The Collected Lancer Volume 1

by Troy Osgood

  The Wind turned so that we were facing the magbarrier and large opening of the hanger directly. The guidance system pushed the ship forward and the opening grew larger and larger until all we could see was the starfield outside. There was another shudder of the ship as we crossed the barrier, everything getting tinted in blue, and we were floating outside the bay with the thrusters pushing us away from the asteroid.

  I hit the controls and the engines that had been in standby came to life. The ship picked up speed as it switched from thrusters to the drive engines. I fought against the limited gravity of the asteroid and took the ship in a loop away from it.

  I turned the ship so that the girl could get a good look at the asteroid belt that contained CU145792. Lights dotted the rock as well as the large opening of the hanger. Lights could be seen on other asteroids in the belts, more mines owned by the Culkin Union, but only CU145792 was inhabited. It had probably been stripped of all it’s ore awhile ago and now just served as the living quarters.

  Turning the ship again I headed towards the edge of this system on a course that would avoid other asteroids and junk floating in space. I could leave the system on any trajectory and still get to my destination but that might mean more jumps.

  Hopping system to system was like plotting a course on a map. You went from point A to point B to get to point C. You could try jumping from A to C, but that could lead you into uncharted ion storms, nebulas or any of the other thousand dangers of the wild space between systems. All jumps started and ended at the edges of the different systems. That led to hours of in-system travel at normal drive speed and not jumpspeed. Slow. But in-system hops were dangerous. Safer to go the long way.

  Inner core worlds built large docking stations at the edges of their systems to help cut down on the amount of in-system traffic. A freighter the size of the Wind could go in-system and even planetside, but larger ones had to stop at the stations.

  I keyed in the navorders for the hop to Dynuit and once the computer had finished calculating I hit the activation button.

  Technically it’s called Outersystem Warping into warpspace using stardrives but everyone calls it starhopping, or just hopping, into wildspace.

  The stars that were points of light elongated and disappeared as the Nomad’s Wind shot into the wild space between systems. The view outside the window became nothing but a foggy white with streaks of black. The fog looked like it drifted around the ship as we flew at speeds that blew the mind when you tried to think about them. No one knew what this space between systems was really made of, dark matter was the prevailing theory, but I didn’t care. Looking at this always filled me with peace.

  Ships didn’t really need view windows and a lot of the newer models didn’t have them. I’d never own a ship that didn’t. The views well flying were spectacular.

  The Thesan girl leaned forward at the station for a better look. She was smiling, eyes wide with wonder. She’d probably never seen this view before. Not many people took the time to really see what space had to offer.

  Where the girl was sitting gave me an idea.

  The Wind’s control room, cockpit, bridge and whatever other words it was called, had four stations. The pilot’s on the right, co-pilots on the left and down a couple steps were the navigation and weapons stations or what amounted to weapons on this ship. A couple plasma cannons for defense but that station also controlled the shields. The pilot’s station had secondary controls for all those functions. The walls were covered in dials, buttons, displays and read-outs. Lots of flashing lights. Each station was a desk with the controls and a chair. Each desk had a couple monitors and an input keyboard.

  Dynuit was three jumps from the asteroid. Each jump was about six hours long. That seemed like a long time but when you measured distance in light years, it was crazy to think of the distance covered in just six hours.

  It gave us plenty of time.

  I stood up and the girl looked at me. I walked over to her station and pointed at the input keyboard.

  “You understand spoken Tradelan but can you write it?” I asked.

  The girl looked at the keyboard in thought, finally looking up at me and smiling. She looked down at the keyboard and with her long fingers that ended in short nails, she started typing.

  On the screen I saw the word YES.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  I shifted so I could look at her and the screen.

  “Let’s start easy,” I told her. “What’s your name?”

  KAYLIA

  “Nice to meet you Kaylia,” I said, speaking it slowly and looking at her to see if I got the pronunciation right.

  She smiled. Nailed it the first time.

  “How old are you?”

  THIRTEEN SEASONS

  “Where are you from?”

  TURESA

  That was one of the Thesan’s colony worlds. Not in their home system, but a neighboring one. Turns out most systems are like Earth's, only one or two habitable planets and a bunch of uninhabitable ones. Because of this, some of the more empire-leaning beings had expanded out into other systems. Thesa had four colony worlds in different systems. Us earthlings had three and counting. The Tiats had seven or eight. I did a quick mental calculation of how many jumps it would be from Dynuit to Turesa. Seven possibly? Nine most likely. It was on the edge of the Inner Core but on the opposite side of the spiral.

  “Kaylia,” I said gently and she looked up at me. “It’s time for the hard questions, okay?”

  She took a deep breath and nodded.

  “Did the Tiat take you from your home?”

  YES

  “Why?”

  She didn’t type, just shrugged. Didn’t know.

  “Did they hurt you? Is that why you can’t talk?”

  NO. BORN MUTE

  “Did they hurt you at all?”

  She shook her head no.

  GRABBED HARD BUT THAT WAS IT

  “How did you get away from the Tiat on the asteroid?”

  She typed for a while, the words coming fast.

  THEY TOOK ME ON SHIP TO THE ASTEROID AND LED ME THROUGH THE STREET TO A BUILDING. WHILE GETTING INTO THE BUILDING I BIT ONE AND MANAGED TO GET AWAY.

  So she had only been on the asteroid for a couple of hours at most. Interesting.

  “Are your parents on Turesa?”

  She lowered her head, hiding her eyes. I hated asking that question because I was afraid I knew the answer. But I needed to be sure.

  After a minute or two Kaylia lifted her head enough to look at the keyboard. She started typing, slower than before.

  TIAT KILLED THEM

  She sagged back in the chair, looking out the view window at the fog of wildspace. I took a step back, leaning against the pilot station.

  Why would the Tiat attack a Thesan family on a Thesan colony world and kidnap a young girl? Thesa and Tiat used to be at war. Twenty years ago. It was what had allied us, the Terrans, with the Thesans. We took their side in the conflict. That war had ended with a stalemate and non-aggression pact between the three. There were minor conflicts and each side, the Thesans and Terrans versus the Tiat, would try to sabotage the others operations. Real cold war kind of stuff. Walk up to the line but don’t do enough to step over or at least not get caught. No one in the galaxy wanted another war.

  This though, the killing and kidnapping of citizens, could be what finally crossed the line.

  So why? There had to be more to the story.

  The girl didn’t look like she wanted to answer anymore questions and I didn’t want to ask anymore. I doubted she’d have the answers I wanted. Like the ‘why’. But there was one more I did need.

  “Kaylia,” I said gently leaning forward. She looked over at me, wet lines marking the light fur on her face. She had been silently crying. “Last question.” She nodded. “Is there anyone on Turesa that I can take you to?”

  She lifted her head, looking up at the ceiling, thinking. She finally started typing, pausing as she
tried to think of the right words. That was the problem with Tradelan. It did great for the basic things but there were concepts that were unique to one race that didn’t translate into something others could understand. This led to lots of misunderstandings as you tried to put the concept into Tradelan and it got misinterpreted by the other side.

  Kaylia had stopped typing and I looked at the screen.

  MOTHERS LITTERMATE

  Litter? Thesans gave birth to litters? That was interesting. I wonder if it was in numbers similar to earth cats or if it just meant twins. Hard to tell and not really relevant.

  “What’s her name?”

  YOTERRA

  “Will you be okay if I leave you with her?”

  Kaylia nodded. Not enthusiastic but it would have to do.

  Enough questions for now.

  I stepped back and waved at the door.

  “It’s a long trip to Dynuit. We have three six hour jumps. Let me show you to a room where you can sleep.”

  Kaylia stood up, stretching. I wished I had some clothes she could change into and get out of the coveralls. A one-piece suit with a zipper, the Tiat had most likely put her in them. The clothes held her tail down and that had to be getting uncomfortable. I wondered if I had anything that would fit her small frame. Probably not. She was shorter than I was and a lot smaller body wise.

  And it wasn’t like I had a wide variety of clothing.

  I wore my dark green military issue jacket all the time. Long sleeved shirt underneath, blue in color today, and dark pants with boots. Didn’t have a need for much else.

  We walked out of the cockpit and into the hallway. Doors led off, four to each side. Six led to sleeping compartments and the other two to storage rooms that were on either side of the control room.

  “This is my room,” I said pointing to the second door on the right side, the first of the bunks.

  There wasn’t any markings on the doors. Nothing to indicate that one specifically as mine.

  “The rest are empty, you can take your pick.”

  Almost immediately, without any thought, she pointed to the one directly across from mine.

  I nodded and showed her how to use the keypad, teaching her the code to open it. The door slid open into the metal wall and we entered the room, the lights turning on automatically to show a decent sized room. Along one wall was a bed attached to the wall and a desk. The other wall had two doors, the closet and the private refresher. A comfortable looking couch was against the far wall that faced a viewscreen mounted to the side of the door.

  It was identical to the other five rooms.

  There was no decoration and the room had a disused look. No one had been in it for five years. The ship’s air rotation units kept it clean of dust but there was still a musty feel to the room.

  “It’s not much,” I said as Kaylia walked in and looked around.

  She turned around and ran to me, giving me a hug, holding tight.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, putting my arms around her awkwardly. “You’re going to be okay.”

  She stepped back and raised her hands, moving the fingers in a pattern.

  “Does that mean ‘thank you’?” I asked and she nodded, smiling.

  The pattern repeated, slower with more emphasis on the finger movements.

  I duplicated them. My motions were jerky which probably gave my sign language an accent but Kaylia smiled. I did it a couple more times, getting the movements down.

  “How do you say ‘You’re welcome’?”

  She showed me. It took a couple times but I got it.

  Smiling, she walked over to the bed.

  I walked out of the room, closing the door behind me.

  *****

  I waited until I was sure Kaylia was asleep before I started searching the news.

  The galaxy is a big place and there is always a lot of news floating around out there. I didn’t keep up as much as I should have. Part of it was by choice. I’d made the decision to isolate myself when I got out of the military, to be a vagabond and just go from place to place. No home, just me and the ship. Being out of the loop meant I didn’t catch anything from earth. The other part was about the galaxy being so big.

  Each planet had its own news. Each cluster had its own news. Each system had its own news. And then there was the galaxy wide news. I didn’t know many people that kept up with it all.

  Luckily there was the Galactic Feed. This was a galaxy wide application that took all the different news feeds from all over and condensed it into more easily digestible segments. You could modify the Feed to give the news you specifically wanted. The Feed was also a connection to galaxy wide entertainment, shows and music.

  The problem was still that it was a lot of information and what I specifically would be looking for wouldn’t be available.

  That was because of the other problem with the Galactic Feed and any cross-galaxy communications.

  It didn’t exist while in wildspace. Each ship was isolated. There was no way to get a signal through, into or from wildspace.

  There were millions of relay satellites all over the galaxy, hundreds in each system, that would give a boost in power to the signal so that it could go from system to system, but it was as a signal that couldn’t be deciphered well in wildspace. So a ship would enter a system and get an infodump of everything.

  All of it at least hours, if not days, out of date.

  I had the Wind’s systems programmed to get me a dump whenever I was insystem for a couple hours. No point doing it if just insystem to do the next jump.

  If the Tiat had taken Kaylia from Turesa to CU145792 that would have been at least 42 hours and up to 54 or more hours ago. She’d only been on the rock for a couple of hours so that helped narrow it down. Like an idiot I hadn’t asked when she had been taken. But in my defense, I was new at this rescuing kidnapped people thing.

  I was on that rock long enough to get an infodump so I might get lucky.

  Turning on the vidscreen, I entered my password for the Feed and started my search.

  Back in my Special Ops days, I worked with a lot of intel operatives. I was the muscle, the direct action gunner, but I was involved in enough behind the scenes planning that I had picked up a couple of things in how to analyze intelligence.

  First you started with what you knew to be true.

  In this case it wasn’t much. And while I was running through the small amount of facts in my head, it occured to me that Kaylia could be making it all up. She could be lying about her name and everything else.

  I paused, leaning back in my chair and thought about it. I didn’t think so. My instincts told me that she was telling the truth. She was a lost and scared girl that for some reason had chosen me to save her.

  I almost laughed at that. If my old unit could see me now. I was not a nice person. I didn’t go out of my way to help others. I looked out for me and me alone.

  Leaning forward I started typing search commands into the Feed.

  What I knew: a young Thesan girl was kidnapped by the Tiat and her parents killed.

  Yep, that’s a lot.

  I started with the news from Turesa going as far back as a week ago. I started scanning headlines, using the Feed to narrow it down with some keywords. I started with “missing girl” and variations of that.

  Nothing.

  The Tiat would have wanted to keep this quiet, that’s why they went out of their way to hide on CU145792. But would the Thesans? I changed my search tactics and looked up the missing persons news feeds.

  Nothing.

  The Thesans hadn’t reported her missing? That was very odd.

  Why would both sides be keeping it quiet? Who was she?

  Changing the tactics again I started looking for family deaths and for good measure I threw in the name Kaylia had given me. Yoterra.

  That found something.

  A family had died in a small farming settlement outside the major city on Turesa. Father, mother, two sons and
their only daughter. Yoterra wasn’t listed as the mother’s littermate, still wasn’t sure what that meant. Instead she was listed as the regional governor of the planet.

  That was a surprise. She was a pretty high ranking Thesan.

  The news had a video of her speaking, talking about the tragedy. She was pretty enough for a Thesan. Tall, couple inches shorter than me, couple years older. Coal black fur with gray highlights, wearing what I assumed was the height of Thesan fashion. She looked every bit the part of the regional governor speaking at a tragedy of people she knew personally.

  But there was something else about her that caught my attention. The way she stood, her bearing.

  Yoterra was military.

  Why would the Tiat kill a farming family and kidnap the daughter? Along with faking her death? And why was the only other person I knew involved the regional governor? Who was or had been Thesan military?

  I was starting to worry that I had stepped into something very big and very bad.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I searched the Feed for a while longer, not finding anything else. I even looked for more information on Yoterra but all I could find was standard stuff for a regional governor on a colony world. Nothing about military. Nothing about why she might be of interest to the Tiat. I had gotten to thinking that they had taken Kaylia to use as leverage against Yoterra.

  The idea had merit but it just didn’t feel right. Not completely. There might be something there but there was also something else.

  Not even midway through the first jump and I had run out of ideas. I didn’t think I was going to find out anything else from the Feed. And I didn’t think Kaylia could or would tell me more. She probably didn’t even know. Wouldn’t be the first time an innocent and unknowing kid had been involved in something adults should have left them out of.

  I had one more avenue to explore. I composed a quick message and programmed it to send once we got to the first hop point.

  Checking the chrono on my wristcomm I saw it was approaching what would normally be dinner time for most species. I kept an odd schedule so never ate on a regular pattern. Most ships carried two pilots, working alternating shifts, so one would always be up when hit a hop point. Normally those were safe, no problems, but there was always a chance and so a pilot was on duty. It was just me so I couldn’t always do that. I needed to sleep.