by Sam Coulson
Lee watched her go, and then motioned for me.
“Eli,” Lee leaned in to speak quietly as he shook my hand. “Be careful, and take care of her.”
“I will,” I answered. “And, thank you. You didn’t have to take me in, you didn’t have to trust me. But you did.”
“We’re all lost now and again in life,” he replied. “Though, granted, I think you may be a little more lost than most. There are answers out there.”
Without another word he patted me on the back and I turned to follow Ju-lin back to Tons-o-Fun. As we were walking up the ship’s power-plant hummed to life and Loid came skipping down the ramp.
“She’ll be ready to lift in five,” he called back over his shoulder as he walked past us toward Lee in the skiff. “I need a word with Gramps, and then we’ll be good to go, so strap yourselves in.”
I ducked through the cargo entrance and stepped into the large cargo hold. Though the majority of it was filled with pallets of Kevarian Ale, there were a number of other items strapped down to the walls. A few black crates, several laser cannons that looked large enough to mount on a ship, and a dozen or so items I couldn’t identify. I followed Ju-lin into the main hold of the ship, and then up through the hatch to the secondary hold where Loid and I had stored the warheads in crates that Loid had then secured against the wall. Given how readily Loid took to salvaging, I figured that Lee was right about him needing the money.
As Ju-lin turned I noticed that her tears were gone, replaced by a broad smile.
“Come on,” she said gesturing toward the cockpit. “There should be a couple of jump seats in the cockpit.”
I couldn’t help laugh a little at her giddiness.
“What?” she asked.
“You,” I said. “You’re so, happy.”
“Oh shut it,” she gave me a playful shove before passing from the secondary cargo area to the small but functional galley. Just past the galley were four crew berths. Unlike the modular sleeping pods from the Carrack, the Scotsman’s sleeping berths were built into the fuselage of the ship. There were two on each side of the passage, and all four berths had room for a person to crawl in and lie down. An accordion-style retractable curtain to offer some degree of privacy.
“No, I mean it.” I said. “You really hate being on the colony don’t you?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. As we entered there were two jump seats with retractable control panels on either side of us. Further forward and up a few small steps was the pilot’s seat and all of the primary ship systems controls.
“It’s not quite that,” she answered as we passed into the cockpit. “It’s just that I don’t feel right when I’m stuck on a world, there is something about the curve of the ground—”
“It’s because she has Void Soul.” Loid broke in from behind us with a cheerful tone. “Take a seat.”
“A what?” I asked.
“Celestrial folklore,” Loid answered. “They have a bunch of stories about the Thar’esh, a kind of a dark force or ghost-demon that haunts and torments people. They say that the Thar’esh will sometimes come and take a bite out of a child’s soul. It creates an unfillable gap that they call a Void Soul. The bitten become discontent with everyday life, and are only happy when they are out in the black of space where the endless void of the universe can equalize the emptiness of the void within.”
“I didn’t know the Skins had stories like that,” Ju-lin said.
“They say that Void Souls were what drove the Celestrials to expand into space in the first place,” Loid said as he slid into the pilot’s seat. “That’s the problem with most Earthborn, we’re so full of their own stories that they don’t listen to anyone else’s.”
“How do you know them?” I asked.
“Oh,” Loid began powering up the engines. “The Celestrials get a bad rap most of the time. Granted, they come off pretty sticky and humorless, but that’s mostly because Earthborn don’t take the time to get to know them. That will change though. Last I heard the Celestrial Imperial Council has been quietly starting talks with a faction of senators looking to establish an official peace with the Collective and the Protectorate.”
“The Prime Minister and the corporatists would never hear of it,” Ju-lin replied.
“Yes, well,” Loid answered. “The Prime Minister wants to keep people afraid to make sure he can keep his power consolidated. As long as he keeps the Protectorate scared that the Celestrials may attack, he can keep the Protectorate Fleet close at hand. Mark my words, the winds are changing. The Earthborn have been run by fear for far too long.”
“You sound like my father,” Ju-lin commented. “He always said that the only reason the Draugari attacked Centauri was because we kept pushing into their territory after we’d cleared the Wild Worlds. But then the Protectorate Command just used the attack as an excuse to double our deployments and push even further into Draugari territory.”
“We’ll see” Loid continued. “I’m all for peace, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. If every schmuck with a starship starts hauling goods between the Protectorate and the Celestrial Empire, my profits are going to go to shit.”
The engines roared to life as Loid finished the ignition sequence. The cabin lurched backward as we lifted off the ground, and then surged forward as he began burning the thrusters to take us up into orbit.
Chapter 15.
I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth and gripped the turret controls with white knuckles. I hated the waiting. The caravan slowly crept into view, but still we waited. Our ship was silent, nestled in the shadow of an asteroid. I glanced out across space, the other ships would be there, also, hiding, waiting for our prey.
The caravan included seven vessels. Four were fighter escorts, we would target them first, and destroy them before they have time to react. The larger combat vessels would come second. Two of them, with markings from the Collective. Their armor is thick, but weaponry small. But with our Slires hiding in the shadows, waiting to strike, the fight would be quick. We will leave the cargo vessels untouched. Kill the crew. Take our prizes. Victory through honor.
Today the weak will feel the power of the strong, and they will be punished for stealing from the worlds that do not belong to them.
Once we were clear of orbit, Loid spent several minutes adjusting our trajectory with maneuvering thrusters, and then set in a slow thruster burn to send us in the toward the flux point to Aurae, the next system on our journey. Once he was done, the ship settled into soft whispers and creaks as we seemingly drifted through space. After the thunder of the Scotsman’s lifting off and pulling free of the planet’s gravity, the silence of space travel was unsettling.
Ju-lin, true to form, was quick to break the silence. We were discussing interplanetary navigation when I asked about one of the terms she used: flux points
“What are fluxes?” Loid echoed without turning around as he made final adjustments to our course. “Eli, what cave did you crawl out of that you don’t know what flux points are?”
Little did Loid know how close his sarcasm came to the truth.
“He was sheltered,” Ju-lin covered for me as she began to answer my question. “A few hundred years ago, back when we were confined to the Sol system we discovered several random gravitational anomalies floating around. Some scientists thought they were randomly occurring micro-singularities, but a few others had other theories. They thought that the anomalies weren’t random, and set about to find a way to open them.”
“Open them? Isn’t a singularity another word for black hole?” I asked “Wouldn’t that have just expanded it and devoured everything?”
“That’s what the first scientists thought,” Ju-lin answered. “They said that if the micro-singularities were naturally occurring and that manipulating them could be disastrous. It was before the Earthborn Society was founded. The United Nations Interstellar Council was in charge of setting policies and standards in space back then. They f
orbade anyone from experimenting with the micro-singularities. But, of course, a small group refused to listen, and went ahead on their own to build the gravitational flux drive and started hopping between solar systems.”
“How does it work?” I asked.
“Think of space like a large flat sheet. It’s not, but think of it that way. Then you imagine folding the sheet and stitching together two points. The grav drive briefly props open the micro-singularity—the things that we call flux points—wide enough for a ship to enter, and the ship passes through, slipping through the stitch between two points in space.”
“Where do they come from?” I asked.
“That’s still the question,” Ju-lin answered. “When we first discovered them we thought we were the only humans in the universe, possibly the only intelligent life. We didn’t know about the Celestrial Empire, or the Domari Collective. The thing about the flux points is that they are clearly not random occurrences. A flux drive opens the anomaly, a ship passes through, and then it shrinks back to size. Those first scientists were right. If the singularities were naturally occurring, they would collapse in on themselves or expand infinitely. But they don’t do either. After the grav drive’s field passes through they just snap back to how they were. Given that, scientists universally agree that the flux points were built, or at least created by someone or something else.”
“The same thing that spread out the human genetics across the worlds?” I asked.
“Some say so,” Ju-lin answered. “Others disagree, they say the flux points are likely a few billion years older than the oldest evidence of human habitation on any known world.”
“But that’s just one theory,” Loid broke in. “Over in the Collective, the natives of Hoken believe that they are the footsteps left by the God Iagen, the Great Fat Druid. After creating the universe, Iagen visited every world by leaping from star to star, but there were some points that could not hold him when he landed, so he fell through the universe and landed in another point. The holes remained.”
“Or yes, there is that, if you prefer superstition to science,” Ju-lin rolled her eyes.
“You never know,” Loid answered. “The Domari mastered the grav drive 900 years before the Earthborn, they may know something we don’t,” Loid answered as he spun around in his pilot’s chair to face us. “Besides, I’ve seen a lot of strange things in the ‘verse. When I first heard stories about the Giant Space Whale I thought they were completely ridiculous.”
“A Giant Space Whale?” I asked, astonished.
“Oh you’re just full of fables,” Ju-lin sighed. “The Collective integrated three pre-industrial species and took them from their mud huts and gave them the stars. So now we have to suffer the primitives, and listen to stories about Space Whales. And then over on the other side we have the Celestrials and their, what was it, the Thar’esh taking bites out of children’s souls? What’s next? The ancient Earth stories about time traveling doctors, or how about the Draugari apocalypse calendar?”
“The Doctor!” Loid grey eyes lit up with a smile. “That’s one of my favorites. I have all of the old vids saved on my Slate if you want to watch, great stuff.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Nevermind,” Loid chuckled to himself.
“Dear lord,” Ju-lin unstrapped herself and got up. The artificial gravity had engaged once we left the planet’s atmosphere. She turned to head back toward the galley. “I’m starved, I don’t suppose you have anything besides protein packets and recycled bilge water?”
“Actually, I’m a man of comforts,” Loid responded. “Above the stove you’ll find freeze dried foods of all colors of the rainbow. Stay away from the Orion peppers though. They’re hallucinogenic, so I’m saving them for a special occasion.”
“Right,” she said as she slipped through the passage back into the living quarters.
“Ah,” Loid said as she was out of earshot. “To be so young and so sure. I used to be that, but the ‘verse has a way of undoing our certainties.”
“I can’t say I’m too certain about anything,” I answered.
“Yes, I can see that,” Loid answered. “That’s a better way to be I think, a skeptic is rarely surprised. Though you seem to be hovering between skepticism and ignorance. That’s a bit more hazardous.”
“Does the Collective really have stories about a space whale?” I asked.
“The whale? Oh yes, the stories are real, and true enough,” he answered. “I was out prospecting once with Mith, an old Hoken friend of mine that I used to travel with, we were scanning an asteroid and found huge beams lodged in the stones. At first we thought it was a huge wreck of a ship. The scans came back that the remains were biological. There wasn’t enough to prove what it was, and then we lost the exact location on our return trip when we tangled into an ion storm and our computer systems were fried. But I am certain it was a Space Whale’s rib cage. Sometime I’ll retrace that trip and see if I can find it again. Too bad the Draugari moved into that region after the battle at Centauri, or I’d be back searching right now. There is a fortune to be had if a traveler can bring back proof of a Space Whale, but there’s no profit to be had if your head gets stuck on a Draugari pike before you make it home.”
I looked at him, skeptical.
“Oh, yeah,” Loid dug around for something. “I almost forgot, I found this in the wreck, figured you could use it.”
It was an empty Draugari sheath.
“Thanks,” I answered as I took it. I turned it over in my hand. It was made of some kind of leather with ornate designs scrawled throughout. Its smoothness felt like an old friend as I slid my blade into it.
The flight through the Eridani system to our first flux point took almost three hours. When we reached it, I found that the flux point from Eridani to Aurae was just empty space. Loid explained that flux points in populated systems are often controlled by local authorities, stationary outposts, or patrol fleets. But here, off the beaten path and a few fluxes removed from civilized space, it was nothing but a blip on a display screen. When we arrived at the location, Loid spun up the grav drive and we fluxed.
My stomach whirled as space outside turned into a shifting blurred pattern of nothingness. Gravity seemed to spin as I lost my bearings, not only on direction, but on time, and reality itself. After a few agonizing moments, it was over. When the flux completed, it seemed like not much had changed. We were still floating in the blackness of space, but instead of a distant yellow star, there was a bright white one.
“I was scanning an asteroid belt out here when I caught your Celestrial and Draugari friends passing through,” Loid said. “It looked like they were coming from Hyades, luckily the flux point isn’t too far. You can end up with a long slog between fluxes out here in the Nymphs.”
“The Nymphs?” I asked. “What are they?”
Loid paused again to look at me sidelong before he continued.
“You’re in the Nymphs,” he answered, turning back to the controls. “It’s a patch of eight systems. Aurae, Hyades, Maia, Celaeno, and, damn there are a few others, there on the map. Back in ancient times on Earth there was a pagan religion that believed in all sorts of gods and spirits, the spirits of nature were called nymphs.
I leaned back and studied the star map. There were dozens of blue, yellow, and orange spheres representing different stars. Aurae, where we were flying, was marked with a green dot. I followed a connecting line from Aurae and saw Eridani, my home system that we had just left. Up and to the right I saw a long string of connected stars, large, floating green letters labeled the region the Earthborn Protectorate. I followed another dotted line further upward and to the left from our position to three closely packed stars with the label “The Furies.” Beyond the furies was a series of unnamed stars accented by bright red.
“The Furies,” I repeated. “I’ve heard of those before.”
“I’d bet,” Loid answered as he moved the display to focus in on the three pale-blue stars. �
�The Furies are one of the two gateways between the Earthborn Society and the Celestrial Empire. Both sides have fleets patrolling and keeping guard over their flux points. The Celestrials like to keep to their borders secure and do most of their trading with the Protectorate and Collective through the trading hubs in the Nexus system. They’ve been in the stars longer than most, don’t trust most outsiders, and like to keep their borders closed.”
“But you have Celestrial markings on your tailfin,” I recalled Lee noticing them during our conversation earlier. “That means you can get in and out?”
“My access is minimal, but I can poke my nose into the Empire,” Loid said, his voice tinged with self-satisfaction.
“How is that? If they don’t trust outsiders?” I asked.
“Most outsiders,” Loid corrected me. “We’ll deal with that when we get there. In the meantime, I think it’s time to grab some lunch.”
He set our course for Hyades, a 10 hour trip. The food stocks that Loid maintained were far better than anything I’d eaten back at the colony. The colonial rations were all processed protein molded and flavored to look and smell like other foods. Loid’s food, on the other hand, was freeze-dried versions of the real thing. I was amazed at the depth of flavor and texture as I bit into a rehydrated apple. After we ate, Loid showed us around Tons-o-Fun and gave us a primer on the flight, control, and combat systems.
As he walked us through the ship, he told us how he came from an overcrowded moon on the edge of the Protectorate’s border with the Collective. He left his family and signed onto a fuel hauler bound for the Collective when he was 14. Eventually, he somehow managed to save enough to purchase Tons-o-Fun, a rundown Scotsman that had been bound for the scrap pile. Over the next ten years he had flown Tons-o-Fun from one end of the known universe to the other, picking up tricks, technology, and, of course, stories, along the way.