He activated his radio.
“Beau, come in,” he whispered. “I don’t know where I am, but hopefully you guys aren’t far behind. I’m entering a rocky planet that’s orbiting what looks like a class G star.”
He waited for Beau to reply, but no answer came.
The radio in his suit was dead.
He moved to another location in the engine room. “Beau. Beau? Beau!”
Silence.
He took off his helmet and inspected it. Everything was intact. No damage.
Then he looked out the window. It had to be the radiation. The star’s emissions were interfering with his transmission.
“Just my luck,” he muttered.
He couldn’t see behind the ship. He didn’t know if Beau was still following.
The rocky planet neared. Its cratered surface reminded him of textbook photos he’d seen of Earth’s moon, taken a thousand years ago, back when humans still lived on Earth, before the mass migrations. The planet had no atmosphere, no moons from what he could tell, and most importantly—no water.
Water.
He scratched his helmet, forgetting for a moment that he had it on.
That’s why they needed all the water he’d found in the cupboards.
But it still didn’t make sense.
He heard footsteps in the kitchen, and he crept to the engine door and listened.
From the heavy plodding sounds, he guessed it was Gen. Lighter footsteps down the stairwell—Rina.
Plop.
Glug-glug.
“Drink up,” Gen said. “It’s hotter’na bitch there.”
“How long is this going to take?” Rina asked.
“As long as it needs to. You getting second thoughts?”
Hesitation.
“Never. I just didn’t think it was going to be… this intense.”
Gen grunted. “The first drop is always the hardest. You get used to it after a while. They used to drop in mid-space. Had to line up the airlocks of two ships for transport. You better pray that you don’t ever have to do that. Come on, let’s get ready.”
The cupboards clapped open.
Grayson listened as they unloaded the bottles of water onto what sounded like a dolly. He heard the scritch-scratching of Velcro straps, wheels over tile, and unintelligible banter that faded in volume as the two disappeared into the airlock.
He tried his radio again, but it was still silent.
More footsteps in the kitchen.
Rina.
Gen called to her from the airlock. “Go ahead and prepare for re-entry!”
Rina’s footsteps tracked up the stairs.
“Rina!”
The cockpit door opened. “What!”
“Use the auto-entry button, rocky planet setting!”
“What?”
“Rocky planet!”
The cockpit door slammed.
A few seconds later, the ship’s computer chimed.
Descending into planetary atmosphere…
Grayson grabbed a post and held on tight as the ship angled downward toward the gray planet.
The engine blazed, brightening the room with fire and ashes.
Grayson trusted his gloves. Military-grade grips. They’d hold on as long as he did.
He breathed in and out in quick puffs.
“I can do this,” he said. “I can do this!”
Outside, the gravity ring recessed into the ship, and he went weightless. The engine screamed as the ship rocketed down, down into orbit.
Grayson grabbed onto the post, his feet pointing toward the window like a doll being tossed in the wind.
“Come on!” he said to himself, tightening his grip.
The engine blared waves of heat across his body. The screaming rattled his bones and his fingers ached from the strain.
Orangish yellow plasma covered the window.
And the shaking. God, the shaking!
Through the plasma, the surface of the rocky planet slanted across the glass, expansive and imposing.
The ship roared as it plunged further.
He’d trained for this kind of landing. Planets without atmospheres were tricky, bumpy exercises in masterful navigation. He remembered the training ship landing on a test planet. It had thrown him around just like this one. But he had been in a harness then, strapped into safety.
He kept his grip, gritting his teeth.
The ship rocked, and for a moment he almost lost his hold. If he let go, he’d break every bone in his body against the back wall, and then bounce into the engine’s flames.
He tried not to think about an untimely death.
Instead, he thought of the innocent people in the airlock. They were depending on him. He wasn’t going to fail them.
He wasn’t going to let go!
The ship rocked again, knocking one hand loose. He hung on with the other hand, trying not to yell.
“Come on!” he said through clenched teeth. “Come on!”
The planet’s surface covered the entire window now, and he could see the dark, rocky craters looming like bottomless holes.
Then the ship righted itself and slowed down.
He let go, then rolled across the floor and stopped short of the wall. He breathed in rapidly and scurried for the post again.
The ship was at cruising altitude over the planet’s surface. Below, he noticed a silver dome just where the planet’s rocky surface met the horizon. The destination.
“Rina!” Gen cried.
The door to the cockpit swung open. “What now?”
“Nice job,” Gen shouted. “Get down here and let’s prepare for the drop.”
Chapter 6
Grayson listened to Gen and Rina as they bumped around in the airlock.
The ship must have been on autopilot, and Grayson watched as it descended into the dark world below, toward the glass dome.
As it neared, he noticed what looked like some kind of dock underneath the dome. He tilted his head, trying to make out the shapes in the blackness, but he couldn’t.
Then he heard screams.
The victims.
Gen and Rina were unloading them.
Men.
Women.
Children.
All screaming, crying, yelling.
“Shut up!” Gen said.
Whack!
Someone toppled to the ground, hitting the metal. Grayson winced.
“Suit up!” Gen hollered.
“Suit up,” Grayson repeated. He snapped his fingers.
Damn.
The suits hanging in the airlock—they were for the victims! He balled his fists and shook at the realization.
The glass dome was a few hundred meters away now.
The ship circled the dome and then began its final descent. A glass airlock sat at the base of the dome. Several shadowed figures waited at the bottom, waving up at the ship.
He crouched next to the window, watching as the ship landed in a cloud of dust and rocks. The touchdown was bumpy, and it would have thrown him across the engine room if he hadn’t grabbed on to the post at the last moment.
The dust settled outside and the ship began to roll. As it did, Grayson wondered about it—those were some damn good autopilot coordinates.
A standard private passenger starship knew how to fly itself, and with AI technology, it got smarter every time you flew it. But according to Beau, this ship was just purchased from a dealer. Grayson didn’t know of a single ship that could make a tough landing like this and roll itself into a glass dome without a pilot.
Unless the ship hadn’t come from where they’d claimed. Or someone had downloaded the instructions into the ship’s autopilot system so that it got “smarter” faster.
Something weird was going on, and he didn’t know what it was.
The ship wheeled into the safety of the glass dome. It stopped next to a long, wooden walkway that extended toward a brown, egg-shaped structure. He’d never seen anything like it before. It had
square, blue-tinted windows in the front. Fire shone against them, and smoke rose from a vent in the top of the building.
A honking alarm sounded and the airlock opened.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Gen yelled.
Feet pounded on the wooden walkway, and Grayson counted ten pairs of boots.
Soon, the boots echoed farther and farther away.
The victims. They were gone.
He’d failed them.
He started toward the engine door, and soon found himself two feet in the air as he bounced off the wall.
“Whoa!” he cried.
The gravity. There was less of it. He guessed the gravity here was half of what he was used to back on Provenance.
If he wasn’t careful, he’d fling himself into the sky and give away his location.
He remembered the training drills in low-gravity situations. The instructors had drawn equations in the sand that he never understood.
But the lesson was clear: lower your center of gravity and pile on more weight—and shuffle, don’t run. In fact, Will had tried to run in a low-gravity simulator, and had gone crashing into the ceiling.
He needed to find something heavy to weigh him down.
He dropped to the floor, crawling on his stomach.
In one of the cupboards, he found a gas canister that Gen had missed. He pursed his lips. If he had a gas can on his back and someone shot him, he’d be a walking bomb.
But maybe there was another way.
He slid out of his suit and stuck the gas can inside. It tugged at the space where his buttocks met his legs, but it weighed him down. While it looked funny, it would not be immediately obvious that he had a gas can on his back.
Now he just had to avoid getting shot.
He moved slowly, testing out his theory. Walking felt unnatural, as if he would take off into the sky at any moment. He perfected a mix between a shuffle and a regular step, and it kept him on the ground. Soon it became second nature, and he was able to walk into the airlock at about half of a regular walking gait.
The airlock was empty.
All the spacesuits were gone.
His suit beeped at him.
Oxygen levels at sixty percent.
He winced.
He was barely at half a tank, and he had no idea what he was going to do.
He didn’t know if Beau and Will were on their way.
Maybe they weren’t.
He might die on this marble of a planet.
He shuffled to the edge of the airlock, looking around. In the distance, a long line of red suits marched toward the brown dome.
Grayson crouched and did a small hop, landing on the wooden walkway.
“Time to figure out what the hell is going on here.”
Chapter 7
Cold air blasted him and almost knocked him backward. He could feel the chill through his suit. He didn’t expect it to be so cold.
From what he could tell, the planet wasn’t rotating. The curved glass of the dome showed the same stars, with no movement.
A group of heaters hummed nearby, sending waves of heat across the walkway. Grayson shuffled toward them, looking around.
He tried his radio, but it still didn’t work. He scanned the skies for any sign of the GGC Horizon.
But Beau hadn’t followed.
Maybe Gen and Rina had lost him.
Grayson swallowed hard.
Then he heard footsteps. The door on the brown dome opened and shadowed figures walked out.
Grayson dropped down and hung off the side of the walkway, hugging one of the posts. The rocky landscape was ten feet below him.
The footsteps rattled the floorboards and shook Grayson’s post. Whoever they were, they were heavy. Not even Grayson’s footsteps sounded so loud in low gravity.
Then he heard their voices.
Snorts. Grunts.
Growls.
The smell of dirt and mud and excrement.
His stomach churned.
“Bok bok!”
“Pa-bok-bok!”
Oinking sounds as the footsteps made their way down the platform toward the ship’s airlock.
Grayson peeked his head up and confirmed his suspicions.
Arguses.
Two fat men in black cloaks entered the airlock. They had heads that resembled pigs, with white tusks and flat, square noses. They walked on two feet, and must have weighed at least four hundred pounds. Their potbellies bounced as they jumped aboard the ship.
“Bok!”
“Bok!”
Grayson swung down out of sight.
What were Arguses doing here?
***
Sometime, around a thousand years ago, a scientist on Earth had the bright idea of sending human and animal DNA into space. Since aliens were more intelligent than us, he reasoned, and since humans had yet to meet them, this would be a peace offering. He believed that they might be able to unlock the secrets of our DNA and visit Earth with knowledge to bestow upon the human race.
This was, of course, during the famines and rapid warming of the planet.
He packed in DNA of all the major human races and ethnicities, but in a last-minute gamble, he included animal DNA, too. Horses. Cows. Lions. Spiders.
And pigs.
He sent the package into space onboard a nanocraft that could travel at twice the speed of light.
The scientist was universally mocked and he died having achieved nothing.
No one heard from the spacecraft for nine hundred and fifty years, until a race of anthropomorphic pigs was spotted on an Earthlike planet in the Argus Galaxy.
Scientist scratched their heads at how an alien race could be as intelligent as pigs, look like pigs, and walk on two feet. A full-blown scan of the DNA found remnants of the very samples that had been sent into space so long ago.
Scientists think that the nanocraft collided with an asteroid that had some kind of molecular life on it, and that that asteroid crashed onto an Earthlike planet that supported carbon life. The two life forms mixed, rapidly evolved, and Arguses were born—a barbaric, scavenger race that served as a reminder of home in all the wrong ways.
At least that’s how they taught it to Grayson in the history books.
“If only someone could have traveled through time and stopped that scientist,” Grayson thought.
The Arguses stacked the canisters of gasoline onto the walkway. Then they began to count them.
“Crap,” Grayson mouthed. The canister on his back felt heavier than ever.
“Bok bok!” one of the Arguses squealed. It pointed to the pile of canisters and stomped.
“Pa boo gwok human bok gwok!”
They marched down the walkway and into the brown dome. A few moments later, they emerged with Gen and Rina at gunpoint, pushing them along with the barrels of their AK-47 coils.
“What the hell is this about?” Gen asked. An Argus nudged him onto the ship, where the gas and water were neatly stacked.
“We delivered your crap,” Gen said. “What’s the matter?”
The Arguses grunted and pointed to the pile of canisters.
“They’re all there, just like we promised,” Rina said. She was fearful.
The Arguses squealed again and slapped the canisters, knocking them across the ground.
“Hey, you’re going to blow us up!” Rina said.
“Bok! Bok! Fraud-Bok!”
“Fraud, my ass!” Gen said.
The Arguses counted on their five-fingered, clawed hands. Then they pointed to the canisters and counted again.
One short.
“You’re saying we’re liars?” Gen asked. “Why the hell would we steal gas? One of your pig men must have miscounted when they loaded our ship back on Fracturis.”
An Argus pushed him on the chest, and Gen drew a handcoil.
Rina jumped between them. “Stop!” she screamed. “Just—stop!”
Silence.
“If you want to subtract the canister from our
payment, fine,” she said, pointing at the pile. “But you made a promise.”
Grayson shimmied down the post and landed on the rocky soil. Then he hopped high and far.
This was his chance.
While Gen and Rina argued, he took big hops and long strides toward the brown dome. He had to control his jumps so that he didn’t hit the top of the walkway. After a few minutes, he stopped several feet from the entrance to the dome, then sidestepped and took a big hop.
Up!
He landed nimbly on the walkway, then looked back at the ship.
Gen and Rina were still fighting with the Arguses.
He turned back to the dome. Seeing it up close, he shook his head. The dome was shaped like a boar’s head, the windows its fiery eyes.
An automatic sliding glass door opened, and a rush of warmth blew into his face. He rubbed his hands together to warm up, then his jaw dropped.
The brown dome was longer than it looked, and he realized that it was a rectangle connected to a dome on each side. The brown, drab walls were the color of dirt. Artificial torches burned next to sloppily placed windows, and heaters hummed from the walls. A giant gray spaceship lay recessed into the ground. It was triangular, with three thrusters in the rear, and reminded Grayson of a paper airplane modified for space.
An airlock on the side of the ship was open.
The victims were inside, still in their spacesuits, their arms and legs cuffed to the wall.
Then he realized the purpose of the ship, a discovery that chilled him and sent him back to the darkest memories of his African ancestors.
Gen and Rina weren’t smugglers.
They were slave traders.
Chapter 8
“Oh boy,” Grayson said, running a hand across his helmet. “If I survive, this is definitely going to make it on the news.”
He looked around. From what he could tell, there were no other Arguses in the dome.
He made a small hop and landed on the recessed platform that the ship rested on. He shuffled toward the airlock. The passengers saw him and stirred, and Grayson gestured for them to stay quiet.
“Ssh,” he said. “Or we’re all going to end up in chains, all right?”
He stopped next to a can of gas.
Honor's Reserve (Galaxy Mavericks Book 1) Page 3