XXIII
Distress Signal
Garryn stared at the ship and immediately recognised it as the one encountered at Cathomira.
Despite its lack of markings, there were only two places a ship of this design could have originated, either from the Imperial Navy or the Security Elite. Garryn discounted the ship belonging to the navy immediately. He'd served as one of its officers for years. He knew their first reaction to an incursion into restricted space would not be the overwhelming response the Wayward Son had just escaped. They would have, at the very least, made an attempt at communication.
No, this ship was Security Elite.
In determining this, Garryn also knew the commander of the ship probably knew who was on board the Wayward Son and cared little if he murdered a Prime to complete his mission.
“Got any ideas?” Garryn asked Flinn. “We can't outrun them forever.”
“I've got a plan. Its risky, but right now we don't have a lot of choices.”
“Let's hear it, then.” At this point, Garryn was prepared to entertain any insane idea Flinn had. The remaining fighters were now regrouping, coming up with a new strategy.
“No time. Just stay calm and keep those guys off my tail.”
“I had every intention of that anyway.”
A dozen more ships appeared behind them in pursuit. This time, the fighters were trying to drive them towards the warship. Their blaster cannons erupted with more ferocity, bombarding the hull of Wayward Son with a relentless barrage. Their savagery of their attack fuelled Garryn's own aggression and he returned fire with equal vehemence. He tried not to think some of them might be pilots he'd flown with.
Unlikely, he told himself. They were Security Elite.
Releasing another succession of blasts, the energy bolts found their targets promptly, despite the best efforts of those in pursuit to evade them. He destroyed two fighters simultaneously, a flight leader and his wingman. Their ships flared with cackling energy before the explosions consumed them.
Don't think about them, he told himself. Don't think about who they were.
The warship was coming up fast on them and Garryn realised that Flinn was speeding to meet it. Why was he playing into their hands? The action confused the fighters in pursuit, who were trying to determine what the pilot was doing. They began flying at the Wayward Son, attempting to throw it off its current trajectory, since shooting at the craft might result in the warship taking fire.
The ship veered from side to side, barely avoiding a collision in some places while weaving through the large number of fighters as nimbly as a ship of that size was capable of doing. In the cockpit of his ship, Flinn was working furiously to counter anything they could throw in his path. Once again, he was relying on their inability to predict what he was doing. If they guessed what he was up to, then they would really be in trouble.
Like before, Flinn kept the warship in his cockpit window, just as he kept the planet. Emergency systems on board his ship were sounding collision alerts as he poured more power into propulsion. Flinn ignored the alarms he could hear ringing in his ears. He ignored fighters firing at him and the bombardment against his front shield. As he closed in on the warship, Flinn began calibrating his targeting scanner.
It has to be a precise hit, he told himself. Nothing less than a precise hit would save them.
What he intended to do was drastic, not to mention extreme. He doubted any other pilot would dare to make the attempt, but Flinn Ester was never one to play it safe. This was their only way out, short of surrender. Even if Garryn was an excellent gunner, there was no way he could sustain a prolonged defence against all those ships. As it was, Flinn was amazed they hadn't taken a direct hit already.
With the warship looming closer now, the ship went into a barrel roll, tumbling through two fighters while trying to shake off the others in pursuit. Within seconds, he was flying over the hull of the enormous ship. The warship's artillery batteries began firing at the underside of the Wayward Son as she flew over it. The fighters continued their head-on assault and Flinn reacted, pouring all power to his front shields and smashing through their formation. The fighters spun out of control as they were swatted aside, crashing into the hull of the large ship.
The Wayward Son returned to the warship in a tight loop before launching a strafing run across its front bow. Flinn did not know how much damage he was doing, but it did give him a great deal of satisfaction to see the hull igniting under the bombardment. He was realistic about the extent of the damage because the reputation of Brysdynian shields was well known, but he was approaching his primary target with little interference.
The plasma torpedoes in his ship's armoury were a luxury item Flinn had purchased through an illegal arms' supplier in the wake of a very successful charter. Although the weaponry he'd installed on the Wayward Son was already an adequate defence against enemy ships, he'd purchased the torpedoes on a whim.
Rogan, a fat, sluggish man who was very happy with his charter, offered the torpedoes to Flinn at half their normal rate. He was not fool enough to refuse. In space, it was more common for a ship to be destroyed by a spacial anomaly than a marauding warship. During his days in the fleet, he'd encountered spacial phenomena like cosmic strings and gravity wells capable of destroying starships and often it was their plasma torpedoes saving them.
As much as he disliked wasting his torpedoes now, Flinn saw little choice. The fighters were bad enough, but trying to fight them and a warship was playing too much against the odds, even if his luck had been extraordinary so far. He needed to even things out before it was too late.
“Garryn, I want you to raise your canopy shields.”
“What?” Garryn's astonished reply resonated through the room. “How am I supposed to shoot if I can't see?”
“Just use your computer. I don't have time to debate this with you. Do it now!”
Flinn took another pass at the warship as Garryn's compliance was reflected on his instrument panel. Fixing his concentration on the targeting computer, he noted that the ships in pursuit abandoned their strategy of interception and were outright firing at him. He suspected they'd guessed at the last moment what he was planning. Multiple blasts rocked the Wayward Son precariously and Flinn knew his ship could not take much more of this assault.
Again, emergency klaxons signalled the impending danger of a complete shipboard systems failure. Once that happened, Wayward Son would short out and be dead in space. They had one chance at survival and he had to take it now.
“Hold together baby, this is it,” he whispered to himself and his ship, convinced she understood him.
The second he saw the target area slip into the cross hairs of his firing scanner, Flinn acted without hesitation. Multiple plasma torpedoes escaped from the main guns, sailing towards the bridge of the warship with singular purpose. Unlike the clumsy randomness of normal ship's blasters, the purity of plasma moved through the dark sky with a streak of comet-like grace.
The bridge of the Warhammer flared up in a burst of white hot brilliance as the plasma torpedoes met their mark. The burst contracted, replaced by the thickening spread of amber, deepening swiftly into crimson. The bridge of the warship exploded in an eruption of metal, fire and plexiglass. Debris could be seen leaking out into space as Flinn pulled the Wayward Son away from the destruction.
Widening the distance between his ship and the crippled vessel, Flinn knew the warship was by no means done. At least the blow delivered would be potent enough to occupy its attention until they could escape. The warship, having lost all navigation control, was caught in an erratic trajectory towards the moon. Like terrified children, the fighters returned to the mother ship as she fought for survival.
“Were those plasma torpedoes?”
“Yeah, and trust me, you're paying me back for them,” Flinn quipped, only half-joking. “Now, let's land my baby before anything else happens.”
“No arguments from me,” Garryn replied.
/> * * *
As the Wayward Son descended into the planet's atmosphere, the cockpit began to fill with daylight from the blue sky outside. Garryn stared through the cockpit window for a few seconds, letting the vista sink into his mind. The blue sky, so vivid in his dreams, actually existed. Once again, Garryn felt relief surging into him at being neither mad nor delusional. None of the Dreamers were, he thought with some satisfaction.
“Any ideas where you want to land?”
This was still Garryn's charter, even if Flinn received more than he bargained for when they first negotiated the charter. Right now, his only condition for a landing site was that it be peaceful, so he could conduct some much needed repairs to his ship. In any case, the information discovered while he ran a routine scan of the planet was disturbing, to say the least.
“The continent on the southern hemisphere, the one closest to the southern polar ice cap.”
It was the location on the globe Garryn had seen in his dreams.
“Okay,” Flinn nodded and paused a moment before speaking again. “Garryn, I've just run a sensor scan on this planet. There is no nuclear holocaust.”
Garryn didn't look at him, because nothing surprised him anymore.
“No, I don't suppose there would be.”
Flinn continued to speak. “No holocaust, no natural disasters, nothing. Perhaps a little pollution content in the upper atmosphere and a slight depletion of ozone levels, but that's consistent with a nuclear age civilisation.”
Garryn finally understood the reason for the warning buoys, the Security Elite warship and the lie about Cathomira. All of it was designed to keep anyone from landing on this planet. Its entire existence was always a maze of misinformation to obscure any path to the truth. Even hiding it in plain sight. A lie about nuclear holocaust made sense. In a twisted sort of way, it was almost logical.
“Any life readings?” Garryn asked, although he already knew the answer.
“Massive life readings. Almost on every continent except for the polar caps.”
Garryn blinked. Another lie disproven. What would he find on the surface?
He was about to answer Flinn when he saw something on the communications panel that made him sit up. At first, he had no idea what he was looking at as he studied the colourful assortment of sensor lights.
“I'm picking up a signal.”
“You got through to Erebo?”
Since encountering the warship, Garryn had been trying to raise Erebo Station without much success. As crippled as the enemy craft was, it was still capable of jamming them and preventing any signal for help to escape into space.
“No. This is coming from the planet.”
“You're joking. Are you sure?”
“I'm sure,” Garryn proceeded to triangulate the location of the weak transmission. “It's being transmitted by carrier wave signal. Binary, I think.”
“I didn't find any complex communication network across the planet during my scan, but carrier wave transmitters are very primitive. It would be easy to miss. The orbital satellites we saw on our way in weren't too sophisticated. They could have been used for carrier wave transmissions.”
Garryn had remembered seeing them when they entered the planet's atmosphere. The majority of these satellites were drifting aimlessly in space, trapped in perpetual orbit around the planet. Still, the transmission he was trying to locate did not come from the air. It didn't take long before he was able to pinpoint exactly where it originated.
“Change trajectory, we're going to the source.”
“You sure about this?” Flinn asked, sceptical of it being anything of value. It could be a leftover automated signal for all they knew.
“Yeah, I'm sure,” Garryn replied. “The signal's Brysdynian.”
* * *
Yellow sun.
Blue sky.
Garryn stared into the sky above and saw these things, knowing he was neither asleep nor dreaming. If there were any doubt left in his mind about this world, it disappeared the moment he set foot on the ground and gazed up into the sky.
Around him were the decaying remnants of what would have been an impressive metropolis in its day. Tall buildings, even if somewhat unimaginative in architecture, rode the skyline as far as he could see. There were bridges and roads, houses and shop fronts, street signs and transportation vehicles. It almost reminded him of Paralyte.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, the transmission device bringing them here to begin with was waiting.
The signal led the Wayward Son to a city in the northern hemisphere. Of the continents on the planet, this one seemed to have the most cities. The city was abandoned, although remnants of its masters still remained. Their monuments of glass and stone remained behind to mark their existence and their civilisation. Even though scans revealed there was life teeming on this planet, the litter and debris-covered streets revealed all evidence to the contrary.
They are hiding.
Why shouldn't they be afraid of us? Garryn thought. If he were a part of this primitive world, with no contact with the spacefaring races of the galaxy, the sight of a space ship landing in their city would be quite alarming. This was a civilisation with no knowledge of intelligent life beyond their own. The inhabitants of this world were probably watching them now, from behind broken windows of the houses and the tall skyscrapers, trying to determine what he was.
Flinn was dubious about the authenticity of the transmission, believing it might be a trap set by those who'd tried to keep them from landing. Garryn discounted this, since the fighters and the warship seemed reluctant to approach the planet. After entering the planet's atmosphere, the fighters gave up their pursuit as if warded off.
The presence of the signal only served to deepen the mystery. How had a Brysdynian come to be on this world that was declared restricted to the rest of the galaxy? More importantly, why use such an obscure code? If it had not been for his time in the service, he doubted he would have recognised the signal for what it was.
“Are you ready?” he inquired as Flinn walked up alongside him.
“Yeah, the ship's secured. Let's go.”
Garryn glanced at the portable signal tracer leading them to the source of the transmission.
“This way,” he started walking.
“Here.” Flinn handed him a blaster. “You never know what's around the corner.”
Garryn could not argue with that. They proceeded walking up the street, taking note of the terrain as they progressed. One thing became apparent very quickly as they made their way through the upturned vehicles, the garbage-filled streets and their first glimpse of the city's inhabitants: whatever happened here was sudden and quick.
Skeletons began to appear sporadically, some lying on the sidewalk, some in their vehicles, others hanging from open windows, all left to rot where they fell. There were other signs of the world's violent end. Dark scorch marks blackening the sides of crumpled buildings struck Garryn as oddly familiar. He tried to recall why, but the answer was still trapped behind a wall in his mind.
“What the hell happened here?” Flinn asked, not one to keep anything to himself.
“I don't know.”
“Those blast marks,” Flinn stared hard at another scorch mark. “They almost seem…” His voice trailed off.
“Like what?”
Flinn did not answer, but Garryn suspected he knew the answer.
* * *
Less than an hour later, Garryn and Flinn found themselves standing before a tall skyscraper. Surprisingly enough, most of the windows on this glass edifice remained intact. The sunlight bounced off the reflective surface, making it difficult to look at for very long. At the top of the building was a pointed metallic spire. Even though the construct was primitive, it was obvious to the two men what it was.
“A transmitter.” Flinn glanced at Garryn.
“I'm amazed its still functions,” Garryn replied.
“Someone has been taking care of it.”
<
br /> Flinn pointed to the main entrance of the building. A wire mesh was haphazardly strung across the front, held in place by metal twine. Now he was closer, Garryn saw angry red letters painted across the glass in an unknown language. He guessed it to be a warning of some kind to the locals. The mesh protecting the building from intruders was jagged and sharp. Anyone trying to cross it would find themselves severely lacerated.
“Someone has,” a new voice spoke.
Both Garryn and Flinn turned simultaneously, going for their weapons. The stranger had crept up on them without making the slightest noise. The man made no effort to hide himself as he emerged from behind an overturned vehicle. He was aiming at them with a dark metal object with a long barrel that both men knew immediately was a weapon.
“What did he say?” Flinn glanced at Garryn. The man spoke in Brysdynian, not Standard Galactic.
“What are you saying?” the man demanded to know, the barrel of the weapon moving in Flinn's direction.
“It's alright!” Garryn called out, speaking Brysdynian. “He didn't understand what you said! He's a Jyne!”
The man stared at him with wide eyes. It was difficult to guess his approximate age, because his faced was lined from too many years outdoors and his hair was sun-bleached. If Garryn had to take an educated guess, he would estimate the man to be in his early fifties. He was just a little younger than his father, if not slightly worse for wear. There was also something about his clothes that struck a chord with the Prime, but Garryn couldn't put his finger on it.
“Who are you?”
“We picked up a distress beacon,” Garryn answered quickly, not trusting the wild look in his eyes. Who knew how long he had been trapped here and what it had done to his sanity?
“That distress beacon has been there fore twenty-three years! Are you telling me you just happened upon it?”
Garryn slid his weapon back into his holster as a show of faith and gestured at Flinn to do the same. The pilot frowned unhappily at the idea of leaving himself so vulnerable, but he followed suit, trusting that Garryn knew what he was doing.
Children of the White Star Page 20