by Sam Renner
GALAXY RUN:
UMEL
by
Sam Renner
+++++
PUBLISHED BY:
SIX to ONE Books & Media
Copyright © 2020
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01
Nixon has drifted off twice. These modern ships don’t need much in the way of pilot intervention to fly. Point them in the right direction and they’ll find their way.
He’d entered coordinates into the navigation console a couple of days ago—It was just a couple of days ago, right?—and then spent almost all of his other time sitting in this pilot’s seat. He gave himself a quick tour shortly after boarding, once he knew there wasn’t someone taking off in another ship at the starport and giving chase.
The ship is mostly empty space, but that’s what you get from this kind of craft. It’s meant for hauling things. Not the kinds of things a full-size hauler would shuttle around, but smaller loads. The majority of loads, honestly. So, considering that, this ship had: Crew quarters big enough for two. A pair of small beds that were molded from the wall. A small side table sat in between and a small desk at the foot of each bed. A tiny galley space is down the hall from the bedroom. It includes a small table that seats two and a small heating unit for food preparation. And across the hall and down from the galley is a small bathroom area. Big enough to stand in and clean yourself but not much more.
So, most often, Nixon finds himself spending the majority of his time here in this pilot seat. Watching things on his datapad and looking out into the black and tracking progress on the navigation console.
The ship calculated a nine day journey to Planet Azken. Nixon spent the first two days doing nothing and had no plans for the other seven. So he spent a lot of his time, when he wasn't staring out into the dark or watching something on his datapad, playing with the case.
He was trying to get it open, because he still couldn’t imagine what was inside. What is so valuable that it cost Shaine his life and prompted Mira to completely uproot hers. He was nearly dead because of it, and now he’s on a ship he’d never seen until he’d run up on it in the starport and riding it to some far off corner of the galaxy. All because a guy he hadn’t seen in months—Or was it really a year?—asked him to.
So is this stupid? Is he trying to honor loyalties that only he feels? Before the night he called Shaine and met him in the Goodtimes Palace they hadn’t spoken in months, and every time they did see each other, Nixon was the one who’d asked to meet.
Maybe Mira had gotten to him. Told him to cut all ties. She’s the one who convinced him that he didn’t need a partner in the first place. She’s the one who’d forced Shaine and Trevor to have that tough conversation at the food cart in Old Town Exte. Shaine had said it was just him stepping back, but maybe Mira had wanted him to do more.
Shaine had gotten there first and had already bought a pair of hot meat sandwiches. The bread was toasted crisp. The meat inside was seasoned and grilled, and Nixon could smell it from two blocks away. By the time he arrived Shaine was already through one sandwich and was eating the second, wearing most of it.
He handed Trevor a sandwich as he approached, and the whole thing was over by the time he’d unwrapped the paper. Shaine needed to go in a new direction. Mira was pregnant, and he needed to find something that was stable. Something that was real. He’d hoped that Trevor understood.
He nodded his head that he did.
“You know I’d have loved to hear that from you.” Trevor whipped around, and there he is. Shaine. Sitting in the navigator’s seat. “I’d have loved to hear you say the words ‘I understand,’ “
Trevor stared.
“It wasn’t my idea. It was Mira’s.”
“She was right,” Trevor said. “You had her. You had the baby coming. I got it.”
“But you never told me that. I felt awful. Like I was abandoning you.”
Because you were, Trevor thought but didn’t say.
“But look at this.” Shaine gestures broadly to the ship. “This is pretty nice, right?”
Trevor looks around the flight deck. “Yeah, pretty nice.”
“Well, you’re welcome for that.”
Trevor hadn’t known until now just how stir crazy he’d gone. How much just a couple of days isolated like this would start playing tricks on his brain. His life is one that’s lived alone, and he likes it. Alone never means entirely. No, he doesn’t have a family to go home to like Shaine, but he still sees others. He still has interactions that stimulate those parts of the brain that crave relationships. But out here flying all alone, he’s not getting any of that, so his brain is left to create it. That’s all this is. This is Stir Crazy Shaine, and he likes to talk.
“So who were those guys who were chasing you at the end?”
“Shouldn’t I be asking you?”
Stir Crazy Shaine stands up and starts walking the cabin. He runs his fingers over buttons. He grabs at locks. “Fair enough.”
He continues to look at the ship like he’s exploring some place new. “But I don’t know who they were.”
“Of course you don’t,” Nixon mutters to himself. “Because you’re just me. You don’t know anything I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t talk things out with me.”
“You heard that?”
“Like you just said, I’m you. I hear everything you say. And the things you don’t.”
Nixon stares at Shaine, but doesn’t say anything.
“Yes,” Shaine says. “Even that.”
Nixon spins the pilot’s seat to follow Shaine as he circles to the back of the room. “Then help me puzzle this out. What’s in this box? Who are the people who seem to want it so badly? And why do they want it?”
“Well, I’m dead. You probably should be. So what’s in the box isn’t the usual stuff I’d been helping people get from one place to the next.”
“And where were you supposed to take it?”
“You’ll have to check your navcom for that.”
Nixon does.
“Planet Azken. What do you know about Planet Azken?”
“I know what you know.”
Nixon grabs his datapad. He taps the screen until he’s pulled up a profile of the planet. He begins reading.
“Planet Azken is a mixed climate planet on the far eastern side of the galaxy. Three moons. Industrialized and … oh.”
Stir Crazy Shaine turns and looks to Nixon on that last line. “Oh?”
“Tychon controls 60 percent of the economy there.”
“Were you running for Tychon? After lecturing me about getting tangled up with the Uzeks?”
Shaine doesn’t answer.
“Of course, you don’t know if you were or not because I don’t know if you were or not.”
Nixon throws his datapad onto the deep dash in front of the pilot’s seat. It tumbles into the case. Nixon grabs it next and runs a thumb along its smooth silver side. The bumps of its locks tickle his fingertips as he gently passes them over the top.
“No, you weren’t. I know you. Even if you’d wanted to, Mira wouldn’t have let you. She’d have let you do a lot of things. Would have encouraged some of them, actually. But not working for Tychon.”
Tychon hadn’t been able to establish itself much anywhere but Planet Azken and the planets nearest that one. A corporate power with a big footprint, it often comes in and stamps out any kind of competition both for customers and resources. Nixon and Shaine had heard things about Tychon, but it’s creeping shadow hadn’t made it to Exte in any real way, but it was coming.Just the small starport was the only kind of presence Tychon had on
Nixon continues to talk, but an alarm drowns out his
next few words. Both Nixon and Shaine turn to look at the dash. A single red light flashes there—a warning. Code starts running across the screen in front of Nixon. There was a time when all of these letters and numbers would have made some sense to him. Not anymore.
The same sequence scrolls past on a loop, and the alarm keeps blaring. The flashing red light in his periphery distracts.
The numbers begin to make some sense. It’s coming back. Something about an engine. Only two of the ship’s three are functioning—one completely shot through before leaving Exte and a second compromised by blaster fire in his fight to get off the planet. The ship’s been pushing itself hard. It’s bound to …
Another alarm joins the first one. Another flashing red light. Another line of code. Nixon looks for Shaine, but he’s gone.
This scrolling string is just as confusing. He stares at it, trying to pry out any kind of information he can, but a third alarm sounding makes concentration impossible.
The codes become meaningless when a fourth and fifth alarm sound in quick order. The inside of the pilot’s deck sounds like some kind of Rhummey bird sanctuary Nixon visited as a kid. The flashing lights bathe him in red.
He doesn’t have time to try and decipher what’s wrong. He taps the screen on the navcom console. He needs a place to put this ship down, and he needs it now.
02
By the time the navcom finds a place to land, two more alarms have gone off. Total of eight now. The ship is falling apart as it’s flying.
Nixon straps himself into the pilot’s seat. He tightens his belt down so tight that if the ship can’t land gently he runs the risk of cutting himself in half.
He’s helpless because of this modern ship. The whole thing falling apart around him and all he can do is sit here with his hands at his sides. He’s buried his fingers under his leg to keep from grabbing the controls.
The ship jostles and shakes. All of the alarms are sounding, a wretched chorus of warning bells. The ship rolls hard to one side, and Nixon strains against the belt that’s keeping him in the chair. Metal strains against metal. The whole ship creaks. It moans to keep itself together. The alarms continue to blare.
Then a ninth alarm sounds, one that screams louder than all of the others. Another light blinks red on the dash. Like the others, any label that may have been there has been worn off by whoever or whatever it was that flew this thing before Nixon.
He’s trying to make sense of all the alarms and lights, but before he can figure any of it out the ship goes quiet. The screens go blank. This isn’t back to normal. This is the opposite. The ship is another step—a giant step—closer to dying.
Nixon grabs the controls. He pushes them left and the ship responds. He asks the ship to go up, and she does.
“We’re still alive then,” Nixon says to an empty room.
“We are,” the room says back.
Nixon drops the controls. He scans the room. There’s no one else here, not even some stir crazy visitor from his past. Who just spoke?
“Hello?”
“Hello,” the voice responds.
“Who is …” Nixon can’t finish asking the question.
“I am EHL 628. I am the craft.”
“The ship?”
“I am.”
“I didn’t know this model could…” Nixon has never flown one of these responsive ships, the kind that could talk to you. The kind of ship that could puzzle out problems with you.
“I can.”
“So, what’s next? “ Nixon asks.
“Please repeat.”
Nixon shifts forward in his seat. “Help me find a place to put you down. You’re in rough shape, and I don’t want to die out here.”
“I can’t.”
“That’s not very cooperative.”
“My systems are offline.”
“Then how are you responding now?”
“My intelligence engines are on a different …”
Nixon grabs the controls again and interrupts. “OK. OK. So this is on me.”
“What is on you?”
“The responsibility for flying the ship.”
“It is.”
Nixon tries to recall what he’d seen on the navcom screen earlier, but he was only making passing glances. He didn’t need to know where they were headed. He just needed to make sure he’d be alive when they got there and that the case would be safe.
Nixon scans the narrow bit of space he can see in front of him. There’s nothing there. He doesn’t know where to go. That freedom that he was excited to experience again, the ability to go anywhere he wants—any direction—is suddenly paralyzing.
With just a single engine, Nixon fights the controls to keep the ship pointed straight. But straight at what? Who knows? There’s nothing to point at.
There’s a loud bang from the back of the ship and the one engine seems to stall. Then another bang and the engine fires back up. The ship lurches and Nixon struggles against the controls, but when he gets EHL back under his command he sees it. There’s something in the corner of his view. Just a dot for now. A point of light. But it’s a point of light that’s in a fixed spot. It’s something he can point the ship toward. It gives him a reference point for direction. This thing, this whatever it is—maybe it’s a planet, or a starship, or just something big enough to reflect enough light to show up to the naked eye—is in front of him. That means this direction he’s flying now is forward.
And as he flies forward this point of light becomes something more. It grows bigger in front of him until he knows what this is. It’s a planet. It’s still a long way off, but he knows this isn’t something made by anyone’s hands. This is natural.
As he flies closer, he can see the peaks of mountains. He sees the flat of the land. Mostly, though the place looks wet. There’s a lot of sea. Everything is coastline.
He aims for pockets of population. What does he do, though, once he gets close? He has no idea how to land this thing. Even when he was younger, ships were able to take care of that part of flying. You turned over the controls to the internal systems and they brought you down easy. So smooth that you never felt when you were on the ground. It was like a Farrow bird feather settling.
Three cities come into view from this far out, and Nixon picks his favorite. It’s a random decision, but it looks to be the most populous of the three. He sees small snakes of ship traffic flying above a city spread out wide along a coastline that looks to go on forever.
He points the nose of the ship at what looks to be the city’s center then starts trying to bring EHL’s systems back online. He punches buttons, hoping to see something spark. A monitor blink to life. A light on the dash flash. Something that says he isn’t going to have to try and fly this thing nearer the ground, try to pass it through the traffic lanes above the city. Or bring it safely to the ground.
But nothing.
He looks back out at the planet, and it fills his entire view. The individual trees that grow on top of the mountains suddenly look like they’re going to reach out and grab him. He banks the ship hard to the right and the mountains move out of view. Now, he sees the water and the city that stretches out along the coast. He brings the ship back level.
He turns back to the buttons inside the ship and again tries to bring everything back online. Nothing works. He lets out an “Arghhh” in frustration and closes his eyes. He’s trying to summon up something, some kind of memory that can help. His earlier life flashes in a blurred mess of swirling colors.
Then it stops.
He sees nothing but hands, but he knows who they belong to. These are his father’s hands. Nixon is a kid and suddenly this moment is coming back to him. He’s not even 10, and he’s in one of those beaten up ships his dad always seemed to bring home. He’d get infatuated with one, and they’d fly it everywhere until it literally fell apart. This one they’d been flying a while.
Alarms were screaming. Nixon was panicked. His dad, though, was calm. He was very deliber
ately pushing buttons, and, as he did, the alarms were shutting off. He watched his father’s hands work. They found a button; they pushed that button. They found a switch; they flipped that switch. A quiet confidence that this ship wasn’t going to crash. Not this day and not with this crew on board.
Nixon opens his eyes. He looks at the panels in front of him. Suddenly, they aren’t just a bunch of plastic and metal without meaning. Do they make total sense? No, not yet. But they are no longer some confusing puzzle that isn’t meant to be solved. He reads the labels that remain and presses the buttons controlling the systems he knows he’ll need. Slowly things begin to come back online until: