Last Ship Off Polaris-G: A Central Galactic Concordance Novella

by Carol Van Natta

  Gavril turned his back to the breeze and looked up at the midnight sky, wishing for stars. The sky over Aetheres was never clear because of the constant debris from dying trees, ash from a continent’s worth of burned crops, and the ever-present wind. The city lights reflected off the pale dust, giving it a claustrophobic feel, as if a city that had once boasted a growing population of three hundred thousand was being wrapped in soft cotton batting for storage.

  Still, the corner balcony of Anitra’s twentieth-floor apartment offered a spectacular night-time view of the glittering city. The door slid open behind him. “Come get food and news, before I crater.”

  He stepped in and slid the door closed behind him. The rich smell of stew made his mouth water as he sat at the place she’d set for him at the kitchen bar.

  She ladled stew into two bowls, then pushed one to him. “Mostly premade, except the extra onions and mushrooms.”

  “Better than I’ve had in weeks.” He smiled.

  They ate quietly and quickly. Even though exhaustion rounded her shoulders and hollowed her eyes, she was still as intriguingly vibrant as he remembered. Not vapidly pretty, but with subtle beauty that snuck up on people. He found himself wanting to hold her, to take care of her. Now that he’d seen her operating so effectively in her professional environment, and the homey comfort of her apartment full of professional-quality art she’d painted herself, he began to understand why his offer of traveling the galaxy had held little appeal.

  She finished her stew and put their empty bowls in the sanitizer, then leaned against the counter, cradling a glass of red wine.

  “Here’s what I know. The blue-skinned dead man was a mercenary pilot and aspiring spy named Rausch. He was a low-level telepath and a ramper who thought he could fool Dammerk. When Dammerk blew past Rausch’s containment, Rausch ramped up to lightning speed and shot Dammerk with a stunner. In case you didn’t know, by the way, stunners usually disrupt minder talents, sometimes for hours.”

  He twitched a smile. “I’ll add it to my list of things not to get shot with.”

  “Rausch belonged to a group that thinks if we leave, the military will do to Pol-G what they did to Rashad Tarana and poison the planet for all time. Since Rausch’s cover was blown, he took the opportunity to do damage. He tied Dammerk to the chair, killed each of the pilots as they came in, then waited for the queue system to send the next. Dammerk recovered from the stunner sooner than Rausch expected and shot Rausch with the hand beamer, but one of his shots went wide and killed the man in red that we saw. Rausch’s last act was to stun Dammerk multiple times.” She took a sip of wine. “Shouldn’t have been fatal, except Dammerk was already very sick from enhancement-drug withdrawal. He was also a top-level telepath, which is why he was able to hit me with that big mental package even as he was dying.” She rubbed her temple. “He wasn’t exactly an organized thinker. I’m still trying to sort it out in my head. I briefed Ferrsi on what I could.”

  Gavril had no experience with telepaths, that he knew of. Anitra’s description made him want to avoid them in the future. “What happened after Ferrsi sent me away?” She’d hastily given him the location ref and access codes to her apartment, since they didn’t want a public transportation record of him going back to the repair dock.

  She rolled her eyes. “I got promoted.”

  He gave her a sympathetic smile. “An honor you could do without?”

  “Good and bad, I guess. I like making sure things are done right, but I’m overwhelmed as it is.” She swirled her wine and watched it a moment. “After Dammerk scanned me a couple of months ago, he recommended me for the committee. They didn’t want to add more members back then, but now that Dammerk is gone, I’m in. Ferrsi took me to an emergency meeting right after, which is why it’s so frickin’ late. From what the committee told me, the plan is either audacious as hell or warped beyond all recognition, depending on how you look at it.” She took a large gulp of her wine.

  He started to ask for details, then stopped himself. Secrets and hidden agendas irked him, but realistically, he was a public display wall compared to Anitra, with her useful shielder talent. If he didn’t know anything, he couldn’t it give away.

  “Here’s the part that concerns you. I told them my idea about the freighter. The top minister of my government department is a man named Dalgono, and he’s on the committee. He supported my project, if we find a suitable pilot and spacer crew. I got the committee to release your ship—you should get the notice tomorrow. I told them you’re my massage therapist and I trust you. I didn’t tell them you’re the supervising refit engineer for the Diamantov, because I’m greedy. I don’t want any politicians stealing you for themselves or their rich donors.” She gave him a sardonic smile. “I vouched for you, so you better not turn out to be a settlement company spy.”

  He shook his head. “Not me. I hate working for anyone else.” He twitched an eyebrow. “Present boss excepted.”

  “Thanks. Ferrsi convinced the committee that only I should know where the Diamantov is, for now, in keeping with their policy for compartmentalizing knowledge. They didn’t mind, probably because they think it’s a long shot.” She gave him a lopsided smile. “I may have implied the ship is small and in terrible shape.”

  He chuckled. “Always better to under-promise and over-deliver.”

  “Exactly.” She held up her wine glass as a toast, then downed the last few swallows and put the glass on the counter. “I’m flatlined, and we have to be in the air by six.” She pointed to the couch he’d napped on earlier. “That unfolds to a bed. Blankets are under it. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen or fresher.”

  He’d already been cooling his jets in her apartment for four hours. “I’ll be fine.” He stood and stretched. “Want that massage I owe you?”

  “I’d love it, but I’d be asleep in three minutes.” She smiled. “You do know the committee thinks you’re my freelance recreational sex partner, don’t you?”

  “I figured.” He gave her a saucy smile and wink. “I always wanted to be a boy toy.”

  She laughed. “I always wanted to be rich enough to afford one.”

  She locked the front and balcony doors, then wished him bright dreams and disappeared behind the sliding door of her bedroom.

  He pulled out the blankets and decided it was too much trouble to unfold the couch. He used the orajet gel he found in the fresher to clean his mouth and dirtied up one of her washcloths by wiping the ever-present dust off his face and neck. He’d make a lousy boy toy, but he wouldn’t mind wrapping himself around warm, sensuous Anitra in her bed instead of sleeping on the lonely couch.

  He made a face at himself in the mirror as he loosely knotted his braids on top of his head. Considering the way they’d parted, and given the current looming catastrophe, that seemed about as likely as winning the Nine Planets lottery.

  The best thing he could do for now was get the Diamantov ready to fly again, and make it past the blockade with his own ship. Future miracles would have to wait.

  3

  * Interstellar Transit Point Blockade: CGC Military Frigate “Bassilon” * GDAT 3233.047 *

  As the captain of the Bassilon, a well-armed peace frigate of Concordance Command’s Space Division, Ivar Okeanos shouldn’t have been filling in for the comms officer, who was the guest of honor at her own promotion-to-subcaptain celebration. Commodore Britton, head of the task group enforcing the quarantine blockade at the Polaris-Gamma system’s interstellar transit jump point, would probably lecture him about maintaining the proper command distance. She liked lecturing, which was why Ivar assiduously avoided being in the same room with her. Daily realtime holo conferences were bad enough.

  He also shouldn’t have paid any attention to a large message packet queued in CPS Security Officer Paderau’s dataspace. While the Citizen Protection Service was a military division just like Space Div, Paderau wasn’t in his chain of command, and could ignore any order from him unless it involved combat enga
gement or the immediate safety of the ship. However, as the CPS’s representative, she could give him orders regarding his crew, including forcing them to submit to a telepathic interrogation if warranted. She could also, under the broadly-defined charter of keeping the galactic peace, order the ship to take questionable actions.

  Unfortunately, Paderau was a dangerous combination of sly, obsessive, and ambitious, and heedless of standard military protocol. The only reason Okeanos noticed the message packet in the first place was because Paderau had left it open and unencrypted, and the shipcomp comms system had flagged six warning messages about it.

  He absolutely shouldn’t have read the packet. Getting caught would have cost him his recently awarded rank and first-ever Space Div solo command. But the CPS security officers on all the task force’s twenty ships had been burning up the bandwidth since the first day of the blockade, and Ivar’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. He wished he hadn’t read it, because now he had to do something about it.

  Which was why he’d ordered a surprise inspection and hands-on test of Bassilon’s escape pods. The frigate had two hundred and twelve of them, and that didn’t count the sealable engine and navigation pods that could act as escape pods, or the ten rapid-launch pinnace system ships in the Bassilon’s mid-section.

  The ship’s subcaptains and commanders grumbled because each inspection took two people away from their regular shifts. The Bassilon was currently seriously understaffed, which was why it had been sent to the easy-duty blockade to await incoming assignees. To show his command staff that he sympathized with their resource limitations, he volunteered himself and Subcaptain Nieth Sobek, his second-in-command, to pitch in.

  The frigate’s common spaces were always clean because of an army of cleaning bots, but the air in the corridor he and Sobek now traversed smelled stale. The hallway dead-ended at a dark and sealed emergency backup nav pod. According to Bassilon’s records, it had been overlooked in the last three rounds of escape-pod tests.

  Ivar used the wallcomp to provide his biometric and key the sequence to activate the emergency pod. He hand-cranked the doors open, pleased that the analog mechanism was in working order. He stood back and ushered Sobek in first, checking the wallcomp properly indicated her presence, then started it on a diagnostic program that would take nine minutes. He stepped inside and sealed the pod doors.

  When he turned to look at Sobek, she was glaring at him, arms crossed. “Out with it, Ivar.”

  He didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t arranged the whole inspection program just so he could talk to her in one of the few unmonitored locations on the ship. She had nearly eighty years of experience in Space Div, and after nine years serving with him, she knew him too well.

  “Yesterday, I came across a packet of Paderau’s that leads me to believe the CPS is using the settlement company’s dispute with its settlers to institute de facto regime change in the Polaris-Gamma government. Pol-G is a ‘threat to the galactic peace’ because it’s been dragging its feet in applying for Concordance membership. It also refused to give the Concordance priority access to its unexpectedly abundant rare-earth metal deposits or the output of the flux fuel manufacturing facility they built under the ocean.”

  “Imagine that.” Her tone was dry as a desert.

  “Yeah, what a surprise. Unfortunately, any day now, we’re going to be ordered to destroy, not just detain, a desperate, unarmed fleet of more than a thousand ships, not just two hundred, and that are carrying an estimated total of a hundred thousand refugees. Oh, and bonus, we get to let another fifty thousand people on the planet starve. Seems the settlement company lied about the population by an order of magnitude, and the CPS knows it.”

  Sobek’s expression and body language became unreadable. “What do you propose to do?”

  He appreciated her propensity for cutting straight to the core. “I don’t know yet.” He walked around the center pillar to the nav console and powered it on. A small cloud of dust settled on his black-and-gray uniform sleeve. “Everything I’ve thought of so far tanks the career of everyone on this ship, or maybe even gets us killed.” He brought up the old star charts to confirm their integrity, and while he was at it, grabbed the current charts from Bassilon’s primary nav comp. On strong impulse, he copied all the old charts back to the main shipcomp into an innocuous data hypercube. He’d learned to listen to his subconscious when it pushed like that.

  Sobek unfolded the smaller console built into the pillar, producing another cloud of dust. The pattern from holo display cast her round face in blues and greens as she manipulated the interface.

  He called up the maintenance list from the networked gauntlet he was never without and checked off the completed items, as per Space Div procedures. He knew Paderau read everything in his dataspace, sooner or later. “If something happens to me, I hope you’ll find a way to get the word out.” He rolled his head to relieve the gathering tension in his neck, to ward off another headache. “You’d think the military would have learned from the mass casualties it caused at Rashad Tarana, but apparently not.”

  She gave him a sharp look. “You’ve chosen a very hazardous star lane.” She opened the environmental controls. “Right now, Commodore Britton and Paderau think you’re an unimaginative traditionalist trying to live down an unconventional military career and live up to a semi-famous family name, but if you’re caught, Paderau will turn your mind inside out. She’s not stupid.”

  “I’m well aware,” he snapped. “Would you prefer we demolish thousands of unarmored starships with innocent colonists?” He took two measured breaths to regain the lost reins of his temper. He was mad at the situation, not at Sobek.

  “Don’t be dense. You’ve been keeping your head down for so long that you’ve forgotten how to look up. I’m telling you to use your intuition and your genius for unorthodox strategy to figure out how to mitigate the impending military disaster, and not fucking get caught.” She straightened up to rigid attention. “Sir.”

  “Hmph.” He shook his head. He appreciated her rare bluntness. Usually she couched her advice as suggestions or alternatives, like philosophical puzzles. “You’re the best second I’ve ever had. Don’t go all stick-and-shine on me now.”

  She laughed. “I’m the only second you’ve had.” She relaxed to her usual borderline slouch. “I don’t envy your choices. Space Div can’t take another public-relations nightmare. Everyone over the age of thirty still remembers the images of the Rashad Tarana survivors, and the realtime holovid of Subgeneral Ntombi’s execution. Whether or not they know it, Space Division needs you.”

  Ivar shut down the nav systems. “I don’t know about that, but those people deserve better than whatever the CPS has planned.” He slammed closed the console with more force than was necessary. “Keep the galactic peace, my ass.”

  4

  * Frontier Planet “Polaris-Gamma” * GDAT 3233.054 *

  “No,” said Gavril into his earwire, “the other X-one-eighty!” He blew out a frustrated breath as he watched the holo display of the work being done in the engine pod. How a certified system-drive design engineer managed not to know spatial directions was beyond him.

  The newly enclosed nav pod of the Diamantov turned it into a proper emergency escape pod, but they still hadn’t gotten the comms systems to connect, so Gavril and the refit team made do with earwires and a temporary secure net. Anitra had worked farkin’ miracles in the last forty days to acquire the goods and services they needed, but competent, trustworthy ship specialists were hard to come by. It was a good thing liftoff was rumored to be two months away. Or three months, or six months, depending on who was talking.

  The daily newstrends featured multiple stories of possible settlement company spies, with all minders being automatically suspect, or military spies out to sabotage the rumored but probably nonexistent planetary defenses. The Pol-G government blindly pretended business as usual, and did useless things like building more ground and air public transports, a
s if more settlers were coming, and mistakenly issuing four-hundred-liter, collapsible recycling crates to every adult and child on the planet, instead of one to each household.

  Gavril didn’t know about Pol-G’s other cities, but he suspected Aetheres would explode when the government publicly announced the flight plan, which was why he’d moved his trader ship to a hangar on the far side of the spaceport and added extra security measures. The polarized stay-versus-leave factions clashed often, sometimes violently. The burn-the-blight activists regularly torched vacant fields and empty buildings.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the trip into town that evening, but he’d promised Anitra he’d help her evaluate a cache of what she suspected were interstellar ship add-ons for luxury yachts, including a new-in-crate autodoc, and a two-meter cargo container full of parts printers.

  Thinking of Anitra reminded him he was supposed to have been practicing using his empath talent. He liked the lessons, mostly because they gave him a chance to spend quality time with her, but he was less fond of practicing by himself.

  He cautiously extended his talent to try to determine who else was on the ship, and where they were. He’d made progress in the last two weeks—albeit uneven—by following Anitra’s suggestions of things to try, such as finding a metaphor in his head for the sensations he experienced when using his talent. He didn’t know if she didn’t have time to give him more detailed lessons, or if that was her teaching method. She told him she couldn’t compare his talent to her own or to previous trainees, since they’d had very different life paths. That was as close as she got to discussing anything of her history before Pol-G. He had the impression that whatever had sent her running to the frontier had been life-changing.