The Clan Maeris Fleet departed Irpul-4 within the hour and without further incident, fully loaded for their next stop at Epsilon Sextanis-6. The SpaceTime jump would take the fleet five standard days.
Five days of routine, nonstop physical training and education. Five days for Naero to wrap her head around the loss of her parents, mourn for them, and find a way to not be insane and move on.
Enough time to get rid of the hallucination on her forehead and not go completely whacko. Her mind was already on overload.
She had more than enough to worry about, what with the intrigue surrounding her parents’ deaths, and the Corps trying to abduct her and her brother–for reasons still unknown.
Let alone trying to figure out where she and Jan stood with the Clan Fleet, and what kind of future they had there, if any.
At least Naero was used to the jump routine; she’d lived it all her life.
Spacers made good use of their down time–if any could even call it that–to better themselves. They never stopped improving, never stopped learning. They worked hard, trained hard, and played hard in their off hours.
She didn’t really feel much like slacking off, but she also understood how important rest and relaxation were to a balanced life…and mind. The delusions she suffered and her mental state had Naero more worried than anything else.
Her mother used to say that the point of a blade could only stay so sharp for so long before it blunted or snapped. Even a razor’s edge could be honed too thin, and grow weak and brittle.
Naero’s hallucinations proved how fragile she was.
In the Spacer concept of overall personal balance and harmony, knowledge and skill translated into survival and success. Yet they should also be rewarded with comfort, ease, and pleasure.
After she did manage to fall asleep, she had another nightmare in which she again struggled against a similar dark power that threatened to swallow her up. This time, a young, glowing blue woman with white hair appeared, studying her, just out of reach.
“Help me!” Naero begged.
“I’m not sure if I should,” the blue female said, clearly afraid of her. “What are you?”
“I’m in trouble. I need help!”
“What are you?” the blue woman repeated in fear.
Naero woke up startled and gasping, just like before. What was her madness trying to tell her? Did it make any sense at all?
What was she?
Exhausted, she forced herself to rest some more.
On jump day number one, Naero flashed out of her bunk at five bells, tore off her headband in the mirror, and looked for her new third eye.
She cupped her hand over her mouth. She nearly wept.
The extra eye–proof of her growing insanity–was gone.
Morning PT began, intense physical training. Stretching, running, weights, and a brutal, punishing obstacle course, parts of it in zero-G.
Then they broke off into education rooms for pilot training.
She and Jan and the rest of the flight and command crews spent most of the morning going through interstellar navigational problems, with Aunt Sleak as the instructor.
First they worked through problems using various navigational programs. Then they used handcomps. Then write boards, and finally in their heads–all in specified time limits, according to Spacer military regs.
Jan breezed through it all, navigation his gift.
Naero struggled when it came to scratch boards and doing it all in her head. She had to hang back after the session was over and work with Aunt Sleak. That took an hour longer after everyone else was dismissed.
Great. She wouldn’t hear the end of that, from anyone. But at least she wasn’t going nuts.
After they finished, as if that humiliation wasn’t bad enough, she was late for her sparring sessions...with Aunt Sleak and several of the crew’s best fighters. Which included her smug little brother.
Why did he seem to be rising above it all? Especially while she moped around and didn’t feel like doing much of anything?
Aunt Sleak followed right behind her, all the merry way to the training center on board The Dromon.
“We’re holding a wake for your parents on third night,” was all that her aunt said, out of the black.
A Spacer Wake. So awesome. Things just kept getting better.
A big stupid party celebrating her parents’ snuffed out lives.
She didn’t feel like a party. She’d never see them again.
She and Jan didn’t even have a fingernail from either of them.
Her guts swirled like a typhoon inside of her.
Perhaps she needed to hit something after all.
Naero attached programmable, nanoreactive gelpads to her flight togs in the sparring room, covering her head, joints, hands and feet with the same. An invention of the Mystics that modified the Nytex of their suits, the gelpads formed reactive smartarmor, affording some protection against the worst blows. Yet never enough.
Pain. Always an effective teacher in combat training.
Naero waded into three separate clashes with good Clan fighters in different simulated situations.
Naero relied on her own rampant, acrobatic freestyle that combined the best techniques gleaned from each of her formidable fighting parents. Her unique fighting style was fast, intense, inventive and overpowering.
A good part of it was very similar to her mom’s champion fighting style, from her days as The Invincible Cyclone.
Naero also used unusual angles of attack, walls, floors, and even ceilings and an opponent’s own body, momentum, and blind sides against her opponent.
With her pent-up, slow-burn fury, she put all three opponents down before they hardly touched her.
No one cheered or taunted like they usually did in the sparring arena. In fact, they were strangely quiet.
Then Aunt Sleak took on Naero, Jan, and Saemar.
All three at once.
Aunt Sleak grinned and narrowed her eyes to black lines. “Come taste some pain,” she told them.
They did their best to rush her from three sides in a combo attack.
Aunt Sleak tripslung Jan into Saemar, knocking their heads together, dazing them both.
Double reverse kicks kept Naero blocking, forcing her to pull back.
Aunt Sleak pressed her assault, hand and foot techniques blazing. All of them would have been on target, too.
Any one of them would have taken Naero down.
If not for her exceptional speed.
Yet speed alone was never enough against Aunt Sleak. She was nearly as fast, and very clever and adaptive. She could read a contest like Naero only wished she herself could.
Naero only got in a few painful counters. Her knifestrike to the neck just missed the throat.
How could her aunt instinctively know to dodge like that?
An elbow to the hip. A shin kick that made Aunt Sleak’s eyes go wide for a bare instant.
Naero fell for a cagey feint. Aunt Sleak’s spinheel kick found Naero’s left temple in a splash of light, painful and startling.
A swordhand thrust tapped her windpipe. Just enough to make Naero gasp for air as she went down, and lost.
She vaguely noticed Aunt Sleak finishing off Jan and Saemar. Naero crawled to the sidelines and caught the rest of her breath.
It would be her turn to get pummeled again soon enough.
Aunt Sleak came by and offered her a lix pak to drink. The basic fruit punch lix tasted stale and sweet at the same time. It sure wasn’t Jett, but it replenished lost fluid and nutrients.
Not in a position to be picky, Naero sucked it down.
“You’re a good scrapper,” Aunt Sleak told her. “You’ve got your a good portion of your mother’s speed, but not her technique yet.” She smiled and shook her head. “I could never beat her once she became strong enough and skilled enough. You could unleash a bit more of your father’s power as well. You’ve yet to test your true limits, spacechild.”
At times the bottom
dropped out and Naero’s world and spiraled out of control into darkness and despair without warning.
Naero stared at her hands crushing the empty lix carton.
She had six fingers now instead of five–one extra finger on each hand.
Her parents were dead and she was continuing to lose her mind under the pressure.
She held her hands up before her deluded eyes and flexed all of her digits–even the new ones. She was losing it, definitely not getting better.
And she still couldn’t believe that her mom and dad were gone, but they were. She and Jan should be traveling with them, training with them, learning what they knew. They’d never get the chance to do any of that–now, or ever.
So much would never be the same again. She’d never be the same.
“Hey, Naero?” Aunt Sleak snapped her fingers. “You still with me?”
“Yeah. Sorry,” Naero said, looking down, hiding her freaky hands under her. “Just thinking.” She didn’t bother asking if her aunt or anyone else could see the hallucination. She didn’t want them to know. It was all just in her mind, anyway.
“That’s all right. I miss them too, Naero. But keep your head in the game here. Strategy. Tactics. Execution. You have good defenses, but you rely on them too much. You still wait too long for openings instead of making them. Take the offensive a little more. Take some blows if that opens your opponent up. You act like you’re afraid of getting hit.”
Naero rubbed the side of her head. “You got that right. Haisha, it hurts like hell.”
Aunt Sleak chuckled a bit. “I used to be the same way. You didn’t get all your power from your dad, you know. Your grandfather Amashin was small like you and your mom, but very powerful for his size. He could hit harder than anyone I ever knew, even when he pulled his stuff. He taught me a lot about taking hits and suffering the least damage from them.”
She barely knew her grandparents, mostly from family vid archives.
All of them had perished during various wars.
“Like I said, Naero. Your mother was better at all of this than I am.”
“You seem to be doing all right.”
Suddenly she thought of Baeven for some reason, and what happened on the yacht. Somehow he had managed to do several things all at once to ruin the enemy’s plans, and also take out that Matayan Slayer. All with apparent ease.
Aunt Sleak had warned her how dangerous he was.
While other crew members sparred their turns around them, Naero had to ask.
“Aunt Sleak, do you think Baeven told the truth about the plot to kill you and Zalvano, and kidnap me and Jan?”
Sleak shrugged. “It’s hard to know. I doubt that Baeven would spirit himself onto Drianne’s yacht to warn us for no reason. But it scares me to think that Triax would risk an interstellar incident, perhaps even another Spacer War, just to get at you and Jan. Think hard. You never went with your parents any place out of the ordinary? You don’t have anything special they brought back, do you?”
Naero shook her head. “They never gave us ancient trinkets or artifacts. They weren’t frivolous like that.” Naero grinned. “I thought you weren’t afraid of anything, Aunt Sleak?”
“I’m afraid of losing my ass and my fleet, and getting vaporized in another stupid war. You kids don’t know, Naero. You weren’t on the lines during the last one. But tell me, when we left Drianne’s yacht, you didn’t find anything on our shuttle?”
“The neutron detonator?” Naero said. “Zalvano and I did full scans. But if Baeven removed it, he might have simply taken it with him.”
Aunt Sleak grinned; her eyes narrowed once more. “Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask him. I’d bet the fleet times ten he’ll turn up again, Naero. I have so many questions for him, new and old.”
“I want to be there when you ask him,” Naero said. “Jan and I have some questions of our own. We don’t know anything about what Dad and Mom were doing, even if they were working with Shadowforce. If they knew something about this Kexxian Matrix, they never mentioned it to us.”
“Yeah, about that, Naero. We still need to be sure. You can’t think of anything someone might want from you or Jan? Are you sure your parents didn’t give you anything to keep safe for them, anything at all from their trips into the Unknown Sectors? A trinket, an artifact, a relic–even data files?”
“No. Nothing. Jan and I have been over this, too. We checked all of our files and logs, and scanned our belongings. Someone might be desperate to find this alien stuff, but the scary thing is–we don’t seem to have it. That’s all I can figure out.”
Aunt Sleak frowned. “We’re missing something important; I can just feel it. Well, I’ve put out feelers with some old friends in Shadowforce. We’ll get copies of your parents’ fleet logs. It might take some time, but we’ll get a line on something.”
“I hope so.”
A shadow fell over them. Jan stood between them and the lights. “You two gonna gab, or fight? We’re up again, N.” Naero sat on her hands, resisting the urge to smooth her hair away from her face with her added digits while she tried to run out the clock.
Leave it to Jan. Apparently he enjoyed getting beaten and throttled. A little bit too much for her tastes in her current state of mind, or lack thereof.
She clenched her six-fingered fists inside her six-fingered sparring gloves and prepared for combat.
15