Law's End (14 page)
Authors: Glenn Douglass
Tags: #adventure, #travel, #dog, #future, #space, #rescue, #supercluster
Quickly regaining his footing Kassad considered
his options. He didn't want to hurt the person, who was clearly
confused and frightened as to what was happening to them. More
importantly Kassad didn't want to get injured himself attempting to
rescue them.
Self consciously looking around to make sure no
one was around to see what was about to happen Kassad unholstered
his pistol. Habitually checking the charge level on the weapon
Kassad apologized to the stranger embarrassedly. Taking calm aim on
the thrashing figure Kassad took a deep breath and squeezed the
weapon in his hand evenly, letting the discharge surprise him. The
bright electrical bolt leapt from weapon to target with such speed
it registered only as an afterimage in Kassad's mind.
Arriving back at the survivor's camp at the
same time as Greene, Kassad announced, "I'll take this one." He
patted the individual's flank in a friendly manner. "He is going to
need extra sedative." and declined to elaborate an explanation to
Greene's inquiring confused expression.
Chapter 10: "Rescued"
"Exposure to Lawless Space has negative
effects on terrestrial nervous tissue particularly with respect to
neurotransmitter production and function. Degradation of neural
activity occurs unevenly, with some areas being affected sooner and
more severely than others. The reasons for this are not fully
understood, and may be related to an as yet unobserved immune
system response or failure specific to the Law's End
phenomena."
-Excerpt from "Conclusions, Biochemical
Analysis of Law's End Exposure"
then she was. She knew that overwhelming relief at having gotten
everyone onboard the Sabha and loaded into the medical pods was
clouding her judgment. That relief overshadowed the fact that she
had done most of the work. After Kassad had loaded his mysterious
problem passenger he'd disappeared into Sabha's equipment spaces
leaving Greene to finish the actual rescue work alone.
In fact the last two survivors had to be
transported in the dark, a darkness which had fallen rapidly on
Alone. Greene was grateful that she'd mentally established a path
to move the survivors from their camp to the Sabha. By the time
darkness had completely fallen she'd been just familiar enough with
it to avoid getting lost in the maze-like boulder field that
surrounded them.
Greene's own forward thinking was not an excuse
for Kassad's disappearance. He was the one who had been contracted
to retrieve the crew of the expedition. While Greene was willing
and eager to help she was principally there as an expert advisor,
and couldn't help but feel as though she'd been taken advantage of.
In addition to the annoyance of this lack of work, which had made
the entire process take so much longer than it should have, Greene
now couldn't find Kassad anywhere on the Sabha.
After returning her pressure helmet to its case
in her stateroom, and getting a whiff of its exterior, Greene
decided the entire pressure suit was in desperate need of a
cleaning cycle. Even modern automated hygiene regulating and self
cleaning suits benefited from taking a breather. After more than a
week inside the pressure suit the relief she felt at removing it
was more psychological than physical as her skin complained that
the surrounding air was uncomfortably cold.
Fishing out her old traveling pressure suit
Greene was struck by its immediate familiarity even after all these
years. She'd hand decorated it in what more than one crew person on
the ships she and her father had traveled on had called 'true
spacer art' without any sarcasm that Greene could detect. Cartoon
flowers and butterflies cascaded down from the helmet in a swirl of
bright pastels that in knee-jerk-reaction seemed overly girly.
In more recent years Greene had attributed any
girliness in her personality to her father's influences. Her father
had a place for everything and everything in its place and this had
included his daughter. He'd always wanted her to be the picture
perfect little girl in homage to ancient and quaint notions of
gender roles that fit so well with the corporate image.
Now the overly feminine and decidedly childish
run of rendered flowers and butterflies she held in her hand were
stripped of their color. Rendered in flat shades of grey the design
seemed sadly devoid of the expression of personality she'd
painstakingly poured into it. It felt very much as a personal loss.
This was something she'd done as an expression of self, and not
because she'd been compelled to by her father or as a product of
her own misguided efforts to please him.
The admission that not everything childish or
feminine about her was the result of her father imposing on her was
a modest revelation that she pondered as she donned the suit. Back
in its day it had been one of the finest models available, able to
adjust to fit any form, it had been designed to be worn for a
lifetime. She'd taken it along simply for emergency backup,
swapping out the batteries and self regenerating cartridges as a
matter of course even though she'd never expected to wear it
again.
Everything still fit as advertised. Unlike the
new cutting edge suit this required no stretching to force a fit.
It was a home coming that suggested that perhaps she'd been too
eager to distance herself from everything that connected her to her
past. In her desire to fit the image she had so desired to project
it may have been that she had denied the expression of some aspect
of herself.
Lovingly replacing the helmet in its case
Greene longed to see it again in glorious color and paused at the
entrance to her stateroom looking back. So many decisions had piled
up over the years between that creative outburst and where she was
now. Could it really be so easy to recapture that lost part of her
simply by acknowledging that she was more than the words and forms
she defined herself by?
Outside Greene's stateroom she found Canis
doffing his own pressure suit in his dedicated cubby in the lounge
area. With a kicking of feet and wiggling of withers and flank
Canis extracted himself from the single piece garment. In a move
that suggested much repetition of the procedure Canis activated a
lever with one paw that caused the now empty suit to automatically
perform the same sort of post use maintenance that all pressure
suits required.
For a moment Greene stood in admiration of
Canis. She couldn't help but be impressed by the ease at which the
animal adapted to all the strangeness. The police dog turned pirate
didn't even recognize the shift in allegiance. Then again the
animal had to deal with the being a non-technological species
living in a world built out of technology every day of its life.
More than anything else it was the casual ease at which Canis fit
into his world with his people that she found more than worthy of
respect, and perhaps worthy of emulation.
Noticing her approving gaze Canis gave Greene
an open mouthed dog smile and a friendly bark. Greene reflexively
smiled back and Canis responded by stretching out his front feet
and head down with his back arching high behind. The stretching
ended with Canis rolling on his side with one paw batting playfully
for her to join him on the floor.
Thought of tussling with the animal elicited a
genuine smile to brake across Greene's face and she replied, "Maybe
later. Right now do you know where Kassad is?" And immediate Greene
felt embarrassment at having asked the deceptively human animal any
question at all.
Canis barked affirmatively and springing to his
feet bounded towards the cockpit.
"I already checked the cockpit." Greene
protested, but Canis barked insistently and Greene relented to
follow the animal with a sigh.
Walking inside the ship with its original
configuration, as Greene was introduced to it rather than how she
had become accustomed, was a bit disorienting. Of course that she
was also exhausted from hauling survivors from their camp to the
Sabha for hours might have something to do with her disorientation.
Then there was the unavoidable but unpleasant to dwell on fact that
her mind was breaking down.
As Greene followed Canis up the ladder to the
cockpit she could hear definite sounds that were not something a
dog would make. Sounds of tools and the thud of something heavy
came from the cockpit. Interlaced through the working noises was a
deep harsh breathing punctuated by mutterings uttered with the
vehemence of darkest profanity.
Peaking cautiously into the cockpit Greene saw
it every bit as empty as before and called out, "Kassad?" There was
no immediate response except that Canis came over to paw nervously
at her foot.
It was only when Greene stepped fully into the
cockpit that she saw what her casual glance had missed before. A
large deck mounted access plate had been removed to reveal an
equipment space for the Sabha's control systems below. Inside the
small space there were tools scattered about and several components
had been dismantled. As Greene looked on in horror Kassad popped
up, face red and puffed out in rage, slicing through a thick cable
with a viciously curved knife.
Lunging towards the knife wielding Kassad
Greene slapped him with enough force to knock him sideways. Taking
advantage of the effectiveness of the stunning blow she tore the
knife from his hand and sent it flying with a clatter down the
ladder well. Grabbing the still stunned Kassad by his flight jacket
she gave him a hard shaking.
Greene shouted demanding, "What are you doing?
We have to get out of here. Have you gone mad?" Still recovering
from the slap that had left a clear hand print shaped discoloration
on his face Kassad simply blinked and stared in shock until Greene
on the verge of tears demanded once again, "What are you
doing?"
After a minute a sheepish Kassad replied,
"Rewiring the autopilot to take inputs from those monitoring
devices you installed."
Dubious and angry Greene rejected the
explanation. "With a knife?"
With more self assurance and a growing
annoyance Kassad explained, "Well yes. It would be a simple tweak
ordinarily except that the wires are all color coded, and with
color vision being gone, I'm having to reroute them through
manually configured automatically fusing connectors, and…" Kassad
trailed off then abruptly came to an angry revelation that made him
shout, "Hey, you hit me!"
Realizing that she may have overreacted Greene
replied, "It was just a slap."
"Why would you hit me?" Pointing indignantly to
the cockpits ladder well Kassad added, "And throwing knives around
like that. You could really hurt someone."
"I'm sorry. I thought you went crazy and were
tearing apart the ship." Greene tried to explain then gave up and
changed the topic. "What's wrong with the autopilot anyway?"
"You mean aside from being an antiquated
military specification set up not friendly to modest tinkering?"
Kassad asked rhetorically grimacing severely at the mess he'd had
to make in order to implement the fairly minor change. "It's not
designed to operate the jump drive, and we need to get the jump
drive online and transit the moment we're clear of Law's End."
It made more sense than the sabotage Greene had
originally suspected, but not much more. "Why? The Armhamon is
going to be there to board us anyway. You can't run from a
Lawship."
With more than a little skepticism Kassad
noted, "If they're really a Lawship."
Rolling her eyes in disgust Greene replied,
"Now you're being stupidly paranoid."
With a bitter chuckle Kassad explained his
perspective, "Oh really? They certainly aren't just hanging out at
the edge of Law's End for the scenery. If they wanted to rescue
these people then why didn't they? It wouldn't be too hard to rig a
shuttle with reaction drives to fly in and bring the crew out. I'd
almost believe they were there to stop others from making the
attempt except you saw for yourself how impossible making an
interception in deep space is." Kassad looked into Greene's look of
disbelief and looked away sighing. "So you tell me, if they're not
there to perform a rescue or stop others from trying, then why are
they out there? The only thing they can do is stop anyone from
coming back out."
"That's insane." Greene protested, although the
cold logic of it stabbed deeply from the cynical mistrusting part
of her mind.
Resigned to Greene's disbelief Kassad grumbled,
"Ordinarily I wouldn't have too much problem slipping past a ship
like that by swapping drive systems, or backing out the other side
of the system. In this case they had to have gotten a solid scan of
the reaction drives on the way in and we'll show up like a signal
flare coming out, and spending more time than absolutely necessary
in Lawless space is not an option we want to entertain."
his options. He didn't want to hurt the person, who was clearly
confused and frightened as to what was happening to them. More
importantly Kassad didn't want to get injured himself attempting to
rescue them.
Self consciously looking around to make sure no
one was around to see what was about to happen Kassad unholstered
his pistol. Habitually checking the charge level on the weapon
Kassad apologized to the stranger embarrassedly. Taking calm aim on
the thrashing figure Kassad took a deep breath and squeezed the
weapon in his hand evenly, letting the discharge surprise him. The
bright electrical bolt leapt from weapon to target with such speed
it registered only as an afterimage in Kassad's mind.
Arriving back at the survivor's camp at the
same time as Greene, Kassad announced, "I'll take this one." He
patted the individual's flank in a friendly manner. "He is going to
need extra sedative." and declined to elaborate an explanation to
Greene's inquiring confused expression.
Chapter 10: "Rescued"
"Exposure to Lawless Space has negative
effects on terrestrial nervous tissue particularly with respect to
neurotransmitter production and function. Degradation of neural
activity occurs unevenly, with some areas being affected sooner and
more severely than others. The reasons for this are not fully
understood, and may be related to an as yet unobserved immune
system response or failure specific to the Law's End
phenomena."
-Excerpt from "Conclusions, Biochemical
Analysis of Law's End Exposure"
then she was. She knew that overwhelming relief at having gotten
everyone onboard the Sabha and loaded into the medical pods was
clouding her judgment. That relief overshadowed the fact that she
had done most of the work. After Kassad had loaded his mysterious
problem passenger he'd disappeared into Sabha's equipment spaces
leaving Greene to finish the actual rescue work alone.
In fact the last two survivors had to be
transported in the dark, a darkness which had fallen rapidly on
Alone. Greene was grateful that she'd mentally established a path
to move the survivors from their camp to the Sabha. By the time
darkness had completely fallen she'd been just familiar enough with
it to avoid getting lost in the maze-like boulder field that
surrounded them.
Greene's own forward thinking was not an excuse
for Kassad's disappearance. He was the one who had been contracted
to retrieve the crew of the expedition. While Greene was willing
and eager to help she was principally there as an expert advisor,
and couldn't help but feel as though she'd been taken advantage of.
In addition to the annoyance of this lack of work, which had made
the entire process take so much longer than it should have, Greene
now couldn't find Kassad anywhere on the Sabha.
After returning her pressure helmet to its case
in her stateroom, and getting a whiff of its exterior, Greene
decided the entire pressure suit was in desperate need of a
cleaning cycle. Even modern automated hygiene regulating and self
cleaning suits benefited from taking a breather. After more than a
week inside the pressure suit the relief she felt at removing it
was more psychological than physical as her skin complained that
the surrounding air was uncomfortably cold.
Fishing out her old traveling pressure suit
Greene was struck by its immediate familiarity even after all these
years. She'd hand decorated it in what more than one crew person on
the ships she and her father had traveled on had called 'true
spacer art' without any sarcasm that Greene could detect. Cartoon
flowers and butterflies cascaded down from the helmet in a swirl of
bright pastels that in knee-jerk-reaction seemed overly girly.
In more recent years Greene had attributed any
girliness in her personality to her father's influences. Her father
had a place for everything and everything in its place and this had
included his daughter. He'd always wanted her to be the picture
perfect little girl in homage to ancient and quaint notions of
gender roles that fit so well with the corporate image.
Now the overly feminine and decidedly childish
run of rendered flowers and butterflies she held in her hand were
stripped of their color. Rendered in flat shades of grey the design
seemed sadly devoid of the expression of personality she'd
painstakingly poured into it. It felt very much as a personal loss.
This was something she'd done as an expression of self, and not
because she'd been compelled to by her father or as a product of
her own misguided efforts to please him.
The admission that not everything childish or
feminine about her was the result of her father imposing on her was
a modest revelation that she pondered as she donned the suit. Back
in its day it had been one of the finest models available, able to
adjust to fit any form, it had been designed to be worn for a
lifetime. She'd taken it along simply for emergency backup,
swapping out the batteries and self regenerating cartridges as a
matter of course even though she'd never expected to wear it
again.
Everything still fit as advertised. Unlike the
new cutting edge suit this required no stretching to force a fit.
It was a home coming that suggested that perhaps she'd been too
eager to distance herself from everything that connected her to her
past. In her desire to fit the image she had so desired to project
it may have been that she had denied the expression of some aspect
of herself.
Lovingly replacing the helmet in its case
Greene longed to see it again in glorious color and paused at the
entrance to her stateroom looking back. So many decisions had piled
up over the years between that creative outburst and where she was
now. Could it really be so easy to recapture that lost part of her
simply by acknowledging that she was more than the words and forms
she defined herself by?
Outside Greene's stateroom she found Canis
doffing his own pressure suit in his dedicated cubby in the lounge
area. With a kicking of feet and wiggling of withers and flank
Canis extracted himself from the single piece garment. In a move
that suggested much repetition of the procedure Canis activated a
lever with one paw that caused the now empty suit to automatically
perform the same sort of post use maintenance that all pressure
suits required.
For a moment Greene stood in admiration of
Canis. She couldn't help but be impressed by the ease at which the
animal adapted to all the strangeness. The police dog turned pirate
didn't even recognize the shift in allegiance. Then again the
animal had to deal with the being a non-technological species
living in a world built out of technology every day of its life.
More than anything else it was the casual ease at which Canis fit
into his world with his people that she found more than worthy of
respect, and perhaps worthy of emulation.
Noticing her approving gaze Canis gave Greene
an open mouthed dog smile and a friendly bark. Greene reflexively
smiled back and Canis responded by stretching out his front feet
and head down with his back arching high behind. The stretching
ended with Canis rolling on his side with one paw batting playfully
for her to join him on the floor.
Thought of tussling with the animal elicited a
genuine smile to brake across Greene's face and she replied, "Maybe
later. Right now do you know where Kassad is?" And immediate Greene
felt embarrassment at having asked the deceptively human animal any
question at all.
Canis barked affirmatively and springing to his
feet bounded towards the cockpit.
"I already checked the cockpit." Greene
protested, but Canis barked insistently and Greene relented to
follow the animal with a sigh.
Walking inside the ship with its original
configuration, as Greene was introduced to it rather than how she
had become accustomed, was a bit disorienting. Of course that she
was also exhausted from hauling survivors from their camp to the
Sabha for hours might have something to do with her disorientation.
Then there was the unavoidable but unpleasant to dwell on fact that
her mind was breaking down.
As Greene followed Canis up the ladder to the
cockpit she could hear definite sounds that were not something a
dog would make. Sounds of tools and the thud of something heavy
came from the cockpit. Interlaced through the working noises was a
deep harsh breathing punctuated by mutterings uttered with the
vehemence of darkest profanity.
Peaking cautiously into the cockpit Greene saw
it every bit as empty as before and called out, "Kassad?" There was
no immediate response except that Canis came over to paw nervously
at her foot.
It was only when Greene stepped fully into the
cockpit that she saw what her casual glance had missed before. A
large deck mounted access plate had been removed to reveal an
equipment space for the Sabha's control systems below. Inside the
small space there were tools scattered about and several components
had been dismantled. As Greene looked on in horror Kassad popped
up, face red and puffed out in rage, slicing through a thick cable
with a viciously curved knife.
Lunging towards the knife wielding Kassad
Greene slapped him with enough force to knock him sideways. Taking
advantage of the effectiveness of the stunning blow she tore the
knife from his hand and sent it flying with a clatter down the
ladder well. Grabbing the still stunned Kassad by his flight jacket
she gave him a hard shaking.
Greene shouted demanding, "What are you doing?
We have to get out of here. Have you gone mad?" Still recovering
from the slap that had left a clear hand print shaped discoloration
on his face Kassad simply blinked and stared in shock until Greene
on the verge of tears demanded once again, "What are you
doing?"
After a minute a sheepish Kassad replied,
"Rewiring the autopilot to take inputs from those monitoring
devices you installed."
Dubious and angry Greene rejected the
explanation. "With a knife?"
With more self assurance and a growing
annoyance Kassad explained, "Well yes. It would be a simple tweak
ordinarily except that the wires are all color coded, and with
color vision being gone, I'm having to reroute them through
manually configured automatically fusing connectors, and…" Kassad
trailed off then abruptly came to an angry revelation that made him
shout, "Hey, you hit me!"
Realizing that she may have overreacted Greene
replied, "It was just a slap."
"Why would you hit me?" Pointing indignantly to
the cockpits ladder well Kassad added, "And throwing knives around
like that. You could really hurt someone."
"I'm sorry. I thought you went crazy and were
tearing apart the ship." Greene tried to explain then gave up and
changed the topic. "What's wrong with the autopilot anyway?"
"You mean aside from being an antiquated
military specification set up not friendly to modest tinkering?"
Kassad asked rhetorically grimacing severely at the mess he'd had
to make in order to implement the fairly minor change. "It's not
designed to operate the jump drive, and we need to get the jump
drive online and transit the moment we're clear of Law's End."
It made more sense than the sabotage Greene had
originally suspected, but not much more. "Why? The Armhamon is
going to be there to board us anyway. You can't run from a
Lawship."
With more than a little skepticism Kassad
noted, "If they're really a Lawship."
Rolling her eyes in disgust Greene replied,
"Now you're being stupidly paranoid."
With a bitter chuckle Kassad explained his
perspective, "Oh really? They certainly aren't just hanging out at
the edge of Law's End for the scenery. If they wanted to rescue
these people then why didn't they? It wouldn't be too hard to rig a
shuttle with reaction drives to fly in and bring the crew out. I'd
almost believe they were there to stop others from making the
attempt except you saw for yourself how impossible making an
interception in deep space is." Kassad looked into Greene's look of
disbelief and looked away sighing. "So you tell me, if they're not
there to perform a rescue or stop others from trying, then why are
they out there? The only thing they can do is stop anyone from
coming back out."
"That's insane." Greene protested, although the
cold logic of it stabbed deeply from the cynical mistrusting part
of her mind.
Resigned to Greene's disbelief Kassad grumbled,
"Ordinarily I wouldn't have too much problem slipping past a ship
like that by swapping drive systems, or backing out the other side
of the system. In this case they had to have gotten a solid scan of
the reaction drives on the way in and we'll show up like a signal
flare coming out, and spending more time than absolutely necessary
in Lawless space is not an option we want to entertain."
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