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  That terror had fully claimed him. His mouth hung open in a silent scream as the opening flowed shut.

  “These Quailu stand guilty of piracy,” the Human leader declared. “They are convicted by the grisly aftermath of their crimes and they’ll spend eternity among their victims.” With a nod, he signaled to his engineer, who opened the hull side of the chamber.

  Fidrelt could feel their pain, their sheer terror as their eyes, less robust than most species in the HQE, ruptured. Their hearing was next to go and, though he could feel that as well, he was mesmerised by the tendrils of intraocular fluid that extended from their eyes.

  They would freeze, but not right away. The vacuum of space was a poor medium for heat transfer. Their immediate enemy was the pressure drop. One crewman, at least, had forgotten the survival drills and he’d held his breath. His lungs ruptured, releasing gas bubbles into his bloodstream and he doubled over in agony.

  The nitrogen in their blood was turning back to gas, the bubbles stopping the flow and depriving their tissues of oxygen. The more they moved, the greater the pain in their muscles.

  They were all struggling wildly in their panic, bumping each other out of the small chamber and into the void.

  Where their victims awaited them.

  Their minds were fading quickly, now that there was no oxygen, and Fidrelt’s terror abated somewhat as the outer opening closed. He closed his mouth and tried desperately to think of some way out of this mess. Do I know anything about Memnon they might be able to use?” He knew the answer to that question even as he was thinking it.

  Memnon wasn’t stupid enough for that. Fidrelt had wasted precious seconds of life on the bastard. He was wasting it still…

  Hands grabbed him and shoved him into the chamber. Die well, he told himself, forcing back the fear and coming to stand in front of the window. He would face this impudent Human executioner – show him how an awilu died.

  The commander was opposite him on the safe side of the glass and he squinted, leaning down to look at something on the glass. “Is that Durian crisp-leaf?”

  “Well the glass did come from their salad station,” the engineer replied. “Worth a look when we’re done here. Don’t often see fresh crisp-leaf on a ship.”

  The portal flowed shut, cutting off the sound of their conversation, and Fidrelt stared in disbelief as the Human leader ignored him completely. He seemed to still be talking about food with his engineer. He mimed taking a bite of something as the outer hull began to open.

  That was the last he saw. His eyes ruptured, scaring him more than hurting, but it at least brought on the agonized gasp that emptied his lungs before they could burst. He’d expected a searing cold in his lungs when he breathed in but there were no gasses to pull inside.

  His eardrums hurt more than his eyes. Fidrelt gave a silent scream of agony, reaching up to touch the side of his head, noticing, just before passing out, that his skin had swollen from the evaporation of water in the cells.

  Eth stood patiently in the holographic image of Mishak’s bridge. He bowed his head when the Quailu approached him. “Lord.”

  “Another successful deployment!” Mishak offered him a grotesque version of a Human grin, which was an honor, considering the Quailu had minimal use for facial expression.

  Eth returned the grin. “And four prizes taken,” he added, hopefully. Though his Humans had done the taking, it was still up to their lord to decide what happened to them.

  “I can use another cruiser,” Mishak mused.

  “And I could use more frigates,” Eth ventured. “Word has it there’s a new draft of Humans waiting for us at Kwharaz Station. I’d be able to fill out the crews on my six Scorpion-class ships and still have enough to crew three more.”

  “You don’t want the cruiser instead?” Mishak asked.

  Eth shook his head, flattering his lord by implying that he’d catch the gesture. “They don’t suit our fighting style and they’re a damned personnel sponge. Takes too many of our people and we’d rather sneak up and slit the enemy’s throats while your cruisers are giving them an honourable, face-to-face beating.”

  Mishak nodded. “Very well, commander. I’ll send over a team to take that cruiser off your hands before we return to my own territory.”

  “Very well, lord.” Eth bowed his head again. When he looked up, the holo of the Dibbarra was gone.

  The Multitasker

  Mirsit Transit Point, HQE space

  Eth stopped at the entry to the shower hall, head tilted to the side. I suppose I’ve never taken a shower on this ship during path travel before, he thought. The ceiling plates in the anteroom were vibrating, giving off a low-pitched thrumming sound. Some series of physical connections leading from the engine mounts had led here, transmitting a vibration that matched the resonant frequency of the moisture-resistant cladding.

  He continued inside. Stepping up to a cubicle, he pushed his heels inward to start the retract sequence. He lifted his feet out of the foot-plates and stepped forward to struggle out of his under-armor suit.

  He turned around and walked into the shower hall, tossing the suit through a hole in the bulkhead that led down to the ship’s laundry unit. He nodded politely to the young crew-woman who was the only other person using the room and moved to the far end.

  It wasn’t exactly a written rule but the generally accepted practice was to give one another the maximum amount of room possible in the shower hall. It didn’t always work out that way, especially in the later watches, when more crewmen were off duty, but you still didn’t shower next to someone in an empty hall.

  And you didn’t look either.

  That was a new one. Before they’d won their freedom, they’d openly ogled and propositioned one another. With no STD’s and zero chance of procreation, sex was a casual, inconsequential pastime for many Humans.

  He didn’t think any of his species had done anything to reverse their steri-plants yet, but they were certainly experiencing an evolution in their attitudes. If we actually are a species, he thought, then smiled to himself.

  Perhaps they were becoming one after all…

  Attitudes toward sex didn’t make a species, but they might be a potential indicator. It was taking on a new meaning for Humans.

  He finished up and headed back out to the doorway, noticing that the woman had already finished. The air-curtain activated as he walked out, leaving him mostly dry. The fresh suit he grabbed from a shelf by the door would wick up the rest and feed it into his EVA suit for later use.

  He walked back to the cubicle where he’d left his armor, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the crew-woman was struggling into her own fresh suit.

  He dressed and stepped back into his suit’s foot-plates. It finished flowing into place around his body just as the young woman strode past, her suit not bearing the color-coded bands of any of the ship’s various divisions, and he realized who she was.

  “Scylla!” he called, jogging out of the anteroom to catch up with her.

  She stopped, turning to meet him with a distant smile. “Hello, commander. Can I help you?”

  He grinned. “I was going to ask you the same thing. How are you adjusting to life on the ship?”

  Scylla was the name Eve had given to the young woman they’d captured at Kwharaz Station. They still had no proof of where she’d come from, though they had a shrewd suspicion the Chironians, whom his team had exposed for having illegal copies of the Human genome, were behind it.

  She’d been wearing a bomb intended for either Mishak, Sandrak or Marduk, the emperor’s chief of staff. Eth had felt her presence on his way to a meeting of the three nobles and had managed to stop her but some kind of neural pre-conditioning had wiped her mind.

  Since then, she’d been aboard the Mouse, developing a new persona like a newborn in an adult body.

  “Well enough but I have no work to do and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one here who can say that.”

  “You feel ready fo
r specialty training?”

  “I think so. I’m getting tired of just wandering the corridors, soaking up the crew’s sympathetic glances.”

  Eth nodded slowly, impressed by the calm confidence he felt from her. “Do you have a moment? There’s something we should discuss in private.”

  “I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that yet,” she countered calmly.

  Eth reddened. “Whoa! I just mean…”

  “It’s alright, commander,” she assured him, deadpan. “That was just a joke.”

  He stared at her. Could at least smile if it’s a joke, dammit!

  She looked at him for a moment, long enough to make the moment more uncomfortable. “Interactions have a steep learning curve,” she finally announced, though Eth had already been thinking the same thing.

  “It’s difficult to gauge what’s appropriate behavior for our species,” she added.

  Eth offered a wry smile. “You’re not alone in that,” he assured her. He gestured down the corridor. “Can you join me?” he asked. “In the ready room,” he added hurriedly.

  She nodded and turned to head forward. “I don’t suppose there’s a manual on interpersonal relationships among Humans?”

  “I doubt any species has such a manual,” he said with a frown.

  “Of course they do,” she insisted with quiet conviction. “They call them families.”

  Eth had no answer to that. He chewed it over all the way to the bridge but, when they reached the ready room door, he put it aside in favor of an issue he felt better equipped to deal with… Marginally…

  He closed the door, giving them privacy from the bridge crew and sat opposite her at the large table. “I know you have no memories of it,” he began cautiously, “but you were taken from Kwharaz Station by the Varangians.”

  “So you told me.”

  “I was taken as well and it changed me.”

  She frowned. “How were you changed?”

  He hesitated, looked around the room. I’m going to tell her, he decided. Still, no Varangian had shown up with a gun to stop him from polluting the timeline. Have they sent someone before? If so, I wonder how many times…

  “My perception, my understanding of the universe, of the universes, was altered. Where they took us both – it was outside of this universe. We were outside, looking back at ourselves, in a way. It stripped away the biological filter we use to view our existence.”

  He sensed shock in her mind.

  “I’ve heard that before,” she whispered, shuddering, terror creeping up from her amygdala.

  Eth came around the table, turning her chair and kneeling to place his hands on her shoulders. “We’re still here,” he said, softly but firmly. “This universe is no less real for us now that we see it differently!”

  She was shaking violently but she fixed her eyes on his, delved deep into what she found there, and found someone who’d been through the same ordeal. Gradually, the shaking subsided.

  Eth could feel the fear abate but there was the same mistrust for the physical realm that he’d felt after his own journey. She’d remembered some of her experience, even though her mind had been blanked. Maybe the mind is more resilient than the Chironians realize. “How much do you remember?”

  “A lot!” Her focus drifted away from his face. “I remember escaping from our Chironian handlers, at Kwharaz,” she said. “I spent weeks living in the alleys, snatching scraps from the refuse conveyors behind the chop-shops…” She looked at him, her gaze sharper.

  “I remember seeing you, wondering how you’d escaped. I didn’t recognize you…” Her eyes darted left and right as she searched her mind. “The memory stops there, as if I fell asleep. Then I woke up screaming with a Varangian on the other side of the glass!” She shuddered again.

  “Chironians?” Eth asked, knowing it wasn’t as important as her own possible transformation, but the word had been shocked out of him. He’d given up on ever finding evidence of a Chironian involvement in the plot that had nearly killed his lord.

  She nodded. “I was the only one meant to stay on the station, so they were acclimatizing me. The others were going to be sent to something called the Irth Project.”

  “What the hells is an Irth?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know but that’s where the other Humans were supposed to go.”

  Eth decided to come back to that later. “When I came back from my time with the Varangians,” he said, watching her closely, “I was different. I’d discovered that I had new… abilities.”

  Her eyes were focused on his shoulder, her mind teasing at the tendrils of memories given up for lost. “Did your Varangian talk about dimensions with you?”

  Eth nodded, though her eyes stayed on target. “The speech about a two-dimensional creature stepping out into our three-dimensional world and seeing itself in a new way?”

  “And how,” she added, “we would look like line segments if we happened to interact with that creature’s two-dimensional universe.” She looked up, into Eth’s eyes. “That line segment is only a tiny fraction of our entire being. But what if a circle in that two-dimensional plane steps out to discover that he’s actually a sphere and his wife is a cube?”

  Eth grinned at her. “It would explain why she keeps changing her length!”

  Another shrug. “No doubt he’d always thought of her as mysterious.” She stared at him calmly, then gestured at her own body. “Effectively, what you see here is just another line segment.”

  Eth’s head tilted slightly to the right. “You mean…”

  “I mean,” she cut in, touching her chest, “that this and this,” she reached out to press her hand against Eth’s chest, “are miniscule parts of what we really are. I understood this until I returned to Kwharaz Station and ran into a Chironian handler, which caused my mind to reset.”

  Despite the momentous words, Eth felt a quickening of his pulse at the touch, even with his EVA armor in the way. Can you go any lower? He excoriated himself. She’s practically an infant in an adult body!

  She smiled, the most emotion he’d ever seen on her face.

  “So much is coming back to me now. Until this talk, I’ve been like an amnesia patient. An adult’s mind but with no memories to give context to my world.”

  Can she read actual thoughts? Fornication! Can she read this right now or is she really good at reading faces?

  She actually chuckled. “As I was saying, we are so much more…

  “…than what our eyes show us.”

  Eth, still on one knee, spun in shock. Her voice had finished that sentence from behind him and he lost his balance, his left elbow stopping his fall by coming to rest on her seat.

  The seat was empty and he was now looking up at her. She had been leaning down to finish her alarming sentence but now she straightened.

  “How did you do that?” he blurted.

  She opened her mouth, as if to respond, but then closed it again, frowning. “Give me a moment.” She grimaced. “It’s one thing to suddenly realize you know something incredible. It’s quite another to put it into words.”

  She looked over his head for a moment, then nodded to herself. “If you stick your index finger through the two-dimensional universe,” she began slowly, “it appears as a line to the other inhabitants.” She extended her index finger and poked it downward.

  She pulled it up, moved it to the left and poked down again. “If I do this, I seem to disappear and then pop up in a new place. That’s all I’m doing. I’m moving this three-dimensional intersection of myself from one place to another.” She offered her hand.

  Eth took her hand and climbed to his feet. “And here I thought I was going to be the one telling you amazing things about the nature of our existence,” he admitted ruefully.

  “What amazing things?”

  Eth shrugged. “Empathic abilities, telekinesis… Nothing big…”

  She smiled. “I haven’t tried moving things with my mind, but I can read thoughts.”
>
  Great! She knows how you’ve been reacting to her! He stiffened, realizing she could read that thought as well.

  “It’s alright,” she assured him. “I haven’t been in this body for very long but my brain has the same hard-wired instincts as any other Human. I can plainly see it’s an attractive physical form. You wouldn’t believe what some of the crew think about doing to it.”

  “Ah, well…” Eth rubbed his hand on the back of his neck. “Some of the crewmen are used to an unrestrained way of life…”

  “It’s not just the men,” she corrected. “And, frankly, you barely scratch the surface before you catch yourself. It’s far more intriguing…”

  “Hear that, dumbass?” Ab said in his mind. “She likes us!”

  “Not now!” Eth hissed, darting his gaze to the right. Now he’s in my waking mind?

  “Very well,” Scylla said calmly. “I hope you take no offense. As I said, I’m still finding my way through Human norms. I’ll do a database search on the proper way to initiate a sexual encounter.”

  “Told you!” Abdu crowed.

  “Just hold it!” Eth told Ab, realizing too late that Scylla might not understand to whom he was talking. Can she hear him? Then her words registered. “Wait, what?”

  “Hear who?” she asked.

  “Um, it’s my…” He pointed a finger at his head. “… old…” He trailed off, dropping his hand and shaking his head. “It’s complicated,” he explained lamely.

  “She can’t hear me,” Abdu declared. “Turns out I’m more than just a thinly veiled symptom of your desire to have a father-figure in your life! I’m also a way for you to preserve some semblance of privacy in your inner dialogue!”

  “So,” he began, and then realized he had nothing to follow ‘so’ with. He dropped his right arm on the table, fingers clenching nervously. He pressed his lips tightly together, mind racing for a way forward.

  “You said your presence only represents a tiny fraction of who you are,” he asked, desperate to steer the conversation back to safer ground. “Where is the rest of you?”

  “Scattered across what we perceive as time. A two-dimensional circle perceives the third dimension as time. We do the same with the fourth.”