Ages in Oblivion Thrown: Book One of the Sleep Trilogy (7 page)

Night was on its way again to where he was,
on heavy wings, hunting him with oppressive abandon. He’d used to
love darkness once, before he’d sold his soul away, before he
realized that she’d never forgive him for it. She was then kept
away from him, and asleep by the time he found her again. He’d paid
dearly to be included. The hardness of the others, who would have
liked it better were he not there at all, stayed with him as
well.

“
Rumor volat.” He said to himself,
with just a hint of the turmoil within.

۞ –
Two weeks later – aboard The
Nimitz
–

“
Dude, you know we could spend a year
here and still never see everything on this base.” Josh and Maeve
were finishing a slow run along a trail through the extensive
arboretum, staring off into the innumerable species of flora and
fauna. Birds chirped and squabbled, frogs sang, and insects
frustratedly tried to fly or crawl past the invisible barriers
keeping them in their habitats.

“
Yeah, you know, of all the places we
could have been stuck, this isn’t too bad.”

“
No argument there. I wonder what
we’ll do in the long term, though. It would be weird to just be
here indefinitely, mooching off of whomever
we’re…mooching.”

“
I know what you mean. Nobody seems to
realize that, to us, we all had a purpose only a few days ago.
Though I’ll be damned if I can think of what mine was.”

“
Don’t be so hard on yourself. We’re
all suffering from a post-modern culture shock here. But we could
all decide to become celebrities, or eccentrics….”

“
Or carnies. ‘A buck a look! See the
three hundred year old kooks!’ We just need a bearded
lady.”

“
I’m not sure about that. Shall we
move on to the next evolution of this workout?”

“
You’re killing me.”

“
Hey, you’re the one who asked to get
‘whipped’ back into shape.”

“
I know.” She made a dour face as she
he directed her to do burpees.

“
So what are you doing tonight? Gracie
and I got invited to have dinner with some monks. You could come if
you wanted.” Next was crunch reps, as he pushed on her shoulders
every time she got too high off the ground.

“
Actually, tonight is the night that
the Colonel’s XO gets back, and I’m supposed to have dinner with
them.”

“
Well, ain’t you something? Colonel
Tarkington seems a bit taken with you.”

“
Don’t get any ideas. The man has a
serious girlfriend, and he treats me like a kid sister. No, I think
that he wants to discuss the future a bit, at least as it pertains
to us. For some reason, he seems to think that I’m the chairman of
this crazy coo-coo board.”

“
That’s because you are. All the way
to the ground, no cheating. That’s it. We’ll have you doing weights
in no time.” He watched to make sure she was hitting her pushups
before continuing. “Nobody has a problem with it, if that’s what’s
worrying you. More burpees!”

“
I hate you.” But she complied. “Yes,
maybe it was a little. I don’t want to make anyone upset, since
we’re all in this together. But I guess we do need someone to be at
the forefront, if I’ve been volunteered, I guess I’m the donkey for
the trail.”

“
It’s fine with all of us.”

“
Not really.”

“
Antonio will come around. He’s just a
technical weenie who’s really ticked off that his 4.5 GPA doesn’t
mean shit anymore.”

“
Hmmm. What’s everybody else doing
tonight, then?”

“
I think that they’re gonna hang with
some of the officers we’ve met. Libbo and all, the weekend, party
time, you dig?”

“
Awesome. Hunky and or dory. Well, I
better shower up before this evening. I don’t want to gross out
everyone in the restaurant.”

“
Nice try. You still have metcons to
do. Get some!”

“
I don’t wanna.”

“
Tough luck. Go!”

“
Damn you.”

۞

The Nimitz shifted once again into evening.
Maeve picked her way through what she thought were large crowds,
though Tark had told her that there was barely half the normal
numbers present on board. Alien species milled about, amply
mingling amongst the humans, interacting with ease.

This would take getting used to. Not
really the foreign species part, but that the residents of
Earth
seemed
to have redeemed
themselves from being such...slow learners. It gave her hope. She’d
also discovered that war had been relatively absent in the last
hundred or so years. And now she was on her way to be feted,
apparently.

Leif and Jemi went out, as Josh had
mentioned, with several of the other officers on board. The latter
group had promised to show the former around and keep them out of
trouble. Maeve had her doubts about that promise, knowing what she
did about the military, at least how it had been back in their day.
She found her way easily to the restaurant that the colonel had
told her about. He stood just inside, along with another man.

This was his XO, introduced as Major Dmitry
Petrovich. This man stood nearly as an equal to Tark’s six foot
four inch frame, an edgy hardness distinguishing him from his
Tark’s lean pliancy. His chestnut hair was freshly cut back into
regulation, but she had the feeling he’d let it grow while on
leave. Piercing blue eyes returned her stare with sardonic good
humor.

She knew his type, to say nothing of what
his off-duty pursuits were likely to be. Nonetheless, Maeve
continued to look him over, assessing him as if dictated by
instinct alone. He was good-looking, athletic. She found it a bit
of a challenge to look directly in his eyes and not see raw animal
energy staring back. The thought shook her. She hadn’t expected to
appraise him quite so viscerally. Even as she had these thoughts,
there was also a sensation that she was betraying someone.

Dmitry, for his part, found himself nearly
eye to eye with their newly arrived dinner companion. She wasn’t
his height, but within several inches. Though she was still a bit
pale, it seemed as though a brief moment or two in sunlight might
change that. She was thin, but not angular, tightly wound, intense.
Her face was not quite what he would call pretty.

Pretty was what he normally went for,
because one could ignore a lot of other faults with the distraction
of pretty. No, she was not pretty. Beauty was different, at least
to him. Sa’andy had it in spades, for instance, that kind of old
Greco-Roman statuesque beauty. Maeve had something else entirely,
something deeper, harder to define. He felt an unsettling sense
that he could easily get lost looking at her. What was more, she
hadn’t blushed and averted her eyes, the way other women did when
he put his full attention on them.

Instead, she was sizing him up. He could see
her measuring him with flickering hazel eyes that conveyed,
somehow, a sense of wary interest. Time seemed to slow somewhat
under her scrutiny. He came to his senses, and shook himself free
of her for the time being. There would be time to…get to know her
later. Now was time for business.

She walked behind the two men to their
table, purposefully, to watch them interact. They spoke to one
another in an easy manner, as though they were old friends. She
concluded that they must be. To her, at least, it seemed unusual
for a major to be hanging around playing sidekick to somebody who
acted more like a peer than a senior.

Dmitry turned his head, noting the way
she hung back. He wrote it off to shyness. That perception was
satisfactory to her. His eyes lingered over her as he continued to
talk to Tark. He liked her eyes as well, with their color that
refused to be any one shade. They were like twin oceans in the wake
of a fury. She was
not
his
type, he reminded himself.

And yet he watched her still, while he
mulled over that last thought. Tark had said that she and her
friends had all looked somewhat sickly after being awoken, but this
was no longer the case. Between the efficacies of modern medicine
and the power of what he presumed to be sheer determination, she at
least was looking…fit.

She wore a simple black dress, made of a
light material that hung off her body as though it knew her. He
could not tell whether it was sleeveless or not; she was wearing a
tailored denim jacket, which he felt must hide a multitude of
secrets. He recognized her jewelry as something purchased from the
open-air markets, and was instantly dismayed by this knowledge.

In his duties as station’s executive
officer, he had less to do with giving orders to personnel,
certainly. It was his job to see to the needs of the personnel and
the requests and complaints of the civilians. Essentially, to see
to all the things with which Tark could not and should not be
involved.

It would seem however, that he, Dmitry, had
become overly familiar with his surroundings. If he was able not
only to recognize a woman’s accessory, but know who had sold it to
her, and how much it had probably cost, the answer was yes. He
wasn’t totally sure how he felt about this realization.

Belatedly then, he began to realize that
he’d been staring at her the whole time. Maeve didn’t seem to mind.
He sheepishly redirected his eyes. Meanwhile, she was finishing
sizing him up, though he was blissfully unaware of that fact. He’d
been so busy looking her over that he’d not noticed her doing the
same thing. Nor, that he’d narrowly missed sprawling himself into a
table encircled by elderly women, who were tittering under their
red hats at him.

As they passed, Maeve would have sworn that
she heard one of them say something like, “…bit of a biscuit,
that,” in high, York-tinged accents. She smiled, but was careful to
hide it when Dmitry finally shook himself out of his daze.

The proprietor gladly placed them in the
smallest of the private dining rooms, and kept everyone else out,
excepting the server, who nervously took their drink orders. Tark
asked for a decent wine, and Dmitry would have done the same, had
Maeve not explained to the wide-eyed young woman how a lychee
martini was made. He changed his mind, and ordered a whiskey. He
wasn’t about to let her outpace him. It wouldn’t do. Maeve only
knew that she felt like uncoiling from the tensions of the past few
weeks, and planned to do so, whatever it took.

“
So, Major, I would hazard a guess
that you and the Colonel here are old buddies.” Tark grinned at the
glint in her eye. She was trying to put him on the spot for some
reason.

“
You guess correctly, Lieutenant.
We’ve known one another since basic training.” A slight frown
washed away her tiny hint of humor. Did she ever smile?

“
Don’t call me that, please. That part
of me is…dead, and meaningless.” She looked away then. Though it
was said without animosity, there was something there, some barely
controlled emotion.

Dmitry liked the simple fact that there was
something in her left to be tamed. Startled again by his own
ruminations, it occurred to him that he hadn’t had conversations
with himself like that since well before Rebecca had left.

Once, he would have been bothered by such
things, since the past provided much in the way of pain. He felt he
no longer carried any illusions with regards to love. As far as
anything like that went, he felt that he couldn’t afford to let his
guard down anymore. Work was his life; despite leaving the thrill
of frontier patrolling behind, he was happy staying in one place
for now.

He had the opportunity to do some good. It
didn’t matter that he had made mistakes before. Tark had given him
a second chance, and he owed it to his friend not to screw things
up. So he smiled and pretended that he’d thought nothing, although
nothing was definitely fooling around with something right
then.

“Hey, we’re all learning about each other.
This is great.” He stared her down, willing her to come back with
some smart-assed remark. She wouldn’t be baited. The night was
young yet, her drink only half-gone. He made sure she saw him
dispatch his own whiskey swiftly, and ordered another, asking to
have it served colder. He cleared his throat. Something was
definitely taking him over. Its undefined yet sharp edges held him
in thrall. On top of that, she was resisting him thoroughly. He
didn’t usually go for headstrong types. His inner voice was quite
clear on that.

Maeve ordered another drink, feeling like
the cat, rather than the canary. It was a rather strong feeling she
had that Major Petrovich would spend the night catching up to
her
. She wasn’t sure why she’d think in such terms. After
all, he wasn’t her normal type either.

She wondered briefly if he had any idea that
she could perceive his thought processes as clearly as if it was
written on his own forehead. He’d been watching her for the past
hour, trying to be discreet, trying to read her and find her
secrets. He’d fail in that, as so many others had. So far as she
could recall, there had been only one person who’d known her like
that in her whole life.

“
Sure, we can all learn about each
other. For instance, did you know that our food is here, and that
I’m happy as a result?” Tark was good-natured, but aware that he
was miles behind some subtext that was taking place. It unnerved
him to see his friend suddenly go into pursuit mode, if anything
could be judged by Dmitry’s having leered at Maeve for nearly an
hour. Maybe that was unfair, but he felt protective of Maeve, as if
she were a long-lost relative. To be sure, Sa’andy had already
noticed, and had made a quiet remark to him about it earlier in the
day. Luckily, she thought it was endearing.