by E M Gale
I turned off the anti-grav engines, my craft hung in space, and it would hang there, a few metres from the Tortuga, forever if I didn’t move it. I grinned to myself and put my hand on the thruster and pulled it back to guide my ship forward. It responded and Tortuga fell away behind me. Because it was expected for people stealing spaceships and avoiding robots, I threw the ship into a completely unnecessary barrel-roll.
I turned the ship directly across Tortuga to head towards the edge of the dust sculptures. I’d looked on the map. I had enough fuel to get there and back and look around a bit.
‘This is good, I’m out here alone.’
I kept flicking between the forwards and backwards views. I couldn’t see a single other ship out here other than Tortuga, which was rapidly shrinking in my viewscreen.
‘This is proper exploration! And no one here to distract me.’
The dust sculptures were ahead of me. It was only because of my paranoia of being sneaked up on that I managed to keep flicking from the forwards to the backwards view. By flicking viewpoint with the same frequency, your brain got used to it and expected the viewpoint to change. The important thing was building up the three-dimensional map in your head. I still managed to find time to admire the dust clouds; they were immense, these nebulae where new stars were born out of the swirling dust.
I had arrived at the edge of the dust sculpture. The clouds were yellowy-orange here and mostly blocked out the stars behind, but here and there they formed strange tenuous smoke-like shapes lit up by brand-new green and blue stars from within the dust sculpture. I coasted along the edge for a while, just admiring it. I felt fragile. Nothing other than a thin metal skin protected me from cold, hard vacuum. It was an odd sort of vulnerability. It reminded of the two times I’d felt something similar before. Once, when I was cycling across London late one summer night, I’d stopped at a traffic light and looked down to see my bare foot covered in a few bits of leather that made up my sandal about two inches from a foot-wide wheel belonging to a 4x4. The other time was when I’d swum across a deep lake to an island in the middle. I had stopped halfway and dived down. I couldn’t reach the bottom of the lake and after about two metres, the water got so cold and dark, I just remembered thinking that if I couldn’t swim myself back to a shore, I wasn’t getting out of this.
I turned the ship into the dust cloud. Since I didn’t have the robot with me, I couldn’t ask it if my ship could handle the dust and the ship’s computer wasn’t quite clever enough to understand my query. I felt the exhilaration of taking a risk, of doing something you shouldn’t. I grinned. From within the dust cloud, the visibility was reduced. I really had to pay attention to the coordinates and the movements of the ship. And wouldn’t you know it, the robot was right–there were plenty of asteroids floating around for me to crash in to. Or to fly around.
I did some astrobatical practice around the asteroids. They were quite spread out here and nicely marked on my map so this was less of a danger and more fun. I’d improved. It was nice to feel the ship moving fluidly under my controls, to see the asteroids going past but never coming too close to the ship.
I was circumnavigating a huge asteroid when suddenly I noticed, from my constant flick-flicking of viewpoint, three ships trying to sneak up on me. They were keeping to a tight triangular formation and positioning themselves behind and above my ship, which was the hardest place to see or shoot at them. I pulled a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch turn to aim back towards them at high speed. I coasted over them, upside down, to view the top of their ships; they were painted grey and red and I couldn’t see any identifying marks. They fired on me, but I was moving too fast and they missed.
‘What the hell?’
Suddenly my comms set sprang to life: since I was the only person on the ship it was on continually and I didn’t have to do anything special to talk back. Someone said in English: “Identify yourself.”
‘Meh.’
I flew away from the strange ships, looping around asteroids to lose them. They kept up with me and fired either side of me.
‘Either those were warning shots or they have really crap aim.’
“Identify yourself,” said the voice again.
‘Oh, well, here goes nothing.’
“Please stop shooting at me,” I said.
“Clarke! At last!” replied the voice, sounding jubilant.
‘Shit. Shoulda kept my mouth shut.’
They sped up and kept on my tail, firing at me and now only narrowly missing. I did a few of the manoeuvres from the astrobatical kata I’d invented the day before, the ones where I pulled three ninety-degree turns around all three axes in short order. One of the ships following me crashed into an asteroid and exploded on the viewscreen.
‘Ah, it might be a little too late for negotiations now.’
“Vampire Clarke, we have a bounty on you, please stay still,” said the voice over my comms set.
“Oh, you wanna capture me alive?”
‘Maybe I can negotiate my way out of being fired upon and worry about escaping from them later.’
“Oh, no.” The voice over the intercom sounded like someone gloating. “The details of the bounty are, ‘Dead, deader than dead, no way she could resurrect from that, in pieces and most definitely not undead and still able to walk around or perform any biological functions’.”
‘Huh. Is he trying to distract me with this crap or does he think it’s funny? I suppose there is more than one person per ship on my pursuers’ ships, if they can spare an entire crew member as a comedian.’
I spun around the edge of an asteroid, getting rather close to the surface. My attackers pulled back a bit.
‘I wonder if I can fly and fire at them at the same time? Probably not.’
“Computer, target the pursuing ships and fire at will,” I said. My ship started shooting something backwards. Its aim wasn’t great, but it was at least slowing down the two remaining ships.
“You’re not getting away this time,” said the voice over the comms set.
“Say, how much are you being paid for this?” I asked, turning left, pulling a barrel roll to confuse them, then yawing, then pitching up. They shot across me and a shot hit.
‘Shit.’
Luckily, my future self had designed the cockpit. A display came up telling me that I’d been hit in a side shield and that it was at forty percent shield now. Had Rob designed the cockpit there would be alarms shrieking and lights flashing to look cool and put me off.
“Six million pelfre. Why, you going to double it?” asked the comedian.
‘Oh, I love mercenaries.’
I did another one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pitch to fly back towards them. On the straight my computer could target better and I traded a few shots, but I was outnumbered and they seemed to have better aim than my computer. I took a hit on the top of my ship.
‘Rats, I’ve only done a little spaceflight. OK, let’s try diplomacy.’
“Yeah, I’ll double it,” I said. “Stop firing on me and we’ll meet in a bar on Tortuga. I’ll even buy the first round, you can’t say fairer than that.”
I narrowly avoided an asteroid. This was all rather difficult; I was flick-flicking the viewpoint but I had to avoid asteroids whilst getting as close to them as possible to try to cause the ships following me to crash. My targeting computer kept firing at asteroids in addition to the ships, and it wasn’t coping that well with anticipating either my or my pursuers’ astrobatics.
There was laughter over the comms system as I got hit again.
‘Damn!’
I cut across them. They fired on me, but were too slow. Whatever they were shooting at me was falling behind me–not by much, mind you, I could see tracers in the reverse viewpoint. My ship finally managed to target and shoot one of the ships. It spun off and narrowly missed crashing into an asteroid. I hightailed away from where that ship had spun off to, in case it was still capable of flying and came after me.
I still had one ship on
my tail. There would be no more chitchat, it seemed; the comms set was silent. I circled a few asteroids, weaving in and out of their slow tumbling.
‘Left and spin, right and spin, pause, look out, dodge.’
I was cutting in and out of the asteroids’ paths, getting closer than I was comfortable with and only narrowly avoiding them in some cases, but I still hadn’t lost that last ship.
“Fuel low,” said the computer.
‘Oh, no! I programmed it to tell me when I have to turn back to Tortuga to arrive with a comfortable margin of fuel. But I’m not on the edge of the cloud now. I’ve headed inwards to loop around asteroids and avoid getting shot.’
I turned my ship towards the Tortuga. I was still dodging around the asteroids, but not as randomly as before. I got hit again.
My ship was holding; due to my astrobatics I’d not taken two hits on the same area of the ship, but every part of my ship other than the front had taken a hit.
‘Well, what to do? I’ll find it easier to dodge in the asteroids, but once I run out of fuel I’m a sitting duck. I could try to land on an asteroid and hide, but who would pick me up? And how the hell do you land on an asteroid?’
‘There’s only one thing for it–run.’
I was near the edge of the dust sculpture now. I flew as complex a spin as I could, my path tying knots in the air, as I tried to crash my pursuer into an asteroid. It didn’t work; the asteroids were far more spread out here on the edge. I coasted under a wrecked ship that was spinning flotsam, dead in space, and my pursuer had to pull back to navigate that. Whilst he did that, I broke out into clear space and headed straight for Tortuga at top speed. I took a moment to read my displays.
‘OK, my lowest shield is the rear one at just ten percent, but my engines are in top gear and my gun turrets are working, for what good they are, and I’ve got just enough fuel to get back, I think. Maybe.’
I started flicking the viewpoint from forward to back, and I saw him. That final ship was on my tail. Still.
‘Can I outrun him?’
“Computer, can we go faster?” I asked.
“Engines are operating at maximum,” it said.
‘Well, fair point. Who would design a ship whose top speed wasn’t achievable by using the cockpit controls?’
I was travelling fast though, and my pursuer wasn’t catching up.
‘I reckon I can outrun him on the straight.’
They were still firing on me. A shot hit the back of the ship.
‘Shit.’
“Computer, lay down chaff out of the back of the ship.”
“Yes,” said the computer.
‘Oh, it understood that. Good, it seems she’s programmed my ship with strange phrases like that.’
The computer was targeting my pursuer’s ship and firing rather more successfully at it than it had been earlier. The enemy ship was having to dodge and my ship was dropping something out of the back that its shots were hitting instead of me.
‘Cool. Yay, I think I won this one!’
I kept flicking the viewpoint, but turned my attention towards landing; the fuel was rather low. I couldn’t slow down without getting hit and I really didn’t have much in the way of shields on the back of my ship. I was on five percent shields at that point and I had no idea what would happen if that number went down to zero.
‘This is why I should have read up on the schematics of my ship before engaging in asteroid field dogfights.’
‘Heh, ‘dogfight’, aren’t I angry at Rob for calling me a dog?’
‘Clarke, concentrate!’
‘Right, I know how to land by slowing the hyperspace engines to a stop outside of Tortuga and slowly drifting in under the power of anti-grav engines, going through the airlock and parking using the small adjustments from the anti-grav engines. But I don’t know how to crash-land at high speed. Hmm…’
“Computer, tell Tortuga to prepare my docking bay for a crash landing,” I said.
“Yes,” it replied.
“Will that be safe, for people in the docking bay?”
“Yes.”
‘Stupid autistic computer.’
“Explain how the docking bay is prepared for a crash landing?”
“A set of docking bay doors are opened. An area of the docking bay is cut off from the rest by forcefields to prevent depressurisation.”
‘Neat. So I crash into Tortuga in vacuum and on the other side of the forcefield the marines are safe and able to watch my fiery death. I like it–well, I like the design, not the fiery death part.’
I was getting closer to Tortuga. The ship behind me was still there, giving chase. It hadn’t hit me, but I couldn’t risk slowing down.
‘Will it crash into the docking bay as well or turn away?’ I wondered.
“You are entering neutral demilitarised space. Desist any hostilities immediately. This is your only warning,” said a voice over the comms.
‘Hmm, will that stop the guy chasing me?’
He pulled away out of range. My ship stopped firing at him. I pushed forward on the throttle to reverse the direction of the engines to try to slow down.
“Stop dropping chaff,” I commanded. Nothing was being dropped out of the back of the ship now. Several red and black ships launched out of Tortuga and passed me to head out into the space behind.
The landing visual came up. I was slowing the ship, but I didn’t have much range to slow over and I had been going at max speed. The docking bay door was already open. I pointed my ship at it. I had no air brake, since I had no atmosphere. I was coming in too fast. I put the anti-grav engines on to try to slow me down.
‘I think these are only good at slow velocities, but what the hell, every little helps, right?’
All my engines were screaming and aiming backwards to slow me down but I wasn’t slowing. I gritted my teeth as the ship shuddered with the effort. I went through the docking bays and noticed I had a strip of the docking bay cordoned off to me. I was still going too fast. I yanked the controls to twist the ship round so that the bottom of it would crash into the wall instead of the cockpit; the bottom had only taken one hit; I was sitting in the cockpit and I didn’t want to hit the wall.
I managed that manoeuvre just in time. My ship crashed, the reverberations came up through the ship structure and there was a deep crunch of impact from within the ship.
‘The bottom of the ship must be designed to take that sort of punishment, surely? It’s usually the bottom that impinges with the ground in crash landings, so it must be pretty tough.’
Flick-flick on view points. The ship was moving slowly backwards, away from the wall. I turned off the hyperspace engines and moved backwards at about five miles an hour. I listened very carefully. I couldn’t hear anything that sounded like the air rushing out of my ship.
Flick-flick–the docking bay doors closed behind me and red lights flashed on the docking bay floor just outside the forcefield. My ship was side on and must have looked rather strange hanging there like a leaf caught in a spiderweb. I used the anti-grav engines to reorient the ship so that it was the right way up.
“Repressurising docking bay,” said my ship’s computer.
I nodded at it and hoped that the addition of atmosphere outside my ship wouldn’t break anything. I gently turned and landed the ship in the middle of the parking bay using the anti-grav engines and then breathed out a sigh of relief.
I winced at a couple of loud clangs and hisses.
“Docking bay repressurised,” said my ship’s computer. “Atmosphere-induced damage to vacuum shielding on the aft and rear.”
‘Was that what those bangs were? My shielding was that trashed that it broke in atmosphere? Shit!’
“Fire crews have been dispatched,” continued the ship.
“Fire? I’m on fire?” I gasped. On the viewscreen robot engineers were trundling towards my ship at top speed.
Flick. My arse was on fire. Or, more accurately, the ship’s arse was on fire. I
could see flames. I swore I felt warmer, but I was probably imagining it.
“Shiiiiiit!” I shouted, jumping out of my seat. From the ceiling of the docking bay some sort of opaque gas that was heavier than air released. It streamed down making a ‘ffssssssshh’ noise that reminded me of carbon dioxide fire extinguishers. The flames died down and I flicked the view point forward. The engineer robots surrounded the ship. Behind them the flashing red lights were turned off and flashing yellow lights took their place.
I slumped back into the pilot’s seat and sighed, letting the stress evaporate from my body.
‘Well, I think, on balance, it was a good idea not to bring my friends on this trip.’
“Docking bay area safe,” said my computer. Outside the ship, the lights went green, then the surrounding forcefields shut down in a shimmer of blue radiation. I noticed for the first time that there had been quite an audience watching through the forcefield.
I checked over my ship’s displays.
‘Well… the shields are intact… ish. There are no warnings of anything about to explode, and I don’t seem to be on fire anymore, which is nice.’
I got up and headed out into the back of the ship. Everything looked pretty much intact, other than a few cups in the kitchen that were shattered on the floor.
‘Rats. Shouldn’t they have been attached to something rather than loose like that? I don’t want to have to tidy up and buy new cups every time I spin round an asteroid.’
I opened the door and climbed out of my ship, took a few steps and surveyed the damage. The ship was steaming and the carbon dioxide had sunk, forming a cold mist under it. Bits of twisted shielding poked through the atmospherics. The ship had an organic look to it like that.
‘Ah, the shields my ship’s displays referred to are metal shielding, not forcefields or anything.’
I walked around my ship slowly, shaking my head; the metal was twisted and torn. In places it was completely ripped away and I could see the workings in the undercasing. The rear of the ship was a complete mess. The metal was blackened from the fire and resembled a modern art sculpture more than a functional machine. A couple of interestingly-coloured sparks arced from one bit to another.