Supergiant (Gigaparsec Book 2) (9 page)

Roz managed to avoid Max for over a week until the
transition to subspace. Both he and Ivy hovered over her narrow bed like
nervous, old women. “We just jumped,” Ivy announced at last.

Max had been watching the EEG
readout. “Your electrical activity spiked.”

“That’s because she squeezed my
hand like a python swallowing a rabbit,” Roz complained. The event hadn’t hurt
this time. It affected her more like the rush of falling from several stories
up. “I’m fine. You can all go back to your daytime duties and let me rest.”

“You shouldn’t spend so much time
alone,” Max said.

“I’m not alone. Echo is teaching me
some branch of Magi mathematics I hadn’t even heard of until this trip.”

He shuddered at the topic of math.
“I’m glad you’re doing it. I can compute dosages based on body mass, but don’t
ask me for much more than that.”

Ivy made a gagging gesture.
“Remembering flavor ratios for mixed drinks is my limit. All of that ‘two
trains approaching each other on the same track at different speeds’ stuff
seemed like a waste of time.”

Roz peeled off the monitor strips
with increasing irritation. “So you’ve replaced me on all the valuable tasks
aboard except the mental equivalent of janitorial service. If you’ll excuse me,
I’m taking my required vacation day in the jungle room. Jeeves is waiting down
there for me.” She swept out of the room before the others could object.

Playing with Jeeves was just what
she needed to relax. His favorite game was hide-and-seek. In the rare event
Jeeves made a mistake or taunted her with an easy hiding place, she would try
to sneak up to him. The moment she tripped over a branch, however, he would
shriek with joy and scamper back to the safe spot without getting tagged.

“Turkey,” Roz said, limping back to
home base to give him his treat.

The only time she could fool him,
even briefly, was by standing motionless between several good hiding places but
choosing none of them. He would search each possible location, ruling out each
until he caught her in the last available place.

Sometimes the mimic would let her
read while he took a victory nap on her lap. The math transformation exercises
Echo had assigned were harder than hull ceramic. Homework assignments could
easily take three hours a day. Then Echo would demonstrate a solution to each
in minutes. The only term Roz could come up with for the latest technique to
convert complex flow graphs into alternate graphs was mind-expanding. The
equations were drastically different ways of modeling the same system—like
viewing a star from above and below Einstein’s rubber sheet. She felt like
everything in graduate school had been Tinkertoys by comparison.

The days blurred together as she
synchronized to the jungle’s light schedule instead of the ship’s. Several
“afternoons” later, Max appeared behind her, silent as a shadow. “I wasn’t
finished with your examination.”

Roz hopped up, spilling her
homework and Jeeves onto the ground. The mimic immediately flattened himself
and turned the same green as the undergrowth. She glared at Max and flicked
soft dirt off the corner of her computer pad.

“Sorry to startle you,” Max said.

“I was just reading about the
effects of malnutrition on child development. Now I’m not sure if Jeeves walks
hunched over because that’s what his species does or because his growth’s been
stunted.”

Max raised an eyebrow. “Don’t
borrow trouble from medical libraries, please.”

“So I shouldn’t have him tested for
Attention Deficit Disorder? He doesn’t always listen to me when I’m trying to
explain things.”

He opened his mouth to reply but
changed topics instead. “Are you avoiding me? I haven’t seen you at dinner
since Alyssa started cooking.”

“She makes me sack lunches,” Roz
explained. “The first night, she cooked
Ropa Vieja
for me. It was like
being home again.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“No, I’ve only really met her
once.” Roz recalled the wan face that could have graced a museum painting, with
dark hair and a mysterious heritage. Alyssa’s ancestry could have been
Mediterranean, Arabic, or even Indian “Honestly, it’s like she’s hiding from
me.”

Excited by the word “hiding,”
Jeeves approached to sniff Max’s feet. Hopping up and down, he squeaked,
“Seeeek-seek.”

Roz rolled her eyes. “I played with
you almost an hour today, greedy boy.”

Max looked stunned. “He … speaks?”

“When he really wants something,
and only words with the long e sound. He can’t get enough of hide-and-seek.
Again, I’m not sure if his speech difficulty is species related or due to
insufficient vitamins in the formative months.”

“He plays?”

“He’s too old now for peekaboo,
which would be peek-peek,” Roz said. “Maybe he’d be better off learning Bat
than Human. Their phonemes might suit his mouth better. Although, some of his
reluctance to speak might be due to his desire to remain unnoticed.”

“Could you demonstrate?” Max acted
like she had just told him those paintings of dogs playing poker were real.

“Counter or runner? I’ll warn you,
he can’t count to thirty, and you have to shout out when you’re ready. He can
find you pretty easily after that.”

“Why don’t I just watch the first
time?”

Roz shook her head. “Oh, no. I’ve
been doing all the play-play. It’s your turn. I’ll count, and the two of you
run. The first one caught has to count next time.” She hid her eyes and counted
to thirty slowly.

When she raised her head, the
jungle was utterly still. For three minutes, Roz walked in a circle, searching.
“You’re good, Max. There’s a chance I’ll find Jeeves first this time.”

Suddenly, a pebble rattled through
the underbrush, striking Max’s hiding place in the tree. “Ow. Hey, that’s not
fair. He cheated.”

“Shh,” Roz said, closing her eyes
to concentrate. She knew the pebble was a distraction and where the mimic would
be running. She crept toward the home base, aiming her arms in the opposite
direction of Max’s tree. She adjusted her position when she heard the rustling
underbrush and knelt. As Jeeves burst from the shrubs, she opened her arms to
catch him. She hugged him tightly, tickling him until he squealed for mercy.

Unnoticed, Max crept up on them
both. “You’re amazing.”

The way he said it made her shiver—in
a good way. “What did you want to do to me? You know, medically.”

He held out a hand to help her off
the ground. “I brought a dose to inoculate you against the radiation in the
Phoenix system.” Once she was on her feet, he didn’t let go of her hand. “How
did you catch Jeeves?”

“A trick. His distance vision isn’t
the best, so he relies too much on his mental senses. Once he’s running, I
stand in a spot where there are at least two choices to hide but don’t commit
to either. As long as I don’t move, I could be anywhere.”

Max stared down at Jeeves as she
scratched the mimic. “You used your Probability Mechanics to pretend to be one
of his species?”

“Yeah. Kind of.” Max was still
holding her hand, distracting her.

“You’re brilliant. Maybe why he was
so drawn to you. He senses your talent to blend in.”

“I like to think it’s more than
that,” Roz said. “He knows I’ll take care of him like a mommy should.”

“Mee-mee,” Jeeves affirmed.

Roz held out her arms for Jeeves to
climb in. Instead, the mimic enveloped their joined arms. Hand in hand, she led
Max to the door. “Now, as the loser, you need to take me to dinner.”

“After we put Jeeves down for a
nap.”

As they ambled toward the lift, Max
continued to stare at her in wonder. Roz found she enjoyed the attention and
contact.

****

Roz hummed to herself happily in the mirrored chamber that
evening.

Echo said, “You’ve patched things
up with Max, then?”

The humming stopped. “Mostly. How
could you tell?” Oddly, Echo knew more about her by now than her own family.

“I may not have a uterus, but I can
tell love and contentment when I see it.”

“Maybe,” Roz allowed, focusing on
the three-dimensional matrix. “The more I learn about math, the stranger this
asymmetry seems.” Understanding flickered at the edges as Roz flexed her mental
muscles.

“Our theory was that it represented
the time axis, which cannot go in reverse.”

Roz wrinkled her forehead. “What
does the rest of the equation represent?”

“A better question would be, ‘What
was constructed to model this equation?’”

Glancing around her, Roz guessed,
“The ship?” Echo touched the base of her neck. All manner of details fell into
place for her then. “That series represents the power cascades. That part is
the collapsing manifold. Oh, God, it’s all so …” She fell to her knees. The
massive problem dwarfed her, like the globe of Earth pressed down on Atlas.

“Overwhelming?” Echo draped a silky
arm around her, encouraging and stabilizing.

For an instant, Roz felt certain
the problem was solvable with just the right viewpoint, but the tiny pieces in
her brain couldn’t hold together. They scattered like a handful of ash in a
breeze. “It was staring me in the face all the time. Does anyone else know?”

“Among the living? Only us,
promised one.”

Dizzy, Roz closed her eyes. “It’s
so heavy. We’re so small. How do you manage it?”

“Faith, friends, and focusing on a
piece smaller than myself.” Furniture appeared, and Echo guided Roz to first
sit and then lie down. “This is enough for one day. Rest.”

Roz wandered about in a daze for days, followed by a worried
Ivy. Comparing this ship to those in the library let her know the difference
between features that were merely conventions and those that had specific
intent related to the prototype drive. Every time Roz stroked a smooth wall or
examined a control panel, she gasped and muttered how it fit the pattern. The
first time she found something that broke the model, she became agitated. Ivy
asked, “What can I do?”

“I need to fix this.” Roz circled
the area with her red marker and logged the need for a critical repair on her
tablet. She knew the name of the power-regulator component from the diagrams of
similar Magi ships but not the specifications for this vessel’s. “That idiot,
Zrulkesh, probably removed anything he didn’t know the purpose for.”

Ivy shrugged. “So buy parts in
Phoenix.”

“You can’t buy these off the shelf.
Humans can’t fabricate tech like this. We’d have to custom machine them to
nanoprecision, which is impossible.” Pacing, Roz called Echo on the intercom
and informed her of the complication.

“We have 3D images of the original
equipment in the archives,” said the holographic projection of the astrogator.

Roz snapped her fingers.
“Photovores.”

Echo nodded. “If the components
aren’t subject to high stress, we can implement them that way, but we’ll need
to keep extras in case elements break when we run power through the drive.”

“Like one of Edison’s bulb
filaments,” Roz agreed.

“Look, I’m glad you’re finally in
the land of the living, but what are photovores?” asked Ivy.

Roz looked both ways. “Echo, are
there any non-partners in earshot?”

“Negative,” replied the astrogator
with out-of-body talents and access to ship security systems. “But I’ll keep
watch.” Her image vanished.

“Very slick, high-grade nano
imported from the Magi. They love light, especially the edge conditions. You
pour them into a hologram, and they fill in every crack of the shape. Then you
feed them the desired material, and they die in place like coral polyps,
solidifying into the image.”

“A plaster cast,” Ivy said.

“Yes. One that can be adjusted to
any scale. I’ve used photovores for a temporary repair on a Saurian vessel the
way you would a spare tire on a jeep.” Roz chewed her lip. “A low-population,
high-tech world like Phoenix might have a small quantity for emergencies. I’m
not sure if they’ll want to part with them, though.”

“Sounds expensive,” Ivy muttered.
“How important is this part of the drive?”

“The drive mechanism is a dynamic
system, almost alive. What would happen if you took out 1 or 2 percent of your
body at random? We need them sooner rather than later because even if we had
the photovores tomorrow, it would take us months to reconstruct the subbasement
drive. When we reach the professor, I’d like to have everything in place.”
By
then, we may be able to improve on the old model.

“You really think we should put all
our eggs in one basket this way?”

“It’s a winning hand. This beats
every other prize in the known galaxy,” Roz insisted.

“Fine. We’ll find something to
trade, or a way to borrow the nanos.” Ivy seemed glad to have a problem in a
realm she could tackle.

Roz held up a hand. “No more
breaking the law.”

“How do you feel about bending it
till it begs?”

“No more sex analogies, please,”
Roz pleaded.

“What’s the matter?”

“Max held hands with me the other
day.”

Ivy put a hand on her chest.
“Heavens to Betsy. Lock up your daughters. The Casanova pirate is on the
loose.”

“It’s not funny. I’m not sure if
he’s being nice to me because he wants my genes or he really likes
me
.”

“He wants what’s
in
your
jeans. Heh, heh.” Ivy wiped the smirk off her face. “Sorry, I’ve spent too much
time around the Goat. Everything sounds dirty after a while. I’ll tell you
what. You’ll need to pick up the photovores on Phoenix. No one else will know
what they look like. They could put modeling clay in a crate and fool us. We’ll
send big, mysterious Max down with you as a bodyguard. You can use that time to
finagle answers out of him.” Touching her comm badge, Ivy said, “Reuben, what
kind of romantic scenery do they have on Phoenix?”

Over the radio, the young Goat
snorted. “The planet is a radioactive rock that has to import water.”

“What’s something I might find
pretty and be grateful for?”

“The crystal fields have tours.
This time of year, they have spawn bursts.”

Roz perked up. “I’ve always wanted
to see that phenomenon. A crystal flower absorbs nutrients and energy until it
reaches critical mass. The head vibrates for a while and then—
boom
.
Seeds go everywhere.”

“Yeah, I’m the one focused on sex
metaphors,” Ivy mumbled.

“I hear the colors are spectacular
and very romantic. Thank you, Reuben.”

“Have Kesh wrangle one of those
tours for our team,” Ivy said. “You know, to show our representative of the
Magi that the crystals are authentic and robust.”

Meanwhile, Roz had a hundred more
calculations to run and check against the physical model. Because reading the
book
Learning Bat for Fun and Profit
had been no help, she made a note
to chat with Deke about the sounds in the Bat alphabet. Deke would be able to
tell if Jeeves could hear and produce the tones outside Human hearing. She was
certain she wouldn’t have time for Max in any case.

****

The intense solar wind in the Phoenix system was dangerous
but surged in predictable cycles. Nevertheless, Roz couldn’t rely on autopilot
alone as their ship returned to normal space. Lethal stellar flares might lash
out at any moment, and flying close to the larger sun, she would have very
little time to react. With white knuckles clutching the helm for hours, she
barely had attention to spare to listen to the cargo negotiations.

The exchange rate between grain and
gems was well established. The ice cream and news about the milk embargo were
both more valuable than anticipated, but so was the scarce photovore nano. In
the end, she had to throw in her own fine, wooden bedroom set for Royce, the
colony’s CEO. Indeed, every scrap of wood and paper book on the ship sold as a
luxury item. Kesh wanted to trade some of the ship’s living trees to the domed
colony, but Echo put her foot down because they were part of the air-recycling
system.

On the bright side, their load
heading out to Cocytus would be extremely light, requiring no additional fuel.
In the absence of a convenient gas giant, fuel was at a premium in this system.
They would wait and top off the tanks somewhere with lower prices. On the
negative side, bursts of static and odd oscillations often disrupted radio
communication.

Deke referred to such occurrences
as “the Voice of the Void.” As she ended her shift, the Bat tuned the bridge
radio to these sounds, treating the communion time as meditation or prayer. Roz
indicated the upcoming flare events and the ETA for the colony on the flight
plan.

Arriving for his stint on the
bridge, Max likened the sounds to whales or the ancient “Music of the Spheres.”

Deke said, “You, sir, have the soul
of a poet. You will do well in the courts of our leaders.”

Max smiled. “I’ll be practicing my
courtly manners at the cotillion. We should schedule you to do a series of
lectures on Bat culture once we leave this system.”

“Cotillion?” asked the Bat,
puzzled.

“Um … Banker is horrible with
certain concepts. A soirée, hoedown, the annual Spawning Dance on the surface.
It’s a huge social event. Reuben scored us invitations.”

“Us?” Roz repeated, suddenly alert.

Ivy, her shift companion,
whispered, “We discussed this. You wanted to inspect the gem fields.”

“I can’t dance,” Roz whispered.

Max cleared his throat. “A cruise
director recently showed me the basics. I can lead convincingly enough for both
of us. You just need to relax and follow.”

Glaring at her friend Ivy, Roz
said, “I don’t have a dress.”

“Except the one you wore to Max’s
dolphin-medal ceremony,” Ivy said. “You wore that on the shuttle up from Eden.”

Roz set her jaw and tried glaring
louder.

“Oh, that’s a nice dress,” Max
said, offering a drinking bulb to Deke.

Ivy nudged her. “Eh. He likes that
one.”

The noise of solar static and
social anxiety forced Roz from the bridge. In the elevator with Ivy, Roz
squeaked, “What am I going to do at a dance?”

“You mean, other than spawning?”
Roz slugged her friend in the arm. “Ouch. I guess you’ll have to give up total
control of your life for a couple hours.”

“Impossible.”

The lift reached their bedroom
level, and the door slid open. Ivy said, “How much is the information you’re
after worth to you? If you won’t do it for curiosity, do it so we won’t offend
Mr. Royce. You’re attending as his guest, so you need to be
very
nice to
him for selling us the photovores. Tell everyone else at the party what a great
guy he is and how valuable your bedroom set was.”

Roz growled as she bounded toward
their room in reduced gravity. “You use logic the way I use pliers to eat
crab—to get what you want.”

Ivy pulled an ID out of her desk
drawer and handed it over. “Reuben spent a lot of effort on this. You’re name
for the night is Rosalyn Cinder.”

“Cinderella?”

“Isn’t that what you’re hoping
for?” Ivy asked.

The crew organizing the event hit
one major snag. The ship couldn’t have both pilots on the surface in case of
unanticipated flares. With no space station, they couldn’t dock. Most Human
ships landed on the airless world, but gravity would deform
Sphere of
Influence
, ruining all her careful repairs. Without the perfect shape, the
star drive wouldn’t function properly. Therefore, only one of the
Sphere’s
pilots could travel to the planet at a time.

When Roz asked when she could take
their shuttle down, Deke replied, “You’re not touching my blade.”

“We’re on the same team. You
refueled your shuttle off of
my
fuel tanks, and somehow that was okay?”

Deke wouldn’t even look at her.
“The captain authorized everything.”

“He’s not a real captain. If he
were, he’d tell you to rein in that hotdog flying style of yours.”

Max raised his hands. “Don’t worry.
We have plenty of fuel. You saw to that. The Phoenix colony is sending several
massive cargo shuttles with efficient moving crews. That was all part of the
sales price. We can ride to the surface with them.”

“Then why is Deke flying down there
with the Goat?” Roz asked.

“They’re going early to swap the
whiskey for some opportunistic cargo,” Max explained. “The quality of each will
affect the quantities traded, and nobody can trade horses like Reuben.”

****

The dance experience was terrifying and humiliating for Roz.
In the hours between the end of her shift and the arrival of the transport, she
had to shave her legs and squeeze back into a tight, golden dress that didn’t
quite fit anymore. Wearing the shoes was an exercise in self-torture. Then Ivy
put on makeup for her again. The eyelash brush poked Roz, and the beautician
had the nerve to say, “Don’t cry, or you’ll ruin all my hard work.”

The admiring look Max gave her when
she wobbled onto the shuttle in heels made the torment worthwhile. He looked
awesome in a tuxedo and radiated confidence. The fact that he wore Goat contact
lenses and sideburns felt a tad creepy, though. “Sorry about the disguise. Magi
usually employ Goats as servants, not Humans. This will throw any police off
the trail if we have an incident. Reuben will ride up with us on the next
load.”

Roz sat in the copilot’s seat in
the Phoenix shuttle in case anything went wrong. As they landed on the nearly
airless surface, the pilot of the rental spoke to her for the first time.
“Three hours till my last liftoff. I won’t wait.” Adding surface transport each
direction and the official dance duration, she had just enough time.

Security at the spaceport had the
strangest ritual—they weighed her to the gram. Then the guard pointed to the
poster hanging over the exit arch that said, “You Can’t Take It with You.”

“Our water recycling is the best in
the Human Confederation,” said the guard. “Our biggest loss to the system has
been from visitors. Now we require every visitor to void himself before
leaving.”

“What if I can’t pee on demand?”
Roz asked.

“We weigh you again on the way out
and charge for the water you acquired while here.” The words were cheerful, but
the guard scribbled a note by her name.

Now I’m a suspected water
smuggler?

Max said, “Have a little alcohol at
the party. That stuff goes right through.”

“It’s free?”

“One glass each comes with the
price of admission.”

After she confirmed the photovore
shipment at the gate, Roz let Max do all the talking. He led the way through
the maze of tunnels with confidence. Reuben had programmed the entire event
into his wrist computer like a military mission. Max refused to let down his
guard for idle chatter on a crowded train in “enemy territory.”

At the cotillion grounds, Roz clung
to the observation bubble, avoiding actual dancing. She didn’t dare eat for
fear of exploding out of the dress or tipping the scales. All she could do was
sip champagne beside CEO Royce and gush over him the way Ivy had requested. To
keep him talking, she asked questions about his favorite subject—crystals.
“They remind me of a field of sunflowers.”

The pompous, gray-haired executive
nodded. “Much like heliotropes, our plants track the sun as well. Are you
familiar with the concept of
mahdra
?”