Ad Noctum: Chapter 1

P=NP, eh?

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Abduction. Anxiety. Panic. Purposefully insensitive discussion of mental health issues. Boundary problems. Manipulation.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 1

The sky was clear and cloudless over Pasadena, California. 

Dr. Dale Volker threaded his way past the dusty construction site of Caltech’s latest questionable decision in architectural design, jaywalked across California Boulevard, cut through a shadowed shortcut between close-set brick buildings, and passed through the graceful, solid arches on the eastern side of the Planetary Sciences Building.

Once inside, he pulled off his sunglasses and dropped them into his shoulder bag before plunging a hand in after them to fish for his keys. His fingers scrabbled through a nest of pens, his VGA adapter, his iPod, the tangled wires of two pairs of headphones, and scraps of little notes to self that made their home next to the sheaf of final exams from “Topics in Advanced Astrophysics.”

He really needed a better system of organization.

Or something.

He also needed the caffeine that was in the coffee that was in his hand to actually just be in his bloodstream right about now. That would be good.

The door to his lab was already open. Volker looked at his watch. Only half past nine, a little early for academia. Then again, grad students always turned a little more motivated right before the holidays. It was the general ambiance of the season, he supposed. That, or the bone-crunching anxiety that accompanied committee meetings and qualifying exams, no matter how much he tried to reassure them.

After a good span of simultaneous walking, coffee-drinking, and key-fishing, Volker emerged victorious with the errant keyring just in time to detangle his keys from his headphones before he turned down the narrow hallway that led to his office.

There was someone waiting for him.

Someone who wasn’t a grad student.

That was weird.

“Hi.” Volker angled his head and took in his visitor.

Shoot. Was it his week to host the visiting speaker? Who the heck had he invited?

“Hello,” his visitor said, “Dr. Dale Volker?”

The guy radiated the uber-intellectual, artistically unkempt, jacket-jeans-and-incongruously-fancy-shoes type look that came with academic apex predators. His glasses pulled the whole look together, sharpening it up with the neat lines of their designer frames.

“Yup,” Volker said, his hands full of coffee and keys. “That’s me. Hi. And you are?”

“My name is Starr. David Starr.” The man spoke with an accent. Scottish maybe?

“Nice to meet you.” Volker turned the key in the lock, then put his shoulder into the door to unstick it from its slowly warping frame. “You look familiar. Have we met? Are you on staff here?”

“No.” Starr favored Volker’s doorframe with a vaguely displeased look. “I’m not. I’m a professor of mathematics from UC Berkeley. I was visiting a colleague and I thought I might stop in for an unannounced visit. I’d like to ask you about your work.”

Volker made his way around his desk and dumped his bag atop a solid mat of printed journal articles. He separated his laptop from the stack of final papers he was supposed to be done grading and pulled it free.

“Yeah,” he said. “No trouble. I’ve got about an hour before I have to get to a committee meeting for one of my students. What’s your area?”

“Applied mathematics.” Starr’s eyes flicked restlessly around Volker’s office. “With a heavy emphasis on computational modeling. Lately, I’ve taken an interest in the cosmic background radiation. Amongst other things.”

“Neat.” Volker was still trying to wrap his mind around the reason the other man seemed so darn familiar.

“I’m looking t’collaborate with someone with access to low-frequency EM emissions across the observable sky. Raw data.”

“Radio waves?  I’m your guy.” Volker downed the dregs of his coffee.

“Fantastic.” The other man pulled and broke the word like cool toffee.

“Okay,” Volker said with a thrill of intellectual anticipation. “What’s this new model?”

“It relies on integer programming to model the topology of the universe based on input values from publicly available WMAP data.”

Volker frowned. “Integer programming?” His brain was a whirring mess of interconnecting ideas. Beneath them, however, he felt an echo of recognition and—something else.

Unease, maybe?

“It’s not a popular approach,” Starr admitted. “I’m afraid I can’t go into the details until we formally agree to collaborate.”

“I understand,” Volker said. “The topology of the universe is one of the most high-profile questions in theoretical astrophysics.”

Starr looked at him, expressionless. “I’m aware.”

“But—“ Volker said, uncomfortable with the man’s demeanor, “—maybe that’s not where you’re going with this?”

“Perhaps not.” Starr smiled faintly.

“But you want my data to plug into your model?” Volker clarified. “A superimposed map of radio waves and microwaves?”

“Yes,” Starr replied. “That would be ideal.”

“Authorship?” Volker asked.

“Joint,” Starr said.

“If I put one of my thesis students on this full-time, they’ll need a first-author manuscript.”

“Not a problem.” Starr opened his hands. “Whatever you’d prefer.”

“Okay then,” Volker said, surprised and slightly suspicious at how easy that had been. He was sure he wasn’t getting the full story. “Want to see the lab? I’ll show you the remote feed to our radio array, then we can take a quick look at the database directly.”

A flicker of wistfulness crossed Starr’s features. “That sounds wonderful.”

They walked together across the hall and into the open lab.

“Caltech is renovating the majority of its lab space, I hear,” Starr said as they passed between benches loaded with cutting-edge hardware.

“Yep,” Volker replied. “That’s the plan. Apparently, MIT is building a new physical sciences center, so, you know how it goes. Can’t let the competition get ahead. I’m not complaining, though. I’m hoping I’ll get an office that doesn’t flood when it rains.”

“Does it rain often?” Starr asked, amused.

“No,” Volker replied. “Thank god.”

They made their way past the Faraday cages of the neighboring lab and rounded a corner to find Nupur, his third-year graduate student, sitting in front of the live feed that monitored the desert radio array. She glanced up as they came in.

“Hey, Dale.” She returned her attention to the feed. “There’s been some damage to the eastern end of the grid. We’re not getting any data at the moment. They’ve got some repair guys coming to fix—” She broke off as she glanced up again, getting a good look at Starr.

“Nupur, this is Professor Starr. He’s looking to collaborate with—” Volker trailed off in the face of the intent stare that his thesis student had fixed his visitor with. “Um, do you guys—know each other or something?”

“I don’t think so.” Starr was giving Nupur a decidedly cool look.

“Hi,” Nupur said, a little breathless. She held out her hand. “Hi. I’m so sorry. You must get this all the time—but you look exactly like that guy? The one who disappeared? The mathematician? About six months ago.”

Starr angled his head. He didn’t take her hand. “I’m afraid I don’t know to whom you’re referring.”

“The Fields Medalist,” Nupur said. “Rush, I think his name was? Nicholas Rush? P=NP?”

Volker looked sharply at Starr, feeling the same thrill of recognition he’d felt when he first saw the man. He remembered news stories at the time—his mind scrambled to latch onto relevant detail.

He didn’t pay that much attention to the news, unfortunately.

“Ah. Of course.” Starr radiated unconcern. “Quite a loss for the international mathematics community, I’m sure.” He smiled faintly at Nupur. “I never met the man himself, but I hear he was insufferable.”

“Maybe. P=NP though, eh?” Nupur grinned. “Cryptography will never be the same. Plus, the drama keeps the undergrads in Comp Sci 101 interested, so hey.”

Starr nodded politely, then his gaze flicked to Volker.

Volker looked away. 

“You mentioned something about a database?” Starr asked smoothly. Despite his casual stance, with one thumb hooked through a belt loop of his darkwash denim jeans, there was something about him that suggested impatience.

“Yup,” Volker replied. “It’s on an encrypted server that backs up to an external site, but it can be accessed from anywhere on teh interwebs.”

Nupur held up a hand, and Volker gave her a high five.

“Interwebs,” Starr repeated.

“Kids these days,” Volker said with a rueful shake of the head, recovering nicely. He turned to the nearest keyboard and navigated quickly to the server he was looking for.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Starr go still.

Volker spared him a quick glance while the data loaded.

Starr watched the screen with a feverish intensity, as if he thought he could light it on fire by looking at it.

Volker fought down another surge of unease.

The guy was clearly really, really excited about science. Or math. Or both. And that was fine. Volker was excited about science too.

Science.

Yeah.

Speaking of which, there was something about the idea of “integer programming” that was still kicking around in the back of his brain, giving him a weird vibe.

He pulled up the database and offered Starr the chair that he’d been hovering over. “Check it out.”

Starr slid into position and clicked through directories like he’d coded the architecture himself, bypassing raw visibility data and calibration logs, going for the reduction pipeline. He drilled into Python modules, examining imaging algorithms and coordinate transforms, then moved on, scanning what should have been inscrutable FITS headers and data cubes like he could read them. Like they made sense to him.

Okay.

Integer programming.

Integer programming.

Starr stopped his rapid navigation through the dataset. He pulled up the topological map of low-frequency EM emissions.

“How complete is this?” Starr asked.

“Pretty darn complete.” Volker shifted his weight forward onto the balls of his feet, unable to completely conceal his pride in his work. 

Nupur flashed him a quick smile.

“Yes.” Starr looked up at him, fixing him with the same fiery gaze that he’d just applied to the data. “So I see.”

“What do you think?” Volker asked. “Still interested in collaborating?”

“Very much so.” Starr got to his feet. “Shall we sort out the details?”

Volker looked at his watch. “Sure. We can talk after lunch if we don’t get everything hammered out by ten thirty.”

“Ah yes. Your committee meeting.” Starr’s smile was oddly amused. “Would y’care to discuss this over coffee?”

“Sure,” Volker said. “You don’t want to keep looking at the database?”

“Oh, I’m quite satisfied that you’re the correct choice as far as potential collaborators go,” Starr replied.

Volker smiled. “You don’t mess around.”

“Indeed not,” Starr said lightly.

As they passed from the lab back into the hall, something in Starr’s pocket gave a soft electronic chime. The mathematician pulled an odd-looking phone out of his pocket.

“Terribly sorry,” Starr said. “I need to take this. I believe it may be my—transportation.”

“Sure,” Volker replied. “I’ll meet you back in my office.”

Trying not to look like he was obviously hurrying, Volker headed for his office.

“David,” he heard Starr say into his weird little phone. “Yes yes. I understand that, but—”

Two guys named David?

Well, it happened, he supposed.

As soon as he was out of Starr’s line of sight, Volker darted through the door to his office and slid into his chair. He bent down and dug through the pile of textbooks at the base of his bookshelf. He found the one he was looking for, dropped it on the surface of his desk, and flipped to the index, his finger scanning down the page.

In the hallway, Starr had stopped speaking.

He found the page he wanted and flipped to it.

“There’s no need to concern yourself.” Starr sounded irritated with David #2.

Volker scanned down the page, his eyes flicking from line to line until, finally, he found what he was looking for.

Integer programming is NP-hard.

Meaning, of course, that to render the WMAP data using integer programming, the man would need a fantastically sophisticated computational model predicated on the idea that P did indeed equal NP. Not just the simple proof, but the application of the principles behind it, which would render an intractable dataset in a manner amenable to computational manipulation in real time.

Crap.

Volker opened his laptop, his heart racing; he should have done this first, god, what had he been thinking, going for the math instead of the man himself? He was in trouble. He was in trouble. If this wasn’t “Starr” and instead it was some vanished mathematician—

“Yes,” Starr said from the hallway, his voice closer now. “You’ve made that very clear.”

Where did mathematicians go when they vanished?

Volker opened his browser. He’d go with an image search first—

Starr appeared in the doorframe. “Shall we?”

Volker looked up. “Sure.” He couldn’t keep the hesitation out of his voice.

Starr moved further into his office and rested his bag on the edge of Volker’s desk.

“One moment,” the mathematician said, beginning to dig through his bag. “Just need to find my wallet.” He pulled out a textbook and handed it to Volker. “Hold that, will you?”

Volker looked down at the book in his hands. “Textbook of Medical Physiology?”

“My interests range widely,” Starr replied, still hunting through his bag.

“I guess they would be,” Volker said carefully, “if you’re capable of rendering large data sets with integer programming.”

Starr’s hands stilled. “You’re not married?”

Okay, that was a hard left turn.

“Um,” Volker said. “No?”

“Children?” Starr yanked the physiology textbook out of Volker’s hands.

“Ha, you mean other than grad students? No. I do have a cat.”

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough.” Starr pulled something out of his bag.

“Good enough for what?” Volker asked.

“Catch.” Starr tossed him a small object, the size of a flash drive. It had a small light at one end. Odd it would be glowing when it wasn’t plugged in—

Volker reflexively caught the little device. The small blue light winked out as his fingers closed around it.

There was a strange roaring in his ears and in his chest, in his head and in his hands. It felt like he was being heated from the inside.

His office faded to nothingness.

Or, maybe, it was him that faded.  

When he came back to himself, his eyes were screwed shut. He opened them slowly, one at a time, and found himself standing in the cool semi-dark of a—

Huh.

He had no idea where he was.

He seemed to be in a small metal room? There was a strange vibration in the metal beneath his feet.

“Nick.” A voice seemed to emanate from the walls.

Volker stared at the ceiling, disoriented.

“Nick. I don’t have all goddamn day.”

“Um,” Volker said in the direction of the ceiling. It was—gold? His eyes flicked between the ceiling and the door in front of him. “Hello?” He took a few steps forward, which took him away from a circular pattern that’d been etched into the floor. There were electronic controls on the wall.

The door hissed open, revealing a man dressed head to toe in leather. His hair was dark and his eyes were dark, and his clothes were cut from dimness.

They stared at each other.

“What the fuck?” the other man hissed.

“Yeah,” Volker said. “I know how you feel.”

The man stalked forward, gripped Volker’s wrist, and pried the small device out of his hand. “Where is he?”

“Starr?” Volker asked.

“Starr? That’s great. That’s just great.” The man glared at him. “Yes. ‘Starr’.”

“Um,” Volker said.

His hands were going numb.

“Come with me.” The leather-clad man forced Volker toward the door, one hand closed around his wrist, one hand clamped around the back of his shirt.

“I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Volker said, rallying. “I’m not sure what just happened or who you—”

“Where were you?” the other man snarled.

“What?”

“Where were you when I beamed you out?”

Beaming? Like in Star Trek?

Volker half tripped over something on the floor of the short, dark hallway. The guy in leather steadied him, then pulled him forward again.

“Um, my office?” Volker blinked as he was dragged into a small room lined with instrumentation panels arrayed in front of windows covered by a metallic material. The place looked like a futuristic cockpit merged with the decorating aesthetic of King Tut.

The man shoved him down into a chair away from the main panel and, before Volker realized what was happening, both his hands were cuffed and looped around the arm of his chair in such a way he couldn’t get up.

“Hey!” The reality of the cuffs around his wrists sent a pulse of adrenaline through his system, tearing through the shocky feeling clouding everything. “What the hell?”

“Don’t touch anything.” The man sat in front of the main panel and spoke into a small, odd-looking phone.

Yeah, or, actually, considering the day he was having, it seemed like maybe “phone” wasn’t the best way to describe whatever it was.

Volker was getting progressively more freaked out by the minute.

“Rush,” the other man said. “Come in.”

Well, it looked like Dr. Dale Volker was in the midst of inadvertently solving academia’s biggest missing persons case, aka what had happened to “the Fields Medal Guy,” as Nupur had put it.

Why had he not trusted his own instincts?

Or, heck, Nupur’s instincts?

“Rush,” his captor said again.

No response.

The other man shut his eyes and clenched his jaw.

Volker wrapped his fingers around the short chain of the cuffs and surreptitiously pulled up on the armrest of the chair, testing its durability. It didn’t take him long to give up.

“Rush.” The man’s voice betrayed only a trace of the irritation that was in his face. “Come. In. Or so help me god I will beam down there and drag you back to this fucking ship by your hair.”

“Um, hi, did you just say ‘ship’?” Volker asked with polite incredulity.

The other man glanced at him in irritation but otherwise ignored him.

“Now now,” Starr’s voice—or, rather, Rush’s voice, projected quietly from the device in the other man’s hand. “Let’s keep things civilized, shall we?”

The guy in leather opened his mouth, took a beat to try and disperse what looked like a pretty scary level of rage, then said, “This. Was. Not. The. Plan.”

“Yes well, as usual, my plan is better.”

“Rush.”

“I’ll join you shortly. Rush out.”

Volker flinched as the other man hurled the communications device across the small room.

“Um, hi,” Volker began. “Hello. I think there’s been some kind of mistake. My name is—”

“I don’t care.” The man spun his chair around to fix Volker with a hard stare. “I don’t want to know your name, I don’t want you to know my name, did you hear his name? Fuck. Fuck.” He shot to his feet and stalked out of the room.

“Okay,” Volker said into the empty air.

He tried to take a deep breath, but found it wasn’t all that easy.

He’d been abducted via teleportation by a previously-vanished-Fields-Medalist and a man wearing leather pants? He was also handcuffed to a chair in a ship. A…space ship?

It seemed pretty likely he wouldn’t be making his committee meeting.

He swiveled his chair and examined the displays in front of him. They were in a language he’d never encountered before, with letters and typography that were wholly unfamiliar.

Great.

There were a lot of multicolored triangles?

Also great.

There weren’t any keys. Everything was touch-screen based. There was a histogram display with so many bins it approximated an analog curve. It was shifting moderately in real time. So…monitoring something. Power consumption, maybe? There was a schematic of something that looked like—well, okay. To be honest, it kinda looked like a spaceship.

Cool.

Tempted though he was to chalk this experience up to too many episodes of The X-Files during his formative years, the reality of the cuffs around his aching wrists said otherwise.

He needed to take a closer look at this system to try and figure out what the heck was going on. He swiveled his chair and adjusted his hands, trying to lengthen his reach as much as possible. He stretched his fingers, trying to get—

“What are you doing?”

The guy in leather was back.

Volker jerked in surprise.

“You people are all alike.” The man’s tone was crisp and hard.

“Um?” Volker said. “You people?”

“Scientists. God.” He turned away from Volker and slid into the seat he’d vacated a few moments earlier. He pulled out his communications device. “Rush,” he said. “Do you have it?”

Rush’s voice came again. “Even with the augmented rate of data transfer, there are petabytes of material here, David.”

David drummed his fingers on the console in front of him, then turned to Volker. “Is that true?”

“Is what true?” Volker asked, still off balance.

“Is your database,” he spit the word out with venomous precision, “really petabytes in size?”

“Um, yes?” Volker answered. “But I don’t think he can be downloading it. It’s encrypted and stored on a secure server. You can’t write it to—”

David rolled his eyes and turned back toward the monitors in front of him.

“Can you?” Volker asked. “Are you guys stealing my data?”

“Not just your data, apparently.” The man gave him a dark look.

“There’s no way he breaks my cipher without my key,” Volker insisted. “It’s custom.”

“Got it,” Rush’s voice came over the communications device. “Give me thirty seconds to—”

“Nice try,” David snapped. “Activating transport.” He punched in a command on the touchscreen console.

“Transport?” Volker said.

David didn’t answer. Instead, he turned in his seat to stare expectantly at the closed door, which, sure enough, swished open.

Rush strode into the room.

“If you pull a stunt like that again,” David growled, dark and menacing.

“You’ll what?” Rush asked, sweet and deadly.

“Never mind. Let’s see it.”

Rush held up an external hard drive.

“And what’s with this guy?” David jerked a thumb at Volker.

“He’ll be useful,” Rush said.

“Excuse me, but what the hell?” Volker rattled his cuffed hands against the seat for good measure.

“Him?” David asked. “You’re kidding. And no. Just—no.”

“I agree.” Volker looked at Rush. “Just send me back. I have a meeting!”

“I’m quite serious.” Rush slid gracefully into the seat next to David. “I need him. He’s intelligent.” He hit a combination of controls and the metal shield in front of the forward windows retracted to reveal a breathtakingly sharp starscape.

The planet, his planet, spread out in blues and greens below them.

“This is a spaceship,” Volker breathed.

“Not very quick though,” Rush said. “Unfortunately. But y’can’t have everything.”

“A fact that’s driven home to me on a daily basis.” David shot Rush a pointed glare.

“Scintillating,’ Rush said dryly. “But I can’t fuckin’ teach myself astrophysics within the requisite timeframe. So. If y’want this to proceed in an efficient manner, we need him.”

“Do I get a say in this?” Volker asked.

Rush quirked a brow. “Of course you do,” the mathematician replied solicitously. “You can choose to come with us, or you can choose to go back to Caltech and watch the Lucian Alliance systematically murder your graduate students before abducting you and returning you to me anyway.”

“What?” Volker asked, horrified. “Who’s the Lucian Alliance?”

“Graduate students?” David looked at Rush. “Seriously? That’s the best you got?”

“He’s something of a loner.” Rush shrugged. “No family.”

“I have a family,” Volker said, bizarrely affronted. “I just don’t see them as often as I—look. That’s not the point. You can’t seriously be talking about kidnapping me. I’m a professor at Caltech for god’s sake. People will notice.”

“Indeed they will,” Rush said pointedly, but he wasn’t looking at Volker, he was looking at David. “Perhaps someone will make a documentary about it.”

“I cannot believe you did this. I can’t believe it. You’re out of control, Rush. You can’t just—” David stopped himself, his jaw visibly clenching. “He knows who you are. We can’t send him back. If we do, if the SGC gets wind of this, if—”

“An’ why d’you fuckin’ think I fuckin’ brought him, David?” Rush leaned forward. “He figured it out.”

Actually, Volker realized with a cold thrill of horror, it had been Nupur who’d figured it out. He watched Rush anxiously, his hands balling into fists.

“Did anyone else see you?” David asked. “Anyone at all?”

“No,” Rush said. “I spoke to no one else.”

Volker stayed quiet.

“Fuck,” David hissed. “I told you I should have gone.”

“And when you become a fuckin’ cryptography expert, I’ll happily cede such missions to you, but in the meantime,” Rush said. “I suggest you accept this.”

“Guys, seriously.” Volker cleared his throat. “I gotta go. I have a committee meeting to get to.”

“No, you don’t,” Rush said coolly.

“Yes, I really do,” Volker insisted.

David shut his eyes, clenched his jaw, took a breath, and said, “This is a terrible idea.”

“I agree?” Volker replied.

David opened his eyes and looked dead at Volker. “I want you to remember that he roped you into this. Not me.”

“Um, no,” Volker said. “I’m not in this.”

“Medical conditions?” David asked.

“None. Er. Hypertension?”

“Is that a question or an answer?”

“An answer.” Volker tried for irritation but his voice had other ideas.

“You need medication for that?”

“Yes?”

“Wonderful. And just how exactly are we supposed to get this medication of yours?”

“Beam into his pharmacy, why don’t you?” Rush said airily. “It’s not exactly an unsolvable problem. Best to be quick about it.

David sighed. “How long before anyone notices you’re missing?”

Volker looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Look, I can’t just go off—wherever it is that you guys are going. I have a lab. I have a grant renewal coming up. I have graduate students.”

David looked back at the screen in front of him. “Not anymore you don’t.”

“Yes,” Volker said insistently, trying to recapture his attention, “yes I do. I won’t help you guys, I—”

“You will,” David snapped. “Otherwise, your graduate students will be systematically hunted down and eliminated by members of an elite, far-reaching galactic cabal, do you understand?”

“Are you insane?” Volker asked.

“Me?” the other man said. “No.” He looked pointedly at Rush.

“Cast aspersions all fuckin’ day, if y’like,” Rush said. “But until you cease to need me for this wee cryptographic problem you’re having, you can fuckin’ well give me what I require.”

“You don’t get to ask for people,” David hissed.

“I don’t recall asking,” Rush said.

“Write down the name and dose of the medications you take.” David snapped his fingers in Rush’s direction, and the mathematician produced a pen and small notebook.

Volker wrote down the name and dose of his medication with a shaking hand.

David ripped the page from the notebook, spun his chair around, hit a button on the console, then entered a series of commands. “Take him to get his stuff while I get his meds.” David shoved the torn paper into his pocket. When his hand came back out, he was gripping a small device.

Rush frowned. “You’d trust me to—”

Like a spark jumping an air gap, David hauled the mathematician from his chair and took him to the floor. He settled his weight across Rush’s hips and used his free hand to pin him.

Volker stared at them in shock.

Rush bucked hard. With one hand around David’s wrist, he tried for leverage, tried to roll—

But David gripped Rush’s hair, wrenched his head to the side, and pressed the small device he held against Rush’s neck.

Rush froze. “Fuck you,” he hissed. “We discussed this.”

“And when you abduct people,” David said with a veneer of composure, “when you go on missions that are supposed to take ten minutes and actually take almost an hour with no god damned explanation of what you’re doing—” he tightened his grip as Rush made a sudden, heroic attempt to wrench free, “—that reopens the door for negotiation.”

“This is not a ‘negotiation’.”

“Thanks for noticing.” David smiled tightly. “Now, if you’d like to survive this, hold still and don’t talk.”

Rush gave the man a molten glare, but he stopped moving.

“Breathe in.”

Rush took a breath. Volker instinctively matched it.

“Breathe out,” David said.

As Rush exhaled, Volker heard a quiet pneumatic hiss. David pulled the device away, pocketed it, then ran his thumb over the place he’d injected Rush with—something.

“Fuck. You.” Rush snarled.

“What the hell did you just do!?” Volker strained against his cuffs.

“Try and cut it out of your goddamned neck, next time, why don’t you?” David gave the mathematician a gratuitous shake before backing off and turning to Volker. He unlocked the cuffs.

Volker glared at him, rubbing his wrists.

“Hold out your arm,” David said.

Volker held his arm out. 

“This,” David said, holding up the device, “will implant a transmitter beneath your skin. It means that wherever you are, you can be tracked and retrieved. You cut it out,” the other man said smoothly, “and next time, it goes in your neck. And if you somehow cut it out of your neck,” he said, turning to take in Rush, who’d levered himself up on one elbow and was shooting him a murderous glare, “then next time, I hire someone to put it in your eye.” David turned back to Volker. “Got it?”

“Yep.” Volker felt a sickening twinge as the device shot a small piece of metal beneath the skin of his forearm.

David stepped back. “What’s your name?”

“Volker. Dr. Dale Volker.”

“David,” the other man said, extending a hand. “Colonel David Telford.”

Volker didn’t shake his hand. “Colonel?”

“USAF.”

“United States Air Force.” Rush pushed himself off the floor, still glaring at Telford. “What if you’d missed and hit a vein? Y’could have killed me.”

“Yeah. I’m real broken up about it,” Telford replied.

“You’re with the military?” Volker asked.

Telford nodded.

“So he says, but I’ve seen no evidence of it,” Rush muttered.

“Shut up, Rush.”

“You fuckin’ shut up.”

“It’s a complicated situation,” Telford said. “Unfortunately, you’re now involved.”

“Yep.” Volker rubbed his forearm, his fingers searching out the borders of the implanted metal transmitter. “I’m getting that.”

Volker stood next to Rush in the middle of his own sun-drenched living room.

Volker’s calico cat, Mendelssohn, watched them curiously.

Rush studied the cat, his head angled.

Mendelssohn trilled at them, hoping for a treat.

“So, the whole beaming thing works…how?” Volker asked.

“Well,” Rush said, scanning the contents of the room, “it depends which of two stolen technologies you’re referring to.” He crouched and offered Mendelssohn his hand.

“Uh, you’re saying you guys pirated two different ways to beam?” Volker asked.

“Pirated.” Rush smiled faintly as Mendelssohn stepped closer. “Hmm.”

Volker watched a space-faring Fields Medalist pet his cat.

“Feel free to commence with the packing at any time,” Rush said, absently scratching behind Mendelssohn’s ears.

“Stop petting my cat,” Volker said. “You’re in the middle of abducting me.”

“The cat doesn’t know that,” Rush said in a tone that suggested he thought he was being utterly reasonable.

“You’re crazy,” Volker informed him.

“Less talking.” Rush scooped Mendelssohn off the floor and settled the cat over his shoulder. He headed for the kitchen. “More packing.”

“What the heck am I supposed to pack?” Volker fought through a helpless wave of absurdity. He brought a hand to his head. “Where are we going?”

“If it were me,” Rush said, brazenly rifling one-handed through Volker’s cupboards, “I’d prioritize shirts, shoes, coffee, books, every painkiller you have, and cat food. Possibly also cat litter, though I suspect we’ll make do with materials on hand. Leather pants, if you have them. Wearing other people’s leather pants is less fun than y’might think.”

“Leather pants?” Volker muttered to himself as he walked into his bedroom, making a face no one could see. “Cat food?” he called back to Rush. “You’re going to let me take my cat into space?”

“D’you have a better alternative?” Rush sounded like he was tossing things on the floor in Volker’s kitchen.

“Not really,” Volker muttered to himself, trying to break through the numbness that seemed to have enveloped him. He looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror and barely recognized his own bloodless face. 

He dragged his bag, half full of a random assortment of clothes, back out into the living room.

The TV was on. Rush was walking a slow spiral, cat still draped over his shoulder, a bottle of olive oil in his free hand. He was pouring the oil as he went, leaving a wide streak behind him as he walked.

“Um?” Volker paused his frantic search for Reasonable Things to Take to Space.

Rush paid no attention to him. He was watching the local news. Okay.

Volker ripped his computer charger out of the wall and shoved it in his bag.

“No outlets on a ship, Volker,” Rush said absently. “Use your fuckin’ intellect in fuckin’ polynomial time, won’t you?”

“So, I don’t really have a lot of experience with space and what kind of electrical outlets you find there.” Volker ran a hand through his hair, trying to steady himself. “Will all our conversations be like this?”

“Like what?” Rush asked.

“Um, you just, I don’t know, harassing me about what I don’t know about space instead of helping out?” He did his best to steady his shaking hands.

“Only if you retain your pathetic demeanor and poor choice permutations.” Rush dropped the empty bottle of olive oil on the floor and returned to scratching Mendelssohn’s ears.

“I really don’t like you,” Volker informed him.

“Well,” Rush said philosophically, “you’ll like me less shortly. Are you finished?”

“No, I—” Volker paused, boots in hand, as he noticed what had Rush so enthralled with the local news.

A building was on fire.

A very familiar building.

“Is that my lab?” Volker let the half-filled bag slip to the floor.

“I believe it is.” Rush’s voice was affectedly smooth.

“You—” Volker began helplessly. “I don’t believe this. God. God. Who are you?”

“It’s better for everyone this way.” Rush’s tone turned icy and Mendelssohn jumped out of his arms.

“Better?” Volker said, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

“Your students are alive. You are alive. You owe me.”

“I owe you? For what? For not telling the psychotic Air Force guy up there that my poor thesis student—whose research is now on fire, by the way—was smart enough to figure out who you were? I’m supposed to thank you for not giving him enough information to freaking murder her in her sleep?”

“In her sleep?” Rush said mildly. “That’s unreasonably optimistic.”

“What?” Volker breathed. “What do you mean?”

“Never bring that up again,” Rush snapped. “As far as I’m concerned, I never met a student.”

“You—”

“Let’s go. Time’s up. Find your cat.”

Volker took a breath. Then another, trying to feel the ground under his feet and the cool planes of the first aid kit in his hands. He knelt next to his bag, zipped it shut, and rested his hands against its canvas outlines. “Colonel What’s-His-Name had better not kill my cat.” He forced a bravado he didn’t feel into his voice. “Otherwise—”

“David won’t kill your cat,” Rush said derisively. “Be reasonable.”

“Yeah. Because this day has been soooo reasonable,” Volker muttered. He crossed to the kitchen and pulled a bag of cat litter from the bottom of his pantry. “And ‘David’ seems like a really nice, really reasonable guy. Where’d you find him?”

Rush slipped a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “He found me.”

Volker shut his eyes and pressed his hand against his mouth in the shadows of his disrupted kitchen.

He stayed like that for one second.

Two.

Three.

He turned. Rush had an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” Volker said, “not with all this oil you—”

Rush gave him a disdainful look.

“No,” Volker said. “No. You’re acting like I’m never—”

Rush’s expression hardened. “Like I said. Bright,” he murmured, “but not quick.” He turned and stalked toward the front door.

“Crap.” Volker’s voice broke. “Can I at least call—” he began.

“No.” Rush looked edgily out of Volker’s front window.

“Okay,” Volker whispered to himself. “Okay.”

He crouched down and made a quiet clicking sound in Mendelssohn’s direction. The cat was hiding behind a row of books on the bottom row of the bookshelf. “C’mere, buddy,” Volker said.

The cat looked at him, eyes wide.

“Did the—” he had to work to keep his voice steady. “Did the insane pyromaniac scare you?”

Mendelssohn gave a tiny meow.

“Yeah,” Volker whispered. “Me too.”

He coaxed his cat into his arms and walked back towards Rush, who was fiddling with a book of matches. At Volker’s approach, he struck one with theatrical satisfaction. The flame flared. Steadied. Rush offered the lit match to Volker.

“You want me to burn my own house down?” Volker whispered. He’d meant it to land as sarcasm, but his voice was serious. Unsteady.

“It’s that, or watch me do it,” Rush replied.

Something about the immediacy of the light, the scorching of the wood, and the slow, steady progression of the flame toward Rush’s fingertips tore through the fog of shock that had separated him from everything that had happened.

No matter what he chose, whether he went with Rush or whether he tried to escape, whether he believed the threat to his graduate students or not—nothing would be the same. Everything he’d built, his papers, his lab, his contributions to stellar dynamics and galaxy formation, his work on the radio array—

“Within the span of twenty-four hours,” Rush said, “the scope of your old life will seem unimaginably small.”

“I like my life,” Volker whispered.

“You liked it,” Rush said.

“Yeah.” Volker shivered. He shifted his grip on his cat and took the match. He tossed it in a burning arc to land squarely on the slick of olive oil.

Rush struck a second match. He lit his cigarette, then sent the matchstick in a flaming parabola toward a different section of the room.

The flames took hold with surprising speed.

Volker frowned. “Burning pretty quick for olive oil,” he said.

“Yes well,” Rush said. “I spiked it with a bit of rocket fuel.”

“Oh. Okay. Cool. You just keep that in a pocket, or?” Volker trailed off lamely.

Rush didn’t answer his half-asked question.

The silence was surprisingly awkward, given that Volker’s house was starting to burn in earnest. Mendelssohn curled himself into Volker’s chest.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to Telford that I set your lab on fire,” Rush said.

“Um, okay. Sure.”

“Or your house.”

“Okay.”

“Or the rocket fuel I carry on my person.”

“Um, sure.”

“He prefers things to be a bit more,” Rush paused to take a long drag of his cigarette, “low-profile than I do.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Do you?”

“I realize I’ve known you for like 45 minutes, but yeah. I’d definitely picked that much up.”

Rush smiled faintly and took a long draw of his cigarette. He stared into the flames.

Volker cleared his throat. “I don’t really—” He steadied himself. Tried again. “I don’t really need to watch this. Neither does my cat. So can we?” He looked pointedly at the ceiling. 

“Yes, of course,” Rush said politely. He flicked his burning cigarette into the flames and came to stand beside Volker. He slid a small remote from his pocket and hit a button.

The red-gold of the flames and the black of the charring carpet faded in a flare of blue-white.

Volker (re?)materialized in the same small, dark room that Telford had dragged him out of when he first arrived.

He looked at his watch.

It was half past ten in the morning, Pacific Time.

“Where should I put my stuff?” Volker asked.

“Wherever,” Rush threw over his shoulder as he strode out of the room.

“Great.” Volker scratched behind Mendelssohn’s ears.

The cat shifted, uncoiling to look around. Volker set Mendelssohn on the floor and started dragging his stuff out of the center of the room. He piled it against the wall. When he was finished, he dug a hand into his bag and pulled out Mendelssohn’s travel water bowl, still wet from the water he’d dumped down the sink in his haste to finish his shoddy packing job.

He looked at the small pile of items against the wall for a moment, then turned away. 

Volker stepped into a hallway that ran the length of the ship. On the floor were miscellaneous pieces of equipment, a few crates, and a rather hefty textbook with a red cover, which was open. Volker suspected this had been the item he’d tripped over earlier.

To his right, the hallway ended in the doorway that led to the cockpit, or bridge, or whatever. The place he’d been handcuffed to a freaking chair. Directly across from him was a closed door with an interesting keypad. To his left, there were several other doors coming off the main hall, all closed. The hallway terminated in another closed door.

“Friendly place,” Volker murmured to his cat, his voice admirably steady.

Mendelssohn seemed unperturbed.

“You’re taking this well,” Volker whispered. “Were you meant to be a space cat?”

Mendelssohn trilled inquisitively.

“Let’s find you some space water,” Volker said quietly. “What do you say?” He scooped the cat off the floor and cleared his throat. “Rush?” he called.

A door hissed open and bright light spilled into the hallway.

“What?” Rush snarled.

“Uh.” Hesitantly, Volker approached the open door. To his relief, when he drew level with the small room, he saw it was a bathroom. Rush angled a small mirror, trying to get a look at his neck, rubbing at the skin a few inches above his collarbone.

“D’you know much about human anatomy?” Rush asked.

“No.” Volker fought down a wave of nausea at the memory of metal sliding beneath skin. “The neck has lots of important stuff in it, though. I’m pretty sure about that.”

“I think I could cut it out,” Rush said. “If I had to.”

“Okay.” Volker tried not to imagine what that would look like. Or how wrong it might go. “I just need to get some water. For my cat.”

Rush put the mirror down and stepped away from the broad shallow gold basin that was probably a sink. The design aesthetic here seemed kinda ostentatious for a spaceship.

But, yeah, maybe that was just him?

“There’s an awful lot of gold detailing around here.” Volker waved a hand at the ornate sink.

“Ridiculous, no?” Rush asked dryly. “That’ll be the Goa’uld influence, though you’ll find the Lucian Alliance has a ridicule-worthy aesthetic all their own.” He flipped and rotated the alien faucet, then stepped away, giving Volker space to enter the small bathroom.

“You realize,” Volker said, filling Mendelssohn’s water bowl, “that I have no idea what you just said?”

“Does your cat have a name?”

“Mendelssohn.”

Rush looked away. His shoulders tensed.

“Um,” Volker said uncertainly. “You got something against early Romantic composers?”

“It’s a fuckin’ terrible name for a cat.” Rush stalked away.

Okay then.

Volker set the bowl on the edge of the sink, turned off the water, then picked it up, maintaining his one-handed grip on his cat.

Back in the hall, Rush stood at the door opposite the cockpit. The one at the very back of the ship. At Volker’s approach, he pressed a button and the metal door swished open.

“Y’can put your things in the cargo bay.” Rush motioned at the room he’d just opened. “I’d leave the cat in there for the time being. Give David some time to adjust to you before we tell him you brought a pet.”

“You said he’d be fine with it,” Volker said uncertainly.

“No,” Rush clarified. “I said he wouldn’t kill it.”

“Rush!” Volker couldn’t keep the panic out of his voice.

“An’ he’ll not fuckin’ torture it either,” Rush said, rolling his eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Volker, hold it together, will you?” He pointed to the glowing control panel. “Blue opens the door for a twenty-second interval. Hold the button down until it lights up, and you’ll lock the door in an open position. Shut it again by hitting the red button. Hold the red button down to seal the door. Opening it again requires a CPU override or an eight-digit numeric command code, which I’m not supposed to know. It’s 16180339.”

“You’re kidding,” Volker said. “The Golden Ratio?”

“I suspect it’s a mathematical ostentation,” Rush said. “The Goa’uld are heavily invested in iconography and semiotics. They’re less invested in effective cryptography. I suspect David hasn’t realized its significance, or he’d have altered it by now. I suggest y’don’t enlighten him.”

“So you guessed an alien command code?”

“Have y’seen the fuckin’ gold in this place?” Rush quirked an eyebrow.

Volker wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no, but before he could marshal his thoughts, Rush had turned and headed back to the front of the ship.

Volker made short work of moving his things into the cargo bay. He spread a handful of cat food on the shiny metal floor next to the water dish, set up the litter box as fast as he could, then stepped out of the cargo bay. He watched Mendelssohn crunch a few pieces of cat food, then closed the door.

Back in the cockpit, he found Rush sitting in the same seat he’d occupied earlier, one foot propped on the control panel. He tapped a pen against the pages of a small, handheld notebook.

Volker sat in the chair he’d previously been handcuffed to. He took a breath and tried not to think about the fact that, miles below him, his home and his lab were currently on fire.

“So,” he said, “did you get, um, kidnapped as well?”

Rush gave him a withering look.

Volker really wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Was that a clear yes? A clear no? Was it supposed to convey disdain for his choice of conversational topic? An indicator that Rush had no interest in finding any kind of common ground between them? A demonstration that Rush had no interest in making small talk?

Volker had no idea.

“Okay,” he said, mainly to himself.

Rush wrote something in his notebook.

“What are you working on?” he asked, trying a different tack.

“I’m waiting,” Rush said.

Volker gave it up.

He returned his attention to the displays in front of him. In addition to the vacillating histogram and the schematic of the ship he’d noticed earlier, there was a touchscreen menu that featured blocks of text in different colors. Too bad he couldn’t read any of it.

He started to look for repeating characters and soon his eye became practiced at picking out the unfamiliar arrangement of lines that seemed to approximate letters. He began the attempt to name and count the symbols, trying to get a sense of whether the alphabet was phonetic or not. The letters he picked out looked like shapes suggestive of birds or eyes, almost as if they were a stylized and streamlined version of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

“Huh,” Volker said under his breath.

With that observation under his belt, he began to look for repeating patterns. There was a “word” in the header on the graph he’d tentatively decided was a representation of available power that also appeared on the touchscreen menu.  

He touched it.

With a satisfying trill, the display changed to a series of graphs that displayed in gradients of green and red. One matched the subtly fluttering histogram of the adjacent console.

He felt a thrill of excitement despite his current situation. There was a flatlined graph he guessed was probably total power consumption versus time and several more histograms…power reserves, maybe? Power consumption by different systems?

The word for “power” appeared all over the screen. Volker tried to fix it in his mind. Rectangle. Bird. Other bird. Feather. He also had the feeling the word “time” was something like—rope, sail, birthday cake, feather.

It probably wasn’t actually a birthday cake.

There had to be a way to back out of the power submenu and return to the main interface. He looked around for a likely set of symbols, but didn’t see one.

A colored triangle maybe?

He looked at them, chewing his lip.

“The purple one,” Rush said.

“Thanks.” Volker looked up at him, hoping for more.

Rush regarded him steadily, then said, “Purple takes you up a level, yellow drills you down. Red terminates. Blue indicates movement ahead.”

A mechanized chime interrupted Rush before he could elaborate further. He grimaced and hit a button. “David.”

“Rush.” Telford sounded like he was trying to speak quietly. “I’m having a problem with activating a remote beam out.”

“That’s odd.” Rush didn’t look like he found it at all odd. He shifted his gaze toward the floor on his right and drummed his fingers over the edge of the console.

“It is, isn’t it?” Telford sounded annoyed.

“Are you implying something, David?” Rush asked. “You know social cues aren’t my strong point.”

“Knock it off,” Telford said. “Beam me out.”

“Stand by.” Rush leaned down and unhooked a device from the main panel, which looked like it had been cobbled together out of a circuit board and various connectors. Rush pulled a flash drive out of a USB port that connected somehow to the tangle of wires and slipped it into his pocket. He put the device back on the floor, then entered a command on the console.

“What is that?” Volker pointed to the nest of wire and raw circuit board on the floor.

“No USB ports on cannibalized Goa’uld vessels,” Rush said.

“But what were you—”

“Drop it,” Rush snapped.

“Fine,” Volker mouthed.

Half a minute later, Telford stalked onto the bridge. He glanced at Volker and said, “Your meds are in the bathroom.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

Rush rolled his eyes.

“You’re welcome.” Telford gave Rush a pointed look as he sat. “Get your shit off the bridge.”

“This,” Rush said, picking up the naked circuit board, “is a mechanically sophisticated and ingeniously designed adapter that interfaces two technologies with essentially no commonalities beyond making use of the flow of charge. It cannot, in any way, be classified as ‘shit’.”

“Well, it looks like shit,” Telford said through a clenched jaw.

Rush handed the device to Volker.

“Did you explain anything to him?” Telford pulled up a display that turned the monitor in front of him into a set of controls arranged radially.

“He can pick it up as he goes along,” Rush said. “There’s no way to explain in a time-efficient manner.”

Telford sighed and then spun his chair to face Volker.

“This ought to be good.” Rush braced a foot against the console. “Give him the three-minute version, why don’t you?”

Volker couldn’t help the jump in his heart rate at being the focus of Telford’s attention.

“You’re in a ship built by an alien race known as the Goa’uld,” Telford said. “They’re parasitic snakes that cut their way through the skin at the back of your throat and wrap around your spinal cord to attach to the base of your brain, which allows them control over your voluntary muscles.”

Volker really wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“Apparently, they really liked Ancient Egypt or Ancient Egypt was based on their culture? Whatever. It’s not my area. They’ve historically been the dominant player in this galaxy but within the past ten years we’ve pretty much destroyed their power base through a series of tactical and ideological victories. Unfortunately, that’s left a vacuum, which has subsequently been filled by an association known as the Lucian Alliance. They’re an ambitious, powerful group of humans with the vision necessary to provide the leadership that countless pillaged worlds require.”

Volker’s eyes flicked to Rush. The mathematician was rubbing his neck. He didn’t look particularly impressed with Telford’s recounting.

“Or at least,” Telford continued, “that’s what they’d have the citizens of those worlds believe.”

“And you work for the Lucian Alliance?” Volker asked.

“No,” Telford said. “I’ve infiltrated their organization as part of a covert operation launched by the USAF.”

“And Rush and I?” Volker asked.

“That’s a little more complicated.” Telford dropped his gaze. “Technically, I recruited Rush to do some work for the LA.”

“Recruited,” Volker said, trying for sarcasm but not quite making it there. “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

Rush pulled his feet off the console and sat forward. “We’ll need t’break orbit now if we’re going to make the rendezvous for your precious intel.”

Telford kept his eyes on Volker. “Any questions?”

“Uh…yeah?” Volker said.

Telford smiled. “Start making a list.” He turned to the monitors. “Give me ten percent?”

“Y’have it,” Rush said, his fingers playing over the touchscreen as though it were a musical instrument. 

The ship began a maneuvering burn, its position rotating until the blues and greens of Earth were no longer visible out the forward view. Telford controlled their axis deviation with the pressure of his fingers against the screen in front of him. When they were oriented away from the planet, away from everything Volker had ever known, Telford accelerated.

Their trajectory took them out of orbit, out of the solar system, into darkness.