(You can read the first story in this series here.)
“Ready to ride shotgun again?”
Donovan was just sitting there doodling, as he does, but I knew there was more to it. He’s not usually so cagey.
I was still in R&R but those couple of visits he managed, I knew something was up. Light comes on behind his eyes.
Command’s blood runs a little cold when they see it but he’s our best troubleshooter and you can’t domesticate talent like that. You can only refine it a little to your purpose.
Takes me the opposite. But I got the ear for counterpoint and I like to follow it as it builds.
***
And here he was back again with my favorite jam cookies and sharing ’em out to the staff, and when we’d got ’em nice and merry I fished a deck of cards out of my bathrobe pocket and flashed ’em at the duty nurse and told her we were gonna play a couple of rounds of pinochle out on the terrace, and she shouldn’t worry if I seemed to be getting a little exercised about losing because mannerly as he looks, I’m in hock to him unto the tenth generation already, and we got her laughing so much she forgot to bring me my meds.
And then he slips me a picture of the new prototype while he’s dealing out the first hand and I nearly stopped breathing.
She was like a silver fish that had swallowed a glass ellipsoid.
“Donovan,” I’d whispered, “get me inside that baby, you’re never gonna get me out.”
His remit—field-testing vessels like this—and it’s the biggest damn fucking deal we have in the service. Find the bugs and squash ’em; get a sense of a ship’s soul.
Made him untouchable. They let him pick his own crews. They can’t afford he might get distracted—some idiot disrupting the rhythm of his thoughts. But you gotta justify your selections; make ’em make sense, all the way up the chain. They don't love him just for sentimental reasons.
She was designed for specialized microanalysis, though—not the broad-scale agronomy projects I usually run—so they could build her small and fast. Once they see how she handles the rigors of hyperspace, they can expand on the class.
But my true love’s always been mycology.
I came up with a nice little Basidiomycota study; easy to seed that lab with, say, Grifola, Ganoderma, Lentinula. Explained it to Donovan when he stopped by a week later.
I need something that can draw me a map, he said.
Then I knew.
I’m the one looks like an anarchist, but it’s just the way my hair grows.
Donovan, now—the brass think he walks on water, all right, but they try to keep him moored to his own little corner of the ocean. Wormhole Coordinates aren’t his specialty and the experts have tender toes. They get testy when he swears he can find ’em their Northwest Passage.
He says it so poetical, too; …aneurysms in the flow of time. You need to poke around inside until you find a trapdoor. Sure, if the bubble bursts, you’re fucked…
So I threw in an assortment of Lecanoromycetes. Beautiful things, lichens. More to ’em than you might think.
Wrote a lovely proposal heavy on enhanced vitamin-D synthesis and immunological activity. Cheery, but with a nice modulation of the enthusiasm.
Air-tight, I told him when we rehearsed it. Anyone linking this to Khkulian, they’d really have to be crazy.
He laughed, I ran it to earth so fast. Like I said. You need an ear for the counterpoint.
Now, Khkulian was gorgeous. But the treaty expires, end of the decade; without a viable development proposal we’ll lose all rights. They’re dying to make her an R&R hub for the Outer Band, market her as a tourist paradise—been bellowing that song for fifteen years. But she’s in a tricky quadrant; to commercialize on that scale, you’d need to compress the lanes; you’d need to find a trapdoor. Nobody’s found one yet.
And a ship of this class, she’s not built to go beyond the Near Orbit. Meant only for the cricket jumps linking the research stations.
Command was so relieved they didn’t see any showboating, they signed off faster than usual. Authorized us to go just far enough to evaluate her rhythm but not risk fatiguing her alloys, and I got out of R&R and recertified for active duty and blinking into the sunshine three weeks early. On our lab schooner’s naming day.
The Kimpetourine. That was a bon voyage treat from Ozorof. Donovan told Command it was a really rare gemstone. I laughed for a week after.
***
Six months out, felt like two kids on a camping trip. The lab had the tang of the forest primeval now—magic on your tongue. Donovan rigged up a real grill for us out of titanium wire so we could roast mushrooms when we wanted. The boys at Base Command would have died if they’d seen it.
We did ultraviolet scans on the capsule walls every twelve hours, retabulating the data every twenty-four. Lichens seem to grow slowly but they’re livelier than they look. Swear to God, I’d never been so happy.
I was picking some shiitake when Donovan loped in. Bastard’s usually calm as ice but he was vibrating like a tuning fork.
You suspect wormholes anywhere you find distortions in radiation patterns. But with so much energy chatter in space, you have to guess where to focus, analyze the data and then try the next sector. It’s expensive and slow; they call it a science but half the new routes actually come from ships falling through unmapped distortions and making it intact to a known port.
Lichens—exquisitely sensitive to light, to radiation. We’d looked for microscopic areas of desiccation, plotted ’em, turned ’em into a map of stellar energy, and compared it to the relevant quadrant on the Interstellar Atlas. An anomaly could mean a new cricket jump, even a wormhole. Maybe not anywhere we’d want to go. Miscalculate the coordinates, misinterpret random bursts from one-time events—slip through an unstable region—
Donovan showed me the screen—our little beauty of a map superimposed over Khkulian's quadrant. He’d highlighted the relevant coordinates but I got all I needed from his face.
“It’s win or lose,” he said, “all or nothing.”
Me—never any luck when I gamble. He’s the one with the hot hand.
But now we’re on the same side of the table.
_____________________________________
An earlier version of this story was published in the February 2013 issue of Perihelion SF Magazine.