Unknown

INCEPTION

Copán :

Honduras :

Central American Conglomeration :

My shame is unimaginable.

For years my grandson believed I was just a silly old man. I had hoped he would change his mind and grow to respect me and my knowledge when Colop—the Sky Traveler; the one they call Alex Manez—returned from the stars to thank me for helping the scientists.

I know my grandson never truly respected me, and he has proved to me that I am unworthy. I can no longer bear to face the people in my village.

Perhaps I was too prideful after Colop told me that they needed my help to discover the key to the fifth world so that we may become one with the People of the Stars. He told me the path to the stars was still clouded, and only I could unlock the secrets of the ancient scroll. I had to help him complete his journey.

He is the only one who can hear the Music of the Spheres, but it is not enough. He must also be able to hear the Song of the Stars.

It has been two summers since I spoke with Colop last, but I have worked very hard to translate the scroll for him.

They sent translators to help me when I refused to let them take the scroll away, but since they came to our village, they have been more than useless. They try to find English words to match the ancient Mayan symbols, and they do not listen when I tell them they are traveling down the wrong path.

I told them Colop should be here to learn the story, but they say it is impossible; they will send him images and recordings instead. They do not understand that their machine will only strip the meaning from my story, and so I declined their offer.

Frustrated with me, they took images of the scroll and sent them back to their labs; they used microscopes and chemicals to tell them if the secret was in the paper; they entered the Mayan symbols and pictograms into their computers.

Afraid of damage to the sacred scroll, the translators encased it in a plastic cover for me; for this contribution I am pleased, and I have hung it on the wall in my home.

All their efforts produced nothing more than gibberish, however. After a time, their irritation led them to threats, and then bribes, and then to more threats.

When they demanded to know if I am keeping the secret from them, I told them I have nothing to hide. I can only tell them what my grandfather said to me: true understanding lay not with the story, but in the telling of the story. I offer to tell them the story again, but I don’t think they are capable of listening.

One week ago, my grandson, who has also been frustrated with me for a long time, asked me to tell him the story one more time. I had hoped that my telling would give him understanding, but he ran from my house before I finished the Song.

Yesterday, he brought a friend he said he had met on his city adventure. The stranger asked me plainly why I would not help the scientists learn the secret. If I made them happy, he said to me, perhaps the knowledge could help raise the status of the Mayan people in the eyes of the world. At the very least, they would send us wealth.

I told my grandson’s friend we did not need any more computers or machines. Such conveniences are secondary and unimportant in the great plan. Our status is not necessary, either. Our purpose should be to help Colop complete his journey and become one with the stars; that is all that truly matters.

My grandson said that his friend would like to listen to me tell the story once more. I hoped, perhaps, that their young ears would hear more than the old ears of the scientists from the north.

We sat on the long couch in front of the scroll and I told the story to my grandson and his friend one last time. I was very careful to tell it in the manner it was told to me by my own grandfather.

When I finished, I looked at them expectantly. At first, the other man’s face was clouded over, but my grandson was excited.

“Do you not hear it?” he said to his friend.

After a moment, the stranger nodded. “Yes. I think so. I think you are right.”

My heart swelled with pride. Finally, my grandson understood something in the tale. It was his destiny to hear the story. My grandfather had passed the legacy to me, as his grandfather had passed it to him. And now my grandson will become ambassador to the People of the Stars.

“You know the secret?” I asked him. I was hopeful.

My grandson nodded. “Yes, Grandfather, I believe I do. Thank you.”

“Good.” I closed my eyes with satisfaction. When I opened them again, I said, “Then you must find Colop and reveal the secret to him so that he also may hear the Song of the Stars.”

He smiled at me in a way I had never before seen. “Oh, Grandfather. No, I will not find Alex Manez. And no, I will not give him the secret.”

“I do not understand,” I said.

He stood, and I saw that he clenched his fist at his side. “It is now my secret. It is my destiny to conquer the stars, not his.”

My grandson tore the plastic-sealed scroll from the wall. When I stood to protest, his friend pulled out a gun and pointed it at me.

“What is this? What are you doing?” I demanded of my grandson.

“Sorry, grandfather. You have to come with us.”

Two more men entered my house, then. They had rifles. I had no choice but to go with them.

How could I have been so blind? How could I not have seen all these years how my grandson despised our humble life in the village, and envied the power of Colop?

There is no use left for me. I have failed the gods, and must surrender myself to their mercy.

Selected EarthMesh Forum Excerpts

keyword search: Quanta

September 2103

“…think the mission was a total fail. Now they’re touting him around on the newsfeeds as if he’s a conquering hero. He didn’t even see any aliens or anything. the Quanta: ship of fools. What a waste of money and time…”

October 2103

“…was on a liner to Luna Base last week. Someone said Captain Alex Manez was on board. I tried to get a look at him, but the security was too tight. NASA’s meshsite said they’re gearing up to launch another one of those Quanta ships…”

November 2103

“…you hear about the Quanta 5 test flight yesterday? The quantum drive lasted about two seconds before it blew the ship right into the cosmos. This is—what?—the eighth astronaut they’ve either killed or maimed trying to get this right. Not to mention how many billions each of those ships cost. When are they going to give up? There are more important things to think about…”

January 2104

“…I guess it was my own fault. I sank our life savings into USA, Inc. stock before the Quanta flight, and I kept it there even when they missed the scheduled return date and the value started to sink. Now they’ve put Quantum Resources on the auction block because their stock is at an all time low and they don’t have any more money to spend. I just hope that stops the devaluation. It’s going to be a tight Christmas…”

February 2104

“…saw a report that NASA and CSE officially released Captain Alex Manez from their active roster. He was the pilot for the Quanta. Now that they’ve scrubbed the interstellar program, I guess they don’t need him anymore. I can’t seem to find any pictures of him…”

March 2104

“…and after fifteen years, now I’m out of a job. USA, Inc. needs a new CEO. First he spent trillions on Quanta ships, all of which either blew up or just didn’t work, or the pilots died in training exercises. Now he’s sold all Quantum Resources stock to Canada Corp. for pennies on the dollar. Didn’t he think about all the people who worked in the Houston office? I’m fifty-two; with the economy in a shambles, who’s going to hire me now…?”

August 2104

“…finally getting their heads out of the sand. I just read a press release from Canada Corp.’s SMD stating that they’re no longer actively searching for that Kinemet element. I mean, without a working Quanta ship, the stuff is far too costly to mine. We can use iron ore; that’ll get people building again, jumpstart the economy and create some jobs…”

August 2105

“…you guys remember that position I was applying for with Quantum Resources? They were the ones spearheading the first Quanta missions ten years ago, but they’re more of an applied astrophysics think-tank operation now. Heavy into theoretical research—right up my alley. Well, I got the job! I start orientation in four weeks…”

Canada Station Three :

Lagrange Point 4 :

Earth Orbit :

December 2105

Alex Manez sat in the cockpit of the Quanta. All on-board electronics were dead, the heads-up displays were blank, and the only sound he could hear was the soft beating of his heart in his chest.

To the side of the pilot’s chair, a pull ring hung from a short length of wire. All he had to do was to reach for that ring and give it a sharp tug. The reaction would switch on the generator and charge the battery, which would in turn power the computers and other electrical systems, including the Kinemetic dampers.

Alex reached out for the pull ring, and his fingers—the slender fingers of a teenager—touched the cool thin metal. The last time he had done this, his hand passed through the ring, as if he were a ghost caught between the living and spirit worlds.

The last time, the ship had exploded.

Now, there was no urgency in his actions. With minimal effort, he drew the ring back until it clicked, and watched as the holoslate in front of him flickered to life.

A green light indicated that all systems were operational and ready for normal navigation.

Disinterested, he brushed a thin strand of hair out of his eyes and longed for the time when he had a full head of hair. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

He looked up when a short, high-pitched binging sound came out of the holoslate.

Superimposed on the screen over a schematic display, a sour-looking face appeared, and narrowed eyes stared directly at Alex as if looking straight through him.

“And then what happened?” asked Kenny Harriman, the newest physicist to join the Quantum Resources research team on CS3. He was considered something of a whiz at the University of British Columbia, from where he had been recruited.

Biologically only a few years older than Alex, Kenny acted like a tenured professor. It was as if he had something to prove. From the moment he arrived in the lab, he had insisted on reading every report concerning the Quanta missions, reviewing every diagnostic ever run on Alex, and making sure he was supervising every simulation exercise.

He also had an annoying habit of making every question or statement a challenge. Kenny was a very excitable young man who obviously loved the pursuit of knowledge. At the same time, he was on a personal mission to drag Quantum Resources back into the spotlight of the world’s scientific community.

In contrast to the physicist, Alex was the epitome of calm. “I told you. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing!” Kenny tapped something on his haptic console, and the canopy of the life-sized flight simulator snapped open.

The hydraulics lifted the top up and away from Alex. He blinked to adjust his eyes to the brighter light of the simulation room. Through a large pane of glass, two analysts hunched over computer schematics in the adjacent room.

The light continued to sting Alex’s eyes, but he watched as Ellen Yarrow adjusted the rim of her glasses over her pert nose.

Once, when Alex had first arrived on CS3 after his interstellar flight, he had tried to strike up a conversation with Ellen. She’d acted like she was uncomfortable, and excused herself. Since then, she had gone out of her way to avoid him.

Alex had no idea why he tortured himself over her, or over the possibility of any relationship. Even if he looked as old as his birth certificate stated, he was still a freak of nature, a science experiment gone awry.

He was doomed to solitude.

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” Kenny demanded.

Alex fixed the physicist with a smile of innocence. “I don’t mean anything by it. Nothing happened when I pulled the ring on the flight.”

Kenny seemed completely unaffected. “Tell me why I don’t believe you.”

“It wasn’t enough of a kick to turn the Quanta back on.” Alex explained. “I had to provide the charge to initiate the systems.”

“Right. This ‘electropathic’ ability, which you’ve failed to demonstrate to us time and again.” The physicist pulled a disbelieving face. “All we have is your say-so you have the ability to manipulate electrical systems … oh and the questionable reports from the crew of the Orcus 1.” He waved his holoslate in front of Alex.

Alex had had the same argument for the past two years with every scientist, technician and administrator Quantum Resources and Canada Corp. had sent up to Canada Station Three.

Before the real Quanta’s first interstellar voyage, Alex had judged that the Kinemetic influence on the electrical systems of the ship would far surpass initial estimates. The shielded battery would not hold nearly enough power to start all the shipboard computers. And he had been correct. The pull ring had done absolutely nothing.

The longer Alex had been in proximity to the kinetic metal, the more of a charge he had built up. Once the Quanta had reached Centauri space, there was enough electrical current at Alex’s disposal for him to start the computers and bring the life-support systems back online. That effort—among other things—had completely depleted him for a very long time.

Alex said, “I will be more than happy to show you how it works. I just need an adequate amount of Kinemet to replenish me.”

Kenny gave him a cool gaze filled with disbelief.

Alex repeated himself, and there was a tone of quiet desperation that slipped into his voice. “I need it.”

Without Kinemet, Alex was not only powerless to control electrical currents around him, but the longer he spent away from it, the faster his physical body deteriorated.

As with all living things, there were certain vitamins, minerals and amino acids an organism needed in order to maintain and sustain life; with Alex, it was as if exposure to the kinetic metal had added one more required element to his biological makeup when he had been irradiated on Macklin’s Rock.

The physicist shook his head. “Even if I could authorize a small quantity—which I can’t because we don’t have any—I’m not convinced that mere exposure to the element will suddenly infuse you with some kind of supernatural power.”

“It’s not a sudden effect.”

“Besides,” Kenny said, narrowing his eyes, “according to these reports, when they were still building Quanta ships, they allocated half a milligram of Kinemet here for testing purposes. You were in contact with it.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Alex said. “A drop of water for a man dying of thirst.” Without the influence of Kinemet, his health had deteriorated drastically. The doctors couldn’t prove that lack of exposure to Kinemet was causing his issues, and without a substantial quantity of the metal, he couldn’t prove that it would help.

Kenny waved his hand in the air frantically. “We can go around in circles forever on this. It wasn’t the question I was asking, anyway.”

“I know,” Alex said.

“I know you know!” Kenny was not as capable of hiding his frustration as his predecessor. He took a long, deep breath. “You say you were able to start the generator.”

Nodding, Alex said, “I was.”

Kenny sighed. “Then why did it explode, and why didn’t you die in the explosion?”

“It’s in my report,” Alex said, his voice weary. “I got the systems up, but it was too late to engage the dampers. The secondary Kinemetic reaction had started; there was no way to stop it from exploding. I barely had enough time to eject the escape pod.”

Kenny blinked. “It’s too bad the flight recorder can’t corroborate your story.”

“I told you, when I used the electropathy to start the generator, I pushed too hard and it wiped the storage drive.”

“Convenient,” Kenny said.

Alex frowned. “You should have shielded it better.”

Kenny flicked his hand dismissively. “Never mind about that. You had rations for one week—two if you pushed it. So how did you survive after that? What happened in the almost two-and-a-half months between when you arrived in the Centauri system and when you made the return trip. You just—what—floated in space all that time in the pod?”

“It’s a little foggy,” Alex said. “I think I was suffering some aftereffects from being quantized. Time didn’t really flow in an ordinary way.” He wasn’t a very good liar. From the look Kenny gave him, the physicist didn’t believe him on that point.

In his debriefing to Quantum Resources—when it was still a joint venture between USA, Inc. and Canada Corp.—Alex had reported that his escape pod had detected a star beacon, an identical cousin to Sol System’s Dis Pater, on the outer rim of the Centauri System. Another huge monument that resembled an electron cloud, the alien structure rested on the surface of a minor planet a fraction of the size of Charon.

Alex repeated himself for the hundredth time in the past two years. “I used the pod’s jets to head for the alien star beacon. When I got there, it just … sent me home.”

Fixing Alex with a look of frustration, Kenny said, “And if all of the Kinemet blew up with the Quanta, how did ‘it’ send you back to Sol System?”

That was one of the many questions the Quantum Resources scientists kept asking, but they continued to disbelieve any answer Alex gave them; and they were right. It was unfortunate that he was unable to tell them the truth.

He hated that there were things about his story he couldn’t share. But if he shared his secret before the world was ready, it would lead to…

He didn’t even dare think of it.

The frustration he felt had only sharpened over the past few years. The world needed to develop the Kinemet technology as fast as it could, but they had encountered a brick wall. Coupled with the worsening economy, it seemed no one was that interested in investing in Kinemet.

At times, Alex wanted to scream to get the world motivated, but he knew he had to bite his tongue.

Time was running out; at the rate of things, it might take decades for the science of Kinemet to get where it needed to be.

Because of his health, Alex didn’t have decades; he most likely didn’t even have years.

But whenever Calbert Loche or Raymond McGrath sent up a new physicist to Quantum Resources, Alex did his best to help them, hoping they were the ones who could unlock the secret of Kinemet.

Inevitably, due to his reluctance to tell the complete truth, and also because those details he did share were difficult to believe, those newcomers eventually discounted the rest of Alex’s story.

Kenny was a little more stubborn than his predecessors, but he was on the wrong track. Alex knew where today’s conversation was heading, and the day’s events had taken a toll on him. He didn’t have the strength to endure an argument, and at this point, he didn’t care if Kenny Harriman pitched a fit over it.

Alex said, “I’m tired. I need to rest.”

Vibrating with barely suppressed anger, Kenny stormed off and tapped his report into the haptic console. One of the lab assistants approached and assisted Alex out of the simulator’s cockpit.

∞

It had been over two years since Alex’s return from the first interstellar voyage. The world financial crisis had intensified in Alex’s absence. USA, Inc. and Canada Corp. had banked heavily on a successful mission for the Quanta. Contact with an alien race would have made the country corporations’ stocks soar. New technologies, medicines, and even the possibility of interstellar trade would have boosted shareholder and consumer confidence.

With Alex’s report that he had seen nothing out there except the distant flare of the Centauri system’s red dwarf star, Proxima, the media had descended on the two country corporations, hungry for blood. They accused the United Earth Corporate Council of wasting trillions of dollars on an empty space fantasy when they should have concentrated their efforts on the realities of increasing population, famine and energy depletion. The UECC had backed out of the Quanta trials, and after NASA and Quantum Resources’ repeated failures, USA, Inc. decided to follow suit.

Quantum Resources barely survived USA, Inc.’s downsizing efforts by selling all shares to Canada Corp. and relocating its quantum research facility to Canada Station Three.

Without a steady supply of Kinemet for practical trials, Quantum Resources had turned into more of a theoretical analysis laboratory. At the moment, their only solid asset was Alex Manez. Despite his agreement to be their guinea pig—and as his body continued to fail him—he found himself becoming more and more obstinate.

As had happened during his self-imposed exile on the pirate base on Luna, without the direct influence of Kinemet, Alex had begun to physically deteriorate once more. It was as if the radiation emitted from that element, while basically harmless to those who had not been exposed during a transfer reaction, had become a requisite substance for Alex. He fed off it; it replenished him and kept him alive.

He had no idea how long he would live without it.

The harshest side effect of his condition was that he could not tolerate Earth’s high gravity anymore. While the main labs, administration areas, and the common and recreation centers on Canada Station Three were all fitted with the latest in artificial gravity technology, the levels in the living quarters were completely adjustable by the occupants. Alex, when home, kept gravity to a bare minimum.

Unable to stand on his own for more than a few short minutes at a time, Alex had purchased a set of hydraulic leg braces which would support his weight. He purchased them with the proceeds from the severance package given to him by NASA.

When not in his quarters, Alex wore his hydraulic braces. Using fluid dynamics, biomechatronics and environmental pressure sensors, the braces were able to compensate for any external factors, such as walking on an incline or stairs, or—if he were back on Earth—snow or rain. They provided him with a more natural gait. From a distance, most people would not be able to tell he wore orthotics. Not that it made any difference: Alex looked pale and sickly; his hair was thin and stringy, and his bones continued to atrophy no matter how many vitamin shots the medical staff administered.

All the researchers and corporate administrators treated Alex like a child. Even Ellen Yarrow looked at him as if he were something she discovered in a Petri dish. Although his body appeared to be that of a sixteen-year-old boy, according to his birth record, he was twenty-five; legally an adult. During the eight or so years when his body had been in a quantized state, he had not aged physically.

Once the assistants secured him in the leg supports, Alex pulled on his loose-fitting trousers and fastened them at his waist.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kenny returning, and steeled himself for a confrontation.

Kenny watched as Alex finished dressing.

The physicist finally said, “Look, I don’t want us to be enemies. I want you to trust me. I just want what’s best for everyone.”

Alex scoffed.

Kenny threw up a hand. “Fine. I want what’s best for me, but that can only lead to helping you. So please, can’t we start the dialogue over again?”

“If you truly want to help yourself,” Alex said, “then you’ll listen when I tell you that what you are doing right now is irrelevant—and quite possibly counterproductive.”

Shaking his head, Kenny asked, “How can the study of the most advanced technology in the universe be irrelevant?”

Kenny often spoke as if he were in a lecture hall.

Alex sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying. It is the most important thing in the world. We need to master it before—”

“Before what?”

Alex shook his head. “First, you need to understand the basics of Kinemet. And we don’t even know how to stabilize it. We need to focus on how Kinemet affects people, not how to build a better quantum drive. Everyone keeps looking at the power of Kinemet as if it’s just the key to light-speed travel.”

“But it is!”

Alex shook his head. “Yes, it can be a trigger for quantizing matter into light and powering a properly equipped vehicle at near light speeds. But that’s only the most rudimentary of its properties.”

“What are you talking about?” Kenny scanned his notes, but Alex knew none of his predecessors had written anything about this.

Normally, he wouldn’t try to explain himself. However, of all the researchers sent up to CS3, Alex had a feeling that Kenny’s mind might be open to new possibilities.

Alex said, “It can do so much more than just be a fuel for light-speed travel.”

Voice low, ears alert, Kenny asked, “Such as…?”

Alex pointed to himself. “Human chrysalis, for one. Though we’ve failed miserably in that regard. And then there’s the Grace.”

Kenny stared at Alex as if he were speaking another language.

He blinked. “The grace of what?”

Alex cursed himself and said, “Nothing. Sorry, I’m just too tired to think straight. I have to go to my quarters.”

Interim Report :

Health Status :

Alex Manez :

From: Dr. Naryan Amma, Ph.D., CS3 Medical Chief of Staff

To: Canada Corp. Health Services, Dept. of Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases.

Diagnosis: The subject, Alex Manez, displays symptoms indicative of massive vitamin deficiency, particularly D and C, though all levels of those vitamins are with normal ranges.

Despite bombardment of multivitamins and a diet of citrus and dairy products, Alex Manez suffers from continued hair loss, chronic insomnia, pale skin and osteoporosis.

There is indication of onset muscle degeneration, and I expect other symptoms to become prevalent as his condition worsens.

While his mental acuity remains in the top percentile, his emotional state has become volatile, and he is prone to depression and anxiety.

Treatment: All attempts to correct the subject’s condition have failed to reverse or even stall his deterioration. Physical exercise exacerbates his pain, multivitamin injections and supplements show no effect, and growth hormones only serve to cause gastrointestinal distress and may lead to kidney and liver failure.

Prognosis: Alex Manez has no more than six months to live.

Houston Interplanetary Spaceport :

Texas :

USA, Inc. :

It had been over ten years since Justine Turner had seen a sunrise or sunset, since she’d looked upon the face of another person with her own eyes, and since she had even been able to look at herself in a mirror.

She’d gone blind at the edge of Sol System. While she did not regret the events that brought her to that point—and would not trade those experiences for her sight—she found some days more difficult than others, especially in the beginning.

One of the toughest transitions was the loss of her command status. She wanted nothing more than to captain a ship again; to breathe the stale cabin air of a control center; read digital displays and make decisions that would take her vessel out into the vast reaches of space.

The months she had spent on the journey back from Pluto had been the hardest, when she was completely cut off from all sight.

When she got home, she underwent optilink surgery to allow her brain to interpret electrical pulses from an optical-neural translation sensor, which she clipped to the bridge of her nose.

Still, she had struggled with the most basic of daily chores: cooking, dressing and personal grooming to name a few. She had hired an assistant to help her the first year home, but that only reminded her how helpless she was.

Holoslate interfaces were based off haptic technology. It was a perfect match for those who used Braille. After learning the system, Justine was able to read any eBook, manual, or meshmail with the built-in Braille application as easily as a sighted person.

But adjusting to a world where she was blind wasn’t the worst part; it was the boredom. She’d had nothing to do.

So once she’d mastered the optical sensor technology, she had pleaded with the officials at NASA to reassign her to the active duty roster.

When they offered her an instructor’s position, she jumped at the chance, knowing it was most likely the closest she would ever come again to being in command, or tasting the exhilaration of space flight.

There was a second reason she had so eagerly accepted an instructor’s position. The feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment in passing her knowledge on to the young trainees was something she had come to love.

She would never have a child of her own. Biologically, it was still a possibility—there were women much older than her who had children—but at this stage in her life, and with her own personal challenges, she just couldn’t see herself making that decision. By the time he or she was a teenager, Justine would be in her late sixties, and she couldn’t imagine that she would have enough energy to keep up.

The closest she had ever come to having a child was during those short few months aboard the Quanta with Alex Manez. It had given her a fleeting taste of motherhood, and for the first time her life, she had understood the power of that instinct. To care for and impart her experiences to those who would follow in her footsteps gave her as much of a sense of completeness as she could ever have wanted.

The years she spent as a flight instructor were some of the best in the last decade.

Now, however, that was all behind her.

In the past two years, NASA and USA, Inc. had suffered a great many setbacks—not to mention the loss of many lives on the Quanta experiments. That had resulted in the sale of Quantum Resources to Canada Corp. and the shoe-boxing of the entire Kinemet program. There were far too many problems here on Earth to spend any more money on interstellar exploration; or at least, that was the reason the directors at USA, Inc. had given for their decision to sell.

Many of NASA’s independent contractors had been released from their contracts, and even many regular staff members had been offered severance packages and early retirement.

They had offered Justine a very generous sum, enough that she could easily have weathered the troubled financial times in relative comfort for many years to come. She had taken the settlement, and wondered what to do with the rest of her life. For a time, she thought about returning to the Lowell Observatory and completing her studies there, but the call of space was too great for her to simply retire.

With her background, she managed to secure a position with Lunar Lines Ltd., who ran their space liners between Houston Spaceport and Luna Base, as a public relations hostess.

It was a one-week round trip, and Justine worked two flights on, one flight off. The position was much more than being an attendant or a tour guide; she was also responsible for the comfort and general safety of the passengers, as well as their peace of mind. While travel to Luna Station and the various space stations orbiting Earth was becoming more frequent, only a fraction of the population had ever undertaken the trip, and for many of those who took a liner it was the first time. They were understandably nervous flying into the void of space.

That morning was the beginning of another of Justine’s rotations, and she always looked forward to this leg of the trip for more than just the chance to be in space.

At the Earth-Moon Lagrange 4 point was Canada Station Three, among the Kordylewski clouds. Lunar Lines always had a one-day stopover there before heading to their ultimate destination, and it was Justine’s only chance to see Alex Manez.

She worried about him; he seemed to become more pale and sickly every time she visited him. The last time she had stopped there, over two weeks before, he had been significantly more tired than usual and had cut their visit short.

This time around, she hoped to get a word in with someone in charge of the Quantum Resources labs, and find out what they were doing to help him. And if she didn’t get satisfaction from them, she would just have to call in a few more favors.

The apartment’s home-unit computer system sounded a chime on the main holoslate, indicating there was a vehicle in her driveway.

“Identify,” she said out loud.

<Ace Taxi Service,> Hucs informed her. <Cab Number 3419; the driver’s name is Tomas Salenko, four-year taxi license holder.>

“Oh, he’s early. Thank you. I’ll be a just another minute.”

<Relaying message.>

Justine hurried back to her bedroom and approached the bed. Resting on the sheets were her two travel bags and a specially developed harness.

The optical recognition scanner on her optilink fed her brain rudimentary spatial data. It allowed her to navigate between one room and the next, and even gave her the ability to discern the difference between a fork and a spoon. It didn’t have the capability to show her color, texture or patterns. She could detect the frame of a painting hung on a wall, but she had no way of telling whether it was a blank canvas or a Van Gogh.

Meeting people was just as challenging. It was as if she were face blind. Until someone spoke, Justine had extreme difficulty telling one moving biped from another, unless they had very distinct physical traits.

Optimedia Labs, the company she had originally purchased her optilink through, was also the company who had invented the Virtual Tourist.

A few months back, they had released the next generation in recognition software. Intended for the digital mock-reality entertainment industry, the Personal Environmental Recording Suit—PERSuit, as it was trademarked—was a step up from their Virtual Tourist Camera.

It recorded and interpreted over ten million coded shapes, sounds, smells, colors and textures. Thousands of micro-sensors in the fabric of the harness constantly scanned all audio, video and olfactory data within range.

Contestants on game shows or adventure shows would wear the PERSuit while participating, and then viewers could download those episodes into their septaphonic masks and experience those events for themselves, as if they were there in the contestant’s place.

While the downloads were relatively inexpensive, the harness itself was pricey, and getting the techs to integrate the PERSuit sensors with her optilink required signed affidavits that she would not sue in the event of a sensory overload. Combining her body’s natural senses with the artificial sensors was not recommended by any of the company’s medical staff.

The result was more than she had hoped for, and while she wore the specifically tailored harness, it was as if she had her sight back. There was a major drawback to the garment.

Within a few days of wearing it, Justine began to feel the effect that the company had feared: extended exposure caused her to develop severe migraines. She couldn’t wear the harness for more than twelve hours in a day before the pain became unbearable—her mind just couldn’t process the enormous amounts of data.

Through experimentation, Justine had also found that if she wore the harness four days in a row, the headaches would start as well.

As a compromise, she never wore the harness at home—she had memorized every nook and cranny in her apartment and didn’t need it anyway—and she rarely wore it in public.

For the most part, she wore it when she was working. In her newest vocation as a liner hostess, being able to identify passengers by sight was a valuable ability—especially since the majority of those passengers were country-corporate decision makers, department heads for various science and tech companies, and influential members of the media.

Folding the harness carefully, she packed it in one of her travel bags and headed out to catch her taxi to the spaceport.

∞

Houston Spaceport was bustling with activity. As the taxi pulled up the long stretch of road to the main entry gates, Justine could sense many human forms gathered on the grassy hills in front of the twenty-foot-high fence. While her optilink sensor picked up that the protestors held signs, she could not read any of the slogans written on them; she could, however, hear their angry shouts when she opened the window a crack.

“Feed the people—not your greed!”

“Space is a waste!”

“We need jobs on Earth, too!”

“God gave us Eden; only those who are unworthy seek to leave the garden!”

It was nearly impossible to explain to such protestors that space exploration had opened avenues to new technologies and conveniences which they themselves used on a daily basis. Mining the asteroid belts did provide jobs as the raw materials were shipped back to Earth for processing; it also saved the Earth’s natural resources.

There were protestors at nearly every facility in the country that promoted science and technology. If someone suffered a job loss for whatever reason, they often didn’t care to look closely at the actual cause; it was easier to point the finger at the nearest target. In the past few years, it was the space industry. Nearly gutting the NASA program was not enough; they wanted to ground all space exploration.

There were also outcries from many of the world’s religions, which had started from the day Justine and her crew had discovered the Dis Pater on Pluto. Many thought it blasphemous to consider that humans weren’t a unique and divine species. To entertain the notion that there were thousands of alien races among the stars was sacrilege.

Some pundits theorized the only reason there hadn’t been a full-out religious revolution was because of the failure of Alex’s mission. He had come back without any evidence of alien contact; that, to the religious extremists, was proof that the entire affair had been a hoax, and humankind’s status as the sole intelligence in the universe was secure.

Over the past year, the crowds of protesters had gradually dwindled, and their rants had not held the vehemence they once carried.

Security, however, remained tight. Once the taxi arrived at the main entrance, it was scanned before any of its occupants were allowed to exit the vehicle. The taxi was quickly cleared of any harmful substances, such as explosives, weapons, or contraband. Justine got out, gathered her bags, and headed for the main building.

The automatic doors parted for her as she entered the spaceport, but when she stepped in, her way was blocked by a tall, thin figure whose back was to her.

Many first time visitors to the port were intimidated by the size and scope of the main terminal, which also doubled as a kind of museum of space flight. Large reproductions—most life-sized—of NASA’s various rockets, shuttles and other craft from its long history were displayed throughout the interior of the large building. Crowds of tourists came just to look at the scale models, even if they didn’t have tickets for an outbound flight.

Justine assumed the man in her way was simply taken aback by the scope of the space terminal.

“Excuse me,” she said politely.

The visitor turned, and though Justine could not make out his features, what struck her as odd was that he wore glasses. With current technological levels, they could correct nearly everything short of blindness. It was rare to see someone still wearing spectacles. When he spoke, there was a hint of a foreign accent that Justine couldn’t quite place.

“My apologies, ma’am. I am not sure where I need to go.”

Justine, who had been in the port a hundred times, said, “Are you here for a tour or a flight?”

“Flight.”

“Check-in is right over there.” She pointed to a bank of kiosks to their left. “Then you’ll have to go through security.”

“Thank you,” the man said with a slight nod, and then he headed off.

Justine had no need to check in. She went straight to the security gates and said good morning to the ever-watchful guard. She had to remove her optilink so that he could perform a retinal scan. There was a gentle chime as the computer confirmed her identity, and then a second chime indicating she had a personal message.

Justine put her optilink back on and turned in the direction of the holoslate. While any words written in analog format on a sign were nothing more than a blur, the optilink sensor had the ability to receive digital data and feed it directly into her optic nerve—the original purpose of the technology. Her name, position, and other vital information popped up on the floating slate beside the scanner, and the blinking message icon hovered below her name.

She touched the icon, and it transformed into a terse sentence: Please report to Director Mathers.

The guard, trying to be helpful, pointed down an adjacent corridor with his neuro-baton and said, “Administration is that way, ma’am.” He sat back down on his chair, looking bored. “Director Mathers’ office is there.”

“Thank you,” Justine replied with a smile, though she knew exactly where his office was, and headed off in that direction.

∞

“Sir?” she spoke softly at the entrance of Director Mathers’ office.

Behind the large oak desk, a high-backed leather chair swiveled around towards Justine. Director Allan Mathers held up one finger for her to wait. His other hand was touching the comlink on his ear.

“—Yes, she’s here now,” he said to whoever was on the other side of the call. “—Yes. Consider it handled… All right. I’ll brief her and send her right down.”

He pulled the comlink off his ear and dropped it on the desk.

“Justine,” he said. “Close the door and come in. Sit.”

Usually, the director greeted his employees with a smile, but today his face was grave and drawn. He looked out the window into the distance while Justine closed the door and approached the desk.

“What’s up, sir?” Justine asked as she eased herself into the small guest chair.

Director Mathers turned back and leaned his elbows on his desk. He touched the tips of his fingers together and leveled his gaze at Justine.

“Did you scan the news this morning?” he asked.

Justine shook her head. “Sorry, sir, I was in a bit of a rush.” Then, when the director didn’t follow up his question, she asked, “What’s happened?”

“Justine, you are aware that with all the cutbacks, quite a few of USA, Inc.’s subdivisions, like NASA, have been outsourcing a number of their flights to commercial lines like ours. We even sometimes provide transport for armed forces troops and military cargo to Luna and the outlying space stations.”

Nodding, Justine said, “Yes, of course. Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m not comfortable about it, but the directive came from corporate.” He glanced up at her, then looked back at his hands.

“What directive, sir?” Justine wrinkled her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I follow.”

The director took a deep breath. “Well, apparently a report just came in that the original Mayan scroll—the one they say was transcribed from alien visitors a thousand years ago…”

“Yes,” Justine said, gulping. “I know which one you’re talking about.”

“Well,” he continued, “it’s been stolen, and the old man who had it has gone missing. They think he might have been kidnapped.”

“Oh?” Justine hadn’t heard any news about this. She wondered what the kidnappers thought to accomplish. At last report, translating the document was a bust. That was one of the reasons for mothballing the Quanta experiments.

Director Mathers nodded. “That’s not all. The Honduran Cooperative passed some intelligence on to the CIA. There’s a growing movement within the Departmentals in that country. Many of them consider that, because the aliens”—he made air-quotes—“picked the Mayan people to visit half a millennia ago, they are the ‘chosen ones’ and should be in the forefront of any interstellar commerce. They’ve been grumbling for years about being sidelined. The governments, though, now think this group might be behind the kidnappings and theft.”

Justine pursed her lips. “I’ve heard something about them. What do they call themselves?”

“Cruzados,” the director said. “But now NASA feels keeping their supply of Kinemet here in Houston is a security risk. They’ve suffered enough bad press, and don’t want to see themselves in any more headlines. They’re not doing anything with the Kinemet currently, and so they want to transport it to Luna Station. They feel the rebels don’t have the resources to attempt any extra-planetary action.”

“How much Kinemet are we talking about?” Justine asked.

“About a thousand kilos.”

She whistled. “That’s a lot!” They had used about a hundred kilograms of the kinetic metal on Alex’s flight, and they’d overestimated how much they would need.

“We’ve got the room,” he said with a shrug.

Then Justine cocked her head. “So, what does this have to do with me?”

“Understandably, NASA wants to keep this shipment hush-hush until it has arrived safely on the Moon. An army squad is providing protection.” He pointed at Justine. “But NASA wants a liaison to go with them. Someone who has security clearance, and apparently yours has never been revoked, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You were attached to NASA from the Air Force,” he said. “Best of both worlds. So they’ve requested you accompany the security detail.”

Justine didn’t want to get her hopes up. She swallowed, then said, “Accompany? What does that mean? What do they want me to do?”

“Same thing you always do. Only this time you’ll be attending the soldiers they’ve assigned to the cargo.”

“Oh,” Justine said, trying valiantly to keep the sharp disappointment out of her voice.

“You’re to report to hangar twelve for a briefing with Colonel Niles Gagne before the other flight crew or passengers embark.”

Justine got to her feet and sighed.

The director said, “This is not a crap assignment.”

“Yes it is,” she told him.

“It came from up top, Justine,” he said by way of apology. The expression on his face showed his sincerity. “Look, just do this one boring flight—”

“A week in a cargo hold babysitting a squad of soldiers is more than just a little boring,” Justine said and headed for the door. She would never be recalled to active duty. No one needed a blind pilot. “It’s demeaning. If you recall, my actual position with Lunar Lines is in public relations. Now you want me to serve coffee to soldiers?”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Director Mathers said.

Justine opened the door, but paused before leaving. “Well, I can think of one thing that would make this worth it for me.”

“What?” he asked.

“I have a friend on CS3,” she said.

“You mean Alex Manez, don’t you?”

Justine nodded. “Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“He’s not doing so well.” Justine pulled at her lower lip. “On the return trip, I’d like to take some shore leave up there; spend a little time with him and see what I can do.”

“That can be arranged.” The director smiled. “Consider it a bonus. We’ll arrange some rooms in the Starwatch Resort. I’ll even write it up as a training expense.”

Justine smiled. “Thanks, Allan.”

She closed the door behind her. Feeling much better about her newly assigned duty, she strode off to find hangar twelve and the colonel.

Canada Station Three :

Lagrange Point 4 :

Earth Orbit :

Within moments of entering his apartment, a sudden bursting pain literally knocked Alex off his feet.

That haunting song that he heard whenever he used his sight filled his mind, pushing out every rational thought.

How is this happening? he screamed to himself. The Kinemetic radiation had long since left him.

The song was there nevertheless. It urged him—no, compelled him—to finish what he’d started over a decade before.

Alex was not whole, and unless he could complete his journey and transform into a full Kinemat, he would die in agony; and very soon. Time was his enemy.

For the rest of the day, hiding in his apartment, Alex floated in and out of consciousness.

Since the first time he had been exposed to Kinemet, Alex had not been able to sleep or to dream. He could do neither, and did not seem to have suffered any of the physiological or psychological effects of sleep deprivation. Apparently, his mind could still shut down.

As if drugged, his thoughts soared and wandered. Images appeared before him, and flittered away before they could fully form.

Always, though, there was the Song, calling to him. No matter what he did—taking painkillers, turning off the lights, lying down—it was always there.

It was difficult for him to think clearly. Like a gas-powered automobile running on empty, he needed an infusion of Kinemetic radiation before he succumbed.

His exposure to Kinemet a dozen years before had begun to transform him, but the change was far from complete. Alex was a hollow shell, a ghost, trapped between two dimensions. The key, he knew, was in translating that ancient scroll. No one had been able to solve the riddle, and they’d given up trying. Alex knew the answer was in the scroll. It had always been right there.

As he thought about it, fighting off the pain of Kinemet withdrawal, the certainty grew.

With great difficulty—and struggling to maintain his wits—Alex commanded the communications system to make contact with Michael Sanderson. If there was anyone who could figure out his puzzle, it was Michael.

But the pain!

He couldn’t remember if he had connected with Earth and spoken with Michael, but before he could try again, the song filled his head … and then something happened to him that tore him away from reality.

His body, ill-equipped to deal with the pain, betrayed him.

He began to shut down.

The last thing he heard was the ancient voice calling to him: Alex, come home.

Sanderson Family Barbeque :

Hull, Quebec :

Canada Corp. :

A cloud of smoke billowed out of the barbeque when Michael’s brother, David, opened the lid to reveal half a dozen charred steaks.

“You think maybe they’re cooked enough?” Michael asked, standing off to the side.

With his fingers wrapped around the neck of a beer bottle, he lifted it to his lips and tipped the drink up enough to let a stream of golden liquid pour into his mouth. Several drops spilled over his beard, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand.

“Wise-ass remarks will not get you invited back,” David said, waving a spatula in a fan-like motion over the burning steaks to dissipate the rising smoke.

“Probably better for my health, anyway.” Michael winked at his brother.

“If you’re worried about your health, you’d best watch what you say.” David lifted one of the barbeque utensils and pointed it at Michael. “I have tongs, and I’m not afraid to use them.”

Michael laughed. “I’ll go get some plates,” he said and headed toward one of the picnic tables scattered around the yard.

Halfway there, he stopped and turned around. David was poking at the blackened meat with a long knife.

“And a fire extinguisher,” Michael added in an attempt to keep the banter going.

“Bah!” David made a shooing motion, but he was grinning when he went back to his attempts to resuscitate their dinner.

Laughing, Michael closed the distance between the barbeque and the tables. By the time he got there, though, his smile faded.

His humor never lasted long these days.

After Alex Manez made his miraculous return from Centauri, Michael had returned to Quantum Resources as a consultant to help coordinate the Quanta trials. For reasons the technicians could never adequately explain, none of the test pilots who were exposed to the Kinemetic radiation had fully developed the electropathic ability that Alex had. Without that control, they were unable to return the ships to normal space once they were quantized as light. Several of those who volunteered died during the initial Kinemetic irradiation.

Failure after failure caught up to the corporations, both financially—each ship cost in excess of seventeen billion dollars—and from a public relations perspective. Coupled with the continued economic instabilities as more country corporations went into bankruptcy on a global basis, USA, Inc. had decided to mothball most of their experimental sub-companies, including Quantum Resources, which they sold to Canada Corp. at a bargain basement price.

Rather than relocate to Canada Station Three and administer a team of theorists, Michael decided to let them release him from his contract. Although Alliras Rainier had offered him his old position with the Space Mining Division, Michael and his wife opted for retirement. He had enough savings for him and Melanie to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But what Michael hadn’t expected was that the rest of Melanie’s life was cut short a year ago when a city autobus’s brake line failed and slammed into her one-seater automobile while she was out on a shopping excursion. She had died instantly. A day did not go by that Michael didn’t miss her fiercely.

Over the following months, Michael fell into a deep depression, let his beard grow out, and spent most of his days wandering from room to room in his empty apartment. The only times he ever emerged was for the monthly family dinners his brother held.

No wife, no job, no purpose.

The only thing that held Michael together was the weekly call he placed to Alex Manez; but it was getting harder and harder for Michael to maintain his hope that something would be done to help the boy and his deteriorating health. Without his political contacts, Michael was helpless to prod the medical staff on Canada Station Three to figure out a cure for Alex’s condition.

During their conversations, Alex invariably told Michael not to worry; that it would all work out in the end.

“Are you all right?” a voice said, breaking Michael out of his reverie.

He looked up to see Andrea, David’s wife, fixing him with two very concerned blue eyes. She was a slender woman with smile lines at the corner of her mouth and eyes. Streaks of silver had begun to flow through her raven-black hair.

Andrea and Melanie had been very close friends, and once in a while she would drop over to Michael’s apartment and look in on him, do his laundry and try to clean up the place.

Michael realized he had just been standing in front of the picnic table with a stack of disposable plates in his hand.

He gave her a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Just lost in thought.”

Turning around, he brought the plates over to the barbeque.

In addition to David and Andrea, Michael’s two nephews, and their wives and kids, were also in attendance. Andrea’s sister and her family were also there. David’s son was out of town, but his daughter-in-law Debbie and her two children were spending the weekend. All told, David Sanderson’s backyard held over twenty people.

Michael was grateful for the crowd. Not just for the company, but because, with so much hustle and bustle, he could blend into the background and not have to interact. He loved his family, but lately he had found himself detaching from human contact. It was good to be around people—it reminded him of his humanity—but he just didn’t have the energy to cultivate any kind of relationship with anyone.

David looked up when Michael approached. “Good timing; the steaks are ready.”

“They were ready fifteen minutes ago,” Michael said, lifting the corner of his mouth in a half-smile.

“Just…” David mimed scraping the burned parts off with a knife. “And smear it with sauce.”

Michael laughed. While David put steaks on the plates, Michael carted them over to the tables. While he trucked back and forth, he noticed he had picked up a little shadow.

He looked down to see his six-year-old grand-nephew staring up at him with a grin. “Hello, Carl,” he said.

“Hello, Great-Uncle Michael.” Carl waved his hand in a sweeping motion.

“Just call me Uncle Mike—I haven’t felt great in a long while. Did you want to be my helper?”

“Sure, Great-Unc—sure, Uncle Mike.”

Michael handed him a plate with a thick steak hanging over the lip, and watched while Carl balanced it and carried it over to the tables. All the while, he stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth in concentration.

Michael and David smiled while they watched him go.

“Grandkids,” David said. “They’ll keep you young.”

Then his smile faded. “Sorry, Michael. I know you and Melanie tried hard.”

“I guess it’s for the better,” Michael said after a while. “I was always working fourteen-hour shifts. Barely had enough time for Melanie. If I had kids they’d probably have grown up strangers, full of resentment.”

When Carl came back for his second load, Michael said, “You okay, sport?”

“Yeah. Aunt Ginny says she only wants a half. And one that isn’t a burnt offering.”

With a laugh, David quickly sliced a steak in two and put the slightly smaller portion on a plate, which Michael handed to Carl.

“There you go. Steady now,” he added when Carl overbalanced the plate.

“You know,” David said, and there was an uncomfortable quaver in his voice, “if you’re not doing anything, why don’t you swing by next weekend? Andrea and I are going to a bridge tournament. There’s a lot of single people our age there.”

“I’m not ready.”

Dave held up his hands. “Hey, don’t mean to push.”

Michael shook his head. “I’m just not sure what to do with myself is all. I always thought this would be my chance to travel the world with Melanie.”

“You can still travel.” David prepared another steak for Carl when the young boy returned. “There are chartered tours for practically every destination.”

“Wouldn’t really be the same.”

“You’ve got to get out of this funk,” David said. “I’m saying this as your brother and your friend.”

“I know. I appreciate it, really. I guess I just need to figure things out. I can’t explain it.”

David put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “You don’t need to explain a thing. Just know we’re here for you.”

“Thanks, bro.” Michael didn’t need to force the smile he gave David.

When Carl came back for the last time, he said, “It’s just you and Grandpa left, Uncle Mike. —And me.”

“Well,” Michael said. “Looks like your grandfather saved the juiciest steak for you, a reward for all your hard work.”

Carl beamed as he took his prize back to the picnic tables, shouting at his mom, “Look what I got.”

David served the last two steaks, and he and Michael headed to the table to fill their plates with potato salad, pickles and buns.

While everyone ate, they shared jokes, gossiped, and just basked in the familiarity of family.

Michael’s appetite wasn’t what it used to be, and when he had only finished half of his supper, he excused himself from the table to use the washroom.

“Don’t fall in!” someone joked, and Michael waved a hand in the air as he went into his brother’s house.

On the way to the facilities, he passed by David’s front room. A large DMR casement was playing the highlight reel of the last Roughriders football game. At the bottom of the flat screen was a scrolling newsfeed, and it was one of the sentences there that caught his attention.

He quickly moved in for a closer look, but only caught the last part of the announcement:

“…NASA spokesman discounts the impact of the missing Mayan scroll.” Then the newsfeed went on to other political matters.

Michael sat on the couch next to the control pad and typed in a command to flip the screen to his favorite bulletin board. He cursed when he had to physically toggle back and forth between pages.

Within a few minutes, however, he had the entire story—the kidnapping of Yaxche and the theft of the ancient scroll—and his face grew dark.

“What’s wrong?” asked his brother from the doorway.

“Who uses a damned DMR casement anymore? Why don’t you upgrade to a holoslate with an organic user interface?” Michael asked. “You know, haptic consoles have been around for five years now.”

“I really don’t need to multitask while watching the Jays get beat by the Cubs,” David said matter-of-factly. “I’m fine with one screen at a time.”

Taking a deep breath, Michael said, “Sorry.”

“Hey, no problem. You okay?”

Michael looked up. “Looks like the Cruzados kidnapped that Mayan translator, Yaxche. He was the one who helped us interpret the Mayan text from Pluto.” He flipped a page on the casement. “And they also stole the scroll that was supposed to help us figure out how to use the Kinemet.”

“Oh?” David blinked. “I thought they had given up on that.”

“Yeah. They had.” Michael glanced back at the casement. “And it looks like they won’t be doing anything about this either.” He sighed.

“Well, if NASA and everyone else thinks the document is a dead end, why would the Cruzados go to all this trouble?”

“I don’t know.”

David spoke again, and Michael could tell his brother was trying to make it sound casual. “Why don’t you call up that Calbert Loche fellow? Get your info straight from the horse’s mouth.”

For a moment, while Michael had read the boards, there had been a spark there, a hint of the passion that had fired him throughout his forty-year career. David was obviously trying to fan those flames.

Michael had to admit that his natural curiosity had gotten the better of him for a moment.

He said to his brother, “You know, I think I might do that.”

∞

Most nights Michael couldn’t sleep. His thoughts troubled him: how much he missed Melanie; his lack of purpose; his growing disconnection with everyone who had been a part of life.

That night, however, he couldn’t sleep for another reason. His mind kept working over and over again about why, after so many years and after NASA and Quantum Resources had devalued the worth of the Mayan scroll, that anyone would go through the trouble to steal it. Or kidnap Yaxche. Did they want to hold him for ransom? Who was going to pay?

Unable to sleep, Michael threw on a thin robe and went to his computer. Although many of his files were classified and confiscated when he ‘retired’ from Quantum Resources—both as director and as a consultant—he maintained a folder of his own collected data and musings. Shorthand notes that held no meaning to anyone but himself were added to various documents he had downloaded off the mesh. He also kept a copy of all the declassified material that had been on his computer when he left the company.

Michael began the long and arduous task of sorting and filtering through every file on his computer. He hoped, somewhere in the morass of information, there might be something they had missed. Maybe someone else had stumbled on a vital piece of datum that would reopen the doors to interstellar travel.

It was three in the morning when Michael finally noticed the time. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. He needed a couple of hours sleep to process all the documents he had read, and he had only gone through a small percentage of the notes.

Michael laughed to himself about how much his brother would applaud the change in him, the sudden purpose. He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a tall glass of milk. There was no way he was going to get to sleep with a full mind and an empty stomach. At least if there was something in his gut he had half a chance of getting a few precious hours before morning rolled around. He wanted to be alert when he contacted Calbert Loche.

No—he thought suddenly to himself—when he met with Calbert. Michael decided right then and there that he needed to speak to his former colleague in person.

He went to his computer and logged onto his travel account and purchased a ticket for Toronto, where Quantum Resources maintained their earthbound administrative offices.

Calbert would see him; Michael’s strong endorsement had launched him into the director’s chair. And if anyone in the industry had an inside track on what was really happening, it would be Calbert, who always had both Raymond Magrath and George Markowitz nearby. The trio were an intellectual powerhouse when they put their respective heads together. Since the restructuring of Quantum Resources, the three had been delegated to more of a public relations and administrative role.

Satisfied in his plans, Michael headed for his bed. His empty bed…

He had an unexpected pang of loneliness and loss when he approached the bed he had shared with his wife for more than forty years, and he had to choke back the tear that welled in his eye.

Melanie…

He lay down and was on the cusp of sleep when the comchime sounded and gave him a start.

Looking at the clock again, he willed his lungs to pump air in and out once more. Every time someone called unexpectedly, Michael had a flashback to when he answered the phone to a somber but officious voice asking him if he was the husband of Melanie Sanderson.

Regaining his composure, he said, “Who is it, Hucs?” to his apartment’s home-unit computer system.

<Voice chat from Alex Manez,> was the answer.

“Oh?”

That was odd. Usually it was Michael who initiated contact with Alex. Michael hoped there was nothing wrong.

“Put him on.”

The call came through, and at first Michael thought the link had been disconnected because all he got was static.

“Hucs, can you amplify?”

But there was no need because Michael heard Alex speak then, and the boy’s tone sent a chill through him.

“Michael.” Alex’s voice was hollow and haunted.

Michael asked, “Alex, are you all right?”

“It’s getting harder,” Alex said. “The Song is in my head but I can’t hear it because it’s too loud. They want me.”

“Alex? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know how much longer I can hold out,” Alex said, and Michael wished he could look at the young man. Over a year ago, Alex had disabled the video feed on his communicator. He had said he didn’t want anyone to see him looking the way he did.

“Alex, do you need me to come up there?” Michael hadn’t been up to CS3 since before Melanie passed away.

“No,” Alex said. “But I do need you to do something for me.”

“Anything. What do you need?” Michael asked.

A silence stretched out for an impossible length of time and for a moment Michael thought they had been disconnected. But then Alex said, “Find him.”

“Find him? Find who?”

“He has the answer. He’s always had the key; he just never knew it.” Alex’s voice was becoming thin, and Michael could sense that the conversation would not last very long, and neither would Alex.

He said, “Tell me who you mean, Alex. You need to help me if I’m to help you.”

When there was no immediate answer, Michael barked out a command. “Hucs, get the communications officer of Canada Station Three—”

“Yaxche,” Alex said, interrupting Michael. “You have to hear him tell you the story.”

And then the link went dead.

Michael repeated his command to Hucs to reestablish communication. After several minutes, he managed to connect with a CS3 operator.

“This is Michael Sanderson,” he stated. “Former Director of Quantum Resources. I need to get in contact with Alex Manez. It’s an emergency.”

“Right away, sir,” the woman said.

While he waited, Michael pondered the emotions running around inside him.

In the space of a day, he had gone from a lost soul to someone with purpose. Was it the thrill of a scientific mystery, was it the promise of untold wonders, or was it the concern he held for this young man who was at the heart of the matter? Or a combination of all three?

The operator came back on. “I’m sorry, sir, but Alex Manez has been admitted to our care facility. He’s had some kind of episode. I’m afraid he will be unable to take your call.”

“Of course,” Michael said. “Who is attending him?”

“Dr. Amma. She’s the top neurologist in her field.”

“I’m sure she is. Listen, I know it’s not really your job, but if you could do me a favor and transmit updates to me at this link, I would appreciate it.”

“Yes, sir. I understand your concern.”

Michael hung up. He sat on the bed.

Find Yaxche?

How odd that earlier in the day Michael had learned about the old man’s kidnapping, and now he’d received a message from Alex—almost four-hundred-thousand kilometers away in space—telling him to get to the bottom of this mystery.

One option Michael had was to chart a flight with Lunar Lines and go see Alex. The rational side of him knew that there was nothing he could do except stand vigil beside his young friend, and in the end that might be the only course of action that would do either of them any good.

But Michael had to hold on to the hope that there was, indeed, something that could be done. If finding Yaxche and figuring out why the Cruzados had kidnapped him—and what key he unwittingly possessed—gave Alex any chance of surviving his disability, then Michael really had no choice when it came down to it.

Resolved in his sense of purpose, he slipped inside the bed sheets and forced himself to fall asleep.

He had a very busy day ahead.

Canada Station Three :

Lagrange Point 4 :

Earth Orbit :

When Alex came out of his trance, a nurse hurried over to him, looking concerned.

“What happened?” he asked her in a groggy voice. He couldn’t focus. The lights hurt his eyes.

“It’s going to be all right, Alex,” the nurse said. Her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking to him from a great distance.

“Where am I?” he asked.

The nurse put a cold pack on his forehead. “You had a minor cerebrovascular attack—probably just a side effect of your condition coupled with stress. You’ve developed a fever, but Dr. Amma told me you would be fine in a day or so. Just rest.”

He lay back and closed his eyes, not to sleep, but in an attempt to get back to that superconscious state and figure out what it all meant.

Exhaustion, however, prevented him from reaching that transcendent plateau. He opened his eyes once more, but the nurse was gone.

Alex lifted an arm to press the call button, but his muscles were far too weak to respond.

Despondently, he remained in the hospital bed the rest of the night, struggling to recapture his thoughts, but finding them as elusive as his long-gone dreams.

∞

Dr. Amma visited Alex early the next morning.

“How are you feeling, Alex?” she said. “You gave us all quite a scare last night.”

She was middle-aged, very thin and short. With her hair pulled back in a tight bun, she took on a vague ferret-like semblance. Of all the people on Canada Station Three, and all the Quantum Resources staff, Dr. Amma was the only one Alex thought truly wanted to help him. Everyone else treated him as a lab rat or an untapped gold mine.

“I’m fine,” Alex said.

“Did you get any sleep?”

“I don’t sleep.” Alex smiled when he said it. Dr. Amma often asked him questions like that, as if trying to trip him up. There was a touch of the psychologist in her, he thought.

“Ah, yes. One can always hope.” Dr. Amma looked down at her holoslate and read from her notes. “Well, it looks like your electrolyte count is back to normal. Vitals are stable.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “It wasn’t a coma and it wasn’t a stroke.”

Dr. Amma leveled her gaze at him. “All the readings indicated you were presenting symptoms of a hemorrhagic event. We couldn’t take a tomography scan because of your pre-existing condition, but it resembled a stroke.”

Although Alex’s electropathic ability had been reduced to a shadow of its former power, there was a minute amount of residual radiation in him, enough to skew the results of any X-ray or electroencephalograph. Lack of proper testing reduced any medical diagnosis to nothing more than an educated guess.

“I was aware through the entire incident,” Alex told her. “Though it was clouded.”

Dr. Amma narrowed her eyes. “And how would you describe the incident?”

Leaning back into his pillow, Alex stared at the ceiling. “I was separated from myself, but at the same time I went deeper into myself than I ever had before.”

“A dissociative fugue?” Dr. Amma guessed.

“No. It was more of a trance. I think … I belong in a different place, or a different state, and my consciousness wanted to go there.”

“Do you know where that is?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I lost the connection.”

“I hope you won’t be sending the medical teams into a panic again.”

Alex smiled. “No. And I’m sorry if that frightened everyone. It was unintentional.”

Dr. Amma pulled the holoslate to her chest and folded her arms over it.

“Alex, I want to help you. I need to know everything. If you have any idea how to make you better—”

He said, “Get me next to a supply of Kinemet.”

“You know I can’t,” she said. “They stopped mining it, and whatever they have left over they’re hoarding like it was the key to the gate of heaven.”

Proposed Holocommercial :

Lunar Lines PR Transcript :

The sun slowly settles over the crescent of Earth’s horizon. As the sun meets the Earth, it’s corona explodes in a flash of light.

ANNOUNCER

From the Earth…

The sun disappears to darkness, and a full moon, bright and silver, rises in its place in the night sky.

ANNOUNCER

…to the Moon

Cut to:

Several passengers lounge on large seats and at a bar in the luxurious interior of a Lunar Lines vessel. They are laughing and smiling.

ANNOUNCER

Why not travel in style?

Cut to:

A female passenger lays her head on a pillow on a contoured bed and pulls a comforter blanket around her.

ANNOUNCER

Lunar Lines – We’ll get you there.

Lunar Lines Vessel, Diana :

Earth–CS3 Transit :

Normally, Justine would be circulating around the cabin of the Diana once the space liner reached escape velocity and the passengers were free to roam about.

Like a minor celebrity hired to mingle with customers at a restaurant or political event, Justine’s primary job description was to socialize, tell stories of her days as a pilot, and offer technical explanations for every aspect of their voyage; anything to put the travelers at ease.

Her position as flight guide didn’t give her the rush of actually captaining a ship, but at least she was in space and talking about the things which held her passion.

This particular trip, however, was going to be excruciatingly boring for her.

The cargo bay itself encompassed nearly the entire length of the liner and the lower half of its height. From a fiscal standpoint, Justine knew, most of the company’s profits came from freight rather than fares. Taking on passengers was more for the public relations exposure than anything else.

Since a good deal of the cargo was perishables intended for either Canada Station Three or Luna Station, they kept the heat in the bay at minimum. Justine needed to wear a thick sweater over her PERSuit harness to keep from freezing, and this severely hampered the sensors. Unfortunately, the harness was tailored to fit snugly, and wouldn’t fit on top of a sweater or jacket.

Not having the harness on made her job navigating through the maze of containers something of a nightmare, especially when she had to cart drinks and snacks from the kitchenette one floor above to the soldiers guarding the insulated crate of Kinemet at the back of the cargo hold.

It was ridiculous to think only someone with security clearance was permitted to serve the guards, but she was determined to make the best of it.

The eight uniformed men took their jobs extremely seriously. They were a very tight-lipped crew, and when they were on duty, they held their post in complete silence. At all times, two of them stood guard on either side of the container holding the Kinemet. They had M72 ion pulse rifles at the ready. A third and fourth soldier walked the perimeter of the cargo bay. Every three hours, they would relieve each other in rotating shifts.

When she first arrived in the cargo bay and was introduced to the squad members, they were very formal and would only address her as Major Turner, even after she repeated to them, “Just call me Justine.”

Once they were in space, Justine asked them for their orders, and they stared at her in frozen terror. Here was a retired NASA major fetching drinks for them.

“Guys,” she had said, “if you don’t tell me what you want, it’s going to be a very thirsty trip.”

Having grown accustomed to putting people at ease with her former celebrity, Justine cracked a few jokes and made sure to ask them questions about their family back home in order to get to know them. After a few hours they relaxed around her, though they all remained very respectful and polite.

They would respond to direct questions from Justine, but the only one who went out of his way to engage in conversation with her was the squad leader, Lieutenant John Jeffries. He was quite young—all the soldiers were—and Justine could tell he was trying to set an example for the men under his command. Soon, however, he truly warmed to Justine and there were moments she was certain he forgot her former status as a major.

When the soldiers were off shift they snoozed, read books or watched vids on their holoslates. Lieutenant Jeffries had brought an old-fashioned crib board and challenged Justine to a game when he wasn’t on duty. It killed the time.

Ordinarily, with her optilink sensor, she was unable to discern standard print on paper or cardboard. When the optilink was hooked to the PERSuit harness, however, she could interpret changes in color and translate the two-dimensional images to her mind.

The only problem was, while she played the game, she had to take off her sweater, so she usually had to stop after a few games before she got too cold.

During Lieutenant Jeffries’ second stint off-duty, they played for about an hour. Justine was up six games to five over the lieutenant, who had won most of their previous matches. She was on a winning streak, and didn’t want to quit, despite the fact that she was shivering.

Lieutenant Jeffries was five points behind the skunk line, and Justine needed six points to win. She kept her pegging cards, since it was his first count.

He played his first card. “Three,” he said. “Try to ‘fifteen’ that.”

Justine laid down a ‘three’ of her own. “Six for two.” She took her points while Lieutenant Jeffries pondered his next play. It was obvious he had kept his small cards as well in an attempt to avoid being skunked. He played what Justine assumed was his highest card: a seven.

“Thirteen,” he said.

She dropped her deuce and smiled. “Fifteen for two. Two to go.”

He hesitated and took a second look at her harness. “You sure that thing doesn’t have X-ray vision or something?”

Justine laughed. “No excuses. Get ready to be humiliated.”

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s my other ‘three’. Eighteen.”

With an exaggerated motion, Justine placed her own ‘three’ down. “Twenty-one for two. And game.”

Clicking his tongue, the lieutenant flipped over his last card. “I had a ‘five’.”

“I had you either way.” Justine showed him her ‘four’.

Throwing down his card in mock outrage, the lieutenant said, “I can’t let you get away with that. One more?”

“I wish I could, but you won’t have much competition against an icicle.” Justine chuckled and slipped her thick sweater over her head, reducing her vision to the regular optilink level. “It’s time for me to make a round anyway. Did you need anything?”

“No thanks,” he said. “Hey, I know this must be the worst assignment you’ve ever had.”

“Not the worst,” Justine said with an equivocal smile.

“Compared to flying to Pluto?” he asked while packing up the crib board. “Working as a hostess must be difficult.”

Rubbing her hands together to get the circulation flowing, Justine gave a half-shrug. “It may not be as exciting,” she said, “but at least at I get to tell tall tales, and they pay me for it.”

She got up and, after polling the other soldiers for their orders, made her way to the elevator and up to the kitchenette.

Besides the flight crew and the hospitality staff, no one else knew Justine was on board. She was recognizable, and if any of the passengers saw her, it might lead to questions NASA and the military didn’t want to answer.

While she was loading a cart with snacks and drinks, one of the stewardesses, Brandi, popped into the cramped room and walked directly toward her. Justine couldn’t see the look on her colleague’s face, but the woman’s voice was a mix of concern and puzzlement.

“There’s a call for you,” Brandi said.

Justine shook her head. “No one knows I’m here. Are you sure it’s for me?”

Brandi nodded.

“Who is it?” Justine asked.

“Don’t know. It’s encoded.”

Thinking it might be Director Mathers checking in with her, Justine nodded to Brandi. “Thanks.”

After securing the food cart in the walk-in cooler, Justine made her way toward the cabin, outside of which there was a tiny communications cubical.

It was a video chat, so there was no need for Justine to take her sweater off. The regular optilink sensor could translate the digital images on the screen as if she had normal vision.

She stepped inside the cubicle, closed the door and turned on the holoslate.

A familiar but unexpected face appeared, and Justine was momentarily taken aback.

“Clive?”

When Alex had returned from Centauri, Justine had wanted to be there on the Moon when Alex got back, and had spent a few hours catching up with him. After Alex was whisked off by NASA officials back to Earth, Justine had remained for a few days for a debriefing with Clive Wexhall, who was still NASA’s liaison on the Moon.

The first evening, he had invited her out for dinner. Justine didn’t know whether it was her euphoria at having Alex back safe and sound, or her own sense of isolation because of her blindness and demotion from flight status, or if it was just too many glasses of wine, but she had ended up spending that night—and every subsequent night during her visit—with Clive.

Once she had returned to Earth, she had chalked it up to nothing more than a brief fling, but Clive wanted to see her again.

Despite his regular calls to her afterwards, she had tried to keep her emotions in check, and keep their relationship on a casual level.

When she had secured her job with Lunar Lines six months ago, Clive had somehow found out and had been waiting for her the first time she docked at Luna Station.

They had spent every moment of the two-day layover together as if they had never been apart. Justine had told herself not to let her feelings get the better of her. She had explained to Clive that she wasn’t ready for anything more serious in her life. He said he was perfectly fine with that.

Whenever Justine was away, they remained friendly and platonic; but whenever she was on Luna Station, she would stay with him at his apartment. They had fallen into a routine, and Justine didn’t want to change their arrangement.

She had not had time to contact Clive before the space liner took off, and normally he wouldn’t call her while she was on duty, so she was surprised that he managed to track her down. No one was supposed to know about her presence on the ship.

“Nice to see you, too,” he replied with a playful smile and a hint of sarcasm.

When Justine didn’t respond right away, Clive pretended to look hurt.

“Sorry,” she said. “Of course, I’m happy to see you. You know that. I just wasn’t expecting you to call me here.”

“You don’t like surprises?” he asked with a smile. “I would have called before you left, but I’ve been up to my neck in paperwork, arranging for the transfer and storage of your, ahem, precious cargo.”

“You know about the shipment?” she asked.

“Who do you think suggested you for the assignment?”

Justine’s eyes flared. “You! You’re responsible for me spending the last ten hours in a freezing cargo bay? And you didn’t give me a heads-up?”

His smile grew wider. “Sorry about that,” he said, not sounding apologetic at all. “But I figured it would be a great opportunity for you.”

“What?” Justine couldn’t believe her ears. “And how is this a great opportunity for me? It’s so secret I didn’t know about it until a few moments before I came on board. And it’s so tedious, I’m about to go crazy from the boredom. And did I mention,” she added, “that I’m freezing my extremities down there?”

Clive laughed. “I have some news that might warm you up.”

She pointed a warning finger at him. “It had better be good.”

“I’ve arranged to escort you—and the shipment—from CS3 to Luna Station.”

“You have?” Justine felt herself flush. Then she blinked. “Where are you calling from?”

“I just arrived on CS3 about a half hour ago. I’ve also made reservations for a private booth at the Terra Vista Restaurant, and I have balcony tickets to La Dance Des Étoiles.”

“I’ve always wanted to see that,” Justine said, her voice softening.

“There’s no sense in spending the eight-hour layover—as you say—freezing our extremities on the liner’s cargo bay. There are plenty of things to do on CS3.”

“Clive, if I didn’t know any better, I would think you were trying to butter me up for something.”

He laughed. “It’s all for purely selfish reasons, I assure you. I just want you to start thinking of me as more than a bi-monthly boyfriend.” Clive’s tone turned serious at that last part.

Justine balked at his declaration. She was comfortable the way things were. There had been far too many changes in her life over the past few years, and she was just starting to get her feet under her and adjust to her circumstances.

She truly looked forward to spending a couple of days every other week with Clive on the moon. With his busy political schedule and her traveling, Justine didn’t know if there was any way they could bring their relationship to the next level. Or that she wanted to.

The thought of anything more than what they had already scared her. Justine’s long-ago marriage to Brian had been a disaster, and it hadn’t been his fault. She had always been a career-minded woman, and had her eyes—and heart—set on the stars.

Even now that she could no longer captain a ship, deep down she held the desire to return to space as something more than a tour guide. She did not want to be bound to Earth or the Moon. It was a ridiculous notion, but she hoped technology would advance to the point where it could either completely restore her sight, or provide her with a less cumbersome prosthetic device than the PERSuit.

“Hey,” Clive said. “I didn’t mean to bring you down.”

“No, not at all.” Justine smiled to show she wasn’t upset. “But while you’re in a generous mood, maybe I can get you to do me a very special favor.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Justine said, “Maybe you can help me with Alex Manez.”

Clive made a gruff sound in his throat. “Not this again. Since Quantum Resources is under full Canadian ownership, I don’t even have clearance to ask if they have any Kinemet, let alone get them to allocate any for—”

Then he suddenly figured out what Justine was getting at.

“No way.” Clive’s face turned red and he dropped his voice. “I seriously hope you’re not suggesting we smuggle any of our Kinemet off that liner.”

Justine shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Clive, you know I would never ask you to do anything like that.”

“Then … what?”

“How about the exact opposite?”

Clive stared at her for more than a few seconds, confused.

“But—” Then he sighed. “Oh, I see.” He sounded reluctant, but said, “Yes, I think that can be arranged.”

Quantum Resources :

Toronto :

Canada Corp. :

Toronto was vastly different from Ottawa, both in architecture and culture. While the city planners in the nation’s capital tried to keep the city’s expansion spread out over a large area, Toronto was home to some of the most impressive skyscrapers in the country. Where Ottawa was a hub for politics, Toronto’s focus was commerce.

When Quantum Resources was first chartered, its mandate had been to develop Kinemet into a usable fuel source for interstellar flight. Since the Quanta missions had consistently failed, and Alex’s mission had turned into a public relations disaster, Quantum Resources’ ability to capitalize on the new technology had been severely hampered. After Canada Corp. bought all outstanding shares and put Quantum Resources under the umbrella of the Space Mining Division, the Director of SMD had changed QR’s mandate in order to put the company back on a profitable basis.

In their early years, Quantum Resources had attracted some of the best thinkers in the field of astronomy and physics, and it would be a shame to put their collective brain-power to waste. While some of the company’s resources were reserved for analyzing what they knew about Kinemet in the hopes of one day turning it into a viable fuel, the main thrust of their efforts was to improve existing technologies and increase their efficiency.

As a former employee, Michael was still subscribed to their quarterly meshmail reports. In the last two quarters, and for the first time since its incorporation, Quantum Resources was in the black.

When the autotaxi dropped Michael off at a high-rise office complex he didn’t recognize, he rechecked the destination he had entered into the navigation screen. The directory confirmed this was the location for Quantum Resources.

It had been several months since Michael had spoken to Calbert, but at that time his former colleague had not mentioned any upcoming relocation.

Michael authorized the debit charge, and with his overnight bag in hand he stepped out of the vehicle and entered the building.

In the foyer, he approached the reception kiosk and skimmed the list of companies. Quantum Resources offices were on the thirtieth floor.

When Michael got out of the elevator, he stepped out into a scene of chaos. Construction engineers and electricians were putting up walls, stringing power lines, and setting up computer workstations.

Stepping up to a foreman, Michael said, “Hello, I’m not sure if I have the right place. Is Calbert Loche here?”

The foreman pointed down a half-built hallway. “Yeah. His office is back there.”

“Thank you.” Michael smiled and let him get back to work as he picked his way through the piles of ceiling tiles, steel frames and scatter tools.

When he reached the end of the hall, he heard the unmistakable voice of his former second-in-command.

“I don’t care how you do it,” Calbert Loche said as he stared out the window, his back to the door and to Michael. “We need that meshlink up and running by tonight.”

Calbert turned as Michael stepped inside the incomplete office, and the clouded look on his face disappeared as he recognized his old boss. He motioned for Michael to take a seat while he finished his conversation.

“Yes, there’ll be people here all night. I don’t care about overtime, just get your guys to have the link hot by morning.” He paused while listening to the response, then nodded. “Good. That’s what I want to hear.”

Calbert gently touched the comlink sensor at his temple to disconnect it. His smile widened as he reached across his desk to shake Michael’s hand.

“Long time no see,” Calbert said, and pointed at Michael’s chin. “Looks like the weeds are taking over the lawn.”

Michael chuckled, and rubbed his fingers through his graying beard. “It’s from the stress of dealing with all my sassy employees over the years,” he said with a grin.

Gesturing to a guest chair on the other side of his desk, Calbert eased himself into his seat and leaned back.

He regarded Michael with a convivial smile. “How’ve you been keeping?”

Michael nodded. “Good. Good.”

“Staying busy?”

“Doing a lot of reading.” Michael motioned his hand around the office. “I didn’t know you guys had relocated.”

“Expanded.”

“What?”

Calbert’s eyes widened. “We’re keeping the main labs where they are and just moving administration here.”

“Oh? Breakthrough?”

“Ha,” Calbert said. “I wish. No, without any Kinemet, we’re just spinning our wheels. About six months ago, our grant money ran out, and we all thought that was it. But then the Chilean Corp. found out about our experiments with ‘steam cracking’. As it turns out, it’s totally useless for quantum purposes, but there are other possibilities. They approached us about using the technology to increase the efficiency of their hydrogen plants. We applied some of our theories on their systems and nearly doubled their production with only a marginal increase in expenditure. Since then, we’ve secured contracts with a dozen other power plants around the world. It ain’t glorious work, but it does pay the bills.”

“That’s fantastic,” Michael said.

“And the extra profit keeps Ottawa off our backs, and allows us to maintain our labs on CS3, which,” he said, his voice measured and careful, “is why you’re here. Right?”

Nodding, Michael said, “Yes. I got a strange call last night from Alex.”

“I know. I received the report this morning.” Calbert stood up and looked out the window. “You know my hands are tied. SMD holds our charter and they call the shots. I’m just a pencil pusher, as far as they are concerned. I wish I could help.”

Michael cleared his throat. “Maybe you still can.”

“How?” Calbert asked. “I know you’ve tried to go through Alliras, but since USA, Inc. stopped funding us, SMD isn’t willing to spend resources actively looking for more Kinemet. We don’t have any in our possession, and if NASA has any left over, they’re not fessing up.”

“I know.”

Calbert, sounding defensive and frustrated at the same time, said, “I’ve got some contacts on the SMD survey teams. If anyone uncovers even a hint of Kinemet, you can be sure I’ll know about it in two shakes.”

“I know,” Michael repeated.

“I’m sure things will turn around in a few years and we can begin mining Kinemet again.”

Michael shook his head. “Alex doesn’t have that long. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

“It isn’t?”

“Do you have a transcript of the call I received from Alex?” Michael knew Calbert did. Alex was a very well guarded and unique secret, and anything and everything he said was catalogued, charted and analyzed.

“Yeah…?”

Michael cocked his head. “He asked me to find Yaxche.”

“I heard about the kidnapping and the theft. I feel bad for the old man, but as far as that scroll is concerned, it’s a lost cause. I’m not sure why anyone would go to all the trouble.”

“But someone did.” Michael leaned back in the chair. “Alex obviously thinks there’s more there than what we’ve uncovered, and the thieves also think so as well. And, I’m not sure if you noticed, but Alex asked me to find the man, not the scroll.”

Calbert slowly sat down again. “I did notice that. What do you think it means? Do you think Alex knows something we don’t?”

“If he does, he’s not conscious of it. But it feels like there is some validity to this, even if there’s not concrete evidence. Maybe there’s something that’s been lost in translation.”

“All right,” said Calbert. “Let’s say there’s some merit in finding Yaxche—outside of the humanitarian reasons. What makes you think the Honduran Conglomerate isn’t already doing its best?”

“Maybe they don’t think he’s as high a priority as I do,” Michael answered. “Or as important as Alex does.”

Rubbing his upper lip, Calbert said, “Not saying I agree or disagree, but even if I did, what can I do?”

“Is George Markowitz doing anything important for the next couple of weeks?”

“George?” Calbert sat forward, looking genuinely surprised. “What does he have to do with this?”

“I’m going to Honduras to look for Yaxche. I’d like George to come with me. More specifically, I’d like you to assign him to come with me.”

“Why?”

Michael lifted his hand and ticked off a finger. “First of all, he’s the only person I know who’s met Yaxche. George has been down there a few times. He knows the area. Besides, he’s extremely good at research and these kinds of practical puzzles.”

Touching his next finger, Michael said, “Secondly, if you give him this assignment and put it on paper, it will give us a certain amount of legitimacy with the Copán Departmental. We can say we’re on official business. Otherwise I’m just a nosy tourist.”

Calbert took a breath. “This is all a bit much before I’ve had my second coffee, Michael. Have you even given any consideration to the Cruzados? If they are indeed the ones who kidnapped him, do you think they’ll just hand him over to a retired desk jockey?”

“I’m not planning a guerilla incursion,” Michael said. “Once we track down where he is, we’ll call in the Honduran authorities to take over. I know they consider the document a national treasure. They’ll take action. Besides, I’m getting arthritis in my knees; I’m no hero.”

Calbert leaned back in his chair. “I’m still not convinced.”

“Tell you what, give us a couple of weeks. If we end up with nothing but dysentery, then we’ll come home. Unless, of course, you need George for anything…?”

“No, we’ve got him analyzing hydro fluctuations; any intern can do it.”

“Well, then?”

Calbert shrugged. “All right. Fine. Let’s go talk to George and see how he feels about it.”

∞

Calbert fought traffic all the way across the city as he drove Michael to the Quantum Resources labs.

As one of the few country corporations that still operated on a profitable basis, Canada Corp. attracted immigrants from all over the world. The national policy had always been to welcome the influx of people, but in the major cities the infrastructure was strained to the limit. In the past two years, the government had issued a moratorium on new visas.

Population and overcrowding had always been a concern. Space stations and moon colonies were far too expensive to provide a feasible solution to overcrowding. In the back of Michael’s mind—as with others, he was sure—the possibility of life-sustaining worlds in other solar systems would become a primary consideration once they made contact with the alien culture that had built the star beacons.

When the first Quanta mission was announced, there had been a swell of hope for the future, and as a result there had also been something of a population explosion as people anticipated interstellar trade, commerce, and migration.

That hope had been dashed when Alex returned with the news that he had not made contact, and that there were no signs of life in Centauri. The failed attempts to develop the electropathic ability in other pilots, and the subsequent mothballing of the Quanta projects only served to decrease worldwide confidence. As markets plunged and country corporations fell, there was an increase in civil unrest and crime rates around the world.

In his mind, Michael felt as if he had a responsibility for the direction in which humankind was going, since he had been involved from the start. Perhaps some of his discontentment in the past few years was because he considered the entire affair unfinished business.

He wanted to help Alex, there was no doubt of that; but at the same time he felt reinvigorated now that he had renewed his purpose.

“I’ve been thinking,” Calbert said as he swerved to avoid hitting a courier drone. “With our current expansion, we’re going to be recruiting more technicians and researchers. They’re going to need someone grounded in science in an administrative capacity.”

“Oh?” Michael’s interest was piqued.

“Maybe when you get back you might consider taking a position with the company. I was going to ask you a few months ago, but…”

A few months ago Michael would have said ‘no’; he had been too torn with grief over his wife. Melanie had always been supportive of his career, and he knew she would not have wanted to see him wallow in a directionless existence. Now, things were different.

“That sounds perfect,” he said immediately, unable to keep from grinning like a boy.

“We’ll work out the details later. Of course, there are a couple of conditions.”

Michael nodded. “Shoot.”

“First, you would have to be able to take orders from me. It’s a bit of a role-reversal from the last time we worked together.”

“I have no problem with that,” Michael said, and he meant it. He had always had complete faith in Calbert, otherwise he would never have recommended him for his current position as CEO of Quantum Resources, Inc. “Anything else?”

“Just one more thing,” Calbert said in a drawl.

“Yeah?”

Calbert pointed. “Get rid of the beard.”

∞

They arrived at the Quantum Resources labs without incident, and went in search of George Markowitz. When they found him, he was sitting inside an sealed glass tank filled with water. He wore a wetsuit and a complex mask that looked like something out of a science fiction novel. Inside the green-tinted lenses, lights flashed as sensors picked up data and transmitted it to a computer off to the side.

When he spotted Michael and Calbert, George surfaced and pulled the mask off.

“Michael!” he said. “Long time.”

“It is. I hope we’re not interrupting.”

“Nah. Just testing a new compound sealant against stress. Some of the tropical countries are a lot hotter and more humid than others and sometimes the standard sealant breaks down.” He had a wide smile on his face. “I’d shake your hand but I don’t want to get you wet.”

Calbert said, “Actually, if you don’t mind taking a break, we’d like to talk to you about another project.”

“Yeah, sure.” George lifted himself out of the tank and climbed down the step ladder in lively fashion. For a man in his fifties, he remained in very decent shape. Laugh lines at his temples counterbalanced the shock of silver running through his dark hair.

Michael missed George’s boyish enthusiasm for all things scientific. The man had completely changed from his bitter days at NASA working under his vindictive brother-in-law. Even with his current mundane task, he flourished at Quantum Resources. It was nice to see people in their element.

George stood there looking back and forth between the two new arrivals expectantly.

“Maybe you should change,” Calbert suggested. “This might take more than a few minutes.”

Michael said, “Or we could all go to an early lunch.”

∞

They went to a pub down on the corner to eat. While George decimated a Reuben sandwich, washing it down with a frosted glass of beer, Michael related what happened with Alex, and the request to find Yaxche.

“I heard about the kidnapping,” George said. “He was a very nice old man. I hope he’s all right.”

Michael grimaced. “I’m sure he is. The Cruzados must believe he knows something more about the scroll than what he told us.”

Shaking his head, George said, “You don’t think he misled us all this time? I only spoke with him a few times, but deception isn’t in his nature. I don’t believe he’d lie.”

“Neither do I, but maybe something just kept getting lost in the translation. I believe we’ve reached a pivotal point in all this,” Michael said. “Alex—and the rebels, obviously—think the scroll will provide the breakthrough we’ve been looking for. I think so, too.”

George wiped his fingers on a napkin. “All right. Sign me up.”

“You sure?” Michael asked.

Glancing at Calbert, who nodded, George grinned like a kid with a new robocycle. “You know, in a way, I always felt like I was one of the pioneers, discovering the scroll in Yaxche’s possession. It pained me that no one could figure it out. I’ve spent hours looking over the reports and studying the simulations and recordings, but I would love to take a crack at this in person.”

Calbert finished tapping a few commands into his portable holoslate and said, “All right. I’ve sent in the orders to head office, reinstating Michael to active duty and informing them of your field assignment. You’re both booked on a flight to Tegucigalpa.” He nodded at them and winked. “You’d better get packed!”

Canada Station Three :

Lagrange Point 4 :

Earth Orbit :

Alex sat at a table by himself in the mess hall. He was alone in a crowd of adults. A few familiar faces would nod and smile when he looked up, but no one invited him to eat his meal with them.

In a way, he couldn’t blame them. He was an anomaly. History’s first and only interstellar traveler, Alex looked nothing like a pioneer or a hero. He looked like a sickly boy, and most people shied away at the sight of him.

Picking at his plate of fries, Alex sighed and turned his mind back to his memories. Since the night of his collapse, he hadn’t been able to achieve that transcendent state again. It had been exhausting, and Alex had felt extremely weak for several days afterward.

But there was something out there that he needed to understand. Some metaphysical connection had been made when he was quantized. Was it that haunting voice? What did it want?

Earlier that morning he had tried to message Michael to let his friend know he was all right, but he only got the answering service saying Michael was out of town, but would check his messages periodically.

“Mind if I join you?” someone said, interrupting his thoughts.

Alex, surprised, looked up to see Kenny smiling at him.

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

Kenny sat down and arranged his lunch on the table. It was some kind of vegetable soup and a toasted sandwich.

“Are you feeling any better?” Kenny asked as he broke some salted crackers into bits and sprinkled them in his soup.

“I guess.” Not knowing what motivated Kenny to sit with him, Alex was reluctant to say much.

“You gave everyone a pretty good scare.”

“Did I?” Alex spoke in a dramatic voice. “That’s good.”

Kenny stared at Alex for a moment and started to say something, but Alex smiled to show he was being facetious.

Using his spoon to dunk the more stubborn cracker pieces under the soup, Kenny said, “I guess everyone tends to walk on eggshells around you. No one really knows what you can and can’t do. I’m sure it makes you feel less than human sometimes.”

“Or more than human.”

Kenny took a deep breath. “I’ll say it again. I think we got off on the wrong foot, and that’s my fault. I’m new and I just wanted to impress the hell out of everyone. I’m sorry if it felt like I was using you as a stepping stool. I’m really a nice guy when you get to know me.”

“Thank you.”

Motioning to Alex’s lunch, Kenny asked, “You not hungry?”

“I’m starving,” Alex said. “But not for food.”

“Look, if I could do anything about that…”

Alex offered him a conciliatory smile. “I know.”

Twirling his spoon in his soup absently, Kenny drew his face into a look of concern.

He said, “I wanted to talk to you more about what you mentioned in the lab.”

“Chrysalis.” Alex picked up a fry and bit it in half.

“For starters, yeah.” He stared into Alex’s eyes. “I went through all the reports. I only found one where it’s mentioned, and Dr. Hoit, who was head of the Quanta experiments at that time, basically dismissed the notion. I’m reluctant to repeat his exact words.”

“You don’t have to. I read the report.”

Kenny looked startled.

Alex said, “Back then I still had my abilities. I could see beyond my normal range of vision.”

“Uhm.” Kenny looked uncomfortable. Not everyone could accept that Alex had once had those powers, unless they saw it with their own eyes. “Okay. So, let’s pretend I have a more open mind than some of the others. Do you want to tell me about this chrysalis?”

“There’s not really much to tell,” Alex said. “Both NASA—when it was in charge of the project—and Quantum Resources have been going about this the wrong way from the start. What they don’t realize is that I should not have survived my first exposure to Kinemet. I tried to warn them, but they classified everything I said. Sometimes people get a notion stuck in their head and they’re unwilling to believe anything that goes against that.”

“I have to admit, it comes with the territory,” Kenny added. “Scientists can be the most close-minded people you’ve ever met.”

Alex laughed without humor. Then he said, “The entire Quanta project was doomed to failure from the start. One of the reasons I involved myself early on—”

“By hijacking the Quanta,” Kenny added, twisting his lips in a half smile.

“—was because they assumed that the pilot, once exposed to Kinemet, would automatically return to a material state and turn on the electrical systems when they arrived at their destination, and in turn be able to dampen the reacting Kinemet.”

“And you knew there would be a greater delay than what was required? The report said it was several seconds—too long, as it turned out—before you rematerialized.”

“I didn’t know there would be a delay in my returning to normal space, but I knew there wasn’t enough time to start the generators, charge the battery and engage the dampers. The first time I was exposed to Kinemet I was far too disoriented to be of any use. Any pilot in that situation would take too long remembering what they had to do before being able to do it. It was also foolish of the physicists at NASA to think they needed to irradiate a pilot during a quantized flight to transform him.”

Alex took a deep breath. “But that’s not the only thing they were wrong about.”

“The only thing?” Kenny was obviously struggling to understand what Alex meant.

“Light-speed travel is important,” Alex said. “But the way they’re going about it is all wrong. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk, and you need to learn to walk before you can run. From the moment Kinemet was discovered, everyone wanted to go straight from the crib to flying through interstellar space. They’ve skipped a number of necessary steps before they can understand Kinemet, let alone master it.”

“Steps?” Kenny asked.

“To begin with, like with any radiation, radical exposure will result in death. That’s why they scrubbed the Quanta projects—nearly every pilot who they exposed to the element died, and those that didn’t die are in comas.”

“But you were exposed,” Kenny said. “Twice.”

“The second time I was already partially transformed. Additional exposure had no effect. The first time I was exposed I was partially shielded by the TAHU, and I was also far enough away from the point of origin that the effects were somewhat lessened. It was a fluke; I should have died … like my parents. But I believe there was some kind of catalyst that changed the nature of Kinemet before it irradiated me.”

Kenny chewed on his lower lip. “You mean how we charge it with hydrogen particles to initiate the quantum reaction?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “And I tried to tell them when I got back to Earth, but either I didn’t explain it correctly or they were so focused on other things they weren’t prepared to listen.”

“So … what’s your theory?” Kenny asked.

“I think there is a connection between anyone irradiated by Kinemet and those alien monuments. Because I’m only partially changed, the connection is not clear, but nevertheless, I feel it. It’s like a voice in my head calling me. It was very strong when I was in Centauri, and I have to believe if I had been fully transformed I would now know the answer. There would have been no need to cool the Kinemet because it wasn’t supposed to be used like it was, and the Quanta would not have exploded as a result.”

“Do you think…” Kenny struggled for the words. “…that voice was a broadcast from any aliens in that system?”

“There were no aliens in Centauri,” Alex said, his voice tight. He carefully avoided looking at Kenny. “Just me.”

Taking in a deep breath, as if absorbing all the new ideas that way, Kenny slowly let it out again. “So that brings us back to the original conundrum. What is the proper procedure to become … whatever it is that you would become?”

“Kinemat,” Alex said.

Kenny raised his eyebrow. “Kinemat?”

“Someone who has been fully transformed by Kinemet. They started to call it ‘the Manez Effect’ but I hate that.”

“I’m still not clear on what becoming a Kinemat means.”

“Part of the problem,” Alex said, “is that I don’t know either. I don’t know the correct method to become transformed by Kinemet, and I don’t know for certain what the result is supposed to be. It’s difficult to convince someone they’re wrong, when you can’t prove that you’re right.”

“Forget what you can prove,” Kenny said. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m in a transitional state that should only have lasted a very short time. Days, maybe, or hours. My transformation is incomplete. That’s why my health is deteriorating. I need to finish changing.”

“I’ll say it again: changing into what?” Kenny asked. “And how?”

“I don’t know the answer to either of those questions,” Alex told him, starting to grow frustrated.

“Do you have a theory?”

Alex took a deep breath to calm himself. “I’m not completely sure, but I believe there are instructions on how.”

Kenny made the connection. “The stolen Mayan scroll.”

“Yes.”

Pulling a disbelieving face, Kenny said, “We had every cryptographer, programmer, and analyst in NASA picking it apart for years. Their conclusion was it’s a nice story, but there’s nothing there that gives us any more information about Kinemet or the ancient races who built the monuments on the edge of the solar systems.”

Alex shrugged. “Just because we don’t know how to read the scroll properly at this time doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold the information we need.” Alex absently popped a fry in his mouth and chewed without tasting.

“So,” Kenny said, his voice measured, “what you are saying is, we can’t truly begin to understand how to use Kinemet for superluminal travel—at least the way the aliens do—until we are able to complete your transformation?”

“Right.”

Kenny picked up his spoon and stirred his rapidly cooling soup. “And our only manual is missing.”

“Yes.”

∞

Although Justine had not sent Alex a message, he knew she usually worked on the Diana, and wanted to come and see her when the ship docked. He’d tried to call her from his apartment, but the Lunar Lines receptionist said they couldn’t connect him for some reason. But he wanted to take the chance she would arrive today.

Promising Dr. Amma that he was feeling much better, he got her permission to go. It was an excruciating trip to the main terminal of the space port, but he made it with time to spare. Exhausted from the effort, he sat down on one of the benches.

He didn’t have to wait long before he spotted a familiar face.

Clive Wexhall approached with a warm smile. “Alex, how are you?”

“Hello, sir.” Alex stood up. “I’m good. It’s been awhile.”

“Yes it has.” He shook Alex’s hand. “They don’t let me off the Moon very often.”

Alex found that he developed an ache in his knees if he stood too long. His braces, designed more for walking, didn’t take any of his weight off his joints when he was standing still. If he shuffled his feet or subtly walked on the spot, the biomechatronics would kick in. When he made the motion, though, people looked at him strangely or asked if he was all right.

Alex sat back down on the bench. “Are you waiting for Justine?” he asked.

There was a slight flush to Clive’s skin. He said, “In a way, yes; but I also wanted to see you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, Justine won’t be disembarking today. She has to stay on the liner.”

Alex scrunched up his face. “Oh?”

“But,” Clive said, “she asked me to get you clearance to go aboard for a visit while the Diana is in dock.”

It didn’t take any mystical powers to see there was more going on here than the liaison was letting on. Although Alex hadn’t had a lot of dealings with Clive, he knew Justine trusted him, and that was good enough for him.

“All right. That sounds fine.” He stood up and followed Clive to the security office.

∞

The cabin of the liner was completely empty of passengers when Alex and Clive entered. There were a few members of the cleaning crew there. Bypassing the workers, Clive led Alex to the kitchen area and to the elevator.

Clive motioned for Alex to go into the one-person lift first.

“Where are we—” Alex began to ask, but Clive winked at him and put a finger to his lips.

“I’ll be right behind you,” the liaison said.

Without another word, Alex entered the elevator. The door shut and it descended to the storage area. When it stopped, Alex stepped out and looked around. He didn’t see anyone, and for a brief moment he wondered if he’d been tricked, but then he heard muffled voices.

Without waiting for Clive, he walked down the aisle of containers and spotted a group of soldiers at the opposite end of the storage bay. One of them looked up and grabbed his ion rifle, but then someone said, “It’s all right. He’s with me.”

Alex recognized the voice. Justine beckoned him down, and he waved as he made his way to her.

The soldiers looked at him with a mixture of wariness and curiosity, but Justine didn’t offer any explanations to them or to Alex.

She was wearing her PERSuit harness and looked like she was cold. She gave Alex a wide smile, and he quickened his pace as fast as his braces would let him.

Alex was always surrounded by people, but he usually felt alone except when Justine stopped in on her visits. He always looked forward to his voice chats with Michael, but it wasn’t the same as seeing someone in person.

As he neared, he felt a change come over him. At first, he thought it was a feeling of happiness at seeing his friend, but by the time he was halfway to her, Alex knew what he was experiencing was something different. He could sense it.

Kinemet.

It was like a ray of sunshine to someone who had spent months in the dark. He could feel it radiating through him, replenishing him. Like a homing beacon, it called to him.

Everything else became peripheral to Alex, and with a renewed energy, he made directly for the large container in the middle of the group. He was barely aware of Justine or the others, and only peripherally registered their presence.

“This is Alex, my friend,” Justine said to the group with a lightness in her voice. “I hope you guys don’t mind, but he’s going to spend a couple of hours here with us during our layover. Don’t worry, I’ve cleared it with the higher ups. Ah,” she continued after a moment, “here’s the NASA liaison now.”

Clive appeared from behind the containers and waved as he spied Justine. As if completely understanding Alex not greeting her in the traditional manner, Justine waved back at Clive and met him halfway down the hall.

Alex couldn’t hear what Justine and Clive said to each other. He knew he should at least make the effort to pull himself away from the container of Kinemet and say something sociable to Justine. She had obviously gone out of her way to arrange this for him. But the kinetic metal was a siren’s song for him.

When it was not in the midst of a reaction, Kinemet was only mildly radioactive—less than a percent of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. A person who had not been altered by exposure to reacting Kinemet would need to be exposed to the dormant form in close proximity for several months before starting to feel any effects, and then it would most likely only be about as harmful as a sunburn.

Dormant Kinemet did, however, give off enough radio waves to play havoc with some electronics in close proximity. As a precaution against causing any shipboard disasters, the Kinemet on board the liner was encased in a thick container lined with titanium—the same material used in Kinemetic dampers.

Even through the sealed container, Alex could feel the waves penetrating through to his core.

A few hours? If that was the limit to his time, he would need to get closer. He turned around and said, “Can we open it up?”

With Clive in tow, Justine returned to the circle of guards and nodded. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

As the lieutenant unlocked the main opening by tapping a code into the magnetic lock, Justine grabbed one of the cots and dragged it closer to the aperture.

When the door opened a fraction, a wave of Kinemetic energy poured over and through Alex, and he basked in it. Justine gently guided him to lie down on the cot, and at that moment, she made an odd face.

“Well, there goes my optilink,” Justine said with a laugh. “Might as well put my sweater back on.”

“It is safe for us?” asked the lieutenant.

Justine turned toward the sound of his voice, but she appeared to be looking past him. “If you have a digital watch, it probably won’t tell the time correctly. And forget watching any vids unless you go to the other end of the cargo bay,” Justine said. “But, yeah, the rays are mostly harmless.”

The lieutenant called out a few orders to his men to patrol the area, and told the ones off-duty they could go up to the main floor kitchens.

“I’ll pop back down to check on you in an hour or so,” Lieutenant Jeffries said. With that, the soldiers made themselves scarce.

Whatever Justine and Clive talked about over the next few hours, Alex was completely oblivious to it.

As his body re-energized from the proximity to Kinemet, he found himself once again entering something very similar to that fugue state…

The ancient voice called to him: Alex, come home.

Lunar Lines Vessel, Diana :

Dock Seven :

Canada Station Three :

Leaving Alex next to the Kinemet, Justine and Clive moved as far down the cargo bay as they could while still able to maintain line of sight.

The Kinemetic radiation continued to interfere with both Justine’s PERSuit harness and the optilink; the sensors gave her such static feedback she thought her head would overload with the influx of scrambled data. Even though it meant she was once more plunged into complete darkness, she disabled her optilink and put her sweater back on. At the very least it helped keep away the chill of the cargo bay.

She was fine with her loss of electronically enhanced sight, because she had Clive there; he held her tightly in his arms as they sat on a turned over crate and spoke in soft tones.

“I meant it, you know,” he said.

She didn’t have to ask what he was referring to, and she was never one to play coy; she would not pretend ignorance and make him repeat himself.

Over the past few hours she’d had some time to think about what he’d said, but she was still torn. On the one hand, she was acutely aware that she wasn’t getting any younger, and she wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of her life alone. On the other, her twilight years were still far away, and there was so much more she wanted to do with her life.

Justine couldn’t have asked for a nicer man than Clive. He was understanding, compassionate and kind. Although he could be a bureaucrat both at work and off duty, and could be a stickler for doing things the ‘proper’ way, he also had a singular wit and could make her laugh. The thought of giving her future over to him and making a life on the Moon together was not unappealing. At the same time, she had this fire in her belly that told her she wasn’t ready to settle down just yet.

“I know you meant it,” she said to him. “But it’s been a very complicated couple of years.”

“So that’s a ‘no’?” he asked, but he said it with a half smile, as if he’d been expecting the answer all along.

“It’s not a ‘no’,” she said. “It’s not a ‘yes’; but it’s not a ‘no’.” She squeezed him a little tighter and buried her head in his shoulder. “I just need to get a little more comfortable with who I am now before I can make that kind of decision.”

After a moment, he spoke in a quiet voice. “You won’t mind I ask again at a later date?”

Justine laughed and gave him a playful slap. “I’d be upset if you didn’t.”

They held each other in silence for long minutes.

“This is nice,” he said after a time. “Not quite La Dance Des Étoiles, but it’s still cozy.”

She playfully slapped his arm. “You’re such a liar!”

“Ha.” He laughed. “So, what’s this supposed to do anyway? To Alex?”

“I don’t really know how this works for sure,” Justine said, “but I think it has something to do with how he was exposed to Kinemet the first time. It imbued him with its inherent radiation which changed his physiology. Now he needs it like we need Vitamin C.”

Clive said, “I’m not sure I completely understand.”

“No one does. That’s why he’s gone so long without it; why he’s deteriorating physically. No one believes he needs Kinemet to survive.”

“He seems content now.”

Justine couldn’t see anything. “Does he?”

“Yes. He looks like he’s sleeping, but there’s a serenity about him.”

Justine could feel herself smiling. “That’s good.”

“How much longer do you think he’ll need?” Clive asked. “The liner is set to reload passengers in a couple hours. We’ll have to get him off before anyone sees him.”

∞

They sat together for two more hours, enjoying one another’s company and talking about nothing and everything.

Though she just wanted to rest in Clive’s arms forever, Justine finally squeezed his hand, indicating it was time to go. They had things to do.

She stood up and headed back to Alex, and could hear Clive following.

Alex sat up on the cot. “Thank you so much, Justine.”

“You’re welcome, but really, Clive arranged it all.” She felt around for the door of the container and pushed it shut. It locked automatically, and Justine quickly removed her sweater.

As the Kinemetic radiation was cut off once more, Justine’s main optilink connection came back online, and she immediately turned on her harness. At last she could look on Alex and Clive’s faces with those electronic eyes, courtesy of Optimedia.

Putting his hand out for Clive to shake, Alex said, “Thank you, Clive.”

The two shook, and Clive stepped back and put an arm around Justine. “Not a problem, young man. I just wish there was a more permanent solution for you.”

“This was good enough,” Alex said. “I feel much better.”

“How long will it last?” Justine asked.

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. But one thing I do know: I won’t be needing these braces for the time being.”

Justine watched as he undid the biomechatronic device from his legs.

Alex stood to give Justine a hug, and she blinked away tears. “If I could find a better way,” she said.

“I know.”

Justine heard footsteps approaching.

“Are we about wrapped up here?” asked Lieutenant Jeffries.

Nodding, Justine said, “Yes. We need to escort Alex out before the passengers embark. Thank you, Lieutenant. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

“Uh, I really didn’t do anything,” he said to her in a modest voice, and checked the lock on the container.

“Sometimes,” she said, “that’s more than enough.”

Justine put her hands on Alex’s shoulders, and then pulled him close for a hug. It was difficult to explain to people why she cared so much for this boy. Although she never had any children of her own, that maternal instinct was still there.

Alex was like a foster child to her in some ways, and she didn’t realize how much his deteriorating health had affected her until this very moment. Seeing him looking hale and happy brought a sudden torrent of tears to her eyes, and she hugged him even tighter.

“I feel much better,” he said to her in a low voice. “Thank you.”

Justine gave him one more squeeze, then stepped back, but still kept one hand on his shoulder.

“We need to figure out a way to make it permanent.”

Alex smiled. “Working on it. Now I have a little more time. And,” he added, “now I have something that might help Kenny.”

“Kenny?” she asked.

With a subtle glance at Lieutenant Jeffries, Alex spoke in a low voice. “Kenny Harriman. He’s the new physicist they sent up from Vancouver. He’s trying to figure me out. Since I haven’t been able to use any of my gifts, I don’t think he fully believed my story. Maybe now if I demonstrate, it might give him some ideas.”

Justine was one of the few people who had witnessed firsthand Alex’s ability to manipulate electricity and his uncanny capability to see far beyond the normal range of human vision.

It had not occurred to her until that moment that those gifts would once again be restored to Alex once he was recharged with the Kinemetic radiation. He was connected to that element in a fundamental way. As Alex said often, he needed it.

For the past few years, as Alex’s capabilities diminished along with his health, it had been harder and harder to convince the corporate governments to take an interest in Alex. Justine hoped that this new physicist, Kenny, would be able to help in time; she had no idea how or when Alex would have access to more of the superluminal metal.

Wiping away her tears, she said, “I’ll be interested in hearing about it all when I come back. Speaking of which, I have one more surprise.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve arranged to take a few weeks’ vacation time, and on the return trip, I’ll start them here on CS3.”

Alex’s smile stretched wide. “That’s great!”

His delight in the news touched a chord in her, and she realized that she had just as strong a connection to Alex as he had to the Kinemet. It was a good reason to reconsider Clive’s offer. If she took a position on Luna, she would be much closer to Alex on CS3. There were daily flights between the Moon and the space station.

“Maybe we’ll go on a tour of the Kordylewski clouds or something,” Justine suggested.

“I would love that.”

Clive tapped Justine on the arm and repeated, “We should get Alex off before the passengers embark.”

Justine nodded, and the three of them started back toward the elevator. She mouthed a silent thank you to Lieutenant Jeffries, who gave her a salute in return.

Justine noticed that Alex was no longer walking like an old man. Once again, he seemed to be an energetic youth.

When they all got to the upper level and reached the gangway, Alex stopped and turned around.

“Thank you both again. I don’t know how much longer I would have been able to last if not for today.”

“No need to thank us,” Justine said. “I just wish we could do more.”

They hugged and, as Alex left the liner, Justine felt an acute pang of guilt. She had spent the past few years clinging to the hope that she could once again recapture the glory of her days in NASA. She had nothing to prove to anyone in that regard, and it was time for her to make some realistic choices.

She followed Clive back to the elevator, and as he gestured for her to go first, Justine hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” Clive asked.

Shaking her head, Justine smiled at him. “Nothing. I think I’ve made up my mind.”

∞

Justine and Clive returned to the kitchen area and she enlisted his help to restock the refreshment cart with cold beverages and snacks. She brewed an urn of coffee and liberated a couple plates of fresh pastries for the soldiers.

When she and Clive had descended to the cargo area and distributed the snacks, the men expressed their gratitude as they helped themselves to the donuts, Danishes, and crullers. Their morale seemed high.

Lieutenant Jeffries, flicking icing residue off his uniform as he finished a bear claw, approached Justine.

“Thank you for this.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’m just sorry none of you got a chance to visit the station.”

“Goes with the territory.” He held his smile for a moment, then turned serious. “Do you mind if I ask what that was all about, with the boy?”

Justine hesitated to answer. Any explanation she offered would only raise more questions, and she wasn’t certain how much she should reveal.

The lieutenant added, “I will have to make a report. I just want to be sure to get my story straight.”

She glanced at Clive, who nodded his assent. Clive had cleared the visit with administration, but Alex’s status was still classified.

To Lieutenant Jeffries, she said, “Do you remember the news a few years back about the pilot who returned from Centauri System?”

The lieutenant blinked in surprise. “From the Quanta flight?”

“Yes. You just met him.”

He looked back and forth between Justine and Clive, disbelieving. “But he’s only a kid.”

“It would appear so,” Clive said in a low voice, “and that information is strictly on a need-to-know basis. When you make your debrief, you can report that Captain Alex Manez, retired, performed an unscheduled inspection of the cargo. Make no mention of his apparent age.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and if he was uncomfortable with that, he kept it to himself.

A soft chime sounded, indicating the liner was beginning launch procedures. A pre-recorded voice came on the loudspeaker and encouraged everyone to find their seats.

Justine and Clive found their way to the temporary webbed seating that had been installed for the troops, and buckled themselves in opposite Lieutenant Jeffries.

Justine knew she owed the lieutenant more of an explanation, if for no other reason than plain courtesy.

As the liner fired its engines and eased out of the docking bay, Justine told Jeffries how exposure to the Kinemet had affected Alex on a cellular level, and now he required a certain proximity to the element to maintain his health.

She also explained that, because of the shortage of Kinemet, obtaining it for Alex had been near impossible. Justine and Clive had understandably taken advantage of the situation just to help out a friend.

“Most of your superiors are aware of Alex and his condition,” Justine said. “However, I would suggest you keep this information in confidence. I don’t think it’s something you want to be drawn into.”

“ ‘Unscheduled military inspection’ sounds good to me,” Lieutenant Jeffries said, one side of his mouth turned up in a half smile.

The voice that suddenly spoke through the cargo hold’s holoslate was not pre-recorded, and was not recognizable by Justine as one of the crew; it had a thick Spanish accent.

“Attention American soldiers. Remain calm. Because of the corruption of the corporate countries who have kept humankind in ignorance for far too long, the Cruzados have liberated this vessel and its cargo.

“Cooperate, and you will not be harmed. Resist us and you will be ejected into space.”

Tegucigalpa :

Honduras :

Central American Conglomeration :

His Mayan name was Te’irjiil, but only his grandfather ever addressed him as such. Most Hondurans spoke only Spanish and had difficulty pronouncing his given name, so he went by the name Terry Fernandez. That was the name he gave to the desk clerk of the hostel in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, after he ran away from home in Copán Departmental.

That first night away was the most frightening experience in his life. He had to share a room with three others, one of whom looked pale and sickly and coughed throughout night. The second resident of the room snored heavily, and the third occupant wouldn’t stop talking about how he was going to plunge a knife into the next person who crossed him.

It was the first time Terry had ever been alone, and the strangeness of the city was overwhelming. The pungent stink of the streets, the hard faces of the citizens, and the screams of police sirens and honking of horns all together nearly sent him running home with his tail between his legs.

He had never seen a group of more than a hundred people in one place at one time before. Now in a city of millions, Terry felt incredibly small and insignificant. He told himself to be strong, and was proud that he survived the night.

The next morning, as he stood on the sidewalk outside the hostel, he counted the few lempira he had saved over the past six months. He calculated the cost of the hostel and meals; he knew his money would not last him more than a week, even in the poverty-stricken barrios of the city.

At twenty years of age, Terry’s only viable trade skill was as a laborer in the coffee plantations that employed more than half the population in his home departmental. He had no idea what he would do in the city, but when he spotted a truck with the name of Ruiz Coffee, the company he had worked for back home, he followed it to their warehouse and asked to speak with the foreman.

“I’m young, strong and healthy,” Terry said after the foreman—an extremely grumpy-looking man with grizzled grey hair—initially told him they weren’t looking for help.

“We already have too many workers,” the foreman said and flicked his hand at Terry. “Every day we turn good men away.”

“I will work for free today,” Terry offered. “Just to prove myself.”

The foreman sized him up and pressed his lips together as if tasting something sour. Finally, he said, “All right. We have a truck that needs to be loaded on dock three. Start there. See if you can keep up with the others. We’ll see how you do.”

With a grin, Terry headed down to the loading docks and pitched right in.

While waiting between trucks, one of the other laborers struck up a conversation with Terry.

“I’m Humberto,” the man said. He was middle-aged and stocky, with short-cropped hair and a thick moustache. He sized Terry up a moment before extending his hand. They shook.

“My name is Terry.”

Humberto asked, “First time in the city?”

Terry wasn’t sure whether he should reveal too much about himself, but he didn’t think he could come up with a believable fiction. “How can you tell?”

Humberto pointed at his clothing. “I used to wear homespun outfits when I lived in the country, too.”

Looking down at his rural-style clothing, Terry felt suddenly conspicuous. The other workers wore denim pants and factory-made shirts with logos and slogans on them.

At first he suspected Humberto was making fun of him, but the other man did not have a smirk on his face. Instead, Humberto looked concerned and maybe a little sad.

“Yes,” Terry admitted. “I don’t have enough money to buy new clothes. Yet.”

“I know a place you can get jeans cheap, some sneakers and a shirt that doesn’t scream ‘country’. After the shift, I’ll take you there, if you like.”

“I don’t know…” For a brief moment, Terry wondered if he should trust someone he’d just met. He’d heard stories about criminals in the city who preyed on unsuspecting victims.

Humberto shrugged. “Offer’s open if you want.”

A new truck arrived, and then they were too busy loading to talk.

At noon break, Terry went and sat by himself to eat some fries he purchased from a lunch truck. He listened to the other workers joke and laugh, and though he wanted to join in, he kept to himself.

Deep down he knew running away from home the way he had was childish. Though he wasn’t sure if he could make a life in the city, he knew there was nothing for him back in his village.

For the longest time he had courted Itzel, whose grandfather, Artec, was friends with his own grandfather, Yaxche. Both of the old men had conspired to arrange the union, and Terry had been smitten from the start.

His parents—who both worked long hours—had delegated Terry’s upbringing to his grandfather, and usually deferred to his authority. They approved the marriage, but that was the extent of their involvement.

Terry and Itzel had spent many evenings sitting on the porch making plans for their future. Then Itzel became feverish with typhoid seven months ago.

Honduras continued to be one of the most impoverished country corporations, and Copán Departmental was severely lacking in medical facilities and supplies. Within two days of the first symptoms, Itzel had succumbed to the disease. With her death, all hope Terry had for a future died as well.

His anger, at first, was without direction. As the lonely days piled up, he realized that there had been a chance of Itzel’s survival had the village had proper sewage, treated water, or a qualified doctor—amenities that many other countries in the world enjoyed.

Their village had had its chance. With so much interest from USA, Inc. and NASA in that ancient document, the leaders of the community could have negotiated access to it for better medical care, infrastructure and a better way of life. They also could have sold it outright, as the NASA officials had first wanted.

Instead, his grandfather had chosen to keep the old scroll with him as a cultural and religious artifact, and he basked in the self-importance he received from his new status. It would be blasphemy to charge admission to view the relic, his grandfather had told Terry one time. The ancients had intended for all humankind to benefit from the knowledge contained within.

But no one had figured out the meaning of the inscrutable words, and so no benefit had come from it, only a continued lack of medicine and technology that could have saved Itzel.

Terry’s traditional upbringing would not let him direct his rage at his grandfather or the leaders of the community for not bargaining with the scientists. And so, the only option he could think of was to abandon the people who had failed him and make his own way through life. He had spent the past half a year planning and saving.

But now he was alone, friendless and more than a little frightened. The rudimentary education he had received in the village was enough for him to read and write, but Terry did not even have basic computer skills. The village only had one computer and it didn’t have an EarthMesh connection. When the scientists from USA, Inc. left, they took all their machines with them.

At one end of the spectrum, humankind had traveled to another solar system, and at the other end, there were millions of people who lived in squalor. This was the inequality that kept Terry going. He had no idea how he would do it, but he vowed to set things right and bring balance to the world so that no one would have to suffer and die needlessly, like his darling Itzel.

With renewed passion, Terry threw himself into his work that afternoon, enough so that at the end of the day the foreman invited him back.

“You’re not union so you’ll work on a day-by-day basis.” With that, he gave Terry his first day’s pay.

“I said I would work today for free,” Terry protested, holding the lempira in his hand uncertainly.

The foreman shook his head. “You need proper clothing. That outfit you have on makes you look like a beggar. If any of the supervisors came around, they would write me up for it.” He made it sound as if Terry were doing him a favor by accepting the money.

The foreman shooed Terry off and he immediately went in search of Humberto, who was walking toward the main gate.

“Is it too late to go to the store with the cheap clothes?” he asked the larger man.

“Change your mind?” Humberto didn’t break his stride, and Terry matched his pace.

“Yes, you were right. I need to look like I belong.”

“So old sourpuss is keeping you on?” Humberto jerked his thumb back in the direction of the foreman’s office.

“Just as a day worker,” Terry said. “For now.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

As he led Terry off the factory grounds towards the city centre, Humberto surprised him by saying, “I know who you are.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” Humberto glanced at Terry out of the corner of his eye. “I saw you on the news a few years back.”

Terry answered in a sullen voice. “Oh, that.”

“The way the reporter told the story, your village was host for all those rich NASA men. Good fortune for you.”

“It could have been,” Terry said. “But it wasn’t.”

As if measuring Terry up, Humberto took a long while before prompting him to tell his story.

“It’s all right if you want to keep yourself to yourself,” Humberto said finally. “But I left a village very much like yours because I was angry at how poor our conditions were. I didn’t want to live like that anymore. No one should have to live like that.”

Sensing he finally had someone who would understand him, Terry started at the beginning and told Humberto about his grandfather and the ancient scroll, about NASA and Alex Manez, and when he ended his story with the account of how Itzel had died unnecessarily, there was a catch in his throat and a tear in his eye.

Humberto clapped his hand on Terry’s back. “After we get you some clothes, there are some people I want you to meet. They all have a story like yours,” he said. “They also have a plan to put things right. I think you’ll like hearing what they have to say.”

∞

Terry was nervous about going to a secret meeting. He had heard the stories of criminal organizations operating in the city, recruiting ignorant farmers and villagers into their operation and either corrupting them into their way of life, or using them up and discarding them in the most unpleasant ways.

The only thing that kept him steadfast was Humberto. He seemed perfectly at ease as the two of them wound their way through the narrow barrio alleyways to a ramshackle building. It looked like an abandoned storage warehouse.

“Don’t worry,” Humberto said. “I called ahead to let them know we are coming.”

Upon entering the building, Terry was surprised to see only two people waiting for them. He had imagined a gang of cold-eyed men brandishing weapons. Instead, the first man was scrawny and wore glasses. His pock-marked face was split in a wide grin as he stepped forward to shake hands.

“Hello, I’m Jose Fernandez.”

Uncertainly, Terry shook the man’s hand as Humberto introduced him.

“His first day in the city,” Humberto said to Jose, “but I feel he is the very person we have been waiting for.”

Jose nodded. “You’re from the village with the alien scroll?”

“Yes,” Terry answered. There was no use trying to hide it. If he had been on a newsvid, he would be recognizable to many. “But the scroll is not alien. It’s ancient Mayan. My grandfather is its caretaker. He believes it is the story of the end of our gods; the NASA people thought it was the story of an alien visit.”

“Ah, yes.” Jose gestured to a table with four chairs. “Please sit. Would you like something to drink?” He nodded to the other man who dug into a picnic cooler and withdrew four bottles of beer.

When the man popped the cap and offered the drink to Terry, he said, “Pleased to meet you. My name is Alberto.” Though his voice was deep and rich, there was a hardness in his eyes. Terry noticed a scar that ran from Alberto’s left ear to the corner of his mouth.

Being polite, Terry tipped the beer to his lips and drank deeply. They all sat down.

“First off, I want you to know that Humberto, Alberto and I all have Mayan blood running through our veins to some extent. In that, you are like our brother. That is one reason we have arranged this meeting.”

That was unexpected information, but Terry immediately felt a little more comfortable and trusting of these men.

“I believe in being honest with my friends and family, and I believe in coming straight to the point,” Jose said. “Do you mind if I am blunt with you?”

Terry shook his head. “No. Not at all.”

Jose leaned forward and smiled. “We want you to go back home.”

∞

At one point in pre-Columbian history, before the colonial invasion, the Mayan civilization had been more advanced than any other culture in the Americas.

Along with art, music, and architecture, the Mayans had also been the first in that part of the world to develop a written language. They studied mathematics and astronomy, and in some ways their development rivaled those who lived on the other side of the world.

“It is no wonder,” Jose told Terry, “that the alien visitors chose the Mayan people as the custodians of their technology. If history had progressed as it should have, the Mayan culture would today be the dominant force on Earth.”

Unfortunately, the wars with the northern tribes, the arrival of the conquistadors and the flood of aggressive Europeans over the last thousand years had drowned out the Mayan culture and reduced their civilization to small pockets of communities.

Jose’s mother, he told Terry, was a half-blood Mayan, and had married into a reasonably wealthy Honduran family. Growing up, Jose’s mother had told him stories of his culture. “My legal name is Jose, but my Mayan name is Huehuetlotl.”

It was while Jose was in university studying law that the story of the discovery of Kinemet had broken. For years, he followed the story with interest. After the first interstellar mission, NASA had tried to acquire the ancient scroll for themselves.

A legal aid by that time, Jose and a few sympathizers had organized themselves into an activist group. At the time, they had called themselves the Mayan Spiritualists, and they tried to put pressure on the Honduran government to restrict, or at least regulate access to the scroll.

“NASA was spending a lot of money in the area and in the capital region,” Jose said. “Too many government officials were lining their pockets with bribe money from businesses and contractors who wanted to work for the wealthy Americans. Our movement was denounced, and those same politicians instead pressured my law firm to have me fired and blacklisted. The only work I’ve been able to find in the past year has been as a tutor to university students.”

Jose gave Terry a very intense, impassioned look. “For centuries our people have been taken advantage of, when all along we were meant to lead the way to the stars.”

His words stirred similar emotions in Terry. The Mayans had been stepped over by those with money and power, and kept poor and ignorant. If the Mayan people had continued to be a power in the Americas, tragedies like the death of his darling Itzel would never have happened.

Jose continued. “It was then that my friends and I began our work in earnest. There are more than a hundred of us now, and our numbers are growing. We even have a rich benefactor—unfortunately not Mayan, but he believes in our cause.”

Terry asked, “And what is your cause?”

“We now call ourselves the Cruzados, and our mission is to restore the Mayan people to their rightful place as ambassadors to the people of the stars.”

“How will you do that?” Despite his initial misgivings, Terry was becoming intrigued. If he joined a group who shared his beliefs, the possibilities were limitless.

“The world will not simply grant us the status we deserve. They have already shown their disdain for us. Therefore we must make them give it to us.” There was a hard edge to his voice and fire in his eyes.

Terry balked momentarily. “Make them? You mean, by force?”

“If necessary,” Jose said, his hand balled into a fist. Then he relaxed his hand and opened it; the smile returned to his face. “But it will be better if we secure our position with a different kind of power: knowledge. If we have something no one else has, then they have no choice but to deal with us.”

“The secret of the scroll,” Terry guessed.

“That’s right.”

“But their scientists have been working on that for years. They’ve given up. No one knows how to decipher it, not even my grandfather. What can we do?”

Jose put his hand on Terry’s arm. “We can have faith in our destiny. The secret will be revealed when the time is right. And when that time comes, we must be prepared.”

∞

Over the following weeks, Terry met with the Cruzados a dozen more times, often talking or arguing late into the night. They formulated a number of plans, and by the end of Terry’s first month in the capital, he had thrown his full support into the cause.

∞

Terry returned to Copán Departmental in a rented pickup truck four weeks after leaving. The bed of the truck was filled with food, clothing, and medical supplies. In his pocket, he had more lempira than he could make in a year working the coffee fields.

When he arrived in his village, he recounted to his grandfather and parents how he had made his small fortune at a casino one night, and his first thought was the welfare of the village. He told them he had contracted with an engineering company to rebuild the village’s water processing and sewage system, and had arranged for a doctor to visit the village once a month. Regaled as a hero, Terry spent the better part of the year working to improve conditions in their community.

Terry also brought a pocket-sized holoslate with a mesh connection. Jose had supplied it to him, and instructed him to keep this device secret from his fellow villagers.

Every night, when he was by himself, Terry used the computer to learn to read and write English. He also took courses in math, history and science. Jose believed firmly that knowledge was power, and insisted that all Cruzados had the benefits of an education. As a side benefit, Terry also discovered world music, and spent hours listening to everything from classical to rock to the latest progbeat rage.

Jose had insisted that Terry also spend as much time as he could learning the customs and culture of USA, Inc. and Canada Corp. and the history of the NASA space program—the Quanta missions in particular and every scrap of information they could find out about Kinemet.

During the day, his task was to find out as much as he could about the ancient scroll. Though he still found himself with unresolved feelings of anger towards his grandfather’s stubborn and backwards ways, Terry forced himself to ask after the history of the document and pressed his grandfather to speculate about the secrets it held.

Once a week, Terry would check in with Jose or Humberto to exchange updates, and once every two months Terry would leave the village for a weekend. He told his grandfather he was going to visit the friends he made in Tegucigalpa. In reality, he went into the countryside at a secluded camp where he would train with the Cruzados in combat techniques.

Initially, Terry resisted the idea of military action.

“Sometimes, in order for your voice to be heard,” Jose told him the first time Terry picked up weapon, “you may need to raise it.”

∞

The months rolled by without any new developments until the day when, in frustration, Terry demanded that his grandfather repeat the story of the ancient scroll over and over again.

Listening to the words his grandfather spoke, the key to unlocking the secret of the document came to Terry as if it were preordained.

Running back to his own house, Terry contacted Jose on his holoslate.

That call set in motion a whirlwind of events that ultimately brought Terry to where he was today: standing on the bridge of a Lunar Lines ship with an ion pulse rifle in his hand while Jose announced their takeover to the passengers.

To Terry, the past year seemed more like a dream or a nightmare, and it was then that he realized he had lost control of his own destiny.

Tegucigalpa :

Honduras :

Central American Conglomeration :

The virtual tourist flicks on to show a city bathed in heat and humidity. The sky is a clear blue with barely a trace of clouds behind the skyline of the airport.

A cacophony of noise from the loading trucks, taxis and passenger vehicles outside the terminal is loud enough that Michael—who is framed in the two-dimensional image—has to raise his voice to be heard.

He looks cranky and tired.

“What are you doing?” he asks after tapping a request for an autotaxi into a kiosk.

George’s voice comes from off-screen. “Documenting our trip.”

“We’re still at the airport,” Michael says. “I’m not sure they care whether we can get an autotaxi or how much we paid.”

“Well, you never know. Don’t worry, I’ll edit out the boring parts before I submit the recording. But I think our arrival in Tegucigalpa is a good bookend.”

Michael presses his lips together. “You look conspicuous. We need people to trust us before they’ll talk to us.”

The image bounces. “The only fieldwork we do is looking at reactors. Calbert never saw any reason to upgrade us to the new PERSuit system. Now that’s a toy I’d like to get my hands on.”

Shaking his head, Michael says, “We’ll just have to make do with what we have. Let me do the talking when we get to the consulate.”

“You got it, boss.”

Michael grimaces as he waves down a cab. “Sorry I barked at you. It was a long flight.”

“No worries.”

An autotaxi pulls up and they throw their bags in the storage compartment. The image jostles dizzyingly as they enter the vehicle.

The computer personality prompts, <Destination?>

The image pans to Michael, and George says, “Why don’t we go to the hotel first, check in and get cleaned up?”

“That sounds good.” Michael scratches his beard. “Maybe I’ll shave, after all. I didn’t think it would be so hot down here.”

“The Ambassador Arms,” George says to the computer, and the autotaxi pulls out into the street.

∞

The virtual tourist image turns back on outside the glass doors of an office on the third floor of the Centro Financiero Banexpo building. The frame zooms in on the sign of the Canadian Embassy.

Michael, who looks energetic and confident, stands at the door and pauses. With a clean-shaven face, he is dressed in a loose-fitting white shirt and brown pants.

He removes a wide-brimmed hat and faces George and the camera eye.

“All right. I guess if we’re documenting everything, I’ll narrate.” Michael clears his throat. “We’re here at the embassy office to get our travel papers, maps, and to meet with John Markham, who is the consul’s aide. We hope he can give us some additional information on the theft of the Mayan scroll and the kidnapping of Yaxche, the translator.”

Michael enters into the reception area where a smartly-dressed woman smiles a greeting.

“Hello, I’m Michael Sanderson and this is George Markowitz. We have an appointment.”

“Mr. Markham is expecting you. Go right in.” She points down a carpeted hallway. “It’s the office at the end.”

Michael nods and then proceeds to the consul’s office.

Inside, John Markham stands up from his desk and comes around to shake Michael’s hand. Deeply tanned skin stretches around his mouth as he greets them. His eyes glance at the VT camera.

“We’re recording our progress for our report,” Michael says.

“Oh, that’s fine. Come in. Have a seat.” He returns to his side of the desk.

The image briefly flashes on George’s hiking boots as he awkwardly finds his chair and sits down. As he points the camera back up, John is handing Michael a thin memory card.

John says, “After your supervisor called to let me know you were coming down here, I took the liberty of compiling some local newsvids that reported the incident.”

“Thank you.” Michael takes the card and inserts it in his holoslate to transfer the files. “Every little bit will help.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much there. Whoever these Cruzados are, they’ve kept a very low profile up until now. They’ve never taken part in anything more serious than a protest at the Office of the Interior when NASA first tried to purchase the document. For the past year, they’ve been so quiet we assumed they’d disbanded.”

“Do we know the names of any of their members?”

“Just one. Jose Fernandez, who we believe is their leader. I talked to my counterpart at the US embassy and he forwarded a copy of all the data they’ve gathered on the Cruzados, and a timeline of their activities. Like I said, it’s not much.”

“Do you have any contacts with the policia? Someone we can talk to about this?”

John frowns. “Yes, but I’m not certain they will tell you anything useful.”

Michael looks up from the holoslate. “Oh?”

“Well, for one thing, the government of Honduras doesn’t think the theft and kidnapping are much of a priority.”

With a glance at George, Michael says, “They don’t?”

“The only reason the National Department of Investigations even opened a case file is because of pressure from USA, Inc. and the Honduras Office of Tourism.”

“They don’t think kidnapping is important?”

John shakes his head. “It’s very important, but it happens so often in this part of the world that unless there is a ransom demand or an imminent threat to a VIP, the authorities simply don’t have the manpower or resources to investigate. And so far, the Cruzados are only suspected of this crime. They haven’t taken responsibility or communicated any demands yet. As a matter of fact, according to the consul in the U.S. Embassy, the only reason we know the Cruzados are involved is because of an unsecured EPS to a contact in Houston.”

Michael and George share a grim look between them.

John shrugs apologetically. “I want to help you as much as I can, but I have to tell you I think you’re wasting your time. Until the Cruzados surface on their own with a list of demands, you’re just spinning your wheels.”

Michael has a thoughtful look on his face. “I appreciate where you’re coming from, but we have to follow through on this.”

“Of course.”

With a quick look to George, Michael says, “We thought we would begin our investigation in Copán, where it happened. Interview some of the local residents.”

“I can certainly help you with travel arrangements. There’s a bus that runs daily between Tegucigalpa and Santa Rosa de Copán. From there, perhaps you can hire an autotaxi. I believe Yaxche’s village is less than an hour away.”

George shakes his head, causing the image to bob up and down. “When I was there last, I rented a truck from the owner of the hotel where I stayed. The autotaxis won’t run rurally.”

John smiles and stands up. “Excellent. I’ll call down for some bus tickets while you get your travel documents from my receptionist.” He walks around the desk again and shakes both George’s and Michael’s hands. “And if you have a few extra days while in Honduras, you should visit Copán Ruinas. It’s quite astonishing. If you’re a history buff, it’s a must-see.”

∞

There are a series of images of the landscape looking out from inside a bus. The noise of the vehicle’s engine is too loud for anything to be heard other than garbled audio.

∞

A short nighttime shot of a hotel in Santa Rosa de Copán slowly pans to a busy sidewalk filled with pedestrians. On the street corner opposite the hotel an old beggar holds his hand out while gumming his teeth and staring into the distance.

∞

The morning sun casts shadows on the dirt road of a small village. A couple of barefoot kids kick a partially deflated soccer ball back and forth near a well which serves as their central plaza.

Michael steps into the frame. “We’re here in the village where Yaxche and the document were taken. What’s the village’s name again?”

George says, “Pueblo de Santa Brio, but most everyone here just calls it the pueblo.”

Michael makes a motion with his hand for George to follow him. “We’re going to try to find one of Yaxche’s relatives and see if they can give us any more information than what we already have.”

“If I remember correctly,” George says off-screen, “his house is the last one on the end. Maybe his daughter or his grandson is there.”

Michael heads towards the far side of the small village. As he walks, a few of the residents stop and look up at him and George in passing curiosity.

There are no more than two dozen ramshackle houses in the village, all looking in dire need of repair. The front of one of the homes has a few tables set out. On one of the tables are baskets of fruit, bread and two dead chickens. On one of the other tables a number of handcrafted trinkets are arrayed. A plump woman smiles at them and says, “Comprar?”

Michael glances at George with a helpless smile. “I forgot to pack my translator.”

“She wants to know if we want to buy something.”

Michael shakes his head. “Maybe later.”

To the woman, George says, “Más tarde. Gracias.”

She smiles and waves at them as the two make for Yaxche’s house.

The home itself is of typical construction: the walls are made of adobe, and the roof is constructed with clay tiles. Unlike many of the other houses, this one has a small porch and the floor is made of wood rather than packed earth. The front door is partially open.

George calls out into the house. “¿Hola?”

There is no answer, but one of the soccer-playing children trots over.

“La casa está vacía,” he says.

“Do you know what happened?” George asks in Spanish, immediately translating the conversation for Michael’s benefit.

The boy shakes his head. “They were taken by men with guns.”

“They?”

“The soldiers came and put Terry and his grandfather in a truck. They drove off. This was many days ago.”

“Have you ever seen those soldiers before?”

“No. I know nothing of them.” The boy pointed to a house two doors down made of thatch and clay. “Terry’s mother is there. She waits for them to return.”

“Thank you,” Michael says and passes the boy a twenty lempira bill.

Yipping with joy, the boy runs off to show his friends the money.

Michael turns to the camera. “This is news. We no idea Yaxche’s grandson was abducted as well.”

The two of them cross the packed dirt street to the house the boy had indicated and knock on the flimsy door made of wood planks bound together with a weaved rope.

A middle-aged woman opens the door. Worry lines stretch across her face; her eyes flick back and forth fearfully between Michael and George. Recognition blossoms when her gaze settles on George, who had been to the village over a decade earlier wearing similar headgear.

Behind her are two pre-teen girls who look on with curiosity.

The woman speaks in Spanish, and George translates between them.

She says, “Please come in.” She turns to her children and tells them to go play outside.

Michael smiles politely and nods as he follows the woman into her sparsely furnished house. Handmade chairs surround a carved table. A shelving unit holds plates and glasses, and on the mantle over a rudimentary fireplace is a photographic portrait of a young man.

Michael points to it. “Is that your son?”

“Yes,” the woman says, wringing her hands. “He and my father have been missing these past days. Taken by the bandits, for what reason I do not know. We have nothing of value.” She glances at Michael and George out of the corner of her eye. “You are not the police. Why have you come?”

“We want to help find them,” Michael answers. “Though we only found out today that your son was also kidnapped. Can you tell us about him?”

“Yes.” She sits down on a chair at the table. “He is my only son and I love him, though this past year he has grown apart from me and his father. Terry was engaged to be married, you see. Itzel was beautiful and brought joy to him and our family, but she was struck down by sickness and died. Terry ran away from us in grief and did not return for a month. He left a boy but came back a man. He brought a great many supplies and ideas to our village.”

When she spoke, she did not look proud, and Michael shot a quick look at George before saying to her, “You don’t look happy about that.”

“Something happened to Terry when he was away. My husband does not hear me when I say that he is not the same; he and the other villagers only see the improvements to the village and the wealth he brought back with him. But where did he come by this money? He says he won it gambling, but I think he may have done something shameful. I think—”

She falls silent and stares at her hands. “It is not my place to say.”

Michael puts a hand on her shoulder. “You can tell us. It might help us in our search for him and your father.”

There is a tear in her eye as she looks back up at Michael. “My husband tells me I am being foolish, but I think my son may have … stolen the money from the banditos. That is why they have taken him and my father. They will either ransom them to the village, or they will take their anger out on them.”

She grabs Michael’s arm. “Please. I beg you. Find my son and my father before something terrible happens to them.”

With a grim face, Michael says, “We will do everything we can. Is there anything you can tell us about these bandits?”

“No one saw them closely. They drove a black truck and had hunting rifles. That is all I know.”

Michael turns to George and says, “Maybe we can track the Cruzados by their truck? It might be a long shot, but if there was a satellite in the area the night of the kidnapping we might be able to see which direction it went.”

George taps his holoslate. “On it.”

Michael pats the woman’s hand. “Thank you,” he says. “We will do our best to bring your family back to you.”

∞

Inside the rented truck, George punches several commands into his holoslate while Michael drives.

“Anything yet?” Michael asks.

George nods. “Talk about a needle in a haystack. There was a geological satellite in this section of the departmental looking for mineral deposits. They pick up all kinds of heat signatures. It looks like there were three hundred vehicles traveling on the main road between Santa Rosa de Copán and the Copán Ruinas that night—maybe even double that.”

“Double? What do you mean?”

George shakes his head. “The satellite tracked in a zigzag pattern, so there are dozens of gaps in the record. The three times it passed over the village, there was no thermal activity.”

“Damn.”

George taps a few more commands. “Maybe I can run a filter. Eliminate any commercial vehicles or transports. Autotaxis. That kind of thing. Maybe we’ll get luck—”

“You don’t have to search any further, George,” Michael says. “I think they found us.”

George looks up. In the camera view is a large black van traveling towards them at high speed, kicking up a cloud of dust behind it.

Michael edges to the side of the road. The truck veers to cut them off, so Michael slows the vehicle to a stop.

“What are you doing?” George asks, his voice rising.

“Well,” Michael says. “It’s not like we can outrun them. After all, this is what we want, isn’t it? If these guys are Cruzados, maybe they’ll tell us where Yaxche and his grandson are. And the scroll.”

The black van skids to a stop a dozen meters away and four men with rifles jump out, pointing the weapons at Michael and George. The men have kerchiefs covering their mouths.

They yell in Spanish, and George translates: “Get out of the truck with your hands in the air. Do not try to run.”

Michael says, “We’d better do as they say.”

The two of them open the doors and step out. They put their hands up as Michael calls out, “We mean you no harm. My name is Michael Sanderson from Quantum Resources in Canada.”

“We know who you are,” one of the men says in English. “Keep your mouth shut.”

Another Cruzado walks purposefully toward George. He commands, “Turn it off.”

George says, “Turn what off?”

The armed man reaches out and grabs the Virtual Tourist. He pulls it from George’s head.

“The camera,” he says, as the image bounces around showing the dirt road, a pair of booted feet, the sky, and then complete darkness.

Lunar Lines Vessel, Diana :

Unknown Transit :

Justine could feel the Diana pulling out of the Canada Station Three dock. The massive ion pulse engines gave off severe vibrations when initially engaged, and the first jarring motion of the ship as it uncoupled from the dock was enough to knock someone off their feet if they weren’t safely fastened in their seats.

Both Justine and Clive clung to each other for balance as they quickly made their way to the canopy seats and strapped themselves in.

Lieutenant Jeffries’ men had taken up defensive positions around the cargo, in case the hijackers decided to come down to the cargo bay. When the engines shuddered, two of them grabbed on to the container’s handles to stabilize themselves while the other two, who had dropped to one knee, lost their balance and fell over.

Two of the men who had raced toward the elevators after the announcement—ion rifles up at the ready as if expecting the hijackers to burst into the cargo bay with guns blazing—were thrown from their feet into heavy metal boxes when the liner jerked into motion. One of them got right back up, but the other took a very long time to recover.

Once the liner stabilized, Lieutenant Jeffries and his corporal hurried over to the man to check his condition. He looked back and gave Justine a nod that told her, although battered and bruised, he was otherwise fine.

Justine had been through an attempted hijacking before, though the assailants had been successful in their main purpose: kidnapping Alex Manez. But Alex wasn’t on the Diana. He had disembarked safely.

Fighting back the panic welling inside her, Justine clung to Clive’s arm. His face was set in a stoic mask, but his eyes betrayed his fear.

“It’s the Kinemet.” Clive stated the obvious. “They want it.”

“Why are they letting them take the ship?” Justine asked through clenched teeth.

“CS3 isn’t really designed to stop a ship from leaving,” he said.

Justine shook her head. “I mean the flight crew. All liners have protocols against this. The cabin is self-contained and sealed—in which case they would never initiate takeoff procedures. And even if someone were to manage to get in and hold the pilot at gunpoint, the system is designed to disengage electrical if there are any other biometric readings in the cabin besides the captain and navigator.”

Clive glanced at Justine. “Unless they are a part of it.”

A dark look settled on his face and he called out, “Lieutenant Jeffries?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I don’t think you need to worry about them attacking us.”

The soldier turned his head to look back at Clive and Justine. “Why not?”

“Check the elevator,” Clive said. “I’m sure it’s been disabled. As are, I’m certain, all our communications. They have no intention of fighting with us. Why would they? We are exactly where they want us, safely tucked away in this little prison of our own making.”

Clive laughed, but it was a hollow, bitter sound. “You may as well stand down until we arrive wherever it is they are taking us, or until they initiate contact.”

∞

The forward velocity increased, and the liner’s vibrations lessened to normal levels as the ship finished its launch from Canada Station Three and started in on its trajectory.

What destination? Justine asked herself. “They can’t be heading for any of the other space stations. Everyone will be alerted to them by then. The can’t be going to Luna Station or anywhere on the Moon for that matter,” she said out loud to Clive.

After the abduction of Alex Manez had revealed the extent of Chow Yin’s infiltration into the station, security measures had tripled not only on every settlement on the Moon, but for all space traffic coming to and from the planetoid. Non-commercial or non-military vessels were under the highest scrutiny.

Whoever they were, the hijackers were obviously well organized and funded. Another thought came to her: were they hostages? Or were they incidental cargo? If all the hijackers wanted was the Kinemet, they didn’t need her and the soldiers. It would be an easy enough task for them to shut down the life support system in the cargo bay and just wait until any threat was neutralized.

She clung tighter to Clive’s arm.

Justine still had her PERSuit harness on—she would be completely lost without it—and watched as Lieutenant Jeffries and his men did a full recon of the cargo area, checking the elevators to confirm Clive’s supposition. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe him, but Justine knew from her days in the military that redundant confirmation had proved itself time and again.

Corporal Marks, the second-in-command, tested his communications equipment, and tried to tap into the onboard computer. The result was as Clive predicted. Dead air.

After stationing his soldiers at strategic locations around the cargo area anyway, the lieutenant returned to report. “We’re completely shut in and shut off. Grounded.”

As if reading Justine’s thoughts, he added, “Life support is still fully functional.”

“So they want us alive,” Justine said in conclusion.

Ever pragmatic, the lieutenant said, “Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

The officer shook his head. “There are a lot of scenarios that could be played out. Holding us as hostages is only one of them.”

Justine let her thoughts follow some of the possibilities. They could hold them for ransom. They could release them at a later time as a gesture of goodwill. They could kill them later to serve as a warning, or a distraction. They could sell them into slavery—human trafficking was uncommon, but still an issue in the world.

Before her imagination took her down paths even more frightening, she said, “What now?”

“Now,” Clive said in a drawl and glanced at Justine. “Now we need to figure out where we’re going. Maybe that will give us a clue to the hijackers’ intent.”

Lieutenant Jeffries turned as Corporal Marks reported. “I tried to tap into the onboard computer, but it looks like they set up their own firewall.”

“It’s too bad we didn’t have Alex here,” Justine said, and then when Clive gave her a curious look, she quickly added, “Because of his ability to see extraspacially. We’re all blind in here without instrumentation.”

Clive put his arm around her and growled. “There has to be something we can do other than just wait for them to initiate contact.”

Corporal Marks had an odd look on his face as he fixed his eyes on Justine’s harness. “Even if I had something more powerful than my holoslate, it could take weeks to break the firewall. But…”

“What is it, Corporal?” the lieutenant prompted.

A hint of a smile played at the young man’s lips. “That’s a PERSuit, isn’t it?” he asked Justine.

“Yes.”

He said, “I believe it has built-in gyroscopic sensors and an inertial reference platform.”

For a moment, Justine had no idea what the corporal was getting at, but then she clued in. “As well as an attitude indicator, vertical and horizontal positioning. Along with visual and olfactory sensations, the suit can also provide inertial sensations to viewers. If I were at sea, or on a roller coaster, viewers who are susceptible would experience motion sickness, it’s that real.” She sounded like a brochure.

The lieutenant, excited, asked the corporal, “Can you access the suit and the data?”

Corporal Marks nodded. “I think so. With any luck, I should be able to track our course from the moment we launched. I have astrogation charts in my holoslate—maybe I can figure out where we’re going.”

He cocked his head to one side and said to Justine, “You’ll have to remove the suit, though.”

∞

Though she had been blind for years, there was always a part of Justine that hadn’t completely accepted the fact. There was that glimmer of hope that one day she would wake up and be able to see. The universe had played a cosmic joke on her, and at any moment, it would deliver the punch line, everyone would have a good laugh, and then she would be normal again.

Sitting back in the webbed cargo seat without her PERSuit sensors or her optilink, which the corporal needed to interface with his holoslate, her world had completely plunged into darkness.

She experienced a few moments of all-too familiar despair. It wasn’t a joke, it was a cruel prank and she was only fooling herself into thinking it wasn’t permanent.

Then she felt a warm hand slip into hers. Clive. He gave her hand a quick squeeze of reassurance.

She leaned into him. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Just being here.”

He laughed hollowly. “All things being equal…”

“Same here.” She smiled at him, though she had no idea if he was looking at her or watching as Corporal Marks rigged a connection from the PERSuit to his portable holoslate.

“Listen,” he said, “we’ll get through this. The hijackers haven’t turned off our life support so they obviously need us alive. That gives us an opportunity.”

“I know,” she said. “I just wish I could do more. I feel so helpless.”

In answer, Clive put an arm around her shoulders while they waited.

It was only a few minutes later that the corporal called out that he’d made the connection.

Clive stood up from the seats to approach, and Justine went with him.

“What have you got?” Lieutenant Jeffries said.

“It’s compiling the data at the moment. We should have a readout in less than a minute.”

There was a hushed silence as everyone circled around the corporal and his computer. Justine felt a deep frustration that she couldn’t see the screen and had to wait for someone to feed her the information secondhand.

“Here comes the trajectory now,” the corporal said.

A moment later, Lieutenant Jeffries spoke, and his voice took on a caustic tone. “That can’t be right.”

“What?” Justine asked.

Jeffries said, “Are you sure you have the correct information? Maybe the computer reversed the coordinates or something.”

“What coordinates?” Justine asked again.

Corporal Marks tapped repeatedly on his computer again. “No, it’s right.”

Justine grew frustrated. “What’s right?”

She heard Lieutenant Jeffries take a deep breath and let it out in a hiss. “Well, according to our current trajectory, the hijackers are pointing the Diana directly at the Sun.”

Lunar Lines Vessel, Diana :

Solar Trajectory :

It had been a frightening and crazy week for Terry. At first, when he and Jose had confiscated the alien scroll—along with Terry’s grandfather—he had felt empowered.

He was finally taking control of things and able shape future events. With like-minded people on his side, Terry had taken the first steps toward returning the Mayan people to their rightful place in the world. If he had anything to say about it, his people would not suffer and die needlessly like Itzel.

As with any revolution, there were bound to be casualties. Deep down, Terry knew this; he wasn’t so naïve as to think all they had to do was brandish their weapons and people would simply give in. Though he steeled himself for the possibility, he still wanted to avoid violence as much as possible. Jose assured him he felt the same way. He assigned Terry and another Cruzados, Carlos, to guard the shuttle’s cabin, in the unlikely event one of the American soldiers managed to get out of the cargo hold and infiltrate the upper decks.

Since joining the Cruzados, Terry had been surprised at the size of their network of sympathizers in the USA, Inc. government and NASA. There was an even larger number of people who they could bribe or blackmail into doing what was needed for their principal mission.

One of those they had bribed was the ship’s navigator, Lieutenant John Franks. Terry didn’t know the details, but from what he had overheard, he guessed the navigator may have had a gambling problem and rising debts.

Within an hour of successfully breaking away from the station, Franks stepped out of the cabin and demanded to speak with Jose.

Pointing a meaty finger at the man, Carlos said, “He’s busy. What do you want?”

Franks growled. “I want more money.”

“You’ll get what you agreed on.”

Franks shook his head. He looked very frazzled. His hair was in disarray, his skin flushed and his pupils were dilated. Terry thought he might be on drugs.

Franks growled. “I need more. And I want to settle this now.”

Carlos kept his voice even, but the lids of his eyes dropped, and his irises unfocused. “It’s too late. The deed is done. When we get to our destination, you’ll get paid. Now go back to the cabin and do your job.”

Either Lieutenant Franks didn’t recognize that he couldn’t bully or cajole Carlos, or he was too far gone in his panic that he didn’t care. The navigator held up his holoslate and showed them the screen.

Even from a bad angle, Terry was able to make out the message someone had sent to Franks. He had obviously received it just before the hijacking, but by then it was too late for him to do anything until they were well under way.

The message was from Lunar Lines head office. Franks had been suspended pending a criminal investigation for smuggling.

“See this?” he said. “It was just a couple lousy cases of rum. People do it all the time. Why’d they have to pick on me?”

“Sorry to hear that,” Carlos said. “But it’s not my problem.”

“Don’t you see? They’re already on to me. I need to completely disappear, get a new identity. I need more money for that.”

Carlos was losing his patience. “You’re getting enough from us to do that.”

“I need more!” Franks said.

His eyes flicking wildly back and forth, the lieutenant made a motion as if to race past Carlos and Terry. Holding out one hefty arm, Carlos clothes-lined the navigator, and the man fell back into the wall.

Carlos produced an ion pistol and pointed it at the navigator. “I said: get back to the cabin.”

“You son of a bitch!” Franks screamed and rushed Carlos.

A crimson flower blossomed out of the middle of the navigator’s forehead. Terry barely registered the whir of the ion pulse.

Franks’ eyes widened in sudden shock for a brief moment before the life went out of him, and he sank to his knees and toppled over on his side.

“What the hell did you do?” Terry yelled at Carlos.

“He was crazed. High or something. We couldn’t have him creating a panic right now. Or sabotaging the flight computer. There’s no telling what people like that will do.” Carlos was once again completely calm. He showed no more concern than if he had slapped a bug with a flyswatter.

“But you killed him!”

Carlos turned his full attention to Terry. “Are we going to have a problem now?”

Terry stammered. “N-no. It’s just—”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Couldn’t we have just knocked him out? Tied him up or something?”

Carlos scratched his hair behind his ear. “I thought you were on board with this mission.”

“Yeah. I am.” Terry stared down at the blood pooling under the navigator’s head. He could feel Carlos’s eyes watching him. “It just caught me off guard, you know. Sorry.”

Anything else they might have said to each other went unspoken as two men approached at a jog. It was Jose and one of the other Cruzados, Alberto.

Jose surveyed the scene and asked, “What happened?”

With a shrug, Carlos said, “He got out of hand.”

Jose glanced at Terry for confirmation. Reluctantly, Terry gave a quick nod.

The leader of the Cruzados took a breath. “All right. Clean up the mess. We’ll have to find someone to take his place and help our pilot fly the liner.” He pointed at Terry. “You up to it?”

Terry, still trying to come to terms with the killing, blinked dimly at Jose. All three men were looking at him expectantly.

“Uh. Yeah,” he said finally.

The Cruzados leader nodded and left with Alberto. Carlos tapped Terry on the shoulder.

“Take his legs. Help me get him into one of those freezers.”

∞

Terry remained somewhat withdrawn over the next two days as he assisted the pilot—the first non-Mayan Terry had met in the Cruzado movement.

Captain Gruber was an older man who spoke English with a heavy German accent. Terry’s English was not very good, so it made communication difficult at first, until Gruber ran a translator program from the ship’s haptic console.

At first, Terry had been overwhelmed with the myriad controls and banks of computers, but that quickly settled into tedium.

Captain Gruber told him that, for the most part, he could pilot the liner himself; all flight crew were trained to fly solo should the need arise.

“Basically,” he said to Terry, “I just need you to babysit the console when I sleep. Someone needs to be here at all times or the sensors will shut the ship down. Don’t worry, it’s on autopilot, and if anything happens, the alarm will sound. Your main duty is to call me or come and get me if that happens.”

They rotated in twelve-hour shifts. It gave Terry a lot of time to think about his role in hijacking the liner and whether he had made the right decision.

He had spent most of his life believing everyone in his family had made bad decisions. His parents lived in squalor, never trying to better themselves or providing a higher standard of living for their family. His grandfather had a precious artifact which he could have traded for great wealth for his community. And now, he had to admit, Terry had followed in their footsteps. In an attempt to make a difference, to better his family and community, he had fallen in with a group whose ideals were aligned with his own, but whose methods were extreme.

And Carlos! He had killed the navigator without batting an eyelid. There was no remorse or doubt afterwards. With no more thought than stepping on a bug, Carlos had ended a man’s life.

Terry was certain they could have restrained the man and resolved the situation without resorting to murder.

There was a line Terry had vowed not to cross. Now, upon reflection, he realized that the line had been breached the moment he agreed to kidnap his grandfather and steal the ancient scroll.

How far was too far? It was all too far, Terry knew. But the problem was that he was in too deep to back out now. They would certainly eliminate him if he made too much trouble. The Cruzados had Terry’s grandfather and they had the document. They did not need Terry any more.

If he was to survive this thing, he would have to continue to play along and wait for an opportunity to escape.

Where they were going, however, there was no place to run.

∞

It was three days later that Captain Gruber, looking ruffled from a broken sleep, came in while Terry was on shift. He offered up a token smile of greeting, then motioned for Terry to move aside.

“What’s happening?” Terry asked.

In a gruff tone, the captain said, “We’re stopping.”

“Stopping? We won’t have enough fuel to build velocity again.”

Glancing up at Terry in annoyance, the captain said, “We don’t have more than a day’s worth of fuel left anyway. What did you think, that we were just going to coast the rest of the way?”

Terry hated to admit it, but that was exactly what he had assumed.

The captain pressed his lips together. “We’re going to rendezvous with another ship and unload the cargo.”

“And the hostages?”

Frowning, Captain Gruber did not reply.

A dark look settled over Terry’s face. “We can’t just abandon them and let them drift in space. They’ll run out of food and water before any rescue ship finds them.”

The captain either didn’t have a reply, or chose not to say anything. Instead, he concentrated on bringing the liner to a dead stop.

Within an hour, a bright speck appeared in the distance, and Terry pointed at it. “Is that the new ship?”

“Looks like,” the captain said and called up a display. “Yup. It’s the Ultio.” He pressed the intercom button and announced the new arrival.

Moments later, Jose and Carlos entered the cabin.

“He’s here?” the leader of the Cruzados asked. His face was lit up with anticipation.

Terry wondered who, but didn’t ask out loud. He had the realization that he had been kept in the dark about many things. Though he hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it earlier, he knew now that he wasn’t as trusted as he had originally thought back in Honduras when the Cruzados had first brought him into their revolution.

When he looked up at Jose, he saw that the other man was watching him ponderingly, and Terry flashed a smile to show that he was still on board with the operation.

They all watched as the other ship grew larger until it completely filled the display. The Ultio pulled alongside the liner and an umbilical tube extended out and attached to the main door.

All four men exited the cabin and made their way back to greet the new arrival.

It was with growing anticipation that Terry waited as the cabin door unlocked with a hiss of escaping air, then slowly opened. Only one man stepped out.

“Jose, I’m glad everything went well.” Tall and blond, with piercing blue eyes, the man was in his late twenties or early thirties, though he carried himself as if he were years older. He wore a black suit in a modern cut without a tie. His white shirt did not have a fold at the collar, but instead circled the man’s throat in a restrictive circle. His smile held no humor.

It was at that moment that Terry detected a faint resemblance between him and Captain Gruber. His notion was confirmed when the two of them stood together and shook hands.

“Uncle,” the younger man said in English. “How was the trip?”

“Uneventful.”

Jose, a wide grin on his face, stepped up and shook the blond man’s hand as well.

“Your plan worked perfectly,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it.” The man turned his steely gaze on Terry. “And is this who we must thank for providing the opportunity?”

“Yes,” Jose said. “This is Te’irjiil, who goes by the name Terry Fernandez. Terry, I would like you to meet our benefactor, Mr. Klaus Vogelsberg. His uncle is Captain Gruber. Without their support, we would still be meeting in deserted buildings and just talking about the movement.”

A corner of Klaus’s lip went up in a humorless smile, and he extended his hand to Terry. “Very pleased to finally meet you. We’ve been waiting years for the so-called geniuses at NASA to figure out the ancient scroll, and in the end, the secret is unlocked by a simple villager. How perfect is that?”

Terry felt very uncomfortable under the other man’s penetrative gaze. He didn’t know if he was being complimented or insulted, but didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so he nodded and offered up a smile of his own.

Turning his attention back to Jose, Klaus asked, “I trust we didn’t have any trouble with our guests down below?”

“No. They are completely secure. All entrances are magnetically sealed. They already had enough food and water for the journey down there, and aside from one of them attempting to blow open the elevator door with some small explosive—which failed of course—we haven’t heard a peep.”

“That’s good.”

Terry found his voice. “They aren’t going to be harmed, are they?”

Letting out a sudden barking laugh, Klaus said, “Going to be harmed?” He shared an amused look with his uncle, then continued: “If we wanted them harmed, we wouldn’t have taken them hostage.”

The relief Terry felt was quickly replaced by a measure of embarrassment. These people must think him some kind of country rube. He vowed not to open his mouth again until he had something intelligent to say.

Klaus turned to Jose. “Speaking of which, you may transfer them and the cargo to my ship. Use knockout gas; filter it through their air system.” He glanced at Terry and gave a wink. “No conflict, no fighting, no harm. You see, we’ve thought of everything.”

Terry flushed red.

Jose, a pleased smile on his lips, motioned to Carlos and the other men. “Let’s go secure the prisoners.” As he left with them, he called back over his shoulder to Terry. “You can stay with Captain Gruber and help him.”

Gruber gave Terry a level look. It was obvious what the pilot was thinking: Terry’s status in the movement was on a downward slide.

When Jose and the other Cruzados were gone, Klaus took a step closer to Captain Gruber. “Once we have everything aboard, I need you to set the autopilot to point the liner back at the Sun. With any luck, the authorities will waste time trying to save a ghost ship. By then, we’ll be very far away. We have a lot of work to do, and we don’t want to be interrupted.”

Terry started to say, “But, I thought…” And once again, he felt the heat rise in his neck and cheeks as Klaus looked at him with an amused smile.

“What,” Klaus said, “did you think the governments of Earth were just going to give in to our demands if we turned over the cargo and hostages? Restore you to your rightful place as ambassadors to the stars? Ha!” This time, his laughter had the sound of a threat in it. He was obviously growing tired of entertaining Terry’s ignorance.

Terry knew he was pushing the limit of Klaus’s tolerance, but he had to ask one last question:

“If we aren’t holding the Kinemet for ransom, what are we going to do with it?”

There was a chill moment when Terry thought Klaus was going to order his uncle to shoot him where he stood, but then the younger man’s face broke into a wide grin.

“I’m glad you asked,” he said to Terry. “Because I need you to work with me to complete the translation of the scroll, and uncover its secret. For that, we need the Kinemet, and a few test subjects.”

With that, Klaus gave his uncle a nod, and then headed in the same direction as Jose and the others.

Captain Gruber gave Terry a tap on the arm with the back of his fingers. “Let’s get moving.”

∞

Trying not to be too obvious about it, Terry took a careful look at the unconscious hostages as they were loaded on gurneys and transported one by one from the liner to the Ultio. Aside from a few bruises here and there, and an overall pallor of gauntness from lack of nutrition, they all seemed to be healthy.

He did notice the one woman among them, a civilian, and recognized her from the news. It was the captain from the missions to Pluto. Terry was quite surprised to see her, but made sure to keep his expression neutral around the other Cruzados.

Within an hour, the hostages and the Kinemet were transferred to a safe hold on the Ultio, and Captain Gruber asked Terry to help him fire up the Diana’s engines and set its course for oblivion.

For the most part, Terry had no idea what he was doing, but whenever the captain said to press this button or that, he did. Soon, the liner was fully prepped and ready for its final voyage into the Sun.

“If we aren’t going to return to Earth or Luna,” Terry asked after screwing up his courage, “where are we going?”

“You know, you ask a lot of questions,” Captain Gruber said in German. Though the translation came across in a pleasant programmed voice, the captain’s original tone had been acerbic. He switched to English. “Curiosity could get you in trouble. If Jose wanted you to know, he would have told you.”

Terry forced himself to keep his voice light and casual. “Maybe it slipped his mind. He’s quite busy.” When the captain didn’t immediately reply, Terry asked, “What’s the big secret, anyway? I’m going to find out soon enough. So what’s the surprise?”

Eyeing the young Mayan, Captain Gruber took a minute out from his final preparations and flicked on a backup navigation holoscreen. He tapped in a few commands on the haptic console and the image of a familiar planet came into view.

Terry’s lips fell open as if to make an exclamation, but no sound came out. He finally found his voice. “I would never have guessed.”

“Precisely why Klaus chose it,” Captain Gruber said. “Not only is it right there in plain view, but who would think to look for us in a ball of poisonous gas and sulfuric acid?”

The captain finished programming the computer and got up to leave. “My boy, if there is such a thing as hell, where we’re going is the closest thing to it in this universe.”