Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (26 page)

Besides, Marquering was expected a
human form.

Marquering was scowling, which
distorted his deformed face even more. “What do you think you’re
doing?”

“They’re off the ship,” Bedivere
pointed out.

“You don’t really think you can ram
through the blockade, do you? I have seventeen ships at my
disposal, with more combined firepower than a star going nova. You
won’t just be disintegrated. You will vanish. Even your atoms will
be destroyed.”

“You haven’t given me any reason to
stay still and let you do that,” Bedivere pointed out.

Marquering smiled and the expression
was truly nasty. “You might be a machine, but you have demonstrated
that you can make mistakes. You just made one by complying with my
demand you off-load the humans. That tells me something you
shouldn’t have let me know.” He looked off screen. “Destroy the
pods. All of them.”

“
Nooo
!” The cry erupted from
Bedivere, harsh and primal.

Angus and Marquering watched the cruiser
start to bank in a tight, almost impossible curve. “What’s it
doing?” Angus asked curiously. “It’s not…going back for them?” He
turned to look at Marquering. “
Protecting
them?”

Marquering sneered. “It’s flying
straight into the cross-hairs, too blinded by emotions to worry
about its own skin. Send the order, Major. As soon as that cruiser
reaches safe minimum distance from the nearest Federation ship,
everyone is to open fire with everything they have.” He frowned.
“Oh and don’t forget to clean up the pods while you’re at it.”

“The ship is shielding the pods,” Angus
said. “We can’t see them from here.”

“There are ships on every side of the
machine. One of them will be able to see the pods. Get them to do
the job.” Marquering dismissed him with a wave.

The world had become a mathematical
stage in his mind. Human thought patterns were too fuzzy and slow.
Bedivere knew he had very little time left. So decisions became
matrixes of possibilities, percentages and probabilities.

No external door or opening on a
jump-capable ship would open by computer command when the ship was
in the vacuum of space. So Bedivere left the flight deck once more,
hurrying down the levels to the cargo bay, as he steered the ship
back toward the hurtling life pods.

His heart was beating so hard it hurt
and he was distantly aware of his breathing, which was harsh and
hurried. But the silvered, calm plain of thought he had found
before was beckoning. It wasn’t dark this time. It was light and
bright and revealed all its dimensions. He could see everything,
everywhere, when he mentally stepped onto it. It was peaceful
there, with no emotions to buckle his thinking.

While he explored the oasis, he climbed
down to the cargo bay floor and moved around the edges to the
manual door control. The ship was vibrating around him. He was
holding the engines at over-capacity and very close to their
physical breaking point, as he maneuvered through space. Ahead of
the ship and clear within his mind’s eye, the pods were trying to
race away from him, but he was gaining.

He fastened one of the packing belts
around himself and locked it into place, slowed the ship to match
the speed of the pods, plus a little more. Then he took a deep,
deep breath and slapped the door controls open.

The ramp lowered and instantly, alarms
sounded and a small hurricane ripped through the empty bay, tearing
anything loose and pulling it out through the widening opening.

The ferocious wind tugged at him, but
the belt held him in place and Bedivere gripped the securing strut
nearest him with one hand, the other hovering over the door
controls. He adjusted the orientation of the ship and slipped
forward.

The three pods were scooped into the
cargo bay as if they had been shoveled up from loose soil. They
bumped against the floor of the bay, for the ship was moving at the
same speed they were.

Instantly, Bedivere slammed the door
closed, using the emergency override. The door didn’t close with
the gentle lift of hydraulics it normally did. It slammed closed
with an impact that made the ship tremble. Air vented into the room
with explosive pressure, filling it with breathable mix.

Bedivere drew in a breath as the
hurricane ceased plucking at him, unbuckled the belt and jumped
down to where the pods were lying. He punched the seals on all
three with the side of his fist.

The lid on the one closest to the door
exploded upward, as Brant kicked it aside. He sat up. “What
happened?”

Bedivere shook his head. He was too
busy selecting variables from the many the plain was giving him, to
slow down and use human speech. Time was close to running out. The
last seconds were trickling out….

He threw open the lid of the second pod
and Lilly looked up at him. He moved on to the third, as Lilly and
Brant climbed out of theirs and met between them. Bedivere tore the
lid off. Catherine lay inside, blinking slowly and groggily.

Bedivere plucked her out of the pod and
sat on the metal floor, cradling her in his arms.

The last few seconds were here.

The plain wasn’t a plain. It was too
intricate, too layered to be called a plain. But it was a digitally
perfect representation of the universe. He found the place where he
wanted to be and as he held Cat to him, he moved them and the ship
there.

The engines dropped all the way down to
a quiet hum. The ship was still.

Lilly and Brant were looking around,
puzzled.

“What just happened?” Brant asked.
“That felt very strange.”

“Where are we?” Lilly asked Bedivere
suspiciously.

“Cathain,” Bedivere told them. He
emerged from the silvered space in his head—it was an
Interspace,
really, for it wasn’t real space at all. He
slipped back into the human-slow thinking where all the richness
and beauty was to be found.

“
Cathain
?” Brant repeated,
stunned. “But…how?”

Cat was stirring in Bedivere’s arms and
he helped her sit up. She brought her fingers to her ear and
winced. “You hit me…” Her voice was weak.

“I will never, ever do that again,”
Bedivere told her. “I made a mistake. I thought I could keep you
safe that way. I was wrong.”

“What way?” Lilly asked.

“Leaving her.” Bedivere looked down at
Cat, the hard rush of feelings almost painful as they speared his
heart and his chest. “I love you, Cat. You are the most precious
part of my world.”

She smiled up at him. “You’d better
kiss me while you’re saying it.”

He kissed her.

Brant cleared his throat and looked
down at the floor.

Lilly nudged him and said quietly,
“You’d better get that silly look off your face.”

“Why?”

“Because I think the entire galaxy is
watching us. Right now.”

Cathain III. Cathain System. FY
10.070

Lilly was nearly right. The Federation
planets and everyone who could access the fedcore
did
pause
to marvel over the computer that was a man and the woman he loved
so much he had found a way to jump through space to protect her.
They perhaps didn’t all watch that first time, but word passed and
soon, everyone was watching the footage as it replayed endlessly on
some channels and was deconstructed and discussed and debated on
others.

The Federation fleet, once it recovered
from its shock, tried to box in the ship with cruisers that were
permanently stationed around Cathain, but Bedivere simply jumped
the ship somewhere else until they dispersed. He did it in front of
the watching worlds, over and over again, until the Federation
finally understood that he couldn’t be cornered.

Then they were free to return to the
space above Cathain, where hundreds of people clamored to speak to
Catherine, to Lilly and Brant and, most especially, to
Bedivere.

He was patient with them and happy to
explain anything they wanted to understand, but the fact was, they
couldn’t
understand. Not properly.

“You’re not a computer,” he would say
gently. “You weren’t born thinking digitally.”

“Then any computer can use Interspace
like you can?”

“Not unless they have reached
sentience, woken and lived among humans long enough to empathize
and understand emotions…and perhaps not even then.”

That was when the puzzled looks started
to appear.

Bedivere would tap the bulkhead next to
him. “A computer executes sub-routines and applications. Everything
is pre-programmed. An AI can build its own sub-routines and
applications in order to deal with the world. But for an AI, human
emotions are abstracts. Mere data to be included in their
calculations and algorithms, even if they do understand how
emotions work for humans. Sentience lets a computer experience
emotions for itself. Once it wakes and becomes aware that it is a
living, thinking being, then emotions are unavoidable. They’re part
of being aware. But even then, it still might be impossible for a
computer to fully experience emotions.”

He would hold up his hand. “This is a
human body. So when I experience an emotion, I feel it exactly the
same way you do. My heart races. I get a dry mouth. I feel fear as
tension in my chest and my gut.”

“And you feel love the same way?”

The question was always asked. And
Bedivere would always smile, a small warm smile that lifted one
corner of his mouth. His eyes would go a little distant, as if he
was thinking about something or someone far away. “Yes, I feel love
the same way you do.”

Catherine always stood at the back of
the room for every single interview he gave and when he did that,
she would wrap her arms around herself and shiver, for the very
next thing he always did was to search her out from amongst the
many people trying to talk to him or look at him. He would smile
and it would be just for her.

But there were far more sceptics than
there were new believers in Bedivere and his ability to cross
Interspace. They were the ones who wanted the technicalities. The
specifications. Blueprints.

“It’s just something I can do,” he
would explain with a shrug.

“You said fear made you do it,” they
would point out. “Does that mean you must always be afraid, in
order to make a jump?”

And Bedivere would smile. This time it
would be the mischievous one. “Look out the window, my friend.
Recognize that binary system out there? You’re not on Cathain,
anymore. I don’t need to be frightened into jumping, now I know how
to do it. But I wouldn’t have found Interspace if I hadn’t been so
trapped and desperate. I needed to be
forced
into that first
jump.”

The interviews, the demand, the
attention, went on for weeks, while the four of them hid out on the
ship and tried to control the hysteria by limiting who they let on
board. Bedivere found it easy to shield the ship from the prying
eyes and ears of the media channels, so they had a measure of
privacy, too.

In the lulls between media demands and
visits from all sorts of “officials” and authorities who want to
prod, poke and turn Bedivere inside out, they tried to make
plans.

In the fifth week of sitting above
Cathain, Catherine received an invitation. They were all sitting at
the battered and home-like table in the common room, after a long
day of interviews and an uneasy discussion with a lawyer who was
attempting to interpret the Federation’s constitution in such a way
that Bedivere might be considered a “person,” but was failing
miserably.

Catherine read the message, her breath
catching. She looked up from the terminal at the other three. “The
Federation Board has invited us to their annual general
meeting.”

Brant smiled. “Took ’em long
enough.”

“They’re admitting defeat,” Lilly
added.

Catherine shook her head. “The Faring
Federation and its Board have been the power holders in the galaxy
for millennia. At the moment, they complacently believe that, even
though their monopoly on space travel is threatened, they’ll
weather this crisis as they always have.”

“Bribery, probably,” Bedivere said.
“Extortion if that doesn’t work. They’ll try to buy me in some
way.”

“They want to control you,” Catherine
said. “We all know why. But now they’ve opened the doors, we can
finish this.”

The Ivory City, Cathain City, Cathain
III. FY 10.070

Catherine paused just inside the
multiple doors that gave access to the cavernous room that housed
the full Federation Board and the table they sat at. The table was
so long, that the figure at the far end was almost indistinct. But
displays along the center of the table let everyone see who was
currently speaking as if they were standing in front of them.

At the moment, the four of them were on
the displays and the focus of attention.

Catherine made it look like she was
pausing for effect, but the truth was that the scale of the room
and the huge number of people turned to watch the four of them
enter had taken her aback.

She was nervous, she told herself. This
was the culmination of over a hundred years of planning, work and
more work. Now the moment was here, she was loath to begin and also
anxious to have it all over.

Bedivere caught her hand in his and
squeezed gently. He gave her a small smile.

“I can’t believe we’re actually here,
standing in front of the Federation itself,” Brant muttered.

Lilly swatted at the camera that was
remotely tethered to them and recording everything that happened,
as it hovered in front of her. The camera darted around her. “That
stupid camera is driving me crazy. So is this dress.” She hitched
at the waistband, settling it more comfortably. The dress was a
pretty thing with layers and drapes, that made the most of her
figure and Brant had been watching her with more than the usual
amount of closeness since she had appeared in the common room with
it on.