation you all make when you’re added together changes, and your workflow shifts….

 I sighed, looking around the cargo bay; every single member of my ship was in here now, and for over two hours we had been discussing what to do about the Keeper situation. John wasn’t the only person who wanted to leave; Andrea from the cargo bay also didn’t want to work with the Keepers.

“They frighten me because I can’t understand them,” she said now.

“Maybe it’s just that you need to spend more time around them,” Shirley said, from right beside Andrea.

But Andrea only shook her brown-haired head rapidly. “I didn’t mean there’s some solution to that—I mean I don’t think we can understand them because we’re different species.”

“We might not be able to ever—you’re right,” Babs said. “But then how much do we really understand humans? Every once in a while, I look in a mirror and I don’t know who that chick with the fabulous slick black hair is.”

A few people laughed, and I smiled in Babs’ direction.

“I don’t find this funny,” Andrea said, and I really didn’t appreciate her sour tone, or her sour face. She’d been a member of my crew for a few years now, and I couldn’t recall her having been dourly uncooperative before. If she kept up with the attitude, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go…. How could she even get out of here? That was the question.

“I don’t know,” Matt said from quite close to me. “I’ve slept on this now, and I’m wondering if I should give it more time on the city-ship—and I still don’t like the thought of the mind-wiping crap.”

“No one said your minds would be wiped if you left,” Kostas’ voice suddenly said into the cargo bay.

I frowned. “Can’t you just come in the room, with your whole self?”

“I didn’t want to do that without your permission,” she said, and I was glad that she’d said that.

“Open the door, Matt,” I said, and he walked over to one of the wall control-panels to open the outer bay hatch.

I watched Kostas stride up the ramp and into the bay. Her hair looked messier than yesterday, and one of her hands rubbed at her eyes, as if they were tired.

“If some of you want to leave now,” Kostas said as she lowered her hand, “you can leave on another ship—the Keepers do have a few human spacecraft you can use. Or, of course, you can take the Demeter.”

“No way,” I practically growled. Her respect before for my ship had made me glad; now she was giving out itineraries for it. “I give the orders here. And I’m not staying on this ship of yours without another way off.”

“I was only suggesting what the options are,” Kostas said, her mouth twisting at me a little. “And, as I’ve said, Captain Zarro, we have other Keeper ships inside this one.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how to operate those.” I moved closer to Kostas. “But that’s irrelevant at the moment, because here’s the thing: nearly everyone here wants to remain, so I’ve decided that I’ll try out working on the Monument. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. But, I’m telling you right now, Kostas: I’m sleeping in my own bed. And if we change our minds a few days from now or whenever, we want to be able to leave.”

Kostas nodded. “All right. As you wish.”

“So when can John and I get off of here?” Andrea asked, looking at me, then at Kostas, then back at me again.

“You may leave right away,” Kostas replied.

“What about our memories?” Andrea said, a tremor in her voice now.

“You’ve all misunderstood what we would do: we wouldn’t be removing anything from your brains. We would only apply a field that would make the information about this city-ship and what you’ve experienced and heard here much more nebulous; your memories of us will just be minimized. I have a question for the two of you, though: can you fly a ship?”

“Yes, I can,” Andrea said.

“I know enough to manage,” John added.

Kostas’ back in her red worksuit straightened. “All right then. Come with me so we workers can do the memory-block procedure.”

Kostas walked back out the cargo-bay hatchway, and Andrea and John followed her.

Shirley’s widening blue eyes stared after them. “I can’t believe they’re leaving. I really think they’re making a mistake.”

There were under-the-breath murmurs of agreement from around the room.

*

My crew and I remained in the cargo bay, talking in more detail about the near future.

Matt said then, “Well, if I find I can’t stand it on here, then I’ll be getting the memory-burying too. Christ, what wonderful choices we have.” His gray eyes rolled. “The death of the universe, or the Keepers going at our memories with a ‘minimizer’.”

I frowned, but not only at what Matt had said: if at some point I decided against staying on the Monument, then I’d need to go back to my normal business with the Demeter, and that meant if I left things hanging there now—as in, if I left jobs hanging—my reputation would slide downward. I remembered the commitment I’d made for a new deal with the planet Armine, but now by staying on the Monument, I was effectively saying “no” to the Armine deal, and without even telling the planet’s powers-that-be….

Andrea and John finally came back to the cargo bay; they seemed the same as before, though less grumpy on Andrea’s part, which was good.

Kostas’ voice came into the cargo bay again: “Andrea, John, the effects of the treatment will not show up till the two of you are out of the anomaly. Gather your belongings and I’ll take you both to one of the human spacecrafts.”

Andrea and John left the bay again, and I told Kostas I wanted to watch them fly away in the ship. “Can I talk to them once they’re out of the anomaly? I want to make sure they’re all right.”

“That’s fine,” Kostas said. “When they’re ready to go, meet me outside your ship in the hangar, and we’ll go to one of the viewer-rooms.”

*

When my crew and I were finally standing inside the hangar, saying goodbye to Andrea and John, I felt as if I’d somehow missed making a connection with Andrea while she had been working on my ship; I also felt as if John never really wanted to make any connections on my ship. He had, after all, only been a temporary spaceship worker when I hired him, and he’d only become a more permanent worker on the Demeter because of a freak outside event. Maybe that he was leaving was a sort of righting of the recent events we’d experienced.

The other formerly-temporary crewmembers, especially Nellie and Brayburn—they had worked out much better. They were always quite eager to get involved with whatever tasks people were working on. And I hoped that eagerness would continue into the future, into the unknown future.

*

I was walking behind Kostas out of the hangar now. Gary was on my right; Shirley and Babs were on his right, and the rest of my crew were behind us.

We all walked across the small meeting room, then through a doorway on the left side of the room, then into a series of large rooms, one of which contained several Keepers. All of them were wearing orange robes, but their shadowy heads beneath the hoods of their robes turned in our direction as we walked by.

“Shouldn’t they be working on the cube?” I asked.

“They’re taking a break,” Kostas said over her shoulder.

I noticed Shirley’s head whipping around as we all walked, and that brought me back to more carefully observing our environment, which made me realize that the contents of most of the rooms I’d been to on this ship were just fucking amazing.

Wherever there were consoles, the large buttons on the super-streamlined structures were always arranged in such a clear, orderly fashion, and there seemed to be endless settings for the various viewscreens on the walls, which screens displayed crystal-clear views of space from numerous angles.

Kostas was finally standing in an oblong room, in front of one of the largest consoles I’d seen so far on this ship; she turned on a conventional-looking wall-viewscreen above and behind the console, so we could see Andrea and John on their new ship.

Kostas now said that the environment around us would be masked into looking like the Demeter’s cargo bay. “I’m setting up a duplicating field.”

I flashed a look her way, wondering how she knew enough of my bay to convey an accurate image of it, but her attention was focused on her console. Then she said, “Operating this type of panel will be the first thing we—I—will teach you. You’ll find this arrangement of communications-controls in various areas on the Monument. This button let’s you choose from many types of signals to send and receive, and there are multidimensional options, because ‘the electromagnetic spectrum’ is not really a flat range across the universes; it is a vast, multidimensional phenomenon characterized by qualities other than wavelength, frequency and energy.

“I’ve now contacted Andrea and John by sliding this lever. And this button will accept the video and audio from Andrea and John’s ship in specific.” Kostas’ fingers finally pushed a square blue button; then John’s and Andrea’s faces appeared on the screen.

They were sitting behind electronic panels in the central part of a small, bright bridge; the style of it looked familiar to me. I noticed a large plaque in the back of the bridge—oh, the ship was a Harmon-series craft….

On the screen, Andrea smiled at us. “Hey, everybody—greetings from the Alabaster, and thanks for giving us this ship, Lydia! I know it’s small, but having even a small one has always been a dream of mine—not that I’ll be in space often. I just want the mobility of it all if I decide to move away from wherever I’m at. Thank you for understanding.

“I never said anything to you, but, for a while now, I’ve been feeling like I want to put down roots somewhere. I think I’ll go see my cousin on Diamond. Ever since last year, she’s been asking me to help her out—she owns a big electronics store, and she wants me to co-manage it with her.”

“What about you, John?” I asked.

He grinned at the screen as he sat back in his chair. “The ICFC credits you just gave us are gonna be a big help—Andrea gave me hers, and she’s gonna keep this ship. I’m probably going to do this mining training course on Diamond. I think you know I’ve always been interested in geology. It was on my work-history papers.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling a little.

I talked a bit more with the two of them, and when we said our goodbyes and the viewscreen finally went black, I turned to Kostas: “Your actions made me look like such a generous captain. I feel like shit that I can’t give everyone a ship-sized parting gift and a huge amount of ICFC credits.”

“Showing you up wasn’t my intention,” Kostas said.

“Well, I’ll get over it,” I replied.

*

“How did the Keepers get the ICFC money?” Shirley asked me a little later.

We were in my ship’s dining room, eating at a booth table. Shortly after my crew and I had said goodbye to John and Andrea, Kostas said something urgent had come up about the Keeper work on the cube, and she couldn’t take us on a bigger tour right then. She was supposed to come get us all later….

I shrugged at Shirley across from me. “You know the way the Keepers are. Sometimes it seems like they can make anything happen. But, I’m guessing that the human workers probably made the credits happen.”

“Do you think Andrea and John’ll be all right on the Alabaster?” Geena asked me from beside Shirley.

I had just stuck a crispy piece of potato into my mouth, and I chewed it for a moment before I spoke again. “I don’t know. When they were up there on the screen, I remembered they wouldn’t have any protection now, and I almost said something as a warning.”

“What stopped you?” Shirley asked me.

“Well, we don’t have perfect protection here either.”

“Matt told me he feels redundant—like they’re so powerful on here, why would they need him to protect anything?”

“Is that what he said?” I frowned a little. And a silence fell between the three of us at the table.

Many of my crewmembers were in the dining room now, including Gary, but he had wanted to sit and talk with Steve. They were in a booth farther up the room, and Shirley and Geena were facing them. Shirley’s eyes seemed to keep going to that other table. I glanced over my left shoulder, and Steve caught my eye. He raised his hand at me slightly, smiling my way; then his hand sort of faltered as his eyes moved in Shirley’s direction—

The clicking sound of a glass toppling over—my head whipped back to Shirley and Geena. Shirley was using a cloth napkin to mop up her spilled iced tea. I looked at the wet tabletop; I looked at her; then I looked at Geena, whose mouth turned down a bit as her brown eyes locked onto mine.

I said in a careful voice, “Is something going on?”

“No!” Shirley said, her blue eyes jerking up at me now. “What do you mean? Everything’s fine, Captain Lydia.”

Geena shrugged at me. “Just the usual stuff’s going on.”

I didn’t believe either of them, but I wasn’t going to press them on the issue either: I generally wouldn’t pressure my crew to confide in me on their personal issues, and it seemed something personal had been going on.

My head turned away from Shirley, my eyes roaming over the other crewmembers in the room; we were due to meet Kostas in about an hour.

“Well,” I said now, standing up and looking down at Shirley and Geena, “I’m going to pop into my cabin for a little while. I’ll see you two in the hangar later.”

When I walked away from the table, I stopped at Gary’s and Steve’s table.

“Hello there, Lydia,” Gary said, smiling up at me, his mustache tilting up on one end.

I laughed a little at the teasing look on his face; then I turned to Steve. “I know things have been crazy, but have you had a chance to check out the Rodrum in Nozzle 1?”

Steve shook his head from side-to-side on a frown. “I’m really sorry, Captain. I overslept and, well, my head’s been hurting all day. I took a headache remedy, but the damn thing didn’t work.”

“You should ask the workers to give you something.”

“There don’t seem to be any around compared to on Rintu—it’s strange,” Steve said.

I nodded, slowly. “I said the same thing to Kostas before. She said there are only sixteen on the Monument, other than her and Jim, and half of them are coordinating with the Keepers on the cube.” I frowned now. “That reminds me that I want to ask her about that. Anyway, I’ll see you later?”

I had said that last bit to Gary, and now he grinned up at me and said, “Always.”

*

Later, when my crew and I were finally standing in the hangar, waiting for Kostas to show up, my crew began talking about Andrea and John.

“It doesn’t seem right—messing with their heads,” Cal from my cargo bay said, his ruddy face frowning. He was standing beside Geena, who, going on her sagging cheeks, appeared to be quite down in the dumps now. But then Jim hadn’t come back onto the Demeter since we’d docked inside the city-ship, and I hadn’t seen him around there today either….

“It seems like what’s going on is something really important, or else the workers wouldn’t have taken those measures,” Nellie said to Cal. “They didn’t do that to us after Rintu. But, I admit things have gotten a bit scary now. I hope I’m up to this.”

“What if tomorrow we all decide we aren’t? Can we really just leave then, Captain?” Cal said as I walked closer to him and Nellie.

“I’ll do my best to make sure that happens, if we change our minds.” I raised my voice now, so all of my crew could hear me: “Let’s give this some more time. Maybe our decision will increasingly seem like it was the correct one.”

I began hoping that time would come for me, too, as we followed Kostas through the city-ship on a more extensive tour, which didn’t seem as worker-official as I’d thought it would be: Kostas didn’t only take us to areas that she said we would be training and eventually working in; she also took us to a very relaxing-looking, stone-walled living area, containing numerous floor cushions and ceiling-high racks filled with colorful plants; and then there were the ship’s marble-lined bathing facilities, which weren’t anything like the spartan ones in the Rintu mountain. It seemed The Monument was the equivalent of a Keeper Luxury Liner.

“Oh my—I love this!” Geena exclaimed when we were finally standing in the center of an enormous kitchen area. There were long, sparkling counters and enormous silver cupboards that rose all the way up to the very high ceiling. And then there were the kitchen’s seven pantries, filled with bushels of fruits and vegetables and numerous loaves of what Kostas said was blue bread.

“It’s highly nutritious and we cut it into pellets and dry it for snacking on,” she added.

“It sounds like they’d be good candidates to keep as emergency rations in the worksuits,” I said.

She fixed a wide-eyed look onto me. “That’s an excellent idea.”

I shrugged. “I haven’t been without emergency food on me ever since Rintu. I keep petrified health crackers in my captain’s belt.” I slapped my middle where my little cracker stash was in my red belt. “That reminds me—when will we get worksuits?”

“One of the other workers is testing the programming on them,” Kostas said. “They will be ready by the end of today.”

“What is today?” Shirley asked. “I’m very confused by the time on here—I mean, we’ve got our ship’s Earth time, but I’m feeling that slight dimensional disorientation. Though it’s not nearly as bad as it was on Rintu.”

“You’ll get used to being on here and will stop having any disorientation,” Kostas said. “Just like with the new suits, we have made some slight changes in this ship’s science in preparation for your staying with us.”

“Oh, thank you!” Shirley said on a smile.

“I know we just ate, but I’m feeling hungry again,” someone else said. There were a few murmurs of agreement in the room.

Kostas looked over the crowd of us. “Actually, I was going to suggest we take some fruit and eat it in one of the garden areas. After that, we will begin instructing you on Keeper science in the meeting rooms. Captain Zarro, you’ll have to split your crew into three parts, and I’ll leave it your discretion who will be in your group, which I will teach.”

I nodded at her. “So, where are these gardens you mentioned?”

“We will take an elevator-type mechanism to the top of the Monument. We keep the natural areas there, so they will receive a lot of direct starlight. The natural areas are very large spaces.”

Kostas wasn’t kidding: when we finally reached one of the gardens, it felt so spacious as I walked around inside it, I began forgetting I was on a ship. Only the very top of the garden revealed its true nature; I could see the dark of space and the faint motions of the anomaly’s particulates swirling above us.

“This is definitely beautiful,” Gary said from beside me as he chewed on an orange-colored apple. His eyes were on a tall tree with cherry-red bark and tiny, very-delicate blue blossoms. The tree’s arms seemed to extend to the very top of the garden, as if they were reaching up into space. Visually, there was no cover over the garden; apparently, it was encased in a completely transparent field. I thought I would begin to feel sick because there didn’t seem to be any protection from space, but, something about the plants around me was very soothing.

I took deep breaths, exhaled in long sighs….

“You look completely relaxed and happy,” Gary said in a soft voice. “I haven’t seen you like this in a long time. I wish I could see you like this more often.”

“I wish I could feel it more often. I didn’t expect this here—”

“You will find many unexpected things in the days ahead,” Kostas said as she came up on my other side.

Babs had been trailing behind her, but now she walked ahead of Kostas, to touch one of the ground plants across from us.

“I know this species, lavonda paradisa,” Babs said, her fingers touching the plant’s fine, sapphire-blue fronds. Her head jerked over her shoulder. “How is it here? It’s not supposed to grow anywhere but on the Paradise Moons—it needs extreme root-heat and molten components, so it grows from deep within the crust there inside magma pools.”

Kostas pointed at the lavender-colored, crumbly material beneath the plant. “We have the proper base.”

Babs turned all the way around to us, her mouth dropping open. “The average lavonda root-length is 1500-feet long! Surely the earth on this deck isn’t that deep.”

Kostas’ face changed ever-so-slightly—into an almost smile. “We have a larger collection of lavonda down the path. I’ll explain some of the science….”

Kostas began walking along the gray, earthen path, and Babs followed her.

Gary and I watched them for a moment; then Gary looked upward, toward space. “Every time I think they can’t surprise us anymore, they do.”

“I guess that’s why we’re still hanging around them,” I said, on a sigh.

*

Of course, that wasn’t the only reason we were with the Keepers now: we had work to do, important work, work that was supposed to save the universe. When I thought about that, a part of me couldn’t believe it; the other part wanted to laugh, especially that anyone would think I had some importance to the universe. But Kostas had insisted.

And when I and twenty more of my crewmembers were finally sitting in one of the meeting rooms and Kostas was standing at the head of it, holding a small silver device in her hands, she repeated how important our intersection with that warring species’ path was, only, this time, she added that she was sorry everything was so rushed.

“As I’ve told you, we thought the crisis would be years from now, but then we recently recalculated it and realized we had miscalculated; we now believe the deadline is weeks from now.”

“You believe or you know?” Chen said. He and May were sitting in chairs on my left, but Gary was between me and Chen. I had assigned Steve to another class and Karen to the third one, so every one of our classes would have a higher level engineering-person present; Gary was that person for my group….

Kostas was speaking again, and her eyes were right on Chen this time: “Based on calculations we’ve done, we estimate we have only weeks to achieve as much as possible to fix the problem. We’ve added files of pertinent information to your workbooks. And we’re recording each of these classes, so you can all freely rewatch them on your workbooks at your leisure.”

I wished the workers had thought to put desks in the room: I was now on-top-of-my-knees balancing one of the flat, silver, digital workbooks Kostas had given us to write on, which was quite similar to the type my engineering crew sometimes used.

My workbook’s silver stylus was in my hand now; I quickly wrote, Don’t forget to ask Kostas about my fuel situation!! on my workbook’s pale screen. Then I glanced to my right: Babs was there, and Cambridge was behind her and beside Shirley. The rest of my crew were scattered around the room, in haphazard ways, apparently so some of them could stretch their legs more in front of them. I wished I could do the same, but I felt like I had to act all tense and captainly while I was in an official learning environment, especially an official Keeper learning environment….

“I am sorry,” Kostas suddenly said in a rushed voice, her eyes locking onto her small device. “I must attend to something with the cube. We will meet here again in three hours and try again. Take a rest for now.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Wherever you want,” she replied. Her fingers reached for one of her red worksuit sleeves; then she was gone from the room.

Blinking at where she had been standing a moment before, I sighed hard. Then I looked around the room at my crew. “Well, you can all go wherever you want, but I’m going back to the Demeter.”

*

Everyone in the meeting room followed me, and, as far as I knew, so did every one of my crewmembers from in the other rooms; their “teachers” had taken off too. I probably should have done a head count of my crew as we moved toward my ship, but I was suddenly very tired. I needed a nap badly.

When I reached my ship, I went straight up to my cabin, collapsed back onto my bed, and fell asleep….

When I next woke, I glanced at the little clock readout on my belt beside me—I had slept for a little over two hours. I sighed as I got up and stretched my back; then I grabbed my belt and slipped it back on. When I picked up my worker-workbook from on my nightstand, I saw my reminder to ask Kostas about my ship’s fuel situation—

My wall intercom beeped. It was Steve.

“Yes, Steve…” I said, stifling a little yawn.

“Captain, I’m looking at the damaged Rodrum circuitry inside Nozzle 1. I can rig a makeshift repair, but I’m afraid it’s not gonna hold up for very long. We need a smoother replacement join in the wiring, and I don’t have the material on the ship for that.

“And the weapons-array on the nose—Karen and Gary have taken another look at the data there, and Cambridge and Sam were just over there on one of the platforms, running a close-up scan—it’s the same kind of problem. We don’t have the materials to fix it—I mean, you’re not gonna like this: Cambridge said he could work on re-welding where the front of the release cylinders got crushed, but, he can’t promise that the weapon would fire at the same maximum speed because release cylinders on arrays are made with a composite material that’s cast in one go. Any further melting and rehardening lowers the cylinders’ electromagnetic tolerance. It’s best to replace the whole damn cylinders, but we don’t have any replacements on board.”

“Dammit,” I said on a frown.

“So, what do we do about all this now?”

I thought for a moment, my still-tired brain finally completely waking up.

Then I said, “I’m going to see Kostas.” Then I walked across my room and out the door.

*

“Kostas?” I said as I moved across the hangar now. “I need to talk with you.”

“I’m in the viewer-room where you saw the cube-view,” Kostas’ voice said.

I walked to that viewer-room—ran really, my irritation fueling my feet.

When I reached the room, Kostas was alone inside it. The first time I’d seen this large space, it had looked quite bare, but there must have been equipment hidden in the walls then, because now there were what looked like computer monitors on long consoles against a side wall, as well as a few metal chairs with fat cushions on their seats and backs. Kostas was sitting on one of the chairs in front of a console, near the large front viewer-wall, which was closed now.

I didn’t waste any time: “Kostas, Steve just told me we can’t fix my frigging nozzle or my weapons-array. But I know you can easily fix them.”

Kostas turned to me, to slowly shake her head from side-to-side. “No, we cannot, actually. Repairing your ship last time took a lot out of those who did it. They’ve rested up since then and recharged of course. But, right now, all available Keepers are still working on dismantling the cube. You’re not going anywhere in your ship just yet anyway.”

My lips had fallen open. “That’s all you have to say? Did you even hear me? I’m stuck here now, and I frankly can’t stand that happening anywhere.”

“As I’ve said, we can’t do anything about your ship now.” She tossed a hand at her console, where several sets of red and orange lights arranged in arcs were blinking quite rapidly. “Unfortunately, the cube work is going slower than we thought it would, and we can’t—”

Groaning quite loudly now, I rushed away from her and out of the room before I could start yelling at her.

When I finally stepped into the hangar, I was still fuming inside—fuming hot enough for Gary to tell I was fuming simply by looking in my eyes when he walked off the Demeter’s ramp and up to me.

“They won’t help,” he said flatly.

“NO!” I exploded.

“Well, we don’t really need the Rodrum in space, provided we aren’t going into any nebulae, or, um, this here anomaly….”

“Yeah, that’s the problem!”

“You think we can’t leave, in other words.” He paused—to sigh. “It certainly does look like that at this point.”

“Gary, it’s one thing to choose to do this crazy mission; being stuck here is another. It’s feeling like Rintu all over again.”

“Was it so bad?” Gary said now, really surprising me. “I think we did a good thing—I was reticent at first—I mean you know how worried I was. But, we managed to come through it all right.”

“Aren’t you forgetting Chen’s arm? It’s worse than he says it is for him—psychologically, I mean. May told me he’s afraid to touch her with it, and he won’t let her sleep on his right side.”

Gary’s frown now was swift. “Well, that sounds bad. I didn’t know that.”

“Why would you? And don’t tell Chen I said it. May told me in confidence.”

Gary’s fingers whipped across his mouth, mimicking a zipper motion. “My lips are sealed. And now, how about you seal mine with a kiss?”

I couldn’t help laughing; then I quickly did as he’d asked.

*

No matter our affection at the end of our conversation, all the other subjects of that conversation were still problems that needed addressing. I knew Chen was in psychological pain; for all I knew, he would be in physical pain again at some point. And we were still somewhat forced to remain in this city-ship. It was an amazing place, like something out of a space-traveler’s dream; however, other things attached to the city-ship could wind up turning into nightmares….

Still, maybe I needed to lie back more, to not stress so much about what might happen in the future, as Kostas had said to me. Sometimes you can push so hard to get answers that you wind up pushing the answers away from you.

Gary had gone back into the Demeter to talk to Steve, and I was about to step onto the ramp when I heard Kostas’ voice coming from behind me, from inside the hangar.

 “Lydia, you ran off before I could finish everything I had to say. You are welcome to use whatever materials we have here to fix your nozzle and any other problems. Or, we can take you wherever you want to go. If there were an emergency and you needed to fly a non-Keeper ship out of here, we have those, just as we had for Andrea and John.

“But, you are here now. And don’t you think that at this stage of your life you should start thinking beyond the Demeter?”

Kostas had once again hit on something my heart knew but my mind hadn’t wanted to see lately: my ship was getting old, and not in a good way. I would have some financial and logistical decisions to make within the next few years, and going off with the Keepers would at least put off my having to make those decisions.

And that was why I finally, right-then-and-there decided to go on this mission with them and do the worker training. If our new alliance ultimately wound up not working out, my ship would still have rested for a time, delaying its potential decommissioning to a point farther in the future….

Kostas continued now: “I can maybe arrange for one Keeper to help you with your ship later today. Unfortunately, as I’ve indicated, we are behind in dismantling the cube. We’ve never had to deal with a cube this large, and the design of this one isn’t exactly the same as the others we’ve dismantled. It is like the designing stage’s evolution had worsened; the species who created it overcomplicated it, which has overcomplicated the dismantling of it.”

I was frowning and breathing too hard. “How long will it take to finish?”

“Another day. In the meantime, instead of focusing on fixing your ship, you and your crew should focus on your training. I’m sorry it got cut short before. But I’m almost ready to begin again. Are you? I mean, assuming you haven’t changed your mind about this mission. If your anger over your ship’s technical problems is an expression of that, tell me now, and we won’t waste anymore time dealing with each other. I will find a Keeper to help you fix your ship and you can leave. Your mind and heart need to be in this—not to mention everything else. Too much is at stake.”

My eyes shifted away from her a little, and I felt myself calming down inside. “Well, I’m still annoyed at the loss of control, but I haven’t changed my mind—no. I’m not sure about a permanent situation, though. We’ll see what develops around here.”

“All right then: let’s get back to work. In about half an hour, bring your workbook and your crew back to the meeting rooms.”

*

I was finally sitting in that same meeting room again, chewing on my stash of crackers from in my belt. I felt famished; I thought of that blue bread in the kitchen and suddenly wished I had tasted it earlier….

Kostas walked into the meeting room through a large doorway in one of the walls.

My crewmembers and I sat up straighter; I turned on my workbook—and immediately saw that note I’d made. “Oh—Kostas—I keep forgetting: there’s the fuel and power situation on my ship. We’ve got back-up batteries and we’ve been living on them in here, but, they won’t last forever without being recharged by the engines soon. We need to at least start running the zenite one on a land-setting, so we can power our internals. The exhaust in the hangar—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Kostas said. “Run whatever you need. The hangar field will remove and recycle any exhaust you give off. Nothing will be wasted and you won’t be poisoned. However, if you want, we can hook you up to our power-supply stream. It’s up to you.”

“But wouldn’t you need to make modifications to the science of my ship?”

“Yes.”

“Um, then forget about it. We’ll power ourselves.”

“Captain Zarro, do you have enough fuel to last over a month?”

One side of my mouth twisted up. “We’ll squeeze out enough to last as long as possible. Most of us will probably be in this city-ship a lot anyway, no? We won’t use much power then, so we’ll need much less energy to power the Demeter. We’ll find a way to manage.”

“As you wish—do it your way,” Kostas said, and in a very agreeable tone. But, it seemed clear to me that she knew I probably wouldn’t be able to do it my way. I wanted to, but I did doubt that I’d have enough fuel to adequately power my ship for more than three weeks…then I’d have to either take help from the Keepers, or come up with some other solution. Or, I’d have to spend even more time off my ship and in the city-ship. Time would tell what my choice would be.

Right now, the wall behind Kostas brightened, as if it would become a screen for images, or maybe Kostas would be writing something on it, using that same silver device she often had in her hands. She apparently would be doing both things: the words “The Interstitial Universe” and “A Map Of Dimensional Streams” appeared on the wall-screen, and then an image of the map, which was an extensive network of white, tube-like lines superimposed over a small part of normal space in this universe. The tubes vibrated and seemed to travel across the screen in a sinuous fashion, and as they traveled, they crossed over each other numerous times. When my eyes tried to follow the tube-lines now, my mind couldn’t determine which tube my eyes should flow to next. I couldn’t make out enough depth through the network. It seemed the image was depicting a cross-section of a 3D-space, to make the network’s structure easier to understand, but that just wasn’t working….

I was sighing when Kostas finally began her lesson in earnest: “It is time for a more complete picture of the truth: the Keepers are from what we call in your language The Interstitial Universe. Its boundaries are between other universes, which are universes of various kinds and sizes. This universe that humans are from is one of the most vast universes in existence.

“The Keepers evolved to bounce in and out of other universes—at least the ones who lived on or near the edges of The Interstitial Universe developed that ability. Other life forms farther inside The Interstitial Universe without that ability—they tend to distrust the Keepers. There is also disagreement among the various kinds of Keepers and their sects—some Keepers feel forced into solving the problems of the universes when they do not want to be involved. Others feel it’s the right of other species to know what the Keepers are doing. Rogue Keepers fail to see that what’s happening with people like Claudius is the usual result of other species knowing what we are and do. This is why we actively protect knowledge about us and prevent it from being known—and remembered—by too many life forms.

“The creators of the firestone, the creators of the cubes, the Keepers and various other very powerful species—they do not see all the ramifications of every creation and could not and cannot account for or predict the results of every creation, both organic and inorganic. Even extremely powerful entities are still limited.

“To compensate for this, the Keepers enlist different kinds of worker-helpers in the universes to help keep more order in the universes. There are many dangers, both intentional and unintentional—sometimes the dangers become outsized to what they should be naturally, because life is naturally never 100% safe.

“Now, let us consider the very basic simplistic equation: speed = distance over time.” Kostas’ fingers punched at her device, and the speed equation written out in blue words appeared on the wall. She continued making more notes as she continued speaking: “Multiply both sides of the equation by time and divide both sides by speed, and you get: time = distance over speed. Think of this purely as a relation rather than as an exact equation, and consider it as all three terms vary, and now look at the whole as time is dependent on distance and especially speed.”

A loud silence in the room now, except I could hear several of us breathing too hard. “Wait a minute,” I finally said to Kostas. “Are you saying motion generates time?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Even at the most ‘empty’ of matter, cold places in the universes, there is still a minute amount of gravitational force for example, as the lines of influence from matter can go on to infinitely far. And even at the smallest of interactions among quarks and even much smaller than that level, there will be motion, so then there will be time. As long as there is any fundamental vibration, there will be time. Essentially, wherever there is energy, force, temperature, there is time. Wherever those things are absent, there is no time.”

“But you can’t truly get down to exactly absolute zero, as far as is known to humans,” Gary said from on my right, his voice somewhat dry. “And even if you could, it’s expected that there would still be a minute amount of motion. But then I guess in the known, observable universe, looking at the fundamentals the way you’ve described is oddly consistent because there is always a nonzero temperature, and there is always time marching on, unfortunately.”

“But can you be sure there is always time marching on?” Kostas said. “There are some things in the universes that can actually add or subtract time because they are made of time—they don’t exist in any spatial dimensions. They are pockets composed of time; they are time-based life forms. And you can guess how their presence outside where they should be would affect the other aspects of the universes.”

My eyes dropped toward the floor; my heart pounded harder—nervously. I licked my bottom lip before speaking: “And what can we humans do about that? The more you tell us, the more it looks like the work you Keepers describe is far too dangerous and is above our intellectual pay-grade.”

A few laughs in the room now, shaky laughs.

And then Shirley said, “Kostas, you’ve said that if we continue to work on here that we’re supposed to help fix things—clean them up. But how the hell could you even contain something like those pockets of time?”

Kostas’ head turned to her, then to the rest of us. “The pockets-of-time danger is actually extremely remote and unlikely to happen. I’ve mostly been using their existence as an example of the importance of the work we Keepers do, and that you will now be involved in.

“But, we have been devising ways to better contain time to address any possible dangers. As humans and many other animals have correctly sensed, ‘the wheels of time’ do not normally stop. You cannot really destroy time. However, you can effectively stop and suspend it, as humans have learned, like with curon-bubble technology.

“All of this is ultimately a matter of perspective, too; remember that, from our perspective, time seems dependent on motion, and there are many seeming asymptotes in the universe as well as infinites. Just like you can keep adding 1 to get a bigger and bigger number for forever, you can also carve downward—you can keep subtracting down matter or any quantity of anything—you can keep making it smaller and smaller, into even more components for forever. There are ways to exist at an infinite number of levels. In fact, some species must exist at such high temperatures that they would freeze to death inside a star.”

“Christ,” Gary said.

And Kostas nodded fast. “Yes—it is sometimes hard for me as a human to digest this, too. But, as I think you know, at extremely cold and extremely hot temperatures, interactions can become peculiar and more unpredictable. So does time.

“Think of a wheel again—think of it rotating on a powered spindle-framework. That kind of wheel works when in contact with a surface because the spindle keeps turning. Well, time works for the human-known parts of the universe only because a special framework makes time progress with motion in the universe’s spatial dimensions.

“Gary is correct—even the Keepers have not ever truly reached absolute zero. It still remains a theoretical temperature-point. Nevertheless, we suspect that those species composed of time do reach ‘absolute zero’ at death, and both their ability to add and subtract time to and from the other aspects of the universes and reach absolute zero—both aspects would be detrimental to the other aspects of the universes. It seems those species can directly manipulate time’s framework on a large scale—remember they have no spatial size or conventional mass. They are pure time—”

“What about YOU?” I cut in. “You Keepers seem to instantaneously travel, both as yourselves and as ships—you zip in and out of places, Kostas. You pulled us along with you on Rintu—you seem to move through spatial dimensions with such ease—”

“It is the nature of our technology,” Kostas said. “Humans use the terms ‘layers’, ‘dimensions’, ‘universes’—sometimes these terms mean different things; sometimes they mean the same things. They are each just another way of looking at the Omniverse, depending on what you are doing in the Omniverse at the moment, and what you want to do in the Omniverse in the next moment.

“It is true that Keeper technology can effectively manipulate time to a very great degree. We think we can also contain the time-creatures by simulating the conditions of absolute zero for them, even though we can’t actually reach absolute zero.”

“So, basically, you want to sort of freeze them by freezing time for them,” I said.

“Yes. We would have to move at many extremely low speeds, at least until we could get that life form back to where it belongs, if dealing with it becomes necessary at some point. But, right now, learning as much as you can about how this ship works is what’s most important.”

Kostas kept manipulating her device and words from her kept appearing on the wall again, in red this time. “Let us now simply consider the notion of motion as just being a non-scalar and non-vector measure that equals distance over time. Again, note that you can rearrange that ‘equation’ to be: time = distance over motion or speed. Even though speed has time units inside it, consider speed as being an intrinsic, inherent quality, because it actually is in the Omniverse. Again, the only reason there is time is because there is always motion—there are always thermal vibrations even at the most infinitesimal levels, at the level of the pieces and on-and-off bits of the continuum, of the Omniverse. There is also omnivelocity, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

“The thing to remember is that as long as there is motion, there is time being generated. If all motion were to stop, time would no longer be happening. If all motion stops in some kind of bubble, time is suspended within that bubble. But it seems there is always thermal vibration going on. Even though you are able to manipulate time in curon bubbles, there still must BE time.

“With respect to omnivelocity, Keeper ships can travel using conventional types of motion, but they predominantly use omnivelocities. Keeper ships are equipped with various engine types, but how Keeper ship engines tend to work is they gather energy from anything—from the ones-and-zeros, from the pieces of the Omniverse—and then the ships effectively travel without time because they travel at omnivelocities; in other words, at all velocities within a range you set, so that, effectively, the ship’s overall velocity is zero, because the many velocities are vectors in opposite directions that completely cancel each other out.”

A long silence followed, during which my crew and I tried to absorb all of this mentally, and our hands physically worked at entering information and questions into our workbooks.

With a heavy frown on his face now, Gary finally said, “But then how can you get to another point in the ‘Omniverse’? You’d effectively be stationary.”

Kostas’ head shook fast. “Inside a traveling Keeper ship, you are not stationary. You are actually moving in all of those component directions, and the ultimate addition of their vectors will be zero. But you will have actually moved in those directions—and you can move to anywhere then, instantaneously, depending on how far you go on your path and as long as you are inside the proper path inside a dimensional stream; in other words, to get to points a great distance away, you must choose very large positive omnivelocities in a certain space—and then you must choose the negative of those omnivelocities to cancel out the positive and cause an immense vibration of the Keeper ship, people, whoever, at a certain frequency. And you must do all of this in a very specific order, which is what all of you from the Demeter will have to learn.

“But when you use omnivelocities, you are pinpointing exactly where you want to go—where you want time to be suspended till—and time is indeed effectively suspended because you are moving at such a high overall amount of speeds and velocities, that the time part of the time-equals-distance-over-motion equation is close to zero….”

“I’m sorry, but you’re redefining terms in the equation so often that you’re getting nonsensical results,” Gary said. “This all sounds like magic, and it seems to completely go against your assertion that time is dependant on motion because now you’re talking about going at superhigh speeds, yet time is shrinking relativistically—you’re contradicting your own statements. It also sounds like you and the Keepers—well, like the Keepers are gods.”

“What are ‘gods’?” Kostas asked in an airy, philosophical way, her free hand carelessly waving in front of her. “Ages ago, my ancestors in their cultures endowed their notions of mythical gods with various qualities—some were more fallibly human-like, others were all-powerful. But all-powerful isn’t necessarily what a god is. There are degrees of godness, and that’s because what humans call ‘gods’ are simply not gods; they are life forms in the Omniverse who are extremely capable at manipulating the Omniverse.

“But, basically, if it helps to think of it like this, how the Monument’s main type of engine works is similar to the way a curon bubble works, but on a much larger and much more advanced scale.”

“But,” I said now, “when curon particles were discovered during a space experiment, which also led to our noticing the existence of the space flumes, the particles were really half-invented by humans.”

A sound came from Kostas—half-grunt, half-laugh. “Humans like to think that they think of everything, but the curon particles were actually invented by the creators of the firestones. Curon particles are a toy they used to play with.”

“Shit,” I said, my shocked mouth hanging open afterward. I watched my crew shift around on their chairs. Maybe they were thinking what I was thinking: what the fuck am I getting myself into here?

“Where are the creators of the firestones?” I asked Kostas now. “Have you reached them yet?”

“No,” Kostas said, frowning. “We suspect some of them are in The Steady-State Universe—a universe that is the ultimate universe: complete peace and equilibrium, where life forms just exist in harmony with the vibrations of the pieces of the Omniverse. The Keepers have never been able to reach this place—they haven’t evolved enough yet, and it is dangerous moving from one universe to the next if you’re not ready to. The life inside each universe has evolved so separately and sometimes so differently that you risk destroying the universes when you enter another one. It is likely that we Keepers will never be able to confirm where some life forms have gone because we cannot get to those places till we are ready to evolve into a form of life who can exist there.”

I watched Kostas’ face, her distracted-looking eyes, her slightly frowning mouth. Then I said, “But doesn’t that mean that, before then, you’ll never be completely satisfied with your work?”

“Yes.” A long sigh from Kostas now. “I think that if you keep curon particles in mind, it may help you understand how we Keepers use velocity; curon particles work similarly—how do you think you’re able to use them to set up a separate, controllable space and time in which you manipulate and mitigate time-dilation effects?”

Gary was frowning. “The science of curon particles has never been well-explained. We use them and the fields they create, but we don’t really know how they work; we only know that they work. You don’t have to know how something works in order to use it. It just needs to produce the result you want.”

“Exactly,” Kostas said. “While my use of terminology today seems to be magic or to violate laws in this universe, my terminology is the best I can do to explain a form of science from a being with a different brain and different abilities. My human-language usage is an approximation of Keeper science. Some things do not translate well into the boundaries of what a human can know and become familiar with. Fortunately, as you will see later, much of flying this ship is automated, even for the Keepers, to make operating the Monument easier; while Keepers sometimes cannot control where they are and go, they also do not want to spend most of their intentional time getting to places. They need to spend most of their usable time acquiring, recycling and archiving.”

It was my turn to frown—and literally scratch my head. “There’s something I don’t understand—when you talk of many universes—what about The Infinite Layer? If that goes on forever in some directions, how is there a boundary somewhere, where other universes start?”

“What humans call The Infinite Layer appears to be infinite from your limited science, but it is not infinite,” Kostas said. “There is at least one species there who can actually manipulate the characteristics of that layer—and who needs a populace of other beings around it to survive, as if the populace were food. An outsider like us can do nothing about it. Those inside that layer must figure out how to convince the species to release them.”

“Wait a minute,” Cambridge said. When I glanced over my right shoulder at him now, I saw him sit up in his seat sharply. “I’m sitting here trying to deal with all this, but I just realized something. If you—if we’ll be traveling in this ‘Omniverse’, going everywhere as we move, can I find my son Peter out there somewhere? He disappeared years ago in The Chimera System. I’ve always felt like he’s still alive…. Do you Keeper people maybe know where he is?”

“Yes,” Kostas said.

Now Cambridge really straightened in his chair, and the muscles beneath the dark-bronze skin on his neck tensed into tight, visible chords. “Then he is alive—please take me to him!”

Kostas’ head shook, very sharply. “We can’t do that—at least not at this time. But it would be meaningless because—I will tell you this one thing: he fell in love with being on a planet, and now he cannot leave there.”

“That’s crazy!” Cambridge said now, almost shouting. “No matter what you said about yourselves, you crowd really are like gods—can’t you just get Peter off there?”

“We can’t do this now, and, anyway, the son you knew back then wouldn’t be the same son now.”

“Oh for chrissake—what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I was about to demand that Kostas give Cambridge more information, but Kostas’ voice stopped me: “I realize how difficult all of this is, but you all must put some personal things aside right now—because we have a mission to do.”

“And why do you need us to do it?” I said quite sharply. “I still can’t understand why. With all your powers, you could do practically anything.”

Cambridge glared at Kostas, while she pursed her lips. “It goes back to what I told you all before,” she finally said. “Just like other life forms in The Interstitial Universe don’t trust the Keepers, so do some life forms elsewhere not trust the Keepers.”

“Gee, I wonder why,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So, it seems that, basically, you’ve invited us to be part of the crew here because you want to put a new face on the work you do.”

“Yes,” Kostas said. “That’s part of it.”

“Well, really, I’ve gotta ask: who are you to control any of it? Like even if those time creatures are dangerous, maybe they’re what nature—the Omniverse—wants, so maybe they should remain wherever they go. I’m really starting to feel like I don’t want to be responsible for controlling any of this, for interfering—”

“But, Lydia, you’ve misinterpreted what the Keepers do. They do interfere, but they don’t control, as they are not a type of creator. They are more a type of mediator and protector, and, of course, an archiver.

“But think of throwing a wrench in the workings of a wheel to stop it—that’s what we Keepers tend to do now. We don’t destroy the wheel itself; we freeze the spindle. For example, we must ‘throw a wrench’ at that warring species. It’s really all they do now—they have no conventional bodies. They are only a motion of mind, but that motion can still greatly affect this universe.

“We’re particularly afraid that one of its members has now accessed information that will give their mind-motion outsized power—this is what will destroy the framework. We simply can’t let them move their fight beyond their mental sphere on their planet and endanger other life forms elsewhere, as we’ve described.

“We can’t get back to before the creation of time, or even to our own personal, earlier evolutionary times: just like the creators of the firestone, our evolution has sometimes led to a loss of information from our past existences.

“All of you here in this room will not just be a ‘new face’ on our work. Again, we also want to make sure that we share some of our information with other life forms while we exist as Keepers; that way, our knowledge wouldn’t necessarily die with us if we should ever evolve away from our current function, which has become quite a common occurrence in the Omniverse—”

Kostas’ head suddenly jerked upward, her tall body in her red worksuit stilling in a very tense way. Then she said in a loud voice, “I’m sorry, but I must go.”

And she did go—she instantly disappeared from the room.

My crew and I stared at each other with wide eyes. Then I felt something, through my shoes; my feet were planted on the room’s dark floor, and now there was a vibration inside, an extended rumble. Considering how massive and sturdy this ship seemed to be, I was pretty sure I shouldn’t have been feeling anything through the floor.

“Did anyone else feel that?!” I finally asked.

“Yeah,” Gary replied fast.

My fingers banged on my belt communicator. “Everyone get back to the Demeter—to your stations there!”

I ran from the meeting room.

*

The mass of me and my crew now rushed toward my ship and up the ramp. I ran as fast as possible all the way up to my bridge. Chen, Gary, Babs, Cambridge and Shirley burst into there right after me.

“Karen—Steve—are you there yet?” I said, standing by my chair now, my fingers on my intercom controls for engineering.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Steve said over the line.

“Can you give me any numbers on that vibration in the Monument?”

“I wish we could,” Karen said now, in a tired, drained voice. “I meant to tell you sooner that we almost never get any readings on anything from outside the Demeter when we’re on it. The hangar seems to block everything.”

“Shit,” I said, my eyes whipping up to the front viewscreen.

“Lydia,” Karen said, “what do we do?”

“We sit here and wait for Kostas—what else? I see the frigging hangar door has closed.”

“Captain—” Geena’s voice “—I’m with Bill, Nellie and Brayburn in the hall outside the cargo bay. Is there anything we can do? Maybe we shouldn’t have left the Monument rooms—”

Geena was right. “Hang on,” I said to her. “Kostas, can you hear me? Where are you? What’s going on?”

“There’s been an explosion,” Kostas’ rushed voice said. “Dozens of wounded Keepers are in one of the lounges near the kitchen.”

“Shit!” I said. “Can we help?”

“Yes,” Kostas replied.

I turned my head to the others on my bridge, who had all been standing and waiting in the center of the room. “Geena,” I said over the intercom, “I don’t know where that lounge is, but the four of you just go to the Monument’s kitchen.”

“We’re on it,” Geena said.

And then Chen added, “Lydia, I want to go too.”

“Both of us will go. Babs, Gary, you’re in charge here,” I said.

Then I ran off my bridge.

*

Just like my crew and I fled the meeting room before, Chen and I now fled my ship. Geena and her crowd were nowhere in sight in the hangar, and then I saw why: one second my feet were pounding at the hangar floor; the next I was nowhere, and then the next I was somewhere—in a dimly lit room, full of Keepers. Some were lying on the floor; others were standing hunched over. There were sparkly, sharp pellets scattered around the room—Keeper blood, apparently.

For a horrified moment, I just stood staring with my mouth open. So did my five crewmembers—Geena and the others had been transported into here too.

“What happened?” Nellie asked just as Kostas suddenly appeared at the far end of the room. She bent over one of the prone Keepers.

“Part of the cube has exploded,” Kostas said now in a breathless voice, but there seemed to be something else inside her words, something soft and young, and upset.

I rushed in her direction, and as I did that, she added, “Una is mortally wounded.”

Thura was the only Keeper I had ever heard speak from outside of her mind, but now I could have sworn I heard sad, guttural noises coming from several Keepers. I glanced around the room; as far as I could tell, all of the Keepers were still flashing in and out, but it seemed like it was only a low-frequency flashing. I could finally more clearly see their features now, could finally more clearly see how hollow their features really were, almost as if they were only a shell of a humanoid with a strange, shimmering fluid flowing through them.

“But I thought Keepers can’t die,” I said to Kostas now. I knelt down near her and Una. Una’s parts were still flickering, but very, very slowly, and the overall shape of her wasn’t moving at all. A section of her abdomen seemed to be completely missing, and I counted only four, slowly pumping hearts….

Nellie rushed over and stood above me and Kostas. “I—I have my medical scanner,” Nellie said, her words a stumbling tremor. “It has an extensive emergency-aid database—can I—can I do something for them?”

“It’s too late—she has suffered explosive dismemberment injuries,” Kostas replied in a small voice. “She has lost one of her heart parts. We cannot find and collect and repair her parts in time—they are scattered in the anomaly. Some Keepers are looking for her parts; the rest are working on creating another field around the cube so this disaster doesn’t happen again. If they fail to find Una’s matter, Keeper hearts are very complex, and it would take far too much time to make a replacement heart for her.”

“We can help!” Nellie said.

“No, I’m sorry, you cannot.” Kostas’ hands were holding one of Una’s now.

I grabbed Una’s other hand—at least I thought I was grabbing it. I couldn’t really feel it against mine. I felt a whisper of air along my palm—maybe.

“But what about her other hearts—can’t they compensate?” I asked.

Kostas’ head shook fast, her dark hair finally hiding part of her sad profile from my gaze. “Keepers need all their hearts—they’re not really separate organs. They work in conjunction. These are Una’s last vibrations. I am trying to…make them count,” Kostas finished, her voice cracking.

“Una, I’m so sorry!” I said. “I’m so sorry I never got to know you, but you’re so needed. I wish you could stay. You’ve done so much—you all have.” I glanced at Kostas, but her gaze was still down on Una.

My eyes went back to her, to where what seemed to be her blood was spilling out of her abdomen in a liquid-crystal stream. “Is there nothing I can do?”

A whisper now—in my head.

…You have already done. Kindness. Strength. Thank you, Lydia…. Goodbye, Kostas, my special child. It is finally my time for one place….

I felt Una’s hand seem to jerk—and then seem to harden. “No! What’s happened?”

“Una has passed,” Kostas said in a trembling voice. “Death is partly a release for the Keepers. It is the only state when Keepers will remain in one place—the place where they’ve died. I’ll try to feel happiness that Una is finally at total rest because she is finally completely still.” Kostas’ words didn’t seem to work on herself: tears slipped from her eyes….

“I’m so sorry, Kostas,” I said, my right hand reaching for her forearm and gently squeezing it.

Her dark eyes were still on Una’s lifeless, immobile form. “Una was the first Keeper to mind-link with me….” Kostas’ words must have been too much for her—she stood up now, very sharply, and turned her back to everyone else in the room, including all of the other Keepers. “Many more Keepers are injured here. Butu really needs blue water.” Kostas glanced over her right shoulder at where Geena was working with Brayburn as they tried to lift a Keeper to a more comfortable position against one of the walls.

“Chen,” Kostas said, “keep Butu calm by talking—or thinking—about anything. He will link with you. Geena, Brayburn, Nellie and Bill, please go to the kitchen. Devin is there and he will give you the proper food and medicine for the Keepers. They will need days to rest and heal.”

Geena nodded fast, then ran out of the room just as Chen reached for Butu. And an instant later, Kostas transported to somewhere else, taking Una’s body with her.

*

I remained in the room with the wounded Keepers and Chen for I didn’t know how long, while Geena and my other crewmembers ran in and out of the room, carrying water, medicine and food.

I repeatedly knelt down and tried to make the Keepers as comfortable as possible on the floor, which wasn’t easy; there weren’t enough cushions in the room for all of the Keepers. Many of them mind-linked with me, in and out. They spoke to me only a little then, but I could have sworn I felt sharp bouts of their pain….

I looked over at Chen. At some point, he’d rolled up one of his white sleeves; his Keeper-tinged arm was out in the open now, and one of the Keepers had a hand pressed there. Chen was talking, explaining something mundane about a flying maneuver he often used on the Demeter, but the Keeper’s glossy, clear eyes seemed to be intent on Chen’s face.

Kostas finally returned; she had more Keepers with her, who immediately began rushing around the room toward the wounded.

“The Keepers will take over now,” Kostas said. And she seemed to have recovered from her sadness before: her face and back were in her usual quite-straight state. “We have paused in our work on the cube. It has turned out to be a more dangerous design than we thought. We will be stuck here several more days so this deadly disaster doesn’t happen again.”

If she had said that last bit to me before the disaster happened, I would have been upset at her words because they meant I would be stuck here for even more days with my damaged ship—but now I was glad that Kostas had told me about the delay because that probably meant the Keepers would proceed more carefully around the cube.

I certainly didn’t want to see death on this ship again.

*

“Gary, I feel like complete shit,” I said later on.

Gary and I were in my cabin, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed with my face in my hands.

“I was so focused on the damage to my ship—and now the Keepers have damage to their bodies, and Una is dead. I feel like my priorities were so screwed up, and I’ve been so damn selfish—I was only thinking about my ship. My being here made them rush! I had no idea of the huge danger.”

“We’re not Keepers,” Gary reminded me. “We’re apes with very functional opposable thumbs and lots of tools. And we’re also very mortal. Selfishness has been built into us from millions of years of evolution—behaving selfishly is how animals survive…. Lydia, I hate hearing you beat yourself up like this. I don’t think you should have witnessed all of that in the lounge—”

I whipped my hands from my face. “Yes, I should have! It made me realize that things are worse than I thought. When I thought the Keepers were all-powerful—it was easier to avoid dealing with them, to run away, because I thought they could do everything themselves. But now I see that they may actually need us.”

“Then it’s a good thing we stayed,” Gary said.

I nodded up at him; then I stood. “I guess while we’re waiting to hear more from the Keepers, it’s back to business on this ship. Geena and the others—it looks they’re going to be busy for days tending to the wounded, which means we’ll have to take care of feeding ourselves here.”

*

My prediction turned out to be correct: when I walked into the Monument’s kitchen later, Kostas told me that the Keepers would need to eat a lot over the next few days in order to heal. And because of the mess with the cube and some important maintenance they had to do on the Monument, they couldn’t spare any workers to make meals for the Keepers. Geena and her gang would now be full-time Keeper-cooks.

Kostas stood in the middle of the Monument’s kitchen now, training my crew on how to properly prepare food so the Keepers could assimilate it. They didn’t chew the way Earth animals tended to chew: the Keepers mostly gummed their food so their many small, mostly invisible teeth could absorb nutrients and disperse them into their organs, which meant that what the Keepers ate had to be in a mushy state.

The Monument’s kitchen contained special appliances for preparing Keeper food, and Kostas had written English words on electronic tabs and stuck them to the appliances so my crew could work in the room more easily.

Kostas said now, “We’ve begun doing this around the ship, including on the bridge, for when you finally start your real training there.”

Kostas was looking at me, but being trained was the last thing I wanted to think about now. My head was spinning, and if I didn’t eat something soon, I would need medical treatment…. I didn’t eat anything now, however. I felt sick to my stomach over what had happened to the Keepers—I suddenly remembered the dimensional sickness.

“Kostas,” I said now, “until this accident, I didn’t feel sick like I did on Rintu with the dimensional sickness. I’m feeling twinges now though….”

“Me too,” Bill said. He was standing over by one of the silver, Keeper grinding machines, shoving one of the loaves of blue bread inside it. He normally had quite a lot of color in his face, but his profile was quite sallow-colored now.

Kostas glanced at him, then at me. “I’ve mentioned that we made some adjustments to the Monument in preparation for your being here, to make you more comfortable, but so many Keepers in one place around you will still sometimes have effects we won’t be able to mitigate. I apologize for that. The wounded were at a low energy-state before, but they’re now building their strength back up while they’re residing quite close to this room.” She pulled her silver device from one of her worksuit’s pockets. “I’ll make some adjustments to this room. Hopefully, this terrible event won’t happen again.”

“And I hope it’s not a common occurrence…. Is it common?” I asked.

Kostas’ head shook from side-to-side rapidly. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that since I’ve been with the Keepers.” Her chest beneath her red worksuit seemed to be moving too fast. She suddenly spun away from me and walked over to Brayburn to instruct him on how to use one of the kitchen’s moistening machines.

I sighed as I watched them. Then I said, “I hate to make more work or problems for anyone, but I’m going to need to eat something. Can I just help myself?”

Her back to me still, Kostas’ right arm shot out in the direction of the pantries. “Take whatever you want—and maybe bring food back to your crew on the Demeter?”

“That’s an excellent idea, Kostas—thank you,” I said, moving closer to her and smiling at her, but she only nodded back at me, her posture not as straight as her usual stance.

*

“I know I’ve had difficulties with her and the Keepers, but I really hated seeing her like that,” I said later on in the Demeter’s dining room.

Chen and Nellie had helped me carry a bunch of the blue-bread loaves, jars of nut butters and berry jams, and a basket of fresh fruit back to my ship. Dozens of my crewmembers had filled the dining booths and were now eating the food, but the mood in the room wasn’t exactly jubilant.

Shirley was sitting in the booth across the aisle from me, and her eyelids were swollen and lined with red, apparently from crying. “It’s like everything’s falling apart now,” she said in a weak voice.

“Don’t think like that,” Steve said fast. He was across from her, and his eyes were on the top of her head. He sighed finally, then went back to staring down at his training workbook.

I really needed to review mine too, especially the video of Kostas’ lecture session earlier, but, I couldn’t work anymore right now….

I felt a hand grab my right hand—it was Gary.

He was sitting beside me, and now his other hand stuffed a piece of the blue bread into his mouth. “Did the Keepers make this with that blue water we had on Rintu?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s really quite good,” Chen said as he chewed, from across the table. Surprisingly, his white sleeve was rolled up like it had been when he was in the room with the Keepers. A patch of sparkling skin was visible below the edge of Chen’s sleeve, but he didn’t seem to notice, and neither did May beside him. Maybe they were getting used to it….

I wasn’t, though, and that was because I still felt really bad that the damage to Chen had happened at all. I also still kept forgetting to ask Kostas for more information about potential treatments for Chen’s arm. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t my place to ask; Chen had been around Keepers and Kostas a lot today, and, as far as I knew, he’d said nothing to them about his arm….

“So, what will you all do for the rest of the day?” I asked at the room now, trying to inject an energetic note in my voice, but failing when it only came out tired-sounding anyway.

“I don’t know,” Chen said in response.

And May added: “We’re really feeling like we don’t have a purpose anymore.”

My eyebrows rose; then I frowned at the two of them. “Please don’t say that. Though, actually, I’m glad you brought it up: I keep hearing that same sentiment going around this ship, and to be honest I don’t want to hear it. You saw that room, Chen…it was terrible. We all have a purpose and something to contribute. Part of my reticence in getting involved with the Keepers and workers again is I don’t want any of you to feel inferior to their technology or whatever. Our ship still matters, and so do we.”

“I hear what you’re saying, Lydia.” May was nodding now. “But, if we’re not shipping in space on a schedule, I have nothing I must do. I’m suddenly seeing how big a part of my life working has been. It is my life. I even found my husband there.”

She was sitting on the side where Chen’s normal arm was, and now his normal arm lifted her hand, brought it to his mouth and kissed it.

I couldn’t help smiling; nevertheless, May’s feelings and the feelings of my other crewmembers on this latest issue were bothering me: morale had somehow fallen into the toilet. And I didn’t know how to yank morale out from the bowl.

*

As the day passed, I realized May was right and her words held the key: we all needed to keep working—that was our normal state of existence. Maybe we were normally overworked, a.k.a. workaholics. But that was who we were as people: we had chosen a stressful, on-the-go life because it suited our personalities.

It seemed that, for my own reasons, out of irritation at the way I had lost control of some things and out of worry over my crew, I had been holding back from really embracing what we were doing on The Keeper ship and what we were supposed to do in the near future.

I said this to Gary when we were in my cabin later. We had just spent some quality bed-time together then showered together.

We lay on our damp backs now on my bed, staring up at my dark ceiling.

“Lydia,” Gary finally said, “maybe we can’t have one foot in and one foot out anymore. Things have gotten too serious.”

“I know,” I said, on a frown.

He turned over onto his side, facing me. “I’ve been thinking that we should probably spend more time in the Monument, eating there, maybe even sleeping there—when Geena came back before, she said Kostas told her they’d be needed around the kitchen and lounges for days. Geena’s face was flushed, but I got the feeling it was in a good way. It’s something new, a new environment—isn’t that why a lot of us are traveling out in space so much?”

I flipped onto my side toward him now, studying his face, the warm color and shape of his mustache and mouth in the room’s cool darkness. “We often seem to think along the same lines. Babs told me we’re made for each other.”

He pointed up at the air as he said, “Babs is a very smart lady.” Then his hand reached forward and slid over my bare hip.

*

It’s true that “sleeping on it” will often give you a perspective that you didn’t have while you were awake. It’s also true that not having a consistent time-frame to live in can drive you crazy, but it’s also freeing to be able to eat, sleep and work at oddball times—when you feel like it, in other words.

Gary and I slept for hours and hours in my cabin that day, and when I woke up, I felt better than I had in days. No matter Kostas’ claims that wearing worker-suits could increase life spans, I had seen what happened to poor Una, and that reminded me of how true the “life is short” cliché really is.

Clearly, there was so much that needed doing now with the Keepers, and it was time for me to face this.

*

It did help when my crew and I finally got the new red worker-suits, which fortunately had quite a few differences compared to the old orange suits. The new ones were easier to get into and out of: you just stepped into the attached red boots, and the suit would automatically slowly slide up and over you as you coaxed up the material; then you just had to close up the front. The new suits also were more comfortable because they weren’t so stiff, and the attached boots had more of a cushiony slipper-sole that would comfortably conform to wherever you stepped.

When my crew and I were finally all dressed in the new worksuits and standing inside a meeting room with Kostas, I was staring down at the buttons on the sleeves of my suit. I had only barely used the arm-controls on the old suits months ago, but that wound up not mattering: Kostas now said that the new suits worked differently too.

“We’ve rearranged how energy flows through them, and we’ve added some more functions. These suits have an improved internal self-cleaning function, and they can more readily recharge from their environment. We workers usually have devices with us—you will each also receive a device to use. But we’ve added a few more emergency controls to the suits, in case of the loss of a device. And we’ve also changed from using only ridges in the suit material to using buttons for your controls too, as you can see on the wrists of your suits.

“The red buttons are transporter controls; there is also a transporter ridge higher up the sleeves. The personal transporting naturally cloaks the individual being transported. Personal transporting works similarly to the dimensional traveling of a ship; as your workbooks have explained and as we explained in your first training class, dimensions, which are often connected by dimensional streams—dimensions and their streams exist throughout the Omniverse, though the streams aren’t all over it. There are emptier pockets between streams, which can even mean billions of miles with no streams, and which also means traveling will probably take up more real time in the pockets—movement won’t necessarily be instantaneous there, though it will still be quick in Keeper ships, compared to human ships.

“Keeper ships and the personal transporters normally need both the proper omnivelocity profiles for vibrating at the right frequency patterns, and they need to be in the proper place inside a stream to reach particular destinations. All of this is fundamental to how we Keepers travel and how this ship uses energy.

“Keeper ship engines disassociate fuel-matter down to the smallest measures, even well before the gluon state, in order to get maximum energy from the fuel-matter, which energy is used to propel Keeper ships. And we can use anything as fuel, as energy—including space, normal matter, dark matter—”

“Even our shit?” I said, hearing laughs from my crew around me.

Kostas nodded at me fast. “Of course. Everything is recycled on here, just like much of it is on your ship too.” Her eyes shifted to around the room. “Back to the transporting again: you are all still human, as am I, and if you’ve noticed, I don’t always use personal transporting on this ship. Dimensional sickness is always a concern, so you should get used to using your personal transporter only when it’s very necessary or in an emergency—in other words, day-to-day, you should use the more mechanical means of traveling through this ship. I know that once you’ve been zipping around via transporting, mechanical means are slower. But, again, it’s a good idea to not rely on transporting too much. There are actually shields on the Monument, between us and the engines, and how this ship’s shell moves—there is shielding to protect us from dimensional illness as we live on here. The shielding also prevents the Keepers from being overloaded with energy. But sometimes the dimensional sickness happens anyway, if there is a momentary break in the shielding because we’re repairing something, recharging the engines, etcetera.

“The Keepers have their own ways of intentionally traveling as a whole organism inside here and other places, including in space, which, again, can be quite instantaneous. But we humans can’t use those methods as they inherently rely on having Keeper anatomy to survive the trip. When in space, for example, the Keepers can breathe and maintain pressurization by vibrating in and out of other environments that are breathable and pressurized. We, however, can’t do that, so don’t try to jump out of one of the hatches here while you’re wearing only a worker suit.”

“Um, that wasn’t exactly tops on my list of Things To Do Before I Die,” one of my crew said, and I couldn’t help laughing at his statement. But I noticed Kostas’ face had fallen a little—then I remembered Una….

“How are the Keepers in the lounge doing today?” I asked Kostas fast.

A slow nod from her now, but her eyes were focused on the device in her hands. “They’re doing well; they’re improving—thankfully. After our next lecture today, I hope Geena and several more of your crew can go back to the kitchen—”

“Of course,” I said, glancing over at Geena and Brayburn, who both nodded back at me.

“Excuse me, uh, Kostas,” Brayburn said now, clearing his throat. “Some of us aren’t engineering types—I mean, I’ll keep sitting through the sciency lectures, and I know enough about how to survive some things. But I’ve never flown a spaceship. I prefer doing more normal tasks, like in the dining room, loading cargo, etcetera. I don’t think I’m the only one.” Several people voiced their agreement with his statement.

I sighed, but there was a smile on my face, too. “I think this is my crew’s way of saying they don’t want to sit through anymore incomprehensible Keeper science classes!”

Laughter all around the room now—and even a small smile from Kostas.

*

Unfortunately for Brayburn and the others who weren’t science-savvy, the Keepers felt that all of us humans still had to learn the very basics of The Keeper ship, so, after we were through with our worksuit orientation, we had to separate off into three groups again and go to the next lecture.

I was finally back in the same meeting room with the same crewmembers of mine as during the first lecture. This time, Kostas began with a discussion of the Keepers.

“Because the Keepers naturally flux in and out of places, they don’t necessarily need ships to move; they need ships to contain the devices they collect and dismantle, to store their food, and so on. Many Keepers prefer to remain on Rintu—some must, to protect places like The Hall Of Devices.

“There is always work to be done, and some of that work might involve difficult experiences, which brings me to another topic: The Error Universe.”

Kostas used her device to draw images and words on the wall behind her—sketchy depictions of amorphous objects with words and symbols scattered around them: “+ or – an amount” “lags in efficiency” “incomplete force application….”

“In the Omniverse,” Kostas said now, “it seems every measurement, every event, every motion, every interaction of energy has an error attached—there is entropy too. There are energy losses in many systems, and sometimes to a greater degree than is known. There are unexplained losses too, or losses of efficiency that have been explained incorrectly; the energy did not go where humans and other species believe it has gone.

“What if you could add up all of those minute errors and find it in total somewhere? They would add up to a lot of energy-data. And they would also be a potential source of special thermodynamic parameters: this is energy that can behave outside the every-day ‘laws’ of thermodynamics.”

Kostas stopped talking, and she seemed to become distracted by her device. I really hoped it wasn’t because of another disaster….

Her twitching face didn’t look stressed, however—it looked like she was thinking hard about something.

“Is something bothering you?” I finally asked her.

She glanced up at me, her cheeks containing a touch of pink. “The Keepers are constantly feeding me information—some of which I’m reading off to you. But as I’ve never given lectures like this to such a large amount of people, I’m figuring out how to present some of the basics as I go on. Maybe I can take a break and answer some questions now?”

“Okay—I’ll bite,” I said. “This Error place—are you saying that the Keepers take care of that universe too?”

“Well—” Kostas frowned “—they’re not supposed to—nobody’s supposed to manipulate it.”

“I’m not surprised: it sounds worse than the firestones and energy wells.”

Shirley shifted around in her chair and tapped her workbook with her stylus, then touched the pen to her chin. “Kostas, I’m having difficulty with your description: if there is energy left over from a reaction or an interaction, it will heat the surroundings, be transmitted into kinetic energy—something. And that energy transfer is measurable in this normal universe. This has been tested numerous times. The energy doesn’t go nowhere or just disappear like it’s been transported elsewhere. It can’t be created or destroyed, even effectively.”

“And you know all of that’s true for all reactions and interactions that have taken place?” Kostas said. “Humans do not have access to the constant stream of events in even this universe. How do you know energy is always conserved here? How do you know some supposedly conserved actions don’t actually lose energy from the equation? In The Error Universe, both intentionally and unintentionally, not only is some energy directly siphoned away from other universes for various reasons, there is often a mirroring of the events that have happened in the other universes. This keeps an accounting of where energy is going and has gone at all times, and it determines how efficient the way the universes are structured is.”

Part of my mind froze at the sound—and meaning—of what she was saying. “And what if The Error Universe doesn’t think this one’s efficient enough?”

“Corrections are then made to the laws in this universe.”

Around me, Gary, Shirley and Babs all pulled a face at the same time. “Again, that makes no sense,” Shirley said. “To our senses, not counting the strange interactions and matter we’ve found while traveling space, the laws are immutable—that’s why they are laws.”

“They are called laws,” Kostas said. “Nomenclature does not necessarily determine the nature of the thing that’s been named. Simply that there is even room for debate shows that the ‘laws’ are apparently not concrete. If they were indeed immutable laws, we would never debate them because their nature would be very clear to everyone upon examination.”

In one frustrated shot, I spread my hands around the room. “But then how are we here? We’ve relied on laws actually being laws to get us off the Earth and do so much more.”

“Yes but, again, humans have not seen what has happened to the efficiency of nature. You cannot see every atom. You have not had access to all matter. You have only accessed a tiny bit. You have not seen every atom that’s ever existed, every atomic interaction and consequential macroscopic interaction over the ages of the universes. You cannot see during all the times that have ever existed. You cannot truly time-travel. So what do you have to compare to? Your baseline is: you only have a result that is locked in your real time. Many events have happened, and time can alter what the nature of something looks like. What the past looked like in its present may not be the same as what that past looks like in a future present.

“And, again, all the present interactions—humans do not have the ability to keep an accounting of that either. Even the Keepers can only access a fraction of the events of the universes. They do not control The Error Universe either; they can’t. They just know how to access that universe and slightly manipulate it if that becomes necessary. It took them over a million years to learn how to do that little bit.”

Babs’ eyes were wide with interest, but her mouth ultimately flattened. “Then who does control it? Didn’t you say only some of the error-accounting is unintentional?”

Kostas’ eyes shifted away from us, and her mouth seemed to soften into a strange state for her: frustration. “I’m not sure who or what controls it—the Keepers aren’t sure. We’re still learning.”

Gary spoke now, and his voice was low: “It seems that all this time we thought we had control of our lives when we really don’t.”

There was no frustration in Kostas’ gaze now; she looked at Gary with sure, direct eyes. “You have control of your own actions, just not all of the reactions. From your perspective, nothing has really changed. I have only told you that those reactions are more often under the control of other forces in the universes than you used to think.”

“But I’ve seen the dimensional maps you posted on the wall last time,” Gary said. “And I saw the interactive library in the Rintu mountain. I’ve seen how much the Keepers can access about other events, about where everyone is—”

Kostas shrugged now. “What have you really seen? You’ve seen one small part, one small device. The Keepers have many devices, and some other beings in the universes have even more. The job of the Keepers is never-ending, is constant, as is mine.”

She seemed to straighten up more, at least the pants on her worksuit seemed to change into stiffer, straight lines toward the floor. “I’ve talked enough. It is time to get back to my other work, which is helping to coordinate the cube work. I want you all to review what we’ve discussed so far; do this for the rest of the day. Try to memorize as much as you can. Also, rest and eat what you want from the kitchen. Take a walk through the ship. If you can’t enter somewhere, you won’t be able to enter there. Tomorrow, I’ll take you on a tour of the Monument’s main bridge.”

I watched her rapidly walk away from us and out of the room. Then I said, “Why does it always seem like the more I’m around them, the less I know?”

My friends laughed at my statement, but their laughing ultimately didn’t prevent the uncomfortable silence that followed: we had so much work to do, but would we ever really understand any of that work?

*

I decided to go to that same lounge area to check on the Keepers while Geena and several more of my crew worked in both the lounge area and the kitchen.

The lounge today looked different: many of the Keepers inside it now appeared to be eating and sleeping comfortably; more cushions had been brought in, and someone had turned on a large wall-screen, which contained images of other Keepers, seemingly from on Rintu, given the extremely strong orange color of the landscape in some of the images. Apparently, the Rintu Keepers had been mind-link talking to the Monument Keepers, sending their natural signals attached to artificial ones. I wondered what they were saying….

A tinge inside my mind…a Keeper.

We are sharing the information we have learned about the dangers of the cube, the Keeper said. It will be stored in an archive on Rintu.

Who is talking? I thought.

I am Purn.

Hello, Purn. I hope you’re okay today.

I am getting better. I was exposed to too much energy. Like one of your human electronic devices, my circuitry got overloaded. The residual subatomic stream that affected me is making me twitch a lot. It is quite embarrassing, especially on top of our normal inability to be still.

I smiled a little; then I remembered what had happened to Una, and my smile faded….

“I’m so sorry about Una,” I said out loud, glancing over at the spot where she had died. “Where is she now?”

She is in a tube in one of the gardens; it was one of her favorite places to look at.

“I’m glad she can rest in that one place now,” I said, though my voice didn’t come out sounding as if I was glad….

I was feeling a little too warm in my suit, and I didn’t know how to adjust any settings for that; Kostas had said we would get more training on the suits tomorrow, but I was suddenly wishing we had learned more today. On the other hand, it was feeling like late in the “day” now to me, and when Geena and the others were done nursing the Keepers, we were supposed to all be heading back to the Demeter, to study and then rest—at least those would be my orders.

I shifted my captain’s belt over my worksuit to a better position. I thought of contacting Steve: he and Karen and a bunch of the others who usually worked in engineering had gone with one of the workers to where the Monument’s engines were. I would have liked to see them myself, but there was only so much time in the day….

I began helping Geena hand out bowls of blue-bread mush to the Keepers. As Geena passed near me, I noticed her face: her cheeks looked pale with fatigue, but there was a sharp enthusiasm in her brown eyes. I hadn’t seen such eagerness anywhere on her face in a long time; I couldn’t help smiling at that eagerness now…

…And I was smiling about Geena once again later on, when most of my crew and I were in our normal clothes in the Demeter’s dining room, going over our notes from the lectures—and just relaxing as we ate big bowls of salad and sautéed purple tubers, which Geena had found in one of the Monument’s pantries.

Geena was sitting across from me now. “If I don’t mind saying so myself, I outdid myself with these tubers. They’re fantastic.”

Gary was on my right, and he spoke through a mouth that was quite full of purple mush: “You certainly did—I wish there was more!”

Geena laughed a little. “How much to cook is taking some getting used to. I’ve never eaten many of the plant species on here, so I don’t know how filling they’ll be. Devin’s been helping me figure out how much to make—today, me and Bill and Brayburn had to cook enough for EVERYBODY, including hundreds of Keepers—yikes!

“At one point, we just rushed into one of the pantries and pulled out a whole bunch of containers—fruits and tubers were rolling around on the floor. Jim walked in and his feet jumped backwards, and his eyes widened. He spun around and left as if he had no intention of dealing with any vegetables, and Bill and I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

That must have been the first time Geena had seen Jim in days—at least I hadn’t seen him around in days—yet when she’d spoken about him just now, she didn’t look sad at all, as she would usually look in the past. I couldn’t help smiling about her again.

Across the aisle, Babs and Shirley were sitting together, and Babs was looking down at her digital workbook as she said to Shirley, “You’re welcome, Shirl. I’m also sending you the marks I made on one of the dimensional-stream maps. I think you can see the overall volume of that single, dimensional structure better.”

Shirley nodded fast, her eyes down on her own workbook. “Yeah, I do—thanks. Though, doesn’t it still look like there’s not much in common among most of the minor streams? Though I guess Kostas never said they’re all similar. They might naturally be idiosyncratic.”

“Actually,” I said, chewing on a small, delicious slice of the savory tubers, “that’s a good description of the Keepers, too.”

Steve came up to us and leaned against the back of my booth, pointing a finger my way, then at his workbook. “I’m thinking the same thing; navigating the streams must be, uh, well—the thing is: I just don’t see how there isn’t some special knowledge involved, or at least a whole lot of trial-and-error. The Keepers designed their ships, so they have that special knowledge. But where does that leave us?”

I kind of smirked in reply.

And Steve added, in a slow voice, “Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.”

Beside me, Gary was sighing. “Well, let’s see what happens. We aren’t at the stage yet where we’ve gotten a comprehensive image of the whole ship. We’ve got the maps in the workbooks, but there are gaps in the maps, and looking at those isn’t the same as hands-on. Maybe we’ll find flying this thing is easier than we thought.”

*

Later that night, when I was finally on the verge of sleep while lying in my bed with Gary, I was smiling. The day had gone better than I had expected. I felt like my crew and I were finally making progress on more than just this city-ship.

There was a time when my successes on the Demeter used to be enough for me, but now, I found myself wanting to see how far I could push myself beyond the Demeter.

*

The next day’s “morning” lecture with Kostas was about the worksuits more than about anything else. I learned 1) how to medicate myself in an emergency (push the medical ridge on either shoulder and keep pushing till I felt a vibrational response in the correct part of my anatomy, then push again to confirm to medicate); 2) how to transport to different destinations (push the red button on either sleeve and push again to jump right into transporting away from where you are; or use the readout; or listen to the destination options and choose one, because these suits could talk if you wanted them to; the full workers—their suits could link with their minds); 3) how to use the suit’s communicator and link up with the Monument or even Rintu if necessary (by pushing certain combinations of the three buttons on the chest of the suit); 4) how to set up and turn on the comprehensive sleeve-readout….

The readout’s hologram-like screen was suspended above either sleeve; a readout had to be preprogrammed to the individual wearing the suit, but certain settings allowed you to coordinate with other worksuits and share your readout fields.

As soon as I started playing with my suit controls, I realized that understanding the readout was a very difficult thing to do: some of the data also contained symbols the Keepers used—I recognized the ones for temperature, velocity, omnivelocity, force, ship, and a few others. But, memorizing everything that I might need to know would indeed take time, and lots of it. The meanings of the readout data weren’t necessarily so obvious once you were even aware of what the symbols meant; some readout data just explained what the suits were doing as they were working, which the suit-wearer didn’t necessarily need to know, but I and some of the others in my crew—we didn’t like not having control over whether a mechanism we were using was working properly, especially if it was on our bodies….

“Looking at this is frustrating,” Steve said when we were still sitting inside the meeting room and he had made his readout publicly visible. All of us trainees had our readouts visible.

Devin was in the room with us today, and now he said to Steve, “Explain what you find frustrating.”

Steve glanced up at him. “Well, I’m assuming you’ve been doing this stuff a long time—how long?”

Devin’s dark cheeks seemed to flatten, and his eyes rose up as if he now had to access something in his mind from long ago. “I’m not sure of the exact number—but I’ve been here for decades. I came to Rintu about ten years after Kostas. Kostas trained me, and when she was quite new to this herself. She is the most expert of all of us workers.”

There was a slight smile on Kostas’ face—and maybe a little flush of pride, too—as Devin continued speaking: “I can’t say I ever felt ‘frustrated’ with Keeper mechanisms or Keeper science. But maybe that’s because I initially chose to do it. You have basically been seconded into this. Maybe it would help if you forgot your reason for being here and simply remembered that you are here now.”

“You people often say that,” Steve said, “but I’m finding using your mechanisms isn’t that intuitive—they don’t seem like they’re very compatible with human ones. Even the readout—it’s mostly in English for us, but the Keeper symbols seem to be randomly inserted every ten or so words—”

“Ah,” Devin said fast, “you are looking at the suit’s communication stream for its functions. That does contain extraneous ‘interruptions’ of Keeper signals—you will sometimes pick those up, depending on where you are. You need to remember to turn that setting off.”

Steve flushed. “Geez. What a dumb mistake….”

“No—there is no dumb here, and I admit that I did not always see that about you and the rest of the Demeter crew,” Devin said, his mouth ending on a hard slant. He glanced around the room at us. “On Rintu, I felt that you were being ignorant through stubbornness, but now I see that my ignorance of your feelings was the bigger problem.

“I’ve been spending time with Geena and the others in the kitchen, and their efforts to help the Keepers have been most satisfactory—today, many of them from the lounge have resumed working on the cube.”

“I’m glad to hear it!” I said now.

Beside me, Gary smiled at Devin. Geena, however, was with the other group of my crew; we’d been split into two groups this time, and now I felt sorry that Geena wasn’t here to hear Devin’s compliment.

“Does this mean we’ll be leaving the anomaly soon?” Gary asked Devin now. “I’m kind of anxious about, well, testing out using this ship. Will we see the bridge today?”

“Yes,” Kostas said, her eyes on Gary. “But, you’re not ready to touch much. We will go there so you can get a feel for the area. We can go now, if you all wish.”

“Actually,” Steve said, “I’d rather get another look at the engine area. We barely got to do that yesterday.”

“As you wish,” Kostas said, looking over at me now and waiting for my reply.

“Yeah—that’s fine with me,” I said finally. “We’ll split up. Who wants to go with me to the bridge?”

*

Most of my crew from both groups went off with Devin, and my usual bridge companions plus May wound up coming with me and Kostas.

Going on the overall direction we moved in now, the Monument’s long axis seemed to be perpendicular to the hangar containing the Demeter. But I couldn’t be sure of the Monument’s layout: first we walked along it in a mostly straight line; then we entered a tube-like, long car. The walls of the car were a dark, transparent material. There were rows of seats inside, and once I’d sat down and the car got going, I began feeling a little motion sickness; the car seemed to be whipping through the ship in various directions and repeatedly making quite-sharp turns.

“What’s going on?” Chen asked. “My stomach isn’t exactly liking this.”

“The bridge,” Kostas said, “is in a more protected area of the ship—”

“So that means moving through more fields and dimensional shifts,” I said.

And Kostas replied, “I didn’t have to explain this time, and that’s very good.”

*

Kostas might not have had to explain that traveling detail, but when we reached the bridge, I realized that if someone didn’t explain that, my crew and I would never understand it.

 The enormous bridge area was more long than wide, and it was mostly composed of clear, room-like compartments stacked on top of each other all the way down the bridge’s sides; in many of the compartments, there was a lone Keeper working at the consoles.

Kostas said that there was a forward bridge area, way at the end of the stacks, and when we finally reached it, my eyes slowly roamed over the various table-sized devices, computers, and other mechanisms that banked both sides of the space. The side walls above the equipment were dark, and at the front end of the bridge, there was an enormous viewer screen, similar to the one on the Demeter’s bridge. Most of the Monument’s devices here were dark, with lots of bright lights and arc-ing Keeper symbols sprawling across the interfaces. I noticed small placards stuck onto some of the consoles on the left side of the bridge.

I pointed at one card. “That says ‘Auxiliary Disassociating Engine’—you need that sign?”

Kostas’ head purposefully whipped left, then right, then left again. “No. You do. The forward bridge is symmetrical: both sides can be used to do the same tasks. It is one of our many back-up systems.

“But during your training, you will only use the equipment on the left side. From on the right side, we will keep an eye on—and control when necessary—what you’re doing.”

Gary stepped forward from beside me, to get a closer look at one of the labeled consoles. “Kostas, don’t you think we would have been better off looking at one of those mini-bridges you’ve got up there—I’m assuming that’s what they are.”

Kostas now explained that there was a lot of coordinating going on, of the spatial dimensions of the ship’s structure, of outside the ship, of signals to and from Rintu and other places where Keepers were….

Each mini-bridge usually had separate functions. “The Monument can be split into four ships if necessary,” Kostas said. “Though we’ve never had a need to do that. When we work on important tasks, each of the four ships usually represents a single task, as is the case now, with the cube.”

I ran a hand over the smooth, charcoal-gray, stone-like edge of a console on my left. “What is this stone material? I keep seeing it all over the ship. It was in the Rintu mountain, too.”

Kostas turned to me. “It’s a composite of stone and stellar material.”

“Shit,” I said, whipping my hand away.

There was a laugh behind me—Babs. “It hasn’t jolted you yet, Lydia, so what are the odds?”

“The odds are zero, actually,” Kostas said, her head briefly turning Babs’ way. “The raw, stellar material has been altered. It’s electromagnetically inert to our bodies, but it’s also very light and very strong.”

“What about that?” Gary asked, pointing at the frame of the front rectangular viewscreen. There were no images visible on it now, but the frame literally glowed red and silver, in tiny swirling patterns; they seemed to have been scratched into the brilliant surface.

Gary frowned now. “That looks familiar to me—” he snapped his fingers fast “—oh, I know: there was something on Dia—”

“Humans should not be interacting with anything to do with that species,” Kostas said. “Even the Keepers avoid them. They are much too powerful.”

Gary turned his frown onto Kostas. “Well, thanks for the info, but it’s a little too late because that place has already been settled by people. But if you’re so wary of those powerful beings, how do you have material from them?”

“They tend to abandon their latest inventions before they go into their lengthy hibernation periods. We only take what they’d never come looking for again. We store most of it in our archives, but their creations are very useful, so we make use of them in our buildings when we can.”

 Gary nodded slowly, then began staring at something else. “So, where are the controls for thrusting, for landing, for—well, just about everything!” His brown eyes suddenly lit up into a storm of curiosity.

And now my crew and I spent even more time listening to and talking with Kostas. She encouraged us to use our hands then, to get a feel for how the levers and buttons on the bridge worked, but Kostas said they weren’t connected to any power at the moment. “We can’t afford to accidentally leave the area where the cube is.”

“How far away is it?” I asked fast. “Though I guess it’s not that far—it shook the ship that day.”

Kostas’ expression suddenly softened, and into a sad, deflated one, which made me feel sorry I’d mentioned that incident….

Quickly now, she moved to a small, triangular, green extension on a table on the right, her fingers finally punching very flat buttons there. I heard a wispy sliding sound, then saw the front viewscreen open to reveal an image of the cube, which looked much different now—as in, it was no longer a cube. It looked more like a long, pale candy-bar floating in the murky anomaly space.

“We have finished removing 86% of the cube,” Kostas said. “We should be done in less than two Earth-days.”

“And then what?” Shirley asked from behind me.

I glanced at her, but her wide eyes were on Kostas, who now replied: “And then you train for real.”

*

“Am I the only one who’s nervous about her ‘for real’?” Shirley asked as we walked beneath the last suspended bridge compartment and then completely out of the bridge area.

Before on the forward bridge, Kostas had to suddenly transport-leave, so she had turned on lit-up wall-markers to guide me and my crew back to the tube-car and then back to that same kitchen area we knew.

My eyes followed the red marker-arcs as we moved through the Monument’s hallways, some of which were quite dark; others of which looked more like rooms we had to walk across, empty rooms….The ship was really quite empty—or maybe it was simply empty-looking to us, when there was actually a lot there. But, to our human brains, that lack of decoration made the ship seem an eerie place. I wouldn’t want to be running around in it by myself….

I finally said to Shirley, “We’re all feeling a certain lack of confidence here.”

“I don’t feel that way when I’m around Kostas,” Babs said, and when I looked at her over my shoulder, she was smiling to herself.

Chen asked now, “How do you think the others are doing—with the engines? And where are they doing it?”

May was walking beside him, her head and gaze bobbing at the walls as we moved. “Didn’t Kostas say it was in an entirely different part of the ship than the bridge?”

“Yeah,” Gary said. “And I think I remember seeing the Keeper engine symbol on one of the layout maps.” He pulled off his workbook from two of his suit-tabs. The others had their workbooks attached to their suits too, but I had mine hanging off my captain’s belt….

My eyes began following the wall symbol-directions again, but then I whipped my eyes away when Gary suddenly said, “Here—look. That’s the symbol.”

He pointed at a curving line similar to an S on his workbook’s screen, but the curve had a horizontal T on the bottom; the symbol was centered on top of a large, vacant-looking area in the ship’s map-schematic. “Maybe we can figure out how to get there,” he said. “It looks like it’s not far from the bridge area in the horizontal direction, but it’s three levels up.”

I felt dubious. “Gary, we don’t know where the hell we’re going as it is.”

“But aren’t we essentially explorers now?” He lifted his workbook a little. “We’ve been reading our training material every free moment we get. I think we should try out what we learned in the classes and see if we can read the schematic ourselves. What could really happen? The workers are always up our asses anyway, taking care of us, a.k.a. controlling us.”

The rest of my crew couldn’t help laughing at that a little dryly. And neither could I.

*

A few minutes later, we all stepped off the path Kostas and her markers had laid out for us, and, as far as we could tell from our workbooks and our sleeve readouts, there was one of those tube-car thingies around a bend in the hall we were slowly moving through. The tube-car was supposed to provide vertical transportation, but I was still unsure…and I should have listened to my unsureness, because when we finally turned around the bend, we didn’t find ourselves in anything that looked like a tube-car.

We now stood on a vast plain; it would have seemed like an outdoor plain, had we been outdoors. But we were indoors. And yet, there didn’t seem to be any walls in any direction.

“O…kay,” I said. “Who expected this? I certainly didn’t.” I felt a movement in front of us—like a chilly wind, but it was moving slowly, floating around and between us, and finally making the back of my neck tingle.

“Uh, what’s that—what’s going on?” Shirley asked, and I could hear her feet shuffling, as if she were whirling around. But before I could turn to look at her, I heard another noise—a great lengthy squeeaaaal….

I shoved my palms against my ears, and that did nothing to quell the insane, mechanical squealing noise. My crew were doing the same ear-covering—and also shouting now. We tried running back into the hall, but though the squealing began dying, we didn’t wind up in that hall. We wound up in a stairwell.

We stood on the stairwell’s platform, staring at each other through wide eyes. There was nowhere else to go but up or down.

“Now what?” May asked, grabbing onto Chen’s arm, his not-normal arm actually, which made me remember that I wanted to ask him if his suit-sleeve and readout were working the same as the rest of ours….

This wasn’t the right moment. We were stuck on stairs, to who knew where.

I stared upward, but it was too dark to see what was above us—or below us, when I looked down now. Beside me, Gary’s hands were jerking at his workbook controls as he searched for some answers about our location. When I turned my head again, I noticed a pretty, circular symbol had been carved into the vertical rise of each step.

“Well,” I finally said on a frown, “we intended to go up for the engines, so I guess up it is. Put your workbook away, Gary. It’s clear that we don’t know where the fuck we are because we don’t know how to read the ship’s layout yet.”

Gary sighed hard as he attached his workbook back onto his suit.

I took the lead and the six of us climbed the stairs…and climbed and climbed. When would they end? I was feeling thankful that I had some crackers in my belt. I was feeling not thankful that my current predicament was reminding me of being stuck somewhere else….

An instant later, my crew and I were no longer stuck: the stairs ended, and we stepped into a long bright room with large white boxes sticking out of the side walls. I could see to the room’s other end, but it only seemed to lead to another room like this one.

“Okay,” I said, “we had something to prove, and we didn’t prove it. We still don’t know what we’re doing. Now we’re lost and that’s it. It’s time to transport out of here.”

I tried to push one of my red transporter buttons, but Shirley said in a confused voice, “Captain Lydia—you forgot that the workers haven’t activated our transporters yet.”

My face flushed. “Shit—you’re right. Well, then we’ll just contact the others.” I tried using my belt to reach my other crew—who now had Demeter communicator-buttons attached to their suits somewhere—but I had no luck contacting my crew. Then more no luck when the six of us in that odd bright room tried using our worksuit communicators to contact someone—anyone.

“Fuck!” Gary finally said, his face flushing so hard that sweat slid over his forehead. His eyes lifted to mine, and I read the “I’m sorry” in them.

I nodded at him, but I was too nervous to be annoyed with him: we’d all chosen to go off of Kostas’ path, so getting lost was all of our faults.

*

We remained in that room with the white boxes for a little while, talking about what the fuck to do, but we didn’t cross the boundaries of where any of the boxes were. Something about them bothered me—maybe something was coming off them that I was subconsciously sensing. After a brief while, the others said they felt something too.

“It might be interfering with our signals to the others,” Gary said.

“Well, we’re not going across the boxes,” I said now, “so I guess it’s back to the stairs.” Fortunately, they were still there to go back to.

We moved down the stairs now, while we continued using our communicators to try to contact the others. I also called Kostas’ name numerous times, but still nothing happened, except the stairs kept going down—then all of a sudden the left side of the stairs disappeared—and Gary began sliding toward the hole there.

The rest of us rushed forward to grab him, but we were too late: he fell over the edge, with me screaming his name as he disappeared into the darkness.

*

The rest of my crew grabbed me right before I could jump into the hole after Gary. I was still screaming, but when I finally stopped for an instant to take a breath, I heard Gary’s voice: “Lydia—Lydia—I’m here!”

“Where!” I shouted, my eyes struggling to see him in the gaping darkness. “It’s so dark—I can’t make out anything.”

A mirthless laugh from him. “I don’t know where I am. You can’t see me, but I can see you up there. Unfortunately, there was a lot of heat when I fell—part of my suit got burned—”

I moaned in worry now. “Are you all right?! Use your suit’s medical controls!”

“I’m working on it,” he said. Then, after a moment: “I’m feeling it—I got hurt on my side, but the medicine seems to be going there. Shit—it hurts….”

“Oh Gary,” I said, and I began crying, which I did not want to do in front of my crew, but this was Gary….

Babs grabbed onto my hands, and Chen laid one of his hands on my back as he stretched his neck forward so he could look into the hole. “Is there something you can use there to reach us? My arm—my arm is stronger than it used to be,” Chen said, and my eyes jerked around to him, in surprise. “If you throw me something,” he continued to Gary, “I think I can pull you up—”

“No need—” Gary said “—Kostas just talked to me!”

“Tell her to come get us already!” I shouted.

“She’s on her way,” Gary said, and though his voice was shaky, I could hear a smile in it, too.

*

“I’ve trained many people on this ship, and no one has ever wandered off on their own and fallen into a charger hole,” Kostas snapped at us.

We were in a lounge room near the kitchen. She had transported us to here, and a robed Keeper was looking over Gary—at least her head in her orange robe was moving over where he was lying on a cushion-top table. His worksuit had been burned off on the right side of his abdomen, and the Keeper lifted a flickering hand to near there.

Now Kostas snapped at Gary directly: “There were too many of you on the stairs. They’re programmed to spin to different parts of the ship—though at least that you fell off them and into a hole, I was finally able to locate you. The hole had been turned off. But it was still very hot. If you had fallen a few feet to the left, you would have been char-broiled.”

“I’m sorry!” Gary said, lifting the back of his head from the table. “It isn’t wonderful from my end, you know—ouch!” He had yelled that at The Keeper.

“What are you doing to him?” I said, starting to rush over to him.

But Kostas raised an imperious hand. “Let Tursh medicate him.”

“He did use his suit on himself,” Babs said to Kostas.

“And it’s a good thing he did and that he did it right. His injury would have worsened.”

“Where did I fall?” Gary asked, squinting through the pain that Tursh was apparently causing him. I had to grit my teeth; I was so upset at so much….

Kostas’ gaze fell on her hand-held device as she worked it. “Just like you make use of battery power, so do we have a type of battery set-up. Gary fell into one of the empty charger holes we use for the batteries.”

“Well, how the hell were we supposed to know you had such dangerous things on this ship?” I said, flinging an angry palm at the air.

“Most things on here are NOT dangerous,” Kostas said. “You happened to reach one thing that is. And you did that because you didn’t follow instructions—”

“But we did follow them,” I snapped. “You’ve told us before that we can look around and that the ship would prevent us from going somewhere we shouldn’t.”

 Kostas’ lips twitched and her slowly widening dark eyes locked onto me. “You’re right. I did say that. I meant it in the context of that part of the ship—by the kitchen, meeting rooms and hangar, but I should have been clearer. I made a mistake, just like I made a mistake in saying Jim should come on your ship. It was a stupid idea.”

I pulled an astonished face. “Where did that come from?”

“It is the truth,” Kostas said, and I could have sworn her voice shook. “As I’ve told you before, the Keepers are very powerful but not all-powerful. They—we make mistakes and can’t see everything. Some things are murky because of a combination of physical phenomena—or for whatever reason. We do our best; sometimes that’s just not enough. But had Jim not been on your ship, we wouldn’t have had to rush you toward this training.”

*

Unlike Kostas, I wasn’t so sure that anything was really her fault, but as I silently waited for Tursh to finish helping Gary, I did begin regretting so much, including ever getting involved with the Keepers again….

Gary was still lying on the table—flinching and just generally looking very uncomfortable. My heart was going crazy.

I wanted to grab Gary, but Kostas spoke again: “This time, let me be clear: do not go wandering about ever again in areas of the ship you have never been to before. Use your READOUTS if you’re lost, and look for any danger symbols. I’m surprised at all of this—really. Common sense—I’ve said many times that we’re busy being focused on the cube. We don’t have time to babysit.”

“Well, excuse us,” I snapped through shaking lips. Babs’ face had turned red, and Gary’s had turned really red.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I got over-eager; then I almost got over-heated. But, don’t worry, Kostas, because I won’t be wandering around on here again anytime soon.”

“Well,” Kostas said as her back straightened more, “one good result of this is that you will all never again forget the Keeper symbol for EXTREME DANGER that was carved onto every stair riser.”

*

“I think she dislikes me now,” Gary said to me when we were finally left alone together in the lounge.

I pulled a face at him. “I think you’re imagining things. I know she was annoyed, but I doubt she has feelings of whatever kind toward any of us.” Gary was sitting up now, and I was bent over, examining his bumpy wound. It was about the size of my hand, and Tursh had covered it with a clear bandage of artificial human skin. “Kostas did say that if you keep taking the Keeper medicine, your wound’ll be mostly healed in a few days, and when she said that, she almost smiled.”

Gary frowned down at my fingers on his skin. “She wasn’t looking my way then, though.” He grabbed my hand, said, “Hey, come here,” as he pulled me closer, to his face.

I kissed him then, gingerly throwing my arms over his shoulders. I couldn’t get any closer to him without pressing against his wound, so I used my hands and my mouth to tell him how worried I had been—and how happy I was that most of my worrying had wound up being for nothing.

*

Later, when my crew and I were eating in the Demeter’s dining room, I stopped chewing for a long moment and took a careful look around the room. But I wasn’t looking at my people then—I was looking at the structure of the room itself. It was a long, warmly decorated area that I knew well, and it provided a comforting, safe feeling, just like the rest of my ship.

At the same time, I saw now that there was probably nothing new for me on my ship; it was a well-known quantity, both in how it had been built and in my feelings toward it. There were some wacky, intriguing things that could—and did—happen on here. But, there probably weren’t as many wacky intriguing things compared to what could happen on the Monument.

I thought of that amazing bridge, the levels of it and the lights and the oddball decorations from species I had never met and would never meet. Or maybe….

“What are you thinking about?”—Gary’s voice.

My head turned to him on my right. His uninjured side was facing me, and he was wearing a brown shirt over it. I glanced down there anyway as I spoke: “I’m thinking that there are dangers everywhere—especially if we behave rashly. But, that bridge….” Slowly now, I shook my head on a wistful sigh.

Gary’s lips pursed together. “Yeah. I keep trying to, well, imagine us there…and then I like what I see in my head.”

“I still can’t get over the engine rooms—or maybe I should say room-engines,” Steve said in an astonished voice, his workbook in one hand and a mug of something hot in his other hand. He was sitting at the table on the opposite side of the room; Shirley, Chen and May were with him. Geena was at my table. Babs hadn’t come to dinner.

I wondered where she was; then I shrugged it off and gave Gary’s leg beside me a protective little squeeze. When he smiled at me in a reassuring way, I finally went back to enjoying my food.

*

The next day, I stood in a meeting room waiting for Kostas to arrive, my right hand holding one of Gary’s hands and my left hand adjusting my worksuit’s attached underwear, to make it more comfortable against my butt. The workers had given Gary a new red suit; beneath it, he was still wearing that Keeper bandage….

Kostas finally walked into the meeting room, and she began talking to me and my crew straight away. If she was still annoyed with us, she didn’t show it as she said, “Gary’s accident yesterday is an extreme case of suit-damage that requires extensive repair. But if there are ever any problems with individual suits being minorly damaged or just feeling sluggish in their operation because of a loss of energy somehow, you can coordinate one suit with another to compensate. This will increase your overall energy through a feedback mechanism of improved power-pack efficiency, because the suits assume there’s probably an emergency. Here is how you activate this failsafe….”

As Kostas continued speaking, my eyes drifted around the room to my crew, who, surprisingly, looked comfortable in their worksuits and like they were ready for anything that this new day would throw at them.

Kostas had said earlier that nearly all of the other workers were working on the final push on dismantling the cube, except for Devin.

He came into the room now, holding a large black box in his arms. He laid it on the dark floor and opened it, then began giving the small gray devices inside to me and my crew.

These devices looked different than the ones Kostas and the workers used: theirs had ridges on the sides; ours were smooth on the sides. Fortunately, the gray devices wound up being quite straightforward to operate; they had duplicate functions with respect to the suits, but the devices could also do some things the suits couldn’t.

When Kostas was done explaining a more finicky aspect of the devices, I asked her, “Will we get to see the bridge again today?”

“Yes, when we’re done here. We think your engineering crew should continue looking at the engine controls they started looking at yesterday. But if you’d rather they join you on the bridge, that’s your choice, Captain Zarro.”

Her eyes were on me, but I shifted mine toward Karen and Steve, raising my eyebrows their way. “So?” I asked them. “Where do you want to go?”

“Captain,” Karen said, a jolt of eagerness in her voice, “you should see it there—it’s wild, because there’s almost nothing to see inside the ‘engines’ themselves. The rooms where the engines supposedly work look empty—and they’re so silent! It’s very, uh, Zen—Steve agrees.”

Her head turned to him, and he nodded whip-fast. “Oh yeah—the equipment outside the engine rooms is complex, and well, intimidating, but the empty engines are what’s so fascinating. It’s not a normal power and propulsion system. Kostas can correct me here,” he glanced at her, then down at his workbook in his hands, “but it seems like Keeper ships are ‘propelled’ by directly using a generic form of energy from mass or matter that’s disassociated—like the ships access that ‘pure energy’ the workers have mentioned. Forget reaction-mass rocket flight—you only need energy to do the work of moving a Keeper ship through the dimensional streams or in the pockets between them. You can take in that pure energy somehow and use that, or as long as you have some type of mass to use, you’ll have energy that way, like via mass-energy equivalence.

“The most basic way I can think of to describe it is: the generic energy made available to a Keeper ship is almost like the fuel itself, and that fuel-energy leads to massive vibrations—to being able to use omnivelocities.” Steve let out a hard breath now. “It will take us a lot of time to learn the many details here….”

“You have clearly learned quite a bit already, but you do not have to learn everything,” Kostas said. “Not even all of the Keepers can operate their ships. It’s something they must learn over time, too. We want you to be familiar with this ship right now—that’s all.”

“To be honest,” Steve said, blushing, “I’d like to get more than just familiar with it. When can I?”

“We shall see when you’re ready,” Kostas said, and she was looking at Gary when she said it, who was blushing.

And, I knew my man: he was blushing because he was very embarrassed.

*

When my usual bridge crew and I reached the bridge area, there were more robed Keepers on the upper bridges compared to yesterday—and I assumed there were more Keepers today because they were now able to move more of their attention from the cube to the Monument.

Kostas took me and my crew to that same forward area of the bridge. The equipment on the left side was still sporting labels; however, some of the equipment was usable today.

Now Kostas said to the five of us, “I hope you’ve all been reviewing the dimensional maps and all of the omnivelocity information we’ve taught you, and everything else that’s been programmed into your workbooks.”

I nodded at her fast; so did my crew.

Then Kostas walked over to one of the lit-up consoles on the left side of the room and began going over how to read the velocity-profile diagrams and numerical data on the screen. “This is a simulation,” she said. “I’m going to set up a fake flight scenario, and then show you how it should be worked out. I’ll be doing this on all of the equipment that’s turned on today.”

She moved from one console to the next, pushing at various buttons and explaining what she was doing, while we stood close to her, and watched and listened.

She repeated that whole process several times, and it went on for so long that I lost track of how long we’d been on the bridge—not that time made sense on the Monument now in general. But my aching body began feeling tired of standing on the bridge and watching Kostas’ demonstrations.

She finally said that one or two of us at a time would now work at the consoles. “Lydia and Shirley first.”

Shirley pressed a hand to her chest, her blue eyes jerking toward Gary then fixing on Kostas. “Me?!” Shirley asked.

“Yes,” Kostas replied. “You all have your individual strengths, but you and Lydia are quicker at improvisational thinking. The rest of you are better over the longer-term.”

“It seems you know us well,” Babs said, her eyes on Kostas.

Kostas’ dark-haired head seemed to nod. Her hands motioned toward me and Shirley. Then I pressed a reassuring hand against Shirley’s back, and we began this new, hands-on stage of our training.

And it really did seem that Kostas knew us; other than a few slip-ups in our interpretation of a velocity profile’s upper and lower boundaries, Shirley and I both did everything right—though of course there was little to do at this point because actually flying the Monument was much more complicated. Still, I felt glad that I’d started out on the right foot.

Chen’s turn was after mine, and when he walked up to one of the consoles, I noticed that he was using his good arm to rub at the long red sleeve on his other arm. “I really want to be physically involved today, but my arm’s been itching since last night.”

My eyes widened at him; then they whipped to Kostas. “Is there a problem?”

Kostas’ head shook a “no” at me. “No problem we can see.”

“I wouldn’t exactly phrase it like that,” I said, a little sharply.

A low, almost inaudible sigh from Kostas. “The Keepers have explained to Chen what his options are. We can regrow a human arm for him. But there are risks with the arm growth and attachment, especially because we will need to remove what he has now.”

“Um,” Chen said, his left hand firmly grabbing onto his right arm, “I think I can live with the one I’ve got, at least for now….” His eyes wandered over the rest of us from the Demeter and finally landed on me. “Lydia, what do you think I should do? What would YOU do?”

“It’s not my arm, Chen,” I said.

And he slowly nodded, punctuating his motion with a sigh. “I’m making do, and, most of the time, it’s okay. I just don’t want to hit the wrong thing today—”

“This is the time to learn,” Kostas said. “You must make mistakes to know what a mistake will look like. There is no ‘wrong’ today.”

Chen was nodding again; he moved even closer to the equipment and finally pressed his left hand against it. I thought of May: she wasn’t on the bridge with us this time, and I was glad she wasn’t, given where the conversation had gone.

Kostas, Shirley and Gary stood right beside Chen now, watching him as he worked one of the consoles. Babs was closer to me, and when I glanced at her now, the odd, distant look on her face made me glance at her a second time. I moved even closer to her and asked in a low voice, “What is it?”

She shook her head, her dark hair glimmering beneath the bridge lights. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, a small smile on her face now as she listened to what the others were saying. Kostas had been explaining more of the science of how the controls actually affect the room-engines. And now I watched both Chen’s and Gary’s eyes eagerly light up.

“It’s hard to conceive that the response can be so instantaneous,” Gary said in an almost breathless voice.

“It is though,” Kostas said. “But that also means there is a shorter window during which to fix any mistakes. Flying Keeper ships is more about how well you prepare your path—how much thinking you do beforehand. Improvising can be more difficult. That’s why I keep encouraging all of you to study a lot when I’m not around. Get in the habit of, well, getting in the habit. While many of the calculations are automated on the Monument, just as they are on the Demeter’s computer, a machine is ultimately only as good as its user. I’m sure I don’t have to tell any of you that,” she finished, her mouth curling into a soft smile.

*

My crew and I learned a lot on the bridge that day, and that learning exhausted us so much that, once we left the bridge, we didn’t take any crazy, errant walks anywhere. We followed Kostas’ exact instructions on how to get back to the kitchen-area of the ship; she’d left us again because she had to deal with something about the cube.

When I finally walked into the Monument’s kitchen, Geena and her gang were inside; they’d been putting the finishing touches on a large meal for not only the Keepers, but for us, too.

“Can I help?” I asked Geena, but a yawn from me followed my question. I pressed a quick hand over my mouth, and everyone in the room laughed.

“No, Captain,” Geena finally said. “We’re almost done, and you sound beat.”

“I am beat. I don’t feel very captainly at the moment, especially on this ship.”

“You’ll always be our captain no matter where we are,” Geena said, and a warm feeling filled my chest as I grinned at her.

*

After my crew and I finished eating dinner in the Demeter’s dining room, a bunch of them wanted to play games in the lounge; I decided to just have coffee in there and watch my crew have fun at the electronic play-tables.

I was sitting back in one of the very cushiony armchairs when May walked into the room. She and her usual cargo-bay workers had missed having dinner with us; another of the Keeper workers had taken them to one of the Monument’s storage levels.

May was holding a plate filled with food now, but instead of sitting down, she walked right up to me. “Oh Lydia—what a day we had! I wondered what on earth I could do on here, but I had no idea how much cargo they have. I should have known!”

Her brown eyes buzzed with excitement as she explained to me how the Keepers stored everything—food, fuel, devices; the devices the Keepers collected for archiving made up a good deal of the Monument’s cargo, but some devices couldn’t be archived so had to be very carefully stored for later dismantling and recycling into energy.

“The cargo area’s much more challenging than on the Demeter,” May said. “I’m not familiar with most of the Monument’s contents; I’ve definitely gotta learn more about them—so much work! But I feel, well—I do feel so damn excited about it, you know what I mean?”

“I definitely know what you mean,” I said, smiling and lifting my coffee cup in her direction before I took a drink.

*

Gary had gone to get some sleep in his cabin right after dinner; I thought that was a good prescription for me in my cabin, so I didn’t linger too long in the lounge.

On my way down the hallway, I ran into Babs. There was a big smile on her face, yet a distant look in her brown eyes.

I pressed a hand to one of her arms, gently pulling her to a stop. “Hey there,” I said. “You weren’t at dinner again.”

Babs looked up at me. I kept walking, slowly, and she turned around and came with me.

“I was with someone,” she said, her voice finally lowering. “Kostas.”

I stopped walking. “Um, what?”

Babs grabbed onto my right arm and pulled me toward where her cabin was. Her head motioned for me to come inside, so I did.

“I was just talking with Kostas during dinnertime,” Babs said, “but, uh, we did spend the past two nights together in here.”

My eyes widened at Babs, my heart began pounding. “What?!”

“Don’t be mad, Lydia—I know I should have said something—”

“No—you don’t have to because it relates to your personal life, but, yeah, I should have known she was physically on the Demeter. And I warned you about that—look at what happened between Geena and Jim. He broke her heart. Though, I guess she does seem better lately…. But, you’re raw still, from another relationship.”

Babs’ face flushed. “I know—it never goes smoothly for anyone. Look at Shirley and Steve.”

My eyebrows jerked up. “Huh?”

“When he was drunk that night on Makron and Shirley helped him to his cabin, they kissed before he passed out. But, ever since, he’s been acting like nothing ever happened.”

Now my eyebrows dropped low as I frowned. “Damn. I didn’t know this was going on.”

“Everyone’s been busy adapting here. You’ve been really busy.”

“I think I need to start paying attention more—maybe if I had, you all wouldn’t be bouncing all over with everyone.”

“I don’t know—ever since I first saw Kostas, there’s just something so alluring about her. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way toward another woman before. Even with Derry—it was just very comfortable. It wasn’t exciting.”

“Exciting relationships don’t necessarily wind up being the best relationships,” I said.

“I just want what you and Gary have.”

My shocked mouth dropped open, not just because I couldn’t picture Babs and Kostas as a couple, but also because I wasn’t so sure that what Gary and I had was unique. “And you think you can have something day-to-day with Kostas?” I finally asked Babs.

“She’s warmer than you think she is,” Babs said. The reappearance of that distant look in Babs’ brown eyes confirmed to me that she really was smitten with Kostas.

I sighed hard, my brow wrinkling again. “Wait a second—how did she get aboard the Demeter?”

“Oh—she transported, so the rest of the crew wouldn’t see.”

“Including the captain,” I said dryly.

Babs was blushing again. My sigh this time was softer. “You do look happy—I don’t mean to put a damper on it. Just be careful is all I’m saying. And I don’t think we’ve really decided how long this working relationship with the Keepers will last.”

“I know,” Babs said, on a sigh of her own.

*

A little later, I was finally alone outside my cabin door. I hesitated there; then I swore to myself; then I left that deck and went down to the cargo bay; then I left my ship.

I stood still in the hangar and said, “Kostas,” loudly.

“I am here,” came her voice. “I’m on the bridge, actually—”

“I want to speak to you. In person.”

“If you know how to get here by mechanical means, do it. If not, then transport. Why not test that out?”

Why not, indeed: the workers had finally turned on our transporters, and I hadn’t changed out of my worksuit yet.

I had my little gray device in one of the thigh pockets on my suit, but I decided to use my sleeve-readout: I opened it and looked for any information on the bridge’s location for transporting; when I found the info, I selected it using a fingertip, then used my sleeve-controls—and was instantly transported to the middle of the bridge area beneath the clear upper bridges.

I felt a little lightheaded and the area looked a little too dark to my eyes now. I stood still there for a moment—till I spotted Kostas up ahead on the forward bridge. She and several robed Keepers were moving around inside.

I walked there fast and said to Kostas, “Can I speak to you alone?”

“I don’t have much time,” she said in a clipped way. “We have finished the cube dismantling, and we will be leaving the anomaly now. I thought we’d be departing while you were all sleeping—at least I thought that after your hard day today, you would have all gone to bed early.”

“We’re all tired—it’s true,” I said.

I hesitated now: I knew the Keepers might be privy to everything going on no matter where it went on, but I was still human, and I didn’t want to discuss the private matter of Babs with Kostas when the Keepers were nearby. Yet Kostas was busy at a console and she didn’t seem to want to budge from it.

“Kostas,” I finally said in a lower voice, “I want to talk to you about Babs.”

Kostas’ head shot up, and there was a small frown on her face. “We’ll go into the bridge rest-area,” she said.

I followed her as she walked toward one of the dark walls, where a doorway now opened. The large space the door led into was quite warmly lit; there were chairs and floor cushions scattered around, and a kitchen cabinet and counter area, with colorful bowls stacked on top of the white counter.

Kostas stood with her back to the counter. “Sometimes on extended flights across the universes, we workers and the Keepers sleep in here. There’s a large bathroom through that doorway—”

“That’s good to know, but, right now, I want to talk about your involvement with Babs, as in: if you hurt her, I’m going to be really angry at you.”

Kostas seemed to startle backwards. “Why would I hurt her?”

“In sexual relationships, people don’t always mean to hurt others, but they can still hurt those others anyway. And going on the cold way Jim’s treated Geena, I thought you crowd aren’t supposed to have relationships.”

“Though I am intimately linked with the Keepers, I am still me, Kostas. I have always followed the ancient ways of my ancestry, and I go with whoever I want to go with, when the opportunity comes up.”

I was breathing too hard now, and I shot an angry arm out at the room. “Is that what Babs is to you—an opportunity?”

“Do not paint me as The Evil Thing. She made overtures to me. And I accepted them. I did not plan this. Since I’ve been with the Keepers, I’ve only rarely had any intimate contact with another human. I have too many things on my mind because of my working life with the Keepers. I normally don’t concern myself with the personal comfort of individual humans.”

“Well, excuse me, but all that means is that you’re an insensitive person,” I snapped.

Then Kostas sighed, loudly. “This conversation is going all wrong. I was in the middle of executing our departure from the anomaly. I don’t have the presence of mind to address what’s happened with Babs. I will talk to her later.”

“On my ship, huh? Don’t you think you should have let me know you were on there?”

“I am always possibly on there; so are the Keepers. They cannot always control where they move to, as you well know. Your ship is very close by. Keepers move through it sometimes without intending to.”

I was frowning now. “I know, but you aren’t a Keeper. As a human, you should have told me you were physically there. And I thought you said the transporters can make us sick—yet you use yours so much.”

“I really was just trying to discourage you and your crew from using them a lot when you’re new to them. The only real danger is if you accidentally transport yourself to somewhere you shouldn’t, though there are safeguards inside the transporters—” She seemed to jerk into being quiet. Then she said, “I’m coming back now.” Then she turned around and walked out the doorway to the bridge.

*

I was sighing as I followed her out of the rest-room; she rushed to one of the consoles on the right side of the forward bridge. The front viewscreen was on, and I could see that the floating anomaly particles outside seemed to be floating faster than ever.

“Are we moving?” I asked.

One of the Keepers standing on the bridge spoke to me in my mind: We are priming the engines, and we are using some of the anomaly matter almost as what you would call a “lighter fluid.”

“Oh—cool,” I said, my eyes widening at the screen. “Do we need to strap in—should I tell my crew?”

My hand was on my belt’s communicator, but Kostas rapidly shook her head my way. “No need, Lydia. The Monument flies almost completely smoothly. You will see,” she finished in a confident voice.

And then a moment later, I did see: the viewscreen image turned completely black; at first I thought it had been turned off, but then I realized that the lights on the bridge had also dimmed, and there was a dislocated feeling inside my mind, as if I couldn’t quite place my body’s location on the bridge. Then, a moment later, the sensation was gone.

“I feel like I just had an out-of-body experience,” I said, watching Kostas and the Keepers at the bridge controls, and also trying to learn from the motions of their hands, which motions were quite quick but very methodical looking, as if flying this ship meant doing the same by-rote motions over and over and over again, till you could do them with your eyes closed.

Kostas finally turned to me. “We’re out of the anomaly and in another layer of space—a far layer that humans do not use. I suggest you get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy training day for you and your crew.”

I nodded at her, but I was sighing as I pushed at my suit controls to transport me back to the hangar.

*

Kostas hadn’t been kidding when she said my crew and I would have a busy day the next day: as soon as Kostas joined us where we had been waiting in one of the larger meeting rooms, she said, “We are sending you all a roster over your suit-readouts for where you are to go. I will transport us all to our designated stations now.”

“Hang on a second,” I said fast. “What’s the rush?”

She arched a dark eyebrow at me. “We are running late. It takes time to get to where our ultimate mission is. As I’ve explained, it’s not an instantaneous route. And you and your crew have yet to do any real training.”

“I feel like I have been doing real training,” someone said—it sounded like Matt. “Your classroom here has been real, hasn’t it?”

“I can only teach you so much in an indirect way,” Kostas said. “We must see how you do on the bridge and at the engine controls.”

I was staring down at the roster on my sleeve-readout—my crew’s names were all listed, and next to my name it said that my position would be on the bridge; the same for my usual bridge crew on the Demeter. I glanced down the list for the stations where the rest of my crew would be—and found the same kind of natural alignment with their Demeter work.

I couldn’t really argue with where the Keepers were stationing us, so I didn’t argue. I just said to my crew, “Okay, everyone, you’ve got your instructions. Let’s go.”

*

When Gary, Babs, Chen, and Shirley and I had been transported to the forward bridge, there was no one else on it. For a moment, my nervous heart pounded like crazy.

Then Kostas suddenly materialized on the bridge. I let out a hard breath and said to her, “You almost gave me a heart attack—leaving us alone like this.”

She moved to the largest console on the right side of the room. The consoles had actually been rearranged today; some of the ones that had been flush against the side walls had now been pulled around to face the front of the bridge.

Kostas apparently made another adjustment now; cushioned silver chairs finally slid out from beneath the consoles and unfolded.

“I’m sorry you were alone here for thirty seconds,” Kostas said now, her voice slightly dry. “I had to pass through one of the engine control-rooms to make a quick adjustment there. It will be a long day; I’ve extended chairs for all of you. But if you’d prefer to stand, just press the button on the back of the chairs to put them away.” She turned around to face the five of us. “Now, let’s begin. Lydia, move to the largest front console on the left; everyone else stand at the positions I sent you on the roster.”

I pointed at an eye-catching collection of long, vertical, glowing neon-green tubes that only existed on the right side of the bridge. “What’s that?” I asked Kostas.

Her eyes glanced there. “That is something you won’t be using. It’s a special Keeper transporter for navigating inside the Monument.” Kostas’ eyes fixed on my face; she was apparently waiting on me to move to the very front of the bridge.

I thought it would be an annoying position to remain in because the viewscreen would be so close to me; however, as I moved toward the front consoles now, the viewscreen and its strange, carved red frame automatically moved farther away toward the Monument’s nose, as if another dimension of space had just been created between me and the nose.

I finally stopped at the largest front console—and waited for instructions from Kostas, who finally said, “Excellent. You’re all where you belong. Now, let me explain: today, we will be flying within this area.”

The viewscreen came to life in front of me, though there wasn’t much on it: a bunch of stars on the right, a completely black area on the left.

Kostas continued now: “The Keepers have reserved using this part of the Omniverse for training only. The dimensional streams here are mostly a closed area, so the Monument can go anywhere inside them without concern. Plus, we will keep a very close eye—and hand—on what you’re doing, to help prevent any problems.

“Always remember that omnivelocities also wind up meaning omnilocations. We can wind up anywhere in a planned profile if we unintentionally drop out of motion in that profile, so choose your positive and negative velocities and their ordering carefully, based on the ship’s suggestions—the ship’s computer will always suggest options. If we humans had to do this completely from scratch every time, we’d never get to any actual flying.

“Chen, Gary—I want you to start first: I am sending you the coordinates for a destination. Again, take your time in choosing a profile; refer to your devices, workbooks and suit-readouts for more information if necessary.

“Also remember that the round black buttons on all of the bridge panels are for talking to the Monument’s engine areas. You’re too new to coordinate flight actions with your other crewmembers now, but you may talk to them if it makes you feel more comfortable.”

I pushed the black communicator-button on my panel. “This is Lydia. How are you all doing there—Steve, Karen?”

“Fine, Captain,” Steve said over the link. “I mean, I think. I’m still learning these controls….”

“So are we,” I said on a sigh.

I looked over my right shoulder at Kostas; she arched a dark eyebrow at me.

I turned my head to my left and behind me, where Chen, Gary and Shirley were working on one long console, facing me; Babs was behind them facing a panel against the left side of the bridge. Every one of us was still standing.

“Go now if you’re ready, Chen, Gary,” I said.

“I’m on it,” Gary replied, his fingers punching his panel-buttons.

Looking down at my own panel’s readout, I could see he and Chen had been making adjustments to the numbers of an omnivelocity profile the ship’s computer had suggested. Then Chen finally pushed the blue “GO” button; parts of the consoles were still sporting labels for us….

I watched the front viewscreen…and kept watching it for another moment…for another long moment. There was no change on the screen; apparently, we had gone nowhere.

My face flushed. And when I turned to look at my crew, both Gary’s and Chen’s faces were the definition of “beet red.”

“Shit,” Gary mumbled.

“I thought I did it right,” Chen added.

I heard Kostas sigh. “You’ve forgotten what I said yesterday about the order of your very last actions. You didn’t hit the ‘set up omnivelocity’ button to confirm before you hit GO.”

“Oh duh,” Chen said, and I laughed softly. “We’ll do it again,” Chen added.

He and Gary did try again and—yay!—we moved. I felt a slight twinge of disorientation in my head, and then the screen changed: a foggy, orange color filled the left side of the screen—some light and matter from a nebula, apparently.

Kostas said now, “We are in one of the lowest energy dimensional streams here; navigating this is easy. You will go to one more location inside this area; then we will move to a higher-energy dimensional stream. How to move along the proper path in there isn’t so obvious.”

“Kostas,” I said, “it seems like we’re doing only partial flight steps here in general. It can’t be this simple. There must be more to the process.”

When I glanced over my right shoulder, Kostas was looking at me. “Of course there is. But you are only scratching the surface now. You are still unsure of what your choice will be for the future, aren’t you?”

I nodded at her, but I was thinking that I felt a lot less unsure than she knew. I had really begun to see that the longer I stayed on the Monument, the less I’d probably want to go back to staying on the Demeter only.

I didn’t say any of that to Kostas, however, and then she told me it was my turn to move the Monument.

I worked my controls, and I didn’t have the same problem Chen and Gary had; the ship moved to somewhere new now, only, this time, it didn’t want to stop moving.

“Uh,” Babs said in a warning tone.

“Kostas, we keep jumping to a new spot—we’re not stopping!” I said.

“No kidding,” she replied. “Figure out what to do.”

We did—or Chen did. And the view on the screen rapidly slowed.

“I don’t see how I’m ever going to get the hang of this,” Gary said now.

“We have confidence that you will,” Kostas said in a sure tone to match her statement. “If I and others like me have been able to fly this ship, so should you be able to.”

“But you seem to have a perpetual, worker mind-link with the Keepers. Maybe that helps you understand this ship’s science.” Gary flung a hand at the controls. “To be honest, I’m really feeling overwhelmed here already.”

I heard Chen sigh—in sympathy with Gary. “I thought my arm would give me an advantage, but I still have the same damn human brain. If you expect us to help get us to the warring species, Kostas, how can we make the deadline?” Chen sighed again. “I don’t get the feeling we’re up to it.”

“This is just a start. We don’t expect you to take us all the way to the deadline’s location, but you must have a general idea about how to do that anyway—just in case. I’ve told you what’s at stake. We either do this now, or we risk the framework collapsing.”

“Well,” Chen said, “could your path-library be wrong about that?”

“Of course it can. But we have enough confirmation from other technologies of ours to take this threat seriously. We’ve also checked to make sure that taking action now wouldn’t make things worse, and we’ve confirmed that it would not.”

Chen’s right hand was at his controls again, but his hand wasn’t moving. He did, however, move his head now—to slowly nod at Kostas.

*

The day wore on, and it wasn’t exactly going well. My crew and I on the bridge had a lot of difficulty setting the correct order of omnivelocities for each particular destination, and we screwed up the flight process in some way or another several more times.

I wanted to give up for the day and go rest on the Demeter, but Kostas insisted that we try again. So we did.

With a lot of help from the computer, we worked out a new omnivelocity profile with almost entirely new numbers for a new dimensional stream, but, at the last moment, Gary spotted a mistake and made a quick change right before he pressed GO.

I watched the front viewscreen as we shot into a green-tinted area of space. There were tiny, mint-green globules floating around the Monument—matter from nebulae? I wasn’t sure. Though the readouts on my console-panel were in English, I couldn’t understand most of the science there….

I finally frowned up at the viewscreen and said, “This doesn’t look right.”

“It isn’t right,” Kostas said, and in a quick nervous way, making my head jerk around toward her. “You made an unpredictable, improvised change at the end, Gary, and we Keepers couldn’t compensate fast enough to change our destination to a correct one.”

Gary’s face reddened and sweat dripped down his forehead. He had been sitting on one of the silver console chairs, but now he seemed to shrink farther down into it.

 “But it isn’t just you,” Kostas said, her hands working at the bridge-controls. “The ship momentarily gained too much power. Something happened with one of the engines.”

Now my face flushed badly: I hoped my engineering crew wasn’t responsible for that “something happened”….

“I’m not exactly sure how we got here, but we are on the edge of the Sea Nebula in The Barien Layer,” Kostas said fast.

“What?!” Chen almost screeched. “That’s just a space-flume away from The Reimark Layer.”

It was my turn to screech, “What!” and the room seemed to spin around me.

“Yes,” Kostas said. “We are much too close to there, and we have lost our cloaking. By default, the Monument is naturally cloaked when we’re in motion. The cloaking must be turned off then for it to go off. Yet no one did that—Devin, I’ve suddenly lost the feed to the primary gluon-components room.”

“A problem has developed in the anti-gluon stream there,” Devin said in a rush from inside the engine-controls area. “Thura’s working on it.”

Kostas must have manipulated one of the bridge panels, because the front viewscreen now split into two images: the greenish-looking cosmos filled the right side of the screen, but on the left there was an image of an empty-looking long room with shimmering electronic configurations on the walls; lightning-like strokes of light and matter were rapidly flying from one side of the room to the other, then back again.

Thura suddenly appeared on the screen near the strokes. Her flickering arms grabbed onto one of the lightning blasts—and her whole form suddenly jerked around as if she’d indeed touched a live wire.

“Shit!” I said, my heart going crazy. “Are you all right, Thura!”

Her voice came into the bridge: “I have been jolted with too many fundamental components of matter. I will be what you call ‘sunburned’ for a while.” I could see what she meant: as she spoke, some of her clear parts began turning a reddish hue. “But I have fixed the anti-gluon stream,” she continued. “There should be no more outsized energy surges, and we should be able to leave here in a few hours.”

“Hours!” Gary said from behind me—from right behind me. He’d left his chair and moved away from his console. We flashed each other worried eyes.

“This is my fault,” he said now, in a defeated voice. “I should have just left my mistake as a mistake and not tried to fix it. I’m not used to how instantaneous everything is on here. You told me to be aware of that, Kostas.”

She glanced his way. “It’s not entirely you. The problem with the anti-gluon apparatus would have happened anyway; it just would have been better had it happened while we were somewhere else. I’m working on setting up a temporary cloak, but it won’t be continuous yet, over the whole ship. The Keepers will use their bodies and hand-held devices to make a protective field to fill in the gaps.”

My eyes widened at Gary. Then I asked Kostas, “But won’t others with the ability to detect Keepers be able to detect them now?”

There was a pause before Kostas finally said, “Yes.”

“But” —I sputtered—“but what about Claudius! We could run into him around here—he can see us!”

Kostas’ head shot over her shoulder at me. “The probability of that happening is very low. You’ve got to stop worrying so much, Lydia—second-guessing every action, every new development. Had I known you would become so paranoid and distracted by this, I wouldn’t have told you the whole truth about your path. But I was more concerned with saving you than I was with scaring you.”

I understood what she meant; I often felt the same way toward others. At the same time, I felt embarrassed that Kostas had said I was paranoid—in front of my crew. It was bad enough that I’d been demoted on this mammoth Keeper ship to not being a captain. I didn’t want my crew to lose confidence in me, especially if we went back to business-as-usual on the Demeter someday…though again I saw how that seemed increasingly unlikely. The glow had come off of my ship for me, and I wondered if, someday, I might not want to return to the Demeter, even to sleep….

I thought of my life on there, how I had left some jobs, things and people hanging—like my house on Earth and my place on Pink. And Pete, who only sometimes piloted my ship—his back injury had flared up again, and he was still on Earth now, having medical procedures done—well, I really didn’t know if that was happening “now,” as I’d lost track of how time was passing off of the Monument.

The Demeter’s primary clocks had seemed to keep their usual Earth time, but I couldn’t tell if time was really passing the same way while the Demeter was inside the Monument….

It was becoming even clearer to me that being around the Keepers masked and confused so much, and the only way for me to figure out some things was to ask the Keepers or the workers about those things directly—and hope they would be giving me accurate information in their responses.

I moved closer to Kostas. “Thank you for saving me, but part of my worry is because of the huge loss of control on here—”

“You’ll get more control when you’re ready for it,” Kostas said, her eyes falling on me, then on the rest of my crew. “And I think today has shown that you are all indeed not ready for it.”

I couldn’t help frowning—at the truth of her words.

*

“All training is over for today. All crew back to the Demeter,” I finally said over my belt communicator. I and my crew from the Monument’s bridge had just transported to the hangar, and we were moving up the Demeter’s ramp now.

Kostas had supposedly gone to the Monument’s engine area. She’d told us that we could remain in the bridge rest-room, till we were back flying again, with her and the Keepers doing the flying this time. However, at the moment, I felt safer sitting inside my own ship. The Monument was visible out in space—what if someone saw us? Maybe I could still flee….

When all of my crewmembers were finally on the Demeter, I used the cargo-bay controls to close up the exterior to space specifications. I watched many of my crewmembers rush across the cargo bay and into the rest of the ship.

But I grabbed at Karen as she passed near me. “What about our fuel situation, Karen?” I knew that Steve and Cambridge had patched the forward weapons-array damage as best as they could. But we were still missing the proper supplies for that, and we were still low on other supplies….

May was within earshot of me and Karen. May came closer to us as she said, “Oh—Lydia, I meant to tell you: the Keepers now have fuel for the zenite and curon engines; they removed it from the other human ships they have on here. Do you want me to have them deliver it here?”

My mouth slanted across my face. “Provided we’re okay a few hours from now. I’m not sure if you know, but we’re exposed—the Monument.”

Karen’s blue eyes turned to me. “But, Lydia, before we left the engine area, Devin told us the Keepers temporarily closed up the cloaking field.”

“Well, we were exposed,” I said. “Someone could have detected us then. And it seems the Keepers themselves are helping to make the field. The bottom line is that I’ll feel better once we’re out of here and back in the training area.” I wondered about that area of space. As far as I could tell from my suit readout earlier, the training area really didn’t seem to be inside a defined layer; it seemed to be an area of space composed of normal space and dimensional streams that were unusually similar to each other.

I mentioned that now, and May said, “One of the workers said that whole area would be hard to access with conventional spaceships, so it’s basically a secluded place in space that only the Keepers use.” When May stopped speaking, she began yawning—one of her hands quickly flew to cover her mouth.

I smiled at her a little. “I think we should all just take a break for a while—but at our usual stations, just in case.” My fingers manipulated my belt communicator again. “Geena, you and yours please bring us snacks around the ship.”

*

I spent the next few hours on my bridge with my bridge crew; we ate and talked about what we thought of the Monument, how it compared to flying the Demeter, if we thought we could fly the Monument long term and not fly the Demeter long term….

But that wasn’t exactly what I had planned for us to talk about now; our discussions weren’t what I would call “resting.”

Still, those topics passed the time, and before I knew it, Kostas’ voice was coming into my bridge: “The problems have passed, Captain Zarro. You can come out of hiding now.”

My face felt really hot. “I wasn’t ‘hiding’. I was trying to be prepared for—for anything. So where are we now?”

“We are out of The Barien Layer and are on our way to our end-destination.”

“No more training then?”

“I didn’t say that. Unfortunately, it will have to be ‘on the job’ training. We were delayed too long by the cube, and we want to make sure we get to where the warring species is well before their war worsens. You and your crew will fly part of the way to there—tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, but in a voice that was missing something: enthusiasm.

*

When Gary and I were in my cabin later, sitting back on my bed with our workbooks nearby, I took a look at his wound; the bumpy, darkened texture there had smoothed out quite a bit. As far as I could tell, it was healing nicely.

Gary said the area was a little itchy, and my eyes shot right up to his. “I hope nothing freaky’ll happen, like how Chen got contaminated….”

Gary had picked up his workbook, but now he laid it on the bed as he sighed at me, his breath rustling my hair. His fingers touched the strands, pulling them from one of my cheeks as he said, “Kostas told me that the shiftable matter was responsible for that.”

It was my turn to sigh. I picked up my own workbook, scrolling through the digital pages toward the omnivelocity section, which I had been reading whenever I had any time for reading.

“Every day I still wonder if this is the right decision,” I mumbled.

I could feel Gary’s eyes on my profile.

“What happened on the bridge today didn’t help matters.”

“Don’t remind me,” Gary said. “I feel like an idiot.”

My head shot up to his. “You’re not an idiot. You’re human…. I know Kostas and the other workers can do it, but do you think we’ll be able to do the same when we aren’t workers?”

Glancing up at the ceiling now, Gary frowned. “I don’t know…. The Keeper science behind the ships is often incomprehensible, but, in some ways, flying the Monument seems simpler—their bridge interface is more streamlined, and so is their computer. It’s like the Keepers have been everywhere before. So much has been figured out already—an uncountable number of paths in the dimensional streams especially. We basically just have to massage the numbers to fit the exact destination we want.”

“Yeah, but we’re missing coordinating with the Monument’s ‘engineering’, with how the engines are functioning—that’s a constraint on the velocity profiles we haven’t had to deal with directly yet.”

“Well, Steve’s been going on and on about how the engine areas work similarly: a lot’s already been done for the engineer. You’re basically a watcher in case something goes wrong with the engines.”

I pointed at Gary. “That’s what worries me: as you well know, flying a ship gets so much tougher when problems come up. Understanding the ship’s science suddenly becomes more important.”

“I know.” He sighed again, hard this time.

And I glanced down at one of the omnivelocity pages in my workbook, where I had written: Fuck me: so, to get somewhere, Keeper ships essentially travel everywhere and nowhere. Makes lots of sense…NOT.

*

The next morning, I was stepping into my worksuit in my cabin when Babs intercommed me and said, “I need to see you!” I didn’t bother asking her if it was important; the sharp, high tone of her voice told me all I needed to know.

One of my arms was still being covered by the rising red suit-fabric as I flew out of my room and all the way to her room down the hall. As soon as she let me in and closed the door behind me, she said, “Kostas stole my turds!”

I almost laughed at her bizarre outburst; then I remembered which turds she was talking about, and my mouth fell open.

Babs was pacing the room now, her thighs in her red pajama pants pumping in a jerky way. “I just went to look for them before, and the whole damn container is gone. Is that why she seduced me?”

“But, Babs, it seems you chased her. And I told you not to get involved with a worker—”

“I know, Lydia, but I’m upset here! This is my science work. You don’t do things like that to scientists. I had the samples secured in a specific way so they wouldn’t decay. I feel hurt that she’d do this to me—”

I ground my teeth together as I said, “I’ll deal with Kostas on this.”

*

I left Babs’ room and went down to my bridge to use the new Keeper communicator-device lying on top of my chair’s front panel-table; that morning, one of the workers had shown up in the hangar to give the communicator to one of my crew. They hadn’t had time to attach it anywhere on my ship more permanently.

My fingers pressed the largest button on the Keeper communicator now. “Kostas, I need to talk to you—on my bridge. Now.”

When she finally transported to near me a minute later, I was sitting in my chair—sitting in my chair fuming. I said right away, “You stole something from Babs’ room.”

Kostas’ mouth twisted ever so slightly. But her back quickly straightened up more, and she said, surprising me, “Humans shouldn’t be on Genteran.”

“Well,” I said, frowning a little crookedly, “that’s a blanket statement if I’ve ever heard one. Really, the ape our species is and the apes it came from probably should have never left Africa. But it’s way too late to turn back the clock there.”

“Let me be clearer, Lydia: what humans refer to as Genteran’s Ghost is not a ghost at all. It is an important species in this universe because it consumes large amounts of what humans call ‘strange matter’. And much of that matter is indeed strange: it doesn’t come from this universe. Using that type of matter in a human device is an even stranger state for it to be in, so, naturally, that is why you lost part of your ship on Genteran.”

My eyes whipped to hers. “How do you know about that?”

Her dark eyes flashed me an ironic vibe. It was possible Babs told Kostas about the incident on Genteran, but now I remembered that the Keepers had accessed my ship’s records. And maybe they also saw my past events by using their path-equipment on Rintu….

“Is there nothing the Keepers can’t see?” I asked now, my frown deepening.

And Kostas said, “There’s plenty they can’t see and that they know they can’t see, and there’s probably plenty more that they don’t know they can’t see.”

I was going to respond to her mouthful, but then Babs charged onto the bridge. She had changed out of her pajamas and into a t-shirt and shorts, but the socks sticking out of her brown boots were two different colors.

She pointed at Kostas and yelled, “After last night, you stole my turds!”

Kostas seemed to flinch, but then I saw her take a quick, deep breath. “I did not steal anything from you because it did not belong to you. And it is not turds. It is reproductive sputum from ‘Genteran’s Ghost’.”

Babs’ lips shook. “Wh—what?”

“Yes—it is not what you thought it is. And I did not intend to take the sputum—I didn’t even know it was there! This morning—” she glanced over at me, then her eyes awkwardly shifted back to Babs, “when I woke up, my message light on my device was blinking, and when I picked it up and turned it on to listen to Thura’s message, my device flashed a warning that there was Ghost material in the cabin.

“This is actually a serious situation. There is no way their sputum should be on the surface of Genteran. They multiply in planetary cores and only go above to the surface to eat; Genteran is not what you think it is. It is not a solid planet. It’s a type of space body that forms around the nodes of dimensional streams.”

“Holy shit,” Babs said now, and her lips were still trembling—so were mine, for that matter. Then Babs said on a frown, “I don’t understand something: if Genteran is on a dimensional node, how do ships fly into it without disturbing that stream?”

Kostas pointed at her. “That is a big part of the problem: we can’t keep an accurate-enough eye on that core area with humans unknowingly interfering in the stream all the time.”

“We’re not doing it ‘all’ the time,” I said.

“As I’ve said, you shouldn’t be there at all.”

Feeling really frustrated now, I glared at Kostas. “Why the hell didn’t you know the sputum was on my ship all this time, and now yours? In fact, you just indicated the Keepers knew of what happened to my ship on Genteran, probably from when you scanned my databases.”

Kostas’ dark eyes widened at me. “We aren’t constantly thinking about your ship, and we don’t know every single detail of every single encounter of every single path. At the time, we did not think it significant that a crewmember of yours left your ship and remained on Genteran. We didn’t follow what Babs was doing.” Kostas’ eyes fell on Babs’ flushed face.

And Babs said, “While I was analyzing the pellets, I did wonder if they weren’t stool samples. But I took a piece of one apart and found a carbonaceous ambin compound in the structure, and the molecules seemed to be such perfect, circular clones of each other…at the time, I didn’t think they could be eggs or something similar. I remembered how the being consumed the ambin in the Demeter’s reactor and left a similar ring-like structure behind, so I assumed the stool structures were like a mimicking of the eating and digestion process. How stupid of me.”

“It’s not ‘stupid’,” Kostas said. “You were on the right track. You just had the exudates coming from the wrong hole.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. Babs smiled slightly, but then she let out a hard breath and ran her hands through her hair, which was a bit sweaty so was left sticking up when she removed her fingers. She spread a hand at Kostas. “So now what? Did the sputum come from the one that got stuck in the Demeter’s reactor? Did it get injured in there? Is it going through a metamorphosis now? Maybe it was exposed to something in the reactor’s components that changed it? I did get samples from the broken mess of the reactor that the Genteran people hauled away. But, oddly, the samples didn’t show anything that looked abnormal.”

“That doesn’t mean something abnormal wasn’t there,” Kostas pointed out.

Babs sighed again. “I feel terrible now, in more ways than the one.” Her eyes had been on Kostas, but they quickly shifted away. “I thought I discovered something, but the thing may be out there somewhere hurt for months now, and I’ve been unable to do anything about it. I didn’t even realize it was going on. Maybe had I stayed on the planet, I might have figured that out.”

“And then did what?” I said fast. “If these things live in the crust and core—you can’t dig up the whole planet.” I turned back to Kostas. “Like Babs said: so now what?”

“We Keepers and workers will keep a closer eye on the dimensional stream Genteran is attached to—well, we can’t do this right now because we must be elsewhere. But I’ve contacted those who are free on Rintu. We’ll especially look for more pellets. I’m concerned with why the Ghosts were on the surface: the sputum is released in liquid form inside the planet’s core, and the characteristics of the structure there help the growth of the plasma being, preventing it from getting too solid, though sometimes the Ghosts develop solid parts because they do go above ground and will consume solid materials. But, it’s possible the exudates you found, Babs, were a one-time, freak occurrence—something went wrong and now it’s righted itself. My concern, though, is that a reproductive problem has developed. This universe cannot afford to lose the helpfulness of the Ghost’s existence.”

“Can I—can I work with you on this?” Babs asked now, her eyes suddenly softening.

“Of course,” Kostas said, and, at this point, her voice had softened.

And I took all of the “softening” on my bridge as my cue to leave. “Well then, I’m going to grab some breakfast. Keep me informed about what’s up with the Ghost.”

“Unfortunately,” Kostas said to me, “we will not be able to get very far with that right now. And we will need you and your crew on the Monument’s bridge in an hour.”

I nodded at her and said, “We’ll be there,” right before I left my bridge.

*

To my surprise, delight and relief, things on the Monument’s bridge today wound up going much better than yesterday: my crew and I made no mistakes today. Of course we didn’t have a difficult flight path this time, so maybe our victory along our learning curve wasn’t a huge victory.

Still, we really did do well because we didn’t fly on a training route now; we flew on a real one, toward our most important destination, and we finally got to coordinate with my engineering crewmembers in the Monument’s engine area—which also went well.

I couldn’t help grinning at my bridge crew, who were all-smiles too.

“Well,” Kostas said, from her usual perch on the right side of the bridge, “I must say that you’re all learning very fast.”

“Maybe it’s out of need,” Gary said. “It seems like you really do need us.” Gary blushed now, as if he realized he’d made too much out of what we could offer the Keepers.

Nevertheless, Kostas did nod at him. “You’re correct. You would not be on here if that were not so.”

“Because the Keepers don’t entertain visitors,” I said, in a slightly sarcastic voice.

“Correct again, Captain Zarro.”

My mouth twisted a bit; my upper lip began to sweat. “I’m not sure about that—it feels wrong to call me that on here. I’m the captain of the Demeter. On here, I’m just another human semi-worker.”

Kostas’ eyes were on me. “I think it’s easier for you and your crew if you keep your usual title. And the expression for ‘Captain’ in Keeper languages is something different.”

“So what is it then?” Babs asked from behind me.

And Kostas replied, “Humans would pronounce it as ‘Vell’.”

“Vell Zarro—I like that,” I said. Then I flushed at my presumption.

If Kostas thought I was being presumptuous, she didn’t say so. Her fingers manipulated the console in front of her. “There are a few exercises I want you to do now—‘housekeeping’ actions that keep track of what state the engines are in and whether that’s being communicated correctly with this bridge area, and with the rest of the ship.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ve been worried about that—if we’d be able to handle things across such a massive ship. I do feel like we need more practice on the overall workflow during flight, Kostas.”

“You will get it today and tomorrow,” Kostas said.

And she wasn’t kidding: today wound up being a longer workday than I’d thought it would be, and tomorrow on the bridge started out very similarly. My crew and I also did similarly well.

“At this rate,” Kostas said then as she moved beside me on the bridge, “you will soon be able to fly on your own for an extended period of time.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, my head whipping toward her.

“Nevertheless, I have some work to do on another bridge here. I’ll be leaving you for about three hours, and your day today on the forward bridge will last a few more hours after that. The computer knows where it must stop and start along the route to avoid where pockets of saavin matter are likely to be. If something goes wrong there or something else comes up, contact me using one of the bridge communicators, and I’ll come back immediately.” She rushed away from me and off the forward bridge.

My crew and I stared after her, our mouths hanging open a bit: I suspected that my crew, like I, still felt that we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, that maybe things going well lately had just been a fluke.

I thought of the saavin matter; it was supposedly common along the path we had set the ship on, and the saavin was a big reason why getting to our final destination would take The Keeper ship a longer flying time than was normal for its technology; we had to fly discontinuously now, skipping in and out of omnivelocity profiles and destinations. Keeper ships were unable to use the super-sticky saavin matter for fuel, and an accidental collision with the saavin would supposedly force us to stop for a long while, because the Keepers would have to unclog the Monument’s exhaust and other systems….

My fingers pressed the black, bridge communicator-button on my panel to contact my engineering crew—I wondered if they had been left to work alone at the engine-controls. But when I asked them that now, Karen replied, “Nope. We’re still with a worker—thankfully. We’re still quite wobbly on our feet here—or even off our feet.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, my voice very dry.

*

Saavin matter notwithstanding, because so much of flying the Monument was automated once a flight path had been initiated, and because we had plotted out the ship’s course for the next few hours, my crew and I weren’t continuously busy on the bridge.

I contacted Kostas to ask her if one or two of us at a time could briefly go to the adjoining rest-room and get snacks and use the bathroom, and Kostas said that was fine.

Shirley and I were the last two to leave the bridge for a break, and when we were standing by the white counter in the rest-room, pouring ourselves some fruit juice, I noticed her eyes looked a bit too red.

I frowned as I asked her, “Are you okay?”

She nodded my way fast, taking a sip from her white cup. “Just a bit tired. I was up late last night.”

I wondered why, but I didn’t want to ask her why. I hoped that my looking her directly in the eye would make her tell me more…it worked.

“Captain Lydia, I don’t want to cause friction here, or complain or anything. I’m just trying to deal with something personal, you know?”

It was my turn to nod. “You mean with one of the other crew.”

Shirley sighed hard now, her blue eyes dancing my way, then quickly dancing away from me. “Alcohol does weird things to some people—that’s why I rarely drink. But sometimes it’s like the alcohol itself does something the person himself would never do. This particular person—he’d never like me.”

I didn’t ask her who “he” was; I also didn’t tell her I knew who she meant and what she was talking about because Babs had told me about it.

I swallowed the last bit of my juice and put my empty cup on the counter. “When I asked you to become part of my crew, I wanted to help build you back up—your confidence after your divorce. But I guess that was a mistake on my part.”

Shirley grabbed one of my forearms and rapidly shook her head, her thick dark hair bouncing. “No! This is the best thing that could have happened to me—truly.”

“But, Shirley, you don’t look happy. And I’ve been so busy with all this other shit on here, I should have said something sooner—I should have noticed sooner. Are you sure you don’t regret it here?”

Now she spread her arms. “If I wasn’t here, where would I be? I had nowhere to be. I still would have nowhere if I wasn’t part of this crew. I tend to get giddy with excitement over something new, as if that new thing will change my life. But then I have to settle down to reality at some point: life never goes completely smoothly. I don’t think I’m alone there in getting my hopes up too high. It’s something everyone does sometimes.”

“I agree—definitely. But I really want you to come tell me if you’re unhappy on here—I want everyone to, even while we’re working with the Keepers—no, especially while we’re working with the Keepers. My door’s always open, no matter who you want to talk to me about—understand?” My eyes were right on her now, my eyebrows arching high.

She grinned back at me, nodding quite vigorously. She opened her mouth again, as if she was about to tell me more, but I heard something then—a loud piercing noise, so loud and so piercing that Shirley dropped her cup on the floor and both of our hands rushed to cover our ears.

“What—” Shirley yelled.

I yanked one of my hands from my ears and hit my belt communicator as I rushed out of the room and onto the bridge. “What’s going on!” I shouted, over the piercing sound, which now turned into a drum-like loud beat. “Did we hit some saavin—is this an alarm?”

In front of me, Babs and Chen had their hands over their ears, and Gary was pressing one of the ship’s general communicator-buttons and yelling for Kostas.

I heard Karen’s shout over the line in reply to me: “Devin said it’s a communication—”

“What?” I said, just as Kostas rushed onto the bridge. She ran over to where Gary was, and he stepped aside so she could get to the Monument’s controls faster.

“What the hell is all that noise?” Gary said to her. The sounds had intensified into clanging and buzzing, and what sounded like an occasional bizarre moan.

“This should not be happening,” Kostas said as her fingers flew over an electronic panel. “It is too soon.”

“Too soon for what?” Shirley asked as she came up behind me.

Kostas glanced at us. “This is the Krin—the warring species. But we are too far away; they should not have contacted us yet. Things must be escalating even faster than we feared.”

Around me, my crewmembers rushed back to behind the consoles they usually worked, but my eyes were locked on Kostas’ profile. Her eyes remained on her wildly moving fingers on the ship’s controls; then her eyes shifted up to the front viewscreen. The image there was still the pixelated, multicolored view a more perpetual state of omnivelocities tended to produce. But then that view rapidly cleared to what looked like a normal view of space—deep black and sparkling stars.

“Why did you pull us out of the path now?” Chen asked in a perplexed voice.

“We have to change our path to get there faster. Unfortunately, we will use up more energy this way and will have to collect more at some point. But, it’s become clear that we cannot afford to take anymore time for anything other than the Krin.”

Another rush of clanging noises followed Kostas’ words—then the clangs gave way to more moaning and then to what sounded like a long wheeeeeze. A rush of dizziness filled my head, and I had to grab onto the panel in front of me.

“Babs!” Chen said, and then I heard him fumble over toward her. I whipped my head their way, which didn’t do much for my dizzy state. Chen wrapped his arms around Babs, but she struggled to stand up against him.

“She’s fainting—help her!” I said to Kostas, pressing my palms to my pained ears.

“Unfortunately,” Kostas said in a loud voice over the noise, “the Krin communicate at many frequencies and states of vibration. The sounds in their language can interfere with nervous systems, especially when they’re dropping bombs of communication during their warring. I’m trying to start the translator, which has a mitigating function that will help lower the sounds, but the Krin are so extremely agitated now, and there is a problem with the translator’s power supply. I’ve alerted other workers to fix it. I can’t even talk back to the Krin till we get this fixed. The Keepers will take over for now.” Kostas’ head jerked my way. “I’m sorry for all the noise. This ship is set up to be highly aware of its surroundings, to be sensitive to certain incoming communications. Maybe the Demeter closed up to space-flight settings would provide some protection from the sounds.”

My eyes had been on her, but I whipped them away as I ran over to Babs, who was able to stand up straight again with Chen’s help and mine.

My crew and I now sprinted down the forward bridge—but we had barely stepped off it when the Krin noises intensified yet again. I had to grab at a projection on one of the clear walls beneath the upper bridges. Babs fell against the same wall. And Shirley bent over in front of us and began puking.

“Omigod,” I said, “how long can we all tolerate being pounded like this?”

*

Shirley’s insides continued decorating the Monument’s gray floor while the rest of us struggled to remain upright and conscious.

Kostas finally rushed up to me. My head was tilted down toward the floor. I felt Kostas’ hard quick fingers grab my left arm. “Captain Zarro, come back onto the bridge! The translator’s finally working right. It’s mitigating the intensity of the sounds, and I’ve set it to English. I told Devin to reroute it to the engineering and cargo areas too, for your other crew.”

“But I…I want to go back to my ship,” I said, my voice weak now, because my stomach had begun moving in the direction of what Shirley’s stomach had been doing. I had to bite my bottom lip, close my eyes….

…I was being pulled to the left—the pressure of Kostas’ hand against my arm, my feet in my suit-boots moving, slowly sliding farther up the Monument’s bridge.

When I finally opened my eyes, I was back by my usual front-panel. Both of Kostas’ hands were on my forearms now, as her dark eyes peered into my face. “Lydia, I’ve set your suit to repair any damage your body has suffered from the sounds. I told your crew to do the same with theirs. Babs and Shirley have gone to the rest-room to clean themselves up.” Babs had thrown up too—I’d noticed her upchucking out of the corner of my right eye….

“What a mess this is,” I mumbled now, but then, an instant later, I began feeling a bit better. I still heard clanging noises and what sounded like barks of words—but they were lower than before…well, they had been lower than before. Now there were sudden increases in the intensity of the sounds.

“What good is your translator?” I heard Gary ask Kostas as he came near me. “The noises are still shocking.”

Kostas sighed as her hands let go of my arms. “This is the best we can do. The Krin sounds and language will unexpectedly rise and sink. The translator can only be so instantaneous to mitigate. I’ve also finally set us on a more direct path to the Krin.”

“Great,” I said as I felt the ship shift into a new velocity profile. “I really want to get to that species faster. They’ve only blown out one of my eardrums. I’ve got one more they can work on.” I heard a shaky little laugh behind me. When I turned my head, Shirley was back on the bridge. Her face was a sickly pale color, but her eyes looked quite bright as she smiled my way. Babs was beside her, plopping down into one of the console chairs.

I smiled at the two of them then turned back to the front of the bridge, my eyes falling on Kostas again, whom I somehow heard mind-talking with Thura: I know you’ve been sleeping, Thura, but I think you should—yes. Kostas glanced my way—very briefly. Then she moved to the special, neon-tubed Keeper-transporter, and then an instant later a robed Thura materialized on the bridge.

The Krin sounds almost instantly died down now. I sighed in relief. But, a part of me felt bad that Thura had to deal with the situation. It couldn’t have been easy. She clearly still hadn’t recovered from getting zapped by the gluon stream; her fingers were sticking out of her orange robe’s sleeves, and her normally clear-ish skin was a dull reddish color now. She walked over to beside Kostas, and they both looked up at the viewscreen. I wondered what they were looking at; I could only see the black of space.

Thura’s duller-than-normal Keeper voice came into the room as she lowered the hood of her robe: “We were simply unable to reach near your sphere sooner. We had not known there was a major event…You should have contacted us then. We cannot be everywhere at all times, just many places at one time. We struggle to get other species to understand this…I cannot hear you if you will all be shouting at once. You may be two sides, but I still have only one mind—”

A loud screeeech now. I jumped backwards and crashed into Gary. His arms went around me, but then he had to remove them to cover his ears with his palms. My crew and I were in pain again. I saw the side of Thura’s semi-transparent face begin to flicker faster.

“I’m doing it!” Kostas said out loud, to Thura apparently. Kostas’ fingers had begun flying over the bridge controls—near where the translator seemed to be—

—but whatever that mechanism was supposedly doing, it just wasn’t enough. A loud booming voice sounded on the bridge, and each of the words seemed to pierce my skull like a dagger: “WE ARE NOT HAPPY. THEY WILL NOT TALK, ONLY SHOUT.”

“AS USUAL, KRIN-FREK LIE. IT IS ONLY WEEEE, KRIN-BROK, WHO ARE REASONABLE.”

“WE WILL TAKE THE EAST SIDE OF THE FORMIN BASIN NOW.”

“OVER OUR DEAD MINDS.”

“AS YOU WISH—”

“Enough, please,” Thura said. “We are on our way and will get there within a Krin-day. We will all discuss this then.”

“NO, WE WILL NOT ALL DISCUSS THIS. KRIN-BROK WILL DO A FANCY DANCE OF EVASION AND WEAR YOU AND YOUR PATIENCE OUT, AND THEN YOU WILL HAVE TO LEAVE TO RECHARGE YOUR ENERGY, AND NOTHING WILL BE SOLVED ONCE AGAIN.”

“Maybe you should solve your own goddamn problems!” I blurted out, my fingertips massaging my throbbing temples. However, at this point, I had become so used to the Keeper mind-links that I barely registered when they happened now, and, unbeknownst to me, Thura had mind-linked with me and my crew, apparently to help us with the still-extreme noise pollution—and it seemed that the mind-linking had allowed the Krin to hear the full force of my statement: in my mind, I was really fucking pissed.

“WHO HAVE YOU BROUGHT INTO OUR WAR, KEEPERS? WE ARE PICKING UP ERRANT MINDS—SMALL, SLIMY MINDS.”

“Who are you calling slimy?” Gary growled from beside me.

But Kostas shook a desperate hand our way, and, going on her wide eyes, she looked like she was on the verge of having a massive heart attack. “Don’t talk to them directly!” she hissed at me and Gary.

Thura’s head briefly turned my way, and the twitching of her flickering mouth looked so humanly familiar that it stopped me from opening my mouth again: apparently, she really disapproved of what I’d done.

I flushed, badly, and out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Gary’s shoulders jerk downward.

“I’m sorry!” I said fast, to Thura.

She didn’t respond.

But Kostas sighed loudly now. “With the Krin, we must always try to lower tensions and never contribute to them. They feed off that, which makes things escalate further.”

“Well, you should have told us that sooner,” Chen said, almost a snap. He was standing beside Gary now, but Chen’s angry dark eyes were on Kostas. “All this noise is harming us and we can’t think straight. How much longer will this go on? My wife just contacted me over my Demeter-communicator. She’s stuck in the cargo area here, and she’s in pain. We want to go back to the Demeter.”

“Unfortunately,” Kostas said now, “I made a mistake before: Purn has now informed me that he has done some testing on your ship, and it will not protect you much from the sounds. I am turning translator-access to the Krin on-and-off directly and frequently now, so we can talk in private sometimes. Thura is doing the same with the mind-linking. It will not be a perfect system of communication, though.”

“Look,” I said fast, “I’m very sorry I screwed up before, but this is totally out of our league. And I still don’t know what you were thinking when you thought we could help with this mess! My crew and I need to leave the bridge now.”

I would have done just that leaving, but Thura turned around to me, quite fast. I felt her touch my mind, yet her thoughts came out loud again, to the room. “You must not leave now, Lydia. In the duality of the Omniverse, sometimes an anti-error comes out of an error: when you engaged with the Krin directly, they noticed you and your physiology, and have now scanned it. They—”

“PRAISE THE LIGHT OF THON! WE KRIN-FREK WILL ENGAGE WITH THE LIGHT.”

“NO. WE KRIN-BROK WILL ENGAGE WITH THE LIGHT.”

“Both Krin-Brok and Krin-Frek will engage with The Light Of Thon on neutral territory when we reach Krin-space,” Thura said. “But only if you agree to a cease-fire of words till then.”

There was a long, blissfully silent pause now, while my crew and I stared with dumbfounded eyes at each other, and at Thura and Kostas.

Then there was a final loud screeeech—as if someone had let the air out of a balloon the size of a moon. I wedged my fingertips in my ears, but I still clearly heard the Krin speak:

“KRIN-BROK AGREE TO KEEPER TERMS.”

“KRIN-FREK AGREE TO KEEPER TERMS.”

And now Thura said, “We will contact you when we are close enough to transport.”

“Transport what?” I asked.

Then Kostas turned to me and said, “You.”

*

“I think I see it all very clearly now: you people are fucking nuts,” I said as I rushed off the forward bridge. Kostas had just informed me that I had to directly mediate this crazy goddamn war of crazy goddamn minds.

My crew were right beside me now, and I thought we would get away, all the way to the Demeter, but Kostas followed us, and then Thura came off the bridge, too.

“Why on earth do they think Lydia is this Thon thing?” Gary asked, glancing over his shoulder at Kostas.

“Please stop moving and let us go to the rest-room to discuss this,” Kostas said, and before I could refuse, I felt a dimensional shift, and then we were all in the rest-room.

“Damn you,” I said to Kostas, breathing hard now, both because my noise-damaged brain was trying to recover from the sudden transporting and because I was angry that she had completely controlled where I and my crew had been going.

“You are being too argumentative,” Kostas said now. “You have been interacting with us for months. You have engaged with things no normal human should have engaged with. In our rush to deal with the stone on Rintu, you accidentally touched something in The Hall Of Devices—do you remember? The silver sphere?”

I did remember. I had crashed into the damn thing.

“The Keepers had been unable to confirm this till now,” Kostas continued, “but the spheres apparently originally come from the Thon dimension. It is not somewhere Keepers have ever been, but the Krin had been there long ago. The beings from that dimension disappeared before the Krin-minds reached there. The beings became like gods to the Krin—and in their mythos, the gods disappeared into The Light Of Thon, through the sphere-portals.”

“Portals!” I said, pressing a hand to my chest. “But I touched them—did I go somewhere I didn’t even know then—”

Kostas’ head shook fast. “The portals are inactive, as the devices in The Hall usually are. But, the spheres are not entirely inert as material, and the one you touched apparently left some kind of residue on you, which the Krin have sensed. They think you’ve been enlightened by Thon gods now. They will listen to what you have to say, which is great if you say the right thing.”

“And if I say the wrong thing?” I asked fast.

One side of Kostas’ mouth rose up.

Now, Thura spoke: “Lydia, you are ultimately human. We ask for no more and no less than that from you. However, you—and your crew—keep converging with events that are out of the bounds of what humans should be doing. It makes a difficult situation even more difficult.”

My face was red. “I’m sorry for before, Thura. I feel like you’re mad at me now.”

Thura’s face suddenly seemed to flicker faster than ever—one instant her gold chin was here; the next it was gone; and then the next instant, part of her reddish ‘skin’ was back and twitching in a jerky way. “In certain situations, we Keepers can become a little agitated or annoyed, but we do not get mad in the way humans think of as anger. So, no, I am not ‘mad’ at you, Lydia. I am perplexed that you still resist the obvious of the situation.”

“Well,” Gary said, “Lydia is a very resistive kind of person—sorry, Lydia, but it’s the truth. You’re definitely a challenge and a challenging person.” He turned to me and smiled a little. Then his gaze went back to Thura. “But she’s not the only one averse to what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Babs said, moving to beside me. “We’ve been through a lot in a short period of time—I don’t even understand a small fraction of it. No one should expect us to be flexible when we’re frightened.”

Thura’s head dipped, as if she was nodding in agreement with Babs, and I couldn’t recall a Keeper’s head ever having done that motion. “Are you unhappy here?” Thura asked Babs.

I watched Babs’ lips twitch and her eyes flick over to Kostas for an instant, then back to Thura. “N—no,” Babs finally said. “I’m just confused—I’ve only just met you people—I’m sorry, you Keepers.”

“You may think of us as people, if that would help you,” Thura said.

Babs only nodded now.

“I want to go see May,” Chen cut in.

Kostas looked at him. “May is fine now. The Keepers have examined all of us physically using a scanner of theirs. Our worker suits had to make a few tissue repairs, but we haven’t been permanently injured by the sounds, and Purn has just let me know the status of the rest of the Demeter crew, who are fine, too. A few of them are just complaining about headaches.”

“I’m feeling one coming on myself,” Gary said on a sigh.

“We will provide stronger medication for that. We have much work to do over the next several Earth-long days.”

“You mean I’ll have much work to do,” I said. Then I watched Kostas nod.

*

Not long after that conversation, I finally accepted that I had no choice but to act as a mediator. Wasn’t that what I effectively agreed to when I combined my ship’s crew with the crew of the Monument? I knew then that this combination probably wouldn’t mean a simple life for any of us. Now I would be living that not-simple life for real.

I couldn’t say I liked the little I knew of and had experienced with the Krin. But it seemed I was supposed to stop them from destroying the universe, which now necessitated hours-long talks with Kostas, while Thura and Purn spoke to us from another room, so I wouldn’t get sick from their presence for long stretches at a time.

“And what about when I go to the Krin?” I said to Kostas at one point. “I demand that you give me some earplugs!”

Kostas leaned back in her cushioned chair; we were sitting inside one of the meeting rooms. “We are modifying a translator for you to bring with you on your suit; the translator’s mitigating function will be super-strong, and will filter out extraneous noise and dampen non-extraneous noise.”

“I really wish you’d tell me exactly where I’ll be going.”

Kostas frowned now. “I can’t explain that. It’s something that needs to be experienced by the individual. It may be different across individuals. But just know that we will be watching you every step of the way. If there’s any danger, we’ll immediately pull you out.”

“Um, Kostas, after my taste of the Krin on the bridge, I know you can’t operate your equipment fast enough to guarantee my safety.”

Kostas only frowned back at me now, which I took as confirmation that I was right.

*

“I wish I had crashed into the goddamn sphere too,” Gary said to me when we were lying on my bed together later. “Then I could come with you.”

I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “Either way, it seems we’re all in danger. If I don’t go, then we could all die anyway.”

I felt Gary tense beside me. “Don’t say that—don’t even think it.”

“Yeah, well, it’s hard not to think of death when you’re in the middle of a war.”

“But the Keepers have repeatedly said the Krin don’t have conventional bodies.”

“Yeah, but whatever they do have can affect conventional matter, outer space and animal life—like us.”

Now Gary exhaled toward the ceiling. “We’ve been to so many places and we’ve seen so much, even really freaky things, but it’s still hard for me to believe a framework on one end of the universe could affect another end. Sometimes I feel like they’re shitting us. And now I feel like they’re drugging us. I’m becoming an addict. First the medicine for my burn; now for this damn intermittent headache.” He was rubbing at his forehead now.

I sat up a little and slid closer to him, staring down at his face, at his tired eyes, at his brown mustache, which seemed to droop across his face now. “Gary, Kostas told me the pain will go away in a few more days. The headaches are mostly a physiological adjustment to our being in contact with the Krin. Even she’s got one. They were unprepared for how loud the Krin would be this time. Things have come to such a head there…. How is your side? We’ve barely been naked together lately….”

He sat up a bit and glanced down at where I’d begun poking beneath his white tank-top. I pulled the fabric all the way aside and finally saw that there was only a ghost of a dark scar left from his burn. I sighed hard, in relief. “I can hardly tell anything was there—good!”

“About getting naked together…” Gary said, one of his warm palms moving down my back over my pink pajama top.

“I thought you had a headache.”

“My head’s never aching too much for getting naked.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that—then Gary grabbed the hem of my pajama top and pulled it up over my head.

*

Before I knew it, The Main Moment was here, and my crew and I were on the Monument’s bridge again, with Kostas, Thura, and Purn. The three of them were doing the flying—or, more correctly at the moment, the “stopping”: the Monument dropped out of an omnivelocity profile and into an area of space that looked quite similar to the sparkly, stringy one on the screen when Kostas first told us about the framework, only this time, in real life, in real time, the framework area looked a lot darker—in fact it was so dark, I asked Kostas if I could adjust the front viewscreen to compensate.

But she only shook her head at me. “I’m afraid we can’t do that around here. We aren’t in control of what it looks like.”

I didn’t ask who was in control. I was pretty sure I could guess the correct answer. “So now what?” I asked Kostas on a sigh.

“Now, we wait,” she said.

I figured we would have to wait quite a while, so I told my crew to go take a break in the rest-room, but they were only in there a few minutes before I had to call them back out again: Thura had just asked me to stand in the center of the bridge and “be ready.”

“Be ready for what?” I asked her on a frown, my eyes right on her profile.

“Kostas has been coaching you for days,” Thura said. “I believe you know how to work your emergency suit-controls at this point, and you also know how not to behave around the Krin.”

“What does ‘around the Krin’ mean when they don’t have bodies?”

I didn’t get an answer to my question.

My crew frowned in my direction, then toward the Keepers and Kostas. Gary’s face looked particularly droopy-glum today: I knew he wanted to be right with me while I would be in contact with the Krin, but his accompanying me wouldn’t be possible….

A sudden piercing sensation in my head. Earlier, the workers had made adjustments to all of their and my crew’s red suits to compensate for the Krin sounds; I was also now wearing a tiny extra-strength translator, but, again, any sound mitigation would only be a partial mitigation. The sounds still gave me an uncomfortable, buzzing feeling in my brain. The headaches my crew had been dealing with had abruptly gone away yesterday, but if these new vibrations continued, it seemed my crew would be dealing with headaches once again.

Right now, I had to deal with the task at hand: Kostas’ direct gaze was on me. “I believe you’re as ready as ever, Captain Zarro.”

Before I could get more than an “Um” out in reply and get in a quick, worried glance at Gary, the bridge shifted around me—it brightened, then darkened, and then everyone faded away from the bridge—and then the bridge itself faded away from me, till I was floating in the neverwhere.

No light, no existence—I was trapped in a falling-free state—blackness crashing around me, sweeping my body through a great big zero of space and time. Nothing had meaning. Did I really exist…

…I found myself in a white, box-shaped room. Something was tugging at my legs; when I looked down, I saw the fluid-like, blue flow all along the box’s bottom. The waves and tides of blue kept moving around me, the soft sound of them caressing my ears. Compared to being in the line of fire of The War Of Words, this place truly seemed like heaven….

…Except there was something unnerving about the “water”: when I tried to move my legs, the water didn’t budge, and neither did I. I struggled and struggled and struggled now, but my bottom half couldn’t go anywhere. The blue was really like a glue, keeping me grounded in this strange space, against my will.

I felt pressure—in my bladder. If I peed, would it turn the water green? I giggled a little wildly; then I remembered Kostas’ saying that the red suits had an internal cleaning function. I tried manipulating my controls—tried and failed. I couldn’t remember what I had to do to clean the piss that began dripping into my suit. My hands banged for my two sleeve-readouts, but the screens kept flashing in and out. Useless.

I finally tried using my gray device and my suit and belt communicators to contact the Monument, or a Keeper, or even my crew, but nothing I tried yielded anything. I had been under the impression that the Keepers and the workers would remain in contact with me while I dealt with the Krin, but, clearly, I had erred there.

I remained stuck in that same blue-glue spot, trying to calm my intermittent hyperventilating. I lost track of the time again.

I kept repeating, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Then I lost track of how many times I’d repeated it. I stood there for an eternity, half-immobile….

Finally, there was a loud, “WE ARE HERE.”

I almost cried out in relief; then I remembered if I screwed up here, the universe would end. “Uh, Lydia Zarro here.”

“WE AWAIT YOUR LIGHT.”

“Um, my—uh—I can’t move my legs. With my personality, I can’t easily talk without moving my arms, but when I move them, it pulls at my legs, and they feel glued to the floor here.”

“WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” a Krin voice boomed, but at least my translator seemed to be working because the booming didn’t hurt my ears or my head.

Sweat, nevertheless, dripped down my forehead. “I don’t like deceptions at all…. The truth is: I’ve been working with the Keepers, and what really happened was I accidentally touched a Thon-sphere.”

“WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” a Krin said again, but this voice sounded tinnier than the last.

And then “WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” kept being repeated by numerous voices throughout the room, echoing and diminishing, and then rising high again like a discordant song.

My fingers frantically tried to call up a file I had programmed into my readout, which filed contained important things I’d jotted down that Kostas had told me to say. But my fingers were shaking too much now, and my readout was still looking wonky.

In one frantic moment, I forgot everything Kostas had told me. The weight of the framework and the rest of the universe hovered above my head, and if I said the wrong thing, it would all come crashing down on me and everyone else.

Maybe nothing I could say now would fix a damn thing—what rotten luck that I’d banged into that damn sphere!

“K—Krin, would you please think about a truce? Do you know that the universe—the Omniverse and its parts are connected? One part can affect another part.”

“OF COURSE KRIN KNOW THIS. KRIN USE THIS EVERY DAY.”

“But that’s what I mean: what you do every day can affect every day that other species live.”

“KRIN NOT CONCERNED WITH OUTSIDE KRIN AREA.”

“KRIN-BROK IS NOT CONCERNED. KRIN-FREK IS.”

“LIES. KRIN-FREK IS CONCERNED WITH NOTHING.”

I felt my head spin at their noise-voices, which had loudened. And the perpetually moving yet blue-glue water did not help my dizzy state—

Something Kostas had said to me finally flashed through my brain, and then I said in a louder voice, “An uncountable number of species—all manner of life forms are counting on your resolving the disagreements between your two Krin hemispheres. In the universes, there is the light and the dark, the fast and the slow, the big and the small, the smart and the stupid—”

“AS IN, THE KRIN-FREK.”

“THEN THERE IS THE NOT BRAIN-DEAD AND THEN THE BRAIN-DEAD KRIN-BROK.”

“My point is,” I said in a shaky voice, through a flushed, sweaty face, “two hemispheres make a whole sphere. Without one side of a sphere, there is no other side because there is no longer a sphere. The perfection of the Thon-sphere shows this.”

Silence.

I twisted my hands together and fruitlessly tried to shift my legs, which felt as if they’d fallen asleep, but it was probably their unnatural placement in a substance my body didn’t understand….

“Please talk,” I finally said. “Have you Krin, uh, made a truce—are you still thinking about it—about what I said?”

“YOU HAVEN’T CONVINCED US TO RECONCILE.”

My blood was suddenly pounding at my skull. Maybe nothing I or anyone else could say would ever fix this war—did the fucking Keepers realize that maybe some things could not be solved? Some beings were just stubborn—they liked conflict, and they wanted to drag everyone else into their shit.

I felt so upset and so angry now, which wasn’t exactly the state of mind necessary to stop a goddamn war, especially between Krin. But now, once again, because of the Keepers, it seemed I had been thrust into a situation I couldn’t handle, especially handle well.

My lips trembled, in anger, in fear. I really couldn’t think of a damn thing to say….

Loud banging and then a whizzing sound and a heavy wind-like breathing. Shockingly high cries—my palms pressed flat to my ears now.

But that didn’t prevent my hearing a Krin finally shout, “AHHHHH—YES! IT IS GENIUS—AND IDIOCY THAT WE DID NOT SEE IT. YOUR INSIGHTFUL STATEMENT HAS OPENED OUR MIND-EYES.”

Confusion swam through my shocked brain; at first my mouth moved and nothing came out. “Um, thanks for the compliment,” I finally said, “but I didn’t say anything—”

In what I was beginning to sense was their usual way of filtering out what they didn’t like or need, the Krin kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken: “NOT THINKING OF SAYING ANYTHING, NOT SPEAKING, RESTING OUR THOUGHTS AND MIND-MOUTHS, SO WE KRIN-BROK ARE ABLE TO SEE THE FIGHT WITH A CLEARER MIND—IT SOUNDS LIFE-CHANGING, IT SOUNDS MIND-CHANGING.”

“KRIN-FREK AGREE! LIGHT OF THON BRINGS ILLUMINATION, AND ILLUMINATION LEADS TO CLARITY WHEN VIEWING INSIDE THE OMNIVERSE. THE STEADY-STATE EMPTINESS OF NO THOUGHT IS THE NIRVANA THE THON-GODS ESCAPED TO. WE MUST SEEK THE STEADY-STATE OF CALM MINDS, AND IN THERE WE WILL FINALLY MEET THON-GODS.”

“IT WILL TAKE MANY YEARS OF PRACTICE. KRIN-BROK AGREE TO EMBARK ON THIS JOURNEY TO THE MENTAL STEADY-STATE, IF KRIN-FREK AGREE TO SHARE ANY SUCCESSES IN MAINTAINING THE CALM.”

“KRIN-FREK AGREE, IF KRIN-BROK WILL DO THE SAME. SHARE YOUR TECHNIQUES, AND WE WILL SHARE OURS.”

“KRIN-BROK AGREE TO SHARING TOWARD STEADY-STATE.”

“Wonderful!” I said, clasping my hands together, my heart pounding faster. There was a smile on my face, but it didn’t last long. “Can I go now—can you release me, please, from this blue matter. I—” —didn’t get to finish my statement. One moment my legs were trapped; the next they were dangling in the neverwhere, stretching out below me, or was it beside me….

“Captain Zarro” —Kostas’ voice— “we have received word that there is a ‘cease-fire’ among Krin. Congratulations on successfully carrying out this most-important task.”

“Thanks,” I said, or at least I thought I said it. The neverwhere was doing funny, woozy things to my head…. “I was so scared—I tried to contact you. Why the hell didn’t you tell me I wouldn’t be able to, and that the Krin could read my mind in that box? It would have been nice to know! I could have thought something that would have made the situation much worse!”

“I—” Kostas said, but then there was an abrupt stop to not only her words, but to my body’s motion too. Something was wrong: the neverwhere was spinning around me—too fast.

“Kostas—get me out of here!” I screamed, and my frantic words echoed back at me as if a bell containing my voice was ringing. I heard and felt other loud noises zooming around me.

And then I heard and felt nothing.

*

There was a faint buzzing sound finally; it grew louder. I couldn’t see—but that was because my eyes were closed….

I opened my eyes, with difficulty; they were dry, and my brain felt foggy—the buzzing sound was coming from inside it. I was in darkness, on a floor. My wrists hurt—oh—they were bound behind me.

“What—” I said as I squirmed to break free of my restraint—

A light came on—blinding me for a long moment. Then there was the darkening silhouette of a guy—tall, a weapon-shaped large item in his arms.

The room around us became clearer to me; the space was huge but quite empty: there were several chairs on the other end, electronic panel-tables too, which came on now. Apparently, this area was some kind of bridge. And I was in a dirty corner of it, huddled against a wall.

“What is this?” I demanded at the guy, using all the energy I had, which wasn’t much—

“Captain Zarro, we meet again,” someone else said in a smooth voice.

And when I turned my head to the left, I saw Claudius standing there.

*

My jaw gaped down to my chest as I stared at Claudius. He looked taller than last time, meaner, his dark eyes angry pinpoints in his broad face. There was no false politeness in his expression now. He was in complete control—of my life.

His head suddenly jerked toward his henchman, and the guy came over to me and yanked me from the floor.

I thought of struggling, but what could I do against armed men, especially when I couldn’t use my hands? Men continued to fill the room now; they were all in dark uniforms, including Claudius. I thought of my suit-controls—my brain feverishly going over whatever I could remember from Kostas’ lectures about the suits. But I couldn’t recall her ever saying there was a way I could work my suit if I couldn’t manipulate it. My transporter—

“Captain Zarro, I’m sorry to have to house you in such a substandard area,” Claudius said now in a not-sorry voice. “I’m sure you’re used to better. But, nobody but I and a few of my people ever see my primary bridge. Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.” He grinned, but there was no humor behind the motion.

“What—” I finally said “—what is the game you’re playing? How did you get me here?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

I was shoved into a quite-hard chair now; then I was strapped into it, including a strap around my ankles. Tears pricked against the back of my eyes, but if it was the last thing I would ever do, I wouldn’t cry in front of these fucking creeps. “Why bother putting me in a chair when I can’t even lean back properly? Can’t you at least tie my arms in front of me?”

“No,” Claudius growled, all trace of his smooth accent gone. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know your Keeper suit is capable of great things. And the Keeper ships are capable of even greater things. That is why you are here.”

“How am I here? How did you find me?”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “I’ve been tracking them—and you.”

I didn’t believe him. If he’d been tracking us all along, then why hadn’t he snatched me sooner when it would have been under easier circumstances? I knew that he did almost get me after Makron, but then he apparently soon lost me, at least temporarily….

I saw that the situation I was now in really was inevitable: Claudius would never leave me alone until he got everything he wanted, and the allure of the Keeper ship, the Keeper powers—the pull toward them was strong. To a certain extent, I understood why Claudius wanted what the Keepers possessed. I only hoped he wouldn’t get any of it, even if I wound up having to die in the process.

Again I thought of my transporter controls on my wrists, the buttons there, but my hands were bound beside each other inside a rigid restraint—I couldn’t seem to move my thumbs to the proper spots—

“I have sent the Keepers a message throughout the universe,” Claudius said now. “I’m betting on that they value you.”

“Then you’ve made a mistake: they won’t risk anything for me.”

“Oh, but you are not just you. You are in one of their suits.” He nodded over at one of his men—or maybe not: there were women in the room now. One sat working at an electronic panel. There was a huge screen above her head, and an image of space materialized there now. As far as I could see, there was only the normal black and stars, but when Claudius walked up to the woman, they began talking in low voices, and he pointed at the upper right corner of the screen.

Either my eyes weren’t working well after everything I’d been through, or I was too far from the screen: I struggled to see details on it; I also struggled to stay focused on it. But no matter my struggling, I couldn’t see anything of value. Of course that didn’t mean something of value wasn’t there….

My heart soared a little: maybe the Keepers were there somewhere; maybe they would rescue me. I knew Claudius was in over his head. But, as I’d learned a bunch of times, the Keepers also weren’t perfect, and they really didn’t have control of the universes.

Maybe this time, they had really screwed up—and that meant that I was really screwed.

*

Moments later, something changed on the bridge; Claudius and his crew began speaking to each other heatedly in another language, their voices sounding quite irritated, too. I got the feeling the ship was having technical problems doing whatever Claudius wanted it to do.

Claudius finally growled something at his people, and then one of them unbound my ankles, unstrapped me from the chair and pulled me through a doorway into another room.

This one was much smaller than the bridge room, and there was nothing in this dank space except for a small broken table and a tall cabinet.

The thug in front of me growled at me, “Sit on the floor and don’t fucking move.”

He didn’t have an accent like Claudius had; this guy had an Earth accent. That he was on Claudius’ side truly sickened me. I couldn’t help pulling a face.

The thug now raised his gun in a threatening way. “The captain said not to hurt you—unless you act up. Don’t make faces, don’t talk, don’t move. Sit like a statue, or you’re dead.”

I swallowed, feeling my throbbing bladder wanting to give way. It had given way when I was with the Krin. Little did I know then that my Krin experience would wind up being a comfortable situation compared to the one I was in now.

*

I remained stuck in the dirty room with the Earth-creep for I didn’t know how long. Exhaustion pressed down on my shoulders. My wrists ached, because no matter the thug’s threats, I secretly kept trying to contort my arms and hands into doing something on my suit, which ultimately was a waste of time: I couldn’t get my worksuit to do anything that would help me. Maybe the suit had been damaged by however Claudius had captured me.

My eyelids began drooping; I let them droop….

…I woke to the Earth-thug ordering me, “Get the fuck up already.” He started to grab me, but then his eyes jerked down at my suit, as if he remembered something. He pulled back, jerked his gun toward me, then up at the air.

I had been slumped back against a wall, and though pulling myself up now when my hands were behind my back was a pain-in-the-ass maneuver, I managed to effectively use the pressure of my arms and side against the wall.

I wobbled a little on my still-tired legs, and when the guy said, “Move,” I walked toward the gray door.

He shoved it open and I walked through the doorway.

The bridge-room was emptier now—just Claudius and two other men. They were over by the front controls, but when the Earth-guy shoved me onto the bridge, Claudius came closer and pointed at a different chair from the one I was in before.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said in a sarcastic voice.

I gritted my teeth as I moved toward the chair and then onto it. There was a cushion on both the seat and the back; I almost sighed in relief. But then one of the henchmen quickly strapped me into the chair. Thankfully, he didn’t bind my legs this time. I wondered if that was for show….

The big viewscreen was still on. I didn’t see anyone out in space—any Keeper ships. But they could have been there, and maybe Claudius had a line open to the interior here, so the Keepers could more clearly see he had me inside and that he hadn’t hurt me badly. Yet.

He was standing near me and in front of me, but his gaze was on the screen now. “I’ve sent out word to the Keepers again.”

I didn’t respond to his statement, but it didn’t seem like a good thing for him that he’d repeatedly tried to contact them, yet he apparently still hadn’t gotten a response. Unfortunately, that also didn’t seem like a good thing for me….

“You see,” Claudius continued, “I have nothing against you personally, Captain Zarro, even though you refused to do business with me on Cardoon Twelve, and then shot at my ship. But now, you’re a part of them.”

I squirmed a bit in my chair—and that made me remember how I had shifted myself up the wall in the other room. This chair’s cushioning was quite soft. Maybe I could use the back cushion to massage my suit-sleeves….

One of the women from earlier walked onto the bridge. She and Claudius said something to each other in that Reimark or whatever language of theirs; then she sat down at the controls and began manipulating them. The images on the screen changed, as the ship apparently scanned space at different angles.

“The real issue is,” Claudius said to me now, “I want one of their ships. The Monument. Did they tell you about it? Well, someone told me about it. It’s their most advanced ship. No single Keeper knows everything about it.”

“How do YOU know that?” I snapped.

He grinned at me now, but the smile never made it up to his dark eyes. “I’ve been doing my homework. Let’s just say that I’ve made it my business to find out more information from other alien species, and I got into contact with someone who knows a lot about the Keepers.”

“I bet not everything,” I snapped again, because I had no other way to strike back.

“A person does not need to know everything in order to do something. A person just needs to know enough. And I, Claudius, do know enough now.”

He was full of shit. It seemed he didn’t know enough about my suit—how easily I could transport using it, if I could get my fucking fingers on the controls. But no matter how many times I twisted my hands back there, I couldn’t reach the proper buttons or feel the proper ridges, and I was afraid I might activate something else and then confirm in Claudius’ eyes the power behind the suit….

“I also have enough to do what I want,” Claudius continued now. “As in, I have you, and I will trade you for what I want.”

The image on the overhead screen suddenly changed, and I finally saw the Monument’s immense shadow filling the dark space-night. I felt a tight pain in my heart—my friends, my ship—

“You see, Captain Zarro,” Claudius said, “I don’t want to be human. I want to be more than human. I want to be a god. And you are my ticket to that state.”

Claudius kept talking, but I only listened to his mania with half an ear. My other ear was listening to my own head, which was wondering why the fuck the Keepers weren’t sneaking on this ship to rescue me. In the past, they’d easily entered both the Demeter and one of Claudius’ ships—maybe even this ship, assuming it was the same one that had attacked mine months ago. I couldn’t see the outside of this ship, so I didn’t know where the hell I was trapped….

“So,” Claudius said now, “I keep sending my message, and they sit right there without responding.” He spun around and glared at me. “What does this mean?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I said, and I really didn’t know. Now my heart was jumping in my chest. Now I was worried about the Monument, about my lover and my friends.

“I asked you a question,” Claudius growled, stepping closer.

“I told you—I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe the ship isn’t working. Maybe it isn’t what you think it is.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” he said.

I didn’t respond. My eyes were on the viewscreen, and my wrists were doing a twist behind my back against the chair cushion, a twist I was hoping no one on the bridge saw.

Unfortunately, Claudius did see. “What are you doing back there?” His eyes went to the Earth-thug, who came over and shoved my back forward.

But the Earth-thug only shook his head “no” at Claudius.

“My fucking wrists are falling asleep,” I shot back at Claudius. “What do you think I’m doing? You bound them up tight with a metal clamp. They were hurting before. Now they’re numb. For all I know, I’ve cut them and I’m getting gangrene.”

“So much drama,” Claudius said in a snide voice. “I want to know exactly what your suit does. The red buttons on the chest.”

Apparently, he hadn’t learned that much from whoever had given him information about the Keepers.

I almost opened my mouth and said that to him now—that earlier he kept acting like he knew so much and now he doesn’t seem to know much of anything. But I only kept my mouth shut now and glared back up at him.

In one confident motion, he came forward and smacked me hard across my face. My teeth cut the inside of my mouth. I tasted my bitter blood, felt as if I would choke on it. If only I could reach the shoulder controls to medicate me….

I had tears in my eyes when I spoke, a.k.a. lied. “The red buttons let me transport to elsewhere—but, uh, I have a feeling that’s not what you want, is it? You want me to remain so you can beat me senseless.”

“I don’t want to beat you senseless. I want to beat you enough so that you see I mean business.”

So much for my theory that he didn’t bind my legs again because he didn’t want it to look to the Keepers like he was hurting me. He’d probably just forgotten to bind my legs.

“Wh—what do you expect me to give you?” I asked now in a shaky voice. “I know very little. I was working another job with the Keepers—that had nothing to do with you.”

“Everything has to do with me if I say it does. I will just remove your suit and test it myself.”

My fear went up a few more notches. I glanced at the woman at the controls, but she didn’t seem to care what the hell was going on behind her. Now I said, “I—I’m practically naked underneath—”

“Even better,” Claudius said in a smug voice. Then he motioned to one of his henchmen to move toward me. I saw my chance. To take off my suit without damaging it, they would have to free my wrists—

“If you try anything, you’re dead,” Claudius said in a matter-of-fact way, almost as if he’d read my mind. I really hoped no one had given him any technology for doing that, because my mind was pretty sure he was going to kill me at some point anyway, so what did I have to lose by making a move to get free? And, for all I knew, the Keepers and their technology had gotten my path wrong, and I was meant to die by Claudius’ hand now. If so, I certainly wasn’t going out on a whimper.

The henchman came up behind me and began undoing the clamp on my wrists.

Claudius pulled off the weapon attached to his side and lifted it at me, the barrel of the dark gun glistening beneath the overhead lights. “Remember,” he said.

The clamp was finally off of me, but my wrists were still numb; I grabbed onto each of them and rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. Then I lifted my right hand—my fingers going up to the collar of my suit, as if I was about to undo it. Instead, I slid my fingers along the collar and quickly pushed the transporter ridge on my shoulder.

I felt the shift in dimensional space begin, but Claudius was still visible to me: when he saw me start to fade away, he swore and fired his weapon. I could see the blast heading toward my chest just as a multicolored stream of dimensional matter began filling my vision—then I was floating, caught somewhere in a riot of shooting colors—I apparently hadn’t made the stream correctly—oh—Kostas! She was walking toward me and, behind her, there was Gary—tears fell from my eyes; Gary and Kostas ran closer to me in the chaos.

“How are you here!” I said as I ran into Gary’s arms.

“We were just about to transport you,” Kostas said, “when you started transporting yourself. I intersected our paths—no,” she suddenly said, confusing me and when I pulled back from Gary, she was frowning down in alarm at her silver device.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s Claudius—he’s using yet another device he shouldn’t possess.”

My eyes widened in realization. “It must be mine! I totally forgot about it. I lost it somehow. I haven’t had it since the Krin.”

Kostas shook her head rapidly. “No, it is not your device. But he’s nevertheless located us and is interfering with this dimensional stream.”

“What the fuck does that mean!” Gary shouted.

“I can’t hold us here,” Kostas replied fast. “We need to drop out—”

“To where—” I started to say, but an instant later, we were standing in another space, an outdoor space.

It was a flat expanse of white earth with dots of golden green, but I could tell by the bumpiness in the distance that the earth here wouldn’t remain flat. There were peaks and drops that extended far into the distance; I wondered how I was able to view their topography so clearly when they seemed to be so far away. This earth apparently didn’t have any curvature, or maybe it had an infinite curvature that could let you see everywhere all at once.

“What is this place?” I asked now.

“This is The Error Universe,” Kostas said.

“What!” Gary and I both screeched at the exact same time, our eyes locking onto Kostas.

My lips shook as I spoke: “But you said this place is impossible!”

Kostas was still working her device. “Yes. We had no choice but to go here. I couldn’t safely reach anywhere else when Claudius’ signal was interfering with our trajectory.”

“But this isn’t safe,” Gary put in as he grabbed onto one of my arms.

Kostas was frowning now. “No, it isn’t. You can’t trust things here.” Her eyes gazed off into the distance, and one of her hands went to her other arm’s controls to bring up her readout. “Unfortunately, there’s been a large power-drain on my suit’s transporter function and probably on yours too. And my hand-held device has been damaged by Claudius’ interference, and now it, too, does not have enough power. It will take some time to power up from the surroundings here.”

“How much time?” I asked, my heart pounding very hard.

Kostas shook her head from side-to-side. “It’s impossible to tell. I do have enough power for some functions, though: I’m setting up a field to enclose the three of us. It probably won’t be strong enough to negate anything out there. But at least we’ll be able to trust what each other is doing—hopefully.”

Gary’s mouth twisted. “You’re not inspiring confidence here, Kostas.”

“Who said I had any? I have only been here one other time, and it did not go well.”

“Are you trying to frighten us even more?” I asked.

“I’m trying to tell you the truth,” she replied. Then she exhaled, on a groan. “These controls are useless for what else I need at the moment.”  She straightened up and stuck her device into one of the pockets on her red suit.

“What about using my controls?” Gary said.

Kostas held out a hand to him. “Let me see it.”

Unfortunately, once she’d examined Gary’s gray device, she found it had the same problem as hers. She handed his back to him and said, “Yours is not a full worker device anyway, even if it did have enough power. Let me check your transporters.”

She made us call up our readouts, and, sure enough, our transporters also had the same problem as hers.

She sighed hard. “Well, it seems we’re stuck here for now, dealing with whatever comes our way.”

“Kostas,” I said fast now, “do you have any weapons?”

Her head turned toward me, her mouth shifting into a wavy line.

“Fortunately,” Gary said in a louder voice, “I have mine.” He suddenly removed a small gun from the thigh pocket of his suit. I wanted to kiss him.

I moved to do that, but then I stopped when Kostas said, “Don’t count on that, Gary. It might not even work correctly here. Our brains are more important than anything else now.”

I could feel my face deflate. But then I remembered that Claudius hadn’t touched my belt over my suit; I tried using my communicator there, but of course it didn’t work. Fortunately, when I opened my belt now, I saw that my emergency food was still inside. My voice brightened. “At least I’ve got my food stash—do you, Gary?”

He nodded.

“Kostas?” I said, turning to her.

Her fingers were on the communicator-button controls on the chest of her suit. “Yes, I have a stash. Your idea to always keep some handy in our suits was a good one.”

I felt shocked that she had listened to my idea—shocked and a little proud. But those feelings wouldn’t help us here, that was clear: as we had been talking, the land had changed—there was steam coming off the ground now, a lime-green steam.

“What’s happening to the land?” I asked fast.

“This is an entry from everywhere else—the energy will almost continuously flow in from errors elsewhere. We cannot predict what—or who—will pop up.”

“Omigod—Claudius!” I said.

“It’s possible, but unlikely that we’d meet up with an error of him. Errors here are not connected by any logic. Anything can happen anywhere, so the odds of running into someone specific are extremely small. I can’t emphasize enough how enormous this universe’s dimension is.”

The weight of our situation swooped down on my shoulders, and I felt as if I would collapse inside my suit. I had been through so damn much in such a short period of time. How much more could I bear?

Kostas’ dark eyes were peering at me now. “You need medical attention—there’s a cut on your face. And you’re bruised.”

My hand flew to my face—then I regretted pressing at there; my broken skin began to sting.

“Pull up your readout again and run a medical scan, if you can,” Kostas said. “The power-packs in our suits have lost energy overall, but they recover more quickly than our hand-held devices because the suits are more efficient absorbers of energy from their environment. Transporters unfortunately use a lot of power, so they will take longer to recharge, assuming they do at all.”

I tried to get my suit’s medical scanning function going now, and it worked perfectly. “My suit wouldn’t work at all on Claudius’ ship at first—my hands were bound behind my back in a clamp. I kept trying to reach the controls. I could have sworn I did a few times, but nothing happened.”

“Something must have been interfering with the suit’s power-pack.”

I frowned now. “The clamp was an electronic one. Once they removed it, I was able to use my transporter controls….”

“We know. We saw,” Kostas said as she helped me use my suit to medicate me.

But my eyes flew to Gary’s. He slowly shook his head at me, closing his eyes. When he opened them again, he said, “Claudius is damn lucky I wasn’t in the room.”

“You are exhausted,” Kostas said to me now. “You have been to far too many dimensions in a short period of time. We must find somewhere to rest. We’ll do it in shifts. You two will go first.”

She turned around, and Gary and I followed her across the long plain in front of us. Kostas’ penetrating gaze bounced around the land as she moved, but I didn’t see anything other than the endless plain, which eventually turned into a bumpy forested area—the rocks scattered around here were weird; they looked too sharply angular for natural formations. I said so to Kostas.

“They aren’t natural,” she replied. “I recognize them: they’re pieces of a manufactured material from another universe.”

Both Gary and I nervously jumped farther away from the nearest of those pieces.

Kostas’ eyes shot over to us. “Don’t worry—they aren’t dangerous.”

I was frowning now. “They make it look like a landfill around here. The bitter smell to the air isn’t helping matters.” I suddenly pointed at a large tree nearby. “Can we rest under there?”

When Kostas nodded at me, I plopped down beneath the tree. The earth here was soft. This universe was supposed to be a crazy place, but, right now, it felt like heaven beneath my aching body and to my overstressed mind.

My eyelids sagged as I spoke. “I can barely stay awake now.”

“Rest,” Kostas said. “I’ll continue trying to get us out of here….”

*

When I woke up later, I was alone under the tree.

I almost had a heart attack.

I scrambled to a seated position—then I spotted Kostas and Gary behind one of the manufactured “rocks.”

“Why the hell did you leave me?” I shouted over to them.

Gary’s eyes spun my way. “We need water. Kostas found some.”

“My device has powered up more,” Kostas said.

“So can we get out of here now?” I asked eagerly as I stood up.

But Kostas only shook her head at me.

They both started walking back my way; Kostas held a clear, plastic-looking, bulging baggy—it looked like Gary’s food packaging.

“That bag with the water’s from your food, Gary!” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he replied, patting one of his suit pockets. “I’ve still got it all.”

“How long did I sleep—did you sleep too?”

He nodded.

Kostas passed me the bag full of water. “In Earth time for us, I’d say we’ve been here about seven hours.”

“That long!” I said, frowning. I took a drink from the floppy bag; it wasn’t easy, but I managed to do it without spilling too much water. “Don’t you want any?” I asked, looking at both Kostas and Gary.

Gary shook his head. “We had some when we were getting it. This is for you.”

Kostas’ eyes were on me. “When you finish drinking, we’ll fill it up again—and fill yours too, Lydia.”

When I was finally done drinking, I did as she’d said: I removed my food stash from my belt, gave the food-baggy to Kostas to fill with water, and shoved my stash inside one of my suit’s pockets.

Kostas walked away, and I said to Gary, “Does—does my face look any better?”

“It looks wonderful,” he said, and he grabbed me then, held me to him for a long moment in this strange, landfill-like land. I could feel his heart pounding against mine even through our suits.

“I’m serious,” I finally said. “I didn’t even know I was wounded till Kostas said so.”

Gary pulled back. “Some of the bruising’s gone. Kostas said you might be suffering from a disorientation sickness—well, you should be after visiting the Krin-sphere. She had a special room set up for when you returned to the Monument, so you could heal from the Krin meeting. But then you never made it back to the ship—”

I grabbed onto one of his sleeves. “How is everyone else there, Gary—the crew? And what the hell happened? I mean, how did Claudius get me? He confirmed that he can track us. I think only sometimes, but still….”

Kostas walked up to us, both of the baggies in her hands full of water now and twisted shut. She attached them to a tab on her suit as she said, “Lydia, you must tell me everything you remember he said and everything you saw.”

I did what she asked, relaying my experience in a slow voice, while reliving what I went through in all its unpleasantness. And Kostas frowned while I spoke.

I finally asked her, “Why didn’t you come into his ship to get me—why didn’t the Keepers?”

“They tried, but there is now some type of force-field on the Reimark ship that barred their entry because it quickly drains them of energy. We were finally able to get the transporter through an intermittent weakness in the field that we were using to look inside his bridge, but, still, the Keepers themselves couldn’t make it through. So I came to get you.”

“I’m sure you’re thrilled to be here,” I said in a dry voice. “You once said I was being paranoid—it turns out that I wasn’t!” I sighed. “Still, I can’t understand how the hell Claudius got so powerful so damn fast since the last time he attacked us. It’s only been months.”

“Not necessarily for him. He has apparently been—and learned from—elsewhere. He might have been gone for years. I couldn’t tell from on the Monument’s viewscreen, but did you think he looked older in person?”

Remembering his face in front of me, I frowned now, slowly. “Now that you mention it, yes.” I was still frowning. “It scares me that he was able to do so much, including breaking through the cloaked transporter stream from the Krin-sphere.”

Gary opened his mouth as if he wanted to speak, but then his lips clamped shut.

“What?” I asked fast. “What is it?”

Gary shook his head and sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

Kostas had her device out again; her fingers were manipulating it as she stared down at it. “I still can’t get any communications or transporting to work. I’ve just scanned your suit-functions too. No luck. However, I believe I can draw more power to my device if we move to about two miles east of here—at least I think.”

I was frowning again as we began walking across the land, which, unless I was going crazy, looked different now; there were more breaks in it, with fine cracks and waterways meandering across the ground. Several times we had to jump across an opening of some sort—one of which materialized just as we were moving toward it.

“If this keeps up,” I said, “at some point, there will be no land left.”

Kostas’ head whipped toward mine, a little too fast. It was obvious from the wary expression on her face that what I’d said was definitely a possibility in this completely unpredictable dimension.

*

Completely unpredictable turned out to be exactly right.

The three of us were finally walking near another forested space when the sky suddenly darkened into nighttime.

My feet immediately stopped moving. I never understood where the daytime here had even come from, but that was still better than this current darkness shit.

The worker devices had lights on them, including emergency lights, so both Kostas and Gary quickly set their devices to shine more brightly.

I was breathing heavy and fast now. We had just relieved ourselves in separate spots on the ground in the forest, but now I suddenly felt like I had to piss again. “What the hell do we do now? Will the light come back? Is this place powered by a sun somewhere?”

“No,” Kostas said, and I could have sworn there was a tremor in her voice.

Gary must have heard it too, because he said, “Why do you sound so worried now, Kostas?”

She didn’t respond for a long moment. I felt like walking up to her and shaking her. But, that she was busy working on her device might have been responsible for her silence…. “The land here has omni-curvature. We can see very far ahead in every direction, and if you look out there now, it looks dark everywhere. My device is showing the same. For a major change to happen to such a large area in The Error Universe—that means there has been a sudden, great influx of energy.”

My eyes were right on her when I spoke: “So you’re saying that anything can happen now.”

In the strong lighting of the device right below her face, her heavy frown was very obvious.

My knees began shaking—but not just because of what we’d been discussing. There seemed to be a tremor, coming along the ground. “Can you two feel that?”

Kostas’ fingers were punching fast at her hand-held’s buttons. “I do, but it’s not registering on here.”

“So should we believe your device or our lying feet?” My eyes whirled to around us; I was looking for both the source of the sensation coming from the ground and for somewhere for us to escape to. But of course, it was far too dark to easily make out the latter.

“Do you see that?” Gary said suddenly, pointing toward behind Kostas. “It’s light green and it’s coming our way.”

Kostas whirled around and said urgently, “Let’s go—now.”

The thing in the distance came closer, and I finally saw that it wasn’t only a light green; it was a glowing, fluorescent light green. It was also very tall and stick thin, and as the three of us fumbled into the darkness, with the two devices our only direct light, the tall structure came even closer—and my mouth dropped open at what I saw now: it was a giant exclamation point, as if someone had ripped it off an illuminated screen and thrown it into the landscape here.

A part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity; another part of me was almost out of breath because I was charging ahead at the top speed of my legs as the exclamation point chased us.

The point at the exclamation’s base easily rolled along the ground like a sphere, and the three of us kept running away from it, leaping over cracks in the earth and stumbling—I stumbled twice. Gary picked me up the second time—and then promptly fell into one of the wetter cracks.

“Shit!” he said, scrambling to pull his legs out of the wet earth before the angry exclamation point reached us.

I grabbed one of Gary’s arms as he finally jumped onto flatter ground. I turned and was about to start running again when I noticed the exclamation point had shifted direction; it was rolling at an angle to us now.

“Look—” I said, panting out my words “—maybe it’s—it’s moving to chase someone else!”

“Is there anyone else?” Gary asked.

“Let’s hope not,” Kostas replied.

*

The three of us kept moving along the ground, away from where the exclamation point had disappeared. Then we heard a loud, long roooaaaaar.

Uh-oh.

My eyes whipped to Kostas. She sighed hard, then pulled the bright screen of her device closer to her face. “There are no life forms around according to my scanner maps. I don’t know what that was. It may just be an erroneous sound.”

The “erroneous” sound came again, but, this time, it sounded closer to us.

My gaze fruitlessly whipped around at the darkness beyond the three of us. “Where is it coming from—which direction?”

“Look—the green light again!” Gary said, and, sure enough, the green light was there, looking like a tall blip on the dark land.

Gary whipped out his gun, but Kostas shouted, “No! It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what that would do in this dimension.”

Having no other options, the three of us simply started running again, away from the angry green column. “What the hell is the damn thing?” I shouted. “What does it want?”

“It—it probably came here—unintentionally like we did,” Kostas panted out.

“Yeah, but we’re alive.”

“It may be alive, Lydia,” Kostas said. And, apparently, the exclamation wasn’t the only thing that might be alive around here besides the three of us: that roar came again, and we had unknowingly run in the direction of it, or it had changed direction and was now headed right for us.

“There’s a huge shadow up ahead!” I said. I almost tripped over my own feet as the three of us came to an abrupt stop to turn around—only the exclamation point was coming from that direction now.

“Move laterally, to the left!” Gary shouted, and then we flew that way through the night.

We were all panting in an exhausted choppy way—I couldn’t tell which pant belong to whose mouth. My eyes were dry and tired, my mind frustrated and afraid—afraid we’d lose each other in the darkness—

A sudden, blinking light not far from us: the light pulled all of our eyes there and finally revealed both the exclamation point and an enormous brown blob with long, powerful-looking arms; the arms were wrestling with the shaft of the exclamation, then lifting it up and trying to smash it against the ground. The exclamation didn’t break, but the intensity of its light faded till it was no longer a neon green but was instead a bright white.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here while they’re fighting each other!” Gary said.

“And go where?” I cried. “We can’t see.”

Kostas’ lit-up device shifted against the night as she raised her arm. “I’m going to divert power to make the light on this brighter—”

I shot a frustrated hand up at the air. “Yeah, but then everything here can see us.”

“I’ve also just realized I probably have enough power now to make a local transporter stream. If we’re in danger, we’ll just jump to somewhere else here.”

“And land where?” I asked now.

“You know I can’t answer that,” Kostas replied.

*

We continued rushing away from where the bright-white fight was still going on.

“I’ve got to stop,” I eventually said when I could no longer see the exclamation point’s light. “My stomach is killing me.”

“Yes—we’ll stop—and eat some of our stash,” Kostas said.

A few minutes later we found a somewhat secluded spot between two large rocks with flat, extended tops; they made a crude cave beneath them, but who knew how long that would last in this ever-changing crazy place.

I plopped down onto the ground between the rocks, then pulled my knees to my chest and gulped at the dark air. Gary sat beside me and handed me a piece of his stash—a disk of dried fruit from the garden on the Monument. Looking down at it now, I felt a pang inside me, near my heart. I missed that frigging mammoth ship, no matter all the trouble my being on it had now caused me.

I bit into the fruit, taking only a small chunk then handing the rest back to Gary. “I wonder where everyone is back on the Monument.”

Kostas was still standing; her eyes were gazing at the two rocks above us in a measuring way. “I’m sure they left where Claudius was and are no doubt cloaked at maximum power while also altering the cloaking on all the forms of transporters, to compensate for everything that’s happened.”

“You got a message from them saying all that, or you’re just guessing?” I said, my voice coming out kind of snide. As soon as I spoke like that though, I felt bad about it. If Kostas noticed my tone, she didn’t say anything.

“I think I’m completely stressed out,” I said now on a sigh.

“You need sleep,” Gary said. “You too, Kostas. You didn’t wake us last time and take your turn. I’ll stay awake now and keep a lookout for…things.”

“All right,” Kostas said, and her voice clearly sounded tired now. “I feel like this predicament is my fault, and so far I’ve been ineffective in getting us out of it. I don’t understand why I can’t get my device to power up faster—but I do think it was working better when the sky was light. I keep rerouting how the power moves through it to try to save energy, but I can never get the rerouting to stick for very long. Whatever is going on, maybe if I sleep on it, I can think of another solution.”

*

I really didn’t want to leave Gary alone and awake while Kostas and I slept, but I had no choice: I wasn’t feeling well. Between my nearly empty, acid stomach, the scary surroundings, and my aching lungs and limbs from all of that running, nothing could stop me from nodding off now….

“Lydia—Lydia—wake up!” came Gary’s voice through the fog of sleep—Gary’s frantic voice. “The exclamation’s back!”

I was lying on my side; I mumbled a “Huh?” against the ground, Gary’s wacky statement not registering with me at first.

Then when I finally realized what he meant, I shot up to on my knees.

Kostas said fast from on our left, “I can’t get a local transporter stream to coalesce!”

“We’ve gotta go!” Gary said as he grabbed me by my left arm, his eyes on the opening between the rocks on our right, where that familiar length of green light moved in the distance.

I was on my feet an instant later, and as I began running, following both Gary and Kostas, I finally realized something else: the sky had lightened. It wasn’t “daylight” out; more like a twilight, with only certain parts of the sky lighter than others. But at least I could see where the fuck I was going now…or maybe that was a bad thing. Did I want to see the cavernous area we now had to run across and then climb through? Fuck no!

“Where did the ground go!” I shouted at Kostas’ back as I crawled up a hill. Gary was behind me, and the hill wasn’t that steep, but it was still high and far too sandy to walk up. We had to use all of our limbs now to grip into the hill’s earth—the going up was so damn slow.

One good thing though: the sandiness had somehow prevented the crazy exclamation point from continuing to follow us; it was rolling around at the base of the hill, as if it was waiting for us to return—or for us to fucking fall down the hill.

My fingers gripped at the scratchy-sandy soil; sweat slid down my face and into the neck of my worksuit. I thought of the baggies full of water, which Kostas had lost “last night” when we were running. “We need more water!” I said now.

“Once we get up the hill,” Kostas panted, “I’ll run a scan.”

“Has it…powered up more?”

“Yes, a little…. Almost there to the top,” she said, strain in her voice now as her red-covered back and arms struggled to pull her tall body up and then over the top of the hill.

“Can you see anything good?” Gary called to her when she was finally standing.

“I think I’ve found some water,” she said. “It doesn’t look like much, but we’ll go that way and drink what we can.”

She turned around and helped me up the last of the rise; then I turned around and pulled at Gary as he slid up over the sand.

The three of us finally stood together on the plateau of the hill. The land laid out before us was the flattest it had ever looked in this dimension. I could no longer see very far away; the omni-curvature was totally gone now. If we had to run, we wouldn’t be able to so easily see where we were running to.

I couldn’t help sighing; it seemed that nothing in this erroneous place would ever go right.

*

Though we were apparently safe now from the exclamation point, I did not like the look of the land here as we continued moving over it toward where the water was. There were random inclusions beneath the brown ground now—hot inclusions, molten and angry. Their heat filled the air, though the liquid didn’t quite break through the clear, crystal-like, round plates over the red fiery fluid. But every step I, Gary and Kostas now took between the plates made my heart jump.

“I’m thinking that maybe we were better off being around the exclamation point,” I finally said.

Gary shook his head from side to side, but his eyes remained on the dangerous-looking ground. “We don’t even know what happened to the thing that was fighting with it.”

“The water should be less than 500-feet away,” Kostas suddenly said.

“I’m more concerned with what’s under us,” I said. “Are we walking on volcanic land?”

Kostas’ dark head shook now. “I don’t believe so. But whatever this land is, I have good news: it’s charging up my device faster, and probably our suits too. The land may be a type of electrical system—which brings me to the bad news: the flow below is somehow ionizing the air here. If that continues to this degree, the air will become a conductor. With all the energy coming into this dimension and the shifting magnetic and other fields, there may be high voltages induced too. This place could become a layer of lightning.”

“Shit!” I said, a string of nervous spit flying out of my mouth. “I hope you still have that protective field around us.”

Kostas glanced my way. “The field can only do so much. At the moment, though, I’m more worried about whether there is enough water and where it actually is….”

When we reached the coordinates of the spot her device had indicated, she was right to be worried: if there was “water” here, it must have been inside of or beneath one of the many burning, electrified flows in the ground.

“Well,” Kostas said, throwing a frown at both me and Gary, “we’ve found water before in this dimension; we’ll probably find it again. In the meantime, we can adjust our suits to mitigate some of our dehydration.”

“Actually, right now, I’ve really got to piss,” I said.

And Gary nodded fast—in agreement.

Kostas glanced around us, then pointed to her left. “We need to get to a less volatile spot where there’s no ground-flow. According to my scanner’s data, there’s greenery over there. Let’s go.”

Gary and I followed her lead again—gingerly over the angry earth, and we eventually found some bushes to both “safely” rest and pee near.

When I was done emptying my bladder behind the bush we’d designated as our toilet area, I sat between Kostas and Gary. They had their food stashes on their laps now; I pulled out mine, then stared at my two companions as I chewed. They both looked pale, tired and dirty, all of which was probably exactly how I looked.

One of Kostas’ hands was sticking a dried piece of blue bread in her mouth; her other hand was working away at her device. “I’ve been running an analysis on those yellow, lemon-looking berries we keep seeing in the greenery here; fortunately, they are edible. They exist in other dimensions. The Keepers call them eoni.”

I swallowed the bit of emergency food in my mouth and closed my belt on the pieces I had left, which weren’t much. They might get me through another three days—tops—without my feeling too many effects from starvation. I asked Kostas now, “Have you eaten the eoni before?”

Kostas shook her head “no.” “The Keepers have.”

I frowned. “But we’re not Keepers,” I reminded her. Sometimes it seemed like she would forget that so easily.

“If we’re here long enough that we need to try the berries, we’ll have no choice,” Kostas said. “The amount of food we have won’t last much longer.”

I thought back to the Lamren dimension—to when I was stuck there and had to take a chance on the fruit there. That worked out fine for me, but that didn’t mean the same would happen here….

Or maybe the three of us wouldn’t even reach the point of needing more food because we’d be dead by then: something was growing now behind Kostas, growing across the land—a white-hot shock of electricity suddenly jerked across the ground and crashed into a huge dark rock, shattering it into small pieces.

“Shit—” I said, jumping up “—the lightning!”

While we were eating, Kostas had laid her device on the ground, and Gary, his gun; but now both Kostas and Gary scrambled to pick up their stuff; then the three of us rushed out of the bushes.

The lightning was coming from the right, so we ran to the left, across a quite empty plain—there would be no protection from the electricity—

We ran and ran and ran now, the electricity making crashing sounds behind us. I didn’t dare look over our shoulders. Through my boots, I felt the earth absorb the shock of some of the electrical blasts; tears of fear pricked my eyes.

Then the sounds of the storm lessened, and so did our pounding feet. We finally braved turning back around—and immediately saw that the land looked far more barren than before. Where there had been greenery and the occasional boulder, there was now a powdery film. It looked as if the place had been hit with a nuclear blast.

But at least the lightning was gone.

I was both out of breath and breathing a sigh of relief that the three of us were still intact when a wheezy high-pitched sound from the sky pulled my eyes upward: a silver ship soared there—but it was headed toward the ground, not far from where the three of us were standing.

Kostas’ eyes widened at the ship as she yelled, “Move out of the way—run again!”

So we did run again—we sprinted away from where it seemed the ship would land.

A moment later my legs felt the massive vibration of the crash, and I almost stumbled as I kept moving.

Kostas suddenly turned around to look at the wreck, which made me and Gary stop.

Gary’s eyes were on Kostas, and his voice was severely out of breath when he spoke: “Kostas—what—is it?”

“My ship. That’s my old ship,” she said.

Now my eyes opened as wide as possible, both at the crumble of shining metal in the distance and at Kostas’ shocked face. “The one you came to Rintu in?” I finally asked.

Kostas’ nod was rapid. “But what does it mean? It doesn’t make sense. We converted my ship’s parts into energy—was that a mistake? Was my staying and working with the Keepers actually a mistake?”

“Kostas,” I said, my eyes wide in astonishment now, “what the hell are you doing? Don’t try to analyze this insane place!”

She opened her mouth again, but before she could respond, we all felt something: the earth moving, again. There was a vibration or an electric feeling—something that wasn’t right.

Our eyes whipped down to the ground now, mine looking to see if more of those hot flow areas had popped up, but I didn’t see any nearby. And I couldn’t tell where the vibrating was coming from. Kostas whipped out her device and punched at it, but her eyes twitched as she stared at her screen. Then she said fast, “We can’t stay here—we need to move!”

“Where!” I cried, my head whipping around.

Kostas sped away from me, and Gary and I rushed after her—and that was when I really felt the ground move and heard a loud CRAAAAACK. When I looked on my right into the distance, lines of molten red inclusion were spreading over the earth.

“Holy shit!” I screamed as we all began running in the opposite direction to the angry earth. It kept bursting and roiling, and then a piece of the earth split off and up and tossed Kostas away from me and Gary.

“Kostas!” Gary and I shouted at the same time.

The earth seemed to suddenly stop moving, and we immediately ran to Kostas: she was lying on her back on the ground, with blood coming off the back of her head. Her chest heaved jaggedly beneath the red material of her worksuit. I never thought I would ever see her like this—so limp, so broken, so powerless. For an instant, I stood staring in shock.

Gary dropped down to her first, and that pulled me to reality.

“We need to work her medical controls!” I told him.

“It is too late…” Kostas said in a weak voice as she glanced down herself at her arm, to where her readout was blinking in and out now. “The suit—not strong enough to save me in time. My injury…too severe. Listen to me,” she said, trying to sit up, but failing, partly because I had grabbed onto her to hold her still, so she wouldn’t injure herself further. “If—if Keepers don’t ever come…” she said now “…there might be a way for you to get out of here. This is the last resort—now that I am on the cusp of my life, now that I am leaving….”

“Don’t leave!” I said, wanting to shake her to keep her with us, but her bleeding wasn’t slowing—

Her dark eyes widened at me, and she tried to grab my hand. I quickly grabbed hers. “Listen, Lydia…Gary…not enough energy before for this, and there’s a risk your energy won’t be enough now and you’ll drop out to somewhere even worse…but if you coordinate your suits, your energy will be higher. It might give you momentum out of here. Your controls….” Her pale face seemed to convulse in pain, and I felt tears drop from my eyes onto her. Then her eyes slid right to mine. “Tell Babs—tell her thank you. Thank you for being so caring…I know it was brief, but it meant more to me. I’m so sorry, I…work your controls, the second ridge…” she said finally. Then she jerked upward for an instant, and then she was gone.

“No!” I cried, both for her and for us, because Gary and I were next. We needed her guidance; all along, we had relied on her and her device and experience telling us what to do—and not just here, but everywhere we had interacted with her. In all things the Omniverse, Gary and I were like dependent children still. We especially couldn’t survive here in The Error Universe alone.

I said that to him now in a frantic voice, and he grabbed me and shook me the way I had wanted to shake Kostas to urge her to stay alive. “We’ve got to think, Lydia—of the stuff we learned from her and the others!”

“But she never finished explaining. The second ridge—the one on the suits isn’t how to do the emergency suit-coordinating, though she only explained how to do it that one time—I don’t know if I even remember that right!”

“But,” Gary said, “her brain was shutting down. Maybe things got muddled and she wasn’t talking about our suits just now.”

I thought a moment. Then my eyes whipped to his. “You’re right!” I’d completely forgotten about the side-ridges on Kostas’ full-worker device. It had fallen onto the ground when she’d fallen—please, let it still be working….

I found it, grabbed it, held it right-side up and examined the side ridges. I pressed the second one on the left side, but nothing seemed to happen. I pressed the second ridge on the right side—again, nothing happened.

Then I told Gary to press his controls to coordinate our suits while my right hand would press one of the second ridges on Kostas’ device, and my left would press my suit controls to coordinate with Gary and start my transporter.

“I feel like this is probably what she meant,” I said, breathing heavily, staring down at her lifeless body and feeling sadness tighten my throat. I hated to leave her lying here, but I didn’t know if it was safe to include her dead body in the transporting….

“This set-up seems right to me,” Gary said now. “All right, let’s coordinate on the count of three.”

“One, two, three….”

We pressed what we needed to press, and once again, nothing happened.

“Shit!” I screamed, and I almost flung Kostas’ device away from me.

Gary grabbed my right arm and deftly slid the device from my grasp there.

But as I watched him move the silver box, something came to me….

I was still breathing too hard as I said, “Wait—maybe just pressing the device’s ridge isn’t enough…. Maybe there’s something—some instruction on the screen for how to maximize the device’s energy. Kostas was trying to do this all along, and then the changes in the ground increased. Maybe they’ve given the device an extra jolt of energy.”

Gary stared over my shoulder now while I fiddled around with the device’s buttons and my eyes rushed through the writings that came up on the screen—most of which weren’t in English.

I finally noticed one of the circular Keeper danger symbols, and it said below in English, “Device Overload.”

My fingertip jabbed at the screen. “That’s it—that’s what we need to do.”

Out of the corner of my left eye, I could see Gary’s throat nervously moving as he swallowed. “And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then I guess we’re stuck here forever at best, dead at worst.”

Our eyes locked onto each other. My mouth turned down as I looked at Gary’s jumpy eyes and sunken cheeks.

“There’s no choice, Gary,” I said, suddenly feeling immensely sad.

Gary closed his eyes and softly nodded at me.

“I’ll activate the overload first; then we’ll follow the same procedure as before.”

My fingers shook on Kostas’ device and on my suit controls, but as soon as Gary and I went through this new sequence of actions, the area around us shifted into a deep black, and then we were suddenly floating in it….

“Yes!” I said in a happy voice, looking down at the bright readout screen on my left arm. “We’re out.”

“Yeah, but where are we?” Gary asked.

“I—I don’t know. There are no numbers. My readout just says we’re in a stream.” I was still holding Kostas’ device, and when I looked down at it in my right hand, the front screen of the box now looked like a charred wreck. Apparently, when the device had said “overload,” it really meant it. I was lucky the thing hadn’t burned my hand, but then, knowing the Keepers and the workers, the device had a safety feature.

“Lydia, are you sure about where we are? I can’t get much data to show up on my readout either,” Gary said in a more desperate voice now, his right arm extended in front of him, his left holding his gray device. “I also can’t get a location on my damn device. Not for a dimension or a dimensional stream—not for anywhere.”

I tried using my suit readout to do the same things as he had, and now I got the same result as he had. Suddenly my readout was barely working, no matter what I tried doing to it.

Feeling quite woozy as we floated and zoomed through wherever we were, I said,

“I guess we just have to hope the Keepers can see us now and bring us back from wherever the fuck we escaped to, if we’ve indeed escaped.”

*

Time and space had no meaning in the black. I only knew where I ended and Gary began.

We continued floating in this existence; my stomach swam and began making me gag. Just when I thought I was going to upchuck into this black neverwhere, a reddish, golden light materialized beyond me and Gary, and grew into an elongated, humanoid shape….

“Thura!” Gary and I both shouted in relief. She was robe-less and flickering wildly, but she was still such a welcome sight.

“It has been very difficult to locate you, but I am very pleased to finally see you,” she said out loud now. Her voice seemed to bounce around me and Gary, enveloping us. “Where is Kostas?”

“Dead!” I said, and I immediately began crying.

Thura’s golden chin seemed to be moving more than normal. “Do not operate your suits or any other devices. You must remain in this stream to reach the Monument. And I must go back for Kostas’ body.”

“But,” I started to say to Thura, but then she was gone an instant later.

Gary and I grabbed onto each other now. I was shaking, and he held me hard, his hands shaking too, over my back….

The space around us began lightening, and my nausea began subsiding. I pulled back from Gary’s arms. “Something’s changing.”

“Yeah,” Gary said, as forms around us grew clearer—angles and lines first, then walls…

To my surprise, we wound up materializing in the Monument’s kitchen.

Geena had been working inside there; she held a bowl in her hand, and as soon as she saw us, she dropped the bowl and shouted, “Captain—Gary! What happened to you?”

Someone else rushed into the room and up to me and Gary and hugged us—Babs. I felt my heart sink against her….

When she pulled back, she asked the same thing Thura had: “Where is Kostas?”

I didn’t know what to say; neither did Gary. We just looked into Babs’ dark eyes, and she knew us quite well…I watched tears finally fill her eyes.

She turned away and grabbed onto the edge of one of the counters.

“I’m—I’m so sorry, Babs,” I said, suddenly feeling like not only a very inadequate captain, but also like a very inadequate friend.

“And I am so sorry for interrupting,” Devin said as he shot into the room. “But, we’ve still not solved this whole situation. Claudius has a Keeper on board his ship.”

*

I spent the next several minutes trying to console Babs while she, Devin and Gary and I rushed across the Monument, toward the bridge. Devin explained that, in this timeline, Gary and Kostas and I had only been gone half a day while we were inside The Error Universe. The Keepers had remained hidden in this layer of Krin-space where Claudius still was because the Keepers were busy trying to find where the three of us had disappeared to and because they had sensed something important from on his ship.

Devin continued now, “Claudius is threatening to kill the Keeper he has imprisoned there if we don’t hand over the Monument to him.”

“How the hell did he get a Keeper off of here?” Gary asked Devin.

Devin shook his head fast, his breaths coming out of his mouth quite hard. We had reached the bridge area, and we were all practically running across it. “This Keeper is not from this ship. He’s apparently been with Claudius for a while. This must be how he knows so much about Keepers and how he apparently has some Keeper technology.” Devin’s mouth twisted a little.

We slowed down as we entered the forward bridge area. And then I asked, “Are you saying this Keeper gave it to Claudius?”

“We don’t know yet,” Devin said. “The ship’s force-field seems to be both outside the ship and inside a small area surrounding where a Keeper presence seems to be. The Keepers are having trouble mind-linking with the Keeper there.”

I sighed in frustration and fear; I hated the possibility that there were bad Keepers. It made what my crew and I were doing on this ship seem different…. “Not a single goddamn good thing has happened on this whole trip on this ship.”

I glanced at sad Babs, but when I turned my head the opposite way again, Devin shot a half-frown at me, and said, “You forget that the framework’s still intact. If that isn’t a good thing, then what the hell is?”

*

A moment later, Shirley and Chen rushed onto the bridge, and when we were done with hugging each other and my lightning-quick description of what I and Gary had been through, Devin told us to move to our usual positions on the bridge.

Thura suddenly showed up. She was in an orange robe now, and Babs seemed about to rush over to her, but she stopped herself, her dark eyes imploring Thura.

“I am sorry,” Thura said as she moved to one of the control areas on the right side of the bridge. “I must attend to the danger from Claudius right now.”

Chen was at his usual panel behind me; he glanced up at me, but when I smiled at him a little, his head only shot down again. I frowned at his odd reticence. Normally he was so open toward me, and he’d hugged me hello only moments ago.

I chalked up his behavior to the emergency we were in; then I turned to look at the front viewscreen, which displayed a view of the exterior, including Claudius’ warship. As far as I could tell from the emerald-like color and the large, electrified weapons-array running around the long axis, the ship was indeed the same one that had attacked the Demeter. And considering the warship’s location now, it was also probably where I had been imprisoned. My heart began pumping too hard.

From behind me, Gary said, “The scumbag—why doesn’t he just drop dead already?”

If only the universe were so accommodating. Instead, poor Kostas was dead, and creepy Claudius was very much alive….

An image of his bridge filled the right side of the screen now. He was standing there in his dark uniform-suit, his posture confidently straight, and his head firmly tilted back as if he held all the cards in the situation and he was about to throw his winning hand down onto the table.

I could feel angry color fill my face. I said over my shoulder to Thura now, “Can he see and hear us?”

“No,” Thura said, her here-not-here fingers deftly moving over some buttons. “And we will be presenting a false image to him from this bridge. It will look like only a few Keepers are on it. You and your crew will remain hidden.”

“GOOD,” I said, but then I ground my teeth together. A part of me wished Claudius could see me alive and well because his plan had completely failed. Well, maybe not completely….

Now I said to Thura, “Kostas told us you couldn’t get on his ship—are Keepers still blocked from there?”

“Yes,” Thura said. “We do not know that much about Claudius’ past history. When we entered his ship outside of the Rintu cloud months ago, we could not find much historical information in his computer. We could not even find the ship’s name. It apparently does not have one.

“But the humans in The Reimark Layer are not necessarily normal humans anymore. They have apparently had close contact with remote alien species, and we know that the Reimarkians have sometimes received payment for their mercenary services in the form of other technologies. We do not know exactly what they have. We have unfortunately had to learn about that as we go along.

“Claudius must have acquired new technologies since we last met. We are unable to penetrate his new shielding because it is harmful to us and also because it is randomly generated and pulsing extremely quickly. We Keepers can only slip inside a pattern that flickers slower than we can. We have found one small weakness in the warship’s shielding, which we have been exploiting to watch the inside. We continue to look for more weaknesses.”

“And we hope to keep him talking while we work on defeating him,” Devin added now.

I frowned up at the screen, where Claudius was gesturing orders to a woman at the forward controls. Going on his routine facial expressions and motions, it didn’t seem as if Claudius knew we were watching him. “I’m telling you all that he will not negotiate on anything in any way.”

Another orange-robed Keeper suddenly walked onto the bridge, and though I couldn’t hear anything that Keeper and Thura were saying, I could have sworn I felt them talking over a mind-link.

“Thura,” I said, “how are you even back here now? Where is Kostas’—” I had almost said, “Kostas’ body,” but I remembered Babs was on the bridge.

“We have laid Kostas in a cocoon,” Thura replied. “We will address what has happened to her later. Although we are safe on this ship now from Claudius, especially because we have just finished an upgrade on our shielding, we should still get away from him as soon as possible.”

From behind me and to the right of me, one of Gary’s hands shot toward the viewscreen. “How can we just leave him to do what he wants now? Look what happened when I rescued Lydia—she could have died in The Error Universe, and Kostas did die.”

Thura turned to us, and her reddish face beneath her robe’s hood began fading in and out of this dimension faster, especially her gold-tinted chin. “Gary,” she said now, in a much quieter voice, “you must control your agitation. We need you to think.”

A brief, very tense silence filled the bridge.

Gary’s brown eyebrows finally shot up at Thura and his mouth dropped open. “Why me?”

“Because,” Thura said, but that was all she said. She moved to where the other robed Keeper was working at the controls of those odd green tubes that the Keepers supposedly used for navigating inside the Monument. Maybe they were making technical changes there because the tubes were transporters, which apparently were no longer totally safe from Claudius’ abilities—

“Captain Lydia,” came Shirley’s voice, Shirley’s shaking voice, her eyes glancing my way, “we just got a text message from the warship. It says: ‘Keepers, we are waiting for your response. Your Keeper comrade is especially waiting—with a deadly weapon aimed at him’.”

My eyes widened. “Now what?” I asked fast, my eyes rushing to the Keepers.

However, Devin spoke: “We will open a communications-line between ships, but only I will be speaking.”

“Captain, are you there?” someone suddenly said—Steve’s deep voice.

I pushed the black communicator button for the engine area. “Yes—I’m here, Steve.”

“We’re all very glad you’re back! The workers had all of us crew take our usual Monument stations. We’re waiting on orders about what to do with the third room-engine.”

I glanced at Devin on my right, but his dark profile was fixed on his own hands working at the ship’s controls. “Are we going somewhere, Devin?”

His head shook a slow “no” back at me. Then he said, “Thura, I’ve started the façade and opened the path. Should I tell Purn to go to the engine-room controls?”

“Yes,” Thura said abruptly.

“What’s going on?” I asked, frustration shaking my voice now.

“We have a plan,” Devin said.

And then something changed on the screen: more people walked into Claudius’ bridge room. One of them held a controller, which was apparently for the large black box that was now rolling along the floor to near Claudius, where the box finally stopped.

“Ah,” Claudius said now, “so I finally get to see the inside of the infamous Monument. Very impressive bridge. And, soon, I will be standing on it.” He nodded at the guy with the controller, and then a little viewscreen opened up on the black box, which apparently was a filmed view of what was inside the box: a sluggishly flickering Keeper with a stooped back, sitting on the bare floor.

I thought I felt a strange sensation suddenly—anger, from Thura. But it happened so fast, it must have been my own anger getting mixed up with the situation.

Claudius said in a confident voice, “This foolish Keeper didn’t realize that he was teaching me how to imprison him. If I were you, I would execute him for his stupidity.”

A saw a muscle twitch in Devin’s dark cheek. “How do we even know that once you take control here, you’ll do as you say and release this Keeper and let everyone off this ship without hurting anyone?”

“Why would I want to hurt anyone? I want your ship, not you.”

I sooo wanted to reply to Claudius, but it seemed I had been left out of the Monument loop. I didn’t feel very captainly at the moment….

I watched Devin quickly turn off the communications-line to the warship. He turned to me as he asked, “What do you think about his truthfulness?”

“I think he doesn’t have any. But could he really hurt us on here? Is my crew in danger now?”

Shirley had come up beside me, and we were both staring at Devin’s profile now, waiting for a reply.

He finally said, “We can never, one-hundred-percent promise anything to you for in the future, with respect to your lives. But, working with us will most likely improve your chances of survival and longevity to a great degree. Claudius is a unique situation. Let’s work with what we have at hand, because this is an emergency. We really must get this Keeper back.”

“Why?” I said fast. “He was working with Claudius. How do you know he isn’t still working with him? This could be a trap.”

“Keepers may be naïve and unhappy sometimes with the nature of their own kind and what our jobs must be, but, Keepers are not deceptive like that. This particular Keeper has one of the highest degrees of mind-linking telepathy a Keeper can have. No matter the disruptive box around him, since they’ve moved him onto the bridge, Thura has been getting bits of clearer communications from him. He is in pain, both mental and physical….”

Devin quickly turned on the line back to Claudius. “Every Keeper is vital to the work we do, so we must save every single one. We cede to your demands, Claudius Fentimani; however, we have one of our own. We will transport you to here and hand over this ship, but only if we can transport The Keeper along with you.”

On the screen, Claudius’ whole body seemed to pause; the sound from there apparently went out now too.

“Why did we lose the sound?” Gary asked Devin, moving up closer to the viewscreen now.

“He’s cut us off—or at least he thinks he has entirely,” Devin said. “We’re back to only the visual spying through that lone weakness in the force-field. Strangely, we can’t seem to get audio through as easily. But, his twitching body language tells me that he’s desperate to do the deal whatever way—do you agree, Lydia?”

I nodded rapidly. “I do. He’s one of those people that gets fixated on something, and it usually—and hopefully in this case—causes their downfall.”

Claudius’ smooth voice came back an instant later as he opened his audio line again: “I agree to your terms—provided that you understand that this Keeper will remain with my weapon aimed right at it.”

“That is acceptable,” Devin said. “You will be transported to a secure part of the Monument; your confinement will be on a timer. That will give us time to vacate the ship. Then you will be released to take over.”

“At least you aliens are sensible aliens,” Claudius said, his face twisting strangely, as if he was struggling to not laugh.

“Is he really so stupid?” I said. “I don’t trust him. He wouldn’t trust you crowd so easily.”

“It does not matter,” came Thura’s sudden voice. “We must follow through.” Her flickering face seemed to nod at Devin.

And, on the screen, Claudius was pointing his weapon at the black box and saying, “Remember: if you kill me, you kill him too.”

“We understand,” Devin said. He turned toward Thura. “We’re ready.”

Thura took her hands off the bridge controls; however, the other Keeper’s hands were not only flickering fast but also moving fast among the neon-tubes and their controls.

The image on the viewscreen shifted to the inside of an empty, gray, cavernous long room. The other end of it was visible for a moment; then that gray wall gradually disappeared into the distance, as if someone were pulling it away from the other side.

Diffuse white light shone down from the top of the room, but that top wasn’t visible now, only the gray sides, making the space look like a ceiling-less tunnel.

“What’s going on—what are we seeing?” someone asked—Babs.

When I glanced over my shoulder at her, her eyes were wide open and locked onto the screen. She hadn’t spoken in so long—I’d forgotten she was still here. There were tear-tracks all over her cheeks, as if she had been crying the whole time on the bridge….

Devin replied to her now: “That’s the third room-engine. Claudius and his box-prison will be there in one, two, three, four—now.”

A faint, gray, block-like silhouette suddenly appeared in the room-tunnel. The silhouette darkened as it continued materializing, and then it split into two distinct parts: Claudius’ tall form and the even taller bulk of the black box.

The camera view wasn’t a close-up one, but I could tell by Claudius’ quick motions that he was disoriented and worried. He fumbled with his gun a bit, almost dropped it; then he pointed it at the black box. But his arm was clearly shaking as he said, “I’m here, you Keepers. Now what? This better not take long.”

“It will not take long,” said a Keeper from somewhere.

There was a pause. I imagined I could hear Claudius nervously breathing heavily—no, that breathing was coming from me and my crew, possibly Devin too—

—The whole image on the viewscreen suddenly brightened, as if someone had taken a picture inside the tunnel using an old-time flash and a huge camera. The shapes of Claudius and the black box were there one instant; the next they were gone, as if they’d been absorbed by the white light—no, they had indeed been absorbed: when the light cleared an instant later, the gray room was empty again and the farthest wall had slid forward into being visible again.

My stunned mouth had fallen open, but now I closed it some to say in Thura’s direction, “You killed him!” A part of me felt more worried than relieved about that. I was very glad for everyone on this ship—and for the damn universe, considering what a menace Claudius had become. Still, I never thought the Keepers would do something violent….

Gary’s shaking hand suddenly slid over mine, but his eyes were on Thura as she finally said, “Claudius is effectively dead to this universe, yes. The physical part of him has been disassociated; the mental part is now secured elsewhere till it will be sentenced for its crimes, which sentencing will probably be a form of amnesia of personality, then a lifetime of service at a simple, pleasant task. He will never be back in this universe in any form because his brain has now been made incompatible with existing here.”

When I finally closed my mouth more, it was to say: “So you’ve turned him into a worker-drone.”

“‘We’ have not done this. It is the task and responsibility of others to do.”

Now Gary said, “And the rogue Keeper? It looks like you killed him too!”

Shirley had a hand pressed to her red-covered chest, and her frightened blue eyes were on Devin.

Devin must have noticed her paling face: he quickly shook his head “no” back at us. “We released him first, of course. Once the box’s field was outside the stronger field of the warship, the subfield of the box clearly got weaker; then we were able to penetrate the box using an aminyte laser, which tool is invisible to humans.”

Gary was frowning. “So then will the rogue Keeper get the same treatment as Claudius?”

Devin shook his head again. “This Keeper is indeed part of a sect of Keepers who do not necessarily agree with the tasks the rest of us feel it is our duty to perform. He thought it might be beneficial to have a tie to humans and alert that tie of what a Keeper presence here in this universe means. Before he realized what was happening, the information he’d shared with Claudius was being used against him. He had been imprisoned since.

“He will now be sent back to The Interstitial Universe, where he will face the governing Keepers—they will decide where he will go. We have him confined and have been talking with him. He is a naive, too idealistic Keeper, but he did not mean harm to anyone, especially to humans.”

Shirley was frowning at Devin. “Still, he did foolish things that almost got a lot of people killed. Yet you seem almost blithe about him! Didn’t he give Claudius devices to do all this?”

Nearby, Thura seemed to have faded away a bit.

And Devin shook his head fast yet again, at Shirley. “No, he did not give Claudius devices. Fortunately, he also didn’t have any information on newer tools our sect of Keepers uses, such as the new red worksuits.

“One device Claudius has been using—the one he used to kidnap you, Lydia, and then disrupt your dimensional transporter stream when you fled—that device has been banned for use by the governing Keepers; Keepers aren’t even allowed to preserve this device in The Hall Of Devices. It is from another species…we Keepers do have an enemy—we have not had contact with them in a long time. Sometimes species get rubbed the wrong way and they don’t want to see reason. Instead, they see a threat in us where there is none. Some species are also just very war-like and are always looking for conflict.

“The other technologies Claudius possesses—we have no idea how he acquired those and adapted them for his use. He must have had help. But, we’ve been unable to find any information on that in the path-library and by using our other equipment. We may never know how all of this happened. The Reimark Layer is positioned in the Omniverse in a very central spot—the people there must have had contact with species they shouldn’t have had contact with. The Reimarkians are lucky they didn’t have a disaster happen.”

“And we’re unlucky that they didn’t have a disaster happen,” I said. “Right now, I’m really feeling like the Omniverse is a goddamn mess—and you Keeper crowd aren’t doing a good job of keeping it all together. I’m sorry to say this to you—but I’m just stressed out and disappointed here….”

“The Keepers, like any other species, are always still learning as long as they’re still existing,” Devin said. “Perfection is something we never claim we have—our jobs are too complex for us to ever be perfect. Again, though, this is why we Keepers are cultivating this worker set-up with you and your crew. If you feel you can no longer do it because of what you’ve now learned, we’ll accept that.”

I frowned. No matter everything that had happened, no matter my disappointment, no matter any fears I might have, the thought of going back to the Demeter still just did not thrill me the way this Keeper ship did. A life on here would probably be more dangerous, but it would also be more exciting. At this point, it seemed impossible for me to go back to being a normal goods shipper—that life seemed almost boring to me now. And it also seemed that my ship had slowly become a bed-only for me….

Gary suddenly let go of my hand—to shake his hand at the viewscreen, which now showed only an exterior view of the warship. “What I still don’t understand is: why can’t you banish all of them on that ship like you’re doing with the rogue Keeper—better yet, why didn’t you do this from the get-go when Claudius attacked the Demeter?”

Devin had a slight frown on his face now. “You know what our primary jobs are. You know we try to interfere as little as possible in the active, contemporary affairs of the various universes. We work in the background, not the foreground. We work on creations that have already been discarded or fallen into disrepair. If we go around removing individuals from this universe and throwing our powerful weight around, we are affecting far more of this universe than is safe for everyone, including us. We Keepers live a very long time, but we are not immortal. This is one reason why we had to remove the rogue Keeper from Claudius’ sphere: we do not want Claudius to learn even more about Keepers than he unfortunately already has. Though our lives are devoted to doing things for others and to preserving the Omniverse’s technological history, we are still living beings.”

I watched Gary’s lips fall open slightly, which echoed what I was feeling too: apparently, it was very easy for us humans to forget that though the Keepers seemed god-like sometimes, they really weren’t immortal gods, as was obvious on that day in the lounge, that day of disaster when Una died….

I heard Thura’s voice now, and it sounded unusually loud for a Keeper as she said, “This is the Monument, and we, The Keepers Of The Tasui, have a message for those of you still on the warship: your captain and his mission have failed. You must give up in your efforts to gain outsized power. You cannot win against us, but should you continue to pursue your current course, you will continue to meet a response that will destroy your plans—”

A clear vibration now in the bridge floor; it shook the bridge, and made me and probably everyone else on it tilt to the right, as if the ship had been thrown out of equilibrium and was passing on that off-kilter state to our bodies.

“What’s going on?” Chen said fast. “My panel’s showing our centerline has shifted.”

Devin’s fingers were moving fast on his controls. “We’ve been struck by the Claudius ship.”

My heart was going crazy now. “What! Everyone on the bridge get back to your stations,” I said, then I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know enough to take command now. I could barely battle Claudius on the Demeter—forget about here.

But if I had said the wrong thing, Devin and the two Keepers on the bridge didn’t seem to notice or care. Or maybe they were busy thinking about what to do…that seemed to be all they were doing now: just standing there, staring up at the screen.

“Are you Keeper crowd in conference or something?” I said. “Could you let us in on your minds?”

Thura’s head turned my way. “We were actually not talking to each other. I was going over the events and the data we have collected from them. We have lost the location of that fluctuating weakness in the warship’s field. Zuri here has been trying to find it, so we can get a view of the bridge again.”

“Why is that important…” I began. But I never got to finish my sentence because the viewscreen suddenly brightened and faded into that interior view of the warship’s bridge—where, wonder of all wonders, Claudius was standing once again, his dark eyes thunderous and his stiff posture full of suppressed fury.

It seemed like everyone on the bridge did a jaw-dropping double-take, including the Keepers.

My heart hammered against my chest as I said, “What the fuck is going on—I thought he was dead!”

“I was afraid of this,” Thura said now. “Right before the other Claudius body was destroyed, we collected some data on him. There was an abnormal growth history to his DNA.”

She paused, and then Babs said from behind me, “So? That can be a natural occurrence, especially for humans who successfully grow in far layers with slightly different radiation profiles from where we originally evolved on Earth.”

“That is not what I meant,” Thura said. “It appears Claudius is in possession of what we Keepers call an eternity machine. It allows users to reproduce themselves exactly as they are, at any age.”

Shirley had gone back to her panel, but now she said in a frantic voice, “You mean Claudius can make photocopies of himself?!?”

Thura seemed to do a quick flicker-turn to Shirley. “Yes. But each device for doing that can only make a few copies off the ‘master copy’ it’s coded to, or else the new copies will have too many heath problems to develop properly. If the master-copy original dies, at some point, all the copies will eventually have died, and the person will be no more.”

“How many copies can each device make?” Shirley asked.

A pause. Then Thura said, “About ten.”

“Fuck,” I said, “that’s still a lot!” I ran my fingers through my hair, my eyes passing over the astonished, worried faces of my crew. “I don’t fucking believe this. How will we get rid of this guy—and now his Claudii!”

“I don’t understand how this has happened,” Shirley said now, a frown in her voice. “Why weren’t you Keepers able to see this coming? It’s so frustrating that you’re only able to see random bits of the future.”

Thura’s clear, bouncing eyes turned right to Shirley. “Even when we can see more than that, we cannot act on most of it. A peculiar aspect of the Omniverse is that if you act based on a glimpse of the future, you can greatly affect the present, too. And the present can be harder to perceive and fix than the future—”

“WHERE is my brother?” a furious familiar voice suddenly shouted.

My eyes shot up to the screen, where Claudius suddenly grew larger to us because he’d moved closer to his front viewscreen camera. Or, shit, maybe he wasn’t actually Claudius. I couldn’t even be sure the one I’d had contact with on the warship was the real one, though I felt like he was. On the other hand, Thura didn’t give a timeline for when Claudius had cloned himself. He might have gotten hold of multiple eternity machines over the years, for all anyone knew. There could be dozens—hundreds of him out there now—shit!

“I’m asking one last time, and then I will fire on you again: WHERE IS MY BROTHER?” Claudius yelled.

I pressed a palm to my usual bridge-panel, and a patch of my sweat grew on the slick dark edge. “Please, Thura,” I said now. “Let me speak to him.”

Devin turned to me—and nodded hard, one time.

Then I finally said (and enjoyed saying), “This is Captain Zarro. Your brother is dead.”

There was a pause, during which a flash of surprised anger contorted Claudius’ face. “Ah, Captain Zarro, you’re still alive. Most unfortunate. But then you won’t be alive for much longer.”

Before I could say, “Keep dreaming, scumbag,” Claudius fired off another shot toward the Monument. He must have recently made modifications to his weapons too, because, going on the numbers on my panel, this shot was a cluster of energy far more powerful than what he’d hit the Demeter with months ago.

I could feel a vibration spread through the bridge floor and up the dark walls now. My head shot around to Thura on the right side of the bridge. “I thought you said we’re safe in here!”

“We are,” Thura said. “He can drain the Monument of some of its energy, but he cannot damage it.”

“Well, maybe he can keep shooting at us enough that this ship’ll wind up dead in space!”

“Why the hell aren’t we firing back?” Chen asked in a frustrated voice, one of his hands loudly banging at his controls. And when I turned around to look at him, the hand doing the banging was his Keeper-tainted one.

Chen’s head was hanging low, and now his eyes drifted up at me, then quickly dropped back down to his panel. His hand finally stopped trying to shake (and break?) his controls. “I just wish we could do some damage to this fucking moronic asshole waste of space already.”

I couldn’t help laughing at Chen’s mouthful of swearing, especially because he didn’t often swear.

“We can’t fire on the warship,” Devin said now. “We’re unsure if there are others on there being held against their will. The field-shielding is also very strong. We can’t damage it so easily.”

“But you can drain it like they can do to us, can’t you?” Babs said.

Devin was quick to nod now, but he only said, “We can, but we won’t. And we have our reasons for this.”

“So we’re going to sit here and play this drain-game with them?” Gary asked in an angry voice. “Why don’t we just take off? I’m beyond ready to start an omnivelocity profile. Just pick a damn place.”

“We must get more data from the ship before we go—” Devin began.

But Steve’s harried voice over the communications-line interrupted him: “Captain—Captain Zarro, Purn said to give Thura and Zuri a message; Purn had to go into the load cells, because of the energy drain from the warship’s shots. For some reason, Purn can’t seem to mind-link up to the bridge.

“About the load cells—he said the power-output ignition isn’t fluctuating sinusoidally. There are discontinuities. It’s too dangerous to travel at very high speeds right now, especially in dimensional streams. Purn needs about twenty minutes to recharge the switches in the load cells.”

“Another reason we can’t take off,” Devin said now, a heavy frown on his dark face. On the screen, Claudius and his crew oddly—and silently, because we were in spying mode again—rushed off the warship’s bridge.

“So you’re telling us we have no options,” Gary said, his eyes on the viewscreen as it shifted to an image of the warship floating in space. “This is crazy. Why have this big ship if you can’t ever throw its weight around—” He stopped talking so abruptly that my head whipped around to him.

“What is it, Gary?” I asked him fast.

There was a frown on his face as his brown eyes stared at the screen. “So, okay, we can’t book out of here till Purn makes repairs, and we can’t damage the ship’s hull because they might have other prisoners on there. But how about kicking its ass across the universe? This ship is far bigger than the warship. Use our brute bulk momentum to push it far away. That will give us time for Purn to make repairs without our being in reach for anymore shots.”

Devin flashed Gary surprised dark eyes. “What an excellent idea. Thura, can we make it happen?”

“We are now making arrangements to do this,” Thura replied. “We have analyzed the warship’s field further, and we now see that it is vulnerable to collisions with much larger masses. However, as we have never actually done a maneuver like Gary’s described with the Monument, we cannot say what the results will be. And we have no time to consult the path-library to get a probability profile on the results. We have one engine fully online still—we will use that one to build up a momentum. Gary, we want you to initiate the ramming in four minutes.”

Gary was still standing near me, and now I watched him swallow hard: apparently, when he’d thought up the idea of pushing the warship, he hadn’t expected to be the one to have to do it. If it went wrong, he would feel doubly responsible—I knew him.

“Don’t worry, Gary,” I said quickly. “They wouldn’t say for you to do it if you couldn’t.”

His nod now was a little choppy. He walked back to his usual console and began working at it as he said, “Devin, you’ve told us that this ship has a more conventional thrusting option. I’m assuming I should use that?”

“Gary,” Chen said fast, sounding quite excited, “I’ve already started setting up flight-path coordinates for that. Let’s push the bullies around.”

Now that my crew had a purpose, things on the bridge got quieter—even Babs rushed to one of the panels. And then she said, “Chen, Gary, I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t go head on—for days I’ve been studying the schematics of this ship more and how the mass distribution oddly changes, almost as if there are relativistic effects going on. But I think the forward mass fluctuates down to too light for what we need to do. A side push might be better.”

“We are very impressed with how quickly you and your crew have learned this ship, Captain Zarro,” Thura said, and I could have sworn I heard a smile in her normally solemn Keeper voice. “Carry on. We Keepers are distracted by our efforts with the Keeper from the warship. He is ill and needs our energy and other efforts to heal.”

“Well,” I said, “even though he screwed up, I don’t wish him bad things. Just, well, please keep at least one Keeper’s mind focused on what we’re doing….”

“Devin will observe. He is most adept at operating this ship,” Thura said.

And the dark-brown color of Devin’s cheeks quickly turned into a mahogany-red blush.

*

Less than a minute before we were going to ram the warship, I suddenly remembered how filthy I was, that I hadn’t washed in too long, and that I had dried piss on my legs inside my suit. I probably smelled bad too.

But I knew it didn’t matter. It seemed like nothing much mattered lately, except the survival of the universe….

“Port nozzles have been extended—fifteen seconds till ram,” Gary finally said.

I tensed in front of my panel.

“Counting down,” Chen said. “Five, four, three, two, one.”

“Engaging full power, Engine Seven!” came Karen’s excited voice over the line from the engine area.

And then we were off, soaring through space, starboard-side first; the view of space out ahead of us in the starboard-direction looked normal for this framework-area of the universe. But then suddenly the view wasn’t normal—because the warship had fired off another white-hot blast, this one even more powerful than the last one.

“Incoming to starboard!” someone said—it sounded like Chen, but my eyes had been glued to the screen—

“Keep going,” Devin said fast. “The Monument’s shielding will absorb the blast and the force of our contact with the warship.”

Everything Devin said turned out to be true—but our bodies didn’t come with individual shields, and when the side of the Monument finally collided with the warship, pushing it back and back and back, I thought my body was being pulled apart. There was a weird, twisting feeling to the bridge space, as if the Monument was now bent into an arch on its starboard side, where it was still pressed against and nestling the warship.

“Increasing speed,” Gary said now. “Release in three seconds, Chen.”

“One, two, done!” Chen said.

And then on the viewscreen, the warship finally soared away into the cosmos, almost instantly turning into a tiny dot, which disappeared altogether the next moment.

My bottom lip was hanging way down now. “According to my panel, the ship’s gone from this layer! How the hell did it go so far?”

“The Monument does not impart a normal momentum to anything,” Devin said in a matter-of-fact voice, reminding me of Kostas. I wondered if he thought of her, if he missed her—or maybe he didn’t because it seemed that her absence had left him at a higher position of importance….

No, I was probably being stupidly human while thinking like that: knowing the full workers, their egos weren’t in their jobs, so Devin probably hadn’t been coveting Kostas’ position.

I stared around the bridge; the postures of my crew had greatly relaxed by now, as if they were relieved and pleased with what had just happened with the warship, which was exactly the way I felt.

However, something suddenly struck me now: “You know, you Keepers make no sense sometimes: you didn’t want to fire on the ship because it could hurt the individuals inside, yet you let us ram the thing—and hard enough to push it out of this layer!”

“We have not explained to you how powerful the weapons on here are,” Thura said. “They are quite like the disassociating engines. If we fired a disassociator at the warship on the very lowest setting, parts of it would have been decimated. Outside of a room-engine, we cannot control exactly where a disassociator would disassociate, and who would die in the path of that.

“The warship’s field can handle damping most of our push from the perspective of the inside of the warship, but that ship’s a much more inefficient, sluggish design than the Monument and would need time to reach us again. We will be long gone by then—Purn has just finally mind-linked with me. He has recharged the load cells. We are ready for an omnivelocity profile.

“Over the next few days, we will have to make various adjustments to the settings of many of our technologies, so that the warship and others cannot locate us in future, even if our cloaking fails again, as it did that one day. We will also have to change all of our cloaking as Keepers to maintain a tighter control of all the locations where our matter is in this universe, especially for where our matter is visible.

“I will program a secure destination into the ship’s computer, so we can work undisturbed; we will modify the ship’s cloaking to strengthen it again and do the same to all of the transporter cloaking. Your crew may now pick whatever specific location you want inside that secure area, Captain Zarro, and then take us there right away using an omnivelocity profile.”

“No wonder Claudius wanted this ship,” I mumbled, remembering back to what he’d said to me, about how powerful the Monument was.

For once, Claudius was right.

*

When the Monument reached that more secure area of space, the ship uneventfully floated inside there for a time and was finally cloaked in an updated, more secure field.

My crew and I were also cloaked more effectively now—and I was also finally able to get cleaned up and REST.

I had been through so much: the physical war with Claudius, the war of words with the Krin—essentially, I’d been involved in a two-front war. And now I was completely exhausted; now I felt out-of-phase with my life.

Walking onto the Demeter now seemed stranger than ever; even my cabin felt, well, unfamiliar to me.

“I don’t know how to be in here,” I said to Gary, standing in the middle of my cabin, still in my dirty worksuit.

He’d been undressing and was now wearing only his worksuit’s detachable underwear—it, too, looked as dirty as I looked. Gary’s face was far too pale, and his hands were kind of cold when they reached for me now to help me take off my suit.

But I quickly lowered my head to his shoulder and finally let the tears that had been burning behind my eyes flow.

*

When we had showered together and slipped into my bed, Gary held me and said, “Always remember that you did good.”

“I did?” I asked in a weary voice, my eyebrows sliding up.

His arms around me squeezed me tighter. “When you were with the Krin, I was on the Monument’s bridge. Babs and I got to see more of the framework’s science in operation. It was incredible—both massive and intricate. There’s a continuous, massive amount of both normal, abnormal, and dark energy coming off it, almost as if there’s an engine inside creating all kinds of energy. I see now how its collapse could affect the universe and even destroy it. But that hasn’t happened now—thanks to you.”

“Thanks to us,” I said.

*

I slept beside Gary for I didn’t know how long. At some point, he got up; at a later point, I had difficulty rousing. When I finally did wake up, I was alone in my cabin, and both my worksuit and Gary’s worksuit were gone. He’d probably brought them to the workers to be cleaned further. My red captain’s belt had been cleaned and was now lying near me on my nightstand….

I sat up quite fast, suddenly feeling a moment of dizziness and suddenly worrying about my crew and how they might be feeling now. For too long lately, I’d had to worry about myself, and now I felt like I’d totally forgotten about my crew for most of that time.

I quickly used my bathroom and got dressed in my normal shirt-and-leggings-and-red-belt captain’s outfit. Then I went to the dining room.

As I moved through my ship, it felt like a ghost-ship; I saw no one along the way and no one inside the dining room—oh—Geena suddenly popped out from one of the pantries.

Her eyes brightened when she saw me. “Captain—you’re awake!”

My mouth slanted across my face. “I forgot to check how long I was out….”

“I think it’s been nearly a day.”

“Shit!” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Where is everyone?”

“Just about everybody’s gone onto the Monument for their normal work. I was headed there myself. One of the Keepers hasn’t been feeling well for days. I’ve been, well, nursing her with a special Keeper food preparation. It takes a few hours every day for me to prepare her gruel properly and feed her—oh, Lydia, you must be starving!”

“Too right,” I said. “But you go do what you’ve gotta do.”

Geena pressed a hand to one of my forearms. “There’s fresh hummus and spring rolls—are you sure you don’t need me to serve you?”

“Of course not. Off you go. I’ll see you later.” I flashed her a bright smile, then walked over to one of the tall metal refrigerators at the front of the room and rummaged around for—well, for everything.

My mouth watering, my stomach growling, I piled a bunch of different foods onto a tray, poured a big glass of fruit juice, then plopped my ass at one of the booths.

I was half-way through shoving a plate full of spring rolls down my gut when Babs walked into the room. Her head was hanging low and her normally sure stride was faltering. She looked tired and depressed, and seeing her like this made my heart hurt.

“Babs!” I said in as bright a voice as I could muster up. “I just woke from my endless sleep. I’m so glad to see you. Come eat with me.”

Her face looked a little less dejected now as she sat down across from me and grabbed a spring roll.

“How have you been?” I asked her. “What’s been going on with the crew?”

Babs filled me in on a bunch of details now, including that Cambridge had been working on rebuilding an entirely new type of forward weapons-array by incorporating some materials from the other human ships on the Monument—and he’d finally finished the building job.

“That’s great,” I said, but I felt kind of bad that Cambridge had worked so hard on doing that. What did it really matter at this point when weapons made with human materials were nothing compared to what we had access to on the Monument….

Babs must have read my mind. “He said it looks like we don’t need them anymore, but he was using the work to help brush up on his skill-set. He’s been in training on the Monument, too, for doing similar work. He was in the Monument’s weapons area when we were under attack.”

Babs talked some more about what my crew had been up to, but her face and her eyes were still lacking that enthusiasm of hers that I had come to count on seeing, and maybe even needed to see, especially now.

I wiped my hands on a napkin and swallowed the food in my mouth, my eyes looking right at hers, which were turned down at her own hands as they played with her half-eaten spring roll. She seemed to be struggling to build up an appetite.

“Babs,” I said, “you look so sad, and I’m so sorry.”

Her nod was slow now; she was still looking down at the table.

“Have you talked to the Keepers at all? I feel like—well, like I might have slept through her funeral….”

Now Babs’ brown eyes shot up at me. “That’s what I don’t understand—I’ve asked them repeatedly if I could see her, but they told me they’ve got her sealed up in something. I never got to say goodbye….”

I grabbed both of Babs’ hands. “Don’t worry.” I let go of her hands and used my belt-communicator to contact the Monument’s bridge. Devin was there; I told him where I was and that I wanted to speak to a Keeper.

“I’ll tell Thura,” Devin said.

A moment later, a spinning, sparkling patch appeared in the dining room; then an unrobed Thura materialized there. It seemed strange seeing her on my ship, especially when she finally walked over and sat down beside Babs—pulsed beside Babs really; parts of Thura’s body kept disappearing over the tabletop….

“Do you want any food?” I asked her quickly. “There’s hummus—it’s mushed up—”

“I know what hummus is,” Thura said out loud, her voice coming from somewhere inside her shimmering head. “I have had it before. Kostas was fond of making it.”

Babs’ face twitched, as if she was going to cry; then I jumped up from my seat and rushed across the room to get the hummus from one of the fridges. I put a big mound of the hummus on a plate, poured some water into a glass, then brought that stuff over to the booth.

As Thura began using her clear fingers to scoop up the golden hummus and slurp it into her still-red-tinged mouth, I sat back down and said, “We need to talk about what happened to Kostas. Maybe things are different for Keepers, but many of us humans prefer to see our dead and say goodbye that way. We really need to.”

Thura paused in her various motions to stuff the hummus in her mouth; then she took a quick flickering drink of the water. I saw the contents of her mouth quickly slide down inside her transparent chest—I had to look away at the view of her intestines.

Then she said: “When our Keeper paths first crossed with Kostas, we could tell she was a very brilliant person. And then she also became a very special worker. Kostas has had a Keeper worker-chip in her brain all the while, but she had also been injured when we first met, and we had to replace another portion of her brain then with Keeper matter.”

A light-bulb seemed to flash on inside my head now: I had finally learned the reason why Kostas had seemed so stolid, so inscrutable.

A tear slid down one of Babs’ cheeks. “She never told me about that. I wish she had.”

Thura’s shimmering head turned toward Babs. “That probably was not because of you. We Keepers do not share everything, and, even when Kostas was not momentarily mind-linked with us, she had more of our traits than other human workers do because she had a bigger part of our Keeper material.” I thought of Chen now….

“Fortunately,” Thura continued, “because of that matter, we may be able to bring her back to life.”

Babs’ mouth fell open as her eyes shot to Thura’s. “Is that true?!” Babs said.

“Of course,” Thura replied. “This is what we have been trying to do since I brought her back here. However, her having died in The Error Universe will probably change her more than a normal death would, assuming we can bring her back. If we can, her memories will be unpredictable and might have combined with another part of her in The Error Universe, if there are any parts there.”

“Thura,” I said fast now, “when we were there, we saw her ship. It crashed not far from us!”

Thura was silent for a long moment. Babs’ waiting eyes were on Thura the whole time.

Then Thura finally said, “You must have experienced some temporal effects there.” Thura seemed to intentionally shake her head as it unintentionally pulsed. “Whatever has occurred, if we get her back, there might be permanent losses of memory.”

“You mean she’ll have forgotten me,” Babs said in a sad voice now, and I could feel my heart sinking along with hers.

“We shall see what happens,” Thura said. “But this is why you should not have had relations with a worker if you are not a full worker yourself—or else your attachment will become too strong compared to a full worker’s attachment.”

“I’ve already heard that kind of thing from my captain,” Babs said, a touch of tartness in her voice, but I could tell she hadn’t meant it toward me, and maybe not even toward Thura. I reached across the table and squeezed Babs’ hand, but she must have heard her own tone and had second thoughts about it. Her eyes quickly shifted back to Thura. “I’m sorry, Thura—I know you’re doing the best you can.”

Thura’s mobile head seemed to nod, but the motion happened only once, so it was hard for me to tell if it was an actual nod or just her normal flickering.

Babs twisted her hands together on the tabletop. “I don’t care what Kostas is like if you can make her come back; I just want her to be all right again. That you could even save her at all is like a miracle. I can see why Lydia wanted us to work with you.”

“Lydia makes wise decisions,” Thura said, and I almost choked on my own tongue. “But,” Thura continued, “we Keepers do not perform miracles. What you are perceiving when you are around us is the science of who we are as a species, things we were born capable of doing so can’t help doing, things we have since learned to do. We make mistakes sometimes because there is so much to do. That places like The Error Universe exist shows that mistakes are probably an inherent part of the Omniverse. We Keepers have our path-library and our many other mechanisms that yield us data on so much in the Omniverse. But, there is always chaotic data inside data streams. The Keepers cannot read the chaos that much better than you humans and many other species can—you must always remember that. We may seem pushy sometimes, but that is likely because of the urgency of so much of our work, and because of the species-divide between us, which sometimes does inadvertently lead to insensitivity.”

I remembered how I had accused Kostas of that on Babs’ behalf, and now I felt bad for my rash words to Kostas then. We had all been trying to do the best we could. Sometimes those efforts just wouldn’t wind up being good enough in the ultimately uncontrollable Omniverse—I saw that now.

My eyes widened a bit as I thought more on what Thura had just revealed—it really did explain some of Kostas’ inhuman, dispassionate ways. At the same time, the other workers apparently didn’t have Kostas’ Keeper brain parts, yet they were often out-of-it, too.

Or maybe I was being unfair and had been unfair all along: apparently, Kostas wasn’t that dispassionate, given what had happened between her and Babs. Maybe all of the workers were simply working a lot, so they were too busy thinking a lot to be feeling a lot. Would I become like that on the Monument? Time would tell….

“So when can I see her—can I please see her?” Babs asked Thura now.

But Thura replied, “She is in an activator-cocoon. It will be days before we know anything. If she does not come back to life, then you can see her. If she does come back, there will be a period of adjustment, and I don’t think it would be best for you to see her during that time.”

Babs sighed; then she quickly changed the subject. “I need to keep busy. I’ve not had enough work to do. Thank you for saying earlier that you were giving me time to grieve, Thura, but I only become more upset when I’m stagnant. What’s the itinerary for the Demeter crew today?”

Thura swallowed the last of her food and drink. “Actually, something has come up, and we must go to Rintu. Captain Zarro, I thought you and your crew might want to fly the Monument to there.”

“You thought right,” I said now on a smile.

*

A little later, I was finally in my now-completely-clean worksuit and was stepping out into the hangar when I spotted Devin and Cambridge walking into the hangar from the small meeting room.

“Cambridge!” I said as I moved toward him. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Babs told me you finished working on creating a new weapons-array—super! What have you been up to today?”

Cambridge was all smiles as he stopped in front of me and jerked a thumb at Devin. “I’ve been coordinating a Monument weapons-test with him. Captain, they moved me down to the weapons area permanently to work—I hope that’s all right.”

“Of course,” I said, smiling.

Devin’s gaze turned into a familiar-looking, distant haze, as if he was mentally talking to the Keepers. Then his eyes shifted to me and Cambridge. “If you don’t mind, we should all head to our stations now. You can talk as we move.”

“We’re not transporting?” Cambridge asked as the three of us walked out of the hangar.

“Zuri has finished more work on the new transporter cloaking; however, we are in the middle of testing it. We will then have to make more adjustments to the transporters in the red worksuits, but we’re always protected anyway when we’re inside the Monument.”

“This place is awesome,” Cambridge said suddenly, and I couldn’t help smiling.

Devin was walking faster than Cambridge and I were, so I took advantage of this more private moment to ask Cambridge if he still felt all right with becoming a permanent part of the Monument.

His dark eyes jerked back at me—in surprise. “Captain, I thought it was a given that we were staying. If you don’t mind my saying, I know I don’t know you very long, but, from Day One, you’ve always seemed like you were here to stay.”

My mouth curled at him, but not in a frowning way. “We may have only recently met, but it seems you know me well…. I’ve still gotta consider all of you, though. You were so disappointed when the Keepers wouldn’t tell you more about your son.”

Cambridge frowned a little, seeming to consider my words. But then he quickly said, “It isn’t all bad: at least I know Peter’s alive. At least I have that now, which is more than I had before.” We were walking into one of the Monument’s tube-cars. “I do wonder about Chen though. He seems unhappy now after what happened on the bridge.”

My head whipped toward Cambridge; my mouth fell open a little. “What do you mean—what happened?”

Cambridge’s eyes seemed to suddenly expand in his brown face. He finally flushed a deep red. “Oh—you don’t know then. I—well, you should ask him.”

I did ask him: he was there on the forward bridge when I finally walked onto it with Devin. Gary, Shirley and Babs were there too, and Babs looked the happiest I’d seen her since Kostas had died.

A part of me felt so happy seeing my crew on the bridge; it felt like our very-familiar bridge set-up, even though it was inside a not-very-familiar place. However, this not-very-familiar place had indeed grown on me, the newness of it all, the exposure to so many unique scenarios. I felt like an explorer of the galaxy now, not like a shipper of goods in the galaxy….

Chen was at his usual spot when Devin and I walked near him, but I told Chen I wanted to talk to him alone in the rest-room.

He followed me inside there, and not for the first time since I’d been back on the Monument, I noticed that he was having difficulty looking me in the eye. “What’s going on?” I asked bluntly now. “Cambridge told me you’re upset. I can see you’re upset.”

Chen’s dark eyes whipped right up to mine now. “It’s all my fault what happened to you. You could have been killed!”

“Chen, what the hell are you talking about—”

“My arm,” he said now. “Claudius got control of it somehow. Thura said the rogue Keeper may have been forced to help there. I weakened the cloaking on the transporter stream Kostas was using to pull you in from the Krin-sphere.” Chen’s dark eyes looked wavy now, as if he wanted to cry. “It was terrible, Lydia. I could see my arm there on the bridge panel, but I couldn’t make my arm do what I wanted. It was like someone else’s brain was stuck inside it. Devin told me that I don’t have a Keeper brain, so I can’t work at blocking out any intrusions. Having this thing—” he shot his Keeper arm up at the air “—is a liability for this ship, for us, from the Demeter. I want to get my arm removed and reattached—Thura told me they can probably grow something normal for me—”

I grabbed onto him and his “bad” arm. “Don’t you dare do this for me. What are you thinking? I’m the captain; I’m supposed to take most of the risk. Let the Keepers work on coming up with some other solution to the problems you’re having with your arm. You didn’t do a damn thing to me. It was all that scumbag Claudius. He could have gotten hold of anybody and used that to harm any of us! He’s a crazy person with a god-complex.” I squeezed Chen’s arm harder. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, but I still somehow felt the strange shifting of his skin beneath the material. “I want my old friend back—his mind. I don’t care what his arm is. Can you bring that old Chen back—the one I can depend on to fly not only my ship straight, but me too?”

Chen’s startled-looking lips twitched for a long moment. Then he finally said, “Yes, Captain!”

“Yes, Lydia,” I corrected. Then I pulled him into a hug.

*

When we walked back onto the forward bridge a moment later, Devin was walking off it; I followed him, saying that I wanted to talk to him. He stopped beneath one of the clear upper bridges.

“I’ve been thinking about my device,” I said then, lifting up my new one. “Not this one you left for me—I mean my old one, the one I lost. If Claudius got hold of it when he kidnapped me, I’m pretty sure he would have mentioned it and demanded to know what that did too. So I don’t think he ever had it.”

“Let’s hope he never has,” Devin said.

But then if Claudius had never had my device, who knew where the damn thing was and what could be done with it if someone ever found it? I didn’t say that to Devin now, however, because something about my interaction with the second Claudius on the viewscreen popped into my head instead: I remembered that his surprise at seeing me still alive seemed genuine. I wondered if he’d been unable to track me anymore since I’d gotten lost in The Error Universe.

“Do you think it did something to change me?” I asked Devin now.

He nodded at me rapidly. “It’s quite possible. But we’re still working on masking you and your crew more effectively, so Claudius can’t find you again by however he tracked you the first time. We will be putting stronger personal cloaking features on the worksuits especially.”

“You know,” I said, pointing at one of my dark-red sleeves, “I think it’s past time for you to install weapons on these worksuits.”

Devin frowned at me heavily. “The Keepers are barely trusted as it is.”

“Well, I’m not a Keeper, and neither are you.”

“But I—we’re representing them. This ship has weapons. That is enough.”

“Not if we get kidnapped again!”

Devin’s dark eyes turned distant. “Maybe we need to work on a better emergency transporter that we humans can always mentally access in an extreme emergency, even without a chip inside us. I’ll discuss this with the Keepers.”

“That would be great,” I said on a smile. But my smile soon faded. “I’ve been thinking more about my and my crew’s permanence on here. I know you full workers have a mental link with each other through the chips and Keepers, but we don’t necessarily want to hear each other’s private thoughts. We just don’t want to be forced there.

“I’m sure you know how I—we—feel about being full workers like you. But, we will accept being workers, alone, at most. We don’t want any chips—any Keeper matter or technology inside of us. It’s not that I don’t like the Keepers; I do. I trust them quite a lot too. But, I still want to be me, myself and I while I’m on this ship.”

I watched Devin’s slow nod. “That seems fair. And Thura has just mind-linked with me and said it is unfair that you do not know the full truth here. Now is the time to explain the crux of the problem, which is the Monument itself.

“You see, this ship must exist. It was created long ago by ancient Keepers. We do not know exactly how they created it, and we also don’t how to dismantle it. It may not be destroyable. It has some self-sustaining systems; when they are damaged, they self-repair. The other parts where we must live—those parts we have added on over the ages, and they need intentional upkeep.

“‘Pure energy’ is a group term for the basic energy of the fluid the Omniverse actually is—many years ago on Earth, people claimed an ‘ether’ existed around the Earth. They were quite right overall; they just didn’t have the specifics to reinforce their claim. And later human science seemed to disprove those claims. But it seems the Omniverse is essentially an energy fluid—as is evident from phenomena like gravitational waves. Pure energy is inside everything, including inside us, but it is normally in an inaccessible state, residing separate from normal energy.

“There’s probably an infinite supply of pure energy available in the Omniverse because of the nature of the omnifluid, especially if the Omniverse keeps growing or expanding. Pure-energy forms normally cannot be converted into other forms directly and as easily as normal energy. Pure energy can only be accessed via certain technologies; then the energy can be used to do work.

“For example, in order to maintain themselves and then move a ship, the firestones access pure energy from their surroundings and from other parts of the Omniverse where the densest pure energy is, and the wells apparently access even more of that energy.

“We think the core of this ship also accesses this, but the core is unreachable to us now; it probably contains massive amounts of pure energy—which the Monument can convert to other forms perfectly and easily—you may have noticed that its parts can also change so easily, like with the staircase near the battery-charger area. This ability is partly our programming and partly a product of the ship’s being constructed with pure energy. We current-day Keepers can use pure energy too, like when we disassociate matter and use the resultant forms of pure energy to create omnivelocities—we can also use pure energy directly from space, and the worksuits and our other devices can access it from various scenarios too. However, we cannot use pure energy very efficiently in all of those cases and the losses that occur probably wind up in The Error Universe.

“However, the ancient Keepers apparently figured out how to harness pure energy with perfect efficiency to keep this ship in existence in perpetuity. They never documented their process anywhere though, maybe because they were afraid of all the power that knowledge would provide.

“For all of these reasons and more, we Keepers must always have good individuals whom we trust running the Monument and watching over it, because it might always be around the Omniverse. As you can probably see now, the Monument is extremely powerful, maybe the most powerful single technological creation in the Omniverse.”

As Devin had spoken, my mouth had dropped open and my hands had begun shaking at my sides. “You’ve complained before about species creating very dangerous technologies, and here you’ve gone and done the same—and then you expect us to keep that going and keep it out of even more dangerous hands—talk about pressure!” I finished, in a truly flabbergasted voice now. I felt red-hot color filling my face. “We only barely understand this ship compared to you crowd.”

“You don’t need to know how a machine works in order to use it,” Devin said. “But knowing how it works would help you use it more efficiently—if someday you had to do it all on your own, without the Keepers. We’re confident that you and your crew will learn how the Monument works, inside and out, as much as anyone can, including the Keepers, just as you and your crew have learned with your own ship. Your technological acuity is at an extremely high level. And familiarity, close contact—that eventually breeds understanding. It is ultimately the way of the Omniverse.”

*

When I stepped onto the forward bridge again a little later, my head was spinning with the information Devin had finally shared with me, information a part of me wished I had been given sooner. But, better late than never, and all that….

Gary was standing on the right side of the bridge now, behind Shirley. He looked at me and jerked a thumb toward the back of the bridge. “Devin said before that we can handle flying to Rintu on our own. I think we can too. Do you, Captain?”

“Of course,” I said, and I meant it. I was smiling as I took my spot at the front of the bridge. My smile widened at Gary on my right, and there was a familiar, sharp twinkle in his eyes, as if he wanted to kiss me. It would have to wait till later….

“I’m finishing entering the numbers of the omnivelocity profile to Rintu,” Chen said now. “The computer likes the path I’ve chosen.” Chen’s voice had sounded a little shaky, but when I turned my head toward behind me and flashed a grin at him, he smiled back at me—with his normal, open Chen smile, the one that reached his eyes.

Near him, Babs was busy typing something at her controls, and there was a small smile on her face too. On my right, a serious-faced Shirley was sliding a lever to help test something in one of the room-engines; she was coordinating the test with Steve. In the dining room earlier, Babs told me the tension between Shirley and Steve had calmed down, and they’d begun spending more time together. Babs also told me that Geena had given up on anything romantic happening with Jim, and it hadn’t been that difficult for her to do so when she was so busy—and happy—with her new duties.

There seemed to be so many opportunities out in the Omniverse now, so many new things for everyone to explore, but there were also so many new dangers.

I thought of Babs and Kostas again and how people in space normally didn’t tend to forge tight bonds; life out here was just too precarious. Even the bond Gary and I now had, Chen and May, the one Shirley and Steve were developing—they were all probably even more at risk now.

However, it seems you can’t change the nature of what an animal has been molded to be by living; people will naturally form bonds with each other. And I would have to make sure that my crew remembered that we would have much more than our personal relationships to be aware of in future on this city-ship. Each of us needed to be able to survive on our own just in case we found ourselves alone someday—alone whether through the loss of a partner, or alone in understanding something others could not, or by being physically stranded alone in another dimension.

More chaos had been thrown into the mix of me and my crew, but, as we steered the Monument through the vastness of the Omniverse, I couldn’t help smiling a little at the opportunities for discovery all the chaos out there might create.

About F. P. Adriani

I have an academic background in engineering and science, and a degree in space science in part. For years I worked as a scientific copy editor for a nonfiction publishing house, but now I spend my days—and too many late nights—trying to solve fictional “what if” problems. I’ve written 19 novels and many shorter works; I’ve been writing for over 25 years.

The Backflow books are part of my Diamond Universe. Other works in that universe are: Hellscape, Endland, Destinations and Captain’s Choice, and Diamond On Your Radar.