Part 16

[Schmulky]

Does anybody know where I could find a list (or, better yet, a labeled map) of which regulatory bodies control the various systems in Evochron Legends? I know that Sapphire is the capital system of the Alliance, which also includes Pearl and Sol. I also know that Thuban is the capital of the Federation, and that most of the top half of the map is the actual Evochron sector (is that run by The Guild? how does that work?). Any clarification on this issue would be extremely appreciated. Vannok and Marty are going on a trip, soon, and I want it to be accurate!

Oh, and who controls Riftspace? Or is it unregulated?

[Maarschalk]

Riftspace is unregulated and is kind of no mans land. There might be other alien forces out there we are not aware of though.....:P:P:P:P:P

[Schmulky]

Hey all,
I sincerely hope that you were all on the edge of your seats for Part 5...it is coming, at any rate. But a series of computer issues led to a reformatting, and between that and life in general, things have been a little wacko lately. I'm trying to get it posted ASAP, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience - that is, if you are inconvenienced.
Be well!

[Maarschalk]

Thanks for the heads up. Take your time but hurry up please...LOL....

[Schmulky]

One day, Martis and I were farming loot from a skirmish, so we were pretty spread out, when six bogeys jumped in. We closed distance as fast as we could, but the reds still managed to split into two squads of three, and engaged us separately. I didn't even notice till we were in the thick of it that Martis and I had baited our respective reds and were shooting each others' down at the same time. As I countered a missile and held fire on the red closest to Martis' tail, I mulled over a few possible names for this new pattern. I settled on "baitbacking," because it's just a more fluid version of baiting and backing. Simple, I know. Laugh if you want, but that's what I call it.

Baitbacking is a real thrill – it's offense, defense, and escort all in one. Plus it builds trust, seeing as you count a lot on your one friendly. In a few days, Martis and I had it down to three minutes per skirmish. Pretty soon we stopped bothering to dock, too. Between Martis fuel converter and my repair system, we were pretty much autonomous. Strangely, nobody from the station ever asked us to leave the area, but they seemed pretty happy that we had stopped bugging them for service (we still showed up to buy countermeasures). I guess they didn't want to fall, but they didn't want to be labeled as our allies, either.

Martis and I didn't see much of each other in person for a while – we were always keeping scramble-ready. Martis spent most of the in-between going over all that encrypted data in his banks, and doing god-knows-what with it. He wouldn't tell me much of anything, he said, until he had thoroughly processed the data. I spent my time doing just about anything, but mostly reading up on ship maintenance. I wanted to be ready in case my repair device ever failed, but I could understand pretty quick why they were such a hit. Pods are very complex! I looked it up - apparently it takes an average of 5 years of training to qualify a tech to build a single spacecraft component, 8 more years to oversee the development of an entire subsystem, with the exception of the AI, which takes more like 20. Of course, I wasn't looking to build - just fix - so my "homeschooling," as Avi called it, took less time per component.

Martis and I were holochatted from time to time. Martis liked talking about how the attacks had been escalating in frequency and magnitude, and how he expected there to be a big push real soon. I was inclined to agree, but felt like I just wanted to blow things up as they came. Then we spent a little time guessing who was behind the attacks. We figured it wasn't a government, because no capital ships had showed up yet, and the pilots were strictly average. That also crossed out the possibility of a major crime boss, but there were just too many ships for one minor crime boss, either. The bogies' hull markings weren't much help; they were from just about everywhere, far as we could tell. And if the fighters were serving as some sort of distraction, something else would have happened by now. As to who who WAS behind the attacks, we resorted to wild speculation. Evil family members was classic, but too unoriginal. A drug syndicate might make sense, if, as Martis had pointed out, the pilots all flew inebriated. I even went so far as to suggest that the attackers were a new alien species, and Martis figured they might be some sentient form of cheese. Don't ask me how he got there. You've probably had conversations like that, too. Anyway, it was getting pretty late at that point, so we signed off, and I hit the bunk straightaway.

The next day I decided to try out something new. It had been close to a month since I'd been more than 4 kilometers of Port Oasis, and besides being sick of the place to start with, I wanted to see what the bogeys would do if they found Martis and me farther away from the station. I ran this by Martis, and pretty soon we were parked 10 kilometers out, facing galactic north. It wasn't long before the bogeys jumped in - behind us, this time - and went straight for the station, even though we must have showed on their radar. Martis and I closed the distance with a quick jump, then started backbaiting as quick as we could. It was strange, having the station as a third bait, but it helped a little. We whittled it down to 5 reds before the rest broke off and tried to swarm us.

Of course, taking on 5 bogeys was a cinch for Martis and me by that point. With a little fancy flying, we just about finished them off when suddenly my radar showed 25 new enemy contacts. I heard Martis groan over the comm, and a little notice popped up on my HUD that Avi had logged a jump point so that I could bug. I closed the notice and called over to Martis, "Hey, sure you wanna see this through?" He took a while to answer.

"Yeah," he said, "Like Don Quixote." Whatever that meant. Anyway, the reds were closing fast. Normally I don't believe in using missiles, but at this point I wondered if I would ever get another chance. I tagged a bogey, aimed a little to its left, and whaled on the afterburner. Once I closed to within gun range, I launched two missiles at him. I guess he wasn't expecting that, because the glow of his explosion filled the cockpit for a second. Then I was back in the dark, with 13 reds to worry about (Martis had 10 of them distracted, Avi told me). I tagged the nearest one, swung around, and started toward him. I landed more hits than he did on our first attack run, so the idiot went into a spiral. I pitched up, so that he was right "below" me, then jetted down. I felt that incredibly painful tingling you get when blood rushes to your head, but I kept going. Pretty soon, the guy was flying circles around my horizontal plane. Next time he got in front-starboard, I locked the guns and started firing, yawing port to match his pattern. As he flamed out I targeted a red behind the explosion. His shields were already half-down, so I lost another missile. He lit up. I picked the next nearest bogey and shot him down while flying backwards, slewing up, and rolling port.

This whole time, I had been dodging missile fire. I was flying hard enough that most of the gunfire missed me, but I had been dropping CMs like like the Federation drops empty threats. It was while turning to face another bogey that I ran out, and two missiles found my tail. Avi shifted power to the aft shields, but the hits still took my engines down to 45%. I couldn't bug out now - not that I had ever planned to. I checked on Martis - his shields were still at 69%, lucky guy. I accelerated as much as I could away from the group, killed the IDS, then 180ed. Mid-turn, I saw Martis trying to make his way over, but we both knew it was a bust. Soon a missile hit him, then another, and a third was firing my way.

"Hey, Martis," I said as I finished the turn, targeted the red in my sight, and fired my last missile. It missed, of course.

"Yeah?" Martis sounded strangely calm, I thought, just when I was getting jumpy.

"What the hell is a donkey hotay?"

"It's a kind of cheese," he said.

"No, seriously, I said, and then two big things happened in my life.

[Edited on 9-15-2010 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Maarschalk]

Ah, finaly part five and another cliffhanger...LOL...now don't stomp on my fingers......Great Read Schmulky!.......:P:P:P:P:P

[Schmulky]

The first big thing that happened in my life was the missile I mentioned heading toward me hit, lit, and tore my ship in half. I remember seeing my left wing tumbling away, glowing and sparking on the end that had been attached to the pod. Then my drive exploded. Luckily it was far enough away that the concussion only widened a few cracks. I was belted in, so I wasn't blown out then and there, but the whole thing had me dazed. Lucky for me that Avi, for having just lost half his body, was on a surprisingly even keel. While I sat and nursed a dim sense of urgency, he sealed all the doors that would still work. The bulkhead behind the main pit slammed shut like a guillotine, then a few control panels flickered back to life. I came to, thanked Avi, then shut down everything. Gunfire lanced by my windshield, and I decided not to punch up the distress beacon, or even correct my tumble until I had drifted far away. All this took about 10 seconds, after which I slipped back into being dazed.

I saw the light from the second big thing first. It took another tumble-round for a Pearl Navy destroyer to come into full view, then fly out again. As far as I could tell, all the reds broke off Martis and I and beelined towards the destroyer. I remember thinking "coffee, I need coffee." Then I felt a stabbing pain in my leg as Avi shot me with adrenaline.

First I checked my suit - the needle-hole had self-patched, so I was all-green. Second, I tried to bring the thrusters back online. Stick control was dead, but the backup controls worked...if you can call it working. On an overhead panel, there were 8 buttons and 2 mini throttles, each with a number, but positioned odd as can be. Especially in a pinch, remembering which thruster is which button is tough. Also, you can't really look out a window while pressing the button - you have to check in between bursts to see how the thrusters are affecting the pod's attitude. Grumbling to myself, I reached up and turned on the panel. I guessed that I had thrusters one through four, and maybe five. Without the stick, the thrusters wouldn't gimbal, so I had to use them in their current configuration. At least with the gravity offline, I'll be able to feel everything.

Let me be the first to tell you that correcting a tumble is no easy task when you're alert and in a full ship with powered gyros, wings, stabilizers, thrusters, and a fully functioning AI. I couldn't even look forward. I pulled off my harness, drifted up, and faced the panel so that it was upside down, sprawling on the ceiling so that "up" was straight out the forward windshield. Then I eased in on button 2 (the numeral 2 looks very odd upside down, you should try it some time), which had the effect of partially checking the downward pitch of my tumble. Balancing the pod at this rate would take a while, but I figured that it couldn't hurt to try. At least this way I'd get a better view of the battle I was missing.

It worked. In ten minutes, I had the rotation slow enough that the stars looked like individual points of light, and not blurry lines. Every 7 seconds I got a pretty good view of the Desrtoyer, which I realized had a detail of several fighter squadrons. The battle was still raging eleven minutes later, which amused me. I couldn't find Martis anywhere, but that didn't mean much.

Next turn, I saw that one of the Feds was getting swarmed. I was expecting to see him light up, but instead he lost 8 missiles, almost all at once. they barreled toward his nearest bandit, and five of them hit before it died. The remaining missiles tagged the next-nearest target, and finished him off, too. I was impressed, and made a note to write my own program for rapid missile launching. I kept track of that fighter, just to see what else he could do, and I was very surprised when about half a minute later, he launched another volley of 8 missiles within about a second! Again and again, this kept happening, until he had used up far more missiles than his ship could possibly have room for. Part of me was thinking that I must be hallucinating, but a much bigger part of me was thinking, "I want a weapon like that."

Suddenly I was caught in a tractor beam, and the remaining tumble stopped pretty quick, and I flew across the cabin and slammed my funny bone into a panel of switches. That woke me up. I sat back down at the con, used the emergency battery to bring the radio online, and picked a frequency I knew the Feds used a lot. "Comm check," I said. Then I saw my right wing drifting away. The beam must have shaken it loose.

"Stand down and prepare for boarding," a formidable voice replied.

"Copy," I said. With Feds, terse is good.

I was indeed boarded - I could hear the spacesuits through the walls. We hit an impasse when I wouldn't let them into the main pit. I tried to explain that I couldn't open the bulkhead with a vacuum on the outside, and that doing so would endanger everyone nearby, but they kept threating to shoot me down. Eventually I just gave up and let them blabber as they dragged me back to Port Oasis. On the way there I jerry-rigged my antenna to leech power from the tractor beam to kickstart my repair device. I was happy when it worked. When we got to the station I was also happy to see Martis' Levi was already snug in a tractor.

Docking me was tricky. The station's tractors snagged me no problem, but my power relay was damaged beyond recognition, and my fuel relay was on the half of the ship that had blown up. The pod's frame was bent enough that the docking port wouldn't fit, either. In the end, the Feds glued a Res-Q-Port to my windshield, then made me cut a hole in it to get out.

Once I climbed into the station, I was met by a group of something like 20 soldiers with rifles, all trained on me. I held my hands up, but they still tased me and ran a strip-search, right there in public. When this was done, I was escorted to one of the rental rooms, where I met Martis and a very angry woman in a Rear Admiral's uniform.

"Sit," she said. I sat. "Do you two know why you're here?" she asked. Martis and I shrugged. "You are here because you are responsible for the greatest traffic violation in the history of the Federation!" Martis and I looked at each other. "We heard reports of multiple skirmishes near Port Oasis, but we never thought for an instant that those responsible would be incon-SID-erate enough not to clean up after themselves. Do you have any idea how much trouble you've caused? 43 MA-jor shipping lanes..." And so on and so forth. Apparently, Martis' and my "indiscretions" - as she called them - had put a real stopper on Federation commerce. I didn't believe this for a second - you could get a perfectly clear approach from galactic south, which is exactly what most everybody did. A month-long brawl just past the front door isn't going to intimidate the kind of spacers who show at port Oasis. I didn't bring this up, though.

Eventually, she got to the part about the "consequences of our actions." She said the Federation was going to park the minifleet that had saved our asses right in front of the Port. If any more attackers showed up, they would "dispatch" them. They didn't much care what we did with ourselves, but if we ever showed up again at Port Oasis, they would "dispatch" us. Nothing would stand in the way of the GLO-rious Federation. That last bit must have been real important, because she mentioned it several times. I didn't get much more than that because I was devoting so much brainpower to not reacting.

We got yelled at for about half an hour; then we were escorted back to our ships and given an hour to clear out of the sector. I got in Martis' pod and we dragged mine out on his tractor. We maxed to the galactic south as fast as my trailing pod would let us.

[Edited on 9-16-2010 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Maarschalk]

LOL....very nice one schmulky.....:P:P:P:P

[Sinbad]

Wow... gripping stuff Schmulky. How can I order the paperback?

[warsign]

Very nice...

[Schmulky]

Thanks for all the wonderful feedback, guys! It really keeps me going at times, so thanks (you fellow writers know what I mean).

I looked back through that I've written so far today. It turns out that there are actually 7 parts up, not 6, and that I lost count somewhere towards the bottom of page one. There were also a few typos that I'll go back and correct soon enough, as well as adding a (probably incredibly short) scene where Vannok buy s the 4 "new" torpedoes that he just lost.

Unfortunately, I won't be writing with nearly as much regularity soon, as school starts back up. I'll still post, because I want to write this just as much for myself as for you guys.

Part 8 is coming up! This one will be rich in dialog.

Again, thanks for reading.

And above all, good hunting.

[Edited on 8-17-2010 by Schmulky]

[Maarschalk]

Thanks for providing us with something cool to read.......

[Schmulky]

Given the damage to my pod, it seemed clear to Martis and me that we, or at least I, wouldn't be going anywhere soon. We thought that letting it leech off of Martis' tractor beam would speed things up a bit, and it would have, but the noise just got too irritating. In the end, I suited up, "walked" over, and prioritized the power relay on my repair system. Within two hours, my pod was leeching straight from Martis' reactor with an umbilical. After that, we had nothing but spare time.

Martis still spent a lot of time poring over his data, but I could tell that he felt guilty for being a bad host. I didn't mind being alone most of the time, but I also felt like I was being a bad guest, so it was really only a matter of time until we found ourselves in the rec area, sitting around a blazing holofire. Martis had some real hot dogs stashed away somewhere, and he brought them out for the occasion. We held them right up to the fire - the computer wouldn't let it burn our hands - and roasted them that way.

"Excellent dog," I said, after I had taken a bite.

"So," Martis paused dramatically, "Your ghosts, first? Or mine?"

"Yours," I said, finishing the hot dog and holding another
into the fire.

"Any preference as to where I should start?" he asked.

"Where did you get your frame?"

"I already told you I bought Used," Martis said, "I bought it from my quirky uncle at a ridiculously low price. As far as I know, nobody in my family knows how he got it. Obviously it's a bit older than just one generation, though - what with the fiber-optics and such. He was a real hoot, my quirky uncle."

"Did you buy it before or after you met Leah?" I asked. His face knotted a little, but not in a revealing way.

"Before," he replied. "I bought it as soon as I earned my heavy license. Then I went off to the Sapphire Science Academy to become a Quantum Mechanic."

"And you met Leah there?" I finished.

"No. I met Leah much later than that! Maybe it's time I tell you a little something of my research..." I nodded, and he continued, "back at SSA I had a friend who was studying to be a Navigator. He and the rest of our little group loved going off on these little 'adventures' on the weekends. On the longer vacations, we'd go find more obscure things. One time during we found the Wolf sector - I think that was the Christmas break of my junior year."

"You've been to Wolf?!?" I blurted.

"Yes," Martis chuckled. "I'll give you the coordinates sometime. Anyway, the summer after that, we set off to find a hidden planet - the one at Aries. We found it after two weeks of pattern-hopping, and while everybody was celebrating, I was wondering about a very important detail."

"What was the detail?" I said, taking the bait.

"Well, I could tell at a glance that the planet was well-lit. It had an atmosphere, weather systems, even some geothermal activity. But I could tell in the very same glance that there was no star nearby."

"Bull," I said. "Can't happen." I reached for a third hot dog.

"Think about it," Martis said. "Did you see a star when you went out to Pearl's hidden planet?" I was dumbstruck. I had been to a hidden planet and back without noticing, but once I thought about it, I remember there not being a nearby star - and I had landed on the dayside. It must have shown on my face, because Martis laughed.

"Don't worry! That's what I had assumed, too, until I saw it with my own eyes. It got me wondering if there were any other well-lit planets out there without suns, which, by the way, is not the type of question you can just bring up in a casual conversation at a science academy. Basically what I did, I convinced my friend to take the group out to find Virgo's hidden planet, and as I had suspected, it didn't have a star, either. If anyone else noticed, they didn't show it." Martis paused for a moment. "Anyway, the hidden planets took a backburner as I finished my thesis. I promised myself that I would solve that mystery some day, but you know how these things go. As soon as I graduated, I got a job as a nanotechnician with Google, which ate up most of my time. Bills piled up - not too fast, you know, just fast enough to keep me where I was. I moored the leviathan at a LaGrange point, bought a car and a house, and settled down to spend the rest of my life on Sapphire. I was part of a civil engineering think-tank on the multiphasic effects of gate travel - trying to figure out how to stack hyper-c objects in same space without annihilating each other. Pretty important stuff! Pure physics became a hobby for me." There was another pause.

"What changed?" I prompted.

"Well, I kept my hobbies, but they became more of an armchair affair. I was living on top of the largest planetary database in the history of mankind, so I used my spare time to analyze archived telescope and spacer data to plot the locations of other hidden planets and so. In a few years, I knew more about the backwaters of Evochron than most spacers do in a lifetime."

"That's because they don't need to know all of it." I don't know why I felt defensive about it, but I did.

"Quite so." Martis paused again. "So, anyhow, that was the state I was in when I met Leah. We still have a few old-fashioned libraries on Sapphire that are open for public use, and I started to frequent one in search of old hard-copy flight manuals of prominent spacers, treatises on quantum tunneling - anything that could get me a lead on the location of a hidden planet or how it might be heated. Some of the more obscure works hadn't even been scanned in to the Cortex, and almost all of those ones proved to be helpful. Anyway, only a very few other people even bothered to use the library, and Leah was one of them. She was a CMB radio astronomer, working on the Science Academy payroll for her doctorate at the time. There were few enough regulars that we sort of got to know each other, but she caught my attention because unlike the others, she didn't spend much time looking for her books. Leah spent almost all her time reading, curled up in some corner or another. She didn't care too much what she was learning, as long as it interested her."

"Nice." I nodded. I wished a lot that I could have known her, then.

"So anyway, we already sort of knew each other when she found me in the Library one day, and asked me some question about quantum computing. I don't even remember what it was, to tell you the truth, but I remember being impressed at a radio astronomer's comprehension of the matter. It was at that moment that I knew she could help me discover the secret of the hidden planets.

"Explaining things to her was difficult. Remember, you didn't believe me at first, and we've been wingmates for nearly two months, now. It turned out that the only way I could convince her I wasn't lying was by taking her out to Aries Hidden Planet and showing her the lack of sun to light the dayside." Martis smiled. "She was a tough biscuit, Leah..."

"So then what happened?"

"Well, we got straight to work. We did research, took measurements - annotated, of course...things got exciting pretty quick. I had already suspected that quantum tunneling was involved somehow, but Leah took it to a whole new level. She hypothesized that the reason almost nobody seemed to notice the lack of a star near a hidden planet was caused by some sort of naturally occurring perception filter. You get that? Nobody's ever really made a successful EM-based perception filter, and suddenly we know of at least five naturally occurring ones, on a massive scale. All we had to do was prove it, and we started with Pearl. The first thing we figured out was that, as assumed, Peal's Hidden Planet has a stable magnetic field and is subjected to a constant solar wind - photons and all. The next part we figured out, and this really raised my eyebrows, was that the solar wind is not directed - that is to say that while it does hit the planet at a consistent attitude, it doesn't focus down to a point in any direction, or even particularly seem to come from anywhere. It's just there," he stressed, and I nodded. "Of course, this was a major impasse, but at least we pretty much knew that complex quantum tunneling was also involved, so I started running calculations on our data, just to see what would turn up. We took readings from all over the sector, kept crunching numbers, but we hadn't gotten very far when the meteor hit."

"How long were you out there taking readings?" I asked.

"Four years," he said, looking down and smiling. "four years...and I still don't have a mathematical model for either the tunneling or the perception filter." He almost seemed angry about that last part. then he looked at me. "So how about you? How did you get here?"

"Eah," I hesitated, wondering if I should apologize for Leah again, "that's a pretty long story."

"Why don't you start by telling me a little bit about your childhood," joked Martis.

"I grew up on Riftspace," I said, looking him in the eye.

"Gristle," said Martis.

[Edited on 9-20-2010 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 9-20-2010 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Sinbad]

Great stuff. Keep it coming!

[Maarschalk]

LOL......Great story....looking forward to hear more about his life in riftspace....

[Schmulky]

"Yeah," I said.

"So you..."

"Were the son of second-generation pioneers, grew up wild and free, lived off the land, that kind of stuff?"

"Yeah,"

"That's me. We even had a farm with free-range krupta."

"Oh."

"I hated it. I didn't get along too well with my parents. They wanted me to run the farm when I grew up, and I wanted to fly. My father, he got angry real easy. He loved to say that I'd take the farm and be happy about it. Ironically - well, you've probably heard enough Alliance fighter slang to know that "taking the farm" means getting shot down over a planet. I don't know why they thought yelling at me would make me want to stay, but that's what they did. Lots and lots of yelling.

“The rest of the planet wasn't much better. No matter where I went, I was surrounded by people who were really proud to be pioneers. I mean too proud. In school, we had these Nationalism classes, which were disgusting. I had this one Nationalism instructor for several years, and she had this spiel about how great it was that Riftspace had an 18% infant mortality rate. You get that? She'd be glowing, and everyone else would be nodding or taking notes...Same spiel every year, too. Just about everybody was that way – proud of things like their infant mortality rate. They were proud that we didn't have enough hospitals, and that most fires had to be put out by bucket brigade because only two cities on the entire planet had water mains... You know what a bucket brigade is?� The fire crackled, as if to make a point. Martis managed a nod, but barely. “Oh, another thing everyone just loved was plows. Most of the farmers on Riftspace used old-fashioned plows of one sort or another – the more archaic, the better. It was almost as if the longer it took you to till your land, the better a pioneer you were. Farmers would be out there turning ankles and stepping in ox dung and cutting themselves on sharp plow-edges in this planet-wide, ongoing manliness contest, I guess? It made me want to vomit. I had to leave. They were driving me crazy.�

“I can imagine.�

“I wish you could have seen it. From a distance it was probably funny.�

“I'm sorry.�

“Nah, don't be. I mean, I made it out okay, right?�

“How did that work, by the way?�

“One day I ran away. The nearest city was only about 5 decs away, and I hitched a ride from a spacer once I got there.�

“You walked 50 kilometers?� Martis almost shouted in surprise. I smiled at that.

“Yeah. It was that, steal my parents' combustion car, or take a horse.�

“So what happened then?�

“The spacer I hired flew me up to R-Com, which was the local name for the Alliance recruiting station in the sector. I signed on as a mercenary (not a goon or a militiaman!). For the first few weeks I was just a guard in some hallway, but I guess I was real good at standing formidably or something. Pretty soon I was in basic flight school, and I graduated with honors in what my advisor said was record time, though I never got a badge for it. I got a low-end used Pulsar on a rent-to-own plan, and I was assigned to a flight group.�

“Is that where you were when...�

“No, I was back at R-Com, actually. They commissioned me early so I could be reassigned as a flight instructor.�

“Nice,� Martis said, and then realized what he had just said. “I didn't mean�- he gushed.

“I know, I know� I said. “Don't worry. I get it,� but he still looked a little frazzled. I let it slide.

To be honest, I was getting a little frazzled, too. I knew where this conversation was going, and I didn't like it. We both reached for another hot dog at the same time, saw what the other was doing, and put our hands back in our laps. I nodded for Martis to take one first.

“So your parents...� he floundered. “Did you ever...�

“Get back in touch?� I finished. He nodded. “No. Nope. I always meant to, but I never did.�

“I'm sorry.�

“Thanks, I guess – but it doesn't do much good, you know.�

“I know.�

“These hot dogs are amazing. Are they beef or pork?�

“Turkey, actually,� said Martis.

“No drell?�

“No drell. They're made from real, free-fall turkey.�

“Free-fall?�

“The turkeys were raised in low lunar orbit. It makes for more white meat.�

“Wow. We never had that on Riftspace.�

“Let me guess, it wasn't backwards enough?�

“Bingo,� I said.

[Edited on 9-25-2010 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Schmulky]

Hey, all,
With school out of the way for a few months, I'm going to try writing and posting again. I'm rather eager to continue this story, so I hope there is still some interest out there...
Also, I'll be playing again as soon as I can get my joystick back (Long story).

[Maarschalk]

Yes, ofcourse there is intrest......LOL....I have been waiting 8 Looooooooooong months....No pressure...
but will you PLEASE HURY UP.......:P:P:P:P:P

[DaveK]

Hey, all,
With school out of the way for a few months, I'm going to try writing and posting again. I'm rather eager to continue this story, so I hope there is still some interest out there...
Also, I'll be playing again as soon as I can get my joystick back (Long story).

I'd begun to think that the writing fraternity had either moved on to another universe or that their creative juices had dried up

Yes please!! :D:D

[Schmulky]

We talked for a while longer. Thing is, I didn’t want to spill about Riftspace. Martis tried not to act too curious, but it didn’t work, so things petered out. I was getting tired anyway. Finally Martis took the hint - he put out the fire, stowed the hot dogs, and offered me Leah’s cubby, adding as quickly as possible that there were no other places to sleep on board because all the other crew slots had been filled with databanks.

The cubby smelled odd, which didn’t surprise me. It had been about three weeks since anyone had lived in it, and I already suspected that Martis' pod didn’t have service nanos. I got into the sleeping bag and looked around.

Pictures.

I had never seen so many pictures in one place before! She must have had a kilo of pictures on those walls. I couldn’t help but look at them. First I saw a picture of Leah standing at the edge of a massive canyon, then one of Leah with her...well, it looked sort of like a dog, but with a longer snout and a prehensile tail. Then I saw a picture of Leah and what I assumed to be her family all standing in this field next to a radio telescope. Her dad, if that’s who he was, had completely silver hair. I liked him right away – he seemed to look right at you through the picture, like he was glad to see you. Everybody in the pictures was smiling so wide...I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but then I chalked it up to Sapphire custom.

Suddenly I felt like I was spying. I tried not to look, but the pictures were everywhere. No matter how I turned, I saw the same woman smiling ear to ear. A dead woman.

I was in her sleeping bag.

It was a very long night. I kept having this dream, over and over. Leah would be in this field - the one next to the radio telescope – dancing. She’d be dancing and laughing, and the dream would zoom in to her face. Then, mid-laugh, she would corpsify, and I would wake up, let out a hefty yelp, maybe bang my head on something, and spend an hour or so trying to get back to sleep without looking at any more of Leah’s gorram pictures.

Next morning, I told Martis that I didn’t want to sleep in Leah’s cubby again. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. I was glad he didn’t. That night, I took her bag out to the rec area and set the grav to 0.2, but the damage had been done. The dream came back, but with a sadistic twist. Every now and then, Leah would sort of turn into...

Frak it. Just frak it.

Her name was Saer. In my dream, I kept seeing Leah and Saer and Leah’s face after she died and Saer’s face as she died. Sometimes I could see the corridor, too.

Anyway, I didn't get much sleep that night, so I started taking knockout pills each evening after. Still, the dreams would come back as I woke up in the morning, and I still felt like I had spent most of the night awake anyway. Martis still wouldn't let me help sift through his frelling data, so all I could do to pass the time was try to read or listen to music (Martis didn't have recreational any visualization systems on board), neither of which worked. It got to the point that I was trying to play chess in my head, but I couldn't concentrate for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Every now and then and with absolutely no warning, I’d get a flashback. Never a full one - only parts at a time - really unnerving.

I hadn't thought to ask or look around, so it wasn't until about a week in that I discovered the treadmill. I unfolded it and started running on it like mad. I could feel myself almost starting to calm down when Martis came down to see what the noise was. He got this weird look on his face when he saw me. It made my hair crawl.

“Running, huh?� he sort-of-called over the whining machine.

“Yeah,� I said. I was having trouble running straight, I was so tired. Martis made the kind of weird face that meant he was trying very hard not to make one, then turned back towards the ladder.

“Hey!� I wanted an explanation, but Martis reached out and grabbed a rung. I stopped the treadmill.

“MARTIS!� That got his attention. My legs were sort of wobbly - I guess they didn't like slowing down so fast. “What is it?� I snapped.

“Nothing,� said Martis.

“I know that look. What are you hiding?�

“Nothing,� he insisted. Looking back, I understand why he looked so confused right then.

“Porra.� Suddenly I was on the other side of the cabin, next to Martis. “What the hell are you not telling me?� I must have looked wild.

“Look, Van�-

“I. want. to. know.� There was silence. Martis shook his head and let out a sigh.

“If you really must, that was Leah’s treadmill,� he said, and he started climbing the ladder back up to the flight deck.

I knew that some emotion or another was flooding through me, but I had no idea what. I didn't care. I never liked emotions anyway. Then I got an idea. A really, really stupid idea, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I turned around a bit, balled up my fists as tight as they would go, and let out the loudest scream I could make. Halfway through it turned into a sob, so I kept screaming. You know what? It felt pretty good. In a few minutes, I felt good enough to fold up the treadmill without slamming.

Five minutes later I was in the sonic shower. As it hummed around me, I wondered what Martis must have been thinking as I bawled my brains out. It can’t have been nice for him, I thought. Nobody wants to have a madman on their spaceship. I came that close to hurting him, too, I thought. I didn't want...well, I didn't want to do that. No more slipping, I told myself.

I got out of the shower, suited up, and pulled my way along the umbilical back to my pod. I cycled through the airlock (this time it was my airlock that had equal pressure on both sides). On my way up to the control deck, I saw the galley. It was empty. When I got up to the main pit, I plugged my suit radio in to the console. “Avi?� I called.

“I am here,� he answered. I was glad to hear his voice.

“How have you been?�

“Busy,� came the reply.

“Sorry I dinged you up so bad.�

“Do not worry,� he replied. “It is an occupational hazard.�

“Look, Avi, how long until life support can be on line again?�

“I could turn it on right now, though that would be inadvisable. Barring anomaly, minimal optimum functionality should be restored by 09:33 tomorrow.�

“Thanks,� I said. “That’s the best news I've had all day.�

“I would have informed you sooner, but you put high-function wireless communications pretty far down on the Repair Device’s priority list.�

“Avi, you sound positively vexed.�

“Of course not. I am incapable of vexation.�

“Sure thing. Hey, I’ll let you get back to doing your thing, alright? I gotta say goodbye to Martis.�

“Do you realistically anticipate that it will take you 16 hours and 32 minutes to do so?� I thought about that.

“Nah, I can stay here for a while.� So I did. I spent about four hours in my new/old seat, just staring out at the stars. I guess Avi was more interested in having company than talking - not that I could have kept up with a quantum computer, anyway. It felt sort of good to be empty.

[Edited on 6-3-2011 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Maarschalk]

LOL...Nicely done, and I thought I would have to wait a few more days for part 10....Thanks Schmulky.......looking forward to part 11.....:P

[DaveK]

:D:D:D:D:D:D

Thanks!

[Schmulky]

I didn’t want to go back. As soon as I unbuckled my harness, the queasiness hit again. I practically had to force myself through the airlock. All along the umbilical, I kept reminding myself that I had to go back - that I had nowhere else to go for over half a day - which just made me feel worse.

***

“I’m leaving tomorrow,� I said.

“Vannok, you don’t�-

“Martis, listen. You saw me earlier. You heard me.� I paused, trying to sort out the important thoughts from the random bits. “I can’t stay here, or near here. I need to get away from these...triggers� I let out a breath. “I gotta go,� I said, with what I hoped was a sort of finality.

“These last few weeks haven’t been easy for me, either,� said Martis, doing his best Buddha. “Healing takes time, you know, and humans do tend to heal faster when they are not alone.�

I know that, I thought. “Look, Mart, I haven’t slept well in days! I've got bruises from waking up every morning! I can't stay like this, and you know it, and I know it, and it's nothing personal but I need to be away from everything.�

"Have you thought about seeking professional care? PTSD has had some pretty standard treatments for a while, now."

"If I get diagnosed then I can't fly. Noone takes that from me."

Martis didn't say much, but it was written on his face. He was the same way, deep down.

“I wish I had something better to say,� I continued. “I wish I could thank you – properly – for putting me up this long...I wish you knew that there was nothing you can do and that it isn’t your fault, even though you already know that.�

“I understand,� said Martis, which made me feel very alone. After a pause, he said, “You still have some time here, I’m guessing. You can talk to me, if you think it would help.�

“Talk about what?�

“About how...� Martis sort of gestured at me, “how you got like this. About what Leah's death seems to have done to you...about, I'm guessing, the day-�

“I don’t want to talk about it,� I said, and that was that.

Next morning, I put Leah’s sleeping bag back in her cubby. “fat lot of good you were� I muttered as I tied it to the wall. I should have just slept outside in my spacesuit. I was finishing a breakfast of “orange�-flavored algal porridge when Martis climbed down from the flight deck - evidently he had pulled another all-nighter crunching his data. “That study of yours really means a lot, doesn’t it,� I said.

“Yes,� he said. “I feel a compulsion to finish what Leah and I started.� I nodded. Martis was a pretty zen guy.

“Will you go back to Pearl’s Hidden Planet?� I asked. Martis shot me the “what else can I do?� look. “Well, then, if I ever need to find you...� He smiled. “Hey, I’ve been wondering about this for a while, now, and I figure I might as well ask you, of all people. How come I can hear missile impacts through the vacuum of space?�

“It’s one of the great mysteries of modern science,� he said, shaking his head. He looked at me. “To date, nobody has published any relevant work. I guess with some things, it's just easier to accept them and move on.�

[Edited on 6-10-2011 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 6-24-2012 by Schmulky]

[Edited on 8-8-2014 by Schmulky]

[Schmulky]

Thanks for reading, guys. It really makes me feel good every time I see the number of visits on this page go up. Stay tuned, and as always, good hunting.

[Maarschalk]

Thanks Schmulky. now on to Part 12.....:P