He released the magnetic locks on his feet and kicked himself towards the portal, grabbing onto the edge and swinging around to plant his feet on the bottom of the gunship. He reapplied the magnetic locks and was stuck to the skin of the ship. Gan touched the outside control panel, applied some power from his smartskin, and the door to the portal irised closed.
Gan stood up straight and looked for the station. His HUD pointed it out to him. Lodebar was little more than a rogue star at this distance, but once the suit showed him where it was, he could track it easily. The station was not only far above him, or below him, relatively speaking, it was far ahead of him also. His suit had to take into consideration the ship’s velocity—which was also his velocity—when calculating his jump.
Another chime sounded the twenty second alert. Gan double-checked his gear, made sure everything was well battened down on him, especially the artifact. Then he crouched down and breathed deeply.
Zero seconds chimed. Ganyasu jumped. With all his strength he kicked against the hull of the gunship, releasing his magnetic locks in the same instant, and soon he was sailing away from the gunship, the vessel’s dark gray exterior already difficult to make out against the void.
Without an N-space drive or at least a good set of reactionless drives travel through space was slow. His smart suit had a few tiny inertial thrusters, similar to, but more advanced than, those on an EVA suit, which allowed him to move and angle himself as he wanted. He let his body rest in a relaxed posture, arms and legs bent, facing towards the station.
Gan watched as Lodebar went from a rogue star to a cluster of lights and wondered what he was seeing. Some of the lights winked out and others winked on. Time passed. Seconds turned to minutes, then an hour, then two. The station took form and grew.
Lodebar station hung in the void. A ring of massive cargo and transport ships hung around it, waiting for dock. Smaller ships flew this way and that. In the distance, the stars smeared and blurred. A white light flashed as another big, blocky cargo ship jumped into the vicinity, wreathed in little bubbles of N-space which ruptured and popped out of existence one by one. The stars behind the ship returned to their natural location.
The station itself was a massive bell-shaped cylinder, wide and sloping at the top, thinner at the bottom, with long projections that Gan discovered as he got closer were docking piers. Below these were large, blocky projections that appeared to be cargo bays. From the upper, wider part of the station, six spherical additions Gan took to be habitation sections projected.
Gan pulled a long repeater-shaped tool and took aim at the closest part of the station, which happened to be one of those habitation spheres. The weapon fired a grappling bolt attached to a few hundred meters of ultra-thin, super-strong cable, wounded into two spools seated to a harness on his suit.
Gan let his smartskin’s HUD pick the best spot to fire at, waited for the timer to tick to zero, then pulled the trigger. His suit’s directional thrusters held him in place against the kick of the weapon, and the grappling bolt went spinning off, dragging the cable with it in perfect, twinkling spirals. Gan threw the tool away, finished with it, and prepared for deceleration. His smartskin could have calculated a direct collision course with the station, but Gan knew such a course wouldn’t result in much more than a red stain on the hull of the station, considering his current velocity.
The bolt attached to the station and the grappling coil applied tension on the spools, and Gan decelerated at a safe rate. The harness helped to spread the force of the braking action across his body.
Once stopped, Gan set the spools to reel him in. His oxygen supply meter read ten minutes. Nine minutes. Eight minutes. At five minutes, his feet touched down on Lodebar Station. He looked back, sure to see his vital cargo had become disconnected from him and was now floating away hopelessly beyond his reach. The stasis box was still attached to his back. Gan shook his head.
Included in the gunship’s files on Lodebar Station was a complete maintenance plan. Gan had downloaded that to his suit and now told his smartskin to find the nearest exterior airlock. His HUD pointed one out and Gan ran for it. Running on the skin of the station without gravity was not a problem. His suit’s thrusters simulated enough gravity to push him back to the surface fast enough that he could manage a good jog.
Two minutes of oxygen left. Running meant he was using air faster. The gauge recalculated for this and switched it to a minute and change. Gan reached the access port, a simple maintenance airlock. He dove to the control panel and put a hand to it. He closed his eyes and let his suit cut through the security protocols. He worked to slow his breathing, imagined his heart beating at a relaxed pace. An alert sounded, and he opened his eyes. Oxygen levels critical. Gan sucked in a deep breath and then held it.
His smartskin worked away at decrypting the airlock’s security. Even on civilian stations, airlock security was a high priority. Otherwise any hack could have a bad day and vent half a station before anyone was the wiser. There was no question whether or not his suit could crack the security, it was a question of when.
The control panel turned green and the outer airlock doors slid open in silence. Gan rolled into the airlock and got his suit started on cycling it.
While he waited, Gan kept himself from panicking by dumping the empty oxygen bottles, the grappling coil and harness, throwing them out the airlock, hoping they would never be found. The outer airlock doors closed. Gravity pulled on Gan like a sickness and he fell down, his lungs screaming for air and his vision blurring.
Sound returned as air flooded the airlock chamber. A green light lit, a tone sounded, coming from outside his suit. Gan opened his suit to use external air and sucked in oxygen. For a moment he lay there, thanking Remnant’s master for the stale, astringent air. Once he was breathing normally again, he stood up and signaled for the inner airlock door to open. By the time it slid ajar he and his precious cargo were invisible.
Chapter Nine:
The Day of Evil
“Miss Ashla,” Luna said, “this is your one-hour reminder for your scheduled take-off.”
“Thanks, Luna. Switch the reminder to forty-five minutes.”
“As you wish.”
Ashla knelt on the body of her ship and peered into the open cavity in its number two engine. She pulled a drill from the toolbox next to her and used it to loosen a series of bolts behind the upgraded energy manifold she had replaced a few days ago. Bolts loosened, she disconnected the wires and pulled the secondary modulator from its housing. She had already inspected it, wondering if it had been damaged when the manifold overheated, so now she just set it aside and picked up a second modulator.
Ashla seated the new modulator into the engine housing, connected the cables and bolted everything down.
“Luna, run a diagnostic on engine two for any power leaks or breaks.”
“Running diagnostic.”
Ashla sat back on her knees, set her drill back in the toolbox and looked outside Lunar Seed’s landing bay. A beautiful blue sky stared back at her, flecked with white, fluffy clouds. In the distance she could see the Erdanis Ridge, its big, brown mountains, peaked in white reached skyward.
“Diagnostic complete, no anomalies detected.”
Ashla nodded and smiled. “Great. You can cross that off the list. What’s next?”
Ashla fell into the work. She had heard of the idea of falling in love, seen it in vids and read about it, but it had never happened to her. What she could fall into was the work. The Lunar Seed was a complex network of systems and each relied on the others. It was like a puzzle she could always come back to and figure out. Though her to-do list might never be empty—there were always parts that needed fixing or upgrading—she felt a pervading glee in solving the problems.
Ashla’s forty-five-minute reminder went off, and she switched it to thirty minutes, then to twenty. At that point she resigned herself to minor fixes, so she welded the pieces of housing she took off the ship back onto the re
st of the body with her molecular binding tool and jumped into the cockpit to do some tweaking of Luna’s interface.
Thirteen minutes before her scheduled take-off, Cel Numbar entered the landing bay and the sky seemed to go a little gray. Cel wore what she always wore, the heavy strength-augmenting smartskin under the red-trimmed cyan uniform of a Meritine Guard, all topping the big, black boots. Her long, blonde hair was all rolled up into a tight, flat weave at the back of her head so not to get in the way of a helmet. She was armed with her heavy bolt pistol, an arm-mounted energy shield and her saber.
Everyone on the Meritine Guard carried the same. Ashla remembered being little and asking her father why they all carried swords. Wasn’t that silly? What would they do with a sword in a firefight?
“What are you doing?” Cel asked, stepping up to the ship. “We’re due to leave any minute.”
“I’m just making some adjustments.” Ashla screwed her face up, ready for a fight.
“Is your dress stowed?”
“Yes.”
“Then go change into your flight suit.”
“Just give me a second.”
“Now!”
Ashla huffed. She climbed down from the cockpit, grabbed her flightsuit and then glared at Cel.
“Were you born like this or did the Shaumri beat the humanity out of you?”
Ashla turned to leave but Cel’s hand grabbed her arm with a vice grip. One quick pull had Ashla looking back at Cel, and Ashla knew she chose her words poorly. Cel’s eyes changed, going so cold they were almost colorless.
“What did you say?” Cel’s grip hurt and the courage fueling Ashla’s defiance fled.
“Everybody says you were a Shaumri washout,” Ashla said, trying to keep her voice from squeaking. “Everybody says they chewed you up and spit you back out. If father hadn’t—”
“There’s something you should know about what ‘everybody says.’ Everybody tends to talk about things they know nothing about.”
Ashla opened her mouth to respond, but her tongue was suddenly dry and swollen. Her wit abandoned her.
“Go change.”
Ashla nodded. Cel released Ashla’s arm. Blood flowed into that hand and Ashla wiggled her fingers to stop the pins and needles feeling. She turned and focused on putting one foot in front of the other for a while, lest her knees buckle.
Ashla had always known how to get under Cel’s skin, but this time she had hit a nerve. Cel looked ready to be the first bodyguard in Antarii history to murder their own ward.
Adjacent to every landing bay at the palace was a locker room with showers. Ashla stripped off her coveralls and dumped them into the laundry bin, jumped in the shower to let a cloud of nanites remove dirt and sweat from her skin, then pulled her flight suit out of her locker and got dressed. She used this time to collect herself. Cel could not see that she had intimidated her.
Finally, she grabbed her helmet from the locker, shut it, and then returned to the bay. Cel was already seated in the passenger seat behind the pilot’s chair. She looked cramped and uncomfortable and Ashla derived a small amount of pleasure at this but chose not to show it.
Ashla donned her helmet but left the faceplate open. She climbed up the ladder to the cockpit and crawled in. She cycled up the engines, stowed the boarding ladders, sealed the cockpit, all the while expecting Cel to make some kind of comment. What took you so long? But it never came. As Ashla made the final checks she snuck a peak behind her. Cel was tapping at her link. Her eyes were still cold as ice.
“With your permission,” Ashla said, “I’ll ping the tower.”
“Go ahead.”
Ashla tapped a button. “Tower control this is Lunar Seed requesting clearance for takeoff.”
“Copy that, Ms. Vares,” said a crisp, female voice. “Um, the system says your clearance is pending reception of an authorization code.”
Ashla muted herself and looked back at Cel.
“If you please,” she said.
Cel said nothing, still tapping on her link.
“Lunar Seed, we have received your auth code. You are clear for takeoff. Happy flying.”
“Thank you tower control,” Ashla said as she shook her head and rolled her eyes. Ashla cut the connection. She gave power to the inertial thrusters, and used them to lift Lunar Seed off the floor. Ashla tapped a button, which turned from green to orange. She could hear the hydraulics whine as they lifted her landing gear. She could feel the forward gear lock into place beneath her. Then she turned Lunar Seed to face the big, blue sky, and pushed forward on the throttle.
Lunar Seed’s primary engines hummed, projecting her out of the bay. Once she was going fast enough she took power out of the inertial thrusters. Despite the tremor she still felt over Cel’s sudden outburst, Ashla smiled. She always smiled when she flew.
Vares Starport looked something like a sparse city seen from a distance, skyscrapers near the middle, lower buildings towards the edges. In the case of the starport the skyscrapers were massive skylift vehicles. As Ashla approached one such vehicle, a tall, vertical cylinder consisting of control center, passenger seating and cargo sections on top of the huge contragravity engine, the skylift rose spaceward. Another was descending, its long engine dipping into its recessed housing so that only passenger and cargo sections were still above ground. Bridges moved into place so goods and people could be moved off and on the vehicle.
“Starport Vares command, this is Lunar Seed coming in for our scheduled landing on skylift three and awaiting instructions.”
“We read you, Lunar Seed. Stand by.”
A few seconds passed, then a string of text blinked on her screen. Ashla tapped “yes” and her viewport filled with flight vectors and a virtual tunnel.
“Instructions received. Have a nice day.” Ashla pulled left on the stick and followed the directions, keeping Luna inside the illusory boxes of the prescribed flight path.
Cel remained quiet but Ashla knew she was paying close attention to her movements, making sure she didn’t deviate from the path. In other words, Cel was treating her like a criminal on a long leash.
Ashla followed the path towards one of the skylifts, the one with the two-story tall number ‘3’ painted on its side.
“Lunar Seed,” came a man’s fried voice over her comm. “This is skylift three command. We have your cargo bay open and ready for your arrival.”
Ashla could see the open bay ahead. It was a lot smaller than Luna’s bay at the palace, but big enough for her.
“Copy that, skylift three,” Ashla said. “Coming in for a landing.”
Ashla dropped speed, tilted her stabilizers in on each other to add drag, and fed power to the wing engines to help keep the ship aloft.
“Black void,” Cel muttered, her first words since they left the palace.
“Relax,” Ashla said. “I’ve made tighter landings than this.”
Luna fell into shadow as Ashla piloted her into the cargo bay. She dropped the landing gear, but before finishing the process, she angled the inertial thrusters to put Luna into a 180 degree turn. With Luna pointing outward, Ashla lowered her to the cargo bay decking and activated the magnetic locks in Luna’s landing gear.
“Skylift three, we are down and locked.”
“Copy that, Lunar Seed,” the fried voice replied. “Closing the bay now.”
The huge bay door slid closed and then recessed into its locked position. Then the bay door flashed, and rippled, and then turned into, for all intents and purposes, a massive window.
“Skylift three.” Ashla leapt at the first real communication from Cel in almost an hour. “This is Celeste Numbar, Ms. Vares’ ward.”
“We read you Officer Numbar.”
“I assume you have an emergency protocol to blow the seals on the bay doors in case of an emergency.”
“Um, well, yes.” For the first time the fried voice lost its easy cadence.
“I want control of that protocol on my link.”
�
�Um, Officer Numbar-“
“Authorization code victor seven two five one alpha.”
“As you wish, Officer Numbar.”
“Will the cargo bay be pressurized during the ascent?” Ashla had been on several flights into orbit and to other parts of the Antarii System, but none with such a wide view of the trip.
“It will. We’ll be taking off momentarily. Please stand by.”
Ashla didn’t hear anything past the first two words. Instead, she tabbed the button to dematerialize the cockpit, leapt down to the decking before Luna’s ladder could extend and then ran to the bay door.
“Ashla, wait!” Cel called from behind her, but Ashla ignored her. She heard the clap of Cel’s big boots hitting the decking, and gave passing notice to her bodyguard’s presence, always too close for comfort, but she was focusing on the window, on what lay outside.
“This isn’t the safest place for you.”
“What’s going to happen? This isn’t a pane of glass, it’s six inches of nano-carbonate.”
Cel didn’t protest further, besides an aggravated sigh.
Ashla looked out to the horizon. It was blocked by the wide warehouses and hotel of the starport. Beyond those stood a wide forest. Off in the distance, a paler shade of blue against the sky stood the mile-tall arcologies of Lexina, the system’s capital city.
A voice coming from everywhere counted down. When it reached zero, Ashla could hear a distant whining like an alien wind, then the ground fell away. Ashla felt heavier for a moment before the skylift’s G-buffers compensated for the acceleration. One by one the buildings of the starport dropped away. Then the forest. Then Lexina’s daylight silhouette seemed to bend away from her and then disappear.
Ashla kept her eye on the horizon. She watched with glee as it bent, turned into a curve. She gasped as the whole planet was swallowed up in gray clouds. She smiled as even the clouds bowed before her. Her gaze went down, down, down as Eltar shrank away from her. Then she looked up into a black, starry distance. It had been daylight only minutes ago.
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