(Year 3610, Month 9, Day 13, Hour 7 Minute 11)
And that was that. It was over.
We hung out on the station for a while. Cara wanted to go home as soon as possible to complete the mission, but I and my crew knew we’d never have an opportunity to see anything like this again. We were tolerated – treated with politeness, even. But without the presence of Lucius, humans and K’ntasari were little more than house pets. We weren’t even at the level of the Hreck – the Hreck were useful. We just got underfoot.
Of course, we were denied further access to the meetings of the “real” sentients.
And so, somewhat to my regret, we left the enormous and fascinating station and began the journey home. It would be half a day to the point of evocation, less than a day in the wormhole, and then a bit more than a week from the closure point to Eirelantra. I was to deliver Cara and the K’ntasari safely there, where they would report to the Matriarch’s High Council, and then I was free to take the refitted ship as payment. It wasn’t a great ship, but it was certainly service-worthy. Once again, I would be a free woman, free to leave the Domha’vei and travel the stars.
I could go back to my old feckless way of life.
After everything I’d seen, I could go back to my old feckless way of life. Of course I would never think about alien species that could squash us like so many bugs. Alien species that made a point of squashing any bugs they decided were really infestations. I wouldn’t think about some of the bugs they squashed, intergalactic conquerors to dark too be discussed, some complete with genetically engineered plagues.
I would never think about technology beyond our imagining, talking rocks and dying subatomic particles. I would go back to my peaceful life running drugs and armaments with a newly-recruited crew of losers.
I freaking hate Ashtara.
It’s my own fault. I have got to stop accepting jobs from my ex-boyfriends. Especially Clive and Ash.
In the middle of the wormhole, my datapad signaled that I had a message. At first, I ignored it. It had to be an error. There’s no way to send a message through a wormhole. There are two ironies of modern travel and communications: the first is that it’s faster to go across the galaxy than it is to travel between planets in a system. Depending on how lucky you get with the pathfinder, it can be a lot faster – like now. Sealeesh was on the other side of the Milky Way from the Domha’vei.
The SongLuminants call our galaxy “Source.” I learned that from the Hreck. It’s actually a nicer name. Milky Way sounds kind of dumb.
The other irony is that ships can travel faster than messages. It’s only practical to use radio-plus in the local area. Get more than twenty light years away, and it’s too slow. Civilization is connected by a series of messagehubs that receive and distribute tiny drones containing stored messages. Depending on where you’re sending a message from and to, it could be a matter of minutes, hours, or as long as a day.
And if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, you have to either send a drone capable of evoking its own wormhole (expensive!) or have the messages carried by ships, like the old mail systems on Earth. Exploratory missions sometimes go months without contact.
The point is, radio-plus waves don’t go through wormholes. Messages are carried solid-state. So why was my datapad bugging me?
I finally looked at it, if only to tell it to shut up. I decided that I should have Xris look at it. He was good with diagnostics.
It was a message, in real time, from my Thoughtful 45 app.
Thoughtful 45 – or his people, probably – had figured out how to beam messages through wormholes. Holy crap.
“Hey Suzanna,” he said. “I have a message of High Importance for Ashtara. Is he around?”
“Well, he should be at Eirelantra when we get there. But I hadn’t planned to meet up with him.”
“It’s really important. Please?”
“I’ll see what I can do.” I wasn’t thrilled at the idea, but Thoughtful was a really nice guy. Nicer than most of the men I’d dated, actually.