“Does it bother you that there’s no loved one waiting for you?” Mach said. He had always avoided these kinds of conversations with Adira, even during the warm, tender moments after sex. She just wasn’t the kind of creature who seemed receptive to that sort of enquiry, but it seemed appropriate now, stuck on a distant planet, waiting for the whole system to burn into a singularity.
“Who said there isn’t someone waiting for me?” Adira replied.
Mach fidgeted and turned his body toward her. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his crossed legs. “You mean there is… someone?” He had to fight the urge to say “someone else,” not wanting to presume that he and she might be an actual thing. For all he knew, she only slept with him so she had a warm place to sleep at night. She’d never shared any feelings as such with him.
“Yes,” she said blankly before turning her gaze away from him to inspect some invisible detail on the opposite wall.
That one single word stabbed into his chest, weighed down on him like a personal singularity, and pulled his unspoken emotions down into in an inescapable gravity well. He opened his mouth to say something—anything, but nothing came.
“You want to know who, don’t you?”
Of course he did; how could he not? “Why are you telling me this now?”
“It’s as good a time as any. We might not make it off this place alive; I’d rather you know now.”
A mix of emotions flooded his consciousness. Anger, disappointment, even shame for the way he had let her get into his life, into his mind; the way he had grown to care about her far more than just a bed partner. “So, who is it, then?” he asked.
His smart-screen vibrated on his left forearm before the holographic image of Babcock appeared on the display. “Mach, the drone’s arrived at the site of the signal. I’m patching video through to you now.”
Mach bit his tongue in order to avoid lambasting Babcock for the interruption. In truth, he could have done with the distraction. Adira leaned over him to watch the video playback on his smart-screen. He held the sleeve up in front of them so they could get the best view.
The drone’s video feed was crisp and vivid, the high-definition 8k signal reaching them with its full bandwidth of data. They had Tulula to thank for that; she had upgraded some of Babcock’s encryption and streaming protocols.
“Look there,” Adira said, pointing to a densely forested area below the drone’s flight path. Mach issued commands to the drone to slow almost to a hover so that they could get a better look, and to magnify in closer.
“There’s damage to the trees,” he said over the wider channel. “Are you seeing this, Sanchez?”
“Yeah,” the hunter replied from his berth, his voice sounding as though he had recovered well. “Looks like an emergency landing pattern to me.”
“I think he’s right,” Babcock agreed. “Given the width of the damage, I would say it matches closely to the dimensions of Voyager.”
The trees weren’t just damaged; they were collapsed and flattened the farther the drone flew in an easterly direction toward the afternoon sun. The farther it went, the flatter the foliage, to the point where Mach saw scorch marks on the sides—these matched the landing thruster layout of Voyager perfectly.
“This is definitely it,” he said.
The others murmured a combination of excitement and trepidation. Babcock was talking to Squid Two and Tulula about vectors and mass displacement. Mach tuned out of the ongoing conversation and watched the video, keeping his eyes peeled for any sign of the actual ship. The drone continued in a slow sweep, beaming back the images. The golden light of the sun bathed the area in a yellow-orange wash, bringing out the saturation of the forest greens and blues of the dense trees.
“There!” Adira said, jumping to her feet and bending over so her face was just inches from the holodisplay. The image before them froze before turning to black.
“We’ve lost contact with the drone,” Babcock said. “It’s completely offline.”
“Seems like someone—or something—doesn’t appreciate being spied on,” Sanchez said. “I thought this planet was supposed to be completely deserted?”
“It is… or was,” Mach said. “Could be the Voyager crew, I suppose, perhaps thinking it was a threat to them.”
“Bring up the last frame,” Adira said.
Mach did as she suggested. She pointed to the far bottom left corner of the video frame. “That, to me, looks like the rear corner of a cargo ship.”
“You’re right,” Mach said, knowing almost definitely now that they had found Voyager. “We need more video,” he said to the crew on the Intrepid. “But don’t bother sending another drone; it’ll likely just get shot down again. Send one of the unmanned fighters.”
Sanchez spoke over the ship’s peer-to-peer communication channel, “Did you see it, Mach?”
“The ship? Yeah, just a tiny fragment of it.”
“No,” Sanchez said. “Not the ship… something else, on the right side of the horizon between the tree lines.”
Mach rewound the video and looked closely at the area Sanchez described. “Oh shit,” he said as he watched a number of shadows, far larger than a human, moving with unnatural speed between the trees. One of the shadows stopped just before the drone’s signal cut out.
“Oh, how nice,” Adira said. “A welcoming committee.” She briefly kissed Mach on the cheek before giving him a playful, though stinging slap as she leapt over him and dashed out of his room, leaving her scent wafting behind her, making Mach want to call out to her, ask her to come back, but it was too late. She was gone, leaving a ghost of her being behind to haunt him further while he decided the next course of action.
Chapter 14
The Intrepid hummed with a low-frequency hum generated by the gamma drives. The ship hovered ten thousand feet above the planet’s surface. Mach and the rest of the crew were present in the bridge, waiting on the data from the fighter drone they had sent down to Voyager’s location.
Lassea, in charge of controlling the unmanned fighter, manipulated the controls on her holodisplay. The image was beamed onto the large viewscreen at the front of the bridge. Everyone’s attention was on it; the video showed the fighter’s quick, sweeping descent. It arced low toward the tree line, following the landing skid they had spotted earlier.
The fighter flew over the signs of wreckage. Mach leaned closer to the viewscreen, watching intently. The feed dropped frames, creating a flickering motion, and then snow-static filled the screen from top to bottom until the whole thing was obscured.
“Come on, resolve!” Sanchez mumbled from his weapons station to the left side of the bridge. His hands were clenched together, his attention fully on the video. His complexion had improved since he came back on the ship, Tulula having given him some herbal vestan remedy. Whatever was in it seemed to have done the trick.
The video continued to cut in and out.
“We’re getting bad interference from something,” Tulula said. She dashed across to her station to the right of Lassea and manipulated its controls. “I think the signal’s being actively jammed!”
“Increase the gain and narrow the band,” Mach ordered.
Tulula nodded before briefly glancing a look to Sanchez.
Mach wondered how long she had known about the hunter’s condition, and whether she had been treating him. He would have to make time to speak with her, find out if she knew more about this parasite than Sanchez in his ridiculous stubborn prideful way was willing to share. She remained by her station, her body language difficult to analyze, given her alien ways. The CW did train the humans and fidesians in Axis Combine alien cultures—horan, vestan and lactern—but there was a limit to how closely you could truly come to know a species, much less an individual of the species, just by watching video gathered by spies.
Since she had been on the Intrepid, Tulula had altered Mach’s opinions of the vestan race considerably. So much so, that he now realized just how little
he knew of them, how little he understood their ways. This pattern of cognition brought to him the singular feeling of pending grief. It struck him at the core of his being, a black hole of emotion from which beyond its event horizon there was no escape.
These people around him, his friends and colleagues—they were all he had in the universe. As maddening and unknowable as they were, as frustrating, obstinate, and plain infuriating at times, he loved every one of them dearly and he had put them all in danger. This could be his very last few days in their company before they were dragged into a singularity from which there’d be no hope, no escape. Just a void of nothingness, their particles collided and smashed, fragmented across whatever lay beyond the weapon’s black hole.
Mach looked down at his smart-screen. The ship’s various system updates flowed in a series of columns. The navigation subsystem was online, waiting for an instruction. Mach considered punching in coordinates for the nearest Salus Sphere star, hitting the LD at maximum power and getting the hell out of there. He lifted his right hand and moved it across his body until his trembling figures hovered over the controls. All it would take would be two presses of his fingers and they would be heading out of the atmosphere and into space, readying for an L-jump.
But what of the weapon? The shadows? It was obvious now the planet was not, in fact, barren, but inhabited by some alien force that wasn’t shy about firing upon anything that moved. The image of all those bodies in the quarry came to him… How could they leave a threat like that, knowing the bomb was still here, somewhere?
Mach didn’t get the chance to make the decision.
Lassea smashed her fist against the side of her chair and bellowed an expletive that caught Mach off guard. He leaned forward in his captain’s chair, guiltily hiding his left arm behind his back. “What’s wrong, Lass?”
“Damned fighter drone got shot down too. Heavy laser fire by the looks of it, though the video feed was too short to tell. It didn’t pick up anything other than a burst of light before we lost all signals—it seemed as if the craft flew off course, its vector interrupted by something.”
“Not even the emergency signal?” Babcock asked.
“Nothing,” Lassea said. “Like the drone, it’s completely dead.”
The team groaned in unison as Mach swore.
The unmanned fighter was a key component of Intrepid’s firepower. To lose it so soon in a battle they knew nothing about was yet another blow. Mach wondered for the briefest moment if he had, after all, made a mistake. If his devil-may-care attitude had finally caught up with him and decided to collect on decades of risk.
Adira and Babcock stood next to each other, their backs to their consoles, attentions on Mach. Likewise with Sanchez and Tulula. Only Lassea had her attention on the viewscreen. She worked to disseminate any useful data from the fighter’s brief video. Even Squid Two, hovering over Babcock’s shoulder, its eight limbs swaying as though manipulated by a thermal current of expectation, trained its little red eyes on Mach, waiting, expecting, and judging…
“I fucked up,” Mach said, blurting the words out.
Lassea turned and looked up at him, her eyes wide. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to Mach’s candor, but she admired him for his leadership, and for him to admit something like this would surely shake the faith she held in him.
“I want to do something that I should have done when we were still back on Fides Prime. I want to give you all a decision in what we do. It’s clear that the parameters of this mission have changed dramatically. If you guys want to go home, that’s cool with me. If you want to stay, then I’m with you.”
At first a heavy silence descended upon the bridge. The subsonic drone of the gamma drives rumbled through the ship’s panels and floors. The artificial gravity generators whined quietly beneath them, a ghostly breath reminding Mach that they were as far from home, and far from safety, as he had been all his adult life since leaving the CW a supposed war hero. But could anyone claim to be a hero back then? The Century War was a messy affair at best, and a brutal exercise of bloodlust at worst. Every soldier fell somewhere on that spectrum regardless of their individual triumphs.
Where Mach fell, he couldn’t tell; that was for others to judge.
“I’m staying,” Sanchez finally said. He wiped the back of his hand across his damp forehead. “Not sure how long I’ve got. I might as well try to do something with that time. Besides, we’ve got a predator to deal with. How could I turn that down?” He forced a smile that cut through Mach’s exterior like a monofilament nanoblade.
There was Mach’s old friend, finally coming through the shell of defiance he had worn since they left the capital.
Tulula’s face shifted, her eyes narrowing slightly. She gripped Sanchez’s upper forearm and nodded before looking up at Mach. “I’m staying too. My people have only just joined the CW; I don’t want to be an example of treachery if we leave and are held responsible for this weapon being used against the Salus Sphere. And… well, I’ve come to like this team.” She cast a quick glance at Sanchez, the corners of her mouth twisting up at the ends by a few millimeters—the vestan’s version of a smile.
“Kingsley?” Mach said, raising an eyebrow. The old scientist had barely spoken since they had got back from the planet’s surface. Squid Two chirped a few times in its strange staccato language that the original Squid and Babcock had developed during his exile on Minerva.
“Squid thinks there would be much to learn if we stay,” Babcock said. “I tend to agree with him. The other choice would likely mean exile for us all, and having done that once, I’ve come to enjoy the company of other fools and dreamers and would prefer to avoid exile—at least for now.”
Adira simply gave Mach a nod, like he knew she would, and of course, Lassea, in all her eagerness, was in without a millisecond of doubt. He saw leadership potential in her. Despite being the youngest and least experienced member of the crew, she showed a strong will and impressive initiative. For all of the CW’s faults, Mach had to give them credit for spotting the talent in her and training her in such a way as to bring out her best qualities.
“Okay,” Mach said, relaxing into his chair. “I guess we’re all finally on the same page.” He was about to apologize again for his assumption and deceit at the beginning of the mission but felt the desire to put it behind them, take this united team, and crack on with the task at hand. “Shields up, weapons online, let’s get closer to the surface and find out what the hell has fired on us. It’s time we show these bastards what the Intrepid and its crew can do.”
He waited for a moment as the crew smiled at his mini speech. “Well?” he shouted. “The enemy is down there; what are we waiting for?”
With that, the crew saluted him and turned to their respective stations. The Intrepid came alive with the roar of gamma drives, EM shields, and weapons coming online. The viewscreen flickered before resolving its high-definition visuals of both the ship’s feedback metrics and the view out beyond them.
Lassea’s coordinates blipped on the screen, a red reticule highlighting a section at the edge of a densely wooded area: the section that contained Voyager, along with the destroyed drone. The ship banked against the planet’s dense atmosphere, dipped its long, curved nose and shot towards the surface, sending Mach back into his chair, even as the AG generators tried to equalize the g-force of their dive.
“This is more like it,” Sanchez said as he manipulated the controls for the quad-laser battery, scanning for targets.
Mach agreed; it felt good to have his team onside, the introspective bullshit out in the open, and a focused task. Engage the enemy—recover the bomb, and kick the ass of anything or anyone who stood in their way. That was how the crew of Intrepid worked.
Chapter 15
Lassea navigated the Intrepid down to the planet’s surface, every scanner and weapon looking for signs of conflict, ready to act on the slightest hint of alien hostility. But to Mach’s surprise, it didn’t come, though he was
n’t naïve enough to believe that it wouldn’t at some point.
The viewscreen filled with the ruined scar in the wooded area. “Slow to one percent, follow the tracks. Sanchez, Adira, blast anything that moves and isn’t wearing a CW uniform.”
“Aye, Captain,” both said, giving him a mock salute with their eager smirks.
Mach ground his teeth, his jaw muscles pulsing with anticipation.
Lassea was doing a fine job of keeping the Intrepid steady as it hovered over the chasm created by Voyager’s crash landing. It only took a further minute before the damaged craft appeared on the screen.
The bulky mining ship looked in decent shape, apart from the rear mid-stern section that had buckled under the impact. For over a quarter of a klick, a stream of debris lay scattered: radio dishes, landing gear that didn’t get a chance to deploy properly, and myriad other parts of the ship.
And then a dozen bodies—or what was left of them.
“Put us down there at the port side of Voyager,” Mach ordered.
“Consider it done,” Lassea replied.
Mach was proud of how quickly she had come along since her first mission with him. Especially considering the stakes of this particular mission. He didn’t credit the CWDF academy for her skill and resilience, though; that came from within her. He’d pushed her hard when she and her brother first joined up with him. She didn’t crack. She thrived and rose to the occasion to the point where he was comfortable giving up the pilot’s role, which had been solely his since his days in the CWDF.
She expertly handled the craft, engaging the landing thrusters to lower them slowly into position. The roar of the flames beneath them made the ship judder madly, rattling Mach’s teeth together before he clenched his jaw and anticipated the bump.
The Lost Voyager: A Carson March Space Opera Page 11