The Lost Voyager: A Carson March Space Opera

by A. C. Hadfield

  The pain hit her, the protrusions squeezing tighter against her ribs. All the while, she wondered what the hell could puncture a graphene-weave battle suit.

  Over her comm channel, she heard the screams of the rest of her crew through the static. She finally came to a stop in a clearing. Her body convulsed with the shock of the pain. From out of the dense trees another one of the things stepped, in full clear, hideous view. It was then she realized what she was looking at and screamed until it punctured through her mask… OreCorp was wrong; so very wrong.

  Chapter 2

  The murderer ran through the busy metropolitan area of Fides Prime’s capital city.

  Carson Mach had trouble keeping her in view, even with the adrenal boost from a stim shot fresh in his muscles. Shocked onlookers spread apart, leaving a narrow pathway through the sea of humanity for Mach to sprint after his agile prey.

  She was heading for the transtube station a few hundred meters up ahead. The cylindrical building’s outer glass shell was lit to a burning orange by the heavy morning sun. A bullet-carriage on the maglev track was preparing to depart.

  If the murderous human known only as ‘Ripper’ got on the carriage before Mach could get to her, he could kiss a much-needed payday goodbye—which, as ever, he needed in order to clear numerous misdemeanor fines—or face a decade of solitary on the prison planet Summanus.

  These days the fines he received included an extra Carson Mach tax, imposed by his former friend and officer, Morgan, who was now a head honcho in the Commonwealth government.

  “She’s getting away,” a gravelly voice said in Mach’s comlink.

  “No shit, Sanchez,” Mach replied between heavy breaths. “You wanna help me out here? You’re supposed to be the great hunter, after all.”

  “Just keep running, old man.”

  Ripper knocked over a group of people and stumbled, her muscular arms flailing for balance. Mach gritted his teeth and pushed himself harder, pumping his legs across the smooth sidewalk surface. He vaulted over a couple of elderly vestans who were struggling to get to their feet.

  “I can’t reach her in time,” Mach said.

  Ripper was no more than fifty meters away from the carriage. She held up a small laser pistol and aimed it at the guard who stood within a booth by the side of the transtube entrance.

  The guard, a young man, dived out of the side for cover.

  A cackle came from the murderer.

  If anyone was worth a bounty of three million eros, it was Ripper. Her kill count had exceeded a hundred souls in the last few months alone. And those were the ones that could be accounted for.

  “Might be time for a plan B,” Mach said to Sanchez as he checked his smart-screen, the holographic personal computer on his left forearm, to see if he could spot Sanchez’s location, but as expected, he was nowhere to be seen, having gone into stealth mode.

  Mach would have preferred if he and Sanchez had both given chase, but the old hunter suggested in his usual blunt way that he knew what the hell he was doing and Mach ought to just trust him for once.

  The doors to the transtube closed shut—the guard must have activated a remote security protocol. Ripper smashed her shoulder into it at full tilt and just bounced off. She reached into a black leather pack attached to her back and pulled out a small puck-like device. She placed it on the glass doors and dived behind the security booth, making the guard sprint away into a crowd of people.

  Mach could already hear the high-pitched whine of the tactical explosive device as he closed in. He was no more than fifty meters away now and was in the direct path of the blast zone.

  “Everyone get to cover!” he yelled, using his exosuit’s external speakers to warn the dozens of people who had stuck around to watch the conflict. The people scattered, heading into commercial buildings or squatting behind large steel planters.

  He had no such cover to reach in time. He closed his eyes, pulled his arms into his chest, and fell into a tight combat roll. His exosuit whirred as the impact-activated nanoweave stiffened around him.

  A thunderous shockwave crashed into him, rolling him backward, but his suit’s servos kicked in, stalling the momentum. Mach lifted his head. The transtube doors were shattered into a million pieces. The security booth lay in a heap of splintered plastic. Not good. Not good at all.

  Ripper clambered out from beneath the pile of material and headed toward the jagged opening. Mach stood, drew out his SamCore Stinger, and aimed, but the blast had screwed with his targeting array. His aiming reticule danced about, making it difficult for him to get the shot.

  While Mach tried to steady his aim, he watched in horror as the door to the carriage opened and she stepped her right leg inside. He fired, and missed. She turned and smiled at him with her sharp cruel features and eyes hidden behind mirrored lenses.

  His hands shook violently, his muscles protesting against the assisting servos of the suit. She turned her back and made to step inside, taking away Mach’s bounty and his last chance to prevent a long term in solitary.

  Before she could step inside completely, however, her left knee blew out, sending a spray of bone, cartilage, and blood into the carriage. The other passengers screamed and headed down the narrow walkway to the next section. Ripper crashed to her front, gripping her leg.

  She leaned up, drew her laser pistol, and aimed it at Mach, a pained grimace stretched across her face.

  With his targeting messed up, he didn’t take a chance, but dived to his right, using the destroyed security booth for cover.

  Her shot went wide.

  A quiet whump whispered across the sheet instead of the expected sound of a laser bolt.

  Ripper slumped to her back, twitched once, and started to bleed out from a wound in her head. Her body lay still.

  When Mach’s heart rate lowered and he managed to override the exosuit’s damaged controls, he activated his comlink. “Sanchez, tell me that was you?”

  Mach stood and spun round to see if he could spot his old friend in the crowd of people who had started to fill up the street again now that the danger was over. Mach couldn’t see Ernesto Sanchez, though that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, somewhere.

  Sanchez was as good a hunter as he’d ever seen—or not, as the case may be.

  “Yeah, Bleach,” Sanchez said, using Mach’s nickname, on account of his ability to go in and clean up other people’s messes. “I thought you’d need a helping hand there.”

  “I could have completed the job,” Mach grumbled, walking over to Ripper’s inert body and checking her for signs of life—of which there were none. “But thanks, it was a good shot. Where the hell are you, anyway?” Sanchez’s ID blip flashed on Mach’s holographic smart-screen.

  “Found myself a nice vantage point,” Sanchez said.

  “Holy crap, man, you’re over two klicks away. How did you make that shot?”

  The old hunter rattled off a ton of metrics, including velocity, angles, wind speed, direction, atmospheric pressure, and a bunch of other factors Mach had never heard of.

  “Well,” Mach said, “I’m glad you figured it all out in time. I thought I had lost you back there in the chase.”

  “Nah, I’m getting too old to go chasing around the streets like we were kids.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mach said. “Well, how ’bout you get your hide over here and help me with the body. We need to hand it in to get the bounty.”

  “Sure, give me ten standard minutes.”

  A group of travellers had gathered around Mach and Ripper’s body. He assured them with a flash of his smart-screen that he was on official CW—Commonwealth—business. His fake ID convinced the rabble, and they eventually dispersed, already bored of the situation. Mach dragged the murderer’s body out of the carriage so the transport AI could close the doors and get the transtube system running again.

  While Mach waited for Sanchez, he sent a biometric scan of Ripper’s body to the Bounty Office for verification. Within a couple of se
conds they had paid half his bounty and sent the address where he had to take the body for verification. Then they’d pay him his final half.

  Then he would be a free man again, with no threat of a vacation to Summanus.

  “Ah,” he said, breathing in the cool morning air. “It feels good to be free.”

  A CW uniformed ambassador sneered at him as she walked past, craning her neck to see the bloodied remains of Ripper’s body. Mach just gave her a wide grin, making her snort and shuffle off.

  “Yep, a fine day indeed.”

  Mach entered the mess of his ship, the Intrepid, and sat down at the table with the rest of his crew, their expectant eyes all focused on him, an unspoken question hanging heavy in the pregnant air.

  “Well?” Adira, his on-off lover, assassin, and generally complicated woman, said. “The fact you’re not in lockup tells me you managed to complete the job. Did you get paid?” She sat directly opposite him, her arms folded against her chest, her shoulders and back held straight. Her dark eyes narrowed, an eyebrow arched.

  A smile stretched across Mach’s face. He threw a heavy silver token onto the titanium table surface. It clanked heavily before coming to rest. The overhead strip lights glared brightly off its surface.

  “What is it?” Lassea, the Intrepid’s pilot, said, scraping back her chair so she could lean across the table to get a closer view.

  “A Noven security credential,” an old voice said, answering for Mach. It came from behind him. Mach turned and nodded at the man with a small, multi-armed drone hovering above his right shoulder.

  “You know of this place, then, Babcock?” Mach said to his old friend.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen one before.”

  Kingsley Babcock and Carson Mach had served together in the Century War, on the side of the Commonwealth fighting against the horan-led Axis Combine. Kingsley’s specialty was cyber warfare, but he had taken the knowledge and used it to create a host of intelligent drones. Mach knew that if it weren’t for the drones, Kingsley would have gone completely mad during his exile to the barren planet of Minerva.

  After one of Kingsley’s hacking missions went wrong, providing an entry point into the CW’s IT system to their enemy, he couldn’t live down the shame of his actions that led to thousands of deaths. Realizing his curiosity and talents would likely get more people killed in the future, Kingsley exiled himself on Minerva for decades, only coming out of his self-imposed imprisonment when Mach had found him and convinced him to join his crew.

  Since then, Kingsley had been a highly valuable member of the team, along with his collection of drones. The one that hovered above him now, a shiny metal sphere with eight fully articulating arms wriggling about, was called Squid Two. The original Squid drone had unfortunately met its end during another one of the crew’s adventures.

  Adira focused on the holographic display on her right forearm. She gestured her lithe fingers across it with elegant movements. Lassea, a young pilot of twenty, leaned closer to her older colleague, and one she looked up to—but then it was more out of fear of her reputation than a respect for her skills, not that they were regarded as anything less than incredible—and deadly.

  “Huh,” Lassea said, reading the search results from Adira’s smart-screen. “A dead mining operation, two dwarf planets, no signs of life or activity for over ten standard years… what’s that got to do with this shiny trinket?”

  “That trinket, my dear girl, Babcock said, “is a security token for the NMO—Noven Mining Organization—main facility. Each token holds a terabyte of security protocols. Each member of the corporation carried one for both visual and computational inspection.”

  “Seems medieval,” Adira said. “Why not just use remote biometrics like the rest of the Salus Sphere’s organizations?”

  “You have no sense of romance,” Ernesto Sanchez, the hunter, said as he entered the mess hall, striding with those long legs of his. “Each token is made from a pure sample of whatever the facility is designed to mine. They were reminders of all the hardship the workers went through, as well as a status and security symbol.”

  His rounded shoulders hunched over a wide, bulky torso. His leather jerkin looked as worn as his weather-beaten face. A threaded necklace of varied animals’ teeth around his neck swayed and clinked with each step. The big man nodded at each of the crew, except the vestan engineer, who stood in the shadows of the kitchen to the rear of the mess.

  Tulula and Sanchez looked as if they had had an argument, Mach thought, watching the two of them. The female vestan refused to return Sanchez’s nod of greeting. The alien woman hadn’t had much trouble integrating with the crew since Mach picked her up on a previous mission, but over the last few days he had noticed her becoming more withdrawn, spending most of her time in her private berth or here, in the kitchen, cooking up only God knows what.

  “I think it’s pretty,” Lassea said, holding it by the edges with the tips of her fingers and angling it so a rainbow of colors glimmered beneath the lights. “But what do we have it for?” She looked up at Mach with the same look of innocence she had kept since the very first day she and her brother, now no longer a member of the crew, had met Mach.

  Mach thought back to that time briefly and smiled as he remembered how green she was, how naïve. But now, after a few months with the Bleach crew, she had toughened up into a highly capable pilot, despite her apparent innocence.

  “It’s payment of sorts,” Mach said. “A kind of deposit on our services. It represents our next job and the future security of this ship and its crew—as long as we’re successful.”

  Babcock and Squid Two stepped closer to Mach’s right. Sanchez was on his left, and even Tulula, with her strange shiny black alien features, leaned forward out of the serving hatch of the mess kitchen. Adira, cool as ever, just rested back in her chair, stifling a yawn.

  She only ever seemed to come alive when her, or one of the crew’s, life was at risk. One of the many reasons Mach liked her: she was dependable when it mattered, and usually when it didn’t either.

  “So what are we doing?” Sanchez said.

  “Well, there’s a mining exploration craft that’s gone missing. OreCorp sent it out to destroy some corporate data and carry out another little job.”

  “No communications from the explorer?” Lassea asked.

  Mach shook his head. “The ship, named Voyager, last communicated with OreCorp headquarters a day away from the Noven system. After that there was nothing. Not even a distress beacon.”

  “Could have been taken out by pirates,” Adira said. “The Noven system is in deep space outside of the Salus Sphere’s CW protection force.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Mach said.

  “So,” Sanchez said, “you’ve taken on this job for us to go find out what happened?”

  “Exactly like that. I thought you’d enjoy the hunt for the ship,” Mach said.

  The older hunter shrugged noncommittally. “Depends.”

  “On what the payment is,” Tulula, the vestan engineer, said, finally speaking up. The rest of the crew turned to face her, seemingly oblivious to her prior presence.

  “Two million each,” Mach said. “If we wipe the data and locate the ship.”

  Adira made a low whistling noise. She looked up at Mach and fixed him with her glacial stare that he was never able to look away from. “That sounds like danger money,” the assassin said.

  “Exactly that,” Mach agreed. “It’s a complete gamble, this one. We don’t know what happened to Voyager, but OreCorp is insanely rich and wants its toys back. So that’s what we’re going to do. Lassea, plot a course for the Noven system. Tulula, Babcock, Squid Two, I want you in engineering, preparing for a weeklong LightDrive jump.

  “What about us?” Sanchez said, pointing to himself then Adira with his thumb.

  “Weapons check; both ship-installed and personal. Whatever’s out there, it’s managed to maim an OreCorp exploration craft: that means it’s tough, and we’l
l need to be on our toes.”

  With a series of shuffling chairs, salutes, and whispered gossip, the crew set about their orders. When Adira and Mach were left alone in the mess, Adira closed the door and pressed herself against him. “How dangerous is it?” she asked, whispering into his ear, her hot breath making his skin tingle.

  “Very,” he replied, wrapping his arms around her waist, pulling her closer to him so they were facing each other, their eyes just a few inches apart.

  “So this might be the only chance we get,” Adira said.

  “Better make the most of it.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking. Now shut the hell up, Captain, and kiss me.”

  That was one order Mach didn’t mind following.

  He was honest when he spoke about the danger levels. No one truly knew what was out there in deep space beyond the safety zone of the Salus Sphere. Mach didn’t relay OreCorp’s fear to the crew of what might have happened to Voyager, but whatever it was, Mach and his friends were going to have to face the same thing—and survive long enough to find the exploration craft.

  Chapter 3

  Mach checked his smart-screen. It had been six days since they had left Fides Prime. They were just a single day’s L-jump away from hitting the Noven system and he’d still not told the crew their full mission.

  They thought it was just a routine find-and-rescue job with a bit of data destruction bolted to the side. Easy in, easy out, everyone gets paid and a few months off. It’s not like he enjoyed withholding information from them; he’d rather tell them straight what they were expected to do, but he knew if he did that, there’d be squabbling over what they would do with the cargo once they had secured it from Voyager.

  He stepped across his plush accommodation berth that also doubled as the captain’s operations room. He had smart-screens on three of the four walls, all sending him data and metrics about their journey and Intrepid’s operational capacities.