Legends

Maria

It was the last day of the Month of the Bat of 3447 when I took that fateful journey down Jakob's Axis to Tribei Tuft, one of the deadest dead ends in the jumpgates. I was there to make a delivery, get paid, and get out. I had no interest in remaining there, little in going there in the first place. Death lurked there in the form of swarming pirates, and my little Falcon's Quill was no match for the lumbering monstrosities the pirates were said to pilot.

I thought they were just rumors. I'm a minstrel. I know of rumors, and legends, and spacer's tales. Indeed, I've told a wild yarn or two in my own time, and I knew that most of the tales that wander on down the strings are so much space dust.

I knew of legends. Little did I know that I would fall in love with one.

-----

Let me introduce myself. My name is Toshi Niagabeh, and I am a storyteller. Once upon a time I was a stringer for the Children of the Phoenix, transporting their ships and troops from planet to planet, defending their fleets from space attack as necessary. Eventually I got sick of this life: I no longer had time to do the things I enjoyed, like stargazing.

It's so peaceful out there, lazily orbiting some blue-and-white planet with the stars and local moons, 'roids, and suns wandering about. In my youth, I had written poems about them, until my family (especially my mother) had taken my pen and given me a sword. Bloodied on the battlefield time and again, I still managed to survive, and many lesser tribesmen fell beneath my swords. But I was not suited to this life, and I got out as soon as I could.

I transferred to space ops, taking a dropship command, and later a fighter command. Here I learned to fly and I found something else I liked: wandering the Hyperweb.

But I wasn't free.

I commanded that fighter wing for two years without incident, then I told my captain where he could put his fighting ships, and went independent.

I'd saved my pay and managed to buy a small ship, a ship so small I could barely transport a ton of cargo in it, in fact. It took me three years to save the money to get the Quill, and when I first got her she wasn't exactly in prime condition.

By 3446, though, she was shipshape, and I at last had the life I was searching for: a minstrel slash free trader, wandering the Hyperweb without roots or boundaries.

At the time this story begins, I was transporting an ore shipment to the central planet of the Tribei Tuft, a horrid little sulfur-polluted affair called Rika's Planet...

-----

Coughing. I could not stop coughing. The filtmask kept the toxic fumes out, at least it kept the concentration low enough I would not drop dead from the stinking, yellowish gas. But squik, did it stink. I'd smelled rotten eggs before, and decayed cornmeal, and all those other delightful things that produce sulfur, but this was amazing.

The trader that accepted the ore shipment and paid me stiffed me, but my discomfort was considerable and I barely noticed. I marked his face in memory, asked him a few questions, and resolved to track him down and repay him for his kindness at a later date. If you are a trader, and someone stiffs you, you gotta get even or you'll lose respect... and everyone'll stiff you. Tribal honor is well and good for the Big Four, but all these indies around have no qualms of taking what they like by hook or crook, and it was with these that I had most of my business, unfortunately.

Still, the payment was high enough I was able to pay off my bills and be left with a decent lump that I could go blow on a night out... if I could find anywhere that would be worth the effort.

I found such a place two systems over, on the northern side of the tuft. Overbar, it seemed, was the closest thing the Tuft had to an interesting place, and a resourceful trader would be able to find something of value even on a soot-darkened, unindustrialized rathole like I found myself on.

I went on over to the spaceport's nicest-looking bar. There were several bloody drunks on the floor crawling in the general direction of the door, or perhaps they were just fleeing the bouncer's upraised foot. I stepped over them, deciding they were well too sloshed to be worthy of concern, and pushed my way to the bar.

The crowd was tough, but I'd seen worse. And these seemed bored, or at least depressed. I heard there was a major layoff at the only factory in this side of town, and a bunch of folks without their livelihood was not a cheery crowd.

So I turned to the bar and said, "A pint of Bek Danyells, for a story."

The bartender lit up like someone'd stuffed a stick of plasma-boom up his butt. "You a minstrel eh?" he grunted in the thick brogue of this place.

"Indeed I am," I said. "Let me tell you the story of Instrux, and Harabec's battle against the ice serpent there."

And I was off. The tale which I had recently picked up over in the Cygnus sector was entertaining, more so after I lathered on a few details of my own. The story took an hour to tell, with interruptions from the other patrons, and by the time I was done my throat was raw from having to shout over the happy gabble.

"And when the ice serpent's last head was severed and the hot iron applied to the stump, Bek stepped back and sliced off a bit of the thing's tail to take back to the base camp, because he knew no one would believe him--"

"Yeah, and did he cook it and make a sandwich out of it?"

"No, actually he had it bronzed and made a trophy of it. The colonists searched for another ice serpent, and it took years to find another. And it wasn't half the size of the one Harabec killed."

"I bet I could find one!" one grizzly, drunk fellow roared.

"I doubt it. The world was abandoned when the ice age deepened. The sea is hidden under kilometers of ice now... and nothing lives but the hidden serpents..."

The story finished, I took a long drink and sighed. "Another one!" someone called. "Tell me of something strange traveling the spaceways! I'm a pilot too and I need to know these things." The crowd guffawed.

I wracked my drink-clouded mind and picked a story out of nowhere. "Okay... recently I heard this one from a pilot out in the Hercules somewhere. As you may know, that region is heavily traveled by pirates..."

A few of my audience members growled low, and I made note of these. This region was also heavily traveled by pirates, it seemed... I told the tale of a flashing gold ship that rescued innocent civilians from cruel pirates, turning on the villains with a deadly strength and swiftness. "And one shot from the ship's mighty forward cannon, and the pirate dreadnought crumbled like a tin can. Completing the orbit, the skilled fighter turned yet again, in a side-accelerating burn. Spinning like the blade of a turbine, the smaller vessel pinwheeled into the weakened dreadnought... and sliced right through it like a hot knife through butter."

This story over, I leaned back to check the crowd's reactions again. Some of them looked embarrassed or worried, and they were probably quite glad that my golden knight of the spaceways was just a legend. Some of them were excited, and leaning forward in their seats arguing about vectors and engine ratios and suchlike with each other.

And one was sitting at a chair, staring right at me with the faintest of smiles, locking her exquisite black eyes with mine.

I stared right back. She was gorgeous, and I wondered what someone like her was doing in such a rathole. A cliché, perhaps, but she was out of place there... indeed, she probably would stand out at the Emperor's court.

Thin, elegantly slashed brows twitched with apparent amusement. I tried to calculate how long I'd been staring at her, and blushed when I failed. The corners of her lips twitched upward, and she nodded her head slightly, once, in a regal gesture.

Her lips moved, and though I could not hear her from all the way across the bar, I knew what she was saying. "Come here," she said, and beckoned slowly.

I obeyed as if drawn on a string attached to a fishing pole.

Her figure was-- well, you wouldn't believe me if I told you anyway, so forget it. And those eyes... black laser drills, cutting right through to the core of my being. I was entranced already, and I could tell that she knew it quite well.

She nodded to the seat across from her and I sat, my knees trembling like a love-struck adolescent pup. I'm glad my brain was too fried at the moment to notice my loss of dignity or I'd probably still be blushing to this day.

"You tell a good story," she said quietly in a smoky voice.

"I, uh, thank you," I said, and gave a short bow. "It's my trade."

"And you enjoy it." It was not a question.

"Yes, I do. I love my work."

"I see... and as a storyteller, do you believe in destiny?"

I blinked. I hadn't really considered it. I wondered what answer I could give that would be most likely to get her into my arms, but she was as blank and unreadable as a polished stone. So I settled for the truth. "No, not really," I said. "I think people make their own lives."

She leaned forward then, her face less than half a meter from mine. I felt the silky, warm touch of her hand on mine. "I will make you believe," she said quietly.

My pulse was racing and I was sweating like a herd beast at harvest time. "How so?" I managed.

She smiled...

-----

Well, several words would describe the rest of that evening. Torrid will suffice. We got to my ship, and didn't even wait until we were in my quarters. The sheer, white-and-brown dress she was wearing dropped off somewhere near the main airlock, my own clothes in a ragged path between the top deck's lift and my quarters.

I'd never had such an experience in my life, before or since. She was like a ghost, a slow, liquid grace that seemed to flow through me like vapor. The old goddesses of love they speak of in the ancient stories would have had nothing on her.

We were at for longer than I could quantify. It's been years, but I can still remember every detail of those incredible hours.

In the morning, she was gone. I never had the chance to ask her name.

Normally I'd have been ashamed to know my gentlemanly behavior was so severely lacking; I'd never done such a thing in my life. But when she got a hold of me, I couldn't think of anything but getting her home, and when I got that far, she overwhelmed my senses before I could even remember how to close the airlock.

When I awakened, I searched the area for her as best I could, knowing it was futile. I finally gave up the next evening, and I was unable to sleep that night. I wandered the ship, wondering how long it would be before the medical suppliers would be able to get me my next load of cargo so I could take off and put this world behind me.

It was two weeks later, two weeks during which I told tales at that bar every evening, in hopes of seeing her again. It didn't work. The suppliers arrived and stocked my cargo holds, and I had to be off.

Destiny? Perhaps. Or perhaps merely frustration. Or perhaps just one exquisite night I would remember for the rest of my life.

-----

My Quill was a quick little ship, and agile. In real space I can usually shake just about anything, which is good considering how often I picked up pirates. Going back along Jakob's Axis to the Diamondshatter Lattice, I picked up some near Beta Styolis. Not one, no, not two, or five.

Ten.

I was so stunned I could barely remember how to plot an evasive. Ten pirates on my little junk bucket? Certainly they were pirates: they were lightning-fast, violating any number of perimeter codes, and running no transponders. Not even the indie tribes would be that foolish or defiant of spacer codes.

They englobed me in seconds, despite my best efforts. They matched my vectors neatly, proving that they had some excellent prediction systems aboard. When locked in half a dozen tractor beams, one has little option of fighting or fleeing... and if they hadn't blasted me yet, it probably meant they either hadn't got a lock on me or were trying to decide where to shoot to make the prettiest explosion.

The whistle of in incoming alarm told me I had perhaps thirty seconds of life left to me. I saw the dots on the screens that represented the torpedoes, and shook my head.

I tried one last trick: I rotated the ship along its axis, blasting the mains at full speed while sending power through the spindles. The spindles were ripped off, but I escaped the tractor beams. Shrieking alarms drilled into my skull s I worked the console feverishly, trying to put out enough of an EM pulse to toast the torpedoes and get the hell out. I got rid of seven of the eight incomings, but the last homed in on my exhaust and fired its thrusters for a terminal adjustment straight up my tail.

I spun the ship in a wide arc, but that wasn't working. The torp was close enough to lock on my hull optically.

Well, goodbye life. It's been grand.

I stared the torpedo down coldly. My mother would have been proud.

Then the thing skewed off to starboard at a rate its engines could not have managed, and detonated a kilometer off.

I blinked.

I looked back at the pirates and blinked again.

They were being slaughtered. The bloom of massive explosions lit space, and suddenly there were three less of the pirates.

These were some good-sized ships, too. It took a pretty good hit to take one out. But I could see nothing, except one my one the pirates blowing into fragments.

One escaped, blasting right by me. My eyes bulged as it came close enough for me to see the insignia on its bridge module.

I played back the recordings, and saw that I was right. The diamond-shaped marking, overlaid by a blade impaling a planet, it was very plain.

It was an Imperial logo.

I was incensed. Since when were the Lice sneaking around like thieves in the night molesting innocent civilians? I hooked my tractor beam on the ship and tried to pull it back, but as it was much, much heavier, I succeeded only in spinning it a bit.

It was enough. A blaze of copper-colored light blasted by me, bigger than my ship but more agile than even the smartest torpedo, and a moment later a pinprick of light in the distance signified the passing of the Imperial ship.

"Falcon's Quill here!" I said, blasting a broadband comm broadcast in the ship's general direction. "Thanks for saving my butt. Who are you?"

There was a very long pause, then the crackle of an opening channel. A voice--

My blood froze in my veins.

It was her voice.

"I am your destiny," she said. An instant later, the other ship vanished in a flash of golden light.

-----

The ship was apparently much quicker than my Quill. That's saying a lot: I could burn five thousand gravities with no problem, could manage one fifty cee in warp. That's by no means snail speed. But the other ship blasted by so fast I lost its sensor trail in three seconds.

I tried to get an ID on the thing, but the transponder code was odd. It wasn't shut off; that would have been highly illegal. It was encoded.

I'd never heard of an encoded transponder, and I wasn't sure that was legal either until I looked it up in my database. "Item six point five," I read from the Uniform Spacers' Code. "Persons wishing to protect their identity from other spacefarers may choose to have their transponder signals coded and register their coding with the Imperial Navy Department of Space Operations for a fee."

The fee listed was incredible. I couldn't have paid it off in a year of operations, much less pay it annually. Whoever owned that ship had to be rolling.

Or just illegal, I suppose.

The ship was heading in the general direction of north-inward. The nearest star system I knew to be habitable in that direction was some desert world I couldn't recall the name of, some three weeks travel away.

Common sense would suggest for me to continue on course to the nearest jumpgate, and resume my trip to Diamondshatter. But it wasn't common sense that motivated me in life, most often, and this was no exception.

I brought the ship about and fired the mains, to begin the slow arc that would set me on a path toward the desert planet.

-----

It took four weeks of acceleration, travel, and deceleration to reach my destination. I found no evidence of habitation, which was rather strange because livable worlds don't exactly grow on trees, especially between the galactic arms. It was also strange that a desert world would be listed as habitable, especially one this dry. Cacti would parch.
There were no bodies of water, but there was a vast plain of baked mud, that seemed to be the last remnants of a fair-sized ocean. Algae lived beneath the dried mud, tinting it a dull purple, but that was the only life visible. A disaster had befallen this world, recently by the looks of things.

I began a scan for power sources and communications broadcasts, but by the time I completed my fourth orbit I had found nothing.

I had wasted my time on a fool's errand. A wild glitch chase. I cursed as I finished my sixth orbit, and fired the engines for orbital exit.

The engines shut down just as I was about to press the controls. I called up a diagnostic. Nothing was wrong with the engines... except their power was being sucked dry... and then some. The drain met and then exceeded my reactor output. Systems began shutting down. I tried to boost the reactor output but even though I succeeded, it made no difference. Within a minute, even the lights were off... and I could see the flickering light of a tractor beam out the main view port, dragging me in the worst possible direction: straight down.

I wasn't about to let this go unchallenged, so I powered up the weapons. These had an independent power source that was (seemingly) unaffected by the power drain. I targeted manually (the tactical computers being offline) and fired a full-duration burst as close to the tractor beam origin as I could manage. I think I hit within about five kilometers of the target... in other words, I wasted a shot.

The window whited out from the flames of reentry, and as a sudden, blistering heat filled the air, I realized that the reentry shields would have failed as well, with no reactor power.

I was about to be burned to a crisp... and there was nothing I could do about it.

"Reduce velocity," I told myself. "Velocity equals acceleration plus momentum. Acceleration is a constant, reduce momentum." Sweat pouring from my face, I slid down the ladder to the lower deck. "Momentum equals velocity times mass. Velocity is a constant, reduce mass." At the engineering control room I started shifting some manual release levers (fortunately these particular controls were manual rather than powered anyway) and suddenly I felt a powerful lurch.

Looking out the window, I saw my cargo assembly fly off the bottom of the ship, tumbling end-over-end as it receded from sight. "Velocity equals acceleration plus momentum minus drag. Drag equals density of medium times object cross-section. Density is constant. Increase cross-section."

The maneuvering thrusters, fortunately, were chemical. While they did indeed fire by an injection of electrical power from the ship's energy grid, there were other methods of setting them off.

One of them was raw heat: and there was plenty of that.

I heard loud pops, as the fire of reentry exploded the fuel reservoirs. The ship began to tumble.

The Quill was somewhat dumbbell-shaped, with the habitat section in front and the engine section aft. The cargo section was a torus that wrapped around the ship's waist; without that, the ship had a pretty messy atmospheric cross-section in a tumble.

Somehow I doubted that the ship's velocity would reduce to a speed that would even stop me from burning to a crisp. I couldn't land safely anyway, not without power and control. The failsafes, on detecting the ground, might have automatically fired a deceleration burn had the engines been functioning. I didn't even have an inertial damping field to lessen the impact.

I looked out the window and saw the ground, perhaps ten kilometers away and expanding rapidly.

I closed my eyes just as the impact smashed me into blackness.

-----

I awakened several hours later to find myself in a narrow bunk in a small room carved of stone. The air was hot, dry, silent. I tried to get up to look around but a dreadful nausea took me and I decided to remain where I was so my stomach would too.

I looked around the room. It was about four meters cube, with my bed and a chair and table on the other side of the room. The bed and chair were all cushions attached to stone slabs carved out of the rock, and the table was the same but it was topped with a polished slab of some other kind of stone, white granite by the look of it. Lighting was provided by small, golden-yellow tubes set in the corners of the room. I recognized the distinctive color of sodium vapor florescence.

The room had one decoration, a large, square mosaic of colored gemstones embedded in the opposite wall. It was black, gold, and red with streaks of blue-white here and there. I unfocussed my eyes, and decided it was a rendering of the galaxy. If those rubies, topaz, citrines, galactifires, and oros were genuine, that mosaic was a pretty expensive work of art.

My eyes returned to the table. There was a small, spherical object in the center. I could not identify it. Indeed, I could not even focus on it. Every time I looked at it, it was displaced from my field of vision. I'd never seen such a thing before, and was at a loss to explain it.

Eventually I mastered my nausea and managed to stand. I immediately went to the door, which I found to be unlocked. So, either I wasn't a prisoner or there was nowhere to escape to.

The door led to a short corridor, on the other side of which was another door. I opened it cautiously, to find myself in a small chamber with two other doors, to the left and right. I took the left door and stepped out into a blazing sun and sand as far as the eye could see. The structure was underground, set into a rock outcropping with the base covered with sand dunes. Straining my eyes to the limit I saw a hill or two on the western horizon, and that was all.

I returned to the structure and checked the other door. This one led to a room similar to the one I had awakened in. There was no mosaic on the wall, instead, there was a monitor screen that was currently set to display an orbital scan of the planet. That was strange, because I had detected no orbiting satellites, and those were the first things the navigational sensors looked for upon reaching a planet. The top of the table was of black marble or something similar, and the maddening mirror ball in the center was as elusive as the other one.

The chair had no cushion, nor did the bed.

The woman sleeping there did not seem to mind. I stared at her for a moment, wanting to wake her up and-- well, we'd cross that string when we jumped to it. I approached her and reached out to touch her cheek, but an instant before I would have touched her skin my hand encountered... something, something impenetrable.

Why would anyone want to sleep under a forcefield? And indeed, what was generating it? I didn't see any projection elements nearby, certainly not the complex, detailed ones that would be needed to maintain a field dense enough to keep low-speed kinetics out. And she was wearing no armor, only a white nightgown that drew the eyes in predicable paths. I listened closely but I could hear none of the high-frequency humming associated with forcefields, either, nor detect even the faintest shimmer.

Puzzled, I backed away, turning to take a closer look at the mirror ball. I went to the table and picked the thing up. Or tried to: it felt like it weighed a ton. And then some.

The hairs on the back of my hand stood on end when I touched the thing, stood on end and shot tiny, blue sparks, in fact. The sphere rippled as I touched it and I could see... something inside it. And I heard sounds: explosions, whispered words, screams, laughter. I felt sensations of heat, pain from a wound, the feel of a kiss.

Mesmerized, I stared into the ball of quicksilver, and saw... saw...

I have no idea what I saw. To this day, I cannot describe the experience.

All I know is that a moment later I felt a gentle pressure on my arm, pulling me back. "I am amazed," a soft voice said in my ear. "To be able to touch a singularity... and not die from it, or go mad..."

"A... singularity?"

"A doorway. Outside this universe where we exist only in the present, to one where we are always, from the Big Bang to the Last Whimper, or Big Crunch, if Del has anything to say about it." She laughed softly, apparently at a private joke.

I turned to her, to look into her eyes. They were black, yet not: like the singularity, they were doorways to something far more complex, something I could get only the barest glimpse of. "What are you saying?" I asked.

She smiled, faintly. "You will find out in time..."

"You brought me here," I noted. But she shook her head.

"You followed me," she said. "Under your own power. I only rescued you."

"Fine line," I said.

"Perhaps." She turned to the singularity, stared into it for a moment. "I imagine you are hungry." I nodded. The singularity flashed white, filling the room with light. Or perhaps it was blackness; it was over too quickly for me to process. She reached out for the sphere and touched it, and gestured for me to do the same. I did so.

Reality shifted. I found myself in the same room... but changed.

On the table was a tray with several plates of food on it that apparently had appeared from thin air. "Actually," she said. "We entered a universe in which the food was there, and brought a bubble of that universe back with us."

"But then where did it come from?"

"There are an infinite number of universes. In some of them, there would be situations where I or someone else prepared the food and placed it here."

"Ah, so we stole this from someone."
"No, not really. Because the universe we got it from never existed, because our bubble, without the food, was inserted in there. And since the chain of events proceeding that bubble contained no preparation of the food, the universe in which the food was prepared was actually this one."

"But the food was not here a moment ago."

"Perhaps it was," she said with a shrug. "I failed Paradox Theory at the Academy."

"Which Academy?"

"You would not have heard of it. It was disbanded quite some time ago."

I looked down at the food, collecting my thoughts. "How old are you?" I said quietly.

"Nine hundred eighty-one SIEUR."

I blinked. "I gotta sit down..." I muttered.

-----

"So you're an Immortal," I said later after we had finished our meal. We were outside, walking toward the desert sunset. I had asked if we'd need thicker clothes for the desert night, but she shook her head and told me the desert didn't get cold enough, since the planet rotated quickly.

"The Immortals were humans with advanced, artificial neural nets for brains," she said. "Once, I was. Now I am something else."

"What?"

She sighed, gazed at the sunset. It was rich red, shot through with streamers and ribbons of brilliant yellow. The sun was on the horizon now, an orb of fire about to be snuffed by the sand. "When I figure it out, I'll let you know," she said.

"Why is it you seem so familiar to me?" I asked suddenly. "It's like I've known you--"

She silenced me with a fingertip on my lips. "You have a gift," she said. "You're able to see past the veil of time, into the future. You can read your own future thoughts and feelings... though you usually cannot call them to your conscious mind."

"And you're in my future?" I stopped, to turn and study her.

Her eyes sparkled in the ruddy light of the sunset. "Did I not tell you I'm your destiny?" And she kissed me.

Until that moment, happiness was simply an emotion that I felt or didn't, depending on my situation. It came and went, the same as anger, fear, amusement, whatever. But holding her in my arms, I felt something greater than I had felt before: joy, and a sense of promise, that the feeling would last, for as long as I had her with me.

Now and then in the bars and inns and such, I told a tale of love rather than battle or danger. I'd thought I'd known what the word meant, but now I realized I'd not even come close.

"I love you," I said. It felt so right to say it, so right to think of the words and realize just how true they were. She held me close, and looked into my eyes.

"And I love you," she said, in a whisper so soft even the faint breeze would have overpowered it, had the words not filled my entire universe.

I heard the echoes of the words, coming at me from all directions, and returning to me from a distant future. She closed her eyes and rested her head on my chest, as the sun at last disappeared below the horizon.

Something else returned to me from the future: the scent of danger, of a terrible loss. As I tried to place the feeling, and match it with some experience, and she looked at me with black fire snapping in her eyes. "What is this?" she demanded.

"I don't... know. Something about... our destiny...?"

She stared at me, or perhaps through me, and after a moment she turned away. "We will have to make sure that future does not come to pass," she said quietly.

"Which future?"

She turned to me with haunted eyes. "You cannot read the future," she said. "Be thankful. It is often a terrible curse."

"What do you see?"

She did not answer. "I cannot say," she said. I knew that meant will not, but I didn't comment. "But I know we will have some wonderful times together."

I gave her a little smile, and turned to see the fiery colors in the sky slowly fade. As the first stars came out we laid down on a flat space on top of a large dune, to look up into the sky and watch.

What did she see up there? It was obvious she saw more than I did, but when I turned to glance at her, she was watching me instead. "Look to the stars, love," she said. "I want to see them through your eyes." She moved closer to me, turning toward me and wrapping her arms around me.

"Another time," I said, and turned my attention from the sky to her.

Making love with her, I could almost forget the future, and whatever danger awaited us...

-----

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