Chapter 6: Chapter 6; Travel Time

Alex swallows the mouthful of water she had taken from the cup Agent Coreance had gotten for her as she finishes describing her first few hours as a member of the Black Star’s crew. She hadn’t even realized how thirst she was until she downed half of the cup in the first sip, this last one had taken it down to a little over a fourth of what she had been given to start with. The whirlwind of the emotions she had been through brought back to the forefront of her mind draining her physically and mentally. She looks into the cups depths and sees not just her own reflection but Lerra’s, her chine pressing on her shoulder and the feeling of her arms wrapping around her waist, she forces all of her will into closing her eyes and her hands to put down the cup on the on the steel of the table top.

“Thanks for that.” She says somberly forcing her eyes to look at Agent Coreance.

“You’re welcome,” Agent Coreance assures her with no rush or mock sympathy in his voice or demeanor as he sits across from her with his main hands under his chin and the axillary pair clasp in front of him in almost a prayerful manner as if he has until the universe ends for Alex to continue, “now how long did it take to get through the corridor?”

Alex picks the cup back up to takes another sip before answering, trying hard not to look at the water’s mirror like surface but once again she sees Lerra in the water and put the cup down hurriedly. “About a week.” She whispers yet Coreance hears every syllable as if she is yelling the words.

“Impressive.” He says with the reverence such a proclamation truly deserves. “You made a trip of seven light years in only a week with no time dilation due to the approach of the light speed barrier. Even the most advanced Alliance scouts would be lucky to make the same trip in a month with their FTL drive. Those corridors really are quite amazing.”

“Their locations are also state secrets. Even if you have my H.N.I. you can’t access them without my biometrics and DNA, so even if you try to crack it it’ll just blow a hole in this pretty ship of yours.”

“I never expected you to give me their locations and readily assumed that the coordinates you gave a few moments ago were wrong.”

“Not wrong, merely altered, remember I have a navigational implant in my skull I could find a speck of dust in a solar storm so it’s easy to figure out altered coordinates on the fly that would put you in the right neighborhood but still leave you chasing your tails for years until you give up completely, besides you would need a working tesseract engine which we both know the Alliance doesn’t have.”

“I will not deny you the truth of that.” Coreance says with a soft shake of his head. “Well I assume there was more crew than Lerra, Arthur, the captain, and yourself so who were they?”

“You’re wrong,” she says with a shake of her own head, “Lerra and Arthur were the only real crew on the Black Star. I was a contractor, but there was a passenger.”

“A passenger, on a cargo ship into Black Space?” Coreance gives the rise of his antenna that is for him the raise of his eyebrow.

“I guess ‘passenger’ is the wrong word to use,” she admits, “he was the client, Doctor Steven Granger Peacock.”

“The name has a ring of familiarity to it.”

“It should,” Alex says into her cup of water, “he created the cure to Varik Syndrome.”

“Varik Syndrome?” Coreance asks with a bird like tilt of his head, a strange thing to see on a creature that evolved from insects that were eaten by birds. “I’ve heard of it, it’s a colony disease isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but unlike Formac Syndrome only humans get this, human children. The more religious of us believe that it is a punishment for our hubris upon believing we could tame the stars. It’s caused by our inability to adapt to the solar radiation of stars other than our own Sol mixed with the processes we use to terraform our colony worlds. Adults can somehow survive the radiation but our bone marrow isn’t developing so I guess it makes sense in a sick way. It’s fatal to anyone with it, though it takes time to kill, since it mutates the kid’s bone marrow and stem cells. They live pretty normal lives until they hit puberty then the pain rips their minds apart and their cells deform or liquefy, or worse and they die so badly deformed the only thing their families can do is say a few words as they burn their child’s body.”

“Anyone who could cure something like that must have been seen as a hero.”

“Maybe, but we humans are notoriously stupid creatures who don’t always realize who our true heroes are. Dr. Peacock was given a pat on the back and not much else.”

“That must have twisted him.”

“I don’t know if that’s true, I just know the guy scared the carp out of me with just a look.”

“When was the first time you meet him?”

“Not till we had left the corridor, he stayed in the med bay most of the time before, during and after.”

I had been working on the charts for our trip the whole time we went through the corridor and had taken all of my meals in there to. I had planned on taking my meals outside the corridor in my room as well. The tesseract engine has the power to get us into and through corridors but beyond that they have little or no power to do anything else while we travel through the corridors, it takes a lot of energy to fold space like paper, so eating a hot meal is a bit of luxury and eating dehydrated food for a week puts me a bad mood, always has always will. Lerra decided that she had had enough of me being a shut in during our trip and now that we were out and able to cook she decided that I was going to eat something she cooked with the rest of the crew and she decided to get me out of my quarters by slamming her cybernetic arm into my door until I was forced to pay attention to her, it only took about three good slams since at the time I wasn’t doing much more than pull ups from slats in the ceiling to clear my head, I can look at maps all day but if I don’t stop every once in a while I have to step away before I reach the point of diminished returns.

I grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat from my face and hands before I moved to open the door and I wasn’t so polite in my greeting, I kind of yelled at her. “It’s unlocked for the sake of the damn gods, it’s not like I’m naked in here or anything!”

She slammed the door one more time and before clicking it open, “You,” she snapped at me, “are not going to eat in this room alone again.”

I really wasn’t paying any attention to her and threw my towel onto the bed before picking up a pad I had been working on before I started my reps. “I am, since I’m going to eat in here, alone, I like eating alone.”

“Well not tonight.” She snapped marching into my room and taking the pad I had been working on out of my hand and keeping it out of my reach. “You like being a bitch and I’ve had enough of it. We’re out of the corridor and have finally been able to power the kitchen properly and I’ve made my specialty to celebrate.”

I tried to get my pad from her and gave up after two tries, Lerra is a good sixteen centimeters taller than me and with her cybernetics more than a little faster than me to, so defeated I settled back onto my bed to look up at her as she stood above me and glared at her as best as I could. “You’re not going to let me eat alone are you?” I growled under my breath.

“No,” she said flatly, “even if I have to use my pheromones on you.”

“Pheromones?” I gaffed. “Those are a myth.”

“You want to test that myth.” Her smile could have been called vamperistic, or more realistically overwhelming.

“Not right now?” I bounced my way off the bed and onto my feet, and returned to being sixteen centimeters shorter than Lerra.

“Can I ask you a question?” She asked me before I could take a step away from her.

I just sighed and conceded to the inevitable. “You’re going to ask me anyway so just get on with it.”

“Why are their magnetic restraints on all of your things?”

“Simple,” I answered her with a smirk, “I have this thing about sleeping with the gravity off.” She gave me a lifted brow as I walked past her and out the door.

“Really?” She asked me evilly and I thought better of it than to answer her.

Unlike opening my door closes quietly, and we walked to the common area without saying another word but we only had to travel about twenty feet. Arthur was busying himself setting the table so he paid nether of use any visible attention but with all his sensors that meant about as much as a star shining. And since I had been forced into this meal I thought I might as well know what I was going to be shoveling down my gullet. “So what’s for dinner anyway?”

“Something that you might remember from your home.” Lerra said without saying anything that meant anything, my alias said I came from Earth but Earth had hundreds of races and more styles of cooking and types of food than there are stars in the Gamma Chu Cluster.

“Could you be any vaguer?” I sighed.

“You’ll find out.” Lerra continued to tease foolishly.

I gave up trying to get anything from her and turned on Arthur, he would answer anything I asked truthfully, it was in his programing. “Arthur what did she make?”

He didn’t even stop to look at me as he continued to put out silverware and glasses. “She made a variation of sushi with Neralian carp and Salron wild rice.”

“I hate sushi.” I declared flatly, alright I stuck out my tongue too, in a purely juvenile display of disgust.

“I also made a salad of Valarian greens.” She had a wicked smile but every time she showed it to me I wanted to, never mind it’s not important.

I pulled out my seat and sat down. “I think I’ll take the sushi.”

“Good choice.” James smirked.

The others each pull out their chairs and took their seats around the table and begin to dish out the food. They passed the salad by me two times before I open my mouth to talk again. “I know this is probably a stupid question but why is the table set for five when there are only four of us eating, no offense to you Arthur but you’re an android you don’t eat.”

“No, no, na…” His vocal processors began to glitch again and he had to restart them before he could finish. “None taken ma’am.”

I sighed heavily, I can’t tell you all the times I had already told him to just simply call me Alexis like everybody else but he just refused to, it was like his programing was incapable of changing what he called people but I’m a hot head and I had to tell him again. “I told you to call me Alexis about a thousand times already.”

“I am sorry ma’am.” He said flatly.

“Never mind.” I sighed as I took a few pieces of sushi off the main platter and put them onto my plate. I was just getting the first piece up to my mouth when Dr. Peacock walked into the room like he owned the whole damn universe and was disgusted that we even existed. I could almost feel the malice that radiated off of him and I wanted nothing to do with him as I stopped bringing the sushi to my mouth and stared at him trying to keep from peeing myself or worse, vomiting and running away in fear like some scarred child.

James though didn’t seemed to be worried or alarmed at all he even smiled at Dr. Peacock when he saw my reaction, I think he might of just thought I was suffering from star shock. “Hey Doc, why don’t you join us for a meal? We’ve got a place all set for ya.”

I had never heard him speak, medical history was never my forte, I actually hated the subject, even though his invention helped to keep me and my friends alive along with our genetic modifications, but his voice was not kind it was like the voice of the devil. As cold as ice and as calculating as an atom boom and washed over me with so much malice that I thought I would turn to ice and shatter if a speck of dust were to drift on me.

“I think I would prefer to eat in my own room.” He bent over Lerra and took up his plate from the table and with a surgeons precise movements he filled his plate. Once he had taken four pieces of sushi and a pinch of salad he rose back up and prepared to leave. “I still have some tests I’m running which need my full attention.” He turned on his heel and walked back down the hall back to his room with the air of a Nazi soldier who had just killed a room full of Jewish prisoners, and enjoyed it.

“Who was that?” I asked the sushi still in inches from my mouth.

James turned back around in his seat so that she could see me better. “That’s our patron, Doctor Steven Peacock.”

I put down my food and covered everything with my chopsticks as I ran through my memory. “Why does that name seem so familiar?”

James rolled his eyes at me and shook his head sadly. “Gees you’re dense. He came up the vaccine for Varik Syndrome. A few years ago you couldn’t see a news vid without seeing his face somewhere in it, then the wars started again and we all forgot about him and what he did for all of us.”

I couldn’t stay there any longer and pushed away from the table and started to make my way back to my room. “I’m sorry Lerra, everything looks great it’s just that I’ve lost my appetite.”

Lerra looked at me with not a mechanic’s eyes but with a caring person’s. “You okay Alexis?”

“Yeah,” I lied, “I’m just not hungry and I still have to plot the route for the next leg of this damned trip unless you want to run into every pirate between here and the next star cluster.”

“Alright.” She whispered.