Surebleak Orbital Influence Zone
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Theo wasn’t exactly lazing at the board, but her concentration was elsewhere when Clarence repeated his question, louder.
“Would the Captain, currently lazing at her boards, be interested in turning her chair over to her second and visiting the mess for the duration of her break?”
The message having reached her, she raised a hand, fingers shaping hold, her head filled with the intricate dance of gravity, rock, flotsam, jetsam, and scrap. It was a complicated dance, and even with Bechimo’s assistance, demanded very nearly all of her attention—until, it began to fade, the bridge overlaying the gyrations of junk.
“Theo,” Bechimo said quietly, “I’ve stored the data and am updating real-time. You can come back to it very easily later. At the moment, the crew needs your attention.”
Bond-space and its fascinations faded away. She blinked at the well-lighted bridge, her returning sense of the here-and-now sorting sounds into words, her eyes catching movement, her nose—
“Maize buttons? You’ve got maize buttons?”
Clarence laid a small tray before her, keeping himself between an interested norbear and the treat.
“That’ll be for you to tell me. These’re just samples—I’ve got four different batches testing for time and technique. For something that oughta be simple, there’re enough secrets, tricks, and must-do preferences in the recipes to make my head spin. And since you’re the expert, you’ll have to let me know which ones the crew can be roused to duty to cull for you…”
Kara appeared then, smiling and nodding Terran-style, remains of some delicacy held daintily in an upraised hand.
“This is a duty I will suffer to do for you, O my Captain.”
From her chair, Theo lightly bowed acknowledgment of one acting out of the interest of others, which brought an outright laugh. Theo hoped it wasn’t because she’d done it badly. Bechimo’d been coaching her on her bows.
She took the tray from Clarence and rose, waving him to her chair.
“Sit, by all means! My expertise is required elsewhere.”
* * *
The sorting of Kara and Clarence into stations had caught Hevelin’s interest, so Theo and Bechimo had the galley to themselves.
There’d been a recent discussion among crew, regarding what favorite foods and treats they particularly missed. Kara had lamented the lack of a certain cheese tart; Win Ton a seed cake.
Theo had remembered her father’s preferred snack, with a sigh as much for his absence as the tasty treat.
“Bechimo, what are you doing?”
Even as she took the first delightful bite of a lightly browned and slightly crunchy maize button, Theo was in bond-space again, feeling Bechimo’s watchful presence over her shoulder, as it were, before she was distracted again by the button—the slightly moist yellow interior, and butter—ah, butter! And the dainty texture of the properly ground meal, far more present and piquant than a simple powdered maize flour…and the butter smoothly at odds with the grittiness, textures to tease her tongue and please her mouth…
“I have watched the process of this baking,” Bechimo said. “I am attempting to determine exactly how the…individual parts of the recipe trigger your enjoyment. I—I am not able to taste in exactly the way you do, but I can use my sensors to…”
His voice faded off, as if he was embarrassed.
“To what?” Theo asked.
More hesitation, which was even more intriguing than the maize button. Bechimo had mostly gotten past his…reticent phase; this return to uncertainty was…puzzling. Especially since maize buttons, in Theo’s experience, weren’t particularly frightening.
The pause grew longer.
She put the rest of the maize button into her mouth and sighed. Butter!
And, as if the act of eating the last half of the button had released him from some moment of intense observation, he spoke.
“Through our bond I have access to sensors—extra sensors, which are providing me with data that I am…not equipped to analyze. Taste is a complex sequence of events. Through you, I am experiencing a…unique delight. I would, with your permission, like to share this sequence with Joyita. As comm officer he may need to be able to discuss similar experiences with those with whom he comes into contact.”
Theo chose a maize button from the tray in the far upper corner of the table and considered it for a moment. It felt…right…in her hand; it was the proper weight for its size, it had the proper density, and was properly toned from pale yellow to tan on its surface.
“So,” she said carefully, “you’re learning to taste?”
“And to anticipate taste, as you are doing now, which is a different level of enjoyment. The shading of flavor appears to be an act of art rather than science. I am attempting to analyze in what—!”
Space blazed around Theo; her mind naked to the stars, as distant Chuck-Honey, along with a thousand known moving objects within Surebleak System, cycled into acceleration curves. Shielding increased, the blaze dimming, threat assessments blending over each tracked object. There was a new brilliant energy as powerful as Jump glare, dulling even as they sought the new energy source, the blare of its energies dissipating, becoming a point, an object, a—
Rock.
Bechimo’s automatic subsystems were already working with spectrum analysis, timing the actual entry real-space, understanding vectors, attentive to everything at once.
“What?” Theo managed, immersed in the whole of it, almost understanding, if she could only—
“Anomaly,” Bechimo said, isolating the pertinent data into a single line that unrolled before her mind’s eye, suddenly comprehensible. “That was not a Jump; it was energy displaced by drive function.”
“Drive function!” she exclaimed, seeing it as the data continued to unroll. “This close to a planet, that’s—”
“A Clutch-style approach,” Bechimo said, and there was more data now, in a second line. “Without more information we cannot be certain that it is a Clutch vessel, but evidence strongly indicates that—”
An image of the thing flickered into Theo’s consciousness, a subsystem showing it in multispectra display, too far away for active radar, but closing into that range fast.
It came to her then that it was not just a rock. If not a traditional hull, it had still been shaped, it was visibly elongated, and—energy flowed as the object’s vectors changed.
Theo felt the flutter of systems working; focusing on one allowed the others to fade somewhat into the background. She blinked predictive tracking closer, finding no ambiguity there.
“It’s headed directly for Surebleak,” she muttered, to herself or to Bechimo; it was all the same. “This isn’t an accidental entry.”
“Agreed. There is no indication of hostile intent, no indication of Old Tech influence, no active scan emissions. Joyita…”
He paused, as if verifying something on the main board, and in that instant Theo saw it herself—comm lines open.
“Joyita is in communication with the incoming vessel, and with Jeeves,” Bechimo said.
The crew, Theo thought, then. The crew was enjoying Clarence’s latest culinary experiment, with no idea what was happening outside the galley, much less the ship.
“Comm,” she said or thought, and it was hers.
“Object incoming,” she said, her voice dragging across her ears almost too slow to hear, while the data flowed through her, bright and crisp.
“Joyita, live feed to main screens! All crew to bridge!”
Joyita was abruptly at the edge of bond-space, and the feed was enriched with information gained from his analyses, weaving seamlessly into the loop of what was known and extrapolated.
“Show me that entry,” Theo demanded, “which sensors reacted first!”
The feed blurred; re-formed into a list of sensors in order of their reaction, by nanoseconds, found the trace of an event occurring, which next, when the sensor checked again against random noise and determined that this was a signal, then when the individual sensor triggered the array that notified a higher system to attend this happening, when the…
“Butter?” Theo asked in wonder.
The sudden taste of butter in her bond-space mouth fled.
“Calculating,” Bechimo said, which he never did, and finally in an almost sheepish sharing sotto voce, “Yes, butter, Theo. You were sharing the sensation of butter overwhelming the tongue’s first taste buds, and it became…connected to the event of the sensor report by happening simultaneously.”
“That happens,” Theo told him. “These…associations…happen. But I didn’t think it would happen to you.”
“I am,” Bechimo reported austerely, “in contact with Jeeves. He has asked for our assistance in coordinating what is reported to be a visit to Delm Korval. Joyita is in contact with the pilot, confirms Clutch.”
Theo blinked back to the feeds, located the projected course.
“That’s close to the house.”
“Yes. All projections agree: the Clutch ship will land in the driveway.”
“Miri’s going to like that.”
“It will be very convenient for her,” Bechimo said, and Theo laughed.
“The port has issued a space weather alert,” he said. “Clarence has called all hands to stations. I believe this includes Captain Waitley.”
“It probably does,” she said, and sighed as bond-space melted away around her.
* * *
Win Ton, hair tousled with sleep, swung into the galley as Theo was rising from the table.
He grinned, snatched a handful of maize buttons, and bowed lightly.
“Captain, please. Precede me.”