One Last Flight: Book One Of The Holy Terran Empire

by Carlos Carrasco

  One Last Flight

  Book One of The Holy Terran Empire

  By

  Carlos Carrasco

  One Last Flight

  Ⓒ 2018, Carlos Carrasco

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any print or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Thank You.

  Book One of The Holy Terran Empire

  By

  Carlos Carrasco

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Afterword

  1

  "Welcome back, Strumpet!"

  The greeting woke me with a start. It was Mook Buckles hailing me through the ship's commlink, his adenoidal voice unmistakable even through the tinny sounding speaker. He was transmitting from the spaceport outside of Koppolo City, the nearest thing to a capital on the planet Ramage. I raised myself wearily to a sitting position, grinding my teeth against the many pains and attendant nausea which wracked my body. My captain's chair adjusted itself as I did. The back rose to a right angle while armrests unfolded out from beneath the seat and swung into place.

  "Do you copy, Strumpet?"

  "I copy, Koppolo Port Control," I answered through a half yawn-half moan. I cast a cursory glance across the command console. Everything was in order as my ship, the Strumpet plowed her way through the plenum of space. We had just cleared Ramage's LaGrange Point 2. The green and blue mottled orb of Ramage grew steadily ahead of me. Hafez, the planet’s ferrous moon was a reddish blur just beyond it. Orbit was twenty-five minutes away.

  "Sorry, Fritz my man," Mook said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

  "No worries, pal. It's not like I can land the ship while sleeping."

  "No, but your computer can."

  "No chance," I said. "I wouldn't be any kind of a pilot if I let the ship's computer do all my flying."

  "Your atavism is nothing if not quaint, Fritz, ol’ pal."

  "Ramage is one of the few planets where you can still fly in manually," I said.

  "Are you implying that we here on Ramage ain't properly civilized?"

  "Not civilized in the least," I answered. "And I thank the Cosmos for it."

  "Wouldn't have it any other way myself," Mook concurred. "Unfortunately it seems civilization is headed our way whether we like it or not."

  "What do you mean, Mook?"

  "Don't you watch the news?"

  "Not if I can help it."

  "What do you do out there, Fritz, all by your lonesome on these long hauls of yours?"

  "I catch up on my beauty sleep and my reading."

  "Your need for beauty sleep is understandable, but; I didn't know you could read."

  "Sure, I'll teach you some time," I said. "The news, Mook? What's gone wrong since I left our fair slice o' paradise?"

  "Well, the Feds and the Empire got into it over Amber eleven days ago," Mook said. "It's all 'he said-she said' at this point so the details are still fuzzy. Word is the battle involved a trio of Federation Corvettes and an Imperial Paladin."

  "What the hell were those warships doing in Open Zone space?"

  "Each side is claiming they were there in response to the other's breach of treaty," Mook said. "Some rumors have their troops fighting on the ground, each aiding a local faction."

  "So there's civil war on Amber?"

  "Looks like it."

  "What about the Feds and the Empire?" I asked. "Has either side declared war?"

  "No," Mook said. "Not yet anyway. Diplomats are doing their song and dance but both fleets are gathering just outside the OZ. There are also reports of the Psion Collective amassing forces on their border with the Orion Hegemony."

  "Is it related to the situation on Amber?"

  "The Hegemony and the Collective are not the most open of societies, so who knows?" Mook answered. "At any rate, bossman reckons that, should it come to war, Ramage will prove irresistible to the Feds. Apparently we'd make a splendid forward operating base. He expects them to start arriving within a week of a war declaration."

  "There goes the neighborhood," I said, making light of a development that, in fact, disturbed me. "My scope shows the Olympus in orbit."

  "Olympus arrived three hours ago,” Mook informed me. “She dropped a dozen shuttles worth of passengers for a seventy-two hour layover. Lucky you just missed rush hour.”

  Ostensibly there was nothing amiss with the Olympus' visit. She was one of a half-dozen starliners that regularly visited Ramage and yet, her visit under the shadow of war stirred an old memory which cast a shadow of foreboding across my mind.

  I put my worry aside for the time being. I certainly didn't want to share my misgivings over the airwaves, so I changed the subject. "I didn't have too much time to shop around on this trip, Mook, but I did find you a case of twelve year old Loch Ness."

  "I've had that," Mook replied excitedly. "It's made in Edan. Cheery good for an off-Terra scotch."

  "Meet me on the pad and it's yours at no charge."

  "You serious?"

  "I am."

  "Well, that's cheery good of you Fritz. Cheery good! Strumpet, consider yourself cleared to proceed to surface any way you well please."

  "Copy that."

  "I'll clear the baboons off landing pad number four for you myself."

  "Much obliged Koppolo Port Control. Pad number four, it is. Strumpet, signing off."

  I switched off the comlink’s connection to the starport and pulled a small safe box out of the command console side drawer. Pressing my thumb on its sensor lock opened the box. I pulled a hypodermic needle and a small vial out of it. I transferred the contents of the vial into the syringe and placed them carefully on the console. I then pulled a pressure cuff out of the box and slipped it on, raising it just past my right elbow. I tapped the On button and the cuff began to constrict, slowing the flow of blood into my forearm. When my hand began to warm and tingle, I found a vein in the crook of my arm and injected myself. A tap of the Off button released the cuff's vice-like grip on my bicep.

  Nano bio-enhancers. I was introduced to them during my time flying for the Federation Forces and I got hooked on them, as some soldiers did. I abused them for years after leaving the FF, abused them until my endless chase of ever greater highs landed me on a Psion prison planet. The ten years I spent there were pure hell, but they did allow me the opportunity to kick the habit. But as fate would have it, less than twenty years later I began using again. Only this time I wasn't shooting up for the thrills; my condition didn't allow for any. The euphoric effects of the enhancers were all spent on pain relief. I was shooting up to stay alive and functional, squeezing as much time as I could for myself out of what I knew was a losing battle against the big TC, the always-terminal Transuranic Cancer.

  I placed the syringe, cuff and empty vial back in the box. There were only three hits left, I noted, before placing the box in the drawer. I had left with what I thought was a sixty day supply for a forty day job, but the progress of my illness steadily lessened the palliative effect of the bio-enhancers. I was lucky to return before my supply ran out. I turned
back to the commlink and sent a quick text message to my dealer, requesting that he reserve me a ninety day supply which I would pick up later in the day. After a few minutes he messaged me back, agreeing to see me later. I then sat back and let the enhancers do their work, returning me to some semblance of well-being. The nausea dissipated almost immediately as the enhancers stimulated my parasympathetic nervous system. The various pains melted away more slowly. I stared out my cockpit canopy while I waited.

  Ramage, the fifth planet of eight circling an A Type red dwarf, was a world of lush jungles and thick forests spread across three massive and mountainous island continents. Its swirls of green, blue and white slowly swelled on the screen as the Strumpet approached. The planet was first terraformed more than two thousand years ago as a wildlife sanctuary. Ramage's original fifty thousand colonists and their immediate descendants jealously guarded their emerald reserve in space for many generations, allowing outsiders no more than short term visits. After fifteen hundred years however, the population on Ramage burgeoned to sixteen million and the objection to migration was finally swept away by a generation of young, would-be cosmopolitans in whom the founding ethos of stewardship had all but disappeared. Five hundred years later their open-door immigration policy ballooned the population to eighty million people who created for themselves a sanctuary of sorts for an altogether different kind of wildlife.

  Ramage's location, unaligned status and free-wheeling ways made it a smuggler's paradise. Freighter pilots like me paid only a simple tonnage fee upon landing. There were no exotic regulations, exorbitant taxes or, more importantly, cargo inspections to worry about. Why bother with inspections when the system didn't acknowledge the existence of contraband? If there was a bureaucrat on Ramage who would as much as raise an eyebrow at the six tons of bead rifles, grenade launchers and ammunition I was importing, he would be careful to keep his concerns to himself.

  While a good sixty percent of my hauls were above board goods which I could have delivered to any spot in the galaxy, it was the illicit forty percent of my loads that kept me and my ship afloat. These ill-gotten profits also kept me in the relative security of the assumed identity of Fritz Landsenson who could be said to be many an unsavory thing, but not the escaped prisoner, wanted dead or alive by two galactic superpowers which my true identity could claim.

  There was no better place for me to hide than on Ramage. By galactic standards, it was still a lightly-populated, developing planet. Its global government was laissez faire to the point of being nearly non-existent. It could more accurately be described as an advisory board to the twenty-five city-states in which genuine power was concentrated. These city-states were in turn governed by crime syndicates operating behind the thinnest veneers of legitimacy.

  Ramage was one of the fifteen unaligned worlds of the Open Zone, a bottle-shaped stretch of space whose boundaries were conterminous with the borders of the Holy Terran Empire, the Federation of Free Planets, the League of Independent Worlds and the Orion Hegemony. These galactic powers enjoyed free passage of commerce and peoples through the OZ, but by a centuries-long treaty, they had all agreed, with the exception of humanitarian missions, to keep their militaries out of the Open Zone. And while the League and the Empire were content to keep that status quo, the Hegemony and the Federation have long fixed expansionist eyes on the OZ.

  Conquest was the Orion Hegemony way but, outmanned and outgunned by two of their three rivals, they dared not do more than covet from afar. The Federation of Free Planets on the other hand had been buying influence and friends all across the OZ for decades, trying to get as many of its fifteen planets to join the FFP as possible. The Feds' efforts on a snake pit like Ramage had thus far proven futile. However, on Amber, the most developed of the OZ's unaligned worlds, pliant politicians and other amenable allies were plentiful. But while plentiful, pro-Fed enthusiasts had not proven persuasive enough to win the majority of their fellow Amberites to their cause. The FFP's efforts had instead sowed divisions among its peoples, divisions that had seemingly become intractable and finally cause for civil war.

  If Amber fell to the Federation, a good number of the other unaligned worlds would follow suit, Ramage, kicking and screaming, among them. The Feds annexing of the OZ would pinch the other galactic powers financially as they would be forced to pay transit fees or take on the greater expense of flying around the zone. The Empire would be additionally perturbed to suddenly find itself sharing a border with its age-old rival, the Federation. The more I mulled over the crisis on Amber and the politics that had ignited it, the more war seemed inevitable.

  For myself, the very idea of the OZ falling into anybody's hands bothered me, though it should not have.

  I was dying after all.

  Fritz Landsenson A.K.A. Gaelic of Commune Arkum, cosmic-class ne'er do well extraordinaire had but a few months left to live. I should not have allowed myself to be concerned with anything but my most immediate plans which included dropping off this last load, getting paid, spending the next week in one of Ramage's finest whorehouse, and then shoving back off into deep space for my final run; one last flight, straight into the maul of oblivion.

  The war needn't gum up any of my plans, I told myself. I didn't have a dog in the coming fight, didn't give a rodent's rump whether the Empire and the Federation blasted themselves to smithereens. And as for Ramage, my erstwhile home for these last score-plus years, it would have to go the way of all worlds, I decided with a shrug, as surely as I would go the way of all flesh.

  "Entering Orbit," Strumpet's computer announced in the melodic contralto I programmed for it.

  "Let's go to manual," I ordered.

  The ship’s yoke swung up from beneath the console and my seat slid forward on tracks to meet it. All thoughts of politics and my approaching death vanished as soon as my hands gripped the yoke. I took the Strumpet through a series of rolls to assess her handling and when I was satisfied that all was well, I nosed planet-ward. Rather than wait until I was over the starport and drop straight onto pad number four via the Strumpet's electromagnetic refractors, I chose to glide her down the longer, scenic route. I had made similar descents hundreds of times over the years and had usually taken the scenery for granted. It was often no more than mere background to the dynamics of flight, but now; I found myself revelling in the view as well as the flying, feeling a rush as banks of gossamer clouds parted before the Strumpet's prow, stirred by the sweep of froth-laced seas racing beneath me and thrilled by the lush looming of gorgeous, green life as I dropped altitude to hug the contours of the land. I streaked northward across the continent of Westland, the Strumpet’s wake combing the treetops. The enormous jungle at the heart of the island continent was a vast sea of foliage broken up by the occasional clearing. Islands of civilization; grazing fields for cattle, stepped rice paddies, fruit, tobacco and sugarcane plantations and other small farms and homesteads dotting the junglescape flew by in blurs.

  I was oddly pleased by it all and laughed at myself for growing sentimental in my last days.

  2

  The Spaceport lay fifty miles south of Koppolo City in a round, mile-wide clearing of jungle. There was a large central pad - number one - on which the twelve Olympus shuttles were parked like the numerals on an old-fashioned clock. Pad four was one of eight smaller pads that surrounded the central one like petals around a flower. The only other ship at port was parked on pad two. She was a sleek and pricey swallow-tailed sloop favored by corporations and the very well-heeled. A service road circled the flower of landing pads. There were also two runways outside the circle of landing pads which served the local aeroplanes on Ramage. The control complex, administrative office and a dozen hangars were housed in a long, two-story, crescent-shaped building on the east. The spaceport was small but state of the art. The previous syndicate that ruled Westland built it to accommodate the planet’s growing tourist trade. Mook Buckles ran the port for Jacques D’Llorros, Westland’s latest crime lord. Mook had a crew of
ten to twenty part time workers he often had to roust out of bars or cat houses when the remote station on Hafez alerted him to an incoming starship. The Starliner’s visit had undoubtedly kept them busy all morning.

  I touched down on pad number four a little after thirteen hundred hours local time which translated as mid-afternoon on Ramage’s twenty-one hour day.

  "Strumpet, lower the loading ramp and power down main engine," I said, picking up a pair of cargo pants I had left in a crumpled pile over my calf-length leather boots weeks ago. I heard the tell-tale metallic clunk of the loading ramp unlocking. The background, gently throbbing hum of the Aether Drive began to grow faint immediately. After slipping into pants and boots, I donned a gun belt and clasped my commband behind my right wrist. Finally I put on a vest in whose pockets I kept some hard currency, a small laser tube, brass knuckles, an extra spool of beads for my pistol and a few other sundries.

  I walked to the rear of my ship. The Strumpet's cockpit opened up into a roughly oval twenty by twelve foot space that served as my quarters and mess hall. A railed gallery lay beyond the oval through a short, arched corridor. The gallery looked down on the cargo bay. Pallets of crates piled head-high checkered the floor of the hold. They contained six tons of weapons and ammunition for the local warlord, my boss, who was arming his crew for their coming confrontation with a rival syndicate. I gave no thought to the carnage the cargo I was delivering was likely to unleash. I only hoped that I would be long gone before the turf war erupted.

  From the loading ramp at the far end of the bay, hot, sweetly humid air, the pungent exhalation of the surrounding jungle swept into the ship. I took in a few appreciative lungfuls of the heady scent before fetching the case of scotch from one of the cabinets that lined the wall of the gallery. I shouldered the case, made my way down the stairs to the hold and then down the ramp to the surface of Ramage. Mook Buckles was waiting there, hand cart at his side, his large, green cyclopean eye opened wide in anticipation. Six safety-vested ground crewmen waited behind him. Behind them, where the tree line encroached upon the service road that ringed the landing pads, four baboons sat, watching us curiously.