Homeworld
(Starspeak)
Myself, Tasser, Nai, Jordan, and Sid made five. Deg, Nemuleki, Corphica, Wurshken, Lorel, and Peudra made eleven. Halax and Tox made for unlucky thirteen.
The two of them taking up berths on my ship was really rubbing me the wrong way. The fact that having them along made things objectively easier wasn’t helping.
But it was what it was.
Nerin staying behind to do medical checkups with Dyn only freed up one berth, but as much as I’d come to like having her around, the abductees on Hashtin’s moons would benefit more from her presence than us.
It left me ten slots to fill. It was true that we could take more than eight munchkins, but as things stood, I was seriously considering taking fewer than that.
But…Sid had asked Deg be brought along. The two of them were more involved in overseeing the younger abductees than me. So if we were bringing both, why not fill the remaining ten slots with younger kids?
Seeing an alien planet was a once in a lifetime experience, completely different from visiting moons and planetary colonies that were still decades away from being terraformed.
I wanted to drag some of the Puppies with us. Aarti was busy being on loan to Ken’s group out in C3, and with her gone, Madeline was missing her best friend. Ben was the only Puppy I knew wasn’t interested in going, because he was a little too invaluable on the Siegfried working with Shinshay on technical projects.
Nai would probably want Donnie and Johnny to come along too. She’d been training them weekly (at least) for the last two years, and I didn’t think she’d want to give them a break.
If those three Puppies came along, we’d only have seven berths for munchkins. And one of them would even have to bunk with an alien or one of us old folks.
Deg and Sid had put together a list of munchkins in order of who we should take. It sported surprisingly robust criteria. They’d looked especially at abductees who’d put in the extra work to pick up Vorak languages, asked the kids for written answers about why they wanted to go, even conducted small interviews too.
So it wouldn’t be hard to fill the Jack’s extra berths once I finalized the rest of the crew.
If I’d learned anything in the last couple days, it was a renewed respect for Serral. Making personnel decisions was not easy. Nai was right, I’d been the functioning captain of the Jack long before this. I’d just been pawning most of the formal work off on her.
I looked over my lists. Decided crew. Prospective crew. Food stocks. Maintenance supplies. Spare parts. Destinations of interest. People of interest at those destinations.
There were almost too many tradeoffs to track.
Serral had told me to limit my Coalition and alien crew, and I’d done that as much as I could justify to myself. It was greedy to bring Nemuleki, Corphica, and Wurshken, but they had too much rapport with Tasser, Nai, and me.
I knew we worked well together. I knew we worked better than some of the humans I could bring instead.
But at the end of the day, I only had twenty-two berths on board, not counting the captain’s quarters.
“[Hey. You rang?]” Madeline asked, swinging into the open doorway to my shiny new captain’s quarters.
“[Yeah,]” I said, unsure quite how to say what came next.
“[Trip planning,]” Maddie observed the documents I was poring over.
“[Yeah.]”
“[Jack launches in like…twelve hours, and you haven’t finalized the crew?]” she snorted with a smile. “[I’d say you like cutting it close, but your hair is so long I don’t think you’ve cut it since we got abducted.]”
She wore a bright smile which just made the next part worse, but she actually beat me to it.
“[Or have you?]” she asked. “[You already did finalize the crew. And I…am not going. Am I?]”
“[No,]” I admitted.
“[Because you’re taking eight munchkins,]” she nodded.
I flashed her some of the documents that I’d weighed for the decision, and she gave them a cursory glance.
“[Yeah. Oh well.]”
I blinked.
“[So what’d you call me up for?]” Madeline asked. “[You just want to get a glimpse of my dazzling mug?]”
Hah.
I’d really expected her to take it worse than this.
“[Keep flirting with me like that, and one of these days I’m going to flirt back,]” I said.
“[Oh I’m counting ‘em down.]”
“[What?]”
“[The days. Until you flirt back.]”
“[I really don’t know how to respond to that.]”
“[And that’s why I have to count them down,]” Madeline laughed. “[We’re going to miss you guys while you’re gone. All of you. Hope you know that.]”
“[Thanks,]” I said. “[And hey, I meant to say something sooner. But you did great work in that standoff with Aaron. Kept your cool, made good decisions, and you were a team player? Top notch. I mean it.]”
“[Thanks right back.]”
“[You know with me, Nai, and Johnny gone, a lot of eyes are going to be on you, right?]”
“[Donnie’s going with you too, what about him?]”
“[So he’ll be gone too, and a lot of eyes will be on you. Don’t choke up on the bat; swing for the fences.]”
“[You realize like six other people in this whole Flotilla understand your baseball metaphors right?]” she said.
“[Seven,]” I defended. “[Nai’s been inside my head enough to get them. But sucks to be you, because you’re one of the seven. Know what I’m saying?]”
“[Yeah. That I can—and should—step up. Take charge.]”
“[Talk to Serral every damn day. He knows you’re at his disposal, but remind him anyway. Talk to Fenno. Talk to Vez. Talk to Weith. Serral’s right that this Flotilla needs to be a more human operation.]”
“[It’ll start with me,]” Madeline promised. “[But let me get out of your hair. Make sure you make your launch deadline.]”
She ducked back into the hall and floated toward the ladder. I stuck my head out after her.
“[Hey, we’re going to miss you guys too, you know?]”
“[Of course!]” she smiled.
·····
“Okay, final checklists,” I said. “Food cargo.”
“Check,” Jordan said. “Fourteen crates.”
“Fuel.”
“Ninety-two percent full on hydrogen,” Tasseer confirmed. “Engine diagnostics clear too. The Jack is in fine condition.”
“Cash?”
“We’re piggy-backing off Willy’s group’s accounts from Hashtin’s moons,” Sid said. “But we’re flush. We’ve also got crates of precious metals and stable organics to trade on the ground, plus some deliveries we can be paid for as soon as we land.”
“Pearls?” I asked.
“Serral, Madeline, Shinshay, and Fenno are all squared away. Their pearls shouldn’t need maintaining for at least eight weeks,” Jordan confirmed. “If we really need to get in contact with the rest of the Flotilla, we can.”
I knew Drew also carried a pearl, but she wasn’t in this star system right now.
“So, am I missing anything?” I asked.
“Crew check,” Nai reminded me.
“Shut up. I was getting to that.”
Green lights from each of them .
Eight confirmations from the kids. God, psionic ID tags were so convenient. I didn't just get eight generic pings. Each one corresponded to a specific kid.
And that just left the five of us on the bridge. It was a bit strange that the oldest person on the ship was actually a Vorak right now. That definitely hadn’t happened before.
“Twenty-three out of twenty-three,” Nai confirmed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jordan said. “I’m sick of zero-G.”
Tasser flicked the throttles, and from the flight deck, we could see our ship lean away from the Flotilla’s much larger flagship.
Jordan sat motionless in her seat, showing no irritability, but giving off murderous vibes for our last moments of weightlessness for a while.
It took a few minutes to gently maneuver us enough miles away from the Siegfried, but as soon as we had sufficient distance, Tasser punched in our flight plan.
The Jack’s literally-one-of-a-kind computer let it do something that no other alien ship could: autopilot. Standard practice was for a mathematical trajectory to be calculated and carried out as closely as possible by living pilots making adjustments as necessary.
With the Jack, that last step wasn’t strictly necessary. Although Serral and I had shamelessly stolen a lot of Flotilla regulations from comparable Coalition military ones.
So Tasser had to sit at the helm anyway the whole trip, but he didn’t complain when he got to fire up the engines.
“
The computer activated the twin engines, and everyone suddenly had weight again.
I thought I caught Jordan actually let out .4 G’s worth of contented sigh.
Next stop: Kraknor.
·····
A decent chunk of my initial planning had assumed that Peudra would be riding in their own ship, or with the presumed military escort’s second vessel.
So as irksome as it was to have them taking up a berth, there was an undeniable advantage to having them on board. Nobody—not even the career soldiers of Tox and Halax—knew how to navigate procedure like Peudra.
The Jack slipped into orbit above Kraknor, trading radio chatter with orbital platforms and comm stations on the ground. It was standard procedure for anyone landing on a planet that wasn’t just dust and vacuum.
When we’d visited Nakrumum’s moon, we’d been stuck in queues for several hours before being directed to a pad, but with Peudra?
Six minutes in orbit before we began our descent.
Prior notice counted for a lot in Vorak bureaucracy, and Peudra was proving to be a prodigious planner. It made me a little excited to see exactly how she planned to end the war going on.
Of course other people on the ship were excited for more normal reasons.
“Wait, the sky is blue here?”
“Duh. The sky is blue. That’s not news.”
“But it’s an alien planet. Why couldn’t the sky be another color?”
The discussion flickering back and forth between the Jack’s coterie of munchkins would be easier for me to solve if they hadn’t been abducted so young. How’d you explain atomic theory to a fourteen year old?
But in some ways Peyton and Ash weren’t fourteen. They were old enough to be freshmen in high school, but they hadn’t actually finished middle school. The Flotilla did its best to educate everyone part of it, abductee and alien alike. But we weren’t experts.
Sid and Deg had expressed frustration in the past about how hard it was to answer some questions. It wasn’t even their fault either. It was one thing to lack the philosophical savvy needed to explain to one abductee how to process the grief of watching another abductee die. But more than that, we couldn’t always answer more basic technical questions. No one could know everything.
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So it made it worse when Halax came to their rescue.
“It’s because Kraknor’s atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, just like Earth’s,” he explained, materializing a glass tube filled with colored gas.
“What about oxygen?” Gemma asked.
“Well there actually doesn’t need to be too much oxygen for us to breathe,” Halax explained. “In fact, if we had an atmosphere that was half oxygen and half nitrogen, we’d die rather quickly.”
The gas in his tube split so it was two different colors on each end.
“But Nitrogen is a gas that’s…well, call it ‘lazy’. It doesn’t like to do much. Which is good for us, because that means we can breathe it in and breath it right back out without anything good or bad happening,” Halax explained, filling more of the glass tube with quasi-Nitrogen.
“We only need about twenty percent of our air to be oxygen, actually. Even thirty percent starts to do bad things to Vorak and Humans.”
“What does this have to do with the sky being blue?”
“Like I said, air on Earth and air on Kraknor are made of the same gasses: Nitrogen and Oxygen. When light travels through lots of that gas, certain colors get scattered. Blue light scatters on the atmosphere, going in every direction rather than just away from the star. So more of it reaches your eyes...I think.”
“If blue is what reaches your eyes, why isn’t everything blue?”
“The other colored light gets scattered too, just not as much; it doesn’t stop existing.”
Halax’s little atmospheric demo had to go a bit by the wayside as the conversation drifted, but the munchkins were enraptured as we completed our final descent.
“Ah, feel that?” Jordan asked me, sliding down the ladder into the lounge half of the deck.
“Feel what?”
“Gravity,” she said. Jordan didn’t tend to emote much, but she smiled so wide I almost would have said she was grinning.
Almost.
She was practically luxuriating in the sensation of weight we all had again.
“I remember when you first came onboard, you seemed to handle weightlessness pretty well,” I said.
“That’s because the novelty hadn’t worn off on me yet,” she said. “I spent the first year under A-ship gravity, then most of the second under Cammo-Caddo gravity. Zero-G was a new experience, but the fun wears off after you bump your head on the umpteenth bulkhead.”
“Well speaking of long-term gravity, we’re going to need to take a day or two to acclimate,” I said. “But even then, we’re going to be [dog-tired] running around here. Even on vacation, we’re going to have to pace ourselves.”
“Local pull is one-point-one-four, right?” she asked.
“Gives a whole new meaning to the [freshman fifteen], doesn’t it?” Johnny asked, joining the conversation.
“Don’t be gross,” Jordan said without missing a beat.
“[What?]”
“[What?]”
“[Freshman fifteen? The college thing?]”
“[Yeah.]”
“[Yeah, don’t be gross. What does that even have to do with what we were talking about?]”
“[The freshman fifteen? The fifteen pounds every freshman gains their first semester in college? I know the gravity here isn’t exactly fifteen percent, but come on—wait, what did you think I was talking about?]”
Jordan’s poker face was perfect for keeping the embarrassment off her face, but she couldn’t hide her emotional shift from my psionics.
“Ha!” I chuckled. “She thought you meant [body count].”
“[God, I hate that you can do that,]” Jordan confessed.
“[Do what?]”
Halax wandered over from where he’d left the munchkins peering out the window.
I narrowed my eyes at him. Him knowing English irked me. It was harder to keep a conversation private.
“Caleb has this psionic thing where he can tell when your emotions change,” Jordan said. “I can barely pick up on people’s vibes if I focus a ton, but he can do it at basically all times.”
Halax actually looked surprised.
“Is that not common?”
“No,” Jordan said. “You can do it?”
“I can’t detect specific emotions, but I can detect specifically when someone’s mood drastically shifts,” he said. “I didn’t understand this was not a more common psionic trick.”
“It’s not a trick at all,” I said. “It’s not rooted in any construct.”
“How do you know? It seems to me like the only way to test that theory would be to do a full dump first,” he said.
“Well I’ve got a superconstruct in this noggin, so I’m not about to put that to the test,” I said.
I almost added that Jordan did too. But her superlocator was a card we’d agreed to keep close to the chest.
“I don’t,” Halax said. “I want to test this. If I pack up all my constructs, will you hold onto them while we check?”
He asked the question directly to me. So earnestly. Almost like a puppy.
I usually liked puppies.
God, I wanted to throttle him. Or stamp my foot. Everything this stupid rak did drove me up the walls.
Instead, I kept my face even.
“Sure,” I said.
He took a few minutes to carefully condense his personal documents and choice pieces into the densest package possible. I tossed him the psionic equivalent of a basket with a rope tied to it so he could put everything in it.
“Ready? I have a lot.”
“Not that much,” I said, and gave my superconnector a kick.
He tossed the psychic basket and its contents out of his mind, and my superconstruct yanked on the rope, pulling the stuff inside my firewall.
Without even thinking, I ran a touch over Halax’s constructs, trying to see if I could read any of them, but he’d encrypted them well before packing them up.
Looking at him? He knew.
Shit. That was embarrassing. I knew it was rude to snoop, but I’d done it practically on reflex.
“Yeah, I can still feel all the same ‘vibes’,” Halax confirmed. “The sense isn’t rooted in a construct.”
“Could it be one of the rarer Adept senses?” Johnny wondered. “Some of them get weird, right? So far, only Adepts have shown any streaks of sensing emotions. That doesn’t seem like it would be coincidence.”
“Our sample size is too small to know for sure,” I said, tossing Halax his basket of tools back. “We’ll have to be on the lookout for any non-Adepts who might show the ability.”
This region of Kraknor had an interesting way of landing spaceships. They already had a system in place to haul cargo dropped into the ocean from orbit. So instead of sprawling spaceports, wind channels, and dust trenches, they landed ships on platforms out in the open ocean. Then tugboats would pull the ship to shore.
It apparently saved a ton on real estate, and was only slightly more inconvenienced by the weather compared to more traditional spaceport.
Jordan followed me to the Jack’s upper hatch, and we cracked open the hull for our first breath of Kraknor air.
One look and I knew I’d never forget that first sight.
We were in a massive bay, miles across, and a humble tugboat huffed along, dragging a square platform fifty meters to a side. Dominating the coast was a city sparkling in the afternoon sun. The buildings followed the curve of the bay, separated from the water by only a thin band of pale beach.
The first time I’d landed on an alien planet, I’d been thrown not just by the drastic differences, but the uncanny similarities. But Yawhere’s purple evening skies and grey & yellow plant life had fueled a lot of the contrast.
Kraknor’s similarities to Earth were even more unnerving because you had to look so much closer before you picked up on the differences.
Sure, the sky was the wrong shade of blue. But it wasn’t that far off. Sure, the city streets had denizens covered in fur, but if you only looked at the skyscrapers, they were practically indistinguishable. Even the grass and trees in the countryside beyond the city were properly green like Earth plants were.
But what struck me most was my own reaction.
Landing on Yawhere and having to cope with all the threats smothering me was one of the worst experiences of my life.
Landing on Kraknor, I wasn’t the same kid. I’d learned a lifetime’s worth of lessons already, and I wasn’t daunted by what unknowns awaited me.
It was a genuinely, simply fun sight to behold.
“
I psionically prodded Peudra on a different deck.
“<…of Zeegfli,>” I announced, butchering my way through the pronunciation. “”
Jordan and I both made sure to grab some photos as we were pulled into a receiving area on the south side of the bay. I went so far as to even grab my smartphone from my quarters to make some non-psionic backups.
“
·····
Peudra was, once again, indispensable.
We were all technically still part of a diplomatic mission, which was reflected on our documentation. It would have been nice to have a physical passport or visa, but an interesting quirk of never visiting new planets was that there wasn’t a database to compare us against.
Of course there wasn’t.
We could tell them a human diplomat was coming. We could tell them their name was Caleb Hane, and the names of all his accompanying humans were so on and so forth.
But at the end of the day, they just had to take our word that each of us was who we claimed.
As Peudra presented the correct documentation certifying our agreement with the system militaries, I couldn’t help but notice two Vorak Adepts who were a little too uninterested in us.
The normal reaction to seeing a bunch of humans show up was to rubberneck. But these ones were deliberately trying to keep a low profile: surveillance, no doubt.
I pointed Tox their way, just in case.
The biggest hold up going through customs was, surprisingly, not the munchkins. The individual agents working the port customs desks were noticeably more amicable with the kids—even though they weren’t that much younger than us…were they?
Peudra had warned me it would be inevitable that we would be kicked up the food chain. It was actually better for us that way. It was the higher-ups that Peudra, Serral, and I had exchanged messages with in advance.
The more I saw Peudra flexing their own diplomatic skills, the more I understood just how long ago this trip had first been planned. They wouldn’t have known exactly who’d be arriving, but given how quickly bosses showed up to greet us and expedite things, Peudra must have been discussing the idea with Vorak officials on the ground for months.
We hadn’t even decided on this landing point until a few days ago.
Peudra must have at least pursued the possibility with every major city in the region.
We had to split up to multitask, Jordan and Sid handled the money side. The cargo we’d taken on at Vaco had been picked for its sensitivity. Not everything worth shipping could be roughly dropped from orbit into an ocean.
Prearranging for perishable goods and several tons of lithium to be sold the moment we landed would keep us in the black for at least the immediate future if not the remainder of our trip.
Johnny, Donnie, and I were monopolized by the local Tayv— a governor or mayor.
They weren’t happy about our itinerary, but I made it clear that I wasn’t going to budge our plans for the first few days: light activities only. Poke around town, visit the beach, maybe see the local music.
That last one would at least give the politician some room to arrange a photo op. Peudra said Vorak didn’t have exactly the same media as on Earth, but that there might be streaks of similarities.
They’d at least reassured me that paparazzi didn’t really exist in Vorak culture.
Even if they had though, I wasn’t worried.
The first mention of my name, and the closest dozen Vorak had all gotten very uncomfortable. That number doubled when they asked if I really was ‘Ajengita’.
I’d have to check in with Peudra tonight about the outstanding details. I was especially keen on the details of the fugitive the Vorak wanted me to help with, but for now?
Things were going smoothly.
Almost perfectly, in fact.
If only Halax wasn’t here to spoil my mood.
I’d put him out of my mind as we landed, but once we officially cleared customs, we agreed to take a bus into town, and since we could all fit into one vehicle, I didn’t get to avoid him.
He was eyeing me.
Staring out the window at the ocean didn’t seem to deter him.
<…What do you want, Halax?> I asked silently, beaming the question directly to him.
I actually turned to look at him, craning an eyebrow. He’d just gotten short with me! Had he noticed my cold shoulder? I wasn’t being subtle about it, but this was the first sign he’d given that it upset him in any way.
It would be extremely petty of me not to, so I fought the urge to smile at that.
Hang on…
A proper noun from Vorak mythology. Word that meant something about creating light. But one with sinister overtones instead of bright, shiny, positive ones?
“[God damn it…]” I muttered.
Literally.
Halax explained.