Page 16 of Savage Union

“Go ahead.” I swept out my hand in a, “be my guest” gesture.

At first I wasn’t sure if Gurflug would relinquish the nav chair and band. But at last, grumbling about “nasty little snots who didn’t know their place,” he rose and left the nav chair. He pulled the band off his head as an afterthought and tossed it back on the console, as though it wasn’t an extremely expensive piece of equipment. (It was.) I made another mental note.

The boy sat down gingerly in the chair and started to pick up the nav band. But when he went to touch it, we all saw that it was coated in slime and grease from Gurflug’s skin and hair. He made a face and looked around, clearly searching for something to clean the equipment off.

I took pity on him and pulled out the all-clean cloth I carried with me everywhere. It was a self-cleaning and self-mendingpiece of fabric that looked shiny blue in some lights and dull green in others. I had gotten it in on Zerkzies Alpha from a wise woman who claimed it would clean anything at all and then clean itself up afterwards. Imagine my surprise when it actually worked. I’d had it for five cycles now and I didn’t go anywhere without it.

The boy took it from me but looked up at me uncertainly.

“Er, are you sure, Captain?” he asked, looking at the slimy, greasy nav band and then at the pristine clean-cloth. “I mean, it might get ruined.” He kept his voice low but Gurflug wasn’t paying attention to us anyway. He was staring at the viewscreen where his route was still displayed and frowning moodily.

“It will only stay dirty for about an hour,” I told him. “Once I wad it up in my pocket again, it will clean itself.”

“Oh!” The boy examined the cloth with renewed interest. “What a great invention!”

“I thought so too—that’s why I bought it,” I said dryly. “Now use it so you can prove your claim. You’ve got some big fucking words to live up to, boy.”

“All right.” He quickly cleaned the muck off the nav band and handed me back the cloth. Then he settled the band over his temples and closed his eyes—the better to concentrate.

I watched the viewscreen which was momentarily blank. Then it was covered again with the same star map showing all the worm holes between the Imperium Galaxy and the Triplex Cluster as smears of color.

But the boy must have seen more than just smears. In only a matter of seconds, glowing gold jump lines began to appear. I watched in astonishment as he mapped out a route in under a minute! And there were, as he had promised, only five jumps—not seven—which would save on fuel considerably. Jumping through worm holes always drains a ship’s reserves.

As soon as he was finished, the boy took off the nav band and looked at me.

“Done, Captain. Please have the Verifier check my route,” he announced.

“Agatha? Check it,” I said to the AI.

“At once, Captain.”

The verification of the route took longer than it had taken the boy to plot it in the first place. But soon Agatha announced,

“Route passed verification. Rating from one to five—five stars. This is a perfect route.”

“What?” Gurflug bellowed, making me wince. “But that’s impossible!”

“I don’t think you know the meaning of the word,” the boy said coolly. He looked at me. “So? Do I get the job?”

“Hang on—let’s just test a few more routes,” I said. Frankly I was so surprised I was just playing for time. I’d never heard the Verifier call any path through the stars a “perfect route” before. I thought it must be a fluke—a lucky guess on the boy’s part.

“All right,” he said calmly. “Test me. Where else would you like to go?”

“Plot a course from The Triplex Cluster to the Neverending Galaxy,” I said, off the top of my head. “It’s shaped like a?—”

“I know what it’s shaped like. I have most of the star maps for the known universe memorized,” was the boy’s astonishing reply. “Let me concentrate.”

He closed his eyes and the maps on the viewscreen changed. A moment later golden jump lines were being drawn.

I was used to watching a navigator draw the lines mentally–it always looked like an invisible pen slowly and laboriously tracing one line at a time. With this boy, it was different. The lines popped up like magic, going from one wormhole to the next so fast I could barely keep track.

“Merciful Amok,” I heard Yorrin breathe and though I didn’t worship his deity, I had to agree with the sentiment. I had never seen anything like this in all my years of captaining.

Again, in less than a minute, the boy was done. And when the Verifier report came back, it was declared, “Five out of five stars. A perfect route,” once more.

Yorrin and I stared at each other and then he said,

“What about to individual planets? Can you get us from Undon in the Triplex Cluster to Hundoi Six?”

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