The Smuggler's Ascension

by Christopher Ingersoll

  Sabine made sure the Wraith’s shields were up and then scanned the identity of the approaching cruiser. As she feared, it was a ship belonging to the Duranis family, which she announced quickly. Apparently Kristof had already made the same determination as he turned the Wraith to pass above the cruiser and away from the heavy guns at its sides and underbelly.

  As they crested the top of the cruiser their target came into view. Far off in the distance was the blue and white globe that was Purannis, and the orbiting station that they desperately needed to reach. Sabine also noticed a number of other ships; cruisers and frigates and dozens of fighters, all moving towards the Wraith. She had no time to identify any of them as friend or foe as the cruiser they had just passed launched its own fighters in pursuit of them.

  Sabine busied herself with the weapons controls before her and began shooting at incoming fighters that followed them, safe in her assumption that they were enemies. Kristof’s and Max’s shouted words behind her, along with the twisting and turning feeling in her stomach, gave evidence to the wildness of their mad dash towards the space station. She continued to fire, losing herself in the effort of destroying the fighters that were trying so hard to kill her and her love in return.

  Around her, the Wraith lurched and jumped as laser blasts found their mark, but Sabine just continued to fire. Smoke began to sting at her eyes as small fires broke out in some of the consoles that had only smoked earlier, but she continued to fire. Even as proximity alarms began to sound loudly, she continued to fire, determined to go down shooting if she must.

  Suddenly, Kristof was there and he unsnapped Sabine’s harness and jerked her out of her seat roughly, dragging her out of the cockpit. Sabine glance back quickly and saw the docking bay of the space station approaching at a rapid rate. She couldn’t understand how they would stop in time, and then Kristof was pulling her aft towards the communal area.

  The ship lurched violently and she heard the rushing of air as they reached the communal area. Through the smoke that filled the air she saw an open hatch that she had barely noticed before not far from the hatch to the gun turret above. The doorway was filled with light and Kristof was pushing her towards it roughly.

  When Sabine passed through the door she slammed roughly against a padded bench that stood against the wall, while behind her she heard the hatch slam shut and seal. She found the room was little more than a cramped closet, and then she realized she was trapped in an emergency survival pod that was hardened to survive a violent crash. She turned quickly and looked out of the pod’s tiny window back into the ship proper.

  Kristof was there, a look of relief on his face as he looked back at Sabine through the thick glass. Sabine pounded on the glass as she realized what was happening, but she could not get the door to open so that she could reach him and pull him in too. She didn’t care that the pod was only designed for one person. She wouldn’t want to live if she lost Kristof this way.

  Suddenly the Wraith gave another violent lurch worse than all the rest, and Sabine watched as Kristof disappeared from sight. She watched as the bulkheads between the communal area, the cargo hold, and the ceiling all buckled and sent shards of metal flying about the room. One piece of shrapnel bounced harmlessly off the window as she desperately sought to find Kristof amidst the chaos.

  Another violent lurch followed that sent the sounds of screeching metal though the dying ship, and Sabine was slammed back against the padded bench. The small pod sensed the crash and filled with additional expanding cushions that locked her in place. She continued to hear the hideous screeching of metal on metal followed by one last, bone jarring lurch.

  Silence fell outside the pod as suddenly as the chaos had started. Sabine fought with the cushions that restrained her until she found her knife at her belt and started puncturing the inflated cushions. Once she had slashed her way free, she returned to the windowed hatch and looked desperately for a release, but could not find one.

  Outside of the pod, fires had broken out and were slowly spreading. Worse, she could not find any sight of Kristof anywhere in the chaos. Screaming, Sabine pounded at the glass, furious at her helplessness and sick with worry for the man whom she had come to love these past days and now may be lost to her forever.

  She was still screaming and pounding at the glass when, after what seemed forever, Sabine saw shapes moving through the smoke. The fires soon started to disappear and she could hear voices, though not what they said. Finally a face appeared at the window. The man was clad in a sealed fire suit and carried a fire suppression gun that he used to put out the last of the fires close to her.

  “Where’s Kristof?” Sabine screamed at the man through the glass. “Where’s Max?”

  The man ignored her questions and instead replied after examining the survival pod, “We can’t open the pod in here, there’s too much damage to the ship. We’re going to extract the pod from the outside. Be patient a bit longer.” And then he was gone. Sabine screamed in frustration and fear, sick with the thought of what they weren’t telling her.

  Pounding on the glass once more, Sabine screamed for the fireman to come back and talk to her, but nobody came to answer her calls. Thousands of thoughts ran through her head of what could have become of Kristof, and she wept uncontrollably in the confinement of the survival pod as she waited helplessly. She wept and she prayed that the first love of her life would not end tragically like this.

  Sabine’s father had died in a shuttle crash years before, and she could recall the pain and agony she’d felt then at the loss. Fear of facing the same fate again began to crush her spirits as her tears refused to stop. So she waited and she cried, and she prayed with all of her heart.

  ~*~

  ~Interlude 2~

  Max’s systems fluttered and flashed as he came back online. After a few moments of diagnostics he realized that his primary systems were fine, but his limbs were severely damaged. His right arm remained functional and he used it to start pulling away the shattered remains of the cockpit from around him. Lights were flashing outside the crumpled remains of the ship, he could see, and he could hear the sounds of people shouting.

  Kristof and Sabine could not be heard, and Max wondered whether they had survived the crash. Kristof had rushed to pull Sabine back to the survival pod as Max fought with the dying ship to land it as safely as he could. There’d been no way to know if Kristof had been successful or not, though. Even if he had, Max knew Kristof was likely dead either way.

  An enemy ship had scored a laser strike that had broken open the Wraith’s hull and created an explosive decompression of the ship’s atmosphere. For at least a minute the Wraith’s interior had become a vacuum before the ship had passed into the space station’s hanger bay at a frightening speed. Humans were not built to survive in a vacuum, and Max had little reason to think Kristof, and possibly Sabine too, had survived.

  Max found an odd fluctuation in his systems whenever he considered that Kristof was dead. He was still running diagnostics to try and determine the source of the anomaly when the rescue crews pulled him from the wreckage of the Wraith. He also felt another fluctuation in his systems when he saw that Sabine was alive. Again he ran diagnostics as they waited together to learn Kristof’s fate.

  When the rescue crews had found Kristof alive an hour later, Max’s systems fluctuated wildly and he feared he was suffering some sort of computer virus. All of his scans turned up no anomalies, however, and Max was left to try and puzzle out the meaning of his system oddities as Kristof was rushed off to surgery.

  Sabine had ordered the techs in the hanger bay to take Max to be repaired, despite Max’s wishes to accompany her to watch over Kristof. The fact that he could not walk made it impossible for him to insist on going with her, however. The techs took him to an android service bay and had begun disassembling the remains of his mangled and destroyed limbs.

  It had been years since Max had received any upgrades, so he found the new limbs to be very agreeable. The
new legs were stronger and more energy efficient, as was his new left arm. He decided that he would asked for a new right arm once events had settled down, but for the moment he was eager to return to Kristof’s side.

  Max arrived at the surgical theater in time to see Kristof being wheeled out on a gurney. He was connected to a multitude of machines and tubes, making him seem to be almost an android himself, Max thought to quietly. There was a machine to make Kristof continue breathing, as well as machines that monitored his life signs. Then there were tubes connecting Kristof to vials of blood and plasma, bandages wrapping his shoulder tightly and covering several cuts and gashes, and a large splint around his leg.

  Max stood watch in the room they took Kristof too, and it was only by the order of Admiral Arctura that he was not forced to leave. He learned that Sabine had needed to be sedated during the surgery when Kristof’s life signs had continued to crash. He felt the flutter in his own system again as he learned the details of Kristof’s surgery, and wondered what the maddening occurrence could mean.

  More details came in time from overheard conversations, and slowly Max was able to piece together Kristof’s miraculous survival story. Kristof had been found in the remains of his cabin, but the cabin itself had collapsed into the lower deck as the Wraith had crumpled and come apart during the landing. The conduit that had subsequently pierced Kristof’s shoulder and collapsed his lung had been part of the ship’s life support systems and his body had been flooded with oxygen.

  His friend’s luck was nothing short of a miracle, Max knew. As he watched Kristof laying in the bed lost in a coma, he knew that almost losing his friend had affected him deeply. For the first time, he wondered if the fluttering of his system wasn’t something more than just an anomaly.

  Max began to wonder if what he’d felt wasn’t in fact the beginning of an emotion.

  ~*~

  ~25~

  All was silent around Kristof. There was no sense of sound, or sight, or feeling, nor smell; nothing except an enormous sense of peace. He felt as if he were doing nothing more than floating in space with his eyes closed. Memories from his past of being in a sensory deprivation tank during his military training years ago came to mind, and that feeling had been very similar to this new one. This was more peaceful, however.

  The only thing that ruined the peace was a sense that he was missing something; something vitally important to him. No matter how he tried to remember what it was though, the memory eluded him. Soon panic began to arise in his thoughts as he struggled to find the memory, as well as to return to his senses. In the blink of an eye the peaceful feeling of floating in space was gone, replaced by a panic that verged on terror of this dark place he found himself in. Desperately, Kristof tried to recall where he had been or what he had been doing prior to finding himself here, but nothing came to him.

  And then there was a pinprick of white light in the distance, bringing sight back first to this senseless world. Kristof fought his way towards the light, though he could find nothing in this dark nothingness around him on which to grab and pull himself towards the light, but the light grew closer never the less. In time the light began to take on a shape, the shape of a woman with long blond hair and piercing blue eyes.

  Anasha appeared before him then, and Kristof gasped in surprise, and then again as he realized that he could hear again. He looked at the woman who had been his wife in amazement, tears in his eyes at seeing her after so many years. Anasha looked back at him lovingly, reaching out to touch his cheek gently with her luminescent hand. His skin tingled where she touched him, as if she had brushed him with a weak electrical wire that brought his senses fully alive.

  “You must go back, my love,” Anasha whispered to him as she smiled brightly for him, her voice having an ethereal echo to it.

  “No,” Kristof moaned disconsolately, all the pain of her loss rushing into his voice as tears came to his eyes. “I can’t leave you again. Please, Anasha, I need you.”

  “Sabine needs you more, my love,” Anasha whispered, a brilliant smile on her face that surprised him. “Even now she waits for you to return to her.”

  “Sabine? You know?” Kristof whispered in response, all of his missing memories returning in a flood. A sudden wave of guilt flowed over him as his deceased wife’s spirit looked on. Yet he found himself unable to reconcile her knowledge with her smile, expecting to find anger rather than joy as she looked upon him after finding out about another woman.

  “I sent you to her, my love,” Anasha answered him and again smiled like a new sun breaking across the horizon at dawn. “You need her, just as she needs you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kristof said weakly, his emotions in such a turmoil that he didn’t know what to feel anymore.

  “I know, my love,” Anasha replied, her voice caring and understanding and filled with love. “But one day you will. Before you go back, though, my love, there are things you must know.” Anasha pulled her hand away from his cheek and took Kristof’s hand and began leading him towards a new pinpoint of light in the distance.

  “We did not meet by chance, you and me,” Anasha told him as they drifted closer to the growing point of light. “My father and I are of the Su’Tani Order, the Defenders, as we are called in old Puranni. It has been the task of our sacred order to act as guardians to the true royal family of Purannis. Most of us are born into the sect, such as myself and my father. Others, however, are chosen. You have been chosen, my love.”

  “When we first met,” Anasha continued, her voice sounding otherworldly in this strange place, “I sensed in you great potential and a great destiny. I had hoped that in time, through the love we had for each other, I would be able to guide you to that higher purpose and onto the path of your destiny. I abandoned the Su’Tani for this purpose, and that is why my father has long hated you. He felt that you were bringing me low into the darkness, rather than me raising you high and into the light. My father was ever blinded when it came to me in that regard.”

  Kristof looked at Anasha in amazement, his words and ability to speak having failed him. He knew the legends of the Su’Tani Order, about their fighting skills and almost supernatural ability to know things before they happened, as well as many other fantastic abilities small and large. The Su’Tani had been the Royal Guards to the kings and queens of the Protectorate for millennia. He found himself seeing Anasha and her father in a new light, and hundreds of small things he had always wondered at from their time together suddenly made sense.

  “I have always seen the best in you, my love,” Anasha went on. “My only regret was not being able to bring you the rest of the way to being Su’Tani myself, though a part of me has always been with you. When we crashed on Bonibus, with the last bit of life left in me quickly fading, I passed my abilities on to you, my love.”

  “So then all of those little flashes of foreboding I’ve always had since…” Kristof began, but found he could not finish.

  “Yes, it was the power,” Anasha said with a smile. The light to which she had been leading him was very close now. “Listen close now, my love. Sabine is still in great danger. Though she now has the rule of Purannis firmly in hand, those of the Duranis family that plotted her murder are still at large. Also, your father commands the armada at the edge of Puranni space and will seek to invade Purannis soon. When you return, it is you who must stop the House of Duranis, and you must stop your father as well. Only you can do this.”

  “How?” Kristof asked, confused. “I am just one man.”

  “It is the destiny I have long foreseen for you, my love. A great darkness reaches forth through the guise of your father, a darkness that threatens to swallow the Protectorate. You will find a way to turn that darkness back, as this is the path that I have seen you upon all along. You will not fail, it is not in your nature,” Anasha said, as she then began to drift away from Kristof. He reached for her, but she pulled away out of reach. “I will always love you, my Kristof. The love you bear for Sabine
, and hers for you, was always meant to be, though. It is bound and entwined through both of your destinies. Know that I love you, and that I love Sabine too, very dearly. You must return to her now.”

  Anasha’s light faded from sight and Kristof cried out, as the feeling of her loss returned in crushing waves of grief. But moments later the light she had led him to reached out and surrounded him, blinded him, until all of his senses were obliterated along with all though and feeling. For a moment, he was a peace once more.

  ~*~

  ~26~

  The hospital wing was almost as sterile as space, Sabine thought to herself as she made her way through the halls. Two pairs of Su’Tani guards accompanied her, one pair ahead and one behind, as attached to her now as if they were her shadows. The thought was annoying until she remembered that the Duranis family was still out there actively plotting her murder. Just two days ago an agent of the Duranis family had been apprehended attempting to enter the palace grounds.

  The events of the past three weeks were a whirl wind in her mind. After the survival pod had been freed from the wreckage of the Wraith an hour after the crash, Sabine had demanded frantically to know where Kristof was. It was Max that she first saw, however. The android had been pulled from the wreckage of the cockpit, his left arm mangled beyond repair and both legs severed completely off, while his armored torso bore many scars that spoke to the violence of their crash.

  “Well holy fuck,” the android had greeted her happily at seeing her after the rescuers had freed her. “Kristof’s managed to get you into the survival pod after all. It is good to see you alive, Your Majesty.”

  “You knew that he planned to stick me in that survival pod?” Sabine had asked, not sure whether to be angry or not. “Where is he? Have you seen him since the crash?” she asked, her questions tumbling over each other frantically. Max had given her a sad look of understanding, but informed her that the rescue teams had not yet found Kristof. He held her hand with his good remaining hand while they waited.