We go back to my place and consummate a very long dry spell in our marriage. No, I’m not sharing all the details. I’ll talk about other people fucking, but I’m not good enough to make it into the annals of Righteous Boinking. I’m clumsy and routinely fall out of beds. Besides, I’d like to be considered a gentleman about at least one thing in my life. I know I’m not fooling anyone, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Right. After she shows me that she still has far more stamina than I do, I stare at the ceiling and try to get my brain to fire on more than one synapse. Laura traces designs on my chest with her finger.
“Wow,” she purrs, “you’d think that this was your first time in two years.”
“It was,” I admit.
“Liar.”
“No lie. Never wanted anybody else.”
Her finger pauses in place. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“You know me, sex is like truth serum.” I meet her gaze. “I know that I’ll never get to stop apologizing for not being able to withstand a Veeni siren who can overpower any human male in the universe. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough. But it never changed how I feel about you.”
“Then why did you stop chasing me?”
“Baby, the day you kicked me out, you stuck a gun in my face.”
She breaks eye contact and goes back to tracing designs. “I was drunk.”
“You threatened to shoot me if you saw me again. And you burned down our place. I got the bill for that, by the way.”
“I was really pissed at you.”
“You were far beyond pissed,” I told her. “I decided to give you a couple of days to cool off, but when I went to find you, it was too late. You were gone.”
“But you knew where I was. You knew where to find me at that Fleet base.”
“Yes, I always knew where you were. Does that make me a stalker?”
“Maybe a little.”
I kiss the top of her head. “Do you still want that divorce?”
She nuzzles me. “Nope.”
“Good.”
***
Laura is still in the bed when I wake up. I take that as a sign that I can stop worrying that this fragile thing might fall apart at the next ill-placed sneeze. She could have rolled out of bed and left last night while I was sleeping, but she didn’t. I know she thought about it. Any woman would. But not any woman would still have her head nestled in the crook of my arm, and that makes all the difference in the universe. She shifts and snuggles closer. I hear content purring.
She raises her head and looks at me with sleepy eyes. “Hi.”
I smile. “Hiya back.”
“Do you have anything to eat around here? I’m starving.”
“Hey,” I say, “this is the Coach’s quarters. I don’t know what you’re used to down in the bowels of the ship, but this is a full-service suite.” I run my fingers down her spine and stop in the small of her back. “You desire it and it happens.”
“Pancakes with butter and syrup, orange juice, and sausage. Then coffee. Lots of coffee.”
“Big day?”
“Oh, you know, just another spaceball game.”
“No pressure, eh?” I get out of bed and amble over to the food dispenser to get her breakfast. I really don’t have to do anything; the machine is voice-operated and already heard her request. I look at the assembled food on the tray. Something is missing. “Wheat or buttermilk pancakes?” I ask.
“Buttermilk, of course. Wheat is for people who like tasteless shit.”
The little door lifts and a tall stack of steaming pancakes rolls out. Three pads of butter melt away from the top as if racing to see which one can topple over the side first. I ask for another glass of juice for myself, and then carry everything over to the bed.
Laura settles the tray on her lap. “I could get used to this,” she says.
“Feel free,” I tell her.
“I think I will. The food is good around here.”
“Just the food?”
She smears some syrup on my fingers and then leans forward and sucks them clean.
I have a hard time forming a complete thought for the duration. “Wow. Um. Wow.” She lets go of my hand and returns to her food. I take a long pull from my juice. It’s not real juice, just the powdered, reconstituted kind. “So, I know you can’t tell me what’s going to happen,” I say, “but can you tell me what has happened? Can you tell me anything about what led up to this?”
Laura is quiet for a moment and eats some of her pancakes. “You want the story?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She puts her fork down. “Okay, I’ll tell you what I can.”
***
“It goes a little like this,” Laura says. “Three months ago, things were really bad for the human race. Edochian cruisers like the one out there hung around at every Gate, blowing up all our ships that were trying to escape the Nokkran dreadnoughts. They were hunting us down one by one. Everybody was cut off from everyone else, and it looked like the end.” She pokes me in the arm. “Well, at least to those of us not sleeping in giant tampon tubes on Pronos.”
“Hey, we all have our coping mechanisms,” I say.
“I think you’re descended from a badger or some other marsupial. You go to ground when there’s trouble.”
“Not all trouble. Just the universe ending sort that I can’t fight against.”
“Everyone can fight, Rick, in their own way. You’re doing it right now with the Blood Suns.”
“This counts?”
“Sure. Anyway, there’s these two guys, Tom Beane and Skip Tyler.”
I recognize the first one. Beane’s the king of the underworld. Literally, the king of the underworld. I used to think it a name and not a real person, sort of like Rex Duster in the 25th century, Elias in the 23rd, and that Keyser Soze fellow back in the 20th. Before the war, nobody remembered meeting Beane and everyone dealt with him through proxies. Jager might be the head of all the pirates in this part of the universe, but Jager is very public about it and people know what he looks like. Beane is a phantom and criminals terrorize each other with tales of supposed sightings. “I saw on the Net that Beane was the reason the Edochians went apeshit,” I said.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“The First Consortium,” Laura corrects me. “It’s just them. There’s a sort of schism going on right now within the Consortiums. It isn’t on the surface, but the cracks are there. We’re trying to widen them.”
“I take it I’m part of the wedge?”
“Sort of.”
“Are you sure you can’t give me a hint about what I’m supposed to do?”
“Nope. Just be yourself.”
“Famous last words.” I take another sip of my orange juice. I wonder if the woman at that Fast Fruit kiosk would entertain any franchise spin-offs into the juice market. I bet juice from her oranges will taste better than this micro-manufactured stuff. But I’m sure they’ve probably already started on it. Every good idea I come up with, someone else has gotten to it first. Except Kissy. I think I’m the first one to give sex robots a chance at League ball. “Back to the story.”
“Are you at least semi-aware enough to know what Beane was doing to draw the First’s attention?” Laura asks.
“Hello! I was in a sleeping tube, not under a rock. He was doing faster-than-light research.” The Edochians Forbade hyperspace research. With a capital F. That’s how we humans met them in the first place, when a failed experiment back in the 23rd century tore a hole in the fabric of the universe and sucked through an entire planet. The Edochians appeared and closed the hole. They whacked us on the nose and said, “No!” Then they made us sign the Hyperspace Treaty in 2640 at gunpoint and in exchange let us use their Gate network. But no more FTL attempts. Their First Consortium goons ran around enforcing the Treaty, regardless of pesky things like sovereign borders. They’d wipe out whole colonies if they thought there were FTL experiments going on. Humans complained – we’re good at complaining – but it’s tough to argue with a species armed with planet killers on every capital ship.
“You’re right, tube dweller,” Laura says with a smirk, “Beane was running secret research labs to create an FTL drive. The Edochians caught wind of it, and when they realized he had actually achieved the technology safely, they decided to wipe out the human race.”
“Because clearly,” I say, “that’s the proven method of uninventing something.”
“Something about hyperspace travel without a Gate scares the shit out of them,” Laura says. “We didn’t know what it was until three months ago.”
“What happened three months ago?”
“I’m getting to that. Do you know how many Edochian Consortiums there are?”
“Yep, three. They’re like castes. The First is the warrior caste, the Second is their worker caste, and the Third is their science and engineering caste.”
“Right. There used to be fourth, though.”
“Four? What did the Fourth do?”
“The thinking caste. Sort of like their philosophy and religion. They were all telepaths, and the only ones capable of FTL travel. They mentally folded space, allowing an entire ship to instantly travel from one end of the universe to the other.”
“Whoa.”
“They’re the only ones who could do it. Several thousand years ago, the Fourth Consortium had a major disagreement with the First. Mostly having to do with the other races in the universe. The First wanted to rule, the Fourth wanted to leave everybody alone, etc.”
“How did that go for them?”
“The same thing that always happens when pacifists pick fights with warriors. The First subjugated the Fourth. The remnants of the Fourth serve as navigators on Edochian ships, like living FTL drives.”
“Ouch,” I say. “Who’s the other guy, Skip Tyler?”
“He was a Hunter before the war.”
Aha. That’s also with a capital H. Officially, the Hunters are attached to the Fleet Domestic Police, a nice-sounding bureaucratic organization that deals with crimes that humans do to other humans. When human criminals flee beyond humanity’s borders, Hunters are tasked with bringing them back dead or alive. Mostly dead. They spend their time in nasty parts of space and are separated from the scum they chase by a very thin and shaky line. Hunters make Echelon’s special operators look like fluffy bunnies. That thought triggers the image of Jint in her leather getup with a white bunny tail. Awesome.
“What are you grinning at?” Laura asks.
“Some random thought,” I say. “Unimportant. What’s Tyler’s connection to all this?”
“The FTL research has been going on in Beane’s family for generations. Beane’s father knew about the Fourth Consortium and engineered Tyler from remnant Fourth Consortium genetic material. Tyler is a hybrid human-Edochian, and the only one to survive the experiments.”
“What super powers did he gain from that? And why did he get to run around free? Usually people like him occupy small rooms in a lab.”
“Beane’s father thought he’d failed. The only visual indication Tyler has that he’s a hybrid is his eyes. They’re all black. But that’s it. Other than being half a Halloween costume, Tyler has no outward indication that he’s not entirely human. No telepathic ability.”
“Again, why is he running around? I’ve seen enough movies to know that a failed experiment usually involves dissecting the failures to see what went wrong.”
“They didn’t have any more material from the Fourth to splice in, and the Edochians were investigating. They shut down the operation and put Tyler into the foster system. He grew up into the charming man he is today.”
“Does he know that he was grown in a tube by Beane’s dad?”
“He didn’t find that out until a couple of months ago. He always thought his mother was raped by an Edochian during a First raid.”
“Is that even possible? I wasn’t aware Edochians even had dicks.”
“They don’t,” Laura says. “Edochians reproduce asexually. I don’t know much about how it works, nobody does. But we do know that they pass on their memories to their children.”
“Slick,” I say. “I guess it’s easy to be an advanced race when you never forget anything.”
“Right. And it also explains why none of them have done anything about the Fourth, because for them it still happened yesterday. I guess it’s easy to hold a grudge when the memory is still fresh.”
“They should try alcohol. So I take it Tyler does have some ability?”
Laura says, “Yes, Tyler’s a latent telepath. He can’t communicate telepathically with any humans or regular Edochians, but he can connect to the Fourths. Two months ago, he was on a Fleet ship staring down the nose of an Edochian destroyer’s main turbocannon. Tyler somehow freed that destroyer’s Fourth navigator via telepathic link. The navigator was very angry with its captors and killed everyone onboard.”
“So we have an Edochian ship of our very own?”
“No, the Edochians destroyed it. Probably to keep it out of our hands. But for a brief moment, the navigator was free. The result is that the Edochians have untethered their navigators, for fear that Tyler could pop in on Beane’s FTL ships and free them. The Edochians will travel in emergencies, sure, but for all intents in purposes we’ve grounded their capital ships. They have to rely on vessels small enough to fit through the Gates.”
“They don’t have regular FTL capabilities?”
“No need. They had the navigators. They never developed the FTL bubble technology Beane perfected.”
“How does that work?” I ask.
“In extremely simplified terms, Beane’s drive creates a bubble around the ship, lowering its mass to zero, and then hucks that bubble through space.”
“Neat. And the Gates?”
“Anchored wormholes,” Laura says. “No special drive required.”
“Also neat.”
“Don’t you know how anything works?”
“Baby, I don’t even know how the door to this room works. So the cruiser outside Freehaven right now?”
“Second Consortium.”
I frown at her. “But there was a First goon on the vid when they got here.”
“Faked. The Edochians don’t give a shit about us. They’re here because Beane used to use Freehaven as a base of operations, and they’re sitting on the station in case he comes back.”
“But they Jumped in,” I say.
“And I’m sure they untethered their navigator as soon as they got here. We knew through our contacts when they’d arrive, so we had Chippers bring in the Hercules at the same time.”
“Contacts?”
“Not all of the Edochians follow the First’s lead. There are some sane ones.”
I put down my empty glass and poke at the breakfast sausage. I guess it’s beef. We’ll call it beef. I’m going to eat it regardless of what it is, but my brain expects a decision before I put some random chunk of burnt flesh in my mouth. “Does Chippers know what’s going on?”
“Some. He’s a patriot and wasn’t hard to convince.”
“Why me?” I ask.
“We’ve got a special present planned for the First Consortium, but we need the entire universe watching to make it work. The Spaceball Tournament is a great start, but it’s got to be special.” Laura smiles at me. “We needed a circus. As far as ringmasters go, we couldn’t think of anybody better than you.”
“Wait a minute. I was your idea?”
She nods. “I pitched you to Beane.”
“How do you know him?”
“I know his wife, Kiera. We lived near each other when we were kids.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, small universe.”
I sigh.
“What?”
“I dunno. It all feels so, so engineered. Fake.”
“This is not fake,” Laura says. She leans forward and puts her hand on mine. The real one. Her eyes are big and hopeful and determined all at the same time. “You and I are not fake,” she says. “I had no idea this was going to happen, Rick. I definitely didn’t plan on it. I was still very angry with you when you came to find me at Fleet.”
“But this was all planned.”
“Not all of it. I knew you’d come to me for the suits, which are key. But we had no idea you’d recruit your players right out of the clans. That was pure genius on your part.”
“Thanks. It’s a gift.”
“You do have many that I enjoy,” she says. She caresses my fingers.
I wiggle them a bit. “Fancy another go?”
Laura’s eyes flutter. “Most definitely, but later,” she says. “I have a lot of work to do today, and you still have to share your plans for beating the Milkmaids tonight. They’re undefeated.”
“So are we.”
“Rick, they’re undefeated because every team they’ve played against has let them win. Nobody wants to play them.”
“I do. It’s going to be fun!” That’s a lie. It’s not going to be fun.