by Joe Vasicek
“Mariya, look at me. This is my starship. I am the captain of this expedition. We’re a small group of people who are going to be relatively isolated together for quite some time. Under those circumstances, the smallest interpersonal conflicts could easily grow until they tear this community apart. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Under those circumstances, everything on this starship—and I do mean everything—is my concern. When you go behind my back in ways that are manipulative and deceitful, it makes it makes my job that much harder.”
“I wasn’t deceitful.”
“Yes, but were you ever fully honest with yourself and with others? Did you never try to manipulate the truth when it didn’t favor you?”
Mariya shrunk and stared at her knees, wishing she could fall through the floor.
Captain Elijah sighed. “I suppose that what’s done has been done. It’s too late to go back and change anything. But looking ahead, how do you think we should fix this mess?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “It’s—it’s not that big of a problem, is it?”
“Considering how you chased a married man away from his pregnant wife, I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“I—I can take care of her.”
“After all you’ve done?” he said, raising a menacing eyebrow. “I don’t know if she has much of a choice, but what reason does she have to trust you?”
He’s right, Mariya realized. Her heart sank, and she buried her head in her hands. I’ve made an absolute mess of everything.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “What—what can I do?”
For a long time, neither of them said anything. Mariya’s lip quivered, and her throat constricted as she struggled to choke down her tears.
“Whatever you decide, will you promise to talk with me first the next time you have a problem that affects the other people on my ship?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice sounding like a cross between a croak and a sob.
“Very well.”
The captain rose to his feet and walked toward the stairway. He stopped just short, though, and turned back to face her.
“One last thing,” he said. “When we get to Zarmina and your friends are together again, are you still going to try to insert yourself into their marriage?”
Mariya said nothing. What could she say? Whether or not she’d made a mess of things, it was still for the best for all of them.
“I—I don’t know.”
Captain Elijah narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, no matter how you feel about it now, I hope you’ll keep in mind that things can change. Three months from now, you might not even want any of this.”
“What?” she said, bolting upright. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m just saying.” He raised his hands as if to let go of the matter. “Just remember—if anything like this ever comes up again, what are you going to do?”
“Come talk to you,” she muttered, looking away.
“What’s that?”
“I said, come talk to you.”
“That’s right. Take care of yourself Mariya.”
With that, he climbed the stairs to the upper decks, leaving her a bit miffed. What did he mean that she might not want it? That she would fall for one of the Alphan boys on the way to Zarmina? The odds were better that she’d collide with a falling star. No—Jeremiah was still her best option, even if she’d gone about it all wrong.
Three standard months to Zarmina, give or take. With all the uncertainty that still lingered, it was going to be a long wait—and she hated waiting more than anything else in the universe.
Part VIII: Deliverance
Chapter 17
There were few things that Lucca Tajjashvili enjoyed more than jumpspace. That thrill of breaking the sidereal laws of physics, with the stomach-churning rush that came with it—no other physical experience compared. But the best part, by far, was not knowing exactly where you’d end up. With jump drives, there was always a trade-off between distance and endpoint prediction accuracy, which made things treacherous when entering a star system from deep space. Even so, Lucca always preferred to shoot for his in-system destination from as far away as he could, sometimes by as much as a quarter of a light-year. He risked jumping into the heart of a star or planet, but at the same time, opened the possibility of discovering something that everyone else had overlooked.
With that in mind, he surveyed the instruments and display panels of his starship, the Gagarin. Few things made him as proud as the old shuttlecraft that he’d re-purposed as his own private starship. Her hull was long and sleek, with a pair of wing-like vanes for extra maneuverability. Her dual reactors cut down charge time for the jump drives significantly and gave her sublight engines a real push. When running at full capacity, she could do a little under six parsecs in two standard months, and pulled just as much delta V as sublighters twice her size. Not that she was perfect—many of the LEDs on his instrument panel were dead, and the holoscreens flickered like old, tired ghosts. Wires ran along the floorboards, while several of the wall panels were broken or missing. For all her engineering muscle, the Gagarin was certainly a piece of work. But she was his piece of work, and that was all that mattered.
The people back home at Tajjur V had thought he was crazy for setting out for the stars, especially with the terraforming project going so well. They’d thought him even crazier for leaving the well-established merchant routes to the Coreward Stars in favor of the uncharted Outworlds. He’d had many reasons for leaving, not the least the fact that his meager inheritance as the youngest son of a sizable family left him with few other options. But the truth was that he could never stand being confined to just one planet. To be bound by the circle of the horizon, the sky a ceiling and the ground a floor—that was no way to live. Back home, the best future he could hope for was to acquire some land holdings and make them profitable, buying up more land and further rooting himself to his mother-world. How could he do that when the stars were beckoning? No—better to leave it all behind and become his own man, following the path of least regret wherever it took him.
Thoughts like these wandered freely through his mind as he stared out the window at the yellow-white F-class star that was his destination. It shone like a brilliant jewel on a field of shimmering black sable, close enough that it seemed he could reach out and touch it. A more cautious pilot would shoot for a point just above the orbital plane, from which to calculate a more accurate jump into the system proper, but the last month had been quite boring and Lucca was eager to finally be somewhere. Instead, he set the coordinates for a point along the orbit of the fourth planet (it was impossible at this distance to locate the planet itself) and prepared to jump.
Zarmina. That was the name the people of this sector had given to the star. Back home, it was known by the catalog number Gvidiani-28, after the first Tajji astronomer to map the stars beyond the New Pleiades, but that was immaterial. The colonists who were coming to settle this star had named it Zarmina, and since they were the first to actually live there, that would be its name on all of the charts in the future.
He took a deep breath and flipped the switch to initiate the jump. Deep within the ship, the reactors funneled all of their pent-up energy to the engines, making the bulkheads rumble. His hands began to vibrate, and a tingling sensation swept from the back of his neck to his toes and fingertips. The edges of his vision swirled and came suddenly into focus, as if he were looking through a wide-angle lens. Reality itself seemed to bend, as if he were trapped in a bulge that had been squeezed out of a bubble. Then, something imperceptible shifted. Everything returned to normal, except that the colors seemed a little richer and more vibrant than before. But that was probably just his own perception.
All right, Lucca thought to himself as he cracked his knuckles. Time to find out where we are. The stars shone a lot dimmer out the forward window, though the system sun was nowhere in his immediate view. T
hat was to be expected, though, considering how things tended to get disoriented in jumpspace.
As he toggled the nav-computer to begin triangulation, an alert tone sounded from the ship’s main comm transceiver. He frowned and checked the short-range sensors—was someone trying to hail him? But the scanners showed that he was alone. Still, there was no doubt about it—his instruments were picking up a transmission.
After checking to make sure there was no immediate danger from gravity wells or nearby debris, he brought up the message on his main display. The holoscreen flickered, and a fuzzy image of a dark-haired woman came on screen. She was trim and fit, with sharp features and an imposing glare. One of her arms had a silvery sheen—cybernetics, no doubt. Her sleeveless black top had a vague military look, which the pistols on her belt only strengthened.
“Greetings, Jeremiah,” the woman said. For a fleeting moment, Lucca wondered if she was addressing him. Then he remembered that it was only a recording, probably transmitted several hours earlier. Besides, there was no way she could know that he’d be here. The message was clearly meant for someone else.
“Before you panic and make a jump, hear me out,” she continued. “I have something you want, and if you’ll take the time to listen, I believe that we can reach a mutually acceptable agreement.”
What is this? Lucca wondered. Whatever it was, it was interesting.
“By the time you receive this message, several hours will have passed since your escape. At the same time, my men will be pinpointing your location, preparing to make an attack. Of course, such a move would prove futile; you’ve no doubt charged your jump drives to escape again the moment we arrive.”
A game of cat and mouse, spread across hundreds of millions of kilometers of space? A grin slowly spread across his face.
“However,” the woman continued, “if you place any value on your wife’s life, that would be a great mistake.” She paused, her face as impassive as ever. “Even now, my men are taking her into custody. By the time you receive this message, I will have her in an airlock, gagged and bound. If you don’t do exactly as I tell you, I will order my men to vent the airlock and release her into space.”
Pirates, he realized. The system is overrun with pirates.
“Now, I am not an unreasonable person,” said the woman—no doubt a pirate captain. The black and red armband on her good arm confirmed as much. “It makes no difference to me whether your wife lives or dies. What does make a difference—and what I very much want to prevent—is the knowledge of our presence at Zarmina escaping the system. If you return and surrender yourself to my men stationed at the fourth planet, I will spare your wife’s life. However, if you fail to turn yourself in within the hour, I will order my men to space her. The choice is yours—her fate is entirely within your hands. Helena out.”
The screen flickered and went black. Lucca leaned back in his seat and stroked his chin, staring out at the starfield in thought.
So the colonists were locked in some sort of confrontation with the pirates. That much was clearly evident. But for the pirates to send out a general transmission so broad that anyone in the immediate vicinity of the system could pick it up, someone had to have escaped. A short-range jump would put them just far enough that a focused beam wouldn’t be the best way to reach them. In the five or six hours that it took for the pirates to detect the ship and pinpoint its exact coordinates, the escapees would have charged their drives for another jump. No, the only way to get a message off that had any chance of reaching them was to broadcast it everywhere almost the moment they jumped out.
But all of that had happened hours ago—in fact, judging from how far he was from the system sun, about four hours ago. The escapees, if they were still in the area, had been waiting for their jump drives to charge for several hours. By the time his own drives were charged enough for the next jump, the escapees would either be gone, or they would have returned to the pirates and turned themselves in.
They need help, he thought. If the pirates were desperate enough to broadcast a transmission across all of local space, then they were probably telling the truth when they said that no one else knew of their presence in the system. Which meant that no one else knew that the colonists were in trouble.
No one except Lucca.
Fantastic, he thought with glee. A chance to be a hero—just the sort of thing to liven things up. He had enough supplies to get back to Zeta Oriana, just a few parsecs away, but where was the fun in that? He’d dealt with pirates before, back in the New Pleiades—these guys couldn’t be much worse. And if they were already so desperate to keep their base a secret, he could easily bluff his way through. Besides, if he was going to be of any help to the colonists, he’d have to gather as much information on their situation as he could.
He turned to the nav-computer and set the scanners to search for the fourth planet. If that was where the pirates had their base, that was where he would have to go. With four hours until they knew he was here, he had plenty of time to come up with a plan. Though in all likelihood, he’d probably end up doing what he always did—winging it.
Either way, it was sure to be an adventure.
* * * * *
The low groan of metal on metal sent chills down Mariya’s spine, muffled as it was through the bulkheads of the Ariadne. She swallowed and glanced nervously at the airlock on the far side of the narrow cabin. The pirates would be coming through at any moment—and once they did, who knew what would come next?
Mariya didn’t know, but she had a good idea.
“W-what will we do when they come through?” she asked Jeremiah. He stared at the wall, his face expressionless.
“We have no choice—we have to surrender.”
“And then?”
He sighed and looked at the floor. “I don’t know. Hopefully, they’ll keep us together, otherwise …” his voice trailed off.
Through the bulkheads, the docking gear made a low clang.
“Mariya,” he said, looking up at her with apologetic eyes. “I know things are going to be tough for both of us—probably more for you than for me. We can probably expect them to do some horrible things to us. I didn’t meant to drag you into this, but I did, and I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said, her knees trembling. “It’s me—I was the one who chose to come with you.”
“You understand, then, that I had to do this? That I had to come back?”
She swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Still, I’m sorry, Mariya. I really am.”
“It’s okay,” she whispered. Of course, it really wasn’t. They were supposed to be on their way to the Oriana Cluster by now, to get help for the other colonists held hostage on the Hope of Oriana. The ship was still more than a week away from the main planet, which meant a long wait until they were reunited with the other colonists. Unless …
“Do you think they’ll bring in the Hope of Oriana with the jump drives?”
“I doubt it,” said Jeremiah. “A ship of that mass sends out a loud signal whenever it goes in or out of jumpspace. Since Helena wants to keep her presence in the system secret, she’ll probably bring the Hope in on sublight engines only.”
“But what about that transmission they sent us? What if someone overheard it?”
He shrugged. “That’s different. A calculated risk, I guess.”
“But—”
At that moment, the airlock hissed open. The smell of cigarette smoke wafted in through the door, making Mariya cringe. A swarthy, dark-haired man with deep-set eyes and a narrow chin stepped inside, followed by two black-clad soldiers with scary looking guns.
Salazar. Helena’s second-in-command.
“We meet again, star wanderer,” said Salazar. His eyes wandered off to her, and a terrible grin spread across his face.
“We don’t want any trouble,” said Jeremiah as the soldiers clapped a set of restraints on his wrists. “What do you want with us?” Space in the cabin was tight, so that they had to get to him
before they could get to her.
Salazar tapped his cigarette ashes casually onto the floor. At a wave of the hand, the soldiers dragged Jeremiah to the airlock, while another held her at gunpoint.
“J-Jeremiah!” she screamed. The door hissed shut on him, leaving her alone.
“Well, well, well,” said Salazar. “So this is the hacker who nearly escaped from our grasp.” He grinned again, showing his yellow teeth. “And a pretty one, at that.”
She cringed as he undressed her with his eyes. The other soldiers took by the arms, pinning her against the wall.
“N-no!” he screamed. She tried desperately to break free, but the men were too strong for her. Salazar laughed.
“Put her in solitary until I can come for her. You’ll all get your turn, but I want to take her first. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said the soldiers.
He barked the rest of his orders in a language that Mariya didn’t understand, probably to let her know that the first part was for her benefit. When he was done, he stared at her for a moment longer before slipping through the airlock.
This can’t be happening, Mariya thought to herself. Please tell me it’s not happening.
The soldiers pushed her roughly to her knees and pulled her hands behind her back. The cold metal surface of the restraints clamped down hard on her wrists, making her cry out in shock. Her heart started racing, while through the bulkheads, the groan of metal on metal told her that they were taking Jeremiah away.
“Jeremiah,” she cried, unable to hold back. One of the soldiers slapped her across the cheek, making her spin. The other laughed.
“Hacker,” said the one. He reached behind her head and fingered the neural socket at the back of her neck, sending electric tingles across her skin.
At least they still think I’m the hacker, she thought. They don’t suspect Noemi at all. Noemi, Jeremiah’s wife—she was still on board the Hope of Oriana. And since she was safe, they still had a fighting chance. Once the Hope of Oriana docked with the main orbital at Zarmina, Noemi would hack the network and give the colonists the opening they needed to board and take over. It was a desperate plan, one that could go horribly wrong, but at least she still had that hope to hang onto.