by Troy Osgood
That’s why Kaylia had been so urgent in waking me up. There was a limited time to respond.
I could hear the signal playing on a pre recorded loop. Same message, short, repeating.
Sitting down in the pilot’s station, Kaylia hovering over me, I hit the commands that delayed the hop and concentrated on the message.
It was in Tradelan, the somewhat common language of the galaxy, and was being broadcast on all channels. Even the emergency ones which is how Kaylia was able to receive it.
“All ships that receive this, we are requesting your aid in evacuation of Storw.”
I shut off the reception of the message.
Kaylia tapped me on the shoulder and I looked down at her hands, her fingers moving in intricate patterns rapidly.
Evacuation?
I nodded and pulled up the star charts. We were a quick four hour hop from the Wils star system on the edge of the Inner Worlds, where the planet Storw was.
“Remember that news item from last week,” I said as I started programming in the new set of coordinates. I’d have to remember to send a message to the client telling them why their cargo was going to be late. How late? Good question. “About the asteroid threatening a planet?”
She nodded, moving over to the co-pilots station.
“That was Storw.”
Not a big planet or even a popular one, Storw had been in the Galactic Feed news a lot lately. A rogue asteroid had entered the system, on a straight line for the planet. Nothing could be done so evacuations had started. The natives, a race called the Storwos, had no colony worlds and had to scramble to find places to take the refugees.
It was huge news. There hadn’t been a planet destroyed in the galaxy in a hundred years. Which was longer than us earthlings, or Terrans as we were called, had been roaming the stars.
Receiving news is interesting out in the wilds of space. Travel is done by hopping from star system to star system, crossing the incredible distances in wildspace. When in that strange area between systems you can’t receive anything from out of wildspace. So you can go hours or days with no updates. You get the news in spurts. Which is why travelers hop from system to system, cutting down on the amount of time spent in wildspace.
It had been a couple of days since had heard anything about Storw beyond evacuations were continuing. I figured the planet would have been destroyed by now and the last of the people on their way to their new homes.
I wonder what went wrong.
Something had to if they were sending out an all-ships request.
I heard the tap on the console. The sound of Kaylia getting my attention.
We’re going to help?
“Of course we are,” I replied and hit the buttons that locked in the navcourse for Storw.
*****
I’d like to think that I would have gone to help even if Kaylia wasn’t on board the Wind. But would I have?
*****
We hopped out of wildspace, the cloudy white replaced by the black of space with the millions of white dots that were the stars. My ship had a view window, one of the few nowadays that did, but there wasn’t much to see. Coming in at the edge of the system, this far out there weren’t even any planets visible.
I didn’t know much about the Wils system, only what I could get from the information stored in the Wind’s Feed directory, but I knew that it was a rare system in that all the planets were gathered in close to the sun with a lot of empty space beyond. We were still a couple hours out from Storw. I adjusted the scanners, sacrificing fine tuning for range, and picked up multiple ships in the area. Too far away to see, both entering and leaving the system.
The scanners indicated lots of different sizes. Only one of them was a large passenger liner, a ship designed to carry a lot of people. Some were freighters larger than mine. The Nomad’s Wind was a light freighter, I wouldn’t be able to hold many but every little bit helped.
The door to the hall slid open and Kaylia walked into the bridge. The room wasn’t that big, four stations on two levels. Pilots and co-pilots on the upper with navigation and weapons on the lower level, only a couple steps down. Until the kid had come on board, I was the only crew and while the ship was designed for six and could be flown by three, I had rigged things so it could be flown by one.
She yawned and stretched, looking out the view window, her tail swishing in the air. Standing about five foot three, Kaylia was basically a humanoid cat. Gray and black fur in a kind of spotted and striped pattern, long tail, short and pointed ears. Large yellow eyes with thin green irises. There were tufts of fur at her ankles and wrists and her hair fell down her back, parts of it connected to her body like a mane. When I had first found her, the kid had been stuck in worker’s coveralls. Since then we’d managed to get her some clothes of her own but she preferred wearing one of my old Earth Expeditionary Forces military jackets most of the time.
It was way too big for her slender form but if she was happy, that’s what mattered.
You were supposed to wake me when we arrived.
Her sign language was quick, containing a mixture of Tradelan and Thesan. It had taken me awhile to get used to the mix but I was pretty fluent in Kaylia now. There were times when she signed too quickly for me to catch and I had to tell her to slow down.
“We’re still a couple hours from the planet,” I told her turning my attention back to controls. “Figured you could sleep longer.”
Too excited.
“Understandable,” I replied. “Not everyday something like this happens.”
There are evacuations all the time.
The kid had been born at the tail end of the Third Galactic War to parents that had lived it. She had to have heard stories from them and in school history lessons about the battles. Settlements had been evacuated for various reasons during the War, mostly to get innocents out of the way of battles or because there was no sustaining the colony anymore because of battle damage.
I had participated in a couple during my time as a soldier.
“True but not for this,” I told her. “Not for the destruction of a planet.”
I could hear her fiddling with some controls, fingers tapping on the keys. One of her duties as co-pilot of the ship was to update the Galactic Feed when we hopped into a system. There was an automatic pre-programmed download that happened at each hop, but sometimes we wanted to add to it. That was her job and she was looking for updates on Storw so we’d know what we were getting into.
Communication from system to system is spotty and not quick. There are satellites in most systems that bounce the signal around, punching it through wildspace to the next receiver, but because of the nature of wildspace none of those signals can be picked up well there. The Feed is the galaxy wide communications system, everything from messages and news to entertainment videos or books. But because of wildspace and the lag across systems, when you hop into a system you’re behind on the current happenings.
Usually only a couple of hours but those hours can be important.
There was one time on a mission for the 2Es, we’d gotten a signal from a forward base hidden in an asteroid belt that all was clear and the mission was a go. We hopped into the system in the middle of an ambush from the Tiat.
Most of us didn’t make it out of there. Those of us that did, we were lucky.
“Any updates,” I asked the co-pilot.
I looked at Kaylia and she pointed back at one of my monitors. A face appeared, human, male, neatly dressed. Some kind of newscaster. I switched the volume on and hit play.
“The evacuation of Storw was interrupted when the rogue asteroid itself encountered the rings surrounding one of the Wils system gas giants. It was hoped that the ring collision would send the asteroid off course but instead it sent parts of the gas giant’s rings hurtling into the center of the system. These meteors struck Storw’s largest moon as well as the planet itself. Due to the damage to the planet and the moon it was deemed too dangerous to continue with th
e evacuations. The hope is that things will settle down and evacuations can continue. As of now only three quarters of the planet has made it off.”
I shut off the newscast and cleared it from my monitor. Adjusting the scanners I looked to see where we were in relation to the gas giant. Thankfully we were coming in from the side, not in the path of the asteroid or the gas giant that would be going crazy with it’s ring destroyed.
Kaylia tapped on the console. She had been watching the vid over my shoulder.
How many people on the planet?
“Twenty million,” I replied after consulting the Feed archive. “About the same as Turesa.” That was the Thesan colony world she was from.
It doesn’t seem like much in comparison to some of the Inner Worlds or even Terra, or Earth as we natives like to call it. When I left Earth, there were five billion on the planet itself. Our Mars colony had twenty million. Europa was one million, Titan was five hundred thousand and the Sol Station had fifty thousand. Earth’s fleet of government ships numbered in the hundreds with the largest having a crew of five hundred and capable of carrying a thousand soldiers. The largest passenger liner that I knew of had a crew of a hundred and could carry six hundred.
If three quarters of the population had made it off planet, that still left five million Storwos that needed to be evacuated. No wonder they had sent out the all-ships request. No single race, even the empires, had a fleet capable of taking that many people at once. The evacuation was in chunks, a hundred here, a hundred there. If they were requesting ships like the Wind, they were desperate.
When your planet is going to be destroyed and you’re trying to save as many of your people as you can, nothing is too desperate.
*****
The planet Storw came into view.
A small planet, blue and green with white cloud cover. Nothing special about it.
Except for the broken moon in orbit.
The gray rock globe was missing a large piece of it, smaller pieces floating in space around the wound. Cracks streaked across the surface, more chunks of rock breaking off and drifting into the void. A trail of rock debris led from the moon towards the planet, pieces drifting at different speeds.
Dozens of ships were orbiting the planet, large ones that couldn’t enter the atmosphere, smaller shuttles swarming around them. Others, maybe another dozen, could be seen entering and leaving, breaking through the cloud cover and dragging puffs of white behind them.
And there in the distance the streaks across the starfield that marked the meteors ahead of the planet killing asteroid.
Storw didn’t have much time left.
CHAPTER TWO
“Nomad’s Wind to Storw Control,” I spoke into the comms system. There was some static in the system and I made some adjustments.
“Storw Control, we copy you Nomad’s Wind.” The voice that answered, still a bit staticky, was melodious and a lot calmer than I would have been. “And we thank you for your assistance.”
“Where do you need me?”
“Make of ship,” the controller asked. No small talk, which was understandable. Probably had a checklist of things to ask to figure out the best use of the vessel.
“Earth registration and manufacture. Castellan Light Freighter Model F497. Crew of two.”
There was a couple minutes of silence as the controller processed the information, probably bringing up whatever specs they had available on the ship. I had a data packet I was ready to transmit if need be. It didn’t list any of my special modifications of course.
“How empty is the cargo hold,” the controller finally said.
“Quarter full,” I replied and could imagine the controller’s expression. A freighter of any kind with an empty hold like that wasn’t normally a very good freighter. The benefit of a crew of two was they didn’t need as much to keep afloat.
“Thank the Gursn,” the controller said. Probably the Storwo deity. Definitely not part of the script. First time anyone, including me, had been happy with a near empty cargo hold. “Nomad’s Wind, we are transmitting you coordinates now to a small farming settlement called Touryon. Population of five hundred. Ground control will give further guidance once you land.”
“Roger that,” I said and studied my board. “Coordinates received,” I added a couple seconds later.
I adjusted the Wind’s course to bring us to the far side of the planet before we entered atmo. I wondered how many people they were hoping to cram into the ship.
The planet curved below us and I pulled the navguide up on the view window, superimposing it over the polycarbonite. A small green dot appeared on the horizon, an indication of where our destination was. We could see other ships passing us, different colored dots on the screen and even one visible to the eye, some rising from the surface and some landing. I’d never seen this much ship activity, not even at busy ports. In the corner of the view window the distance counted down. This was a feature I had rarely used before Kaylia started traveling with me. When it was just me, I could see all this on the screens at my station. Normally it was stuff shown at the navigation station and I had tasked to mine.
Seeing it on the big screen was much more interesting.
The cloud cover was thick in this part of the planet, not as white, more gray. We could see streaks of lightning cutting through the cover. A storm and it looked pretty planetwide.
I adjusted the thrusters and guided the Wind down through the cloud bank. The window filled with the clouds, similar to hopping through wildspace except for the blue flashes of lightning. Rain started pelting the window, drips splattering against the polycarbonite. The ship shook, nothing bad, but enough that I had to hold the controls steady.
From the corner of my eye I saw Kaylia grip the console tightly.
“Turbulence,” I told Kaylia. “Just a storm.”
It really wouldn’t be just a storm. I had wondered what effects the damaged moon were having and I think we were about to find out.
We passed through the clouds and into the raging storm. Winds buffeted the ship, the thrusters compensating. Rain pelted off the metal, now audible with the force. Lightning strikes slammed into the planet, some so strong they caused small explosions. Fires could be seen dotting the land masses. Flying down closer to the surface, we could see massive waves across the oceans. The edges of the landmasses were getting swamped with the waves.
It was rockier here, less green.
And less ships. I hadn’t seen another one on the scanner in a couple of minutes.
The distance flew by, the storm lessening. The land dropped away, becoming smaller islands in the raging seas. We could see structures on some of the islands, the remains of docks along the shoreline. Waves crashing onto the land and flooding the streets. They looked abandoned.
Hoped they were abandoned because the inhabitants had already been evacuated. But somehow I doubted it. Some of the waves were completely covering the smaller islands.
“There it is,” I said as the green dot on the view window grew larger.
We passed over a wider stretch of ocean, no other land masses, except the one directly ahead. Larger than many of the others, the structures were visible from further away. It set higher up, cliffs surrounding the land and no visible beaches. With these waves, it was the safest bit of land around.
Two and three story buildings filled the near side of the island, trees further away and some fields beyond those. Gray and square, windows filled with a dark material. There wasn’t much appealing about the architecture or the island itself. I wondered what it had looked like back in the planet’s prime.
I slowed the Wind and raised it well above the buildings. No need to add the force of the ship’s passing to the strong winds that were already buffeting the city. We could see people, small from this height, running through the city. All seemed to be converging at a single point. No details could be seen, most were covered to protect from the rain and wind.
Between the buildings and the trees
was a cleared spot. A smaller area recently cleared much larger. The ground was hard packed dirt, no metal landing field. There was a single small square of metal nearer the buildings, the island’s original ship pad, but it had been expanded rapidly. The old pad wouldn’t have handled a ship the size of the Wind and it was not a huge ship and the pad barely held the military style boxy transport that was on it now. It appeared that only passenger shuttles ever really came out to this remote island. Farming island? They must not have exported much.
The cleared trees could be seen piled against the still living ones, branches and leaves still on them, the ends ragged from quick cutting. Stumps and mounds of dirt ringed the field.
As did a large contingent of armed guards and barriers, a crowd of people surging against it.
There weren’t five hundred people, but there was way more than the Wind could take.
I brought the Wind into a hover over the field, the view out the window changing so we no longer had to look at the crowd. I glanced at Kaylia, wondering what she was thinking. She had her legs pulled up tight, arms wrapped around them and was staring at the storm. The ship shook, winds pushing at it, as I lowered it to the ground.
*****
I didn’t open the Wind’s cargo hatch, not yet, instead exiting by the sliding personal door mounted in the larger ramp. I didn’t like the looks of that crowd. They could surge at any moment, nothing is scarier than a frightened crowd, and I wanted to limit access to the ship. I made Kaylia stay up in the bridge. She was able to monitor everything through the security cams but at least she was safer up there.
She hadn’t protested.
Smart kid. She knew what could happen.
I’d never forgive the Tiat for taking away her innocence.
I stepped out on the ground of Storw, hand on my holstered blaster. I wanted the crowd to know I was armed. I noticed a couple of things right away as I used my free hand to shield my eyes from the dirt and small stones kicked up by the wind.