Galaxy's End: Book One Page 18

  “On the job, like all stewards,” he grumbled defensively while trying valiantly to deflect the subject.

  “No, not that. Please do not play games with us. You don’t know how to use your empathy professionally. You just stumble around and sometimes it works and at others, it does not. Right?” Kat placed the spoonful of ice cream on her tongue and let it melt as she waited for his response.

  It came much as she expected. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Captain Stone also waited for him to answer more completely and when he didn’t, she picked up the torch of the conversation as if discussing the dreadful weather. “Was the captain of this ship the first person you ever killed?”

  “I-I didn’t do that.”

  The delay and stutter belied his answer.

  Kat said, her eyes still locked on his, “Bert, can you hear us?”

  The speaker on the ceiling answered softly, but still drawing the attention of all three in the dining room, “Yes.”

  She smiled softly at the steward and spoke to Bert, “Will you please ask Bill to locate this steward’s private quarters and search it for the murder weapon?”

  “You can’t do that,” the steward spat. “It’s my private space.”

  “On my ship,” Captain Stone growled back in the same tone, “there are no private spaces.”

  Bert said, “Done. Bill is on his way.”

  Kat instinctively knew that Bert had supplied Bill with the compartment number and access codes to override the security. She watched the steward slumped in resignation. Stone had guessed correctly. The needle used to inject the poison was in his quarters. She ate another spoonful of ice cream without tasting it this time.

  Her mind had shifted to what would eventually be done to the man sitting across from her.

  Bert spoke from the speaker again, “Your steward has a bank deposit equaling three years of his annual pay in his account on Prager Four, deposited a day ago.”

  Bill entered the room holding a medical injector in a sealed glassine bag. No doubt the murder weapon. It hadn’t taken him long to find it.

  The steward leaped to his feet and charged toward the door, unfortunately choosing to rush past Bill. An elbow shot out and then Bill casually helped the steward to his feet and used a napkin from a nearby table to help stem the flow of blood from his nose.

  Captain Stone turned to the steward. “My mother was from Prager Four. She always said the population was small because the soil was barren and the atmosphere hazy from erupting volcanoes and contaminated from a war nobody remembers. Only one fair-sized city on the entire planet. Too bad.”

  He scowled.

  She continued in a friendly manner, “With such a small population to draw from, it occurs that you and I may be distantly related.”

  Bill started to escort the steward out, but Kat suddenly snapped, “Sit him back down.”

  Bill did so without question. He’d heard that tone from her before and knew not to object.

  Kat said, “Bert, help me out here. Of the thousands of planets humans live on, what are the chances that two random people are from the same planet, one with a small population like Prager Four? I mean, my first instinct is to say the odds are more than one in a thousand that a single person is from there, but since there are two of them in this room, what are the odds? One in five hundred?”

  Bert said, “I do not understand the question.”

  Kat looked at the Steward and then at Captain Stone. She spoke into her hand again, “The chances of both of them coming from Prager Four would be slim, right?”

  “Very slim,” Bert agreed. “You are incorrect in your math assumption. It is a number with a lot of zeros. Let’s just say millions-to-one to round off the answer.”

  Kat closed her eyes. Her mind was closing in on something—but it was not quite there. She ignored the puzzled looks from the captain and Bill and continued, “What are the odds of three people sitting at the same table in a starship by chance being from the same planet? Give me a general answer, not specific.”

  Bert said, “Three people? Trillions to one, however when you consider the small percentage of people who leave their home planet to travel, especially a small one like Prager Four with a tiny population, you have to add a few more zeros, perhaps ten or twelve. Do you wish the exact amount?”

  Kat sat bolt upright. “I’ve heard you can use DNA or bone samples or whatever and determine where a person and their family came from.”

  “There are various methods,” Bert agreed with her.

  “Is anyone in my background from Prager Four? Can you do a quick check?”

  “Wait one,” Bert said, meaning she would have to wait a moment for an answer. Instead, she waited many silent moments, her eyes daring any of the others to speak. Meanwhile, her mind flitted and leaped from idea to conclusion, leapfrogging, and twisting along the way.

  “Well?” she tapped her toe in irritation. Bert was usually much quicker to respond to her silliness.

  Bert finally said, “Your mother was born on an unidentified planet, or one I have not been able to ascertain, however, she moved to Prager Four when young, perhaps at age six. Your father appears to have been born there.”

  “Add another dozen zeros to the odds,” she muttered.

  Bert emitted a single ping of sound that seemed to confirm her estimate.

  Captain Stone’s mouth hung open. She had heard the questions Kat had asked Bert and surmised the rest before Bert confirmed it. Three of them from the same small population pool on a backwater planet was coincidence enough. Add to that the fact that two were empaths and the other anti-empath and there were not enough zeros left in the universe to calculate the odds.

  Empaths were supposed to be rare.

  Kat’s eyes were wide, her brow furrowed.

  Captain Stone turned to the steward. “What do people call you?”

  “Chance,” he said, still holding the napkin to his nose as he stemmed the blood.

  He didn’t seem to have caught on to the impact of any of the conversation. His escape had failed, and he expected the worst. That was probably what occupied his thinking.

  Captain Stone turned to him and flashed an insincere smile. “This is your lucky day, Chance. Your trip into the airlock has been postponed—for now.”

  After her good news announcement, he didn’t appear any happier.

  Wary might be a better description.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kat

  I listened to Captain Stone, directly and indirectly, threaten the steward while the numbers Bert had given me swirled around in my head. Probably only a few hundred people from Prager Four had ever traveled to other worlds. It was a small, backward, agrarian planet where few ships landed.

  The odds of three of them meeting on the same starship were infinitely small. Added to that was the fact that when it was generally believed that only one in several billion were empaths, the odds of us three sitting together at the same table, all from Prager Four in one manner or another, were incalculable.

  Not that it was preplanned or anything, but the factors in the equation were somehow skewed—or our facts were incorrect. In other words, we were wrong in our assumption in one way or another. That also meant Bert was wrong—and to my knowledge, that had never happened.

  The most likely wrinkle was there were far more empaths than known.

  The other was that we were somehow related or involved, the three of us.

  Neither seemed likely.

  Captain Stone said, “Bill, escort our Mister Chance to a location and appoint a ship’s crewman to stand guard. Let the crewman know this is the person who killed his captain and communications officer, tried to turn the ship over to pirates, or rebels, or whatever they turn out to be, and you’d better tell him to make certain no harm comes to Chance.”

  The orders were contradictory. A crewman who learned those things might, and probably would, take matters into their own hands.
I said, “Bill, maybe you need to stay there with him. At least, for a while.”

  Captain Stone nodded and meekly added, “Yes, I suppose any of the crew or passengers would probably kill him at their first opportunity if there is nobody there to keep an eye on them.”

  We watched Bill walk him from the room. Bill seemed conflicted with his odd orders. Chance hung his head and shuffled ahead.

  Stone said to me, “We’re due on the bridge.”

  When we arrived there, Fang turned in his damp seat and said, “I was about to call you. That ship is slowly gaining on us.”

  Captain Stone shook her head. “When we enter the wormhole, we’ll lose it.”

  Their attitude towards Bill and I sometimes rankled. Our friends treated us as innocent idiots. It was wearing on me. Not making me angry, but it needed to stop. We were young, poor, and not as innocent as they believed. I said, “Ships in warp and wormholes cannot be followed. Everyone knows that.”

  Fang flicked his red tongue in my direction as if snapping a flying insect before turning back to Captain Stone. “I’m not so sure. Permission to take a slight detour at the next nexus?”

  “Do it,” she ordered as she took her seat beside him. She motioned for me to sit in one of the chairs behind them.

  The myriad of wormholes intersected millions of times. Switching from one to another at those junctions meant a microsecond to several minutes in warp-space as a ship exited one wormhole and entered another. Ships could be tracked in warp, just as we had found we were being followed. The time transitioning a nexus from one wormhole to another allowed someone a brief time to grab a snapshot of a ship, but there was no way to follow another ship while actually inside a wormhole.

  My mind was not on the pirates, but the man in custody. Chance. Perhaps Captain Stone hadn’t yet understood how three empaths from the same small planet could be together. Forgetting the empathic abilities, the three of us on the same ship at the same time was almost impossible. That worried and ate at me.

  I hesitated to mention it again. I ground my teeth and kept my thoughts to myself. The captain would tell me her ideas when she was ready.

  Fang said, “Turning to follow an intersecting wormhole in three, two, one.”

  There was no feeling of motion. Nothing to show we had turned or left one wormhole to enter another. My eyes were on the screen that flashed a snapshot of the universe around the nexus.

  Captain Stone kept her attention on the readouts and screens providing a myriad of information. A small red blip blinked on and off. She mouthed in a near whisper, “It made the turn right after us instead of continuing ahead as it should have.”

  “Permission to launch into the next wormhole?” Fang asked.

  “Granted.”

  Time lingered and gave me time to think. I had never asked Bert about my origins, but now wished I had. I wanted to know more about Prager Four, too.

  Since his background was as unknown as mine, had Bill also come from the same planet? If not, or even if he had, how had we managed to arrive on Roma? If Bill was a native of Roma, someone had paid for my passage, but who? My parents? Probably. That made sense. It also meant they were either government employees or wealthy enough to afford three tickets. That said a lot, but what it meant beyond that they had the means to buy starship tickets that cost more than most houses—a ticket for each of them and one for me—I had no idea that was possible.

  Like all adoptees or children who find themselves alone in the universe, thoughts of my parents being a king and queen, therefore I was a princess, flitted through my mind. But there were other reasons families traveled between stars. Commerce, military postings, trade, and . . . well, the ideas beyond those were thin.

  If the three of us in my family had arrived on Roma together, as seemed reasonable, where were they? My parents. What had happened to them? Why was I left on my own?

  “Executing wormhole shift,” Frog said, sounding like the helmsmen in vids.

  Not only did he sound like one, but he had also taken control of the ship. He knew his way around the bridge, the terminology, the commands. He had done service time on at least one ship’s bridge.

  I glanced at the red dot on the screen and watched it wink on and off. The ship following us was in a different wormhole when we transitioned. And then it was not. It had instantly exited the wormhole we had been in with us and moved to another instead of continuing in the first.

  It was still following us. Without thinking, I said, “It can’t do that.”

  Captain Stone nodded as she said over her shoulder to me, her attention still on the readouts, “Not until today. I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me what we just observed.”

  “It’s getting closer?” I asked.

  “Yes, but it is far behind,” she said. “At least, two days to close on us at present speeds, but that may not be true inside the wormhole transition.”

  “Then what?” I heard myself ask, wishing I hadn’t spoken the question out loud.

  She said, “We don’t know. The Dreamer can’t outrun what’s behind us, whatever it is if we are in normal space. The only thing we know for certain is that it is following us during transitions in wormholes, and that’s supposed to be impossible.”

  Bert made a gentle pinging sound on the overhead before talking. It was a slight warning that I liked. It seemed to show politeness. “Before you ask me to investigate the wormhole transitions, I have already been hard at it. I may have found a clue.”

  “Tell us,” Stone ordered so sternly that it sounded like a rebuke.

  “There is nothing new about traveling in wormholes on any information outlet I can locate. However, there is a bit of indirect news that may be inaccurate or misleading, however, it is worth repeating. At the far rim of our human colonized sphere, there is a world newly discovered. Its indigenous race is amphibian, upright, and vaguely crocodilian in appearance.”

  Captain Stone said, “Stop with the background, get on to what you’ve found.”

  “Nothing directly linking them to the pirates or who is chasing us, but there is an oddity I’ve observed. I have three reports that show a habitat in their section of space has sold black market items matching those being transported by ships that have gone missing while in transit via wormholes. It seems the cargo survived.”

  “What else?” she snapped. “So, they have a fence working for them. What are you saying?”

  “A quick search of insurance claims for missing ships shows an increase of nearly a hundred percent in the last solar year. That’s still very few ships, but there is no indicated reason. All the ships but one was in that quadrant of space where the newly discovered race controls all commerce.”

  Captain Stone said, “Why aren’t the insurance companies screaming their heads off and increasing premiums?”

  Bert said, “They are just beginning to figure it out. The first hints are still being organized into an overall assemblage. Since each ship disappeared while in transit, inside wormholes, there should be no stolen property for fences to sell.”

  “I see,” Captain Stone said as her fingers stroked her chin. “I didn’t think of that.”

  Fang said, “The one behind is losing distance if the relative locations are accurate as we transitioned to another wormhole.”

  “It came closer so it wouldn’t lose us when we took a few jogs, always at the very edge of its sensors—and where it believes it is out of ours. Now it’s going to follow again in normal or warp space, where it thinks it is just out of range of our sensors.” Captain Stone added for Fang.

  All that was exciting, the chase and pirates along with the discoveries. But my mind kept returning to Chance and the remarkable coincidence of his mental abilities aligning with ours. Three of us on the same small ship from one small planet. All with empathic abilities. It wouldn’t stop irritating me. Like a song that I couldn’t stop humming.

  I had always hidden my abilities and assumed that others did too.

 
; My mind tried to be reasonable as I thought about the beginning of this venture. We could have booked passage on any other vessel. The only reason for taking this one was the destination and timing. Nobody or nothing had coerced us. It had been a coincidence. Right?

  I sat in my corner and contemplated Chance, the steward, and empath, instead of paying attention to the attempted escape and pursuit of the Dreamer. I knew little about either subject, but less about the working of a starship than a knack of communication I’d been born with.

  During a lull, I asked, “Do you mind if I go speak with Mr. Chance?”

  Captain Stone said offhandedly, “Go ahead. Check out the security measures while you’re at it. I don’t trust him and have Bert listen in.”

  I left them as they discussed the possibilities and meanings of the ship behind us. I took the time to examine the surroundings because it seemed we hadn’t left Roma but entered a small apartment complex with metal walls and the constant background hum of air circulators.

  The floor had a slight vibration. The walls had layers of paint, the current cream color over dark green, and where it either chipped or had worn away, a stark white was exposed. The handrails were too low, down below my hip. I was not taller than the average human woman, but I had to bend slightly to use them. They were knee-high for Bill.

  The door handles were also low, the stark lighting directed downward instead of defused. The tiny cabins with the odd restroom facilities.

  The ship we were on had not been built by humans. I have no idea why that upset me. Other races probably built better ships. That idea didn’t help because the one that followed was that others probably didn’t build them as well as humans.

  I poked my head into the galley where three tables where passengers ate, and one steward served them. A pair of older human women were playing a game with squares of plastic tiles while they talked instead of eating. A being with rumpled skin, too much of it from my perspective, was loudly slurping a semi-liquid gelatinous mass from a shallow bowl. All heads turned in my direction as I peeked in and I smiled before firmly closing the door again.