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 Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:35 am
Okay, woah, first off, please don't quote the whole damn chapter, Dayhawk.
Okay.
Yay comments! Thanks for the reviews, guys!
@cocoa beans: Ooh, thanks for catching that. I think I meant to type "coffee beans" instead.
@Janet: Pretty human-like. She was manufactured--yes, there are others. Janet is a German (Caucasian) model, fair skin and features. There are various other models (both gynoid and android) out there, Asian and African and all sorts. And then from there are different makes--weaponized ones used as bodyguards or fighters, ones used for menial labor and jobs too dangerous for people (a major point in their favor, since a broken limb can usually just be replaced), medical professions, babysitters, etc. They usually only have the parts needed for whatever profession they're in. In Janet's case, she was a surrogate model redirected to government work.
@syntax: I ain't gonna touch it. You substituted "objected to" where "getting" works just fine. No offense, but I'm really not going to pay attention to your criticisms of how I structure my sentences unless someone else brings it up.
@the rest: Don't you ******** advertise. I'm not going to pay you to tell me whether or not you like the damn story, and I'm certainly not going to go to your shop if all you're going to do is nitpick at my style.
I'm glad that you like my story, don't get me wrong, but please be short and concise in your criticisms, and don't pick at undeveloped characters.
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Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:43 am
“One Albatross-class cargo ship, private,” Hugh read off the list, “crew of twenty. Two Seagull-class trash collectors, private, crew of four each. One modified Sparrow-class fast-transport ship, private, crew of four. The Albatross, uh,” he checked against the list again, “Herman Melville, left IO two days ago with a shipment of parts for China-Mars colony; the Sparrow Quicksilver four days ago with unspecified cargo, presumed alcohol, to a private family reunion on a cruise ship orbiting Saturn. Seagull Speedy Whip left four days ago with a hold half-full of space junk, saying that they intended to be in the area above Canada for the next week and a half; and the Seagull Anthem left four days ago with unspecified cargo, presumed scientific equipment, possibly mining, saying that they had been commissioned to take it to a private residence above,” he laughed, “Jupiter’s moon Io.”
Midhawra munched on sunflower seeds. After a moment she said, “Why do you think they kidnapped her?”
Hugh thought about it. “Why? I don’t know. She’s special, so you’d think it would be ransom—a king’s ransom—but they haven’t called in four days. I don’t think it’s that anymore. I—” he broke off, thinking of other reasons, and swallowed. “I don’t know.”
She watched him, quietly crunching her seeds, then said, “Cross off Herman Melville; a crew of twenty means that they would notice someone else and twenty is a pretty big crew for a kidnapping. Cross off Speedy Whip too, they gave a large but specific area where they were going to be, easy to check up on them.” Another moment passed as she thought, then said, “How far would Quicksilver and Anthem be to their respective destinations?”
He stared at her helplessly for a moment. “I don’t know those equations. You’d have to ask—”
“Oh, give it here,” Midhawra interrupted, putting aside the sunflower seeds and holding out her hands for the laptop. She typed slow but steady for a few minutes, then said, “Quicksilver should be two days away, possibly within contact range, but I doubt it. Anthem is almost a third to theirs. So what do you think?”
Hugh shook his head. “I don’t know. We can’t go after both, since they’re in different directions. How do we pick between them?”
She shrugged. “Flip a coin?”
“I am not going to rely on chance, not this time,” Hugh said. “This is my daughter we’re talking about.”
She stared at him for a moment, then at the screen of the laptop. “I suppose…” she trailed off, then clacked her beak and continued. “I suppose we could tell IO command to see if they can contact this cruise ship and verify a shipment—they’ll have longer range than we will, plus they’ve got satellites to bounce signals.”
He paused. “We can do that?”
“Sure. If there’s nothing there then a fast-transport ship can be sent to intercept them, badda-bing, badda-boom. If there is something there, then we go after the other one, Anthem.”
“Why don’t we contact both?” Hugh interrupted her.
“Because a private facility on Io will be much harder to get a hold of than a cruise ship,” she pointed out. “I’ll go call outpost command and get them to do it.”
She nipped into the cockpit and he heard her talking, but turned his attention to the laptop instead. Midhawra had left the internet open to the pages she had used to figure out distance and travel time; he closed it and stared at his desktop background, a recursive animation of a color-changing fractal. Someone had changed it to that a week ago when he left it at his desk when he went to get a drink and he liked it enough that he had saved it in case he wanted to go back to it after changing. It was bizarrely soothing.
He caught snippets of Midhawra’s conversation. It seemed like she had been put on hold, and she ducked her head out of the cockpit.
“It’s gonna take them a minute or two to transmit the message and a few more to get a reply. How you holding up back there?”
“Not bad.” Hugh sighed. “About to open a game of solitaire.”
She chuckled like a parrot. “You’re gonna come and sit up here when we finally take off, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. The gravity stuff temporarily deactivates when the acceleration stuff starts up.”
He blinked. “Why?”
“I don’t know, I’m not an engineer.”
They fell silent at the same time, looking at each other, then he said, “How well do you know Anasqil?”
She half-shrugged. “I’ve worked for him once before. Good man, pays well, discreet. I try to be that too, in return. How well do you know him?”
He thought for a moment. “Not as well as I would think I did. I’ve known him for nine years and I never would have thought him so dedicated to his job.”
“He has to be,” Midhawra explained. “He was elected as the man best suited for the job and if he wants to keep that job he has to remain suited to it. That means not up and leaving in the middle.” Something beeped and she made a clucking noise, ducking out of sight again.
Hugh returned his attention to his laptop, which had gone to the black screensaver. He wiggled the cursor, returning the screen to the revolving fractal, and stared at it. It was easy for the cursor to get lost among the elaborate turns.
Midhawra came hopping out of the cockpit after a moment. “Power down, mate, we’re gonna get going in a min. I just wanna make sure that we’ve got everything buckled down before I contact command and get the ready to take off.”
He hurriedly turned off the laptop and stuck it back in his pack, stowing everything away again and letting Midhawra activate the locks on each door to keep the contents in. Then he followed her into the cockpit and sat in the other chair, buckling in like she instructed.
“Stay quiet,” she told him, sitting in her chair with her legs tucked under her. “This is radio.” She pressed a button. “This is starship Malakaminrana to IO command, requesting permission for takeoff.”
“You haven’t logged a flight plan,” the voice replied, crackling.
“Heading to Jupiter’s moon Io with one passenger.”
After a moment the voice said, “Roger. Initiating dock release.”
There was a vague grinding noise, low and punctuated with clicks, but filling the cabin with heavy sound waves that made Hugh’s ears feel like they were going to pop. As a result he didn’t catch what Midhawra or the radio said next, until there was a sudden and unnerving silence. Midhawra said, “Roger-dodger. See you ‘round the bend, outpost command.”
“You too,” the radio crackled, and fell silent.
The cabin was packed full to brimming with silence, pressing in from all sides and amplifying whatever sounds they made, until Midhawra leaned forward a little and asked, “Do you like jazz?”
“What?”
“I hope you don’t mind. I always listen to this song when I’m taking off.” She flicked something on, filling the room with static that abruptly coalesced into the low tones of a bass and piano, a trumpet carrying the melody. “Nothing like N’awlins jazz to lift the spirit.”
Hugh saw her attention fade away from him and turn full-throttle onto flying the starship and likewise turned his attention from her to the window, watching the slow change of scene. IO came into view for a moment, looking like a series of bubbles against the black of space, a faint sheen of colors plastered over the hull. The light from the sun cast strong light over everything, the stars pinpricks in the distance compared to the one they were above, if the eye caught them at all. IO rotated out of sight, to the left and falling away as they rose up and up, the tone of the jazz cheery and upbeat against their slow movement.
It was a few minutes of slow navigation and changes of song before Midhawra deemed them far away to be able to start acceleration without possibly damaging the outpost or any of the docked ships. “Hang onto the armrests,” was all she said.
Just as she warned, the gravity cut out. It was disorienting to feel sudden weightlessness but comforting to know that he was buckled in, a thought that doubled in intensity as he saw the furious attention that Midhawra gave to the controls. Hugh gripped the armrests as if his life depended on it, in preparation for some unknown.
There was something that felt like a bang, the cabin filled with a faint rumbling that competed with the jazz for audibility. It persisted for the duration of the song and longer, fading away to a vague purring by the end of the next. Hugh bumped back against his seat as gravity returned.
Midhawra suddenly relaxed, looking at him and chuckling. “Well, that’s the hard part over with. Now we’re just going to be accelerating for a week, cruise for a week, and then we start slowing down. We’re not going to be able to catch up to them, before you ask, so don’t, but at least the trail hasn’t gone cold and we’re off to a good start.” She blinked. “You can go to sleep if you want.”
“Where?” He blinked back, stifling a yawn and glancing at his watch—five in the morning.
She shrugged. “Either you can sleep in your seat or you can sleep on the floor back there.” She gestured back to the main area. “Go ahead and get up, explore a bit—I keep a sleeping bag in one of the bins, and you can latch it to the side if you’re afraid of drifting or the gravity cutting out again or anything. Bathroom’s in the back,” she added, “but I’m afraid there’s no shower. Hope you can live with that.”
He made a face and fumbled to unbuckle his seatbelt. Getting up, he paused with a hand on the back of his chair when Midhawra spoke again, glancing at him apologetically.
“And I hope you brought something to read. It’s gonna be a long trip.”
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Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 12:46 pm
Jasper Riddle Okay, woah, first off, please don't quote the whole damn chapter, Dayhawk. Okay. Yay comments! Thanks for the reviews, guys! @cocoa beans: Ooh, thanks for catching that. I think I meant to type "coffee beans" instead. @Janet: Pretty human-like. She was manufactured--yes, there are others. Janet is a German (Caucasian) model, fair skin and features. There are various other models (both gynoid and android) out there, Asian and African and all sorts. And then from there are different makes--weaponized ones used as bodyguards or fighters, ones used for menial labor and jobs too dangerous for people (a major point in their favor, since a broken limb can usually just be replaced), medical professions, babysitters, etc. They usually only have the parts needed for whatever profession they're in. In Janet's case, she was a surrogate model redirected to government work. @syntax: I ain't gonna touch it. You substituted "objected to" where "getting" works just fine. No offense, but I'm really not going to pay attention to your criticisms of how I structure my sentences unless someone else brings it up. @the rest: Don't you ******** advertise. I'm not going to pay you to tell me whether or not you like the damn story, and I'm certainly not going to go to your shop if all you're going to do is nitpick at my style. I'm glad that you like my story, don't get me wrong, but please be short and concise in your criticisms, and don't pick at undeveloped characters. Well, sorry taking time to help. It wasn't my intent to nitpick, just to help. To be honest if you ever gave this to a real editor they'd nitpick out the wazoo, way more than I did. I should know stare not only was my father an editor, but my friend who's in publishing (mind you she just does the binding aspect) looks at my work constantly and says "damn, girl mix it up or you'll never be published." She's seen a lot of what an editor can do to a story, and not just with the grammar/style either. So my advise comes from my own constant revision, just wanted to save you the trouble. I know this is your baby, and that my "nitpicking" seems like I'm just poking it with needles, but hey all kids need their shots. The reason why I didn't go into, what I assume what you really wanted to hear (characters, plot, ect, ect), is because I save that for my shop. It isn't a review, persay, more rather a critique. I don't get paid to like or dislike someone's story, but rather help the author's style, grammar, characters, plot, other forms of content, and to offer any advise of what would sell/make the story more appealing to readers. My personal feelings on if I'd ever buy such a story is completly aside from the critique. Hey, if it's any consolation (which come to think of it may not be) in real life if I am not in a creative writing class and someone wants me to edit their story, poem, or personal essey, I do charge $1.50 per page. Why? Because with my critiques I try to look at someone's work at every angle, and give them back loads and loads of feedback. Plus I need gas. razz Anyways, again, I was just trying to help. It wasn't out of pettiness nor disregard to you, just analytical thinking. Trust me when you read a story that has awesome plotlines, which your story is becoming, and an interesting style then that book becomes just timeless to you.
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Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 10:07 am
This story's not my baby. neutral It's something I'm doing for fun, to take a break from my magnum opus. And please don't play the "my dad's an editor" card, because I honestly don't care about your dad unless he's the one editing.
Sorry for snapping (I actually realized I was being rude when I was writing it, and yes, I need to take a bit of distance if I'm getting pissed about a critique).
Also, "so my adviCe" and "etc."
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Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2009 10:11 am
Jasper Riddle This story's not my baby. neutral It's something I'm doing for fun, to take a break from my magnum opus. And please don't play the "my dad's an editor" card, because I honestly don't care about your dad unless he's the one editing. Sorry for snapping (I actually realized I was being rude when I was writing it, and yes, I need to take a bit of distance if I'm getting pissed about a critique). Also, "so my adviCe" and "etc." lol *cough* thankyou it was 3am when I wrote that. rolleyes
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Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 5:04 pm
They were two days into their cruising week and Glitch was bored out of her mind. They had done nothing but play music for the past week, and she had slept more than she ever wanted to, and attempted to read the book that Ravenface—now Owlface—had lent her in order to keep her occupied, but it was a huge book filled with words she wasn’t used to and she had given up after flipping to random pages and reading as much as she could stand. It seemed that everyone was getting as bored as she was, because Ravenmask pulled out a deck of cards from some cubbyhole she didn’t see and handed them to Owlface.
“Hey,” he turned to Glitch and wiggled the cards. “What games do you know how to play?”
She blinked and rubbed her face. “Go Fish.”
A moment’s pause. “Well, why don’t we play that and then we can teach you a new game, huh?”
“A new game?”
“Yeah. I know tons.”
Slowly she nodded. “Okay.”
She won. After that he started teaching her something he called Blackjack, which he said was really just simple numbers, and that usually there were all sorts of other things but for now they would just play the simple version.
Glitch wondered, halfway through the second game, why Dad didn’t play it with her, because it was pretty easy and was more like practicing her arithmetic than a game, and he always wanted her to keep up with her homework.
After a few games of that, when she felt like she had gained some skill, he asked if she wanted to learn another game. She nodded. And so she learned Gin Rummy and War and Mao, and—much to her annoyance—52-Card-Pickup. She was still gathering cards from the floor when another sound suddenly cut through the music; a sharp ping. Ravenmask reached over and cut off the music, and everyone paused.
Another ping. Ravenmask sprang into action, checking things all over the console, while Owlface and Glitch remained frozen where they were. The sounds continued like spastic rain or hail pattering down on the roof; Glitch closed her eyes and pretended that’s what it was.
“Asteroid belt,” she heard Ravenmask mutter. “Bloody asteroid belt.”
“Is it holding?”
“It’s holding.”
Someone sighed in relief. “Good. All that work, just to—”
“Shaddup. You’re the one who didn’t take us up enough to fly right over them.”
“Hey—”
“We’re going to be in them for the rest of the day.”
Glitch’s eyes snapped open. So they were in the asteroid belt? “Can I see?”
They both looked at her and she hesitated. “I…I’ve never seen it before.”
After a second Owlface gestured with a hand and she hobbled into the cockpit.
Space was hugely black, she knew that already. Gaping and dark, with the stars bright little pinpricks; she had been on IO before, and space wasn’t a great mystery. But to see this, these great hunks of rock ranging in size from her fist and smaller to many times the size of the ship, and hear the small ones pinging against the sides of the ship, was awe-inspiring. They weren’t clustered together particularly closely, the expanse of space open to their wandering, and her fear of impact vanished.
“Wow.”
Owlface crouched down next to her and pointed ahead through the silent asteroids. “You see that bright spot there? That’s Jupiter. That’s where we’re headed.”
She squinted. “I think I see it.”
“Do you know about Jupiter?”
She nodded. “Dad told me about the Sol system. Jupiter’s a gas giant, right?”
“Yep. And it’s got a ton of moons—Earth only has one, but Jupiter has four big ones and a bunch of little ones. Did you know that?”
She nodded again.
“Can you name them?”
She shook her head.
“Well, there’s Io, and Ganymede, and Callisto, and Europa. We’re going to Io—it’s really exciting, you know, because it’s got volcanoes.”
“Really?” She looked at him now, eyes searching the mask inquisitively.
“Yeah. It’s the only place in the solar system besides Earth that has them.”
“Is it like Earth?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t have an atmosphere, or an ocean, or anything like that. Just volcanoes. We can’t even really go there, just go above it.”
“Can I see them when we get there?”
“Sure.”
“Cool!”
Ravenmask and Owlface shared a glance when Glitch turned her attention completely to the grand presentation of space. Ravenmask narrowed his eyes and shook his head slightly; Owlface rose to his feet and shrugged.
“Have you been to Mars?” Glitch asked, eyes still plastered to the scene outside the ship. Owlface didn’t look away from Ravenmask.
“Oh yeah, loads of times. Been to Saturn once, too.”
She turned to look at him and he quickly redirected his attention to her. “Really?”
He nodded. “The rings are beautiful. I hope you see them someday—they’re worth the travel.”
“How do you get there?” Her eyes were huge and curious, a couple of feathers on the back of her head rising up into points.
“Same way as you get to Jupiter. Go over—or through, or under—the asteroid belt, and onward until you reach your destination. Of course, how long it takes depends on how far away you are—distances in space are huge, you know.”
“Then how come we can travel so fast?”
“It’s science. Not sure of the mechanism, myself.”
“Go finish picking up those cards,” Ravenmask interrupted. She looked at him, feathers still up, then hobbled back to the other room obediently. Ravenmask watched her go, then turned his attention onto Owlface.
“What’s up with this?” he hissed. “First you get all friendly with the target, and then you take us right through some mining ship’s dumping ground in the asteroid belt. If you can’t concentrate on the job then you’re—”
“I am not a danger,” Owlface whispered back, glancing out at Glitch, who was still picking up cards. “They said alive and well, and you might be able to spend hours staring at a wall but I can’t. She’s bored, I’m bored, we may as well play cards.”
Ravenmask pointed a finger at him in warning. “Don’t screw this up.”
“I won’t.”
He turned away, putting his feet up on the console and crossing his arms. “Go play with the captive, then.”
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Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 12:35 am
Before I comment/critique, I'd just like to say that the long nerd-rant I posted about radiation detection doesn't mean you did something wrong: quite the opposite, in fact. It takes a while to compose a post like that one, and if what you had written was inexcusably wrong, I wouldn't have bothered with more than a grumpy correction. (By inexcusably wrong, I mean a sentence or paragraph that was not only factually incorrect, but insultingly under-researched.) So, no worries.
Anyway, moving on.
Comments on story post #5:
1. I like the mention of the headlines. That's hilarious, and I'd be interested in seeing more headlines, or a little more detail about what the papers are saying. It won't diminish the seriousness of what's going on, since the newspapers are part of the problem, and few people will complain if a book makes them laugh.
2. In the paragraph that starts with "The intruder had entered the house. . ." you might want to set up a little more clearly whether this is the outcome of the police investigation, or from some other record. The reader already knows a lot of this, so it needs to be very clear that the narrator is describing from another viewpoint, rather than speaking directly to the reader.
3. More rambling about telejumping:
[geek] Okay, so basically we're working with Star-Trek-style transporters, here? What I'm getting so far is that permanently-installed telejump machines have both control stations and technology in more or less the same place, while the portable versions have a separate set of controls. [/geek]
[nerd] I'm still not entirely certain what real-world rationale to give you for why there would or wouldn't be recognizable residual radiation at the site of a telejump. It could be powered by a small nuclear reactor (though that might be iffy if it's smaller than a washing machine). Alternatively, it could contain neutron sources or other radioactive materials.
Or, y'know, since teleportation is basically magic, there really could just be "telejump radiation," a previously unknown form of ionizing radiation that is either left behind by people/objects telejumping, or results from some sort of interaction between whatever forces are involved in telejumping and the air/other particles at the point of departure. [/nerd]
4. The sequence where Hugh is packing feels a little abbreviated. The lists and passive voice keep it detached, right up until the end, with the shoelaces. Hugh's double-take and the line about string are a good idea, but they're a punchline. That will work a lot better if the description of packing up to that is a bit longer and more involved. "He put shirts in, then added socks. Next were pants, and in the closet. . ." or whatever seems appropriate. Because then, once the reader has been lulled into the rhythm of "blah blah blah packing," suddenly there's "And then he pulled some fat white shoelaces out of the drawer." That way the reader's rhythm breaks in exactly the same way Hugh's does, with logical, logical, logical, whimsical. . . wait what?
5. Why is Hugh so surprised that Anasqil's agent is female? Is there a good reason this is weird, or is Hugh just accidentally sexist? Either would be fine, but a line clarifying his train of thought would be helpful.
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Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 9:46 am
Thanks for the comment! Yay comment!
@packing: Yeah, I see what you mean. I'll flesh it out when I can--at that point I just wanted to get on to the next bit.
@accidental sexism: I didn't see it that way--he was just surprised. But I see what you're saying.
@everything else: I think you're pretty right about the telejumping in both geek and nerd. And I didn't mind the nerd-rant--it was very educational. As for the police investigation...yes, I definitely see what you're saying there. I'll specify.
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Posted: Thu Jul 02, 2009 7:01 pm
Hugh looked at the diminutive collection of movies for the third time. “Are you positive that ‘Dial M for Murder’ and ‘The Darkness Beyond the Wall’ are the only English movies you have?”
“There might be some other murder mystery collections at the back on the bottom shelf,” Midhawra finally replied, turning the jazz down a notch. “I don’t know, I haven’t looked back there in a while.”
Hugh picked up a random movie and flipped it over to read the back, discovering it was not text but some form of sheet music, then put it back. “Any action films?”
“Figure it out from the covers, Hugh, I’m sure you can do that. We don’t pretend that the movies are things they aren’t—too much hassle—you’ll find them easily enough.”
“I don’t suppose any of them are subtitled.”
“Nope, don’t think so. But why don’t you just redub it yourself? I’ve done that with a couple of French films—the result was pretty funny.”
“I hate it when people talk at the movies,” Hugh replied.
“Don’t you know any shadraxi languages?”
“It’s tough,” he said, running his fingers over the titles. “I’m not particularly musically inclined.”
She whistled along with the song for a few bars, then said, “Are they teaching musicians our languages, then?”
“And linguists, and anyone else who’ll learn it. Of course,” he paused, pulling movies out and setting them on a stack on the floor, “the only people who can teach it are shadraxi and some people are a little nervous about taking lessons from an alien.”
A sour, jarring note whistled through the air. “Birdpeople, parrots—I’ve heard the slurs. And from what I hear about your history you guys can take a long time to get over things.”
He sighed. “Don’t take it personally. There are still people racist against blacks—that’s one of the oldest, uh, grudges? In history.”
Another disgusted whistle.
“But you guys sure made the alien conspiracy nuts and the scientists happy.”
“Because it turned out they were right?”
“Yep. Of course, now there are conspiracy theories that you guys are in on the conspiracy because you won’t verify other types of aliens, and then there are the people who say you aren’t aliens, and then—you know, I’m just gonna stop there. When I say nuts I mean nuts—they’ve got more denominations than modern religion.”
She bobbed her head. “Great Whistler.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
He paused and peered into the shelf. “You’ve got the first season of the X-Files?”
Her feathers ruffled a little. “Guilty pleasure, as you guys say.”
“And here’s—wow, you really do have a lot of mysteries.”
“There should be some action flicks in there too.”
“Thanks.” He pulled them out to start looking through them and casually asked, “Don’t you ever turn off the music?”
“At nights when I sleep, usually,” she said.
“Can you turn it off now, for the movie?” He looked up. “Please?”
She blinked. “Okay, and you can have a bit of silence afterwards, but it’s coming back on at some point.”
“Don’t you ever get sick of jazz?” He put aside a few things he might want to watch and started putting everything else away.
“I’ve got a couple other playlists to deal with such a contingency. Some instrumentals, a bit of punk-rock, and,” she clacked her beak in a grin, “birdsong from all around Earth.”
He grinned back.
“A lot of pilots listen to music,” Midhawra said. “Even the ones who like silence get a little stir-crazy after a while—I mean, the only ambient sounds are the ones you or your ship make, and after a while you start hearing things—it’s not fun.”
Hugh blinked. “Oh.” He hadn’t thought of that.
“Yep.” She glanced out the window. “We can try it if you want, let you get a feel for what it can be like.”
“Uh…”
She glanced back and clacked her beak again. “I’ll probably do it when you’re least expecting.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Yep. Watch your movie.”
He did, and the silence afterwards was refreshing after all the music, which had numbed his thought process somewhat. She left it off while he read a book, but halfway through he looked over and saw that she had plugged in headphones and was listening to her music again while she played solitaire with a deck of cards propped up haphazardly on the controls.
He watched another action flick—for a change of pace, in Radshadraxi—then returned to his book. The hours ticked by silently, until jazz filled the cabin again when Midhawra unplugged the headphones.
“Enjoyed your bit of silence?”
“Yes, thanks. How long do we have left?”
“On the trip?” She blinked. “We’re about to hit cruising speed, so that’s about two weeks left.”
“Two weeks.”
“Give or take a day or two.”
“Is there any way you can shave a day off the travel time?”
“Space getting to you already?” She chuckled. “Nope, sorry. One week accel, one week cruise, one week decel. I’m sure there’s some hotshot pilot out there who’s worked out just how much extra time they can accel for and how that would affect their cruise and decel times, but I am not it.”
The next week passed slowly. Midhawra pointed out when they entered the area of the asteroid belt but said that they probably wouldn’t see anything, since their course went over it, and by the time they had begun deceleration in the third week Jupiter was a large hazy blot in the space ahead.
Hugh woke up that morning to blessed silence, and lay in the sleeping bag for a few moments before getting up and heading to the restroom to take a leak and run his head under the sink to try and get rid of the greasy feeling before he shaved. Afterwards, hair plastered wetly to his head, he found a food packet and wandered up to the cockpit, staring thoughtfully out to space while he ate.
Jupiter loomed, despite only being the size of a nickel held at arm’s length. The red bands that striped its surface were clearly visible if blurred, and the trained eye could spot all four Galilean moons. Hugh examined it eagerly. He had never seen Jupiter before except in pictures and film footage of the first expeditions. Even at such a small size, the great red giant of the Sol system gathered enough light to blank out all the visible stars.
Midhawra was still asleep, he saw. Her chair reclined to some degree, allowed her to lean back while she slept, and her avian face was pressed against the clothlike upholdery.
Hugh returned his gaze to Jupiter. How far away were the people they pursued? Did Jupiter fill their screens and tug at their ship? Had they already made contact with their private contractors?
He crumpled the empty food packet in his fist.
Was Glitch okay? Did they make sure she ate? Slept? Did they take care of her?
Could he and Midhawra find her once they docked at Galileo Station?
He paced back to the cabin and found his laptop, powering it up and seeing if there was any internet connection. He needed to see if Anasqil had found anything, if there was any news, any demands.
The bars wavered, a weak connection to the massive online web that connected the colonized planets; there, but not enough to be able to use the netcam.
He cursed and powered down, turning off the laptop to conserve the battery. With nothing better left to do, he got out one of the books he had brought and read.
The hours passed and Midhawra slept on. Hugh wasn’t worried yet—she had stayed up late making sure they were decelerating properly, and had still been awake when he had gone to bed. He didn’t know just how late she had been up, but it had probably been hours and hours.
Jupiter was, he heard, the trickiest planet to get to, due to its incredible gravitational pull. Last night before beginning decel, she had told him horror stories of ships that had improperly decelerated and been pulled into the massive gas giant, the hulls being crushed inward and depressurizing spectacularly. Dark blotches on the surface were all that was left of their mistakes, blotches that faded in years and were forgotten.
He didn’t know how many of those stories were true, but he just hoped that they weren’t about to join those numbers.
The whirring hum of the engine suddenly became very audible, a loud clacking that filled the cabin with noise and just as abruptly faded away. Hugh frowned.
“Was that supposed to happen?” he asked, looking towards the cockpit. He got no response.
Another hour crept by in silence, punctuated by loud grinding and clacking from the engine, noises that would appear and vanish with startling swiftness. Midhawra shifted in her sleep every so often, but did not wake.
Hugh dug out a movie and watched it on his laptop but couldn’t concentrate and got up to pace after the credits rolled and he turned everything off again. He wanted to shake Midhawra awake and talk to her but held back on the knowledge that she would n** him with her beak if he annoyed her. Instead, he sat down in the other chair and stared at Jupiter.
The silence pressed in on his skull. After a while he realized that the intervals between abrasive growlings of the engine were growing longer and longer, leaving more swathes of silence in between.
Skt.
He froze, looking over at Midhawra, still and quiet.
Skt skt.
Scratching. It wasn’t him—was it the engine? He got up and paced for a bit, wandering as far back as he could before returning to the cockpit. The scratching went on for a few more minutes before fading away, and as the silence stretched on he wondered if he was still hearing it, faintly.
Finally he decided that a peck on the finger would be better than the waiting, even if it drew blood, and shook Midhawra.
Her eyes snapped open and she clacked her beak. “Silence isn’t so fun, is it?”
He swore. “You’ve been awake.”
“For hours.” She got up, stretching her arms and legs and heading back to the cabin. “Started scratching at the chair just to mess with you. That’s what it gets like, you know—you start hearing things and don’t know where they’re coming from, and the silence just squeezes you.”
The engine clacked loudly, making Hugh jump, and he swore again. “Is it supposed to be doing that?”
“Yeah.” She ruffled her feathers. “He’s a bit loud decelerating but that’s just how it is.” Getting a packet of food she headed back to the cockpit and turned the music on; the jazz, although quiet, was startlingly loud after the hours of numbing stillness. “So now we’ve just got a week and a day—or more, or less—and then we pull into GS and see if there’s any funny business going on in the region.”
“And what if we don’t find her?”
She stared at him levelly with her black eyes. “You keep talking like that and we might not.”
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Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 4:43 pm
Janet sat still, her mind whirring. A man was messing around with her right hand, fiddling and poking at the wrist.
“And it was about time you got upgraded to a new model anyway,” the man said, patting her wrist gently. “Other hand, please.”
She held it out, dropping her right hand into her lap. The man sliced the false skin open from wrist to elbow, carefully peeling it back to reveal the innards of her left arm. “That old unit was quite outdated—almost a decade old. But you already knew that, didn’t you?” He fiddled around with her arm, reaching in with a long pair of tweezers to pluck at something. “And there we go. That thing’s active, now—try turning it off.”
She blinked a couple of times and looked at him. “…what?”
“The taser’s active, try turning it off.”
She blinked again and looked down at her arm. After a moment there was a click, and he peered in through the packed plastics and organic pseudometals. “Very good. Now you’ll have to be careful with this new attachment, since it’s powered by you. We also added some extra surge protectors up here,” he reached up to lightly touch the back of her neck, “Just in case.” He pulled the false skin back into place and pressed it together with his fingers, watching the edges stick together. “That should be all sealed up by tomorrow.”
Janet rose when he did, accepting the pamphlet he handed to her. “You should be able to identify what everything is, but just in case here’s a little something on the unit you’ve got now. A checklist of sorts when you do inventory.”
“…thank you.”
He smiled sympathetically. “Cheer up. Things’ll get better.”
She looked at him. “Yes, I sure—they will. Thank you.”
He nodded and watched her leave the room.
Anasqil was waiting for her outside, a strange sight in a fairly traditional waiting room, and he scrambled to his feet when he saw her.
“Janet.”
She smiled, feeling like she could cry and wanting to hug him tightly, but knowing that wouldn’t be the best course of action. “Hello.”
“Come. There is a car for us.”
She walked out with him. “It’s very nice of you to come pick me up.”
Neither spoke again until they had been in the car for a few minutes, being taken to the nearest telejump station. Janet shuddered.
“The cops were there when I came back online,” she said. “Waiting. They wanted to talk to me about…her disappearance. But I just…I couldn’t help. The man was dressed up like he was pretending to be shadraxi, had a mask and a taser…”
She trailed off, staring into space, then said, “I can’t remember her being five, Anasqil. The entire year is just—gone. No bits and pieces, no blurry fragments, just gone. Like it never even happened.”
He looked at her. “It was likely damaged in the attack.”
“Of course it was damaged in the attack. I know that—but it’s still unnerving.” She looked at him, staring at him with eyes so pale a green as to be almost white. “I can remember everything, from the first moment I became active to the night I was attacked, but that year has just been wiped clean.”
“Janet.”
She blinked a few times and looked away out the window, running a hand over her head. “At least they didn’t give me hair.”
Another few moments of silence passed, then she asked, “Where’s Hugh?”
Anasqil ruffled his feathers. “He has gone to find Mir-a-cle. He and a private investigator are headed to Jupiter’s Io on a series of good clues.”
“A private—?”
He clacked his beak. “She is very good. Discreet, works hard, intelligent—you would like her.”
“So they haven’t found her yet.” She felt a sinking sensation.
“No.”
“The press?”
He ruffled his feathers again. “It’s a background story, but once they find out that you’re active again they will latch on.” The car came to a halt and Anasqil looked at her more sharply, turning his head to examine her with one eye. “Do not say anything. Not about her, not about you, not about anything.”
She nodded. “Not a word.”
They got out and headed in to the station; Janet glanced around furtively but they had dodged a bullet that hadn’t even been fired yet. Anasqil stalked past the line with Janet hurrying along behind him, flashing a badge when the attendant looked over in irritation.
She waited until they were in a cubicle to ask where they were headed. Anasqil swiped his card and punched in coordinates. “The shadraxi embassy.”
“What?” She blinked a few times. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at her with one eye, then gestured towards the rings; she obediently went to stand on a jump ring and he followed.
“Anasqil, why?”
They both felt the jump powering up. He kept looking at her with a single examining eye, then said, “Do you really have to ask?”
The kept staring at each other through the jump; out of the corner of her eyes Janet saw the room blur and stretch out for a second, and then she felt a great surge of energy and the image settled down.
Most telejump rooms looked the same to minimize the effects of sudden change on the mind; a pioneer of the first jumps had said that going from one place to another that looked dramatically different was like staring at a picture and closing your eyes while someone else switched the picture, except that you didn’t close your eyes or even blink. While it didn’t bother most people too terribly, it was fairly disorienting.
Different places had different styles, though; the telejump rooms of the Interstellar Outpost were white, while the stations on Earth tended to be off-white or extremely light shades of various colors. The telejump rooms of the shadraxi embassy, however, were gigantic LED screens.
No one knew why except for the shadraxi, and since people never asked they never told.
And so Janet found herself very disoriented, having gone from a room a faint shade of lavender to one that was currently showing a beach with endless blue-green ocean spread out before it, palm trees and endless beach to either side. She turned around and discovered that the screens behind her showed a jungle, lush and green with tangled underbrush and a dark interior.
Anasqil watched her turn around a few times and stare at the scenery, then said, “Soothing, no?”
“Whoa.”
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Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:37 pm
And now, since I have lost any hope of getting reviews in between chapters, I'm just gonna start posting chapter after chapter.
I get so little chatter in here I could probably stop linking each chapter to the first post.
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Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:46 pm
“Come along, we can’t stay in here forever.” He stalked off, walking into the jungle scene. Janet noticed the outline of a doorway, something she hadn’t seen before, and hurried after Anasqil.
“Is it always like that?”
“It changes randomly,” he said. “It was the view from a snowy mountain peak when I left.”
The hallways were again different from what she had been expecting, although she wasn’t too sure what she had been expecting anymore. Instead of the clean white passages of IO, someone had painted them. In this one the floor was carpeted with a yellow brick pattern, with fields of flowers painted on either side and a clear blue sky with white clouds stretching from the horizon to up over their heads. It opened up onto a large room that was painted to look like an open field. The floor was carpeted in lush green carpet, with shadraxi-styled furniture scattered tastefully throughout the room.
There were a few shadraxi in the room already; a brightly peacock-hued one sat reading a book in one corner, and a pair of drably colored females chattered quietly in Radshadraxi in another. No one noticed Anasqil and Janet except for the final occupant, a gray-colored male who sat facing them; he rose smoothly to his feet upon seeing them and came over to them, softly calling a greeting.
He was, Janet learned, the Chinese-shadraxi ambassador, and a friend of Anasqil.
Janet had been assigned to Anasqil in the first place because she was able to speak the same languages that he did. Wietzl turned out to be the language that the two shadraxi shared, and greetings were quickly exchanged.
The gray shadraxi bowed politely. “I am Hudasam ot-Liol. It is a pleasure to meet you, Janet. I take it that you are the metal-female that was attacked those weeks ago?”
She smiled wanly. “I am.”
Hudasam whistled sourly. “I am sorry for your loss. The human newspapers are not kind to your situation, even if they are sympathetic.” He gestured with one hand. “Come. I hope you do not mind if I eat in front of you. I have not had lunch yet.”
She shook her head. “Not at all. Lead on.”
He took them down another hallway painted to resemble the Grand Canyon, complete with red carpeting. Janet looked at Anasqil and said in English, “So why am I here?”
He responded in kind. “For your safety. It may be unnecessary but I hope to keep you from further attack. Plus,” he paused briefly, “it will give you the advantage of avoiding the reporters.”
She smirked wryly. “Of course.”
The tufts of feathers on his shoulders rippled.
“Thank you, Anasqil.”
The cafeteria area was as large as the first room and done in mimicry of a jungle setting, with dark plants in pots and hanging from the walls—Janet couldn’t tell if they were fake or real—and clusters of brightly colored flowers on every plant. Underneath the foliage the walls had been covered in olive and forest green stippling like dappled light through leaves. The floor, for once, was brown concrete with more mottled green.
The tables were circular concrete picnic tables. Janet grinned and sat down, waiting until Hudasam had gone to get something to eat before saying, “You people really like decorating, don’t you?”
Anasqil chuckled lowly, reminding Janet of some evil parrot. “I suppose you could say that, yes. Most of us find it difficult to work in such bare environments as the Outpost, although we certainly can.” He chuckled again.
“It’s nice. Fascinating, even.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Hudasam returned with a fruit platter and a large bowl of walnuts, which he set in the center of the table. Anasqil told him of Janet’s surprise with the decoration of the embassy, an action that made him laugh raucously.
“You must forgive me for laughing,” he amended. “It is simply that every human or metal-human that has been here has expressed appreciation for the ways we have decorated, and yet their outposts remain stark and white. They do not even attempt to mimic us despite their pleasure at our design. I, for one, find such a thing hilarious.” He grabbed a piece of fruit and ate it; Anasqil took one as well.
“I’m sure someone’s tried,” Janet pointed out. “Office workplaces on Earth have always tended to be on the sterile side.”
“Yes, yes,” Hudasam bobbed his head, devouring another piece of fruit. “The arguments for such a thing do make sense. They want things clean and tidy to look nice, and to not be distracting. A productivity thing, they say.”
“Did you know,” Anasqil said, “That there is an official transport ship painted bright red?”
Hudasam laughed again, even more uproariously than before. Janet grinned and shook her head.
“Really?”
“Yes. They call it the Feuerwehrauto,” Anasqil said solemnly. “Modified high-speed Albatross class. Bright red.”
Hudasam dissolved into shrieks of laughter. Janet giggled. “Bright red?”
He nodded. “I have never seen it myself, but I have heard of it. Apparently it has a sister Sparrow-class ship called Dalmatiner.”
“Painted. Let me guess, let me guess. Black and white?”
He nodded, reaching over to grab a handful of nuts. “There is a picture on your internet of the Feuerwehrauto and Dalmatiner crews standing next to the smaller ship while it is in a repair shop, all of them dressed up like firemen and acting like it is a dog. I will have to show it to you both later.”
He cracked the nuts loudly with his beak while Janet giggled helplessly at the thought of the picture.
Hudasam and Anasqil finished the fruit and walnuts in silence, then Anasqil took the platter back. Janet took the opportunity to talk to Hudasam.
“How long have you been working with the Chinese?”
“Eleven years,” he said. “I learned Chinese as a child because it was easy. Tonal Earth languages are far easier with Wietzl as a native tongue. I did not expect to go into politics when I learned it, but here I am.”
“And how long have you known Anasqil?”
He chuckled shrilly. “Nine years, when he first came here. I was his guide to the embassy. And before you ask, I have not met the great Hugh Evonovy, nor their daughter.”
She blinked. “Oh.”
“I had been planning on bringing them up for a visit.”
Janet spun around, startled, and Anasqil chuckled again at her surprise.
“You snuck up on me!”
“Yes I did.”
Hudasam was laughing again as he got to his feet. “Yes, yes. A visit would have been nice, but it has been sadly postponed. Now, Janet, I think we shall show you around now. Give you a tour, if you will.”
She smiled at Hudasam and got to her feet. “That would be very nice, thank you.”
He bobbed his head again. “Now, the first thing to remember is that in order to get to the telejump room, you follow the yellow brick road.”
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Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:51 pm
Glitch stirred, moaning softly. Owlface glanced at her warily.
“Is she waking up?” Ravenmask asked monotonously. Owlface shrugged.
“I dunno.”
Ravenmask turned back to the console and to where Jupiter loomed and filled the window. “If she wakes, give her something to eat, make sure she uses the restroom, and tranq her again. I don’t want to listen to her whining about a headache.”
“Gives me a headache,” Owlface muttered. “Two days, though—just two days.” He leaned forward and turned up the music, letting the Chinese national anthem wash over them. “Then we dump her off with—” He paused, frowning beneath his mask. “Who do we dump her with?”
“Client’s undetermined,” Ravenmask said. “You and the girl stay here with one of the guards, I take the other, we go through the regular channels and see if anyone took the bait.”
“Where are you gonna check from?”
“GS. Where else?”
“They’ve got the net there?”
Ravenmask looked at Owlface. “Have you ever actually been to Jupiter? Galileo Station is bigger than the Interstellar Outpost. Has to be. It’s a great big transportation hub—from here out to Saturn, from here to the jump rings, from here back to Earth, from here to Jupiter and all the moons. It’s research, testing, and development for all nations rich enough to get a slice. They’ve got communications. It would be stupid and a death wish not to.”
Owlface made a face under his mask, then looked back at Jupiter. None of the Galilean moons were visible in their view of the gas giant, but he had calculated for a perfect rendezvous with Galileo Station and knew that it and the moon Ganymede would be in view when they approached for their docking.
He sniffed. “So who’d you bait?”
“Medical community, religious community, a few collectors. There are a couple more invitations just floating about on the underground, so we’ll see who else shows up.”
“Risk?”
“Moderate. The collectors and meds are safe as reeled in—they’ve gotten stuff from the black market before, I doubt any of them are going to have a sudden bout of conscience. The cult nuts are fairly safe but there are always variables to watch out for. Feds might ride in on the underground tickets, though, so we’ll have to watch out for that.”
“I dunno, meds are all about ethics.”
Ravenmask shook his head, staring at Glitch. “Their partners, maybe, but not the guys we contacted. Sour men all.”
“Any birdmen?”
“If they are they’re coming in on the same waves as the feds.” Ravenmask shook his head again. “You’ve gotten real nosy all of a sudden.”
Owlface fell silent. The American national anthem filled the cabin, and there was a split second of dead silence after it ended, a gap before the anthem of Great Britain started up. Glitch stirred again in this gap.
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