Lobo opened a front-facing display so I could watch as we passed through the jump gate aperture and emerged in space behind Trethen, Macken's smaller moon. Normally, I enjoy the process of jumping and discover in each leap through space a kind of wonder I rarely feel. Today, though, I couldn't fully appreciate the experience.
"Take us closer to the planet," I said, "but don't leave the gate's area of influence."
"Executing," Lobo said.
As we turned, I stared at the gate in the display. Like all of them, it resembled a giant pretzel and was a single uniform color. Most were bright, but this one was a very pale green that reminded me of both the oceans and the forests below. Another trait it shared with all gates was its complete lack of tolerance for violence within a sphere with it as the center and a radius of a light-second. Should any ship within that area launch a weapon or be about to collide with anything else, a blast of highly coherent energy would burst from the gate and remove the offender as if it had never been there; the beam left no trace of the offending ship. No one understood how or why gates could do this, but the behavior never varied. In my last visit here, it had saved my life. Until I had spoken to Lim, I was staying inside this safe area in case her message was a trap.
The gates were in all ways mysterious. No one knew how or why they let us instantaneously move between planets many, many light years apart, or what created them, or the reason that not one gate has ever had a single scratch or imperfection, or why every time a new aperture opens we can count on a human-habitable planet being on the other side. As with so many other mysteries humanity has encountered, we simply adapted to their presence and used them to our advantage; because of them, we've been able to colonize worlds all over the universe.
Lobo interrupted my reverie. "I've scanned the local data drops and found an update from Lim with her contact info. She's in Glen's Garden."
The name stirred more three-year-old memories. When I'd last visited Macken, Glen's Garden, though the planet's capital, had been a sleepy oceanfront town desperate enough for my help that it paid me with a then not fully functional Lobo. The jump gate had possessed only three apertures, but the growing fourth had led to conflict between two of the region's largest megacorporations. The entire world had been a beautiful and largely unsettled member of the Frontier Coalition. I'd left before progress could spoil it.
"Call her," I said. "Also, who's running this planet now?"
"Executing the first," he said. "From my analysis of the data stream, Lim's company still has the security contract, the FC's local government is still officially in power, and the same two corporations as before, Xychek and Kelco, actually dominate the economy." He paused for a second. "I have Alissa. Please recall that she rescued you from torture not so many years ago, and do try to be nice."
I remembered, but the last thing I wanted was social coaching from a killing machine. If I ignored him, though, he might never shut up. "I'll be as nice as the situation permits. Now, please connect us. Full display."
Her head appeared where the jump gate had been in the front of Lobo. She was still lovely, but her hair was shorter than I'd ever seen it, just a dark coating on her skull. Veins stood out on her neck and her shoulders and her arms and even across the top of her chest, all visible courtesy of the tight black tank top she was wearing. She'd cut a lot of weight since our last meeting, even since the recording she'd sent me.
She had the hard, lean, distant look of someone ready to go to war.
She nodded. "Moore."
"Lim."
"Thanks for coming."
"You knew I would."
She nodded again. "Yes."
"The fact that I'm here doesn't mean I'm committing to anything. I want the whole story."
"Now?"
"No," I said, shaking my head. "I need to know there's no coercion in any of this."
For the first time, she smiled. "Some things don't change," she said. "Like your paranoia."
"Some things shouldn't change. I'm still alive."
"So what proof would you like?"
"Come to the jump gate," I said. "Take a commercial shuttle. Call me when you're in the station, and we'll dock for just long enough to pick you up. We'll talk when you're here."
"Okay," she said, "but you need to understand this: I'll do what you want for now, but if you sign up, you agree to operate under my command. A whole lot of children don't have the time for us to bring you up to speed and let you design your own attack and run it with different people than the ones I've already recruited. Deal?"
Lim was more than a little crazy, but she was a topnotch soldier and an excellent planner—and it was, after all, her show. "Deal. If I can't accept your setup, I won't join."
"See you later today," she said. Her image winked out.
"Oh, boy!" Lobo said. "A chance to entertain! Whatever shall we serve?"
I don't mind waiting. Staying alert while watching time pass has been a key requirement of many of the jobs I've had. I was, though, now buzzing with energy from the combination of what I'd seen in the Tumani holos, my memories of Pinkelponker, and all the sleep I'd had. To work off some of it, I had Lobo withdraw the pilot couches and started doing cycles of simple body-weight exercises: squats, push-ups, dips on a ledge Lobo extruded, and pull-ups. I pushed the pace until I was pouring sweat and my body ached from the exertion. The nanomachines that lace all my cells would heal the torn muscles and remove the waste quickly enough that in short order I would be back to normal, but for that brief time I was deliciously exhausted and hurting.
"Do you have any idea how much extra air filtration work your exercises cost me?" Lobo said.
"Like you have something better to do," I said as I stretched out on the floor to relax.
"In fact," he said, "I do. For example, right now I've hacked into the jump gate traffic computers and am checking the reservations of all the commercial shuttles headed this way. Lim is not yet on any of them, though to be fair to her, she wouldn't have had the time to catch one unless she'd been ready to roll the moment she disconnected from you."
"As you so often remind me," I said, "your enormous intelligence can do so many things at once that hacking into a single system cannot possibly tax all of it."
"Good point," he said, "I certainly can and do routinely execute more simultaneous projects than your human brain could ever hope to handle."
Lying on the floor, the fatigue washing over me, I smiled at Lobo's needling and for a few moments was calm. I closed my eyes as unbidden memories claimed me and destroyed that peace.