The Styx Strikers

by Thor Zollinger

  He stopped inside the glass waiting booth just inside the doors that led out onto the tarmac. The sign above the entrance said “Verticopter Pad #2” so he knew he was in the right place, at least he hoped he was. The attendant smiled as he came to a stop, “Please be seated, your aircraft will be arriving shortly” she stated. Jake smiled back and took a seat on the hard bench. “Is this your first visit to Wayfarer?” she asked.

  “Yah. My cousin is picking me up. I’m going to live with them from now on.”

  “Oh, a new resident. Welcome to Wayfarer, I think you’ll like it here.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to work for my uncle on his ranch, I know how to run a fabricator and I’m pretty good on computers” he said confidently.

  “You sound technical. We can use more technical types here, they’re in short supply. Wayfarer hasn’t attracted enough technicians to keep up with demand. We have plenty of general laborers and plenty of managers, but definitely not enough guys like you. You should do really well here. Excuse me while I check on your flight…

  I see your flight arriving in two minutes. They will land in the circle out on the tarmac, the closest one right out there.” She said pointing. “Wait until someone waves you over, then head out the door. I have to go check on my next flight, so I’ll see you around some time. Good Luck!”

  “Thanks, I know what to do” Jake answered. “I can take it from here.”

  The attendant smiled and walked off briskly to her next assignment.

  Chapter 2 “New Beginnings” –––––––––––––––––––

  Jake’s cousin Bjorn was sitting in the copilot’s seat pointing at the circle painted on the tarmac below at the large number two in the center. The pilot smiled. He already knew right where they were going, but he let Bjorn think he was in charge. Ben had worked for the Langer family almost since day one on Wayfarer, he’d made this flight hundreds of times. Ben could pilot anything from aircraft to mechs with ease. He slowed the verticopter’s descent and flared just as he neared the landing pad.

  The verticopter was one of the vehicles in the database available to all colonists. The massive database contained almost every innovation of mankind since the dawn of technology, making the job of colonization much less costly. By fabricating what they needed on-planet, the colonists could save the huge costs of shipping heavy equipment through space to their new world. Some of the initial equipment was shipped in to get the process started, but after that the colony was expected to find their own raw materials and manufacture what they needed themselves out of local materials. Each colonist family came equipped with a set of “fabricators” as a part of their startup gear, small to large prototyping machines capable of manufacturing both metal and composite parts. “Some assembly required” was a well known joke among the colonists. One of Bjorn’s friends helped operate a mining facility, providing steel alloy powder as feedstock for everyone else’s fabricators. Another colonist provided copper ore, another provided aluminum and titanium, and a few other far-flung settlements provided the rarer trace elements needed for alloys. Rough plant material was used to supply the need for carbon compounds for composites, along with petroleum oils which were on the moon in sufficient supply for fuel and making plastics.

  Sometimes it was expedient to resurrect ancient technologies like combustion engines when the basic energy source was readily available to a new colony like here on Wayfarer. As a result, the verticopter ran off of a liquid fuel refined from the crude oils they had found beneath the ancient forests on Wayfarer. The copter was a tip jet flyer, with miniature pulse jets mounted at the tips of each of the four heavily reinforced rotor blades. This design simplified the aircraft dramatically; no heavy engine was required. The craft used compressed air to spin up the rotors, then blade rotation pulled fuel up through the central hub from the fuel tank to be ignited explosively out the back of the tip jets. A vertical vane behind the cabin used the rotor’s downward air flow to rotate the craft about it’s center. Because there was no motor torque turning the main rotor, a boom and tail rotor were not required, giving the copter a very compact, stubby look. Onboard electronics provided navigational maps, communications, and lighting. It was simple but effective, and utilized very few raw materials to construct.

  The Langer’s verticopter was a four seater, with a clear bubble canopy. The body was painted a light yellow, the color behind the family crest whose symbol was a hooked siege ladder, emblazoned in gold on the belly and doors of the copter. The crest dated all the way back to ancient earth when mankind was just getting a foothold on their first planet.

  Jake saw the weird bug-like verticopter flare, then settle gently into the center of the circle. Bjorn hopped out and waved him over. Jake grabbed his bags and headed out the doors at a jog, he was too excited to walk. He ducked his head instinctively as he stepped under the copter’s screeching blades as Bjorn reached out for his carry-on bag, which he tossed into one of the back seats.

  “Bjorn, how’s it going! Man am I glad to see you guys” he said as he punched him in the shoulder, their customary greeting. Bjorn punched him back and grinned.

  Picture Pack: Verticopter

  “Hey, Jake! It’s good to see you! Throw your other bag in and climb in the back.” It was too hard to talk much over the screech of the rotors. Jake climbed in while Bjorn hopped up in the front seat and put the headphones back on. Ben had already gotten clearance to take off, and the verticopter leapt into the air and peeled off to the north screeching loudly as it cleared the jungle trees. Jake struggled to get his seatbelt on as the copter maneuvered quickly away from the aeroport. He grinned widely at the way Ben threw the copter around.

  “So, how was your flight? Bjorn asked as he turned to face backwards in his seat. The verticopter had leveled off and was headed smoothly towards the northeast.

  “Not too bad. The turbulence wasn’t too bad on the way down, just a lot of clouds. I saw an ocean on the way down, do you guys ever go to the beach?”

  “No way, too dangerous. We’re too close to Ceazar the gas giant’s gravity well. The tides roar in and out five or ten miles every day like a huge tsunami. You get caught in that and you’re dead meat.”

  “Wow, I didn’t know that.” Jake commented. “I was hoping to learn how to surf when I saw the waves. Too violent for that, huh. How about those big black holes in the ground. What are they?”

  “Oh, those? Those are sink holes down to an underground river. There’s one not too far from the ranch. It’s so big, you could drop the entire ranch into it. It’s part of the land grant my Dad got when we became settlers here on Wayfarer. Dad doesn’t let us go over there alone, he thinks it’s too dangerous” he said winking. Jake knew what that meant, he and Bjorn had been getting into trouble together on and off for years.

  “Hey, where’s Sven?” Jake asked.

  “The copter only holds four and we knew you had some luggage, so he had to stay home. We’ll be back at the ranch in another twenty minutes, you can punch him then if you want.” Bjorn and Jake were almost the same age, seventeen, Sven was a year younger. They also had a little sister Christina, who was eight and was a pest in their opinions.

  “Oh, man! I forgot to get a snack in the terminal. I’m starving” Jake moaned as he remembered what he had forgotten.

  “What? Oh yah.” Bjorn turned around, snatched a bag off the floor and handed it to Jake. “I almost forgot, Mom sent along a sandwich, some chips, and a drink for you. She thought you might be hungry.”

  “Alright! Cudos for Aunt Glory!” he said with a big thumbs up. “What kind of sandwich is it?”

  “Ham I think. We cut up Porkchop, our meanest pig, last week and had him for dinner. He was fighting with all the other males and causing too much damage, so we ate him. We have a lot of ham left over. It’s really good. Dad cooks a mean ham, with glazed brown sugar baked on the outside with a blowtorch.”

  “Surphlr groobn hamwer” was
all that came out, since Jake’s mouth was already stuffed with the double decker sandwich, making Bjorn laugh. He decided to give Jake a few minutes to eat. Jake munched happily on the ham as he watched the savannah’s hills roll by beneath them. Ben more or less was following the main road out to the ranch since it ran pretty much in a straight line north anyway.

  It wasn’t long before the ranch was in sight, a broad open clearing in the trees covering over a hundred hectares where Jake could see rows of fruit trees, some row crops, long green houses, a few open pastures, buildings and small houses here and there, and a huge log manor house with solar roof panels was near the center of the clearing. All of the UV tinted windows were solar as well, providing the majority of the power the house required and helping to keep the interior cool as well. Metal fences enclosed the pastures, and a high massive wall of boulders six or seven meters high surrounded the entire clearing, with a clear-cut gap of over a hundred meters between it and the trees. A large metal gate with spikes on the outside barred the roadway into the clearing. Apparently something in the jungle had to be kept out. Jake wondered what it was, as he finished his sandwich and chips. The juice wasn’t bad either, some sort of sweet yellow guava with a tart bite to it. As the copter flew closer, Jake could also see an anti-aircraft battery with a missile launcher sticking up on a tower in the very center beyond the manor house, capable of firing on any portion of the perimeter. Wayfarer had some teeth, he surmised. He hadn’t heard of anything nasty on Wayfarer. He supposed someone would fill him in later.

  The verticopter flared again just before it settled into a slow rotation before landing gently on the landing pad near the manor house, one of the few paved outdoor spots in the compound.

  Jake and Bjorn piled out of the copter, grabbed his two bags, and headed towards the house. Two large cats, tan, spotted, with lots of black tufts, came bounding around the corner of the house from under the bushes heading straight for Bjorn. “Hi girls, did you miss me already?” Bjorn said laughing. “Jake, meet Frick and Frack our two Servals. They’re from old earth stock. We got them just before we moved here to keep varmints out of our vegetable gardens.” The cats shoulder bumped Bjorn’s legs and wound in between his legs for a minute, then focused all their attention on Jake. They sniffed him all up and down, standing on their hind legs and almost made him drop his bags. “You must smell pretty interesting there, Jake. What did you have for lunch? Oh yah, ham. These two love ham, we have to kick them out of the house whenever Dad cooks like he did last week. Don’t worry about Frick and Frack, they won’t eat you, but they might just lick your face clean off if you aren’t careful.”

  Jake relaxed a bit as the large two cats focused more on his pants where the ham sandwich had sat a few minutes ago in the copter. “Hey, that tickles” he said a bit perturbed. “Determined little beasts, aren’t they.” Satisfied that he didn’t have any ham on him, the two cats took off at a dead run, playfully chasing each other off towards one of the storage buildings further down the drive. “Well that was fun. What other surprises are there around here, dogs the size of a small horse” Jake joked?

  “Nope, no dogs. Dad doesn’t like dogs much, he says they get into the trash and don’t follow orders like the cats do. Those two are trained for hunting small game in the jungle. They’re really smart. They’re really good at flushing out birds and they can catch small game better than anything. With their long legs, they can run faster than just about anything else around here. Stuff that’s their size, anyway. Hey, did you notice the front gate and the rock barriers?”

  “Yah, what the heck is that all about? You must have something pretty big out there to need a nasty spiked gate like that.”

  “Actually, the wildlife aren’t too bad, nothing bigger than a super-sized buffalo. The only thing we have to worry about when we’re outside the barrier are the Lupes and Grizz, kind of like big wolves and a big bear-like sloth. We check the satellite image of the area we’re going hunting in first to make sure we won’t run into anything too big when we go outside the compound on foot.”

  “So what are the barriers and the gate for then?”

  “To keep the Bants, the buffalo, out of our crops and to keep out pirates.”

  “Pirates?”

  “Yup, one of the hazards of being on a sparsely populated moon and being all spread out like we are. You noticed the Anti-Aircraft battery, right? That little beauty keeps ‘em away more than anything. Since Dad put that up, we haven’t been raided once. The mechs work pretty good too at chasing off any rotten pirate types that show up.”

  “Wow. I didn’t know things were so exciting around here.”

  The boys arrived at the back door and sauntered into the kitchen through the mud room, aptly named by Aunt Glory since working out in the fields always resulted in very muddy boots. Aunt Glory was a stout blonde woman, with sparkling blue eyes and a mild manner about her. “Well, who have we here?” she said from behind the large kitchen counter. “Hi Jake, come over here and give me a hug. Why, we haven’t seen you for ages.” Jake smiled, set down his bags and went around the counter to say hello to his aunt. “You’ve grown, young man, you’re almost as tall as I am. How was your trip?”

  “Hi Aunt Glory. It was loooong. I’ve been in the air for over a month.” Aunt Glory let go of Jake and looked straight into his eyes. “When you get a few minutes this evening you need to tell me how your Mom and Dad are, okay? I want some details, we don’t hear anything much this far away from home.” His aunt and dad had grown up together as brother and sister on Lahti. Jake nodded, then she pushed him lightly back towards Bjorn and said “follow Bjorn, he’ll show you to your room. It’s downstairs.” She went back to working on the cookie dough in the bowl on the counter and winked as he headed off after Bjorn. “Cookies later…” she said (as if Jake hadn’t noticed already).

  Yes!, Jake thought to himself, I’m going to like it here.

  Bjorn smirked and headed off down the hall to the stairs and down into the basement. Jake followed and spent the next few hours unpacking and moving into the small room next to Bjorn and Sven’s room, and checking out all of the stuff Bjorn and Sven had set up in their lair. The basement was filled with animal trophies on the walls in the central lounging area, where a “pit” of comfortable couches were arranged in a circle in a sunken area down a few steps. Handmade bows and knives of all kinds were also hung on the walls, and there were plenty of video games on the main computer, projected up onto a wall-sized screen. A military-style shooter was up on the screen running, even though nobody was in the room playing it. They even had a crude mech cockpit simulator built out of fiberboard off to one side facing the screen, with control panels and buttons all over the insides for the pilot. Bedrooms and utility rooms surrounded the lounge area on all sides. Jake’s room looked like it used to be a study room or office, with cork board and white boards on the walls, but at least it had a bed in it besides the desk, and somebody had shoved a chest of drawers into a corner at an odd angle blocking part of the closet. He’d move the desk and straighten the furniture out later when he wasn’t so excited. Jake was in heaven!

  Bjorn and Sven abruptly rolled into Jake’s new room, locked in a wrestling hold. “Hey you guys, don’t break any of my stuff!” Jake hollered. He had just gotten out his two favorite mech models and had placed them on the dresser near the doorway. “Sorry, old bean” said Sven breathlessly, “I was just trying to teach this cretin a lesson for stealing my zipPhone, the idiot left his out all week and forgot to charge it up again. Calling one of his girlfriends again.”

  “You moron, Ariel isn’t my girlfriend. How many times do I have to tell you that! I should have her kick your butt the next time we see her, she can do it yah know…” Bjorn lunged at Sven again and caught his right arm, but Sven was too quick and managed to make it back out into the lounge area before Bjorn could get a good grip on him. Bjorn let him go and flopped down on Jake’s bed. “Ariel is cool, and so is the rest of
our gang, Zane, Dan, Tarra, and Hai. You’ll meet them when we go on safari next time.”

  “Safari? What’s that?” Jake queried.

  “It’s when we get together with our friends and disappear into the Jungle and go exploring instead of doing chores and schoolwork. We try to sneak off with one of the machines early, that way we can get farther away before Mom or Dad catches onto us. Mom insists we always have a zipPhone with us just in case we get into trouble, but we know she uses it to track us so we turn them off at least part of the time. It wouldn’t be good if she knew we were headed down into the sinkhole.

  “You need a Location Spoofer app.” Jake stated. Bjorn looked puzzled, so Jake filled him in. “It’s an app that goes on your phone that tells the world you’re someplace else. You can program it to follow a preset path, or you can have it record your motion for a day and play it back whenever you want to. You just have to make sure you start recording at the exact same location you want to start replaying it later so it doesn’t LOOK like you’re spoofing it. Any obvious break in your trail and your Dad would figure it out.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty rad. How’d you figure that out?”

  “My Dad caught me” mumbled Jake.

  “Oh, right. Where can I download the app?”

  “I’ve got a copy on my zipPhone, I’ll email it to you later.”

  Jake and Bjorn wandered out into the lounge area and watched Sven dodge giant bugs in a game that looked like you were a sparrow flitting amongst the branches of a tree. The goal was to catch as many gnats and fireflies as possible without getting skewered by a giant mosquito or running headlong into a Goliath beetle. If you stayed below the top of the tree canopy you could avoid the hawks, but every now and then a crazy parrot would try to snatch you for lunch. The monkeys were pretty aggressive too, but you could avoid them pretty handily, since they required thicker branches to move around on. Butterflies weren’t worth hardly any points, but they were easy to snatch, just like the moths. Some of the tree frogs were eatable too, but you had to avoid the brilliantly colored poison arrow frogs, they were deadly. Tree frogs were worth a lot of points, though. You just had to be careful and pay attention to their coloration. And when you went in close for a tree frog, you had to really watch out for the ants. The nasty little devils would gang up on you and sting you to death if you gave them any time. They were everywhere.