Vilner had killed her for the last time, he was sure of it. "Hah! Die!" he cried pounding on the console, and Linn laughed on the other end. She curtseyed as the computer-animated illusion disappeared, and she was back in her jumper again, blunt-cut dark hair framing a heart-shaped face. "Why does the love of my life have to be four solar systems away?" he wondered for the third time that week. Privately, though. Vilner had learned his lesson about online dating when he'd met that hazel-eyed lovely from Kaua IV and sent her twenty messages a day. That didn't work out so good. This was much better; the chick even loved computer games! "Wanna play again?" he asked hopefully.
But Linn sighed. "I'd love to, but I need to get some hyper-work done or my boss will kill me," she said, brushing back a lock with a plump finger. "Sometime else, though? Ok bye!" She shot a heart smiley at him and disappeared from his life again.
Vilner groaned and stared over at his own work. He had two projects going, both at or near critical mass. Being a hyperspace alchemist was a difficult task - being one in the ancient world hadn't been as hard, he was almost sure. His gold was almost at powder again.
With a sigh of his own, the young man stepped to the left, then the right, then crossed over his own steps, creating an X, the correct symbol...
...that brought him into the Norm Plane again. He veered slowly over to the cabinet in his little cell and took out some aspirin, then brushed the Plate clean. Then he turned switches left, right, left - down. The world went gray, then normalized. His headache was disappearing.
"Vilner! Almost done with this week's telemetry readings?" yelled his crewmate Jann from below.
"Yeah! Coming!" he called back, lying through his teeth. Lucky for him that telemetry readings were pretty stupid work. Just plug this in, push that out...
As he worked, he thought of Linn. She was the funniest chick he'd ever met, and the sexiest. She had the best taste in warrior costumes for one thing; said she was a designer back home - on Mars, he thought she said. He wasn't totally sure. Martian women tended to be some of the most frequent internet users in the hyper-field, maybe because Mars had the most money in its solar system. They didn't have to be alchemists to get to the hyper-field; he wasn't even sure if there were alchemists on Mars... Whatever she was, Linn was decidedly the best girlfriend he'd ever had.
"Uh-uh," he bopped himself in the noggin. "No thinking of things like that; it's moving way too fast." He finished up the telemetry readings and beeped them down to Warner who beeped for him to get some rest, after sending him some credits with a warning to not use it all up on more hyper-field internet dating.
Four solar systems away, he thought morosely as he settled into his bunk and the styro-web closed about him, making a nice cocoon. The "Grifter" would be in her area in another year and a half; how could he live that long? Vilner started imagining settling down on Mars, in her complex in Bennett City, never having to rely on hyper-fields again for talking with the love of his life, let alone being able to be out of the army. With that happy thought in mind, he fell fast asleep.
When he woke up, his mind felt uneasy. The ship was silent, and she was never that way. "Hey! Hey, you loons, wake up!" he yelled only half-joking, but nobody answered, so he climbed down the hatch into the common tunnels. Nobody was around.
He found gold dust in a fifth tunnel, with a glowing cord on the wall - their signal for danger, escape mode. Vilner felt like he should be vigilant, but he had seen no signs that said he needed to be. By the look of things, whoever it was had been and gone. Just in case, he took the rope, which was spell-cast so he'd be able to use it now as a variety of things. "Dammit, I'm just a third-year private," he muttered to himself heading back to the safety of his own bay.
There would be no way to track either the interlopers or his crewmates, he knew that; when you fled into hyper-space, you left no trace on purpose, so nothing dangerous could find you. Aliens couldn't, so far as the humans knew."Lots of play-time for me, then," he thought but the idea was no longer as tempting. When the hyper-field button buzzed, then, he actually didn't pick it up the first few times. "Hello?" he finally said.
"Hey, hot stuff, wanna play?" It was Linn's standard greeting to him by now. Normally Vilner would have been all for it, but... "Hey, you aren't in hyper. Busy?"
"You could say so," he remarked and told her what had happened.
"Oh, my god, that's awful!" Linn said sympathetically.
"Third time this month, too," he moaned. "I hate it when I get to be the one to stay back! I keep drawing the short straw... I mean, they're safe, and the ship practically runs herself, but you know it's hard! I really want out."
"It'll be all right," she said soothingly. "Listen, why don't you give me your coordinates and I can get you out of there via hyper-field?"
"Abandon my post?" he cried. Martians were wierd, but this was a first.
"Hey, you said you hated the army, Vilner."
"Yeah, but that's like - immoral." His whole family had been army before Huvians wiped them out on Xanax II.
"You're saying I'm immoral?"
"You just asked me to defect! Go AWOL or some crap! Not gonna do that!" he yelled and hung up on her.
She didn't call back.
Days later, his crew returned, by which time he had a mass of food cartons and bottles around the ship. "Oh, the glory," Jann groaned as she saw the mess. "Why do you never clean up after yourself, Vilner?"
"I was working," he snapped at her and saluted Warner, who looked him up and down skeptically. Vilner hadn't changed his uniform since the day he'd argued with Linn; he'd tried to call her back a couple days afterword and found himself blocked by a weeping vengeful angel smiley. He showed the captain his results. "I was plotting out a whole new weapon, one we can use gray goo for."
"Now really, Vilner - gray goo?" Warner asked, one eyebrow lifted.
The young man nodded quickly. "Think of how much anti-matter and matter combined go in and out of hyper-fields all the time," he said. "It gets sucked out usually by space, because we're no better than pixels in there, right? But if we can harness that, then we've a nice big mass of whoop-ass to load into whatever projectile we want..."
"Lemme see that," Jann cried excitedly, grabbing the diagram. "Damn he's right, Captain; we might never have to worry about being boarded again! Hey, V, you should break up with chicks more often."
They worked on the plans the next few days, and Vilner had free reign to go into the hyper-field as much as he wanted. But where he'd have been tempted before to go off and play Warrior for a while, now he focused his energy - literally - on gathering goo. Half the time he left hyper-space sticky with it.
He was busy grinding gold with aluminum a week later when the ship alarms went off. But instead of the captain giving the Roundup for Hyper-space call, this time Vilner heard "Get ready to fight! All hands! Abandon what you're doing and head to battle stations!" Vilner cast a sub-net spell on the project and headed to the nearest gun.
Fire one. He could see them at last, the elusive enemy who he never got to see, not ever. Vilner pounded on the trigger, just like he used to do with computer games.
"Hey, here comes one to your left!" Jann yelled.
"Yeah, I got him - agh!" he yelled as the ship turned over nauseatingly. Goo splattered everywhere.
"Ow, there goes the left wing; we'll have to dock for repairs ASAP," cried the captain.
It wasn't pretty, but it was over. Exhausted and sore from bumping around, the crew staggered into their bays once more, congratulating each other. "I feel like a potted plant," groaned Warner who'd gotten sick on himself. "They never intended the army to fight battles in space..." The captain slapped him on the back.
Vilner found a message on his machine when he got back to his own bay. It was from Linn. "My people got attacked," it said simply. No word of whether she was alive or whether she was safe. He tried calling her as soon as he could.
She appeared looking haggard. Her normally-perfect hair was rumpled, her jumper sweaty. A bit of armband had been ripped off. "You should've seen the other guy," she said wryly when he said she looked like crap, trying to lighten the mood.
"Where is he, I'll kill him!"
Linn wiped a greasy hand over her forehead. "We don't know who he is exactly. Some silly resistance fighter or a smuggler, I guess." She shrugged. "We have to get rid of all of them, you know."
Vilner felt his heart sink. "How about alchemists?"
"Hah! Oh, Vilner, you've a silly sense of humor. Alchemy isn't real, and those idiots who practice it or try to are just fooling themselves. Just another load to be gotten rid of."
He took a deep breath. "So where are you now?"
"Sector 25 of Praxtum galaxy, somewhere past Optimal I," she said.
Vilner nodded and saluted her. "Goodbye, then," he said and cut the power.
He wouldn't forget that firefight for the rest of his life. Not once he'd gotten out of the army, a decorated soldier with some medals for his achievements and for giving them the coordinates of an important enemy, not once he'd been able to ground and become part of a grove on Ulmor, the planet with three moons and few stars, not once he'd become a full-fledged alchemist and got to live to see liberation of his galaxy.
He thought of Linn that night, when they finally became free, and his heart was bittersweet. "Ba-bam, baby," he whispered to the stars, hoping somewhere in space her soul had been reborn.
END