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Peace of Noise
Peace of Noise - Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
“I WON’T DO this anymore!” Sina barks and folds her arms in front of her chest. “It’s ridiculous! This whole trip is ridiculous! I want to return to Gaia immediately, or even better, the Human Unity!”
She looks fiercely at Saros, who doesn’t give damn about Sina’s unhappiness.
We’re sitting on the bridge of Saros’s flag ship, the Matev, and as usual I hold my arm out pointing in the direction of the Star of Sound while Saros calculates the next jump.
“Thanks, Jaiah, I got it,” Saros says in his pleasant bass and I lower my arm.
“Hey, I’m talking to you!” Sina shouts.
“We have heard you, Sina,” Saros says.
“Sina, it’s a great adventure,” Priar says, trying to be patient and soft.
“Fuck your adventure, this ain’t no adventure, it’s folly!”
I feel her stare in my back but I refuse to turn around to look at her.
“Sina, you’re excused,” Saros says suddenly.
I’ve been wondering how long he would put up with Sina’s anger and her complaining. Now I got my answer… it took five jumps. He was more patient with her than I expected him to be.
“Thank you!” Sina says with a grunt and promptly leaves the bridge.
Priar heaves a big sigh.
“Arlis, to the bridge please,” Saros says after pushing a button on the armrest of his seat.
“Who’s Arlis?” I ask.
“One of my benders, she’s a bit odd, but you’ll like her.”
“She can’t be odder than Sina,” Priar mutters.
“She isn’t,” Saros says and there is a big grin in his real voice that Priar unfortunately cannot hear.
Sina has done five jumps. Our sixth and all others following, I suppose, will be handled by the Heelith engineer swarms on board. Saros mentioned that there are two. I haven’t met either of them yet. After the initial jump of a hundred light years to get away from Heelith Homeworld, we now cover two hundred light years per jump. In a few moments we’ll be one thousand one hundred light years away from Heelith Homeworld. The thought makes me fidget in my seat.
I sit on my chair for humans with Saros behind me and look into the void. Since Sina’s human chair beside me is now empty, Priar sits down. The void is boring. Nothing but the black of space and an occasional blip of a star is all we see in this interstellar nothingness.
The Star of Sound is still ahead and I’m starting to wonder whether Sina is right and whether Flinx and the Star of Sound are fooling me and my sense of direction is only an illusion, a result of Flinx’s presumed madness. The initial joy of starting this journey has worn off and the beast of doubt sneaks into my head.
The door to the bridge opens and Arlis enters. She has a reddish hide and black fangs, which is the direct opposite of Saros’s short black feathers and red fangs, and she hums a melody as she joins us. Her torso gown is white as that of all space benders and dotted with lots of colorful symbols.
“Hi everyone!” she says, then looks over Saros’s shoulder at the coordinates on the small 3D hologram of the surrounding space that Saros calculated. I am stunned that she gets so close to Saros and seems so familiar with him. She has a soothing mezzo soprano, not too low, not too high, and a quirky disorder in her voice. Every few tones she whistles oddly.
“Hi, Arlis, nice to meet you, I’m Jaiah.”
“Oh, I know who you are, everyone knows who you are,” she says.
I give that a mock bow.
“Hi, I’m Priar.”
“I know who you are as well, Priar, you were there when Jaiah got shot. The only person left standing.”
“That I was indeed.” Priar grins at her and that hole appears in his cheek from his old facial injury. In the whiteness of the Matev’s bridge his marred face stands out even more than usual.
“That whistling sound you are making…” I say.
“That’s the Heelith version of a stutter,” Arlis says jollily. “I’ve been bullied for it my entire life.”
“Um, sorry, I had no intention to bully you whatsoever.”
“I know, Jaiah, no worries.”
“Arlis, if you please,” Saros says.
“Of course, President.”
Saros pushes buttons and the imminent jump chime rings through the ship, which Priar cannot hear. Nari is not with us because she is trying her best to avoid Sina. I cannot hold that against her. I’m looking forward to having Nari on the bridge from now on for jumps. Sudak, too. He has also been avoiding Sina.
With the chime for the imminent jump, the bridge of the Matev transforms. If the Matev is not in tactical mode, the oval, egg-shaped bridge is black and white, with six black Heelith seats that grow out of the floor. Their armrests contain all connections to the computer brain of the ship. The two human chairs for Sina and myself look very much out of place. All seats face a large window and behind the seats is the elevator door, and left and right are two doors that lead to corridors, which end at the commander’s ready rooms and the engineering section.
When the ship goes to tactical, which includes during jumps, the small hologram next to Saros’s seat “explodes” and transforms the entire bridge into a three-dimensional map. The white walls blacken and it’s as if we are hovering in space. It looks fantastic and even after five jumps I’m still thrilled.
Arlis jumps us and I relish in the voice of the universe. It’s still the same cheer from our first Star of Sound quest jump, different from all the other jumps I heard in my life before the start of this special journey.
“What did it sound like?” Saros asks.
“No change, still cheering us on. What’s that?” I ask and point ahead at four faint light dots in the distance that are too close and too symmetric to be stars.
The moment I ask, an alarm beeps that I have not yet heard from the Matev.
“You got to be kidding me,” Arlis says, still looking over Saros’s shoulder.
“It’s another ship!” Saros barks.
“A ship? Out here?” Priar asks.
Saros’s fingers and antennae fly over the controls in his armchair. A part of the window in front of us enlarges the area ahead. I hold my breath.
The design of the ship looks human. A detachable drive section clings to a cubic hangar bay, which is attached to the “olive” housing the quarters of the crew, and then the “pea”, which is the command center. All four sections can be separated to heighten the chances of survival of the units in an emergency. This ship looks smaller than Admiral Delaro’s battle cruiser, whose infirmary I know quite well, but more streamlined and modern at the same time. A pang of schadenfreude hits me; if Sina had done this jump, she’d be very happy and excited now, but, she preferred to be sulky and left, missing this encounter.
A human’s voice bellows over the Matev’s bridge.
“This is the Human exploration vessel Asher, hailing the Heelith cruiser. We are on a peaceful exploration mission. Please respond.”
“The Asher?” I yell in disbelief.
“You know this ship?” Saros barks.
“Not personally, but before I came to the Homeworld, I was wondering how to get to the Origin and looked for Human research ships on our network just out of sheer despair. The Asher is one such research ship, but what the hell are they doing here? This cannot be coincidence.”
Saros grunts, more than displeased. “Be quiet, Jaiah, don’t reveal you’re on board.”
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