by Sam Coulson
“Aren’t you going to do something about that?” I asked, pointing to the light as I wished she would stop looking at him like that.
“Oh fine, you’re no fun,” Cwaylyn said as he spun around. He adjusted our trajectory slightly and fired are particle beams, to streams of green shot out from the bays along our wings. There was a series of three explosions as his shots struck home, igniting the oncoming missiles.
While the missiles were still exploding, Cwaylyn thumbed down our thrusters and turned directly back toward the station and once again slammed the throttle to full. For the first time, I got a full view of the station. When Alume had described how the moon was struck by the comet, I had imagined that the moon would have shattered and spread out into space. In reality, the gravitational pull of the largest remaining mass of the moon would pull the rest of the debris behind it in orbit. As a result, the large chunk of grey-brown ore that made up the core of the moon had been hollowed out to build the station where we had been held captive. The remaining mass of the shattered moon trailed along behind in a thick and dense asteroid field. The bounty of ore and rare minerals that had once made up the core of the moon and were now trailing the station was worth a fortune. The Domari Collective had given up a lot when they yielded the system to the Celestrials.
“Those fighters are closing in,” Ju-lin commented.
“They won’t catch us in time,” Cwaylyn answered. “When the Celestrials took over the station for some reason they didn’t bring in new fighters. They kept the old Domari defense ships. They are well armored and decently armed, but slow.”
“But where are we going?” I asked, thinking back to our arrival, it had been an hour or two between our last jump and when we had docked. “The flux point can’t be back toward the station.”
“Excellent observation Eli,” Cwaylyn boomed. “Loid said that if anything happened to him that we should still follow the plan. So I’m following the plan.”
“Which is?”
“I’m going to lead the locals on a goose chase and drop you two off to take the Tons out of here,” he responded. “Oh, that reminds me, I’m going too fast, can’t lose them just yet.”
He pulled back on the throttle as we approached the back side of the station, angling toward the long stream of asteroids following in its orbital wake.
“How are you going to be able to drop us off if we’re being followed by the Celestrials?” I asked. “Aren’t they going to notice when we stop and dock?”
“Yeah, about that,” Cwaylyn responded. “Under your seats you will find some environmental suits, you should start getting those on.”
I reached into the cubby under my seat and found the curved dome of a helmet. I pulled it out and looked over at Ju-lin.
Ju-lin looked skeptical.
“Is he serious?” I asked.
“Of course I’m serious,” Cwaylyn replied as he pulled up to avoid fire from the oncoming fighters. “Remember back at the Par’eth I told you about how Loid and I used to pull smuggling scams? This is one of them. I would run the goods out, and then drop them at a prearranged location and Loid would sweep in and pick them up. That way even if I got caught my ship would be clean. Meanwhile, Loid would skip right out of the system with the goods without a care in the world.”
“Have you done this before? With people?” Ju-lin asked.
“Well, kinda,” Cwaylyn answered. “Well once with a dead guy, but he was dead before I dropped him.”
“What?” I asked.
“True story!” Cwaylyn said as we leveled out along the rugged stone surface of the mangled core of the moon.
Cwaylyn jammed the controls left to right as he avoided a spire of stone. We were reaching the edge of the core remnant of the moon, ahead of us the view port was full of asteroids. I saw lights and ships connected to some of the larger ones, miners I assumed, though the bulk of the field was littered with misshapen hunks of dark stone and minerals ranging from the size of a pebble to a few dozen times the size of our little ship.
“We’re going into the asteroid field?” Ju-lin didn’t sound nearly as terrified as I felt.
“Technically this isn’t an asteroid field,” Cwaylyn responded as he pulled up to maneuver between two large chunks of stone. “All of the debris is locked in the trailing orbit behind the chunk of moon that the station’s built into. It’s a debris cloud.”
“So the rocks are more or less stationary and it’s easier to navigate?” Ju-lin asked.
“Exactly,” Cwaylyn responded as he pulled in closer to one of the larger asteroids. “Not nearly as fun as the real thing. How are they doing?”
I craned my neck to look behind us, four of the station’s defense fighters were falling in behind us, but the shooting had stopped. They were struggling to keep up.
“They’re still with us,” Ju-lin answered. “We’re pulling clear though, we’ll lose them in here soon.”
“Don’t want to lose them quite yet,” Cwaylyn eased up on the throttle a bit more. “Are you two getting those suits on?”
I looked over at Ju-lin.
“I can’t say I’ve ejected into open space before. Should be fun.” Ju-lin said as she reached down to grab her suit.
I didn’t share her idea of fun.
I reached down and pulled the rest of the suit out and started to put it on over my clothes. I unbuckled my harness and held myself as steady as possible as I slipped into the suit. It was awkward. After a few seconds I spared a glance forward out of the cockpit and immediately regretted it. We were in the center of the debris field now. Cwaylyn was shifting left and right and spiraling while slowly increasing the throttle.
“Hurry up,” Cwaylyn said. “Tons is parked out at the edge of the field here. I’ll shoot both of you together in her general direction.”
“Her general direction?” Ju-lin repeated.
“Shoot?” I asked
“Yeah, well, sweetheart, believe it or not this is a little harder than it looks,” he pitched downward avoiding a cloud of gravel. “Look, I’ve been around the verse a few times, rescues are messy business. I tend to avoid them as a rule, high risk and no credits to show for it. But Loid called in a favor, so here I am.”
The Matron, Cwaylyn. It seemed half of the galaxy owed Loid one kind of favor or another. I remembered his face as he fell to the ground, his chest covered in blood and the face of the old human and the Celestrial. They weren't with the Collegiate, I was nearly certain. I hoped that whoever they were they wanted him alive.
“I don’t see how ejecting us into open space in the general direction of the ship will qualify as much of a rescue,” Ju-lin countered.
“To be fair,” I said. “The Collegiate goons were on their way to throw me out of an airlock when you guys found me. At least we’ll have suits on.”
“Good point,” Ju-lin answered as she slipped her arms into the suit and zipped it up. “It could be worse.”
“There should be a magnetic grappler back there somewhere,” Cwaylyn answered. “Once you hit open space, find the Tons, grapple her and reel yourself in. Like playing darts at the bar, easy-peasy.”
Ju-lin turned to me and helped me slip my arms into the suit and zipped it up. As the zipper hit the top the suit made a hissing sound as the airtight seals engaged. I caught Ju-lin’s eye and tried to smile reassuringly. I wasn’t sure how reassuring it was since I was fairly certain we were about to die, but I gave it my best effort.
“Helmets on,” Cwaylyn said as he grabbed his own and popped it over his head.
I reached down and slipped it on. Like the rest of the suit, as soon as the helmet nestled into place, the automated seals engaged, clamping the helmet firmly in place. Stale but breathable air began to circulate through my helmet.
“Almost time,” I heard Cwaylyn’s voice over the helmet speakers. “I have a good twenty second lead on these guys. Did you find the grappler?”
“Got it,” Ju-lin answered through her helmet mic.
“Okay, get in your seats and keep your arms in,” Cwaylyn continued. “You don’t want to catch anything on the way out. It should launch you more or less straight out the top here, and I’ll have you angled as close as I can to where I remember where we left the Tons.”
His words echoed in my head: More or less. Should. Close. I wasn’t feeling very confident.
“What about you?” I asked, trying to focus on anything except for being ejected out of the top of a speeding spaceship with a dashing pilot who was flirting with Ju-lin while on the edge of the remnants of a ruined moon full of hostile aliens.
“Me? Oh, I’ll be fine. The cabin will re-pressurize and I’ll just kick in the boosters.” Cwaylyn answered easily. “They won’t have a chance to keep up with me, poor devils.”
“Then why are we bothering with this at all?” Ju-lin asked. “Why not just skip the whole, ejection and fly through space thing and just skip the system?”
We were reaching the edge of the debris field, the question sounded perfectly reasonable to me.
“The Celestrials will have an alert out for this ship,” Cwaylyn answered. “I’m going to hightail it to the far end of this system and make the flux over to the Collective and disappear. But from what Loid said, your colony’s in a bit of trouble. If you come with me you will have to travel through a dozen or so Collective systems before getting back to Protectorate territory, it will take at least three days, and you may notice there’s not much room in here, no food or supplies. But if I scuttle you two into the Tons, you can make a straight shot through the Furies and make it back out to your little world.”
“So they will just let us go?” Ju-lin asked.
“The whole system is focused on me at the moment, they won’t be looking for you. Look back there at the station, after the explosions half of the traders are preparing to flux on out of here. Even a fake Draugari attack is enough to spook em’. Your suits sealed?”
“Mine is,” Ju-lin answered as she checked a display on her wrist.
“I am not sure how to tell,” I answered as I tried to make sense of the little display on my wrist.
“Now where is that spot-oh hell,” Cwaylyn muttered. “Hands in!”
“What did you sa-” I didn’t get the sentence out before the canopy above us slid open.
The rockets in our seats ignited, firing us into space.
Chapter 26.
“The cadre is ready,” Tren said as he opened my cabin door.
“The Slires?” I asked.
“The Chieftain assigned two pilots. Kilan and Lertic,” Tren responded. “Lertic has two kills, Kilan has one.”
“Fighters?”
“A convoy,” Tren answered shaking his head.
“I would have preferred pilots with more experience,” I answered as I continued to sharpen my blade with my white whetstone. “But they will do.”
“Did the Chieftain tell you anything about what we are looking for?”
“No,” I answered. “But this is not an exploration or scanning mission, we are going to hunt. The conclave believes that there may be ground-dwellers coming into the system. I’ve been studying the route and the flight pattern. I think we are being sent to watch over one little world.”
“One world? Three ships to attack a world?” Tren asked.
“You misunderstand, our mission is not to attack the world. We are to protect it.”
“Protect a world? Like a common dirt-dweller?’” Tren turned his head and spat.
“There is something more to this,” I kept my focus on my knife. “Time will tell us what.”
“Good luck, don’t forget-” the radio faded to static as Cwaylyn’s little ship disappeared in the distance, arching toward Kalaedia’s silver ring.
“Don’t forget what?!” I shouted back fruitlessly as Cwaylyn soared out of range of our helmet coms.
I turned and watched as the four defense fighters flew after him.
“Over here,” Ju-lin’s voice spoke into my coms. “To your left.”
I turned, Ju-lin was floating next to me just a few feet off. I reached out but came up a foot-and-a-half short of her outstretched hand.
“Hold on,” I said, remembering that I had seen a length of cable wrapped around the right thigh of my suit. I reached out and unhooked a latch the end and started to unwind it. I was halfway through unwrapping it when I became fully aware that I was actually floating out in space.
I froze, staring out into the vast expanse of nothing below me, above me, all around. The black was lit up with specks of stars, each with their own worlds. A flash of Lor’ten’s memories flooded my mind, images of stars, worlds, huge ships, blazing lights, explosions, and death. I shook off the images.
“Eli,” Ju-lin’s voice was calm and reassuring. “I know. Amazing isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer.
“My dad first took me out on a space-walk when I was nine. He said I’d been begging him to take me out since I was four. I floated out there with him for an hour before he dragged me back to the airlock.”
I stayed silently transfixed as I looked out at the stars. Any one of the stars could have been dead for a few hundred years, and the light would still be shining bright. I wondered if one of the distant twinkles held the world that my people had come from. I wondered if one of the bright stars was really the last gasping light of the long-dead star Vasudeva. I shivered.
“Eli, we don’t have all evening,” Ju-lin continued. “So unwrap that damned cord and toss it over here.”
Roused, I looked over at her, through her thin visor I could see the intensity and urgency in her eyes. I finished unwrapping the cord, then wrapped one end around my wrist, and flung the other end toward her. After swatting at it wildly, she finally grabbed it, wrapped it around her own wrist, and reeled herself in toward me.
“Good,” Ju-lin smiled. “Now, I don’t mean to freak you out, because I know it feels like we’re just floating here, but we’re not.”
She looked over my left shoulder, I shifted to follow her eyes and saw the debris field. We were heading toward it. Fast. Far faster than I thought possible.
“Holy hell!” I gasped.
“Don’t panic,” she said. “The first thing dad taught me about space is that all motion is relative. Relative to you, I am not moving. Relative to the rest of the universe, we’re flying about one hundred meters per second. The second thing was to never panic.”
“Okay, a hundred meters per second. Not panicking,” I tried to sound as convincing as possible as I latched on to her. “What do we do?”
“Find Tons,” she said. “Cway said he would fire us toward her, she should be around there.”
I turned to follow her gesture, scanning the rocky field of debris that was steadily growing closer.
“I don’t see it,” she whispered, her voice starting to shake.
Sweat from my forehead stung my eyes, instinctively I reached up to clear it and ended up clumsily tapping the side of my helmet. I blinked three times in rapid succession and squinted into the darkness. I saw a flash of steel, and then it was gone. I waited a breath, blinked, and looked again, it was there. I saw a faint streak of red among the lumps of grey.
“There,” I pointed. “Right there, on the underside of the crescent shaped stone.”
Ju-lin followed my finger, searching.
“Damn,” Ju-lin said with a wry smile. “How did you see that?”
“Now what do we do?” I asked. Although we were angled close to where Tons was drifting, if we didn’t adjust our trajectory we would soon be slamming into the broad side of the asteroid instead.
“I don’t know if I can hit it from here,” Ju-lin said, pulling the magnetic grappler out of the holster on her belt.
“If you miss, I won’t tell,” I said as I tried to force a laugh.
“I’d appreciate that,” she made an equally pathetic attempt to laugh. “Hold on to me.”
We spun and I swung around behind her, wrapping
my arms around her shoulders and chest as she held the grappler with both hands. I watched over her shoulder as Ju-lin took careful aim at Tons-o-Fun’s hull, aiming at the buxom woman with the bright red hair painted on the Tons’ bow.
I felt Ju-lin take a deep breath in, and as she exhaled, she fired.
We both watched as the grappler flew through the void. Behind the magnetic grappler trailed a microfiber string that fed out the barrel of the gun. At first, it looked like it was going to miss, but then, like the sticky-bomb that Loid had used against the Alonso’s Starchaser, at the last minute the grappler began to arch toward the ship as the magnet found steel, striking home square on the bow.
Ju-lin laughed sharply.
We were closing fast, within seconds we would crash into the side of the asteroid.
“Hold on!” Ju-lin called as she flipped a switch and the grappler began to retract.
With a snap the grappler picked up the slack in the line and shifted our path, pulling us toward the Tons. I held my breath as it swung is in just enough to narrowly miss the edge of the asteroid.
“I can’t believe that worked!” Ju-lin shouted as we swung in toward Tons-o-Fun.
We had avoided the asteroid, but we were still coming in fast. Too fast I thought.
“What about the landing?” I asked as we rushed in toward the hull.
“Umm, yeah,” was all Ju-lin could say before we slammed, side first, against the hull.
I gasped for breath, my right arm and leg throbbed. I couldn’t breathe. For a few seconds, I thought that my suit had ruptured. I imagined the vacuum of space devouring the precious oxygen in my suit. My lungs started to burn and my ears were screaming. Slowly, I opened my eyes. I took a shallow breath. There was still air. My suit hadn’t ruptured. There was still screaming though.
“Did you see that?!” Ju-lin whooped. “That was incredible! I’ve never seen anything like that even on the vids on the nets back home! Eli? Eli are you okay?”
“I think so,” I answered, still gasping for breath. We were nestled against the large bust painted on the nose of the ship. I looked up to find that I was face-to-face with the buxom red-head’s sly and seductive smile.