Alien Caller (56 page)

“You are, but
not David, Cyrea or their baby. Nor any more babies they may have.
Nor any of the other couples and the babies they may have. They are
of both worlds now. Like it or not, your mission has changed. At
some stage you're going to have to make contact and set up an
embassy. Unless of course you plan on either violating all these
people's rights and abducting them back to Leinia or else
abandoning them here.”

Lar closed his
eyes and buried his face in one of his hands, and Alice was almost
sure she could hear groaning. It took a lot of willpower to keep
from smiling when she knew her point had been made.

Who would have
thought? One child had changed the course of the world before it
was even born.

Chapter
Twenty Six

“You know I’ve
always thought of space travel as something glorious and exciting,
and here you seem to have made it into something almost boring.
There’s no rockets, no cockpit, no astronauts, no sensation of
movement, no nothing. I could just as easily be on Earth.” Which
didn’t come anywhere close to describing how let down he’d felt at
arriving on a space ship and finding it was nothing more than an
apartment block, though it was shaped like a giant golf ball.

Yet who was he
to complain? A humble Earthling, off for the first time in his
planet’s history to see the stars, or at least one in particular,
Leinia. If and when this ever got out he would be famous, on Earth
at least, though no doubt the rest of the universe wouldn’t have
cared. And more than that, he was off on a voyage to make sure his
daughter was born safely in the most advanced hospital possible.
Not that the doctors thought there was anything wrong with their
baby; there wasn’t. It was just that given all the unknowns and the
impossibility of it all, they wanted to make sure and David had
readily enough agreed. Not for the trip, though that was amazing,
but for his family.

Cyrea was still
having doubts, or actually not so much doubts as waking nightmares,
as she imagined every possible thing that could go wrong. And if
the truth be told, despite his calming noises he wasn’t much
better. So the offer of a trip to their most advanced hospital, had
been something he’d jumped at every bit as quickly as Cyrea. His
only regret is that they'd waited two months before leaving. The
doctors had said it would be best for the baby. So for two months
he'd been beside himself with excitement. Impatient as a child
waiting to open his Christmas presents.

As presents
went the trip might be a bit of a fizzer. But so what if the ride
didn’t match his imagination? He would have ridden a yak train bare
back if it had come with a guarantee of a successful birth and
happy, healthy daughter. Compared with that this was only boring.
Like a ride in a jumbo jet instead of going sky diving.

The ship
itself, or what he’d seen of it while they’d been docking, had been
unimpressive at best, which was his real complaint. It looked like
nothing more than a steel baseball in space. No rockets, nothing
that even looked like either a nose or tail, no fins or wings, and
in fact not even port holes. Just a giant steel ball hanging there
in the black of space behind the moon. And even the moon, lost as
it was in the eternal dark, hadn’t been that inspiring. Just a big
hunk of rock hanging in space.

Logically he
knew though, as Cyrea had told him several times, that the ship had
no need of any of the things he dreamed of. It had no rockets,
because it sprinted away from the solar system on antigravity, the
most powerful drive known, though in truth it was more akin to
falling away from their solar system. And in fact, if it wasn’t for
the artificial gravity fields put in place on the ship, everyone
and everything inside the ship would be in permanent free fall.
However, the crewman who had shown them to their quarters had told
him that there currently was no other form of interstellar
propulsion capable of matching the incredible acceleration of their
antigravity drive. And even if there had been it wouldn’t have been
usable. Anything that could accelerate the same way would have left
everyone inside the ship as a form of soup on the floors, assuming
that the ship even they survived.

Given the
incredible distances between stars, acceleration at hundreds of
gravities had to be maintained for weeks and months to get anywhere
before the pilot became an old man. A ship accelerating at just one
gravity, or the same acceleration as a man would achieve falling
off a cliff, would take just over one Earth year to reach the speed
of light. Then, the journey to Alpha Centauri, the closest star
would take another year or so, followed by yet another year or two
of deceleration. Three or four years to reach their nearest
neighbour, and the journey to Leinia was hundreds of light years
further than that.

This humble
golf ball in space was actually accelerating at hundreds of
gravities, even as he complained it wasn’t moving at all. The magic
of their technology was so advanced that it couldn’t even be felt.
The Leinians had other perfectly logical explanations for why the
ship had none of the other stuff he’d imagined either.

For a start
there was no such thing as a warp drive, though the Leinians
enjoyed Star Trek perhaps even more than humble earthlings. But
space like time was immutable, unable to be stretched or folded. If
it wasn’t, the universe would have collapsed billions of years
before as the huge gravitational fields of stars and black holes
tore it apart. Meanwhile the speed of light was merely the fastest
speed that light could travel at, not anything else. Nor was there
such a thing as hyperspace despite the endless books written about
it.

The ship had no
nose or tail, because there wasn’t any atmosphere in space to cause
friction, and any dust would be handled by gravitational shields.
For the same reason it had no fins, no wings or tail. And with no
nose, why would it need a cockpit? The control quarters were
actually right in the centre of the ship, where the crew could get
to them fastest from wherever they happened to be. Port holes were
completely redundant when at any fraction of the speed of light,
the equivalent of the Doppler effect would mean that nothing was
visible outside anyway. Computers inside could give a much better
idea of what the ship was passing through, as well as displaying
any other image he might want to see. And as for fusing any form of
mere glass into solid titanium alloy panels, the engineers would
have had a fit at the very idea.

The
explanations all made so much sense and were perfectly logical. But
logic had no place among his childhood dreams of space travel, and
he couldn’t help but lament the loss he felt. Cyrea curled up into
his arms as he complained, the most cheeky smile on her face.

“Oh I wouldn’t
say that. It does have some advantages.” He would have asked but
wasn’t given the chance. She spoke quickly in her native language,
and the next thing he knew they were falling. He grabbed for her in
a sudden panic, and then in time realized they weren’t falling at
all. They were flying! They weren’t going to hit anything. They
were just weightless. Cyrea had turned off the artificial gravity
in their quarters.

He started
laughing then, unable to stop himself, as the reality of the
impossible hit him. He was floating, he was flying. Experimentally
he did a small flip, just a single tip of one of his feet against
the floor and they were cart wheeling gracefully through the cabin.
It was unbelievable as his eyes showed him the passage of their
movement, and his body told him he was falling. It was both scary
and fantastic at the same time, as he kept waiting and waiting for
them to hit something, and yet they never did.

But no sooner
had they reached the far wall then he took off again. Unable to
stop himself he tried another and another flight, until soon he was
rocketing through space, spinning, diving, somersaulting, oblivious
to the floor far below, while Cyrea hung on tight and made sure he
didn't do anything too dangerous.

He was a child
all over again.

Who cared if
there was no such thing as a rocket, or even the sensation of
movement? Weightlessness like this was a thrill beyond anything
he’d ever imagined. Far beyond the limited weightlessness he’d
known when he was strapped in to a diving jet. This was
awesome!

Unexpectedly
there was a small sound, and he looked down to find Cyrea’s hand
reaching inside his jeans. Soon his pants had been pushed down and
his briefs pulled aside and she had what she wanted in the palm of
her hand.

“So you’ve
heard of the mile high club?” She was grinning from ear to ear and
suddenly so was he.

As she had
reached and then taken what she wanted, so did he. Her skirt and
panties, became a memory in seconds and her flesh loomed before
him, bait before a hungry fish. He took the bait, his hands finding
all that they wanted to and he started to set her on fire, while
his lips found her nipples. Meanwhile he felt his top being yanked
up and knew Cyrea was doing the same.

“Close your
eyes love, and let me work. I’ve been looking forward to this since
the moment you said you’d come with me. It’s your first time in
free fall, and I want you to remember this for the rest of your
life. Besides, I owe you an apology for the first time I cheated in
a fight with you, and a big, big thank you for our daughter. This
is my present to you.” He tried to tell her she owed him nothing,
that he surely owed her far more, and that he had dreamed his whole
life of taking a trip on a space ship, but she wouldn’t hear it and
slowly he gave in to her wishes. This was her show. He felt her
hands eagerly stripping away the last of his clothes while her lips
caressed his entire body. Then she let them wander down his belly
heading south and he shuddered with pleasure.

“You know, I
seem to recall the first time we did this, you were a little
nervous about something. Worried perhaps that I might bite it off.”
She was licking her lips as she played with him, teasing him
mercilessly as she offered him paradise.

“Still feel
that way?” She knew he didn’t, partly by the way he had hardened in
her grasp at the very thought. “That’s what I thought.”

Maybe space
travel didn’t have to be so boring after all.

Chapter
Twenty Seven

David’s first
inkling that something was wrong was when the sirens started
wailing all across the ship, typically just while he was settling
down to a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the mess area. Naturally,
he had no idea what the alarms meant; in fact they sounded more
like his alarm clock than any siren he’d ever heard, but their
monotonous sound and the people rising hastily from their seats all
around him and heading for the doors told him what they were and
one thing more; that it was serious.

Taking his cue
from the rest he quickly rose to his feet and began following them,
just hoping they weren’t heading for the life boats. Cyrea had
shown him the tiny two man pods as part of his familiarization with
the ship, and they looked anything but comfortable for any length
of time. Fortunately, before heading to the outer ring of the golf
ball shaped ship the crew turned left and rushed down two flights
of steps to the common room, which doubled as the meeting area.

It was there
that Cyrea and himself would spend their evenings, playing some of
the strange board games that her people found so amusing, or
listening to music, or even playing darts. Darts it seemed was a
universal game with all races having a version. The Leinians’
version consisted of a large round board with three bulls eyes, and
darts that were distinctly too long with strange reed like tails,
but he could still play the game. In fact after three weeks aboard
ship, he was almost becoming quite reasonable at it. But this time
there was clearly no recreation intended.

Instead once
most of the thirty or so passengers had gathered in the room, the
captain’s voice suddenly boomed out of thin air, making him jump.
That was another of the technological masteries of the Leinians
that he could never get used to, they didn’t use loud speakers.
Instead, by using directed force fields they could make the very
air vibrate anywhere, so it seemed as though the speaker was right
beside you. But even as he flinched it was to feel Cyrea’s hand on
his shoulder as she had appeared out of nowhere to stand beside
him. He held her tight.

“Good people,
I’m sorry to have to tell you that for the last thirteen and a half
Earth hours we’ve been under attack from an alien vessel. That’s
why we’ve been changing course so much, causing all the gravity
ripples that may have upset many of you. We’ve been taking evasive
manoeuvres as we’ve received warning shots from some sort of plasma
cannon across our bow.” That caused a flurry of chatter among the
passengers as everyone started trying to speak at once, trying to
confirm with their neighbour that the captain had actually just
said what they thought he had.

It was a shock
to David too as he fiddled with his ear piece which translated the
Leinian's words into English, wondering perhaps if it had
malfunctioned somehow. This was a peaceful universe according to
everything he’d ever been told. And they'd been under attack for
thirteen hours and he'd never known? That seemed very wrong
somehow. Where were the laser blasts and explosions? And what could
he do about it? He hadn't planned for a space battle. When he’d
thought of emergencies he’d thought of a fire or some sort of
mechanical problem, maybe even a sudden decompression, but never
piracy. And thirteen hours? Why hadn’t somebody told them earlier?
Not that there was anything they could have done. But at least it
explained the repeated bouts of nausea he and the others had
endured. Unperturbed the captain carried on, and they quickly
shushed and listened to him again.