Keystones: Tau Prime (26 page)

Jamie dragged Calm out of the room, taking the feeling of a tropical breeze with them.

“Tell me more about this route to Earth,” Andrei said to Cay.

The boy casually rolled his shoulders. “What do you want me to say? It’s the way back.”

“But how did you decrypt it? How did you put it on our systems?”

“It’s what I do. You must have heard of me.” A smile crossed his lips. “I’m the criminal Keystone.”

Cay was supposed to be able to open locks and penetrate any encryption, manipulating computers at will. In an age when every aspect of life was recorded digitally, his trial had prompted mass panic

“We’re all Keystones here,” replied Andrei.

Cay didn’t say anything, but his eyes scanned the room. “All? How?”

“The Sweep changed everyone here,” Deklan said, breaking into the conversation and feeling better than he had since before reaching Tau Prime. “Keystones aren’t rare anymore. There are hundreds of millions of us, and we’re all different.”

“Not entirely,” said Andrei. “Mikhail and Vladimir have the same ability.”

Deklan was sure that fact was important, even if he wasn’t sure why it was important. “What’s their ability?” he asked.

“They both stretch like rubber.”

A man who hadn’t been introduced to Deklan raised a hand and waved it. The fingers and palm ballooned out to massive proportions in mid-gesture. It seemed like a fun ability to have, albeit a useless one.

“Is anyone here not a Keystone?” inquired Cay.

The bridge was quiet as people exchanged glances, except for those who were busy ensuring that the ship avoided more lashes from the wormhole’s walls.

“So you’re telling me,” continued Cay, “that there are more Keystones on this ship than there were in all as a total before I went to jail?”

“Yes,” said Deklan.

“What else can everyone do?”

The conversation was interrupted by a loud yell. “Incoming.”

The images that Cay had placed on the main screen were swept away, and a tidal wave of uneven purple energy was shown crashing toward them.

Captain Andrei’s response was less relaxed than before. “Evade it,” he ordered.

As Cay held up a hand, Deklan could feel the ship lurch, even in the zero-gravity environment.

“Controls have gone dead!”

“No, they haven’t. I’ve taken over.” Cay sounded distracted, and the images on the screen canted to new angles as the ship dove through a break in the energy. Earlier the craft’s movement had been stodgy, slow and reliable but predictable. Now the ship was more like a hummingbird in flight, fast and agile. The entire character of the ship felt different.

“Are you doing this?” Deklan asked Cay.

“Yes.” His head was back and his eyes unfocused.

Maelstroms of energy rose around the ship in towering pillars through which Cay wove. The bridge was silent. Every crew member had his eyes riveted on either the screens or the boy.

“Where did you come from?” blurted Deklan in what seemed a non sequitur. Even he hadn’t anticipated the question.

“I don’t know,” Cay replied. “I think I’ve been wandering inside the wormholes since Calm and I saw the artifact.”

“Stop distracting him,” ordered Captain Andrei.

Cay’s sudden appearance on the ship raised many questions for Deklan. He hadn’t asked Calm about him since they’d first met Cay while crashing through the wall of the wormhole, but now he yearned for answers. How was it possible that Cay had been inside a wormhole? How was any of what he did possible? Calm’s restoration by the encounter with Cay gave Deklan every reason to hope that he also could undergo a similarly restorative healing.

Just then Captain Andrei announced, “All non-essential personnel are to leave the bridge.” Deklan wasn’t sure where he ranked on that scale, but the Captain solved the mystery for him. “That includes you, Mr. Tobin. Konstantin, take him to the medical bay and then to his quarters.”

The mountainous Konstantin swiveled to make eye contact with Deklan. “We go.” The guttural utterance made Deklan feel as though he was about to be shot in an alleyway.

He followed the big man out of the bridge and into the corridor. Unlike the bridge, which was situated at the rear of the ship, the medical bay was located close to the entrance airlock. Deklan idly wondered whether its being so positioned was for the purpose of shaving off seconds of transit time for any injured crewmen. It was something that the documentaries he’d watched had never addressed.

In the medical bay six massive rejuvenation tanks squatted in a row against the far wall. Five of them were empty, and their glass panels dusty. The sixth tank was different. It was lit from the bottom, and its surfaces were polished. Calm floated there in the tank’s translucent fluid. His hair drifted over his head in a dark cloud, and his eyes were shut above the mask that covered his mouth. A tube ran from the mask to the surface of the tank. Deklan knew from experience how uncomfortable it was to have those tubes inserted and also how uncomfortable it was to have them extracted. A glob of thicker goo covered the site of Calm’s wound.

Jamie hovered in front of the tank, her hair a radiant blond fringe around her face, as her fingers adjusted the controls. She glanced up at the sound of Deklan’s entrance. “This equipment is adequate, but only barely. Using this tech we have to do a targeted repair.” She pointed at Calm’s torso. “It’s a bit like working in the Dark Ages.”

The doctor standing next to Jamie visibly bristled at the last few words.

Noticing her colleague’s reaction, Jamie said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m just used to having different options.”

The doctor didn’t lose all of his irritation but appeared mollified.

“How is Calm?” Deklan asked Jamie.

“Stable. He should be fine in a week or less.”

Deklan didn’t want to wait a week to speak to Calm. He wanted to know more about who Cay was and what artifact he’d been talking about. “A week?” he said. “I’m only going to have you to talk to for a week?”

Jamie reached back and swatted him playfully.

“Konstantin is waiting in the hallway to show us to our quarters,” remarked Deklan.

“The hallway?”

“I think he’s uncomfortable with hospitals.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Jamie’s mouth. “Well, we wouldn’t want to make him uncomfortable. Let’s hope that our rooms are close together.”

“I think we’re sharing a room.”

“How convenient,” she murmured.

Day 43

Deklan rolled in his bed. He was alone. That happened often since Jamie wasn’t one for staying put. Deklan suspected that teleporting made it easy for her to move to her own bed with minimal effort. If there was one gift that made laziness convenient, it was teleporting.

He clasped the straps that held him in place for zero-gravity sleep. This ship didn’t have a gravity wheel, so he’d been weightless for most of three weeks now. Three weeks of worrying that the daily exercises and Sanctuarian resistance suits wouldn’t be enough to keep him in shape. As it was, he was only allotted eight hours a day in one of the suits, but even so he was surprised by how little atrophy he had experienced.

They were supposed to get back to the Terra Rings today, Deklan remembered. An aura of excitement had filled the ship as they drew closer. All of the Sanctuarians had grown up hiding from a xenophobic society that had enforced isolation on them. They had been completely cut off from any news about Earth and the inner solar system. It was like watching people come to the end of a pilgrimage. He, Jamie, Calm, and Cay had been peppered with question by curious Sanctuarians who wanted to know about the smallest nuances of life in their various homes.

Cay had been best able to avoid these questions by his posting on the bridge, where his Keystone ability let him squeeze the best performance possible from the ship. Jamie had been asked for help with any number of spurious medical problems, which had been primarily excuses to engage her in conversation. Deklan, meanwhile, had put his legal skills to good use. The Sanctuarians were going to declare themselves to be intergalactic refugees. There was no clear precedent for their situation, but Deklan was confident of their petition’s reception. Tau Prime had long been a subject of fascination on the Terra Rings. No one there was going to turn away a relatively small group of people escaping from such bizarre circumstances. The issue could be a political problem or success depending on how it was handled, but it was minor compared to the issue of evacuating Earth.

Deklan found it amazing how while exploring the universe things kept coming back to his law degree. He also found it amazing that the refugees from Tau Prime didn’t drink coffee. A bacterial infection had wiped out their entire crop over fifty years earlier, and some mornings he craved a cup. They did have a replacement concoction that tasted like a mixture of dirt and roots, but he hadn’t been that desperate. Today he was going to have his first cup of coffee since
Serenity
had exploded. He kept thinking about the coffee and avoiding the larger issue in front of him: he was scared of returning to the Terra Rings; he was scared of having nothing to do; he was scared of getting back to his normal life. He unfastened the straps that would let him out of bed.

The bunks above his were empty. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Calm had claimed that his stomach itched where he’d been injured and that he couldn’t sleep. Deklan had heard him toss and turn up there. The sounds of a man struggling with nightmares left Deklan sure that Calm was tormented by the fact of the injury’s having occurred. How could Calm not be? His illusion of invulnerability had been shaken.

The door opened, and Jamie appeared in the center of the room. She never walked or glided anymore. If she were moving, she was teleporting. Deklan didn’t blame her. If he woke up and could teleport, he’d probably do the same. In her case, though, the inclination was more complicated. Jamie had thought she was unaffected by The Sweep, only to find out weeks later that she had an extraordinary array of Keystone abilities. The discovery must have been overwhelming. She didn’t talk about it and avoided the subject when Deklan brought it up, but he guessed that she was frightened by the possibility of becoming like Slate or someone she wasn’t. Deklan hardly blamed her. On Tau Prime her hair had turned red, and her accent had shifted. If their positions were reversed, however, he would make it a priority to learn how to control those powers.

Jamie grabbed Deklan and pulled him into a deep kiss. “We’re going to be back home in less than an hour!” The statement was jubilant.

Deklan had thought that he would never reach home again. The idea of returning to the Terra Rings was light at the end of a dark tunnel. Once there he could let someone else worry about mapping the wormhole network, let someone else worry about the alien ship that had attacked them, let someone else worry about everything. “Yeah, home.” Deklan forced a smile with all of the skill learned from dozens of movie sets. “Where things will be nice and simple.”

“Simple?” said Jamie. “I still have to meet your mother.”

Deklan stifled a groan. That was another homecoming event that he’d been avoiding thinking about. If he was lucky, his mother would wait half an hour before asking when they were going to have children. He rubbed his eye and dragged his palm up and down his cheek. “Yeah, that’ll be lots of fun.”

Jamie lightly smacked him across the shoulder. “Coward.” She stuck her tongue out at him.

He liked playful Jamie entire worlds more than serious Slate. “Keep the focus on Twix bars,” he said, “and everything will be okay.”

“Get dressed,” replied Jamie. “I want to be with the others on the bridge when we get there.”

Captain Andrei had lifted the ban of non-essential personnel on the bridge after Deklan provided legal aid, Calm promised financial assistance, and Jamie worked as a doctor. Cay had never been banned. As the most competent pilot anywhere, he was welcome in every corner of the ship.

Deklan glanced at his pants and scratched his chin. “We could stay here and celebrate,” he suggested.

Jamie rummaged through a drawer and threw a shirt at him. “Wear this.” She grabbed the rest of the drawer’s contents and stuffed them into a bag. “We’re not staying aboard any longer than we have to. I want to see my apartment again.”

There was a lot that she wasn’t saying in that last comment. She wanted to know that Jamie Beal’s memories of her apartment were
real
memories. She wanted proof that this personality wasn’t a construct of her Keystone abilities. She wanted to know who she was.

Deklan pulled on the shirt and raked his fingers through tousled hair. “Ready,” he announced.

Jamie pointed at his feet. “What about some shoes?”

A blurry line between suggestions and commands characterized her requests, but now was not the time to fuss over the distinction. Deklan caught a pair of shoes in time to stop them from bouncing off his chest. “Okay,” said Jamie. “Let’s go to the bridge.”

Deklan’s shirt itched and felt too small. It had been scavenged from clothes donated by refugees from Tau Prime, clothes that someone had brought along during the rushed exodus but then decided he didn’t want to keep.

“Stop fidgeting,” Jamie said, but her smile moderated the reprimand.

They stood in the last row of the bridge with their backs pressed against the back wall. The room was filled with people, all of whom had their eyes locked on the forward screen. It showed the distant end of the wormhole drawing closer with every passing second. This was the last hurdle before the Terra Rings. After a trip filled with complications Deklan was waiting for something to go wrong, something unexpected to derail their plans. Each day without an emergency left him feeling slightly uneasy, like a hidden trap lurking over his head, but nothing had gone awry.

The mouth of the wormhole was now close enough that the blackness of space was visible through the ring of swirling purple energy. Jamie’s hand found Deklan’s and squeezed once, conveying her excitement.

When the ship crested through the mouth of the wormhole and broke into normal space, a chorus of spontaneous cheers erupted in the room. Deklan contented himself with a small smile. They weren’t home yet.