by Mark Wandrey
“It didn’t crack,” he told her. If it had been damaged, his suit would have told him immediately. Or it would have just exploded, and he’d have been dead in five seconds regardless of what her mechanical genius could manage. Luckily, the helmet plastic was tough stuff. She patted his helmet and pointed. Jim looked and could see a ring of low intensity lights a short distance away, marking an airlock.
He untied the tether from where Splunk had secured it, used the magnetic grapples on his suit, and slowly moved toward the lock. His friend was waiting and had the lock open already. From there it took just a few minutes to get inside, remove the space suit, and make his way to the bridge.
Pale Rider was a fraction of Bucephalus’s size. Purchased by his grandfather out of a scrapyard, the Crucible-class light cruisers were able to land on planets. The designers had considered the ability a benefit; unfortunately, it greatly reduced their combat capabilities. More of a pocket or light cruiser, most modern frigates were the same size.
Sleek and graceful for aerodynamics, Jim had always thought it was beautiful in ways most warships weren’t. She had another advantage over Bucephalus after his grandfather had upgraded her systems—she could be operated by one person for extended periods. Still, he wasn’t overly excited at the prospect of operating the ship by himself.
“Think you can help?” he asked Splunk on the bridge. “Without taking the ship apart?”
“I help,
The systems came online, answering to his codes. Spunk did as she’d said, and the ship’s two fusion reactors came online, quickly picking up power. He entered the commands to keep the ship’s running-lights offline, then laid in a direct low-power course for Karma’s stargate.
The ship fired her ion drive maneuvering engines at 1/10th of a G, and she was underway. Jim marveled at the simplicity of operating Pale Rider. When he’d first ridden in it two years ago, it had seemed a daunting feat for one man. Now he realized how bored Captain Winslow likely was. Two hours after quietly slipping out of Karma Upsilon 4 and aboard Pale Rider, he ordered the ship’s fusion torch to life, and Pale Rider leaped ahead at a full gravity. Another hour and the computer had them flip over to begin slowing as they approached the system’s stargate.
Jim checked his chronometer. Stargates operated on regular schedules, unless you were rich. He might be nominally rich, but he didn’t throw money at things like unscheduled gate activations. His plan was set to coincide his transit with a normally scheduled gate activation, which was exactly five minutes away.
“ESS Pale Rider requesting transition to hyperspace,” Jim broadcast on the standard stargate frequency. The image of a bored elSha appeared, one reptilian eye looking at Jim, the other off-camera.
“ESS Pale Rider, the Cartography Guild wishes you good transit. The stargate fee is 1,500 credits. Advise how you intend to settle?” Jim pulled out his yack and slipped it into the radio’s verification slot. He typed in 1,500 credits and authorized the transaction. The encrypted data was pulsed to stargate control, confirmed, and another encrypted transaction ID was sent back. The card’s balance was reduced by the agreed-upon sum. “ESS Pale Rider, I have confirmation of your payment. Gate transition is in 3 minutes, 29 standard seconds. Synchronize with this transponder. Stargate out.”
As they approached Jim saw a dozen or more other ships nearby, all beginning to move toward the ring of the stargate. Everything from squat, round freetraders to cigar-shaped warships were ready to leave. Pale Rider wasn’t the smallest ship, but owing to the inverse square law, which meant it took more power to enter hyperspace the smaller your ship was, she was definitely on the tiny side.
“Here we go, Splunk,” he said. The Fae nodded as she verified the ship’s power plants were functioning correctly. Either could produce enough power to move them through hyperspace at 95% capacity, the other 5% would run the ship’s essential systems. The second fusion reactor was for redundancy. As the time approached zero, the autopilot nudged Pale Rider’s course.
The space inside the stargate’s ring swirled into a field of discontinuity. For one minute, a portal to hyperspace was active and any ship encountering the event horizon would be propelled out of their normal universe.
It moved steadily closer until they touched. Jim’s universe exploded along with him, then he became whole again. The entire moment of un-creation lasted a fraction of a second, and Pale Rider was in hyperspace.
* * *
Hyperspace travel was always 170 hours. No more, no less, whether you were traveling one light year or one thousand. Experienced spacers learned to live with long hours of nothing to see except the pure whiteness of hyperspace. It was as perfect a whiteness as normal space was black. It was as if the universe was inverted, which maybe it was.
During the 170 hours in hyperspace, Jim continued his now-regular physical exercises and reviewed his notes. Part of the reason he’d decided on these trips was he’d completely exhausted the GalNet’s source material on Raknar. The GalNet was shared across the galaxy, sort of an encyclopedia galactica, if you would. Every time you traveled through a stargate, your navigation computer carried updates to the GalNet, courtesy of the Information Guild. Thus, data flowed constantly in all directions. Your ship also carried messages and copies of financial transactions, as well, all seamlessly and without your knowledge.
Jim was certain there were more complicated or in-depth versions of the GalNet out there. The Science Guild controlled the content, even though the Information Guild handled its transmission through the Cartography Guild’s stargate network. He found the interrelationships between the guilds to often be overly complicated and precarious. Regardless of who was controlling it, he was certain he wasn’t seeing it all.
The guilds all loved their secrets, so he’d long believed someone, or something, was hiding information on the Raknar. The Science Guild made the most sense. If the Mercenary Guild knew more about the Raknar, they’d be using them. Instead, Jim’s use of a Raknar appeared to be the first since the Great Galactic War 20,000 years ago.
Using what data he had, a lot of it very circumstantial evidence, Jim had assembled a list of locations most likely to provide information on Raknar. A lot of the data came from second-hand accounts of Great War battles and accounts of salvaged Raknar technology.
He’d originally compiled enough locations of interest to take him a year, but he didn’t have a year, so he narrowed it down to six reasonable stops. Even then, he wouldn’t be back to meet his Cavaliers for four months. Boy, was Hargrave going to be pissed.
Floating in the tiny bridge of the yacht, Jim looked at a Tri-V representation of the Milky Way galaxy. Humans had long used their own names for the various features of the galaxy but had adopted the Union’s terminology where it made sense. Instead of the six Human-designated arms, the Union used four.
Earth’s home was in the Sagittarius arm, the Orion Spur. The Union called it the Tolo arm which was broken into three regions—Gresht near the Core, Cresht in the middle (where Earth was), and Coro out toward the edge. The huge Norma arm was known as the Peco arm, and likewise divided into three regions. The middle, or Cimaron, was the only one Humans had frequently visited. The Perseus arm was called Jesc, with the Praf region coreward, Centaur in the middle, and Crapti out on the edge.
The center of the galaxy was a zone known as the Core, which was broken up into sub-regions. Hundreds of thousands of old worlds were there, many now dead and abandoned, some supposedly the home to ancient races nobody contacted anymore. Others orbited stars which had little time left to live.
The Cygnus/Scatum arm interested him the most. It extended the farthest out from the Galactic Core, so
it should contain many young stars. Yet, it had no name and wasn’t mapped; it was simply called the Fourth Arm. The Cartography Guild explained it was the wide area between the Tolo and Cygnus/Scatum which made travel hazardous, and thus was not done. Jim didn’t know enough about hyperspatial physics to confirm or deny the claim, but he hoped someday to investigate. Nobody he’d talked to knew anything about it.
He reviewed his candidate locations. Some were industrial, some population centers, still others were classified as ruins. To start, he’d settled on the planet of K’o. The world was the only planet in a system of the same name, and it was in the inner region of the Peco arm, which was called Juut. It was so remote, he might be the first Human to ever visit the world.
Jim took over the little cabin Captain Winslow had used when he’d taken them out two years ago. Even though it was smaller than the master cabin further aft, he wanted to be near the bridge if anything happened. It felt a little strange living in the deceased English captain’s old stateroom. None of the man’s personal possessions remained, but that didn’t stop Jim from looking around uncomfortably. Splunk picked an empty cubby as her home-away-from-home. She liked tight spaces to sleep.
Every day after breakfast he’d work out for 40 minutes on the ship’s gravity deck. During that time, he’d read, listen to audio books, music, or review research in his pinplants. Sometimes Splunk would come along and watch him sweat, though often she’d be prowling the ship’s depths. Afterward, Jim would spend time on the bridge and continue his reading while watching over the ship’s various systems. By the end of the fifth day, it felt like watching a microwave oven make popcorn. It didn’t need his supervision.
On the morning of the last day, he woke early and had a light breakfast. The route to reach K’o was what the Cartography Guild called a “high consumption” route. This meant it skimmed the edge of a couple of empty expanses which, because of hyperspatial physics, approached the ship’s limits. But the computer said he could do it with only a slight increase in power consumption, and it would shave off an extra jump as well. He was a little nervous as he entered the bridge an hour before the timer ran out.
Splunk took the same station she had when they’d left, and he manned the pilot/navigation controls. He could have run everything from the captain’s chair, but it made more sense to split up the jobs. For that matter, he could have flown the ship from his stateroom; Pale Rider was that extensively automated. Splunk and he watched the timer count down to zero. They felt a moment of falling, even though they were already in freefall, and the stars reappeared. Boy, did they!
In the center of the Cresht region of the Tolo arm, Earth’s neighborhood wasn’t crowded. In the terms of Milky Way cosmology, it was around a two on a scale of one to five, with five being the most crowded. The Juut region of the Peco arm was a four. The space outside Pale Rider’s bridge was alive with a billion points of light. It was an amazing sight. So amazing, in fact, Splunk had to bring his attention to someone calling them.
“Who are you?” the transmission demanded. His pinplants automatically translated, though it was from a language he’d never heard.
“ESS Pale Rider,” Jim called back.
“Never heard of ESS. Where are you from?”
“First, who are you?” There was no answer. Jim typed a command into the ship’s controls. There were no less than 20 ships within 100 kilometers of the system’s emergence point. Most were showing almost no emissions. However, the two closest did. One of them was certainly the one transmitting to him. “Splunk, be ready.”
“Ready, Jim,
“I repeat, who are you and why do you want to know who I am?” No reply came. Jim grunted in indecision, then programmed the helm. Pale Rider’s fusion torch lit, and she accelerated at half a gravity. None of the other ships pursued.
Even though Pale Rider could land and take off again, pushing back into orbit consumed a massive amount of her fuel, and Jim’s plans meant a lot of time in unpopulated regions. “I’d much rather not leave the ship in orbit,” he said aloud as they undocked one of the two shuttles, “but we need to in this case.” He thought it was rather ironic Pale Rider was easier to operate than one of its shuttles. The light cruiser was preprogrammed to protect itself, to some degree. It was the best he could manage.
Jim set the shuttle’s autopilot for preset reentry coordinates, and the craft performed it’s deorbit burn then coasted. The landscape of K’o unrolled below them as they slowly got closer. From orbit, the world looked a lot like Mars, complete with intermittent spots of green and blue. Not a very hospitable place.
Now he was extremely grateful for the piloting lessons from Captain Su. The shuttle’s approach profile had to be perfect, plus the controls required constant supervision, even on automatic. There was only so much you could ask a computer to do. Atmospheric turbulence buffered the shuttle as he babysat the controls, reminding him someone else had said almost exactly the same thing.
* * *
“What’s going on, Daddy?” Jimmy asked as he ran into the cargo bay. Dozens of Cavaliers in the blue uniform coveralls of techs or the blue multi-hued camo of troopers watched as a truck used its crane to unload a dozen massive crates.
“A delivery, Jimbo,” his father said as Jimmy came up to his side. Thaddeus put a kind hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. At the age of five, he wasn’t quite up to his father’s waist in height. Jimmy looked at the logo on the crates and the truck. It looked like a big letter B and an I overlapped with a name underneath.
“What is Binning, Daddy?”
“Binnig,” Thaddeus said. One of the crates was being opened to reveal a shiny new CASPer. “They make those.”
“The robots you fight aliens with?”
“Yes, son, but they’re not really robots.”
“I know,” Jimmy said. It scared him every time his daddy flew off into space and wore one of the robots to fight aliens. The CASPer in the crate opened like a clam to show where the driver sat. Thaddeus swept Jimmy off his feet, and they walked over to look inside. “This is different from the others?”
“You betcha,” Thaddeus said.
“Young Cartwright has a keen eye,” an older man said to one side. He had the gold oak leaf symbol, meaning he was pretty high up, but not as high as his daddy. Nobody was higher than his daddy!
“Of course, he does,” Thaddeus said and patted his son’s side. “He’s my son.”
“What’s different about it?” Jimmy asked.
“That is the first of the Mk 7 CASPers. An impressive jump in technology.”
Over the next few minutes, the technicians did tests and other strange things to the suit, then a Cavalier came over in the special pajamas they wore. He was holding all the wires hooked to the pajamas. “I don’t understand why you just don’t make computers run them.” Jimmy said and pointed at the suit.
“Because, Jimbo, there’s only so much you can ask a computer to do!”
* * *
The shuttle finally reached K’o’s lower atmosphere, and he could trust the autopilot to fly the craft. The memory of his father getting the first shipment of Mk 7 CASPers was as clear as if it happened yesterday. He gave a little laugh. The old major standing nearby, he recognized him now. It had been Hargrave, the man who’d been a lowly mechanic in the First Horseman museum when Jim had inherited it along with the family trust.
The rocky countryside was arrayed before him. It was evening, and only a small moon provided any illumination. He passed a mountain range, then a massive valley came into view. It was hundreds of kilometers long and wide, carved out by glaciers in the planet’s ancient past. The valley floor was covered in shapes Jim knew all too well.
“The Valley of Loss,” Jim said. Splunk looked out the cockpit silently, her usually big blue eyes even wider.
“Raknar,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Jim agreed, “lots of them.”
He banked the shuttle and deployed the speed brake
s, slowing them while losing altitude. He dearly wished it had pinplant inputs, but the vehicle was far too old. Instead, he used a combination of manual controls and autopilot entries to fly. As they dropped lower, Jim began to see the valley covered in Raknar was also home to just as many skeletons and fragments of skeletons. Skeletons even more massive than the robots.
“Fires,
The shuttle settled to the ground, its four landing legs absorbing the weight and digging into the mushy soil. He’d circled the entire valley twice before finding the landing spot. There were few open spaces large enough for even the small shuttle. Jim let the vessel’s automated systems assess the atmosphere. It pronounced the air breathable—marginally. As he slid his armored coat on, he put a compact rebreather on his belt next to the magazine holder.
Splunk activated the shuttle’s door and equalized the pressure. The ramp slid down, and the airlock door cast an oblong light on the ground outside. Rain pattered lightly, making a tink, tink sound as it hit the shuttle’s metallic fuselage. Jim stepped out and smelled decay, along with burning chemicals and other unusual metallic scents. Fitting, he thought, for a Raknar graveyard.
Twenty thousand years ago, the fiercest battle between the Dusman and Kahraman had been fought on K’o. Jim had gotten around the lack of Raknar information by mining the GalNet for history which revolved around the war machines. There was a lot about various battles. Mostly dates and locations, though occasionally, it also had the reasons for the battles. In this case, K’o was a Canavar deployment site. The last one, actually. The Kahraman had been fond of using subject planets with high populations as military bases. They adopted the tactic late in the war to stop their opponents from simply destroying the planet, as if Canavar themselves weren’t horrific enough.
The Dusman assaulted with two Vanguards of their elite Raknar Strikers. Each Vanguard contained 20 Nova of 140 Raknar of various types, as well as ground support, space transport, and other logistics units. An assault force of 5,600 Raknar. The Dusman thought they had air superiority, so they landed in the huge valley to allow a smooth deployment. The Kahraman had tunneled under the entire region, and once the Raknar Corps was committed, the enemy attacked.