(Year 3610, Month 8, Day 27, Hour 12 Minute 03)
I don’t know how I got talked into this. It’s all Clive’s fault. He knows exactly the kind of sweet nothings to whisper into a girl’s ear.
“A region of space as yet uncharted by humanity.”
Of course, that means I’ll have to trust Clive’s trans-universal geometries to get me there. Not that I think he’ll muck up the math. He could do the math while standing on one foot. I just wouldn’t put it past him to screw up on purpose – to get revenge on both me and the super-slut, Tara. Two ex-girlfriends screwed in one go.
Ah, what’s life without a little danger? Besides, it’s not like I have a choice. I desperately wanted my own ship again. My last one had been confiscated by the government for being used in criminal acts, and as punishment for “colluding with traitors,” I was grounded for five years. I finally got my pilot’s license back, but I’ve done nothing but shuttle and cargo runs between planets in the Domha’vei, working for other people. My ears longed for the whining thump of wormhole evocation. And Clive promised that as payment for this mission, I could keep this ship, the Battlequeen Emmeris, when I was through. It’s not a bad little ship, but I’m definitely changing the name once it’s mine.
How did Clive get back in the good graces of the Matriarchy before I did? He was one of the ringleaders of that coup; I was just a hired hand. I didn’t know the contents of the package I’d been hired to transfer. Even when Nikki the Rat finessed the seal, I had no idea the thing in the box was the Staff of the Matriarch. Why would an Earth girl like me know that?
It was all Clive’s fault. Maybe that’s why he picked me for this mission – guilt.
No, scratch that. Clive’s never felt guilty a day in his life. I think he’s missing that gene. That’s one of the reasons all those years of conditioning never got him to conform. He doesn’t give a neutrino what other people think. The reason Clive offered this job to me is that he knows I take crazy jobs, jobs other people won’t touch. So this one must be a doozy.
It must be a doozy because it’s an official job for the Matriarchy, and the Matriarch hates my guts. She hates my guts because she’s always taking on my cast-offs.
Well, she can have them. I always pick the wrong men. I’ve had a long string of bad choices, but of them all, she ended up with the absolute worst. Clive and Chase are neck to neck in a tie for most pathetic boyfriend of all time. Clive is cold-hearted, self-centered, willing to kill or betray to reach an expedient solution. Just the kind of guy to settle down with, right? But he’s so cool, brilliant, attractive in the way that assholes are always attractive. Chase was a drug-addled loser who couldn’t even get it up. He was gorgeous and sweet, and from a captain’s perspective incredibly useful – he was an amazing pilot, with no fear at all, and willing to do the dirtiest tasks without grumbling. All that was because he just didn’t seem to give a damn about whether he lived or died. He had absolutely no aim or direction – the kind of guy a smart woman dumps halfway through university to hook up with a lawyer. Except that I was in my late thirties and thought of him as a fixer-upper.*
Well, I really have to stop blaming Chase for the disaster that happened to my last crew. It wasn’t his fault that they were all butchered by the Ennead. But still, you think that a guy could be upfront with you about the little things, like, for example, that he already has a girlfriend. Or that he’s a tree.
Clive’s new girlfriend is a tree. I hate trees.
The trip so far has been uneventful. It’s the kind of quiet that makes me antsy. The thing that’s really getting on my nerves is these people I’m transporting. Cara and the K’ntasari. What a bunch of fanatics. Ari this, the Archon that. You’d think they owed him their lives.
Well, actually, they do. But why do they have to be so weird about it?
The K’ntasari are just weird anyway – six fingers and two eyelids. Melvin, Othello and Juliet. Othello acts like a big shot because he was one of Ari’s hand-picked team to scupper the last CenGov attempt to conquer the Domha’vei. Another thing is that he was combat-trained by Mickey Riley, which means he’s working for SSOps. I’m not supposed to know that, but Clive tells me things, especially when I’m wearing a vacu-bra.**
He doesn’t tell me enough, unfortunately. According to him, we’re on a diplomatic mission. A diplomatic mission to uncharted space? Now an exploratory mission I could understand, but who are we going to meet in uncharted space? Is it so top-secret that we have to go all the way out to the rim, using a whole new series of wormholes to get there?
I’m going to be steamed if all we’re doing is meeting up with Governor Tellick because he’s paranoid that the hawks back home will find out he’s negotiating with the Matriarchy again. Of course, since the President of Earth was just assassinated, maybe a little bit of paranoia is warranted. Especially since everyone thinks the hawks did it because the president was getting soft and was about to legalize religion. I think that’s a crazy rumor. I think the last thing CenGov wants is to encourage Archonist subversives.
Archonists in CenGov space! That’s the last thing I ever would’ve expected. People are going on about how the Archon is some kind of messiah who will lead humanity into a golden age. That our evolutionary destiny is to become one with the forest. Ugh.
If they only knew that loser, Chase, was really the Archon.
Actually, everybody does know it. The emanations of Ashtara have been publically disclosed. Of course, this was after I dated him – I would never go after a married man. Give me credit for some class. But I still don’t get it. Besides being Chase the opium-junkie, the Archon is also a nightclub owner, a sex slave, a lawyer-slash-businessman, a pair of twin rock stars, a madman, a talk-show psychologist, a theoretical physicist…thirty-three of them in all. How can anyone take that seriously? That isn’t a god, it’s a repertory theatre company.
And Clive’s in deep with them, him and his new girlfriend, the tree. Lady Claris. Ugh.
Hmmm…if it weren’t for the two eyelids, that Melvin might be kind of cute.
*Literally, “a Starshony Cruiser.” Starshony was notorious for its use of Calasetti drives, which inevitably broke down. As a result, a skillful mechanic could buy this luxury liner on the cheap and install a more reliable drive – generally a racing drive. Implied in the idiom is the idea that Suzanna’s end result will be fast, hot, and a little sleazy. – trans.
**A gravity-defying article of clothing. – trans.