“Bravo!” Narcís’s bottomless stomach is always ready for the next feast. Especially if there’s good Earth wine to wash it down. “Maybe you’re a self-taught plebe, but your list of successful First Contacts is still longer than Jürgen’s,” he reminds me, laying an arm as thick as my thigh across my shoulders.
This, of course, raises my spirits a little.
But not as much as Nerys does when, stepping into the elevators we take down to the habitat’s ground level, she whispers affectionately into my ear, “It doesn’t matter who makes Contact with those extragalactics, Josué! I love you, and not that robotic German. And tonight I’m going to show you again how much. At your place! We’ll use up your annual water allotment in the best way you can imagine!”
I’m smiling like the drog that subsumed the bisork, like the verastis that parasitized the kindo—or, sticking to clichés, like the cat that swallowed the canary (though I’ve never seen a canary… )—while I picture what awaits me.
I’ll report to the Gaudí tomorrow totally exhausted. But the pleasure will have been worth every last ATP molecule I expend. Oh, to have a biobattery implant, like the fourth-gen proteans.
Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. Wet, splashing pleasure. Nothing like sex with a mermaid. Especially if you do it in the bath, or best of all in the shower. Because in bed, with all the mucus they give off… Afterward, I’ve often had to throw out the sheets, and sometimes even the mattress.
“I smell another wild goose chase. The hypergraph doesn’t pick up any jumps in or out for the past thirty-six hours. But there might be a very small worldship, or maybe one that’s been here for longer than that,” Amaya tells us, her voice sounding tired. “Let’s check the gravimeter. No; just as I suspected, this is a clean, boring system, nearly deserted. Apart from the primary, it only contains a super-Jupiter with… ”
Amaya, a statuesque, dark-eyed brunette, is strangely attractive despite her insistence on wearing her dark hair so short. If only she were a man, if only she had any interest in men. I wouldn’t mind sharing a bed with a him like her some night.
“… with twenty-one satellites and—what’s this?” Our Amaya’s voice is suddenly tinged with interest, and half the crew, clustered behind her in the narrow instrument chamber, tremble with excitement. “Oh, right. Comets. Lots of them. How intriguing. Astrophysically speaking, I mean.”
Nuria, the ship’s astrophysicist, with blue eyes, chestnut hair, and skin so tan she might have been born in the Caribbean, squeezes her lips tight at this dig. (She was Amaya’s partner until last year, and there’s still some bitterness between them about the breakup, which wasn’t altogether friendly.) But she remains stoically silent, stroking Antares, who purrs in her arms, blissfully oblivious to the tensions among us.
Our umpteenth disappointment translates into a chorus of sighs. Amaya’s tone returns to its former monotone. “Nothing on the gammatelescope. Besides the emissions from the primary, I mean. Beta Hydri I think this would be, according to the old Earth star charts. Has anyone recorded its data on the ship’s log? I can’t do everything myself. Nothing in the x-ray range, either. Well, it’s a blue giant, so that would be strange, wouldn’t it? The spectrographs say that its one big planet has a totally boring hydrogen-helium atmosphere, with a liquid core of… ”
“Drop it, Amaya,” Captain Berenguer orders her with a yawn. “Who cares about the atmosphere of one more gas giant? Disconnect. We’re outta here.” He turns to the navigator. “Gisela.”
“All ready for the next leap, Captain!” The freckle-faced, slender redhead jumps up enthusiastically. All she needs to do to complete the picture is stand at attention and salute, like they do in the Navy she served in until less than a year ago. “I haven’t stowed the antennae yet, so we can execute a jump right now.”
Not pretty, for sure, but she’s got something. Oh, if only she were a man…
Well, if she were, I probably would have slept with her by now and wouldn’t be wasting so much time thinking about it. Weird, huh?
Not the best time to be thinking about it, either: as usual, I’m getting lost in digressions and more digressions, at the exact moment when I should be focusing my attention.
A bit past the exact moment, in fact.
“It was reckless of you to leave the antennae out. A single micrometeor impact could have… ” Amaya begins to scold. And we know she’s right, but we also know that if Gisela had given in to Amaya’s sexual advances a few months ago, instead of to our stuck-up sensor tech Jordi’s, there wouldn’t have been any complaints.
A delicate thing, group dynamics on a ship.
Captain Berenguer plays the conciliator, as always.
“Bah, it doesn’t hurt them to stay out for a couple minutes. Nothing will happen, Amaya. You yourself said this system is clean. And leaving them deployed saves us time. This’ll be our fourteenth lightning jump today; after the next one, we’ll recharge the batteries.” His tone shifts from friendly to authoritarian: “Stations, everyone! Hustle! Hyperjumping in one minute, starting….” He glances at the chronometer, almost lost in the bustling instrument panel that is Amaya’s undisputed domain, and at last he says, “Starting now! Destination, Gamma Hydri. We’ll keep combing this constellation. Five seconds before the jump, we disconnect the artificial gravity! On your toes! That means you, too, Josué!”
Lots of things have changed on merchant ships since the times when they were propelled by oars or sails, but some stuff endures even in this era of hyperengines. Pushing, jostling, a call to action stations, Antares meowing in protest at being tossed like a ball from Nuria’s hands to those of Jordi, his official owner.
We all rush to our places, the soles of our shoes slapping the corridor floors. There are ten of us on board the eighteen-thousand-ton Antoni Gaudí: hypernavigator, sensor tech, life support tech, conventional engine tech, captain, first mate, third officer, trade economist, astrophysicist, and me.
Most know at least two professions inside and out. For example, Amaya is not only the best sensor technician I’ve ever worked with, and a better than adequate planetologist, she’s also the onboard medic. Of course, that doesn’t mean what it did centuries ago; she just has a slightly better knack with automated medical care than the rest of us.
Jordi Barceló, our brawny third officer, Gisela’s current partner and my secret nemesis, was in the Navy, so he’s familiar enough with military tactics to serve as our gunner or infantry operative under the command of Rómulo, the first mate and weapons expert.
Manuel (Manu for short), our conventional engines specialist, is our golden-fingered handyman, able to fix almost anything, from a disintegrator to a toaster.
Nuria, the blue-eyed astrophysicist and Amaya’s former lover, is also our computer programmer, though Captain Berenguer himself could do a respectable job of it if he had to.
I’m the only one with just one job. Condomnaut, and that’s it. No other technoscientific skills worth mentioning. So when there’s no Aliens around to make Contact with, and no need for unskilled assistance (like holding a hydraulic wrench while someone changes the gyroscope on an inertial engine), I can kick back and relax. Like now.
It’s surprising how long a minute can stretch and how many things you can do in fifty seconds if you know every inch of the confined space on your ship. Just twenty seconds and I’m sitting in my armchair, safety mesh in place, pleasantly surrounded by the greenery of the ample onboard greenhouse-garden-gym. At forty-five seconds I’m joined by Rosalía, the trade economist and the second exobiologist on board (the first is Pau, our life-support tech, of course). A big blond, built square like a football linebacker, but very feminine—from what Jordi told me one night.