Astra: Synchronicity (3 page)

Her expression hardened into a bitter scowl.
"I could kill you right now. You hear me? You've earned it. If you
had a shred of love for me, you would've told me. But you didn't
because you're just like the rest of them."

"I would never kill anyone, Lyneea. If the
past five years meant anything, please believe me."

Judging from her hateful eyes, she would
never believe another word he spoke. "How could you do something
like this to me? You stand there like you don't give a damn, like
I'm the one with the problem. Well, you're the cause of it."

"You know as well as I do this isn't just
about being a psion, is it…we don't have to go down that road.
Don't make a mistake we can never undo."

"There is no fixing this. It's done. And to
think I actually believed you hated psions."

"I despise telepaths as much as you do."

She balled her hands into angry fists. "Stop
pretending you're not one of them!"

"I can't read your mind. I'm different. I've
never met another psion who can do what I can. Let me show you. I'm
not a monster." He held out his arms to her but she turned away in
an obvious act of disgust. "I still love you. I don't want to lose
you."

"It doesn't matter. It's over. Our marriage,
everything. I never want to see you again." In a blatant act of
contempt, Lyneea flicked him the two-fingered salute with her thumb
stuck out between the two fingers and flounced away.

His briefcase fell over after she passed it,
breaking its clasp and spilling a mess of comtabs onto the ground.
Perfect
. He knelt next to it but could not focus on putting
it back together. In his heart he knew he'd just witnessed the
beginning of the end of his career. And perhaps his life.

"You need to come get me. As soon as you can.
Please."

Captain Ardri Lothian sunk her head into her
hands, her kinky hair spilling over her fingers. During breakfast,
she'd received an urgent message from Fantasti. Only one person
lived there with whom she had any kind of relationship—Lyneea
Zoleki, her younger sister, in the middle of another personal
crisis.

She stared at the granola bar and water in
front of her to avoid glowering at the request. The sweet fragrance
of banana and cranberry tempted her after a long night that offered
her little sleep. "I'm sorry. The
Schenectady
isn't anywhere
near Vega. We're out at Zion. I don't know when we might be back
that way. You know I can't make an exception, not even for
you."

She glanced back at the screen to catch
Lyneea frowning at her. The sound of squealing children almost
drowned out her response. "I have to get off Fantasti. Do you think
I can get my marriage annulled?"

Ardri took a bite of her food. She was far
too busy to get stuck cleaning up her sister's problems again, and
it wasn't her fault if Lyneea kept picking the biggest losers. "You
haven't told me anything, you realize that, right?"

Lyneea gazed around self-consciously. "I'm at
the hospital." Then, she continued in a whisper. "I don't want to
talk about it here. Is there any other ship in the area that can
pick me up?"

"You know I'm not supposed to do this," Ardri
said as she picked up a flat-screened flightlog of the Allied Fleet
and scrolled through a few pages of information on the comtab. "In
two days the
Kearsarge
has orders to stop on Fantasti. I'll
issue a pick-up and figure out a way to catch up with you after
you're aboard."

"Thank you." A four year-old boy launched
himself into her lap, to which she laughed and threatened to tickle
him, prompting him to run off with giggles of delight. She brought
her hand to the far side of her right eye and spread her first two
fingers in the shape of a V on its side. "Later, Didi."

Ardri repeated the gesture. "Later, Lynnie."
And with that, the image on the screen winked out.

She leaned back in her seat and relaxed while
she finished the remaining granola. "Thank Astra I know better,"
she said. All of the men she met had the emotional capacity of a
five-year old, which didn't make them bad people…just
inadequate.

Her calico cat sprang onto her lap and made
herself comfortable. Ardri chuckled when she ran her hand along her
soft fur. "All I've ever needed is you, Dahlia." The cat meowed in
agreement with her.

The computer on the desk in front of her
buzzed, and an androgynous voice began speaking: "The time is
currently zero seven fifty hours."

She sighed and replaced the cat on the floor.
"Duty calls. I'll see you when I get back for lunch, honey." She
tied her hair back into a neat bun before jetting out of her
quarters and heading toward the bridge.

The
Schenectady
had been her home for
years, and though the drab interior of the spaceship saturated her
senses with blandness, this was her domain. Like every other Allied
Fleet vessel, pipes snaked through the inner bulkheads. Electrical
compartments and recessed doorways interrupted the uniformity of
the gray walkways. The rough texture of the floor approximated
rubber, and tubes of chemiluminescent gel on the ceiling
illuminated the way with natural light. Engineers never gave much
thought to comfort or ease of access, but the layout was practical
and efficient. After all these years in space, designers finally
got it right.

She wondered about her sister for only a
moment before she bumped into another bridge officer, Ensign Fred
Maxia. "Captain Lothian!" he called as he strode to catch up to
her. Because she walked in the middle of the narrow corridors, he
had to follow a step behind.

She glanced at him and forced a smile. As
usual, his khaki uniform had been pressed to perfection. "Ensign.
Ready for another round of battle drills today?"

He nodded. "Absolutely, sir. I promise not to
disappoint."

Every crewmember on the
Schenectady
was the finest person for their post in the entire Allied Fleet,
all ninety-nine of them. As the flagship, they had a proud
reputation and Ardri planned to keep it that way. She had yet to
form an opinion on this brash young man, but with any luck he'd
make the cut.

"Would it be out of line if I made a
suggestion, sir?" he asked after they reached the forward lift and
its doors opened. He gestured for her to enter first. "I have some
ideas for making the nav console layout much more effective."

"How long have you been on board, Ensign?"
she said as she stepped inside. "Two weeks?"

"Twelve days." Maxia followed behind her and
placed his hand on the glossy black panel next to the door.
"Bridge."

The lift accelerated upward. "I understand
that you came on board highly recommended by the Academy."

"I graduated first in my class."

"Then you must be well aware of article
seven, section thirteen, which says all suggestions are to go
through the proper channels. There is no 'I' in team, shipmate."
She turned to face him and he snapped to attention. "I judge
everyone aboard the
Schenectady
by the performance of those
around them. Make this ship a better place, and you'll be at home
here. If you can't, you'll be reassigned. Have I made myself
clear?"

"Sir, yes sir!" His eyes didn't leave the
doors in front of him.

The remainder of the trip to the bridge
passed in silence. Ardri was thankful for that. Maxia reminded her
of most men she'd dated all her life: cock-sure, arrogant, and
superficial. Resourceful, perhaps—if he could prove himself worthy
of his post. If not, she'd unload him at the earliest convenient
opportunity.

When the doors opened, Maxia hurried to the
helm on the far end of the room. Lights ringed the oblong
compartment, and electronic displays blanketed every inch of space
on the walls. All visible metal had been painted black to give the
room an illusion of toughness. A viewscreen graced the bulkhead
opposite her command chair, and she often made use of the high-tech
gadget. The
Schenectady
surpassed most contemporary vessels
with its weaponry and technology.

Ardri approached Lieutenant Faeun, who'd been
on watch for the night shift. "An uneventful night, I trust."

Poppy Faeun stood five feet tall with a short
mop of fiery hair styled in the trendy wedge cut of the moment. Her
skin was so pale she made Ardri's Negro heritage obvious despite
being diluted by generations of multiracial blood.

"Mostly, Captain," she said as she picked up
a comtab from the console beside her and handed it to Ardri. "We
picked up some strange readings about ten light-years from
here."

She glimpsed Faeun's black fingernail polish
as she took the computer and frowned at the unusual telemetry.
"There's some kind of man-made object out there? Could it be from
Zion?"

"I contacted Speaker Theresita, but she
reminded me of their strict policy of non-exploration. The fleet
doesn't have anything out this way, and the object's of no known
Asian design."

The captain strode to her command seat in the
center of the bridge. "Well, let's go see what's out there. Ensign
Maxia, take us to Gamma Pavonis."

As of 2310, no human had solved the riddle of
faster than light travel. In the mid-21st century, a fusion
accident led to the first revelations of hyperspace, where velocity
was greatly magnified relative to normal space due to its
curvature. By collapsing 10 dimensions of space-time, quantum
hyperspace merged with real time, allowing distances of 10
light-years to be traversed in a single day.

The first hyperdrive engines inefficiently
maintained the resonance fields. Coupled with the weak propulsion
capabilities of that era, early space-faring ships took months to
reach stars over twenty light-years away. Advances in hyperdrive
and fusion technology over the centuries now provided an easy means
of transportation from one system to another. Although Astra was
fifty light years across at its widest point, it got smaller every
year. If one day humans broke the light-speed barrier, such trips
could take mere hours.

In modern starships hyperdrive merged
seamlessly with standard fusion engines, which produced a quantum
resonance envelope around the ship that extended into hyperspace.
Wrapping a spaceship in such a way prevented relativistic time
dilation effects, both within itself and with other planets.
Navigators plotted careful paths through the galaxy to avoid stars
and other potentially hazardous areas, but computers trivialized
the once precarious calculations. A photonic divergence field kept
spaceships safe from high-energy collisions with subatomic
particles in space by reflecting them away. Thus spaceflight had
become one of the most secure forms of travel.

They traversed the distance via hyperspace in
twenty-five hours. Gamma Pavonis was a yellow-white star orbited by
five planets. The system would've been a natural extension of the
Zion colony had they branched out into space like the other main
factions did. The people of Zion chose to settle the Delta Pavonis
system because of its distance from the rest of human civilization.
They wanted to be alone with their God, and everyone else let
them.

The object had parked in orbit of the third
planet, M-class, brimming with plant and animal species. The fourth
planet was O-class: oceanic with a vast supply of aquatic life. The
crew continued to analyze the strange object in the nearby star
system throughout the day. It seemed much too small to be a ship.
The metallic sphere was six feet in diameter and possessed no
weapons or propulsion system. All attempts to communicate with it
had failed.

Maxia turned toward Faeun. "It's almost as
big as that rock Ford proposed to you with."

Ardri glanced down at the screen on an aft
terminal, wishing Commander Ford wasn't away on medical leave for
the week. Great guy but such a hypochondriac. "The results from the
science department are in; spectrometric readings show it's made of
no known materials in Astra. I think the chances are high that
we're dealing with an alien technology."

"Well, either it's a probe, or those are some
really little aliens," Maxia joked to no one in particular.

The bridge crew glared at him for his
off-color joke.

"What?" he asked as he looked around. "You
were all thinking it too."

Faeun turned toward Ardri. "What do you think
we should do?"

"I'd love to be able to take it to The Palmer
Institute for study, but without knowing what it is and where it
came from, that's a risk I'm not willing to take. Tell the science
department to ready a probe with all first-contact protocols in
order."

She loathed the thought of contacting the
Allied Confederacy about the potential alien encounter or following
their decades-old "protocols" to the letter. Outdated garbage,
that's what it was. Hieroglyphics to translate standard English
into their native language and contact information of the
first-contact ambassador on Chara, a position that hadn't existed
for the past five years. Good in theory a hundred years ago but
insufficient given their current level of technology. It merely put
a bandaid on a gaping sore, one they could ignore no longer.

Within the hour, they released their own
probe. It looked similar to the strange object in orbit, though
about half the size. Their probe settled into an orbit parallel to
the object.

The captain watched it on the viewscreen
while Faeun worked at her station. "We're receiving a signal from
the probe. All systems appear to be operating normally."

Suddenly, Maxia's console began to buzz.
"Captain, I'm detecting something entering the system. It's
dropping out of hyperspace now."

At first glance, the object's blackness made
it impossible to distinguish from space. But as it passed the sun,
the smooth outline of a ship appeared before them. Its sleek shape
reminded her of a fish. It had no exterior lights and no windows,
only set off by the warm purple glow of its engines.