Starfade

by Gary Swaby

  “Send her up!” she heard Pearson say once his gun had gone silent.

  She felt Vraxen get low on his knees again. “Nova, climb up,” he said.

  Through her blurred vision, she could see Pearson’s arm reaching for her above. She holstered the SMG again and then yelped as she moved her other arm from around Vraxen’s neck. Then she shuffled herself up his back, stepping on his shoulder to close the gap between them and the Astrid. She raised her good arm up and Pearson grabbed it.

  Chiaki screamed as Pearson yanked her up into the Astrid with no consideration for her pain. “Where’s the data?” he asked right away.

  “Vraxen,” she responded.

  “First give me the data. It’s what we came for.”

  She didn’t want to hand it over so soon, but in the moment she was only concerned for Vraxen’s safety. Vraxen had looked out for her, even after she’d been so bitter towards him. She went into the pocket she had the SD card stashed in and tossed it onto the ground next to her. Only then did she register another person inside the Astrid with white rubber gloves. A medic she hoped.

  While Pearson scrambled for the data, Chiaki tried to sit herself up to help Vraxen. He had arms that could extend; why was he taking so long to join them? When she peered outside she had her answer.

  The cloaked hecklers had surrounded them and some of them were now beginning to fire directly at the Astrid. Without his weapon, Vraxen had to use his extending arms to knock them back one by one. But he was taking heavy fire and soon enough the beams would penetrate his exterior.

  Pearson leaned out and fired down on the cloaked menaces, taking a few of them out. But then, they saw more of them flooding out from the elevator in the distance. “There’s too many of them. We have the data, let’s get out of here.”

  “No!” Chiaki cried. “Get Vraxen, he’s right there.”

  “We’ll come back for him shortly. I just need time to upload the data without the Astrid getting wrecked.”

  The Astrid door began to close and in a fit of rage, Chiaki attempted to grab her SMG. But that was the exact moment that her body shut down and she faded away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “HOW’S IT GOING, DOC?” asked Pearson.

  “So far so good; there’s a high probability she will survive. The Stowyth did well to give his blood to her. It stopped the poison from spreading through her entire system. Some of the poison did flow past her arm, which is why she passed out. Her body needed to shut down to try and make sense of the chemical and fight it. Luckily, through surgery I was able to flush out what little poison had spread past the arm.”

  “Excellent,” said Pearson. “She did us a great deed so she at least deserves another shot at life.”

  “Yes. But the problem is that her arm is too badly damaged. Once the effects of the Stowyth blood wear off, the poison will spread again. And it’s not as easy as flushing it out. There’s already longterm damage.”

  “How far into her arm is it?” Pearson asked. The doctor slid his arm above her bicep, indicating the area. “Can you amputate her?” Pearson asked.

  “There’s a chance we could keep her in this state long enough for us to find a remedy back at base,” said the doctor. “There may still be longterm damage, but if we find a remedy she could keep her arm.”

  “Screw that, I don’t want her there. Just amputate her.”

  The heart monitor beeped frantically.

  “What’s wrong?” Pearson asked.

  The doctor felt his patients’ pulse and then used a finger to lift her left eyelid. “Oh my; she’s conscious. She can hear us.”

  “Knock her out again and carry out the procedure as soon as possible.”

  The doctor walked across the room to get his Anesthesia.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  - 3 Weeks Later -

  THE SIMULATION ROOM WAS a gymnasium sized area where hackers could set challenges for comrades who wanted to test their skills. Recently, the area had gone completely forgotten. There were thirty-one total residents on the tiny planet of Flade and they were so confident in one another’s abilities that there was rarely anything to prove. Any freelance work that came through the shared inbox was often so straightforward that real skills were hardly required.

  Chiaki always tried to persuade her friends to prepare for advances in technology and new programming libraries that were being introduced but it was hard to keep them motivated when there was never a need to practice. As a result, most of the team spent countless hours playing virtual reality simulators and massively multi-player games. At times when they were struggling to pay for taxes and planet rights for Flade, they would actively search for new clientele.

  Today was different for Chiaki. Upon waking, Chiaki had asked her closest friend, Sage, to prepare a simulation for her. Sage’s real name was Lilian Ross, and she was a fellow lone-child from Earth. Lilian was abandoned by her real parents as a baby because they’d dropped everything to travel the universe together, which was an expensive thing to do. Ship fuel didn’t come cheap, and that was especially true twenty-something years ago. Unlike Chiaki, Lilian’s parents could be still alive in the Milky Way somewhere; she just didn’t know where they were or what they were calling themselves now. When recruiting new residents, Chiaki always had a preference for orphaned hackers.

  Chiaki had asked Sage to rig the simulation room with the most complex obstacles she could come up with; because tonight would be the night that she set out to get answers. Sage had pleaded with Chiaki to let it go.

  “Look, Nova,” she’d said. “I know how hot-headed you can be. And I know you’re still pissed at those douche-bags for holding us hostage and using you. But you only lost an arm three weeks ago, and I don’t care if you’ve replaced it with a synthetic arm, your body still needs time to recover. And you need to adapt to the change. It’s a traumatic thing to lose an arm you know; even if you do have a bionic one.”

  Chiaki had enjoyed the process of securing herself a new arm. AMG systems was an official artillery manufacturer for the Galactic Alliance; they owned a smaller R&D company called Sparse Manufacturing. Sparse specialized in creating products that only the most elite Alliance officials would gain access to. After doing some research on synthetic arms, Chiaki had found a press release from three years prior that detailed a limited edition synthetic arm that came with a socket that needed to be permanently plugged into the owners’ neurons. After a few hours, Chiaki had hacked into Sparse’s network and she saw that one of the final five units of the left-arm version had been ordered and was set to be delivered. Chiaki had updated the delivery location to an exchange station.

  At an exchange station, people could have things delivered there and fly in to pick it up at their own convenience. A perfect service if someone didn’t want a record of delivery on their home planet. One of Chiaki’s comrades who lived on Flade had gone to pick up the arm for her, and he’d made sure to erase any record of the product arriving and leaving the exchange from their database. She could just imagine some overpaid Alliance official waiting patiently for his arm. Perhaps he’d already paid for a new one. Because what was three million credits to a high ranking Alliance official?

  The synthetic arm was the reason Chiaki had needed a session in the simulation room. She needed to test the arm out in real situations.

  Chiaki was tired of sitting around on Flade while Commander Pearson was walking around with the Intel she had stolen for him. And the asshole didn’t even have the decency to tell her what he knew about her brother’s murder like he’d promised.

  Chiaki couldn’t stand clients that didn’t pay on the back-end. She’d always dealt with them by exposing their secrets, or stealing from them. Pearson hadn’t been a client officially, but he’d disregarded their verbal agreement. He was also responsible for her loss of a limb. And furthermore, Pearson abandoned his own mercenary after he’d saved Chiaki’s life. Chiaki had tried to make contact with Vraxen
when she’d regained consciousness on Flade, but there was never any response. She feared the worst. She’d even gone to the extent of doing some digging in the database of a popular Utrion discussion board. She’d learned that one of the loan sharks on Utrion still had an outstanding hit on Vraxen. There was an order to kill Vraxen on sight; should he ever show his face in Utrion again. This suggested that Pearson had not paid off the loan shark. For Pearson’s violations, Chiaki would make him pay handsomely.

  But for now, her plan was to sneak into one of the Galactic Alliance data stations that Tobi had learned about while she was on the Lapwing. She would search for all known Intel on her brother’s murder, because she couldn’t rest any longer without learning what Pearson knew.

  But also, the Intel she’d stolen for Pearson on New Yoy was too juicy for her to ignore. Much of the data had been diagnostics, blueprints and surveillance footage. There were many documents that Chiaki couldn’t make sense of. But one piece of text in particular stood out as the piece of Intel that Pearson was after.

  My lover was stolen from me and my heart will never beat as it once did. Ailmon committed treachery with the Alliance soldier that turned out to have Yoyvis genes. It was The Traveler himself that accepted Flurwick as family, despite the fact that we Children of Yoy consider ourselves separate from the immigrants of Yoyvis. But The Traveler’s reasons were selfish.

  The Traveler was prepared to enter Relaun and recover the Celestibus. Doing so would allow us to cast the magic we’ve been deprived of for generations. But Ailmon, my love, was against magic being part of the Milky Way again. He wanted things to remain as they were on New Yoy. The thought of magic awakening in thousands of beings around the galaxy was a frightening one. For if Flurwick himself was identified as a descendant of Yoyvis, imagine how many more there are out there. Desperate to prevent a potential war for power in the Milky Way, Ailmon approached Flurwick and told him about the Death Shard.

  The Traveler himself told us all about the Death Shard, and swore us to secrecy. The magic energy that comes from the Celestibus causes crystals to form all across the lands where the energy resides. This happened on Yoyvis, and The Traveler told us it would be the case in Relaun too. The people of Yoyvis were always forbidden to harness the powers of the Death Shard, because not only does it allow the most powerful sorcerers to kill with a wave of the hand, but it also enables the gift of absorption.

  According to The Traveler, there was a prophecy on Yoyvis about a sorcerer being so powerful that he’s able to use the Death Shard to absorb the Celestibus from the heart of the planet and become the only being able to harness magic in the galaxy.

  Ailmon told Flurwick this theory. And then Flurwick made it his goal to become the sorcerer that was prophesied. Flurwick went as far as to hunt down ancient scrolls from our ancestors to prove this theory correct. And then, when The Traveler offered Flurwick the task of entering Relaun to recover the Celestibus, he happily obliged, but for his own greed.

  But just a day after Flurwick entered Relaun, The Traveler had an unsettling feeling about him. “I don’t know if we should be so trusting of an Alliance marine,” he’d said. I considered him a fool for waiting until it was too late to express these concerns.

  He visited me at my data center and asked me to roll back every video and audio log that had captured Flurwick during his days here. It was then that we saw the footage of Ailmon corresponding with Flurwick and telling him about the Death Shard. Shortly after, I found my lover with his throat slit. And then all security operations were moved away from my data center.

  I write this so that one day it will be understood why I have isolated myself from the pack. Should I meet my demise, this will be evidence of the events that transpired.

  - Rozzar

  Back on New Yoy, Chiaki had been too consumed with the mission to process what the logs had meant. But after having weeks to adjust to her missing limb—in which time she’d suffered extreme phases of depression—she’d been able to re-read the entries hundreds of times.

  It was difficult to fathom the fact that an ancient race of Elves and humans—existing over a thousand years before first-contact with the Stowyths in 2033—had been using magic. They’d deemed this magic too dangerous and had casted it away into another world and then colonized it. And now, an Alliance marine with Yoyvis DNA had entered the magical world of Relaun to restore magic back to the Milky Way. But this Flurwick character had gone rogue. Not only had he betrayed the trust of the Children of Yoy, but Chiaki suspected that he was also acting against the wishes of the Galactic Alliance. In which case, she didn’t blame him.

  If everything she read was real, she knew a shit-storm was brewing in the galaxy. She had to learn more about what the Galactic Alliance was doing about this conspiracy. Being a gamer, she was partly excited by the idea of Elves and magic, but she wondered if this whole ordeal might be some crazy hoax.

  “Looks like I should have made the simulation more complicated,” said Sage, as Chiaki sat daydreaming after her session. “I went easy on you because of the arm.”

  “Don’t ever go easy on me.”

  Chiaki had destroyed three drones and dismantled an android during the simulation. All of that in addition to hacking a network that Sage had rigged to set off Chiaki’s shock vest if she was detected. She’d passed the simulation with flying colors, but she was still finding it difficult to adjust to the added weight of the arm.

  The arm had some incredible features though. It had a dark metallic finish that went from the socket down to its fingertips, but Chiaki modded it so that she could clip on custom claws of any color she desired. Currently she favored purple claws.

  A circle at the middle of her palm could open up, to fire small mechanical orbs. For instance, she could now fire her mini-EMPs directly from her palm, making drone tackling even fancier. The arm had ripples circling down the forearm, stopping at the wrist. Inside the ripples, much of the technical functionality was housed. There was a multi-tool inside one of her fingers, and she could also fuse cables together inside her knuckles.

  Best of all, she no longer had to wear a Comm-link, because the arm featured holographic Comm-link software that would project a screen above the arm on command. The holographic screen would respond to either Chiaki’s voice commands or the fingerprints from her right hand. She’d already migrated all her data from her old Comm-link to the arm, including Tobi. Perhaps one of Chiaki’s most celebrated features was the ability to record hand and finger movements as macros. This was particularly useful when applying her makeup or braiding her hair.

  Flade’s doctor—by default—was a male of the Garrue species who went by the nickname, Lanxton. Garrues were reptile-like humanoids that were revered in the Milky Way for their smarts. It was Lanxton that had carried out the procedure of fusing the arm’s socket into Chiaki’s neurons. This made it so that the arm really was an extension of her mind. This wasn’t just a prosthetic arm that could be used to help her grab cans of soda.

  ***

  “Why won’t you let any of us come with you, Nova?” asked Sage.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Chiaki yelled, as she threw bags of her things into the Yamata. The Yamata was one of two spacecrafts that resided on Flade, and it was primarily flown by Chiaki herself. “I don’t want anyone else here mixed up in this Alliance crap. They have free reign over the Milky Way, which makes them dangerous. I’m not involving anyone else here in this.”

  “We’re involved just by association,” Sage responded.

  “That’s true, but I need you all to stay here and protect the planet. If you don’t hear from me for a week straight then clip up and be ready for the worst. Maybe even think about fleeing.”

  “You’re so stubborn,” said Sage.

  Chiaki registered the look of distaste that Sage carried on her face. She noted the hot pants she wore, with the plaid shirt hanging from shoulder to waist line. She noted Sage’s sandals,
revealing chipped nail polish. Sage was not prepared to leave with Chiaki. If it had been Chiaki in Sage’s position, she would have dressed accordingly and forced her way onto the Yamata, no questions asked. Sage didn’t want this at all. She only wished for their lives to carry on as normal; and Chiaki’s desire to get even with Pearson meant a possible disruption to the usual flow of things on Flade.

  “You’re damned right I’m stubborn,” she finally responded. “To me, hacking isn’t just sitting at the computer phishing passwords and writing keyloggers. Sometimes we gotta do what we gotta do to change the universe for the better.” It was another quote from her brother. “Look after everyone for me,” she said finally, before walking up the slope and into the ship.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  STATION SIXTY, WAS A GALACTIC ALLIANCE space station that was fourteen Earth hours away from the The Kuiper Belt. It had taken Chiaki two and a half days to travel to the station from Flade using her level two FTL. Station Sixty was mostly used as a data center, but they were smart enough not to advertise this fact, because there would always be hackers as rash as Chiaki willing to try their luck.

  From observation, security mostly consisted of high-end drones and androids. These ones were more deadly than the ones that had been on New Yoy, by far. And they were programmed to shoot intruders first and ask questions later. There was also a unit of marines of different species living on sight. According to what Tobi had found online, a new unit was assigned this detail every six months.

  To make it onto Station Sixty, Chiaki had left the Yamata stationary in orbit, because trying to dock her ship would be the fastest way to a prison cell on Trador. She’d taken a shuttle closer to the station, equipped her breather and used a Jet Booster to glide her way onto the station. She’d used a few of her gadgets to detect cameras and other security equipment on her way in.