This Starry Deep

by Adam P. Knave

  The last hose pulled free and I did a final scan, pulling out my blaster to do one last quick weld where I could see the metal bending a bit as the hull pressurized. We’d have to hope it’d all hold. With that, I opened the hatch and dove inside.

  Bee and her second, a kid named Kem with a large shock of black hair that stuck up every which way, sat at the controls. I came up behind them and kicked Kem out of his seat, forcing Bee into it as I sat in the pilot’s chair. He pouted a bit, but moved.

  “I can do it,” he insisted, hanging around behind Bee.

  “I’m sure you can, kid, but let an old man have his kicks.” I wasn’t so sure this ship would even fly, and I didn’t want them at the controls solo if something blew.

  The ship rumbled to life and I started a countdown to liftoff when Bee hit my shoulder. “What is it?” I asked, thinking she saw something hurtling toward us.

  “The ship doesn’t have a name! It needs a name, isn’t it bad luck to fly without one?” she asked, perfectly serious.

  I wanted to laugh but the hell with it, the kid needed something to reassure her. “She thing, Bee, sure. Let’s call her the Don’t Crash.”

  “That’s a terrible name!” she insisted. I kept readying for takeoff, and asking her for data as I went, but the name issue was keeping her calm and I think we both knew it.

  “How about Rust Bucket?” I offered.

  “Don’t insult the ship, it’s our only hope.”

  “She’s our only hope,” I corrected. “All ships are ‘she,’ just the way it is.”

  “Fine, then she shouldn’t be insulted. Why don’t we call her—”

  But I cut Bee off as the engines sprang to life beneath us. “Hang on!”

  “That’ll do for a name!” she shouted back at me.

  “It wasn’t a name, it was an order!” I yelled back, the engines deafening us.

  “Well, it’s her name now,” Bee told me before turning around to look at everyone else. “Hang on to something!” she shouted at them.

  The ship, apparently now named Hang On, lifted out of the junkyard slowly but with determination. Bee and her crew had done it. The question now was whether we would break orbit. We got higher and higher with no worries, and then the invasion force started to show up around us. They didn’t attack right away, unsure of what the hell we could be, I guessed.

  Our luck didn’t hold for long, though. The sky around us turned to black, orbit was close enough I could taste it, and the ship lurched as one of the bird ships fired at us. We couldn’t take much of that, maybe not even a second hit. One of our lift engines cut out and the ship started to spiral off to one side. We’d miss an orbit break if we didn’t correct for it, but a correcting course would have to be clean and unhindered.

  I rolled the ship around to shift the force and started to correct us when I saw we were aimed right at one of the invading ships. Fine, they could turn fast enough, let him get out of our way. Except he didn’t. The collision didn’t do us any favors, and the dent in the front of the ship was visible from where I sat. It also knocked us back and killed some of our momentum.

  “I can reroute our internals to the blown engine and get at least one burst,” Kem shouted in my ear.

  “Do it!” I told him. He was a good choice on Bee’s part.

  “If he does, what will we breathe?” Bee asked, adding, “We’ll also freeze to death!”

  She had a point, but if we didn’t try it, we would fall from the sky like a stone - if we weren’t blown up on the way down. Six of one, might as well try for orbit.

  Kem shouted that he had managed it and for us to try the second engine again. It caught and we lifted, straining for the black.

  Chapter 19 - Meanwhile

  Bercuser drifted, as was its wont. No one knew, off of a chart, what its orbit truly was, or where the planet thought it might be. Not that anyone thought the planet was conscious. Not really. Planets are not conscious beings. Still, if there was one that would be the exception to the rule, that would have to be Bercuser.

  Folks not from the planet, those who knew of the planet as more than a legend, told stories of a strange history involving a number of highly questionable scientific experiments. They said, often in hushed tones, that one of the experiments went horribly awry and that the planet itself broke off from reality as a result.

  Others thought Bercuser to be one of the lost and fabled Wandering Planets. The first group insisted that the second group agreed with them, even if they didn’t know it, and that those tales were all examples of the same fate that had befallen Bercuser.

  No one knew what really had happened. This was, in part, because many maps omitted Bercuser and the stories were told as legends. However, even the military, which did know about Bercuser, held its tongue about why the planet seemed to vanish from one system and appear in another with no obvious pattern.

  What no one did was ask the people of Bercuser for a reason. Travel to the planet, when it appeared, was illegal, owing to the fact that no one knew how to get there or where they would be leaving from. There had been military incursions, peaceful and fact finding, throughout the years, but they could only discern two things.

  The first, that Bercuser didn’t wander nearly as much as previously thought. How or why it wandered they didn’t understand, but they found only three different places where the planet would appear. People claimed to see the planet all across the galaxy, but truth be told, the planet had three separate orbits it could claim as its own. All three were near each other, system-wise, and though their orbits weren’t fully predictable, they were at least somewhat understood.

  The second thing that the military learned was that the people of Bercuser didn’t care one bit about the supposed problems with their planet. They were content to treat the stars above their heads changing in perfectly unaccountable ways as one of life’s mysteries.

  The people of Bercuser didn’t try to solve mysteries, in general. They rather enjoyed them. The more obscure the better. On Bercuser, the natives wandered from city to city and continent to continent in a state of openness toward life being a mystery. And by solving life you left yourself with nothing, they figured, so why should you risk solving any mystery much bigger than “Where did I leave my keys?”

  Life on Bercuser was not, however, as strange as the classified reports made it seem. People lived and died, ate and slept, and lived as people do. Industry and culture, art and music and writing all, flourished on the planet outside the majority of galactic influence, creating things that no one else did.

  Bercusans, as they called themselves, knew of space travel and dabbled in it, but they didn’t care for it overall. Their expeditions had a habit of never returning. This was not, of course, due to their own personal shortcomings. It was wholly due to the planet moving around and the expeditions becoming lost. And so such projects were scarce.

  The strange tri-orbit of the planet also affected its weather. No one could predict it decently, and the weather in most areas of Bercuser changed as often as night and day, which were also of varied lengths.

  No organized religion existed on Bercuser, the last of them having died out a generation back. Their sense of spirituality, on the other hand, was something that each Bercusan held close. Though they wouldn’t use the term mystics, they often behaved in ways that would be appropriate for the label. They drifted in their lives, accepting what came to them and ascribing many things to the unexplainable without spending much effort to explaining them. Many would predict the future (a few predicting the past instead) using the strange fogs that blanketed most of the planet. The fogs themselves were the result of the oceans being subject to things oceans are not often subject to: the weather, orbit shifting, and everything else about the planet.

  Trapping The Fogs was the most popular ways of working out the past, present, and future of Bercuser, and it would be fair to say that every household had at least one Fogger per generation.

  They were fairly decen
t at predicting the future, with a success rate good enough to worry some of the larger Galactic Government, though they also proved to be bizarrely bad about predicting the past.

  A number of people on Bercuser started to predict doom around the same time, which worried many of the citizens. Others took it as one of life’s mysteries and waited. No one expected the planet to pop out into one of its orbits in the path of an invasion force. Luckily for them, the invasion force was busy with a different planet just then. Unluckily, the orbit that the planet drifted along would make it too easy a target to pass up. Bercuser’s days were numbered. A few of the citizens knew it. Some of the officials on the planet believed those few and contacted the wider Bercusan Government for assistance, only to find that they were already dealing with the problem to the best of their ability.

  Bercuser readied itself for invasion and considered evacuation. They didn’t posses enough ships to get even a noticeable minority of its people off-planet. They also didn’t have weapons of the sort of quantity to fight off a full-scale invasion. Almost no planet did. Planets did not, after all, get invaded, as a general rule.

  And so Bercuser found itself simply waiting. Foggers sought to see the future as accurately as possible, and everyone else walked about nervously, watching the skies.

  Chapter 20 - Jonah

  WE BROKE ORBIT before the engines died or the hull blew apart. The ship didn’t have artificial gravity, but I gave it a hard spin to let the newcomers enjoy something close enough. I needed them focused, not throwing up in free-fall.

  Our biggest problem turned out to not be breaking orbit. Getting there had been a rough path, but staying there looked to be even worse. We popped up in the middle of a battlefield. I knew any second we would be attacked by everything out here, and that meant a lot of guns pointed our way. Then I remembered my thinsuit radio would work again.

  “Deep Water, this is Jonah, come back,” I said, holding a hand up to Bee to shush her. “Repeat, Deep Water, this is Jonah, come back. You out there, Bushfield?”

  “Jonah?” her voice sang in my ear. Oh beautiful, she was still out here raising hell. “Where have you been? I tracked you falling to the planet. But then—”

  “But then. Yeah, I get that. Listen—”

  “Hey, where are you?” she cut in. “Listen, intercept that big bucket of rust coming out of orbit, will you, it might be a bomb or something.”

  “Shows what you know, Deep Water, that rust bucket is me. Long story.” I yanked on the yoke hard and managed to avoid colliding with ships moving fast enough to blur. “Put the call out, ship’s call sign is Hang On, repeat, call sign Hang On. We’d like to not be blown up, thanks. Also, maybe a rescue?”

  “Have you looked out a window recently? We’d all like a rescue.” She broke off for a second as, I assumed, the battle took her concentration. I waited while the crew of the Hang On stared at me, hearing only half a conversation. “I’ll get you a quick escort out of the line of fire, but after that you better be able to suck air a while in that thing.”

  “It’ll have to do, and hey, Bushfield, thanks.”

  “Thank me when we’re on something soft and solid. Frogger’s on return vector, close enough, and will escort. He’ll vector from your right,” she said.

  “I won’t shoot him, no worry,” I said with a laugh.

  “Shoot him? I’m worried you’ll run into him by mistake.”

  I turned in my seat to explain what was going on and what would be happening to everyone else. They were, almost to a person, too scared to listen. None of them had ever been in space before, much less in the middle of a firefight. Not the best introduction to the wide world of interplanetary travel.

  Frogger showed up a few seconds later and started to clear a path for us. I grabbed up my GravPack and gave it a decent once-over. The pack had performed fine on Trasker Four and I knew I put it through its paces, but I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t loop-crash me into a planet again. Nothing on board seemed to indicate a problem with the pack at all, which meant the planet fall was what it seemed like. I got too close, I got sucked in. Fine. Better to check now that I had a moment than to find an error with the selector array or something the next time I ducked out.

  I considered ducking out to help Frogger escort us, but a look around told me this crew would panic if I left. Not all of them, but enough to overwhelm the few who wouldn’t. They were on edge, and losing the one guy who knew what he was doing, and who could actually talk to anyone outside the ship, would shove them right over.

  So I stayed where I was and piloted. Frogger kept us on a straight vector, leading us right out of the fray, except the bird ships didn’t seem to like that.

  “Frogger, there’s—”

  “I got it, Jonah,” he cut in, peeling off to go deal with a ship that had turned after us. He had sensors, we didn’t. I was flying pretty much blind. Then again, the blindness worked to my advantage as well. All we could do was look out the window, which meant everyone else wasn’t busy freaking out about the size and speed of the fight.

  I took a deep breath and tried to find some sort of calm center. I wanted to be out there. A second deep breath. The staleness of the canned air in the ship started to annoy me as well. Sweat mixed into it, and with no air cleaners installed we weren’t going to enjoy this trip one bit.

  I also couldn’t afford to call in to base until we were clear, so I had no way of knowing if there were any updates on Shae. I needed to leave my radio open to the fight. I hated this. I flipped the ship end over end to get a decent view of the field while Frogger was busy. Off to the far right I caught sight of a planet. There shouldn’t have been a planet in orbit this close to Trasker Four. It sat at the outer end of our range, and if we could make it there we might be able to land safe. But what was it?

  “Deep Water, this is Jonah,” I called.

  “Go, Jonah,” Bushfield replied, sounding harried. Not a surprise.

  “I got a planet out here, might be in range for us. Once Frogger gets back I think we’ll head for it.”

  “Roger that, Jonah, but wait, what planet?”

  “Scope it,” I told her and fired off truly rough coordinates based on some guesswork. She didn’t get back to me for a bit, so I took the time to explain to the crew what my hopeful plan was.

  “Another planet?” Kem asked, “Will we be able to breathe?”

  “That’s one of the things they’re finding out for us right now.”

  “We’ll be aliens!” insisted one of Bee’s lifting squad, a guy with no neck who liked to be called Steelbox.

  “Well, sure,” I answered, “but that won’t matter, I’m sure. Listen, most other planets get visitors, they’re part of the galaxy. It’ll be…hold on,” I blinked and shook my head, not sure about what just came over my comm. “Repeat that?”

  “Jonah, they took out Squire! Trasker Four is defenseless.”

  “Well, crap.”

  “To put it mildly. I can’t spare Frogger any more.” She sighed and spoke softer, “And listen, don’t head for that planet. It’s Bercuser, Jonah, you can’t land there.”

  “Sure I can,” I fought down a chuckle, “I have before.”

  “No one is allowed to land on Bercuser, Jonah! No one.”

  “Now, sure. But how do you think we got the information on it?” I asked her. “Listen, I’ll tell you all about it when this is over. I’m headed there, no good choice. You keep the fleet alive, will you?”

  “Roger,” she said angrily, “spot you at base, you buy.”

  “Over.”

  I explained the situation to the crew and, as I did, I had an idea. If I could convince the people of Bercuser, they might be able to send some of their ships out to Trasker Four and save a few folks. Without Squire, nothing should be preventing ships from landing on the planet. That meant the invasion as well as a rescue convoy, but the theory held.

  All I had to do now was pilot us to a contender for the strangest planet in the galax
y, through the edge of a fight. In a ship with no weapons or sensors. And a crew that couldn’t have had less experience if it’d tried. And then land a ship that shouldn’t have realistically broken orbit to begin with.

  I felt alive. Young again. My mission sat in front of me, part of a larger goal, and it invigorated me. The stale air in the ship, the constant low hum of the quickly patched-together electronics, none of it bothered me anymore. I smiled out the scarred viewport and turned the ship hard.

  “Listen, I’m gonna stop this roll, so get ready for zero G for a minute,” I warned them. We came out of the turn and headed slightly away from the planet, looking like we were basically trying to limp out of the field of fire.

  It worked for a few minutes, and we were well on our way until one of the bird ships fired at us from behind. I had to assume it was them, not one of our guys going crazy. Didn’t matter, in the end, because they managed to tear a small hole in the hull. We started to lose air, and fast.

  “Shove something into that hole, will you?” I called out.

  Steelbox launched himself from his seat toward the hole and got sucked up against it. Then he started to scream.

  “I’m gonna get sucked out!”

  “You won’t get sucked out,” I told him, “it doesn’t work that way. It’ll hurt, maybe, but you’ll be fine and the air will stay in. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to be there long. Just take off your jacket it and shove that in there instead, all right?”

  I didn’t want to tell him he’d be fine so long as they didn’t shoot at us again. Standing against the hull when they could pierce it was not a recipe for a long life. Still, it wasn’t as if we had a patch kit.

  I hit the engines, hard, and we lurched forward unsteadily. That second engine wasn’t working quite right and gave us a list to port. I kept them both at full burn. A bit of gravity settled the ship as we hit speed. Of course, the gravity wasn’t oriented the same way as we were, and most of the crew turned slightly green upon realizing that their up and down had shifted yet again.