I COULD ONLY wait in the ship for so long before I set off to find Jorgen and the others. It wasn’t hard to find Jorgen at least, because I could feel his mind and follow in that direction. The passageways here were smooth and sterile, similar to the ones on Detritus, though these were structured more like large tubes than square halls.
Jorgen seemed to shift for a moment, and I wondered if he could sense me coming toward him.
And then— Alanik? he said in my mind.
Yes, I replied. You were able to establish contact.
It’s… similar to communicating with the slugs, but also different. It’s easier when Spensa establishes the connection first.
Have you spoken with Spensa recently? I didn’t know if she’d be able to communicate out of the negative realm the same way we communicated through it.
Yes, twice. Both times she kind of… appeared. But she wasn’t really there. Not like a hyperjump.
There was a kind of sadness that accompanied this. A wistfulness maybe.
You and Spensa are close, I said.
Another emotion joined the sadness. Embarrassment perhaps.
Oh, I said. You and Spensa are a mate pair?
A what? A… no, not a mate pair. I mean, there is no mating involved. I mean—
I laughed, and Jorgen’s voice disappeared from my mind. I thought he’d withdrawn intentionally, and if so that was good. He was learning even without my instruction. I’d found that was the best way, with cytonic powers. They weren’t learned directly so much as experienced and guided. Your mind knew what to do intuitively, if only you could get out of your own way and let it.
I caught up to some of the humans outside a room filled with instrumentation panels. Jorgen and Kimmalyn leaned in the doorway, watching FM as she pored over them.
“Did you find anything useful?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Jorgen said. “I don’t suppose you happen to be an engineer?”
“No, only a pilot,” I said. I approached and glanced at the buttons and switches FM was examining. “Do any of you have expertise?”
“Rig does,” FM said. “He might be able to tell us if any of this would activate a shield, or connect to a cytonic inhibitor.”
“Any of those would be useful,” I said.
FM looked over her shoulder at Jorgen. “As much as I’d love to ask Rig, I don’t know that dragging him into this is a good idea.”
“I wonder if we could get him out without anyone noticing,” Jorgen said. “If we had one of the slugs take us H-O-M-E…”
The pin translated that last bit as a set of letters, but I had no idea what they spelled in the human’s language. “What does that mean?” I asked.
Jorgen sighed. “It’s the word for the place where you live. FM accidentally made that the keyword for the slugs to take us back to Detritus.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” FM said. “It was a logical choice.”
“And we’re trying to get them to only do it if we say their names first as a command,” Jorgen continued. “But sometimes they mess up and someone says something like, I miss H-O-M-E, and their slug takes them to the engineering bay on Platform Prime. Which is only an inconvenience if they were, say, in the mess hall or something.”
Kimmalyn sighed. “But it’s a lot more annoying if you were about to climb into a cleansing pod, naked as the day you were born.”
“Not that she would know,” FM said.
“Bless the stars of those startled engineers,” Kimmalyn added.
“So now we’re reduced to spelling basic words,” Jorgen said. “When we could have picked something more unusual for the code word.”
“So you say the word,” I said, “and the slug hyperjumps with you? That’s convenient.”
“When it works it’s awesome,” Jorgen said. “When it doesn’t it’s annoying at best.”
“Humiliating at worst,” Kimmalyn said.
“It could be life threatening,” Jorgen insisted.
“Hey,” FM said. “You and Rig were the ones who said we should stick with the same word when we trained the rest of the slugs for simplicity’s sake.”
“We’re still working with them,” Jorgen said. “We only had a short time with them before you arrived. But so far they will all go H-O-M-E when they’re asked. Some of them will also take us out a couple of kilometers if we tell them to J-U-M-P.”
“I don’t know what that means, either,” I said. “I don’t think the pins know how to spell.”
“It’s the word for leaping up in the air,” FM said. “Also the second half of hyperjump, which they don’t seem to recognize as a command, thank goodness. They’re all a little better at only doing that command when we say their names first.”
“Probably because they’d rather go H-O-M-E than hop somewhere random,” Kimmalyn said. “Wouldn’t we all?”
“Are those the only commands they answer to?” I asked. The humans were freely giving up the details on how to use their hyperdrives, but I wasn’t going to point this out to them.
“If you want to do anything else,” FM said, “you need a cytonic. Jorgen can ask the slugs to hyperjump anywhere he can see, or anywhere he can visualize that the slugs can recognize. The rest of us are limited to verbal commands, which we have to drill beforehand. The slugs pick it up pretty quickly, and they understand some basic abstract concepts like danger. We’re working on a bonding program. That’s why we keep them with us in slings—though engineering is working on a backpack as well. The idea is that even if the pilot can’t give a command, the slugs are attached enough to their pilot partners that they want to pull us out of danger, and are familiar enough with us to understand what might be helpful and what won’t.”
“That seems like a lot to ask of a slug.”
“Slug!” Gill trilled softly.
“It is,” FM said. “But they’re doing great at it. Aren’t you, Gill?”
“Gill!” Kimmalyn’s slug said, and immediately appeared on top of the dash in front of FM, extending itself up to peer at Gill in FM’s sling.
“Good girl, Happy,” FM said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a tin of a slimy-looking substance. The taynix eagerly ate it off her finger, despite Gill’s best efforts to nudge its way in and take some.
“That’s the other command they know,” Jorgen said. “They can recognize each other’s names and go find each other, regardless of distance. So even if Alanik didn’t want to go to Detritus to get Rig—”
“Are we learning how useless we are without the engineers again?” Sadie asked, walking up behind us with the others. “I thought we knew that already.”
“You’d think,” T-Stall—or Catnip—said. “But it turns out there is no limit to the number of times we have to learn obvious things.”
“Speak for yourself,” the other one said. “I knew it already. I was simply waiting for the rest of you to catch up.”
Arturo followed behind them with Nedd. He didn’t acknowledge me at all, as if our conversation had never happened.
It was entirely reasonable for him not to trust me. But it still bothered me that he didn’t, though he was justified—smart, even—in thinking I might betray them.
“Does anyone else feel… heavier here?” Nedd asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Our planets have a slight gravitational difference. I noticed that on Detritus. I don’t think it’s enough of a difference to matter.”
“It matters to my quads,” Nedd said. “I feel like I’ve been doing laps around the orchard at Alta.” He blinked at me. “You probably don’t have orchards, since you live on trees.”
“We do, actually,” I said. “We graft smaller trees into the branches of the large ones. They also grow naturally in places where the bark has disintegrated into debris.”
FM handed Kimmalyn’s taynix back to her. “I was hoping looking at the tech might spark something, since I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Rig talk about this stuff. But no. Still don’t know enough to be useful.” She looked over at Jorgen. “It’s possible that Command doesn’t know Rig was in on us leaving. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“We could try to bring him out and then return him without anyone knowing,” Jorgen said again. “We might need Alanik’s help for that, though. If we use the H-O-M-E position to hyperjump in, that will be obvious. My mom might even have people staking it out, waiting for us.”
“I want to go,” FM says. “I can explain the situation to Rig.”
“Any of us could explain the situation to Rig,” Nedd said.
“Yes,” FM said slowly. “But he trusts me.”
“He trusts all of us, doesn’t he?” Nedd said. “Except maybe Alanik. No offense, Alanik.”
“Why would I take offense to that?” I asked. “It’s factual.”
“See?” Nedd said. “I knew I liked you.”
Arturo gave Nedd a look I couldn’t quite read.
“Alanik could go get Rig,” Jorgen said. “And FM could go with her to explain the situation. Is that all right with you, Alanik?”
Was I willing to take someone with me when I walked onto a platform full of people who now probably considered me a criminal? “Yes, of course,” I said.
“I can jump straight to Rig on my own though,” FM said. “Gill is really good at finding his slug.”
“I still want you to take Alanik with you,” Jorgen said. “We think Gill will be able to get back easily, but I don’t want you stranded on Detritus, facing court-martial.”
“Wait,” Nedd said. “Why is Gill really good at finding Rig’s slug?”
“Because we’ve drilled them so many times,” FM said. She looked a little pink, and sounded defensive.
“Okay,” Nedd said. “But we’ve practiced with all the slugs. We’ve practiced so many times that I think maybe I could find these slugs in the nowhere—”
“You couldn’t,” Jorgen said.
“Leave it, Nedd,” Arturo said.
“But I’m just saying—”
“I hear what you’re saying!” FM said, too loudly.
Everyone stared at her.
She sighed. “Our slugs are really good at finding each other because Rig and I are dating, and we use the slugs to visit each other so we don’t have to deal with awkward questions, because we weren’t ready to tell everyone. There. Now you know.”
“Oh,” Nedd said. He always seemed to have something to say about everything, but now he seemed abashed. Based on the reactions of the group, I guessed that Jorgen and Kimmalyn already knew, and T-Stall and Catnip didn’t care.
“Are mate-pairs taboo in your culture?” I asked. “You all seem very embarrassed to talk about them.”
“Not taboo,” FM said. “But… personal.” She looked at me. “Do the UrDail always speak openly about these things?”
“Fairly openly,” I said. “It’s definitely nothing to be embarrassed about. It can depend on your family culture, but most families are thrilled by mate-pairings, because they welcome children.”
“None of us are thinking about children,” Jorgen said, quickly.
“Can you imagine?” FM said.
I didn’t understand. “Because you’re at war? You were all born during the war, weren’t you?” Unless I drastically misunderstood human aging patterns, they would have had to be.
“Because we’re too young,” FM said. “And we’re pilots on the front lines. Not a life conducive to raising kids. A lot of our parents were pilots, but most of us had at least one parent who wasn’t flying.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re raised by your parents?”
The humans all looked at me like this was a very stupid question. “Yes,” Kimmalyn said. “Who were you raised by?”
“My grandparents,” I said. “We’re encouraged to find a mate-pair young, so we can have children while our parents are still young and healthy enough to raise the children. Parents have to work to support their families. They don’t have time or energy for childcare. Besides, we only have two of them, when there are at least four grandparents involved, so the odds of one of them being able to care for the children is so much higher than with parents.”
“Huh,” Sadie said. “I guess that does make sense when you put it that way.”
I was trying to picture how human parents must handle having babies while—to use FM’s example—still of age to fly in the air force. That sounded like a terrible system.
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “I think the lesson here is that none of us want to talk about relationships or plan to have children in the near future, except maybe Alanik.”
“I’m not going to have a child,” I said. “I’m not in a mate-pair. But it doesn’t bother me to say so. It’s not shameful in my culture either way.”
“Well, I feel shameful,” Nedd said. “Everyone is coupled up but me! FM has a boyfriend, and Arturo is basically engaged—”
“I am not,” Arturo said.
“And Jorgen and Spensa—”
“Shut up, Nedd—” Jorgen said.
“Kimmalyn, do you have a boyfriend?”
Kimmalyn looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Um, no.”
“But seriously, it’s bad enough that I have to hang around while Arturo and Bryn are making kissy faces at each other—”
“You won’t have to do that anymore, trust me,” Arturo said.
“What?” Nedd said. “Why?”
“Because we broke up.”
Now everyone stared at Arturo. He usually had a confident air about him, but now he withered a bit.
Okay. Humans definitely got unreasonably embarrassed about relationships. It was amazing their species managed to survive.
“Seriously?” Nedd asked. He seemed much more concerned now. “When did that happen?”
“A few days ago. She wrote me a letter. But I thought we established that none of us wanted to talk about relationships. Can we please change the subject?”
“Stars, please,” Jorgen said.
“The question is,” FM said, “do we think Rig’s help with the platform will be beneficial enough that we’re willing to ask him to risk a military trial with the rest of us?”
“If it was a military trial, we’d be cleared,” Jorgen said. “Because Cobb is our military leader, and he told us to go. It would have to be a civil trial for us to be convicted, and they can’t try us civilly because all we did was disobey orders, which isn’t a violation of civilian law.”
“And we stole starships,” Kimmalyn reminded him.
“Which are military property!” Jorgen said. “Also should be tried by the DDF. No defection, no grand larceny.”
Everyone looked skeptical, including Jorgen, but if it helped him feel better I didn’t see any harm in leaving him to his faulty logic.
“You disobeyed your mother,” Nedd said. “What do you think she’s going to do to you for that?”
“I don’t know,” Jorgen said. “But at least the rest of you are off the hook there.”
“I’d like my ship,” I said. “Otherwise we’ll have one fewer pilot in the air. If we brought it here with Rig, could he finish reassembling it?” After my last experience in a human vessel, I’d take my own ship back as long as it flew.
“I bet he’d do it,” FM said. “He felt really bad that he’d dismantled it and then you needed it.”
“I think the biggest question,” Arturo said, “is what are our other options?”
Everyone was quiet.
“Okay,” Jorgen said. “The rest of us will stay here and see if we can find a place where the platform is built to interface with the taynix.”
“Interface with them?” I asked.
“If this platform has hypercomm or hyperdrive technology, it will probably have taynix boxes,” FM said. “Like the one in the broken Superiority ship.”
“We’ll look for the boxes while you’re gone,” Jorgen said, “and then Rig can help us figure it out when he gets here.”
I hoped we wouldn’t be gone long enough for them to do much searching. Going to get Rig and my ship should be an in-and-out kind of mission.
But these things rarely worked out that simply.
“All right,” I said. “Are we ready?”
FM scritched Gill on the head. “Let me take us,” she said. “Gill needs the practice.”
I was a bit leery of jetting around the universe at the whims of a slug, but the humans seemed certain this would work. Besides, I’d wanted to learn the secrets to hyperdrive technology. This was my chance to see one in action.
“Okay,” I said. FM stood beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Scud, I hope he’s not in the shower or something,” she said.
“Or in a meeting with Command,” Jorgen said.
“Or that. Gill,” FM said. “Take me to Drape.”
“Drape!” the slug trilled cheerfully.
It took all my concentration not to fight the pull of the negative realm as I was sucked into it by a force completely out of my control.
