The Gaming Outpost

….Seeker, seeker, wake up…

The voice was impatient, and demanding, calling her back to awareness.  Lucianne de Gellar bit back a growl.  For crying out loud, they were in deep space, at least extrasolar, if not interstellar.

A shove on her jaw, and her eyes popped open to glare from their dark brown depths at Doctor Huseei.  The medical doctor’s face was flat, closed, and his movements jerky as he sat beside the cryocapsule she had just been decanted from.  Trickles of ice ran down onto her chocolate colored robe, and down her maghogany calves as she reclined on the fourty-five degree upright warming table.

“Point.” The doctor ordered, grabbing her left arm, and holding it up for her to use scriff vector sensing ability.  She let her arm flap back to her side, and he gave her a big frown.

“We have time, Doctor. We’re in interstellar space.”  She said reading off the distance measurement of 39.4 lights on the LCD wallscreen on the far side of the white enammelled medical chamber.  Out here, in the Great Light between stars, you could take a week or two to make up your mind about direction changes since the distances were so vast.

The doctor growled at her, and stood to loom over her.  She felt for the knife at her waist.  It was gone.  He sneered at her, and she saw his eyes flicker to the left.  There one the wall, on a high shelf, out of easy reach of her five foot three self, was her pair of deathknives.  One was a larger working blade, and the other, a thin hooked item suitable for extremely close-in work.

“Now point…”

“Really, Seeker Lucianne, you must.” The tall, thin figure of the watchstander, eltee Foster, and current acting Captain.  “We have eight minutes and thirty-four seconds until we lose the window for some of our target stars.”

“So, point, you …Seeker.” The doctor’s hand twisted up into my robe, and I was once again aware that I weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet, and the average man I had met in the verse is at least one hundred sixty, has longer arms, faster reaction, more efficient muscles (as if having more of them was not enough), and was more likely to respond with a fist to the nose to an attack than a collapse into tears.

It was why, Scout, my husband,  had left me with the knives. They were formed of mass alleviated neutronium, and could withstand a nuclear fireball in the kilotonne range, and slice through a steel I-beam like it was warm butter.

“Doc, um, let her go, how about…” The eltee began weakly.

“Give me my knives, eltee.”

“Stop wasting time. We have no time. There are ten thousand souls on board only the first of these colonial ships.  You waste time.”

“Shut it.” I said to him, and then relaxed my muscles as the punch I expected came sailing in to land on my face.  My head bounced back on the table a couple times, and suddenly the eltee was hauling the doctor away from the table as he was a much bigger man, even if not as dominant in nature.

“Whoa, there, doc.” He turned his look at me, one full of irritation. “We really are running short on time.”

I compromised.  I really, really wanted my knives.  There were several sub-societies represented in the main society in the Grand Colonial Fleet, and the doctor belonged to two that disdained woman.  He was both Islamic and Universitad.  The fact that he had to rely on me to point the way to the next star system made him furious.  But, I did not want to send a hundred thousand cold-frozen souls into a Dutchman flight.

I pointed.

What I pointed to was a quarter my husband had borrowed from me about a thousand years ago.  He took the alien ship with the hyperdrive ahead, and looked for already terraformed worlds on the way to someplace truly habitable and very, very far away from the Bugs.  When he found a good place, he dropped a quarter.

I could point to a quarter that I had owned in another universe, a quarter that was mine, at superluminal velocities.  In fact, it seemed to be instantaneous.  So this way, he left flashes for us to tell us the way to go.  He was marking the trail.  For him, he went to a half-dozen or more systems to find the one to send the Fleet too.

“That’s wrong.” The Doctor said, and freed, he came over to reposition my hand about ten degrees to the left.  “That’s right.”

“Is the doctor right, Lucianne?”  The eltee asked as several other officers came in behind him.  I was surprised to see that the eltee hoped the doctor was right.

Seeing as the doctor had not let go of my arm, I bent forward as if to throw up.  He was a skillful enough fellow to know I was faking, and did not let go until the eltee yanked him back.  Then I wobbled to my feet, scooped up a can of something, no doubt inordinately expensive, and flung it at my knives on the shelf.

The can hit, the knives tottered, and I caught them out of the air.

The doctor grabbed my arm, and I let him spin me around, so that the short knife was pressed against his stomach.

“The next idiot who touches me is going to loose a lot of blood.”  I was nearly teary-eyed from stress, but Scout (yes, that’s his name, Scout Humphries) had deliberately taught me a valuable lesson one night when we were dating.  Just because you’re crying doesn’t mean you can’t slice someone open at the same time.  At the time, I had nearly dumped him, but his explanation rang crystal clear to me.

“You’re a worldwalker. And you’re beautiful and petite. You have to be mentally and physically prepared to protect yourself.  The Multiverse is not the Hamptons, rich girl.  Its a very scary place at times.  I’d like to take you there, but I’m not taking a lamb among wolves.”

The doctor laughed at me, and lunged, so I cut off his left arm.

The medbots went to work quickly, but I must admit I was glad Scout had made me kill pigs on that farm in upstate New York.  Otherwise, I would have been totally thrown by just how much bright, red blood flowed.  Its not like television.  Its bright red, and arterial bleeding spurts, and the wounded scream and beg for their mother in a voice like that of a childs.

The eltee and the others stared at me.

“As I said, before I was so rudely interrupted, the next point is that way.”  I pointed with my clean blade, and it took about ten seconds for the eltee to snap out of his trance, and yell for new orders to the engineers running the annies.

“I’d like some coffee.” I said, and walked toward the men who folded back out of my way as if I were some death goddess.  Mostly, I just wanted to get away from the smell of blood.

Across an operating area, and a waiting room, down a hall, we came to a breakroom that was funky with lack of serious cleaning.  The watchstanding crew, understandably, let things slide a bit in between the stars.  When their is literally nothing to do for years at a time, humanity’s innate tendencies toward slobbishness appear even among the tightly disciplined.

The eltee got me coffe, and I put my blades up in their sheathes around my waist.

“You, ah….we can probably write it up to overstress….” The eltee began.  He seemed like a good kid, even if he was two feet, and a hundred fifty pounds larger than me.

“Let me guess.” I said, sipping my coffee. “The doctor refused to crack the cryocan containing me until the very last minute.  Came up with some legalistic hokum, some unexplained equipment failures.”

The eltee blinked.  One of the older men with him nodded slowly.

“I did you a favor,Captain. The doctor was engineering a coup, a mutiny, I think they call it on ship. He wanted to control me as much as he could…”  I did not say because he was a mysogynistic jerk, although that was also true. “Because I’m an independent power source on the ship.  No one else on the Fleet can do what I can do.”

The eltee smiled at me, and shook his head.  Sometimes guys are right, even needful.  You never want to see a ruling clique of all females, trust me, but devious power plays are not the poor dears forte’.

A message came in.  We were on the course I had selected.

“What was the fuss about courses, Captain?” I asked the eltee.  He badly needed his confidence built up.  I could see the nervous twitches and uncertainties that the doctor must have been playing on for who knows how many months, subtly undermining the authority of the Designated Leader.  Fortunately, a smile from me, is, if I do say so myself, quite the spine stiffener.

“The nearest star is two lights away, and we’re running low on supplies.  And you’re aiming us to another star that is fifteen lights away.  Which is …”

“On the edge of what you can do without refuelling and resupplying.” I said, pulling at my lower lip as I sat across from the Captain.

“So we’re putting a lot of faith in your ability, Seeker Lucianne.”  He said, and I nodded, troubled.

“Captain, if I can have my cabin, and my clothes….I will think on this more.” I assured him most seriously.

The men blushed a bit, and they let me go.  I made my way down one hatch, and across one giant bay which held ten thousand frosties, and through a door into a hall, and into my room on the right.  Carefully, I checked the three rooms, and all possible hiding places that my paranoid husband had pointed out to me a thousand years ago.

Then I propped a chair against the door because even though it was computer locked, there had been plenty of time for the ‘good’ doc to insert a virus into the shipnet to let him open my door.  In which case, I wanted to be waiting, fully clothed, and with knife out instead of caught off-guard in the shower.

Shower and food, and then makeup, and then new clothes, and I put the knives on my waist.

I pulled up the maps of where we were going to a map on the wall.

There were four ships, each with twenty-five thousand frosties, and space for them to all live in really crowded conditions.  With only thirty awake, we had space and more space.  We humans were a single pea in an empty tin can.

My husband, Scout, jumped ahead, and looked for viable places for us to land.  For some reason, he disdained the closer star, and urged the star further away even though he would have to know how just how tight our supplies would be.

And then I saw that our course would in four lightyears take us withing ten AU (the distance of the Earth to the Sun.) of another star system.

In interstellar terms that was hitting a bullseye. Strange.  I considered what Scout was trying to get across.  Nothing came to me, and so I dug in deeper.  And here I found that the precise measurement I pointed too was at the end of ten lightyears about four AU off the target.  The computer had simply assumed that humans were being imprecise  humans and ‘corrected’ us.

I ran my hand through my hair.  What was Scout trying to say?  Go near here, and near here, but don’t arrive, and keep on going Dutchman out into space?  I checked his precise course, and yes, if we followed it, in a hundred lights we would intersect a red supergiant.

There was no way that Scout meant for us to do that.

So, his message system is limited to land here, or not….and he is trying to get across a more complicated message.  I went in search of the eltee, I mean Captain.

He sat behind his desk, looking stiff and worried when I walked in.

“Captain?”

“The medical exsys seem to think you’re probably suffering from paranoid delusions.”  And I could feel the presence of two large men coming up on my right and left.

“Don’t Captain, or I will kill them.” I said calmly.

His eyes glinted in genuine fury.

“You’re a sociopath.”

“No, I value my own life.  And if someone attacks me, tries to imprison me, then they have given up their right to life.” I argued back, my hand on my knives at my waist, the large fellows waiting.

“Those are men with a family, children.”

I nodded.

“Understood, but then they should remember that, and not attack me.’

“I ordered them to. If they don’t, I will put them in the brig with a black mark that will have them in the Penal Brigade for life.”

“So, its your fault they die.” I replied to the acting Captain.

“No, its yours.” He shrieked.

“Really?” I asked softly.  And his shoulders began to shake.

“I-I don’t know.”  And I realized he was crying.  I turned to the two men, and said in a calm and implacable voice.

“Not a word, and get out. Now.”

The two large men nodded, fear on their faces.  For even the strong fear when their leaders are cracking up.  They left me alone with a man-child.

“You’re an unstable sociopath.”

I considered arguing with him, explaining that I had a right to self-defense, but he obviously rejected that notion.

“So, you should listen very closely to what I say as I will not hesitate to kill anyone who gets in my way.”  I pulled my knives out, and he straightened up, his tears drying, and shook his head.

“You’re not that way.”

“Can’t have it both ways, Captain. Either I’m a murderous lunatic, or I’m not.”

He blinked, and I truly began to feel sorry for him.  He had been taught a bundle of lies which contradicted what he knew in his heart to be true.  It was driving him mad, and the good doctor had not helped him.

“The medsystem says you are unstable.” He said, clinging to a straw of certainty in a crazed world.

“Mmmm.” I thought, and then laughed harshly.  So obvious really. “Medsystem. Patient Lucianne de Gellar shows no sign of symptoms except for a hangnail. Describe her state.”

The captain stared at me perplexed from across his desk.

“Lucianne de Gellar is dangerously unstable with this symptom, and should be confined to medical observation in a sedated state immediately.”  The Medsystem blandly replied.  I smiled at the Captain who was gaping in total shock.

“Medsystem. Has Acting Captain been given any pshcyotropics in the last hour.”

“Not sufficient authority.”

“Override.” The Captain said, standing to his feet, and I saw his teeth gritted, and his large hands bunched.

A long list of sedatives, inhibition relaxants, and energy depressants followed.

“I….” He began. “I can’t kill him.”

“Why not?”

“It would be….wrong.”

“Captain, he is a mutineer. For that there is one punishment. Death.” I said coldly.  He looked down at his desk for a long moment, and then he straightened up, and I saw in his eyes that he had forsaken the lies taught him.  He was no longer a man-child, but the Captain.

“This is the Captain speaking.” He had pressed the ship-wide com. “Doctor Huseei is a mutineer, and is to be captured or killed as is most convenient.  Do not risk your life to capture him.  I want patrols of three to search the ship…”

Twenty minutes later, we found that the emergency shuttle had jumped off from the ship, and streaked out ahead of us.  Hussei was on board.  He sent us a message with some truly vile things about me, but the Captain turned the message off before it barely began, and ordered it deleted.

“When we catch up to him, kill the bastard.” He ordered. “Now, lets find all the booby-traps left in the ship.”

We took a good six months finding every trick and hack in the systems, Husseei had left.  We also found evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy among his co-religionists to take over the colony once we found a suitable planet to recolonize.  Happily, that was neither my, nor the Acting Captain’s responsibility to deal with.  The Fleet Council would have to deal with that when they were woke up from cryosleep eventually.

So, I took the next three years without coldsleep, and we landed on the first planet.  We were cautious as we took the shuttle down.  Almost certainly Husseei had been here before us.  Who knows what he could have built with a fully equipped emergency shuttle.  Thankfully, he was not an engineer so we didn’t have to worry about an annie explosion as positive met negative and blew the planet up.

Upon arriving on a small island in the tropics, we found a beautiful day, and no bio attack viruses courtesy of the mutinous doctor.  Almost dissapointed because such would have been easy for him to do, we went out to a bright day.

And we saw wildlife in plenty, even a flock of parakeets that landed on our shuttle.  They were bright and beautiful….and cursing, in English.

&&(*&*)(__)(_)(&^%^….get off this planet within two days…..^&^^&%^&%$^&T….nanotech eaters will wake and attack if longer…(*&(^&(&U(*)(U*(U*(*.  Each parrot was gabbling the same message, in between squawks, and in the very tone of the parrots, I could hear my love’s very profane voice.

Back on the Hampton’s we had talked of people releasing parrots into the wild, and tame parrots teaching the wild the words they learned from humans.  In the hundreds of years since Scout had been here, every parrot in the world had learned how to cuss,courtesy of him, and he had left me a message.

We had fourty-eight hours to refill,which we could do,  if we hustled like mad before something from a previous human colony woke up and ate us.  I laughed.  Poor Husseei, he must have spent the last two days of his life terrified as his shuttle could not take off.

“Let’s get cracking boys.” I yelled as I ran to pull out our atmopacker units from the shuttles.