Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades

by Randolph Lalonde

  They came down on the bank of a narrow ditch. Toxic waste from ruptured wrecks, human waste, and other chemicals flowed towards the distant shoreline. Only a few metres away, black smoke billowed from a collection of repurposed heavy metal crates as several people of all ages tended them with long rods. They wore thick strips of insulating cloth from the bulkheads of downed ships over their noses, mouths, hands, and arms as they burned garbage. A young boy with an extractor slung under one arm opened a tap at the bottom of one of the crates, the silver-blue fluid spilled out, scorching the ground and he hurried to close the tap again, his hand barely protected by an old, overlarge glove. He stabbed the puddle with the nozzle of the extractor and swished it around as the machine drew useful metals and compounds out of the scorching slurry. “They’re cooking garbage to separate the heavier compounds,” Ayan said as she watched her scanning system analyse the results of their work.

  “It’s probably how they trade for food,” her father said.

  A group of children ran between them, leaping gingerly over the ditch to stay away from the burning vats, giggling unawares as they pressed through the black smoke. Ayan looked to the coordinates she had from her experience with the Victory Machine and walked down the makeshift alley, her father only steps behind. The hulls of ships that had imbedded into the ground were left where they were, and any materials available were cobbled together to form the shacks that surrounded them. Most of the people were idle, keeping under shelter to protect them from the hot sun. “I’m surprised most of these people don’t have environment suits of some kind,” Ayan said.

  “You grew up on Freeground during the All-Con Conflict, so you feel natural in a vacsuit,” her father said. “Most people have come to trust space travel, at most they’d have an emergency under-suit, or a pod popper on them.”

  It was true, she often did forget how much people trusted ships, and how they loved their clothing instead of the security and uniformity of a vacsuit. She could reshape the safety material into many forms, something she proved occasionally herself, but people in vacsuits still ended up looking similar to each other to an extent. There was just something about the suit that informed the style. These people didn’t know how important protective gear would be before they found themselves stranded in a land of poverty, contamination, and rust.

  A group of armed humans in older looking power armour pushed people out of their way as they marched down the alley. Four of them carried a large atmospheric thruster over their shoulders, a roughly salvaged component. They moved as though everything in their way was a lower life form. Ayan stepped aside to get out of their way, but couldn’t resist pushing on the side of the thruster, unbalancing the four carrying it and sending them staggering to the filthy ground. Their power armour would save them from any harm or contamination, but that wouldn’t lessen the satisfaction Ayan found as she watched their leader turn and shout, “Watch that load! I put you in armour, and I’ll have you put out of it if I find that thing doesn’t fire up because you bungled it!”

  “Ayan,” her father said over an encrypted signal. “Let’s not get caught in the open.”

  “Couldn’t resist,” Ayan replied.

  They came to a more open area and she immediately recognized the shape of a hull fragment sticking several metres up in the air. The black and brown dirt around them, moistened by waste, provided the foundation for what was a centre of refuse. Dangerous mounds of garbage that had been stripped of value, and could not be repurposed, were dumped in the space all around them. “Oh no,” Ayan said as the feeling of recognition increased and she turned to her right. Regardless of the place looking worse than it did when she virtually visited it in the Victory Machine, she could recognize it instantly. Ayan recalled her confrontation with her former self, the sometimes cryptic conversation the future Minh-Chu had with her, and felt queasy. “How could I let myself get so distracted,” Ayan uttered under her breath.

  “This is worse than I’ve ever seen,” Carl Anderson said.

  A rustling caught Ayan’s attention and she stepped towards it. Several young children sifted through the waste. The youngest was a toddler, who found something shiny in the pile and plopped down as she put it in her mouth. Her mother wasn’t far off, but there was no rush as she picked her baby up and took the plastic out of the toddler’s hand.

  “All right,” her father said. He thought a moment then said, “Time for the Rangers to get involved. I’ll give you everyone except for a few I have plans for already and another token ten for Haven Shore. They’re yours as soon as you want to move on this. I’ll even give you the eighty-nine from next week’s graduates.”

  “Thank you, but that’s not near enough,” Ayan said. “I’m going to need your support later today when I strip Haven Shore of all military assets. I want to tell Oz, Jake, and Frost what’s going on next, so I can start helping these people. Everyone in Haven Shore has enough food, clothing, shelter, and water. There are thousands here, no, tens of thousands, who are going without. I hear things are even worse in Port Rush City.”

  “I understand your eagerness,” her father said. “But you need more time to inspect the area and plan.”

  “Mischa has the Council reformation in hand, Lee can handle the final touches on the Everin Building in his sleep, and Iloona has plenty of minders now. Let’s not even consider the fact that Haven Shore is over-policed because we have trained security people with nothing much to do.”

  “What about the agreement with the Carthans? They don’t want us recruiting from the refugees out there because they’re afraid some of them are escaped convicts.”

  “Are you actually seeing the same thing I am here?”

  “Yes,” her father replied. “I’m only playing devil’s advocate so you have all the angles in mind before you start something prematurely.”

  “All right, I understand, and I appreciate it, but these people need someone on their side, and the Carthans have abandoned them. I know what you’ll bring up next: recruiting people for Jake,” Ayan said.

  “I was going to mention that,” Carl said, taking a deep breath.

  “I’m finished accommodating for the Carthans, they’re nothing but self-important prison wardens,” Ayan said. “They can continue to interact with the Council for now, but anything happening outside of Haven Shore will be presented as a separate issue. I’ll make it work.”

  “All right,” Carl said. “You know I’ll be at your side the whole way, and I’ll keep the Council out of it.”

  “Thank you,” Ayan replied. “Let’s get picked up. I have a lot of work to do.”

  “We have a lot of work to do,” her father corrected. “You’re not alone.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Reassignment

  Remmy Sands stood in the hallway outside of Carl Anderson’s office in full Ranger gear, listening to a song with a hop-skipping beat and lilting melody from the Condensers. He bounced lightly against the wall to the rhythm, his large equipment pack providing a buffer. The Order of Eden Knight rifle he was given as a souvenir was completely powered down, leaning against his waist. His regular rifle was slung over his shoulder, while a much smaller pack was affixed to the front of his vacsuit armour. The grit and marks of the field were still on him. He did his best to clean up his gear on the way, but he was still helping with the assessment of the Order of Eden base the Rangers had taken when he got the call.

  The other two Rangers, both older than he by years but of a lower rank, were similarly equipped, except neither of them had as many battle scars on their equipment. He had a few more hours of service with the Rangers than all of them combined, so he didn’t take much time to review their files.

  The tall redheaded woman was named Dorothy Bedel, or Dotty for short, and she’d been in three minor firefights. The last was with a group of raiders who refused to leave the crash site of a downed Carthan cruiser after the Rangers detected life signs inside. It went badly, and while she was trying to shore up a patch o
f hull that threatened to collapse, one of the raiders caught her flat-footed and opened fire. Dotty was finally returning to duty after having her leg replaced from the knee down with a vat-grown limb. The incident wasn’t her fault; she scored high on situational comprehension tests, she was just trying to save the people they had come to rescue and her strategic thinking momentarily failed. Her rash action worked in the end, and the people she was trying to save had just enough time to get out from under the collapsing plating.

  The other person waiting was Elden Trust. The file on him didn’t look as promising. He was a shooter, a born follower who preferred to be on the firing line rather than doing what a Ranger should: find a good vantage point, assess the situation, then consult and act if necessary. He reminded Remmy a little bit of Jack Kipley, only with a little more social grace – but just a little.

  There were two things Remmy enjoyed about ancient entertainment media aside from the content itself. He enjoyed introducing people to old treasures he knew they’d love, and he loved how people assumed that he wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around him when he was tuned in to something. He could be invisible without a cloaking suit, fade into the scenery and hear what they thought as if he wasn’t there at all.

  “I wonder why we had to report in full gear. Don’t we normally deploy from the landing field and get our kits on the way?” Elden asked.

  “I’ve never seen the inside of the commander’s office,” Dotty said. “Hope we’re not being sent to some dead watch post, or on long ranging. That’s the worst.”

  Remmy almost smiled at Dotty’s last comment. He’d spent two weeks on a ranging mission without returning to base. Even with his love of entertainment, which he watched during off-time, he loved exploring Tamber, especially the places where people hadn’t settled for a long while. It seemed that once you got past the vast wastelands you found busy jungle-filled corners, deep mysterious caves, and places where life thrived. The first week was all adjustment, a hell made of boredom. Scanning, walking, skimming along the more unremarkable areas of an abandoned landscape and wishing that anything interesting would happen. He couldn’t multitask while scanning; he couldn’t even talk to whichever pilot picked him up to drop him somewhere further along half the time because they were concentrating. Worse still was that he spent most of his time on foot or hovering along on a portable skid board, slow ranging so his scanner package could take in more information. It was boring even in pairs or groups of four, but only for most of that first week.

  By the second week he started to see the incredible variety of life, how much people appreciated being given a resource pack and miniature water purifier, and how valuable his boring close range scanning was. He could also call a shuttle and get stranded people lifted to a port, a British Alliance Emergency Assistance ship, or more commonly, Haven Shore. Learning about Tamber and helping people during that second week was more fascinating than his ancient entertainments. They could wait while he made a difference.

  The tall, baritone-voiced Elden asked another question after a stretch of silence that was a little too short for Remmy’s taste. “Wonder if we should just go inside?”

  “Scanner says he’s not in there,” Dotty replied.

  “I mean maybe we should be inside already? You know, waiting for him to come in and tell us what’s up?”

  “I don’t think so, but maybe,” Dotty said.

  “Are you sure the room scans empty?” Elden asked.

  “Scan it yourself, we’re both geared the same.”

  Remmy rolled his eyes and looked up the hallway. The walls had a gentle convex curve and were made of hardened material that was a distant relation to the system in their vacsuits. The surface reflected enough light so the space was well lit using as little power as possible. He decided not to tell the pair to his left that the last time a Ranger entered Commander Anderson’s office, she was dismissed.

  Remmy didn’t know why Alice was dropped from the ranks of the Rangers, but he was stunned, and curious. She was a better, more adventurous ranger than he was, in his own opinion. No one had logged more solo rescues, hours exploring, or proven themselves better in combat. She also had the unusual note on her file that she’d technically died and regenerated in the field. She was a framework being, a person evolved from the combination of cutting edge technology and human biology. She’d also let them scan her in great detail.

  While that part of her file was hidden from Remmy, he knew that as a result of those scans everyone who had a regenerative capsule installed, himself included, went in for a firmware upgrade. Someone learned something from those scans, and she was such an example of the solitary Ranger that Remmy couldn’t wrap his head around her getting dismissed from the whole organization. He’d met her more than once in training, and couldn’t help but recall how energetic and charming he found her. She seemed to make friends easily, which left him out of her line of sight, but he didn’t know what to say to such a creature anyway. Since they finished training, they were never assigned together, but his Crewcast logs showed that she checked his status daily, skimming his opinion and accomplishment records.

  He checked hers in return, and was always impressed. It made him wonder if he’d made some kind of impression on her when she was in training and failed to realize it. He still wracked his brain from time to time, going over the few times they were in the same room – never alone, mind you, but with other trainees. He relived every memory, trying to think of something he did that she would find memorable, even endearing. He could only think of a few times when he got people laughing with him, or when he shared something from his own archive of classics that people found interesting. Nothing truly stood out other than her love for the ancient film, Young Frankenstein.

  As he was turning to look down the hallway in the other direction, Commander Anderson came around the corner.

  He marched past them into his office and Remmy followed him through the door, stopping to stand in front of his desk as Commander Anderson settled in. His senior officer was a stately looking man, a little more than average height, and in good shape for a man who looked like he was in his early fifties. Rumour had it that Anderson had begun taking a rollback regimen and met his daughter four days a week to stretch and do the practice obstacle course.

  Remmy investigated those rumours personally, checking Crewcast activities for a few days to discover that it was almost true. On average, Commander Anderson and his daughter, Ayan, the commander with no official last name, managed to meet three days a week on average, and they did the course on most days with a group of people from the Triton, who often included Captain Ozark McPatrick. As for the rollback meds, there were definite signs in Anderson’s biometrics that indicated that he was in the precursor regimen, meant to improve his overall health before entering the youthening phase. In a year, Anderson could look like he was thirty all over again.

  Commander Anderson gestured to the four seats in front of his desk as he sat down. Elden and Dotty wasted no time in dropping their big backpacks and plopping down into the cushy swivel chairs, but Remmy decided to go with a different option. He selected a preset in his vacsuit that flexed the armour’s legs and backside so he could rest in a half-seated position. The internal gravity systems kept him upright and balanced. Anderson fixed him with an amused smile and cocked an eyebrow before bringing up a hologram of the Warlord.

  “Today just got busy,” Anderson said. “So I’m going to give you the shortest version of this briefing. I’m assigning you to the Warlord, Jacob Valent’s ship. His first officer is Stephanie Vega, and that’s who you’ll approach when you forward your orders and request to go aboard.”

  “I thought we were standing in defence of Haven Shore, Sir?” Elden said. “The Warlord has nothing to do with where we’re based.”

  “You’re going to learn that rangers are never based any place for long, son,” Commander Anderson replied. “In fact, it’s time for the Rangers to broaden their scope. W
e have two more trainee classes coming through and if we don’t move most of our current force along to places where they can make a difference, Haven Shore, even Tamber, will be overrun.”

  “Sorry about him,” Dotty said. “He doesn’t understand who the Rangers serve.”

  “Okay, then who do the Rangers serve?” Commander Anderson asked.

  “Well, Sir,” Dotty struggled, “I thought… but don’t they… they serve you, don’t they, Sir?”

  Remmy Sands took Commander Anderson’s expression of surprise as a warning, and mentally rechecked the command chain in his head. His commander’s gaze fell on him next. Remmy couldn’t help but glance at the emblem on his chest as emphasis. It was the Triton skull, only for teeth it had RANGERS at the bottom of the design, and the words EXPLORATION, LEADERSHIP, ENFORCEMENT, curved around the cranium. “We’re technically part of the Triton Fleet. Commander Anderson was the standing senior officer, but now that he’s separated from the Sunspire command chain, I’m assuming he’ll be the permanent head of our organization. Regardless of who is leading the Rangers, we serve an idea. We explore the places and situations around us. We cooperate with existing leadership or take command when necessary to enforce the laws central to sentientism.” The dull stare Remmy was getting from Elden made him seriously wonder if he’d switched to a different language without realizing it. “That means, we learn about a situation going in, talk to people who are in charge and if we don’t find anyone in charge, we take control of a bad situation ourselves. Our job once we’ve taken all that into account is to make sure people are all right, and if they’re not, we have to do what we can to help them out, even if it means calling in reinforcements and getting rid of whatever’s doing harm.”

  “And we spend a long time flying around, taking in the sights,” Elden added sardonically.

  “I think the exploration part of our credo covers that,” Remmy snapped back.