The Wellstone

Chapter eight. Sun ride, sunset

The wrapping of wellstone film had turned a bit clearer, and “above” them, visible through the nearly transparent skylight, the translucent sail was unfurling, both under the pressure of fusion light and by the command of Bascal Edward de Towaji Lutui. Even without a mirrored surface, the impact of photons had already transferred enough momentum to swing their makeshift boat around. They flew “backward” or “downward” cabinfirst, with the sila’a—the pocket star—shining out of sight beneath the floorboards.

The control panel was just a programmed sheet of wellstone, pasted onto a wooden plank nailed low to the wall. The instruments and controls on it were two-dimensional cartoons, clear and contemporary in design, glowing softly in the primary colors and yet vaguely Polynesian somehow. Here was a gauge like a compass rosette from an old map; over there sat a diagram of the eight guylines connecting the cabin roof to the sail. The stylized images suggested some winching mechanism, as if the cables could be tightened or loosened on command, which they surely could not. But Bascal had mentioned a few times that that was the way to visualize the steering of a fetu’ula , a fetula, a stellar sail craft.

“It’s an issue of control authority,” he’d blathered absently, “very comparable to the rigging on a regular sailboat.”

The navigator’s seat was a legless chair, crisscrossed with canvas straps, and Bascal seemed at home there now, sitting with one foot under him and the other stretched out under the console. Despite the lack of gravity and the fact that he was tied down, his posture suggested an attention to balance. He was fussing happily with the controls, glancing up through the skylight every few seconds to watch the sail opening up.

“Keep us safe, Majesty,” Ho Ng said. “I don’t think the boys cared much for that bump.”

His tone was ingratiating and solicitous and shit-nosed, and of course the honorific was both idiotic and illegal, since even a crown prince was not the King of Sol. But Bascal didn’t seem to notice or mind. “You know I will, Ng. A healthy young body, maintained and optimized by fax filters, can handle an awful lot of abuse. I can virtually guarantee that you’ll be fine.”

He turned to Conrad. “We’ve got about ten more minutes of freefall before I opaque the sail. The planette is forty-seven kilometers from the sila’a. Ordinarily I’d just hail the star from here and call up its laser sail protocol, but without a network gate, or even a radio, that would be tricky. You know what we do about that?”

He waited for a long moment, but Conrad, tied down crookedly on his mattress, could only look back at him and shrug.

“Oh. Right,” Bascal said. Then, to the guard—whose feet were somehow still anchored to the floorboards— “Remove the cone of silence, please.” And then to Conrad again: “Sorry about all that. Really.”

The lifting of the silence was a physical sensation, like a breath of wind. “You’re a shit,” Conrad rasped.

Bascal turned back to his controls. “All that is necessary will be done, my friend. I’d rather you were on the right side of that principle.”

“Dead, shitty bodies,” Ho agreed.

Conrad saw no reason to reply. Above, the sail was almost fully open now, and billowing with underwater slowness. Worse: with honeyed, glacial slowness.

From the other room came sounds of commotion, followed by nervous laughter and hoots of dismay. “Hey, do not fuck around back there,” Bascal called out. “Ten gees can kill you falling ten centimeters. You motherless bastards tie down and shut up.”

“Ten gees?” Conrad repeated, his hoarse voice ringing with the worry of all these unpleasant surprises. He’d somehow envisioned the actual sailing as a graceful, languid affair.

“Quit whining, you baby. We’re young and strong, and fit as the morbidity filters can make us. We’ve been faxed; we’re immortal. Well, immorbid, anyway. And anyway, it’s more like eight and a half gees. I am rigidizing the sail ... Now.”

Like mandolin strings, the guylines jinged and sproinged, sending quasi-musical vibrations down through the cabin roof. The lazy batwing of the sail, arched away from the cabin and the guy ropes like a dome-tent roof, began to pull downward and spread out, becoming a flat translucent ceiling a hundred meters above them, its wings stretching out of sight beyond the edges of the skylight, extending more than seven hundred meters on either side, and half that much from top to bottom. The process took about twenty seconds, and chewed up only a tiny fraction of the solar energy raining up to them from the pocket star.

“Now I’m commencing rotation,” the prince announced.

“Why?”

“Because we’re flying backward, idiot. We have to point where we’re fucking going, and the sail needs to be in front of us when we mirrorize it, or the light pressure will push it against the cabin and we’ll get all fouled up in the ropes. You want that? No?”

“Why not just rigidize the lines?”

“They are rigidized.” Bascal huffed impatiently. “There’s a control issue, all right? It isn’t stable, pushing backwards like that. It’s ... look, just shut up and let me sail.”

Above, the left half of the wellstone took on a brighter shade of the same gray color, slightly less transparent than the right half. The guylines spanged and sproinged again, and Conrad felt himself pressed lightly against his tie-downs on the left side. The ship was heeling around, turning to face its rear—and its sail—at the sila’a. Presently, it bloomed at the edge of the skylight, a miniature sun no more than a few meters across. Just a pinpoint, really, yellow-orange and painfully bright, even through the veil of the wellstone.

Then the sail’s colors shifted again, swapping sides, and Conrad felt himself pressed the other way. The sila’a, though, continued its way across the skylight, finally pausing just past its left edge, eclipsed by the cabin’s wall and roof. Then the wellstone sail fabric was edge-on to the light, no longer illuminated like a lamp shade, and through its sudden translucence Conrad could make out the stars gliding gently to a halt.

Deep space, here we come, he breathed silently.

“Now this,” Bascal said, to no one in particular, “is the hard part. You ever try to back up a sailboat against the wind? The trick is to angle in, null your orbital velocity, and then use the sail itself as a brake, kind of like a parachute.”

Conrad couldn’t make sense of that remark. “A parachute? What are we, diving into the sun?”

“Onto the sila’a, yes. The fusing hydrogen sits on top of a neuble core, and there’s a solid wellstone surface on top of that, to hold it all in. We need to make contact with that outer shell in order to communicate with the machinery. But there’s an advantage in doing that: it gets us close enough to reflect the laser beam right back at the sila’a. Set up our own little resonating chamber, for extra pressure, extra thrust. It’ll be like shooting a rocket out of a bottle.”

“I ... have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve done this before?”

“Hmm? Oh, gods no. Nobody has.”

Conrad wanted to object: the very idea of backing into a star—even a miniature one—seemed like craziness of the highest order. And bouncing laser beams back into it, for extra thrust? Something had gone awry in their plans, some deeply fucked failure of communication, because he sure hadn’t agreed to any of this. But here and now, did they have a choice? Could they get back to the planette even if they wanted to? Even if Bascal would let them try?

“Okay,” Bascal said, “I’m going to turn us again.”

It was a stately process, and while it transpired Conrad couldn’t help noticing how bright it was getting outside, as the light of the sila’a drew ever nearer, illuminating the guylines and the translucent shrink-wrapping around the cabin. The sail itself was mostly invisible now, a batwing of utterly transparent material, with little squares of silver flitting across it, and clustering in particular on its right-hand side, like a swarm of sun-seeking insects.

“Asymmetric pressure,” Bascal explained, catching Conrad’s look. “The light pushes on the starboard half of the sail but not the port. That’s what turns us, pulls us around.”

“Why does it flicker like that?”

“Stability. The control system is keeping the sail from fluttering or sliding out sideways against the guylines. It’s like the tensioning springs on a spinnaker tack.... Well, you’ve never been sailing, so never mind. But yeah, it’s supposed to do that.”

Gradually, the flickering squares of silver diminished in number, and spread themselves more evenly across the sail, and began to gleam in a really painful way as the sila’a brightened and neared behind them.

“Boy, that’s bright,” Bascal observed. He did something to the controls on his panel, and the squares of silver became squares of bronze, and the shrink-wrapping above the skylight turned a translucent shade of black that was very close to the natural color of wellstone. It blotted out the remaining stars, and made a shimmery halo of the sail and guylines.

Conrad began to notice a sensation of weight, pulling and pressing him into the mattress again.

“Gravity,” Ho Ng said. “Is that the star I’m feeling underneath me, Sire?”

“Yeah,” Bascal told him absently. He was still fiddling with the controls, looking annoyed about something. “Well, it’s also our deceleration. We’re sort of hovering right now. Or we will be in another minute. I’m trying not to bump us too hard.”

Against the surface of a star. Good God. Against the solid surface of a manmade star that was so unimaginably hot that it could warm a planette, could cook a dinner or burn a young man’s face, from forty-seven kilometers away. And yes, it was definitely getting warmer in here!

“Are we going to be cooked, Bas?” he couldn’t help asking.

“No,” the prince said, sounding even more annoyed. But he fiddled some more, and the view outside the windows went totally black for a moment, and then mirror-bright, reflecting the cabin’s interior lighting back in lumpy, funhouse-mirror ways.

Then he looked alarmed, and had time to say “Whoops” in the moment before something very solid and very heavy slammed up into the center of the cabin’s floor.

BAM!

Even as he was slammed into his mattress and jerked against its straps, Conrad was aware of the sounds of cracking and splintering. He even had time to note that these sounds, however brief and mild, were just about the most alarming thing you could possibly hear on board a wooden spaceship. And even when the cracking stopped, the floor itself groaned. Something was bending it in a way it had never been bent before, and the force of gravity— the invisible hand pressing Conrad into his padding— seemed much too strong. Much stronger than at the surface of Camp Friendly.

“Get us off this thing!” he shouted at Bascal. “It’s breaking, it’s going to break! How do you talk to the star?”

“Verbally, I assume,” Bascal said, sounding a bit shaken himself. “Otherwise we’re in real trouble.” Then he turned his head toward the floor and shouted, “Hello? Sila’a? Can you give us laser sail protocol, please?”

Nothing happened.

Nothing except that Conrad felt his rage boil over. This was their plan? Ramming a star and then shouting at it? Asking nicely? This was their fucking plan?

“Laser sail protocol!” Bascal shouted, more loudly. Then screamed, probably as loudly as he was able, “Laser fucking sail! Now!”

Conrad snarled. “You’re a goddamned idiot, Bascal. Thanks for this.”

“Oh,” Bascal said. “Shit. I forgot to mirrorize the sail.”

He touched the control panel, and then—

They went. Something caught them. Conrad could feel the sail bulging outward against its own incredible stiffness, the tight guylines suddenly straining, the crushing/ pressing ball of the sila’a, maybe four burning meters across, falling out beneath them and dropping away, away.

There was nothing stately about it: the other thing Conrad felt was the air crushing out of him, like an iron-weighted pillow settling down on his chest. Taking the next breath was like lifting barbells with his lungs. His vision had gone grainy and narrow, and he felt, in a distinctly physical way, that he was looking out through a tunnel from the back of his brain. His soul had fled from its usual spot just behind the eyes, had been squeezed back against the barrier of his skull. If it squeezed any farther, it would leave his body altogether.

The windows had gone transparent again, or anyway they were admitting light—a biting monochromatic violet, mirrored brightly in the checkered silver of the sail and shimmering with the telltale interference gleams and darknesses of reflected laser. The cabin groaned and shrieked, and from somewhere came—again!—the long and loud and ominous crack of splintering wood. But Conrad barely noticed, barely considered it. He dragged a breath in and then let it whoosh back out. Dragged it in, let it out.

New squares of silver appeared here and there, the checkerboard sail filling as the sila’a drew smaller and dimmer and more distant beneath them. Conrad understood, in a vague way, that Bascal was throttling their acceleration, upping the reflectivity of the sail to draw out more velocity, more speed, keeping them right at the limits of human endurance. He wished he’d asked more questions during the planning phase—especially given the whole Garbage Day fiasco—but this was a vague thought as well, pieced together in the brief interval between Herculean breaths. He dragged one in and let it out. Dragged it in, let it out.

It went on like that until his sense of time began to flicker out. A minute? Two? And still it continued on, the pain and struggle, the slow grinding of wood against wood. He could feel his flesh bruising, his blood pooling, his bones and muscles and cartilage stretching and twisting in unnatural ways. The pain grew, and the light dimmed, and his breath came harder and harder, and he knew that if they somehow survived he would be sore for weeks.

Finally—finally!—the pressure began to ease. The sail above them was pure mirror from end to end, reflecting a field of fixed stars and a dwindling violet minisun no brighter than a searchlight. But the pressure eased too slowly, and the pain in every part of his body continued to build. He could tell time by it—a pain clock. He had the luxury now of feeling impatient, and feel it he did, marking the passage of every moment.

As soon as it felt possible and safe, he rolled over onto his side. This brought him face-to-face with Bascal, whose customary grin was long gone. He looked drawn and pained, his brown face shining, his hair matted down with sweat. And yet, his right arm was raised and extended, doing something or other on the control panel.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Conrad asked.

“Yes,” Bascal replied tightly.

Indeed, the arm looked both bleached and blackened by its ordeal.

“Shouldn’t you stop?”

Bascal grimaced. “Kind of, yeah. I’m ... going to change seats.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Naw. We’re a minute into the run, and we’ll be holding steady at two gees for a couple minutes here. I’ve had worse.”

“A minute?” Conrad found that figure very hard to believe—surely it should be an hour!—but there it was on the panel’s chronometer: 01:08, 01:09, 01:10 ...

The acceleration was steady now, and yes, truthfully, not so terrible. Even so, Bascal groaned in obvious pain as he undid his tie-downs and slithered out of the nav chair. The pale right arm, drained of blood, didn’t seem to be working well; it flopped around numbly while Bascal worked with his left. When he was free of the straps, he scooted his rump along the floor for half a meter, until he was seated beside his empty mattress. He didn’t try to lift or roll himself into it.

“You make me proud,” Ho said to Bascal, in a tired and grating voice. He was struggling to sit up.

Conrad decided to join him in this, but thought better of it when his back screamed in protest. And then thought better of that when he lay back down and felt the sweaty mattress pressing smotheringly against the side of his face. So he did sit up, and really, it didn’t feel too bad. He was alive, and not seriously hurt, although yeah, he was going to be very, very sore.

People were coughing and groaning and crying in the other room. There was the unmistakable clump! clump! of heavy footsteps on the wooden floor, and then Xmary was standing there, framed in the doorway in a pair of camp culottes and a tee shirt cut off to display her navel, and with the reflected purple of the sila’a laser shining down through the skylights, Conrad could distinctly see her nipples and the outline of her hips and thighs. Her hair was pulled back in the kind of topknot the centenarians were wearing lately, and like many young women, she’d subtly nudged her physical development in a compact but adult direction, and did not look at all like a child in this light.

“Bascal,” she said, quickly and seriously, “something’s wrong with Raoul. He’s coughing, and there’s blood coming out.”

“I’m sailing, dear,” Bascal answered tightly. And yeah, he could reach the controls even from his mattress.

“What should we do?”

“Well, if I don’t keep an eye on these heading corrections, there’s going to be something wrong with all of us, hmm? Just hold his hand or something. Ask the guards.”

“Is it a lot of blood?” Conrad asked.

She shook her head. “No, just, like, spots of it. Can you come look? Please?”

“Yeah,” he said, and made a show of rising without any grimaces or groans. This wasn’t actually so difficult—he felt like he was carrying someone on his back, but no longer as if the life were being crushed out of him. It did hurt a lot to walk, though.

The cabin’s main room was like something from an old movie: wounded men sprawling on narrow, filthy beds. There was blood on several of them, and more streaming out from the finger-pinched noses of a couple of scared-looking boys. But it was Raoul who really looked bad— gray and bruised, with dark baggy circles under his eyes and blood-flecked spittle on his chin and tee shirt. His chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow rhythm.

“You okay?” Conrad asked him, stupidly.

Raoul looked up with frightened eyes, and shook his head. Nope.

“He was coughing,” Xmary said.

Awkwardly, Conrad crouched down beside the bloody mattress. “You’re breathing kind of fast. Can you slow it down?”

Again, Raoul shook his head. No. Definitely not.

“Can you talk?”

No.

“It could be his lungs,” Conrad said, although he had no idea. Why was she asking him for help? What could he do? “This goes way beyond first-aid training.”

“How do we help him?” Xmary demanded.

“I don’t know,” Conrad said honestly. The usual treatment for severe injuries was to throw the victim into the nearest fax machine, and print out an undamaged copy. Was that possible in this case, with the network gates disabled and the machinery bound by weird instructions from the king? He glanced up at the fax machine, bolted against the room’s innermost wall. The divider wall separating it from the main room had been removed two days ago. They had clear access if they needed it.

“Fax, will you take him? Repair him?”

“Insufficient buffer mass,” the fax answered. “I can accept a body and correct its pattern, but reinstantiation will not be possible.”

“Why?” Conrad asked. “Can’t you just use his own mass? Disassemble him and then rebuild him?”

The fax spoke slowly, as if inventing the art of conversation as it went along. “My mass buffers have been depleted by recent operations. Sir. The operation you suggest would bring several of them, temporarily, into a negative mass regime, which is not possible.”

Shit. Conrad had shoveled some dirt in there a few days ago, on Bascal’s advice, but he hadn’t checked the levels since then. Hadn’t really thought about it at all. Did dirt even have the right elements in it?

“Can we throw some of the food in?” someone suggested.

“Or take a huge crap in the toilet?” That was Steve Grush, trying to be funny. Or maybe not; the sink and shower and toilet plumbing ran into and out of the fax in a maze of shiny wellstone pipes. A piece of crap would, in fact, be whisked apart into component atoms and stored in the appropriate mass buffers.

“Hurry up,” Xmary said, in a deadly serious tone. And with good reason: Raoul’s eyes had rolled upward, so that only the whites were showing, and those whites—mostly red—were jiggling and jittering in a spasmodic way. His breathing had grown even faster and shallower. He was dying, plain and simple.

“Fax,” Conrad said, “can we just stuff him in there, and print him out later?”

“Certainly.”

Conrad and Xmary shared a quick glance, nodded at each other, and grabbed Raoul by the arms while Steve Grush undid his straps. The only hard part was the confusing mess of bodies and mattresses between them and the fax, but people were scrambling out of the way, or moving to help. Raoul’s legs were grabbed as well, and his bottom, and as a group they gave him the old heave-ho. It seemed very strange, to stuff a limp, twitching body through the solid-looking print plate of the fax. But it wasn’t really solid. Even a cursory inspection showed it was insubstantial, actually a fog of tiny machines sprouting tinier machines sprouting quantum doodads far too small to be visible. And Raoul’s body went right through it, like a diver through the surface of Adventure Lake.

He was saved. Literally. In memory.

“Anyone else?” Conrad asked anxiously, turning to survey the room. But all the other boys were shaking their heads, hiding their hands. No sir, not me.

“Sure?” he pressed, an edge of humor finally creeping into his voice. But there were no takers, and Conrad had begun to feel distinctly light on his feet. He turned toward the navigation room. The bridge, he supposed they should call it. “Hey Bascal, how low is this gravity going to get?”

“Zero!” Bascal called back, sounding annoyed. “Enjoy it while it lasts!”

Oh. Right. As they drew away from the sila’a, as its laser brightness faded and dimmed, there was nothing to push them, no source of acceleration. Conrad had known this, and yet somehow he’d been visualizing them all walking around in here for two months. Not drifting, not floating. Because it was a log cabin, he supposed. Because it had such a definite floor and ceiling, and belonged on the ground.

In that moment, it dawned on him that he really did have an impulse problem. He had a brain but wasn’t using it, and as a result everything—even the obvious things—kept coming to him as nasty surprises. Hell, they didn’t have any facilities in here for zero gravity. How were they going to sleep? To store things? To use the toilet? Now there was an unpleasant thought! And what had all these other kids been thinking? Disbelieving in the entire scheme, never thinking it would really happen? That, or relying on Bascal to work it all out. Or rather, Bascal and his team, meaning basically just Conrad, since Bascal didn’t care and nobody else seemed to worry much how anything worked. Except Peter, whom they’d left behind on the planette.

“Oh boy,” he said to Xmary. “This is going to be a hell of a trip.”

The illusion of gravity dropped away over the next several minutes while Conrad pointed and gestured and spoke urgently, throwing together impromptu work details to clean up the things that had already fallen and broken, and to lash everything else down, and to come up with covers and hoods for the bathroom fixtures before things could get any worse in there. By the time they were twenty minutes into the flight, gravity was down to a tenth of a gee, and they were all dancing giddily on air.

It didn’t surprise Conrad when people ignored him. What did surprise him was the ease and complicity with which most of them listened and, albeit in offhand and slipshod ways, obeyed. Was this because he was friends with Bascal? (Was he still friends with Bascal, and did he even want to be?) Or was it simply because there were obvious things that needed doing, and he was the only one pointing them out?

The fax proved willing to provide first-aid supplies— crafted from the atoms that had been Raoul Sanchez—so the nosebleeds were soon plugged and coagulated, the sprains iced, the bruises warmed and moistened. Tape bandages were wrapped around questionable limbs and joints, while skin sealants were applied to the many cuts and abrasions the boys had suffered. Anti-inflammatory medications were passed around liberally; the insults of heavy gee had spared no one.

Even Xmary had her share of ouches. Conrad found himself dabbing her middle back with sealant foam while she held the back of her shirt up over one shoulder with a bruisy-looking arm.

“Ow,” she said.

“Sorry. I’m almost done.”

“Does it look bad?”

“It looks painful,” Conrad admitted. The wound was a flap of skin the size of his pinkie nail, not especially bloody for some reason, but partly separated from the flesh beneath. He smoothed it back in place with the sealant, then blew on it to hasten its drying, all the while acutely conscious of the smoothness of her skin. “What did you do?”

“Fell,” she said. “The edge of the mattress caught me.”

“A mattress did this? Gods.”

“Yeah.” She lowered her shirt.

“What the fucky hell?” said Ho Ng’s voice. Conrad turned, and saw Ho there glowering in the doorway.

“What?” he asked, mostly innocently.

Ho stepped forward. “Who said you could touch the princess?”

“What princess?”

“He’s sealing a cut,” Xmary snapped, standing up and straightening her clothing. This effort proved both difficult and elaborate; what little “gravity” they had left was gently pulling things to the floor, but any movement would kick it all up again. She bounced several times on her toes before settling to the floor again, and Conrad couldn’t help but notice the loose jiggle of her small breasts, and wonder what they looked like under there. She gestured around her with an arm—another elaborate effort. “Use your eyes, Ho. We’ve got casualties.”

“I’ll use my eyes,” he said, staring her up and down with creepy lust, humorless and undisguised.

She glided toward him like a ballerina, and managed to stop gracefully, right in his face. “Watch yourself.”

If it was a staring contest, she won it right away; Ho turned his glare on Conrad. “Don’t touch her again.”

“Or what?” he couldn’t help asking. Shooting his mouth off again, yes, heedless of consequence. How many losing battles had he fought for the sake of these verbal jabs? Not that Ho could punch him or kick him or grapple him, not in the immediate presence of two Palace Guards. If rumors were any guide, the things could not only move fast enough to generate whipcracks and sonic booms, but could sense the intention of violence before the fact, could read it in the brain and the nerves and the tensing of muscles. Tazzing a punch was one thing, but how would they respond to an impending act of genuine malice?

Conrad was tired of Ho. If he could fight, it might be better to just get it over with, and give this fucker something to think about next time. On the other hand, he was under no illusion that he could win the fight, or that standing up for himself would magically end the threats and humiliations. It’d make them worse, probably.

Damn it, he’d waited long enough for his fear to kick in. Real fear. It was balanced by anger, what with Peter abandoned to the elements and Raoul stuffed in a fax machine and used for buffer mass. And balanced also by lust and pride; in front of Xmary, who was probably the only girl for ten AU in every direction, he had no interest in looking timid.

“Or what?” he repeated, but his voice broke, betraying his fright. The room had gone silent, except for the gentle whirring of the Palace Guard as it turned its head to regard them.

Bascal appeared behind Ho, tapping him on the shoulder. “Boys,” he said. “Or rather, men! What’s this posturing all about?”

“He touched your woman,” Ho said, stepping aside without turning, his eyes still locked on Conrad.

Bascal took another step into the room. “Is this true?” The question was directed at Xmary, not Conrad.

“He was sealing a cut,” Xmary said. “We have a lot of injuries back here.”

“No doubt,” Bascal agreed, nodding vaguely. His eyes settled on Conrad. “Thank you for helping. In the future, though, try to check with me first. Or Ho. All right?”

“Um, sure,” Conrad said, keeping his tone neutral, though his cheeks grew hot. There was his answer: the pecking order had been rearranged. Conrad was no longer the prince’s confidant, Ho Ng was. The idea would be funny if it weren’t so sickening. “No concern.”

Bascal surveyed the room, taking note of the bandages and bloodstains. “Rough ride,” he said.

“You’re hurt,” Xmary observed, looking at the pale, bruisy flesh of his right arm.

He swung it, then rubbed it, then swung it again. “I’ll be all right. I just need to get some blood back into it. Are we, uh, are we one man short? One more, I mean?”

She nodded. “We had to save Raoul in the fax. Conrad’s idea.”

Bascal’s gaze turned back on Conrad. “Quick thinking, boyo. Very good.” He paused a moment, then tapped his jaw and said, “Now that you mention it, we’ve got some other passengers aboard this fetula who weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the voyage. Maybe we should do them a favor as well.”

“Sir?” Ho said, gliding a step forward.

Bascal nodded at him. “Yeah. Ng, would you please escort Khen and James and Bert into the fax for safekeeping?”

He took her promise, for a start,

And took her hand in his, and,

In love he took her heart.

He took her lips against his own,

He took that girl apart!

— “Male-Ordered Bride”

BASCAL EDWARD DE TOWAJI LUTUI, age 12