The Princess of Caldris (6 page)

stasis field. If someone one homes in one
your beacon before it goes stasis, you may be picked up. Otherwise
you’re under stasis indefinitely-alive, but unable to call for
help.

“
Thank you for that,
Airman.” Tokushima eyed him dryly.

“
Just doing my job,
Maam.”

“
Woolly Bully!” Parsons
snapped from the cockpit and I could feel the craft alight itself,
aloft quickly into the airstreams and high lights of dawn, rushing
like a puppy to the cumulonimbus and the high places in the
stratosphere. Parsons delight was palpable to me; behind us a
shimmering white line, purposeful action made tangible arcing up
and across the sky. Below us marshmallow clouds now, subdued and
silent in their perfect patterns and spiral motions over the seas
and the volcanoes of Caldris.

Far and away….
Below us my world, spinning, turning, its
geographies like abstract speckled studies of color and light;
above us the planets of Caldris System.
The
sky becomes black and the sun a star and still; from Parsons,
wonder and joy; ever and always the miracle of flight for primates
such ourselves,
the staid gleaming of
dreams ineffable since our dawn of self awareness when our distant
ancestors, worlds away, looked out upon the hummingbirds and eagles
with envy and impossible aspiration; to fly
.

And thus we set upon the
worlds, to fly, in search of our Princess.

Parsons’ calls to his
co-pilot were less poetic than his joy, but they too were a form of
phonetic poetry of flight: “Apogee reached, increasing thrust,
apparent solar wind five, radiation shields five, current velocity
at target, orbit traffic control clear, flight path gravity assist
off Electra, gravity assist off Maia to jump point
EMC5.”

And thus we jump skipped
among to moons to point where we could shoot deep through the wall
of space-time and cheat the laws of physics for a fast forward to
the distant corners of the star system in a day instead of months
or years.

Sleep came again with
Tokushima’s radiant glow (with echoes to another floating world,
Japan, Edo period) on one side of me, and Hammerstein’s
sharp-shooter dead eye dick focus (with echoes of John Henry and a
heavy metal sledge) on the other. They my surrogate parents now,
with badges and high energy particle weapons as big as my
arms.

I was twelve, and that was as magnificent as
it gets. Gonna be missing school for a while. Sorry (not
really).

Sleep, dream, sail away,
beyond the tangerine seas and volcanoes, dream, the moons of
Caldris, the daughter of Atlas, sail away.

Somewhere in the dream Parsons gives the
command, “Swirl the Mesons, Buck! We’re breaking for Hyper!”

And all the stars in a jewel box,
darkly.

Neil Thacker

Standing in the ruins at
the great starport at New Galen I came for the first time to that
nihilistic place where as Ecclesiastes said, all is vanity. Among
the crumbled stones I picked up a broken brick. In the still
radioactive ruins lie the ultimate futility of life and reason, so
many people-come and gone-and where to go from there, and what
should I respond to this inevitable wall of dark and unknowable
fate? Yet Einstein claims time is a continuum; the past in all its
beauty, struggle, folly, and grandeur somehow remains. Perhaps it
is good there come a rest from this existence, and dipping into the
well of quanta we become again?

Foolish musing!
Still-philosophers and Priest kings debate upon the epochs these
eternal questions-one must answer this present darkness. I didn’t
have an answer, so told my droid to play Gershwin’s Rhapsody in
Blue as loud as his speakers would, back into the ruins. Music came
again to the long era of devastation, a small revolt against man’s
fate. I imagined the ghosts of New Galen danced that day, grateful
that I slapped back at despair. Perhaps they did. –Princess
Clairissa Maggio.

Parsons woke me with a yell from the
cockpit, “Ba-boomah! Thank you Great Space Ghost we are home and
dry, normal space again, Oort cloud below us, above us only
sky!”His co-pilot (I forget his name, perhaps intentionally, he was
quite the irritant) was lamenting loudly, “I really hate, hate,
hate the OortCloud. What a dump.”

“
Don’t be a Baby. Man up a
little will you? This is a walk in the park, if you’ve got a
pair.”

“
I’ve got a pair, and they
both say it’s a royal pain.”

“
Baby. Just for that I’m
not giving you any phone numbers from my little black book when we
get to Fort Oort. I don’t want you embarrassing me at the base
canteen.”

“
You’ve got numbers from
Fort Oort?”

“
Silly wabbit, I have ALL
the numbers from Fort Oort. Watch your vectors, you big
baby.”

The Oort cloud was looking
a lot better to the co-pilot, I sensed. I also sensed Parsons was
going to hook him up the ugliest beast on his list just for
laughs.

I felt sorry for the poor
beast. Ugly is an accident of birth, rock-head annoying is a
failure of basic common sense.

Tokushima noticed I was
awake and once again I was struck by her yin and yang duality as
she pushed her particle beam disser off to the side and said,
“There, there, little fellow! Did you sleep well?” and brushed her
lovely hand through my hair. Every single officer in her unit would
have bought dinner for the crew to have that hand caressing them, I
thought, and cursed my diminutive size and few feeble years again.
What a goddess!

“
Yes
Mam.” I said, keeping all my goddess thoughts to my humble boy self
but thinking,
someday, you will be
mine
.

“
Oh good!” She smiled down
like a Da Vinci Madonna, angelic, unaware of my boy plans to grow
up and propose marriage.

Well, sometimes you just got a take it as it
comes. Eat your heart out unit. I smiled coyly back into those huge
Asian eyes. I sensed my cuteness was making her want to find a
husband and have babies. Foiled by my own cuteness, she would
surely set about and complete that mission before I had time to
come of age.

Steve Allman

I sighed and glanced at her
big disser. Oh well, at least the babies will learn to shoot well.
I had an impression of her putting a smiley face on a target at 300
yards unassisted, and knew that it was true. She had changed her
hair color to black during the flight, some sort of ready-for-death
symbolism I sensed.

Hammerstein tossed me an MRE. “Eat up kid,
you’ll need your strength. This CCCE ship at Fort Oort is so loaded
with quanta we’re going to have to work at it slowly.”

Hammerstein’s duty in the Navy patrolling
the cloud had been decades before but for him the place held a
strange familiarity. “The sticks. Snowball Ocean, The Ninth Circle
(Dante’s frozen Hell for the treacherous), Outer Darkness-the place
had a hundred nick-names for the unfortunate military stationed out
there.

Oddly enough, prospectors-and Hammerstein,
liked the celestial quietude, the glacial slowness, and the epic
sense of geologic deep time. Once Hammerstein had been given an
order to watch a mining camp suspected of smuggling weapons. He sat
watching for so long his communications gear froze. No way to call
for help, and the next expected pass by the Navy weeks away, he
decided to find the contraband ammo himself. He ignited it,
blinding the smugglers temporarily-long enough to get a bead on
them, round them up and lock ‘em down.

When the Navy finally got around to checking
on Hammerstein again he was grilling lobster tails for himself,
feeding the smugglers oatmeal and water, and dipping into their
spiced rum.

Today, however, he pushed that memory back
into his mind forcefully and realized this wasn’t any old two-bit,
six or eight asteroid stalking yahoos peddling bootleg matter
cannon ammo to wanna-be mobsters on the moons. Whoever was behind
the kidnapping, well, there were a lot more of them than eight and
they wouldn’t be taken down with boot-camp mischievous ammo
reindeer games. No Soirée at the harbor bar this time.

Moreover, there still wasn’t a definitive
direction regarding motive and suspect.

Hammerstein and the crew couldn’t know,
things were about to get a lot worse. Fort Oort was still a haul
away when I got the impression of someone. Vague at first, just
that sense of being watched that doesn’t come from giant snowballs
in deep space, but from eyes. Sentient eyes, self aware, and
busy.

But whom, and busy at what?

Busy looking. Looking
for…a Hammerhead
.

“
Get out!” I yelled.
“Pilot, get out! Something’s coming!” I yelled at the top of my
lungs.

“
Detective you need to
sedate the child?” Annoying-man barked from the piloting cabin.
Parsons, however, had better instincts and changed his flight
pattern hard and fast, bringing us up nimbly in a rush above the
stellar plain.

Just in time. A warp ripple
slammed the space where we had been just moments before and I knew
not even the inertial dampers of the massive

Hammerhead would have preserved our skins
through that shockwave.

“
What the devil was that?”
Annoying-man croaked, and even my twelve year old mind knew he
needed a slap in the head big time.

“
Watch your dials, Ensign,
or I’ll let the kid co-pilot.” Parsons shot at him.

“
Wormhole Generator.”
Hammerstein said evenly. They’re trying to knock us out with a
shock wave. Get ready for a snow storm.”

Comet
Storm
, to be precise. Six light weeks of
super dense Oort cloud shaken with the force of a wormhole suddenly
bending the very fabric of time and space with the full force of a
gravity bomb whose implosion diameter probably spanned a full
hundred kilometers, suddenly sucked away to who knows
where.

And like a snow storm, it came on us with
hurricane force in the darkest, coldest part of the system.

“
Find its center, Pilot,”
Hammerstein howled over the squealing engines banging into the red
to maneuver the storm.

The Hammerhead swerved in
the raging onslaught of primordial ice and rock. I got a big jolt
of fear from Annoying-man as the field shielding too slipped into
the red. “Shoot us a path through that snow, Buck, or we’re gonna
buy it right here right now.” Parsons said coolly, eyeing his
readouts looking for the center as Hammerstein said.

Annoying-man turned out to be a good shot,
when his hide was on the line, and the particle beam weapon atop
the hammerhead wailed into the dark, creating a shockwave of its
own which gave the shields on the Hammerhead a respite from the
pounding.

Hammerstein didn’t feel a moments fear, his
overwhelming frustration that he couldn’t do something but hang on
and watch . Tokushima’s warrior soul finally broke through, yet
somehow merged and not indistinct from her maternal, as she still
managed a worried glance in my direction.

I reached out in my mind, deep through the
raging proto-comets rushing at us through the long wave cycle.
Until the shockwave, the quanta in the debris had followed eons of
predictable, Newtonian orbits, a complexity like a sponge dragged
through a five dimensional squeegee. I looked for an anomaly in the
quanta, through the storm, what I had felt before watching us.