A Thread of Time: Firesetter, Book 1 (16 page)

The Disease didn’t take me after all,
although it eventually claimed the King, on the same night as the fire’s embers
flamed bright, and my son nearly died during one of his odd spells.

Chapter 19

Sandy

When I was fifteen, my dad walked away
from a non-illustrious career in the SpaceForce.  He’d been turned down for
several promotions, probably because he wasn’t all that great of an officer. 
He was argumentative and opinionated, filled with ideas that weren’t
politically correct and happy to argue about them long after everyone else had
moved on.  In addition, Dad had a chip on his shoulder the size of a
battlecruiser because my mom was more successful, having been a captain already
for many years.

“What do you think, Sandy?” he asked,
showing me a pic of an old freightplane that looked like a deathtrap and was
worth more in metal scrap than it ever would have been hauling goods in space.

I responded with some kind of noise,
neither happy nor sad, not that Dad would have cared what I thought.  He had
already made the decision. 

I was offered a chance to go live with my
mom, even though she hadn’t communicated with me beyond a birthday card since
she dumped me at the age of eight. 

However, we considered it briefly.  In
fact, Jill and I went on a vacation to Earth and made our best effort to
reconnect.  Unfortunately, we failed miserably at it.

If I had been given a choice, I would have
preferred to have been cut loose, left to wander the galaxy on my own,
searching for the place I was supposed to be, because it sure wasn’t with
either parent.

Ever since my earliest memory, I had
always felt like I didn’t belong.  Maybe, I was a mental case from my mother’s
inattention, or the lack of paternal figure in my infancy.  Or, maybe, I was
just a mental case, hearing a voice in my head, who whispered whenever it was
quiet, calling to me when I tried to sleep. 

When I was ten, Dad showed me an old
Imperial coin, and when I first touched it, the whispering voice started to
scream.  In the back of my brain, an old memory, an old feeling appeared from
nowhere. 

I knew someone related to this coin, but
who it was appeared fuzzy and just out of reach.  These sensations both
frightened and intrigued me at the same time.

“Sandy’s always got some weird thoughts
going on in her head,” Wen used to say whenever I would zone out during a
conversation to listen to the mysterious voice that no one else heard.

Noodnick would nod.  He understood. 
Sometimes, I thought the voice was speaking to him, too.

As I grew older, these confusing
sensations abated, for the most part.  By the time I was well into my teen
years, I decided that I had been nothing more than a totally messed up little
kid.  There was nothing calming about the coin and it didn’t really work with
my fashion statement, so I stopped wearing it and found a skull and spiked dog
collar to wear instead.

Dad purchased the freightplane from a guy
on the Internet, who sent him the door codes and told us to pick it up at
Spacebase 41-B.  Although, he used all the funds he had saved for my college
tuition, I didn’t care as I wasn’t going to go to college anyway.

“Don’t worry, pumpkin,” Dad assured me. 
“Hauling freight, we’ll make the money back in spades, and if we don’t, you can
always go to the SpaceForce Academy for free.”

The last thing I wanted was to follow in
both Mommy and Daddy’s footsteps, so attending the SpaceForce Academy, even for
free, would be an option that ranked lower than death.  I wasn’t about to tell
Dad that though as he was stressed and very busy dealing with his new
freightplane,
The Flying Mule
, otherwise known as a piece of junk with
engines and a cargo bay. 

“It’s sound…sort of,” Wen said, gazing up
at the hull.  Like Dad, he had resigned his commission, and along with Noodnick,
they made up our crew.  “It flew here, didn’t it?  It’s got all of its safety
equipment on board.”

Noodnick nodded, even though he was also
rolling his eyes.

“I think it’s great,” Dad exclaimed. 
“Now, all we need is some cargo.  Let’s go up to the bar and see if we can
round up some business.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Wen cried, knocking
his heels together and saluting. 

In the meantime, in my head, I heard
Noodnick, “What a farce.”

I laughed and he smiled because only the
two of us were in on this joke.

As Dad and Wen began to walk away, I
called after them, “What about me?  I’m not exactly old enough to go in the
bar.”

For a moment, Dad looked confused as if he
couldn’t quite remember who I was.  Then, reaching in his pocket, he pulled out
a ten credit note. 

“Go get yourself some food and meet us
back here in two hours.”

So there I was, alone on a spacebase, with
money in my pocket.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to buy me a ticket to
anywhere else.  Frankly, all I could afford was a chocolate milkshake and large
order of French fries.

Having acquired both, I wandered the base,
searching for a quiet spot to sit and listen to my music.  The arcade and
shopping decks were overcrowded with too many creatures and too many smells. 
All I wanted was to be alone among the stars, rocking out to the tunes blasting
in my head, briefly, letting me forget both who and where I was. 

I wandered up to the observation deck,
only to discover it was blocked off with scaffolding and yellow tape.  Not one
to be deterred by a
Do Not Enter
sign even though it was written in one
hundred and forty-seven languages, I slipped beneath and strolled along the
base’s topmost deck.

Gazing down at the hordes of people
loitering in the shopping mall, I briefly considered what would happen if I
climbed upon the rail and took a dive.  Not that I would ever really do it, but
I wondered. 

“You will fly,” a voice said. 

“What?” 

Now, the voice laughed, which irritated me
to no end since it was doing so entirely inside my head.  I could hear him even
though I was wearing my earbuds and my tunes were cranked on high, blocking out
all external noise from my surroundings.

“Come here,” he called, interrupting a
song by one of my favorite bands.

I tried to ignore him, because after all,
he was an integral part of my self-diagnosed psychosis.  However, he was
persistent, calling to me even louder than the bass drumbeat in the song.

“I’m busy,” I protested, eating my fries
and drinking my shake.

“No, you’re not.”  That obnoxious figment
of my imagination broke into hysterical peals of laughter.  When he had
finished yucking it up, which incidentally, coincided with the end of the song,
he very loudly proclaimed in the back of my brain to come hither.

“Where?” I demanded, relenting, because
there was only so much fighting I could do with my fabricated demon. 

“Up,” he said.

“Up?”  Up, as in the top of the
scaffolding on the very rooftop of this spacebase near the air conditioning
vent?

Actually, I wasn’t really surprised to see
a guy sitting up there.  At this point, I was so well into my mental illness, I
wouldn’t have been surprised to find a gorilla in clown suit, or a donkey
sitting on an elephant’s back. 

Abandoning all reason, what little I had
left, as well as the remains of the milkshake and fries, I climbed up the
scaffolding’s girders as if this was a perfectly natural thing to do.  The
transit took me about ten minutes, and as I reached hand over hand, rung to
rung, it occurred to me I might be suffering from a form of space sickness
instead. 

Supposedly, I was immune to it, having
been raised completely in space, but strange things still happened now and
again, and this might have been one of them.  I resolved that when I returned
home, which I guessed would now be the Flying Mule, I would google everything I
could about space sickness and interstellar psychosis in teenagers of human
genetics. 

“Hello,” he said, smiling broadly with
straight white teeth and the strangest multi-colored eyes I could ever have
imagined. 

“Hello.”  I greeted him as well, trying to
perch upon the girder in the same way he did.  The metal beams were not only
uncomfortable, but icy cold, cutting into the back of my legging-clad thighs. 

“Do you know who I am?” he asked as I
studied his face, trying to recall if we had ever met. 

I’d known a lot of guys over the years,
having been raised on two starships and enrolled in the SpaceForce educational
system.  However, a guy with his wavy black hair and weird eyes, I couldn’t
recall.  Yet, there was something about him that was niggling at the back of my
brain, and for some odd reason, that old coin kept coming to mind. 

“Nope.”  I shook my head.  “But, you know
who I am, apparently.”

“I do.”  Then, he smiled again and I
decided, whoever he was, this guy was pretty hot.  Probably, he was too hot for
a red-headed, freckled, geeky girl from space, even though now I was still in
the midst of my Goth phase. 

He was strongly built with long limbs and
muscles, and his black hair looked a lot more natural than mine.  He also had
the coolest bird tattoo on the back of his left shoulder. 

“I am waiting for you,” he said, holding
out his hand. 

“Why?  I’m already here.”  I held out my
hand, but wasn’t sure I wanted to touch him.

“I am waiting for you,” he repeated,
placing his palm against mine.  It shocked me like a tiny lightning bolt, which
sent a wave of electricity into the middle of my brain. 

For a moment, I thought I was going to
fall off the girder and into the crowds far below.  My heart began to race as
my head flooded with vague images, sounds and smells, all familiar, yet
forgotten from somewhere else. 

“Hey,” I gasped, once my eyesight had
cleared.  “Tell me who you are!  What do you want from me?”

Unfortunately, I discovered I was
completely alone, at least as far as this girder was concerned.  I sat there
and took deep breaths, counting to a hundred, until my heart returned to a
somewhat normal rhythm.  Then, even though my hands were shaking and my knees
were weak, I managed to safely climb back down to the floor. 

Once my feet were on the ground, I tossed
the greasy fries and melted shake into the trash.

“Never again,” I decided, “will I eat fast
food in space.”

“There you are, Sandy.”  Dad waved as I
stepped off the lift, returning to my new home, the Flying Mule. 

Noodnick was overseeing pallets of sealed
crates as they were loaded into the Mule’s freight bay.  On the side, in seven
languages, the pallets were stamped with ‘Cantaloupe’ or ‘Watermelon’.

“Fruit?” I murmured, coming up beside
Nood.  “Won’t it go bad?”

“Guns,” Noodnick replied inside my head,
prompting me to wonder if Noodnick was acquainted with black-haired guy who
also spoke directly into my mind.

“Sandy, I want you to meet our new
navigator,” Dad called, pulling me away before Noodnick had a chance to
respond.  “This is Taul.  He knows this sector inside and out.  Taul, this is
my daughter, Sandy.  She’s fifteen years old.”  Dad said this last part with a
little chuckle as if to warn Taul against making a pass at me.  Not that he
would.  Taul looked at least twenty-four or twenty-five.

“Sandy?” Taul repeated with his eyes wide
open.  “Your name is Sandy?  But…”

“But what?  You’ve got a problem with
that?” I interrupted, tired of guys who apparently knew me from a past life.

“It’s short for Cassandra.”  Dad wrapped
his arm around my shoulder, just as the last pallet was loaded aboard.  I
shrugged him off and glared at the both of them, crossing my arms and daring
anyone to violate my personal space.

“I have something for you,” Taul said,
digging into his knapsack and producing a pair of chess pieces, the black king
and white queen from a fancy marble set.  “I was asked to bring these to you. 
He said specifically they are for Sandy.”

I took them, and held them in my hand,
feeling the marble warm to my touch. On the bottom of each piece, stamped in
gold, was the same crest on the backside of Dad’s antique Imperial coin. 
Something stirred in me, a distant memory, an image obscured by fog, voices,
sounds and feelings that I knew I didn’t want again.

“No, thank you.”  I handed the chess
pieces back to Taul.

“But,” Taul insisted.  “I brought them all
the way from…”

“I said no thanks!” I nearly shouted, as
Wen waved from the cockpit door.

“We’re ready to go, Captain Lancelot! 
Time to release this pony from her stall.”

“All aboard, crew,” Dad ordered, ending
the discussion by pushing me up the boarding steps.  “Let’s take all these
fruits to space.”