Free Ion 417: Raiju by James Darcey Page A

expert."
    Now that he pointed it out to me so bluntly I realized that he was correct. I'd been too blinded by the differences to realize that I hadn't been having pure water in my room. I tried thinking back to my time of playing the recycler game. I could remember that there were listings for chloride, magnesium, sodium, potassium, and a few other things as well. Now the big question came as to why they had given me water with so many things in it. I didn't have an answer, and I wasn't about to send a message to ask the one person who would know. I wasn't even going to ask if it was possible to send a comm to Teyrn Elon.
    There was no way to add those minerals that I'd grown accustomed to. Even if I could somehow find a way to add them, they would probably end up poisoning Traxel. So far he was a useful pilot, and if I needed to get rid of him it would be less painful to toss him out of the airlock. I just hope that the lack of those chemicals could be alleviated by the new foods I was eating.
    I got into a routine with my exercise, where I could lift boxes in the cargo bay, substituting various boxes for different weights. The extreme terrain shelter was for the heavy push part of my weights, and the portable AI was the warm-up routine. The novelty of the hover cycle had me sitting on it several times, with imagined scenery flying by at five hundred kilometers per hour. According to Traxel it could go up to two hundred before the wheels folded up for full hover mode.
    Every time I went down the ladder to the lower decks, Traxel would follow me if he was awake. He got really nervous every time I ventured near the engineering section, even though I promised not to open anything else without asking him first. I never liked the feeling of not being able to control the things that affected my life, and here I was dependent upon a machine that I knew so little about.
    It helped a lot to have him show me which machines were where, as it was very obvious that the ship had undergone extensive rebuilding in the time since it was first launched. Still the basic arrangement was similar, which I guess was to be expected. I mean there are certain things that a starship needs or it just won't go. Or there's the option of having it go and the people inside not breathing, so it needs certain stuff in order to be a starship. Traxel's explanation of the differences was that The Teyrn liked to tweak everything to his particular liking.
    Being in space, there is a lot of time for everything. I didn't feel like sleeping for too many hours, and even exercise has its limits. So, after exploring about all I could explore that left coercing Traxel into teaching me how to play some games. We watched a few of his classic holos, and alternated with games. This was thrilling to be doing something with somebody. I mean somebody that wasn't testing the adhesion of my skin to the underlying muscles.
    His favorite was one called Rampari. It seemed a simple strategy conquest game at first. However the rules seemed to get more complicated every time we played. The red ship can capture an amber or black ship in a diagonal upward shift, unless there was a solar flare within two parsecs. In that case it had to shift downward for capture. However if the teal ship carried the plasma diplomat then the amber ship could escape by shifting three squares to the right. Or maybe that was three squares up. All I knew for certain was that no matter how many games we played I could never win. My memory was starting to seem a little fuzzy on the details.
    By the sixth day out I was starting to feel weakened. I could still exercise and move fine, but I felt like I had no energy. I know that it must be really bad if I noticed it without thinking about it. My skin was feeling about as smooth as the packing containers in the hold. I was even having a hard time getting an arc to jump more than about fifty or sixty centimeters. I wasn't sure I was still thinking as clearly, and