Back | Next
Contents

Chapter Ten




“Okay, I’m dying to know.” Nathan set down his Triad Trial cards.

The Neptune Belle was on a fourteen-day course for Faelyn’s Grasp, and there wasn’t much for any of them to do until they arrived. Fortunately, Nathan had amassed a sizable collection of books, movies, and games to serve as distractions for passengers (and himself) over the years, and it turned out Joshua was an avid Triad Trial player.

“Know what?” Joshua asked with a coy smile, sorting and turning his triangular cards. “Whether or not I actually have all odds in my hand?”

“No, not that.”

“Ooh!” Vessani cooed, inspecting her newest card. Joshua may have been a formidable opponent, but Vessani was not. She seemed unaware her tail wagged and her ears perked up every time she drew a powerful card.

Not that she was hard to read otherwise. He could have done that blindfolded, what with all her vocalizations!

“Look! Look!” She showed Joshua the new card.

“Oh, my.” He let a crafty smile slip. “That’ll come in handy.”

“Heh-heh. I like this game!”

“Hey, Nathan?” Aiko-Six asked, her cameras darting across her cards. “You think she pulled a good card?”

“No idea,” he replied dryly.

“You were saying?” Joshua prompted Nathan.

“Just curious how the two of you ended up together. Not to be blunt, but you’re . . .” He let the sentence hang unfinished.

“An unlikely pair?” Joshua ventured.

“Something like that.”

“We met through work,” Vessani said. “Some Saturnian university hired the old crew I was with to cart around a team of students and professors.” She put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “This guy was among them.”

“Many of us were performing field research for our theses,” Joshua explained. “We spent most of our time along the outskirts of the old Titanica ruins along the western shore of the Obelisk Ocean. I myself was eager to study the remains of their deifactory. Anyway, the university thought it prudent to provide some protection for us.”

“I’d hardly call that place dangerous,” Vessani said.

“We were the first people to go there in hundreds of years.”

“But we never left the Saturn shell band!”

“There are a lot of dangerous places, even that close to civilization.”

“Got to agree with Joshua on this one,” Nathan said. “Neptune is the same way. Venture more than, say, a few thousand kilometers from the nearest major city, and you’d be surprised by the stuff you’ll find.”

“And the things that’ll leap out at you,” Aiko added.

“That, too.”

Nothing leaped out at us,” Vessani said. “I should know, because it was my job to shoot the wildlife if it tried to discover what students taste like. None of the megafauna even came close to our camp, either. The worst encounter was one angry pig, and that was their own fault.”

“Oh, yeah.” Joshua chuckled. “I remember him.”

“The students decided to adopt the pig as a sort of pet,” Vessani continued. “They named him Poogle and kept sneaking him treats. The professor eventually put an end to it, and when Poogle stopped receiving freebies, he grew temperamental. Began setting things on fire.”

“Excuse me?” Nathan asked with raised eyebrows. “The pig did what?”

“Apparently, the animal wasn’t baseline,” Joshua explained, “because he had what amounted to a biochemical flamethrower in his gut.”

“That was the only bit of excitement on an otherwise long and boring job.” Vessani laughed and shook her head. “Quite the sight, really. A bunch of students running around while this little pig belched puffs of flame at them. That job turned out to be the last straw for me. Mind-numbing work with a dull crew. I left soon after.”

“And how did that pan out for you?” Joshua teased.

“Hey.” She flashed a half smile. “I never said it was a good decision to join up with Dirge.” She turned back to Nathan. “Anyway, a month of pointless guard duty led to me getting to know the students.”

“We hit it off almost immediately,” Joshua said. “I’d never met anyone who grew up in low-tech before, and you were most certainly not what I’d expected! Though, it surprised me you spent all your free time with me.”

“You were the only guy who didn’t condescend to me when you found out where I was from. Of course I wouldn’t want to hang out with those losers!”

Joshua only smiled.

“And here’s the other thing,” Vessani told the others. “When Josh asks you a question, he listens to your answer. Like, really listens. He would ask me about my home, and when I’d get into the details, I could tell he was hanging on my every word. It’d been years since I’d talked about home with anyone, and it felt good, you know?”

“I think I do,” Nathan said, nodding.

“Plus, he never tried to sleep with me. Not once during the whole trip!”

Joshua froze and his cheeks turned a fierce shade of red. He looked down and started resorting his cards.

“Honestly, after a while, I began to wonder if he was even interested.” She put an arm around his shoulders. “Glad I was wrong, there!”

“Well, I, umm . . .” Joshua stammered, then cleared his throat. “Perhaps we don’t need to share the whole story.”

“Hmm?” She turned to him. “But I was just going to mention how we—”

“Moving on!” Joshua interrupted quickly.

“Did you two stay in touch after the university work?” Nathan asked, more in the manner of a lifeline to Joshua than anything else.

“No, we went our separate ways,” Vessani said. “Didn’t see each other again for about half a year.”

“Even so, parts of her story really stuck with me,” Joshua said, looking somewhat relieved to have moved past whatever minefield Vessani had been blundering toward. “Especially where the Black Egg was concerned. I did some independent research into the subject and eventually got in touch with Anterus, who helped me put the pieces into a workable theory. After that, I reached out to Vess and shared my thoughts.”

“That’s how we decided to team up!” Vessani added cheerfully.

“Though”—Joshua frowned—“I do wish you’d told me about your plan to steal Dirge’s ship.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t my brightest idea. I should have—”

The Belle began to tremble, and alarms sounded. Their Triad cards jittered across the table, and Joshua grabbed the edge, his eyes suddenly wide.

“Not again,” Nathan groaned. “Aiko?”

“Number One is in the cockpit. Shouldn’t be long before—”

The background din of engine noise faded, and distant circuit breakers clanked, rerouting vital systems to the capacitors. The alarm switched off, and everyone floated out of their seats around a cloud of playing cards.

“There we go!” Aiko exclaimed.

“Umm.” Joshua swallowed. “What was that?”

“That was two of our fusion toruses not playing nice together,” Nathan replied. “We’ve had this happen a few times before. It’s more of an annoyance than anything else. It doesn’t last long.”

“I see.” Joshua pressed a hand against the ceiling and pushed off. “What do you mean by ‘not playing nice together’? Can you be more specific?”

“It’s rare,” Aiko explained, “but something can cause Torus Three’s output to oscillate, which then interferes with Torus Two. We’re not sure what’s going on, but we’ve never had an issue restarting the reactor.”

“Have you had the reactor inspected?”

“Once,” Nathan grumbled. “Waste of money.”

“And the results?”

He shook his head. “A big, fat nothing. She said the reactor was fine.”

“Hmm.” Joshua lowered his head in thought.

“Shall I go ahead and restart Torus One?” Aiko asked.

“Sure,” Nathan said. “Start it back up.”

“Actually . . .” Joshua held up a hand. “Would it be all right if we held off on that? At least for a bit?”

“Why?” Nathan asked. “What for?”

“Just curious about something. Mind if I look over the reactor’s fault log?”


Joshua sat next to the C Deck reactor torus, strapped in due to the ship’s lack of acceleration, with a diagnostic vlass glowing in front of him. The Neptune Belle’s reactor took up three levels, with A, B, and C decks each housing their own fusion torus.

The room was dark except for the bluish glow of the screen, underlighting his face. He stared at the text on the screen, scrolled through it almost robotically as he deciphered the hidden meaning. Each fault illuminated a separate piece of the puzzle, whether by its mere existence, its timing in relation to other faults, or through the overall sequence of events.

The pressure door opened, spilling a slash of bright light into the room, and Vessani floated in. She closed the door behind her.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Vess.”

He smiled over at her, his mind wandering to a part of their story he hadn’t told Nathan and Aiko. A part he hadn’t even told Vessani yet. Not for any sinister or selfish reasons, but for the mere fact he didn’t feel ready to bare his heart in such an intimate manner.

Not quite yet, anyway.

Because this part of the story centered on his parents, who hadn’t met Vessani and likely never would.

It had become clear to Joshua from an early age that his parents didn’t love each other. He didn’t know what had originally brought them together—whether it was youthful passion or something else—but whatever fires had once burned in their hearts had been quenched by the time he grew astute enough to notice such things.

His parents weren’t rude to each other. Merely formal. Distant. Cold. They passed through the motions required of them for the simple reason that they were expected to act in a certain manner, all while secretly filling the gaps in their lives with other people from outside their marital union.

Both of them had cheated on the other. Prolifically. Almost as if each was searching for an answer to a question they couldn’t quite articulate. Each seeking a way to heal the gap in their lives they could never quite fill.

He knew his parents were immensely unhappy. With each other and, he suspected, with themselves. He was certain of this, and he too had been a casualty of their loveless marriage, being both a physical reminder of their unhappiness and an anchor that ensured one could never stray too far from the other, no matter how much they might wish to.

He considered himself lucky to have made it this far without crashing and burning as a human being. He’d fortunately discovered a love of learning at an early age, which was the passion that filled the hole in his life. His tutors had recognized and encouraged this trait, and some of them had grown into the surrogate parents he’d so desperately needed.

He thought he’d turned out rather well, given that background and his own parents’ disinterest in raising him. Some people might have viewed the Cotton family’s wealth as the ultimate way to cheat through life’s many obstacles, but he knew the truth. Money could purchase many comforts or brute-force a person through many problems, but never had he seen it make a single soul happy. Not in any meaningful, lasting way, at least.

He may not have considered himself happy, but at least he wasn’t a miserable wretch like his father or mother, trapped in a loveless marriage, confined to a gilded cage. He was free to live and learn, and oh, how he loved to learn!

In a strange way, Vessani reminded him of his parents. Not in the wealthy, adulterous socialite way, of course, but by the fact that she was unhappy. Joshua saw a shadow of his parents’ misery whenever he gazed into her golden eyes. He perceived a sliver of his own struggles in them, and that had served to pull him toward her, knowingly or not.

He couldn’t help but feel a sense of familiarity around her. She was alone, bouncing from one ship to another, never with a final destination in mind, always searching for an answer to a question she didn’t even know she was asking. Sometimes acting out her frustrations and angst in drunken antics or wild outbursts.

They both suffered from their own forms of isolation. Different roots, but a similar disease. It’s why he believed he’d been able to connect with her in a way no one else could. Their relationship had started so simply. All he’d had to do was listen to her and let her share her story.

And care about what she told him.

Which was the easy part, because he did care for her.

Deeply.

“Think you’ll be able to solve their little reactor problem?” Vessani asked.

He smiled to her. “That’s not quite the right question.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because”—he tapped the vlass—“there’s nothing wrong with the reactor.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“Unless I’ve missed my guess, the issue is with the plasma outfeed. There’s a balancing error in the manifold that integrates the outputs from all three toruses. This imbalance causes Torus Two and Three to struggle against each other, sometimes resulting in backflow into Torus Three. Normally, that’s not much of an issue. The system automatically adjusts the outfeed, compensates, and moves on with its life. But sometimes the system can get stuck in a loop of overcorrection and start oscillating, which is what we experienced earlier. You follow?”

“Not really,” she replied honestly.

“One of the plasma pipes has a ‘kink’ in it,” Joshua simplified. “The reactor doesn’t like that and starts passing gas.”

“And not a fun kind of kink, I take it,” Vessani noted with a quick wink.

“No.” He struggled to keep a straight face. “Not a fun kink.”

“Okay. That makes more sense now. You just figure this out?”

“No, I’ve known for about an hour, but I’ve been going through the logs, checking for anything that could cast doubt on my theory. There’s no rush, so I thought it best to be thorough.”

“Find anything?”

“Nope.” He closed out of the fault log, reverting the vlass to a general diagnostic screen. “Which means I should probably inform the others.”

He keyed his commect and waited for the captain to respond.

“Yes?”

“I’ve got good news and, I believe, even better news. The good news is there’s nothing wrong with your reactor. The problem’s coming from the plasma manifold. When this last happened, did you have the entire drive system inspected?”

“No. Just the reactor.”

“Thought so. That explains why they couldn’t find the problem.”

“Okay, but what’s this other news you mentioned?”

“I believe I know how to fix it. I’d like to inspect the manifold next. Tell me, Captain, does your ship have a microfactory?”

“A small one on C Deck. Why?”

“Because we might need to fabricate a replacement part or two. We should know more once we open up the manifold.”


“Here goes.”

Aiko restarted the reactor and eased up on the thruster output. Beside her, Nathan sank into the pilot seat while Joshua and Vessani touched down on the floor behind them. Aiko stopped the output at 0.2 gravities.

“How’s it look?” Nathan asked.

“Nice.” Aiko reviewed her readouts. “Normally, it takes the reactor a few seconds to settle into the green, but this time it practically leaped into an optimal state.”

“The ship sounds different,” Nathan said, not exactly complaining.

“Different in a bad way?” Joshua asked.

“No. Just . . . different.”

Aiko listened. “I hear it, too. The engine noise is quieter. More monotone.”

“The missing noise was probably the backwash from Two to Three,” Joshua said. “An interaction like that can cause a low, rhythmic sound as the system pushes through repeating cycles of compensation.”

“Fuel efficiency is up,” Aiko said. “Not by a whole lot. Maybe two or three percent, but that can add up over a trip. Shall I crank it up to one gee?”

“Go ahead.”

Aiko eased the output upward until the ship was accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared.

Nathan unstrapped himself from the seat and clapped Joshua on the shoulder.

“Thanks for looking it over. That problem was bugging the hell out of me!”

“My pleasure,” Joshua said. “Glad I could help.”

“Isn’t he the best?” Vessani put an arm around Joshua, and her tail flicked happily behind her.

Aiko turned around in her seat. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?” Nathan asked.

“We have an excuse to celebrate!” She threw her arms up in triumph. “How about I make a big, fancy dinner as a treat for everyone? What do you say?”

Vessani’s eyes lit up, and Joshua grinned.

“Sounds good to me,” Nathan said. “Perhaps something to go with that bottle of Plexauran White we have?”

“Yes!” Aiko agreed. “Excellent idea!”

“Why would a Jovian get excited about wine?” Joshua asked.

“You’ll understand soon enough.” Aiko crossed her arms, somehow looking smug despite her lack of a facial expression. “I consider the combination of Nathan and alcohol to be free entertainment.”

Nathan frowned at her.

“All right. Any dinner requests?” Aiko asked of everyone.

“Ooh!” Vessani’s hand shot up. “I have one!”

“Shouldn’t Joshua pick out dinner?” Nathan asked.

“Oh. Right.” Vessani lowered her hand.

“No, no. It’s fine.” Joshua gave her shoulder a tender squeeze. “You can choose the meal.”

“Okay!” Vessani’s eyes lit up again. “So, I only had this once. One of my old captains treated the team to a lavish dinner. I don’t know what it’s called, but it was incredible, and I don’t think it’ll be too hard to make, either. The way it works is everyone gets a bunch of stuff to dip in this big pot. Different fruits, vegetables, breads, meats, whatever.”

“What goes in the pot?” Aiko asked.

“A whole lot of delicious, melted cheese!” Vessani exclaimed.

“Then all you want is a big cheese dip?” Aiko turned to Nathan. “I think I have enough ingredients to pull that off. You in the mood for a mountain of food dipped in hot cheese?”

“I could go for that,” he said, grinning.



Back | Next
Framed