Space Murder

by N L Haverstock

  People said that most accidents happened within a few kilometers of home, and billions of hours of research, possibly even trillions, hadn’t changed a thing. Leaving the atmosphere was still the most dangerous part of any trip. That was why only shuttles could do it, and ships were built in hangars in open space. It was far too dangerous to try to launch a ship from a planet’s surface. A lot of good officers and crews had died trying.

  But there would be no launch accidents today. Raph was already halfway through the pre-flight checks, his long dark fingers dancing across the surface like a maestro musician. I started my sequence, though I was really only slowing him down.

  Chloe was still hyperventilating by the door.

  I turned around to spy Horton securing a lumpy square box to an empty chair. “Can you help Chloe sit down and get her to breathe a bit slower?”

  I checked on the security protocol installed onboard. It was far superior to anything we had on our ship, which wasn’t hard because our ship’s features were centuries out of date. But the shuttle had a few tricks that I thought were still only in the testing phase. The scanning range was triple the distance I expected on the 3D display and used a logarithmic scale so a pilot could monitor far and near threats on the same model rather than switching back and forth.

  The technology wasn’t new, but the training needed to understand it was. Luckily for me, I was a quick learner, though I hoped not to need it at all. I ran through the other options, many of which I had never seen in person.

  I had specialized in research vessels, my heart being in discovering the unknown. And after losing both my parents at war, combat could never hold my heart. Fighting would always represent bitter loss rather than noble sacrifice. I was proud that they had saved so many lives, but it was at my family’s expense, a fact I could never overcome.

  But even a research vessel needed protection against threats, both sentient and environmental, so nothing in the shuttle’s arsenal was new to me. But all of it was bigger, badder, and three steps ahead of what I had learned at the academy.

  Grappling hooks, collision mitigation safety devices, and explosives of every variety were easy options. It also had the strongest shields and exterior hull I had seen in any shuttle, let alone one that could reach the speeds it showed on its specs. “Dang.”

  Raph nodded, his fingers not slowing their dance across the instrument panel. “I know. Can we keep it?”

  “We’ll be lucky to keep our skins and our jobs.”

  “Maybe we should just jet off to a faraway planet and start life anew?”

  I didn’t reply, letting the idea sit in my brain for a bit. I wouldn’t ever seriously consider that. Would I?

  The engines began to roar, the sound rising above the gentle hum it had produced at standby.

  “Raph, I’m going to keep an eye out if you want to take the lead.” We were both capable of running the shuttle solo, as he had done when they flew down.

  I was still awed by that. They had broken every imaginable rule, stolen a law enforcement shuttle, and gone on a rogue rescue mission. For me. The pressure in my chest increased until tears were pressing against my eyelids, itching to fall down my face. It was only the adrenaline thundering through my veins that kept me from breaking down in gratitude, along with decades of training, the fact that we were still in unknown amounts of danger, and maybe more than a hint of vanity.

  My brain had taken it upon itself to tear into a million pieces and try to have every possible thought at once. I thought of all the things that could have happened or could still happen, and the murder that turned into murders and why. I weighed all the possible paths ahead of us, forking again and again at every decision we made. Even my rescue could be an elaborate trap meant to crush me in its gaping maw.

  No. I needed to trust in something, and that was my crew. This crew specifically. The three crew members with me had been there since day one, and in every one of those days, they had shown evidence of their character. I never made the conscious decision to trust them, but if it was required, then now was the moment. I trusted them with my life in the most literal sense. If they were going to betray me, I would fall for it. Some things were worth believing in.

  “I trust you,” I said out loud, startling myself.

  “You’d better because I am about to save all our butts,” Raph said before taking off with such force that I heard Chloe and Horton hit the floor with an oomph.

  “Buckle up as best you can. Raph, try to fly casually. We don’t want to draw unnecessary attention.”

  “We’ll be out of here so fast they won’t even—uh-oh.”

  Lights flashed on the panel, and I ran through all the sequences to check. “At least two shuttles are in position behind us. I think they’re going to—”

  I was cut off when a mild eruption rocked the shuttle, and the blinking lights were joined by a panicky beeping noise.

  Chloe squealed. “What was that?”

  “Shut up. I’m trying to focus!” Raph shouted while maneuvering the shuttle at a steep angle to the left then lower, all while accelerating.

  I turned around in my seat. Horton and Chloe were holding hands. Neither of them had been through the same training Raph and I had received, which included combat evasive tactics and counter-maneuvers.

  “It’ll be okay. Raph and I are the best in the fleet, and no one is going to get the better of us.” I took a moment to look each of them in the eye until they nodded.

  I turned back to the controls, shocking even myself that what I had said was true. Confidence was a funny creature, coming to me when I least expected it. I fumbled a bit with the new-to-me controls and viewing system. But my training was spectacular, and before I knew it, I was oriented and ready. “Shields are good. Do you want me to port over my view to you?”

  Raph had adjusted our flight from perpendicular to the surface of the planet to parallel as we raced above the landscape. “They could hit us if they want.”

  “They don’t want to. Try circling hard twenty degrees on the plane of orientation.”

  Straight ahead was both zero degrees and three hundred sixty degrees with one eighty directly behind. Using the orientation of the shuttle and the pilots, the degree went around clockwise, like a traditional Earth compass. Anything more complicated would be explained with computer coordinates. Only in a dog fight would we skip all that. Basically, I asked him to turn a little to the right.

  He nodded and adjusted our travel direction. He jerked back a moment later as the right side of the panel lit up. A second later, the window illuminated with a missed shot.

  “Try three-forty degree.” Asking him to turn left, I pulled up an overhead map of the overall terrain.

  Down below, the red planet slid by, giving me only the briefest glimpses of houses, cities, and pockets of civilization.

  As soon as we banked left, Raph jerked us back to the right with another near miss. “We have more company overhead.”

  I checked, and sure enough, four more shuttles had joined the fight. They were flying above us. Raph jerked the shuttle down toward the planet, but still we were thrown around when multiple shots impacted the top of the craft.

  Chloe screamed, and Horton let out a sickly moan.

  But I barely noticed and didn’t have time to comfort them as a cold sweat broke across my chest and face. “Raph?”

  “I can’t go any faster.” He took us lower. Mountains loomed on either side of us, giving us shelter. “Do we have any way to fire back?”

  “Nothing that would do more than inconvenience them and not enough to take on all six. We’re set up for defense rather than offense. Do what you can.”

  I checked over the map and saw we were rapidly approaching a large body of water, an ocean from the size of it, if that classification was accurate on Cerulea. I had no time to worry about the taxonomy of bodies of water because we were hit from overhead again.

  Our shields were taking a beating but holding up as Raph dropped
lower. Arches and swooping valleys passed under us. It would have been gorgeous if not for the fact that we were racing away in a bid to save our lives.

  The shuttle rocked back and forth and up and down as Raph did some of the best flying I had ever seen or experienced. His piloting was smooth, and he adjusted quickly. Any single false move, and we would be nothing more than a smear and shrapnel on the red rocks below. We had to slow down significantly, but so did the shuttles chasing us. In fact, they slowed down so much that I started to believe we could lose them.

  Finally, after an eternity of racing across the landscape, we shot out over the blue waters. The ships behind us pulled off hard to the side, moving along the coastline. I realized that we hadn’t been chased. We had been herded. But for what purpose?

  I looked down at the water and noticed a particularly dark patch moving to the surface. I barely had time to open my mouth and shout, “Pull up!” before the creature breached the surface, its mouth open.

  I slammed my hand on a button on the panel. And we were enveloped in darkness.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The crash was tremendous. Every safety device in the shuttle went off at once, causing blindness and deafness that still somehow managed to overwhelm every single sensation I had. Then the long, aching sensation of falling led to a second, only slightly softer, stop.

  I couldn’t tell which way gravity was pulling me. My back and neck felt like a giant hand had reached under my skin and squeezed and stretched every muscle beyond its length then squished it back. My head was ringing, and every square inch of my skin burned, probably from the explosives released at impact to slow the momentum of the ship. Without it and the thousands of other safety features in the shuttle, we would have been smashed like bugs on a windshield.

  The view through the front window was pitch-black. The impact had knocked out all the lighting except the emergency red lights. My hands had a few smears of black on them that I realized was blood from where my arms had hit something. I accessed the accident-evaluation table.

  I attempted to crane my neck to look around but immediately regretted the motion. My hand flew up to my neck before I could stop it. Whiplash had definitely occurred, and my shoulder wasn’t doing too hot, either, from where the safety harass had dug into me.

  The first and most important evaluation flashed on the screen. Four persons were identified, and their vitals were at high stress levels, but no one was in immediate danger.

  I closed my eyes in relief. “Thank you, Lord,” I whispered, my voice tight and caught in my throat. By no means did that mean our troubles were over, but at least we had made it this far. A lump formed in my throat. Things had gotten serious in a way I hadn’t been able to contemplate thus far.

  When I was kidnapped in the shuttle, I had worried about myself. But there was something different about being responsible for someone else. Theoretically, that had always been the case. As captain of my ship, I had my crew under my protection, but that had never really been an issue when going back and forth to deliver mail and the occasional passenger.

  Suddenly, and in a way I never expected, reality was setting in and, with it, a raising panic. I couldn’t deal with it now, or ever if I had my choice. The literal pain in my neck felt as though the very weight of my head was too much to hold, which was distraction enough to allow me to ignore the rising panic attack.

  The ship shifted suddenly then jerked twice. A yelp of pain and several groans from my crew set my priorities. I ran my hand across the panel in front of me, stabilizing gravity and locking in the recovery system routine. I scanned the report and let out a sigh of relief that things weren’t worse. Someone out there deserved a medal for whatever programming had been installed for collision mitigation because it had worked like a champ.

  Gravity was restored, giving the sensation that the ship was righted though the monitors showed otherwise.

  I unlocked my harness and turned to Raph. Placing a hand on his shoulder I gently squeezed. “Raph, are you okay?”

  He winced, and his eyes fluttered open. “Where are we? What happened?”

  “I’ll get to that in a second.” I moved back to Horton and Chloe.

  Chloe had pinky-orange blood crawling down her face, lighter colored than my own. She was talking gently to Horton and pulling on his hand. “He’s not waking up.” Her voice carried a hint of distress.

  “Horton?” I stepped around him and grabbed the medical assessment unit off the wall. I pressed it to the center of his chest.

  As the machine’s lights flickered to indicate its progress, he spoke. “I’m fine.”

  “Can you open your eyes?”

  He twisted his head. The skin cracked as it folded, blackened bits still clinging in the creases. “Just let me…” He paused, sucked in air hard, and let out a groan. “I think I crushed something, but it will be—”

  He breathed in hard again, making the entire shape of his chest change. He grunted, and I heard a faint snap. When he exhaled, his chest held the shape, and I realized he had reset a crushed chest. He was far tougher than I had ever guessed.

  The lights that had been flickering red and yellow turned solid red then transitioned to green. The beeping took a less urgent tone.

  Chloe unbuckled and stepped over the deflated pressure bags that had exploded on impact. She extended her hand. “Let me have that.” She was covered in pink impact patches, but overall, she appeared to move a lot better than I felt.

  I passed her the medical assessment unit. She ran it over Horton and pressed on the panel, her eyebrows knitted.

  He twisted in his seat. “Where is my bag?”

  Loose items during impact were one of the greatest risks, so they were usually locked down. But research had shown that passengers, even those with fleet training at the highest levels, had items out during transit. Even a small tablet or work unit could become a deadly projectile.

  I searched the back of the ship and found the roughly square package stuck in a corner. Using a combination of gravity specific sensors, the bundle had been directed to an empty corner before its speed had been decelerated before impact. I picked it up, and much like the rest of us, it seemed only slightly damaged.

  When I handed it to Horton, he clutched it to his chest and ran a hand over each angle with such intensity that I was concerned that the crash had left him with a head injury and confusion.

  Chloe stood up, her assessment over. “Horton had been hurt badly. Dislocated tail. Most of his core is popped out of place in one way or another. Many broken ribs. The seats just…” She snorted air out through her gills and turned away.

  I shared her anger. Ignesians, despite serving in the fleet for years, still suffered from a lack of support. They were too tall and their bodies too differently shaped from humanoids to really function well on ships and shuttles. The fleet said they were happy for anyone to serve, but it was just lip service.

  “It’s just a crick,” said Horton. “I’ll be good as new before you can whistle twice.” He pushed up out of the seat. His tail unnaturally twisted to the left, he moved slowly but with great effort, grunting with each step. “Where are we? What happened?”

  Raph was still seated but unbuckled, so he could turn enough to face us. He held his hands out in the air in front of him unnaturally, as if he were about to type on an imaginary keyboard. “I didn’t crash.” It was a statement but also a bit of defense.

  I shook my head at the unspoken implication. “No. Something hit us. From out in the water.”

  “Oh!” Chloe said, realization in her voice. “A gulper.”

  “What’s that?” Raph snapped back.

  “They are like a fish but breathe air. I’m not sure of the UL word. They can eat metal. There was an episode a few seasons ago that showed them recycling metal from other worlds. There is a big fireworks display, and they shoot the metal out over the water. When the gulpers die, their bodies wash up on shore, and the king harvests them. The bones are mostly mad
e of the metal they eat, and it is this amazing shimmery color. It’s super expensive. They fashion it into jewelry and other ornate objects to export. No one flies over the water for that reason.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Raph shouted.

  “I couldn’t see where we were from back here, and everything was happening so fast. Don’t you have some sensors you should have been checking?”

  “Stop!” I shouted at both of them. “We do not point fingers at anyone but the people trying to kill us. Got it?”

  Raph winced and turned his head away, his arms still stiff in front of him.

  “Chloe, run a health check on Raph. I’m concerned about navigator breaks.” It was a common name for injuries sustained by navigators on impact. Because they always had their arms on the panel, even during an impact, they often experienced fractures to the ulna and radius bones.

  “I’m fine,” Raph said but with no conviction, probably more a prayer for it to be true rather than a genuine belief that it was.

  Chloe looked at his arms and made an unhappy noise as she ran a diagnosis unit over them. When she finished, she gently lowered them onto the armrests of his chair. “Captain, where’s the first-aid kit?”

  “I’ll get it,” I said and hurried to retrieve it.

  I had a general idea of where they were usually kept and why she should stay focused on Raph. She was being calm, but his unusually testy manner made me believe it was worse than she let on.

  “Is there anything more you know about the gulper?” I called out to her.

  “Not really. They talk a lot about the material but not the animal. It is really special because it has the soft organic feel of a natural material but the brilliant coloring of a gem. They say it is like an Earth gem called an opal.” She said it with an odd emphasis. “It has flashes of red and green, sometimes even blue or purple. It can be shaped a little but not like metal. They say it feels wonderful and has mystic powers, though that may just be clever branding. This is the only place in the known universe where it is created. The king is in charge of all of it and only allows a little to be sold at a set price. He got the idea from studying how ancient Earth handled diamonds. Did you know that they used to cost so much money that people saved up for years to give their beloved a ring with one?”