by C. Gockel
“Fire!” Noa said. She could see the red-orange light of plasma fire in their cannons, but maintained the Ark’s heading, gunning to the highest velocity that could be maintained with simultaneous cannon fire. The ship rocked with the blasts from Sterling and Chavez’s cannons, Xo’s vessel exploded, and half a heartbeat later, wreckage bounced off of their hull.
Wren swallowed. “That was awful close, Commander.”
Noa slowed the vessel. She was too keyed to explain to Wren that the Ark’s cannons were designed primarily for forward fire, and that their ability to hit an intelligent target was lizzar piss poor. She’d taken advantage of the Ark’s only advantage—it was designed for accidents like hitting uncharted objects the size of the wreckage produced by say, an impromptu asteroid being blown up by its cannons. Instead of explaining, she laughed. Adrenaline and anger were flooding her system, and on top of that emotional cake was relief.
Wren muttered, “Xo was the one who mentioned there were inhabitants in the cloud … Why would he come here instead of Libertas, though?”
Over the ether, Noa reached for her chief computing officer. “Ghost, do you have any intel for me?”
There was silence on the other end of the line. And then Ghost’s thoughts spilled over the channel. “Oh, fine, I’ll tell them, but Wren was rude.” In snotty tones, he said, “Commander, I don’t know why it was attacking … that thing … but a moment after we arrived, they had a lively debate about whether they should keep attacking the disk, or us. Hence, I think, their hesitation and our relatively easy victory.”
“I’m glad they’re gone,” Wren said. One of his hands went to his neck. “I didn’t think I pissed him off that much.” He turned to Noa and gave a look that somehow was a leer and a wince.
Noa shook her head. “They didn’t follow us … they were here first.”
“Commander, Xo’s drones are reactivating,” Chavez said.
A warning light on her dash started beeping like mad.
“Commander!” Ghost’s voice. “Don’t go to lightspeed! Current heading would put us into a dust cloud in less than—”
“I won’t. Give me a visual,” Noa ordered.
“Hold on …” Ghost said. Over the general ether, Ghost projected a glowing constellation of red lights and data. Noa swore. Some of them were no larger than a few handspans. Her heart fell. “Open all airlocks, and engage.”
“Aye, Commander,” Gunny said.
“Uh …” said Wren, eyes on one of the monitors. “Commander, I think you should take a look at this.”
Noa’s eyes slid to the screen. On the disk's surface, light was spilling from square hatches as they opened, and phaser cannons, hot and primed to fire, rose from the depths.
Chapter Five
James was in Airlock 1. There were no windows, the hatch was closed, but his mind was in the ether and the strange disk. He saw the drones rising from the station, and the cannons rising at the same time as white flashed behind his eyes. He heard Ghost cry, “We have no chance against that thing!” and Noa’s command over the ether, “Prime the self-destruct and open a channel.” And he also heard the ether of the disk. At first it was gibberish—a cipher, he realized. He had another blinding flash of white and he understood. “Shoot down the drones!” said a voice he didn’t recognize at the same time Noa said, “If it’s a game of chicken they want, it’s a game of chicken they’ll get!” Across his own private channel Noa projected her rage, and an image of the Ark diving head first into the central core of the disk, drones exploding on its hull. “This was a trap!” she hissed.
“Noa, no!” James’s mind screamed across the shared frequency.
Noa was on fire, the adrenaline from her battle with Xo still flooding her, the drones glowing outside the skylight and in the Ark’s external monitors. Her hands flew across the dials that would initiate the self-destruct. There was no way that a station—or whatever—with that sort of firepower rising from its innards couldn’t have repelled Xo’s ship. It had been a trap, and she’d flown right into it. The lights aboard the Ark began flashing red.
“I can’t access their ether,” Ghost said. “They’ve got a cipher!”
Noa focused on the last digits of the self-destruct sequence. Just a few more—
“Wait, Noa!” James said again.
The pause interrupted the sequence, and momentarily stilled her hands.
“It’s okay, Noa,” James said across the channel. “They’re on our side.”
“They’re firing,” Chavez cried in the same instant.
Light flashed from the phaser cannons, and around them drones exploded like stars. Before the things could begin their death spins, the phasers from the disk flashed again. There was a sound like hail on a tin roof as tiny pieces of drone struck the hull.
Wren dropped his head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck …”
The comm hissed and an unfamiliar voice said in Basic, “Unknown ship … hope we didn’t scare you there. Weren’t sure how much fire from those things you could sustain.”
With a growl, Noa canceled the self-destruct. “Scare us? You nearly wound up with a phaserton worth of blast in your … core.” Over her private channel to James, she used words that were much more descriptive and involved bodily orifices.
From James she got a snarky, “Have you ever considered becoming a poet?”
In a distant part of her mind, she knew she’d laugh at that snark later, but she was still furious. “Why did you summon us?” she demanded over the comm. “You obviously don’t need our fire power.”
She heard an intake of breath, and then the speaker said, “Our apologies—we did need you! We were in the midst of a reboot when Xo’s vessel attacked. We were moments away from a breach … if you hadn’t distracted them, we wouldn’t have been able to re-establish our defense grid in time.” There was another intake of breath. “We are in your debt, and wish to repay you.”
Noa felt the fire beneath her skin turn to a bone deep chill of an adrenaline crash. Ascertaining that the Ark’s momentum was halted, she leaned back in her chair.
“A reboot,” Wren murmured. “That would explain all the lights coming back on.”
Sure enough, blue lights were winking along the disk’s surface.
“What is this place?” she said with a long exhale. It wasn’t on any list of settlements she had. Not exactly unexpected, the cloud was immense, and dense—it was one reason the Fleet had a hidden gate here.
“The Free People of the Kanakah Disk,” said the speaker. “I am Prime Minister Jackson Li.” There was the sound of a throat clearing, and an uncomfortable pause. “And you would be Commander Noa Sato,” Li said.
Noa sat up straight in her seat.
Answering her unasked question, Li said, “We had a trade delegation on Adam’s Station during your, ah, visit there. Our delegation was there to meet with C-Corp executives. I’ve heard that you traveled aboard the Nina—but that looks to me to be the Ark.”
Noa’s lips pursed.
“Can I inquire what you’re doing in these parts?” Li said.
Her jaw got tense. Before she could think of a suitably vague reply, Li said, “No, no, don’t answer that. Yes, yes, I can see where you might not want to talk, as you’re being pursued by the Luddeccean Fleet. And frankly, if they come calling, I don’t want to know. Oh, yes, much better this way.”
Sterling whispered privately across the ether, “I swear I can hear him sweating.”
Chavez said, “Sounds like he’s afraid of us.”
“Well, you did nearly blow him up!” Wren snapped. “Stupid, suicidal Fleet.”
“I want you to know,” Li continued. “We had nothing to do with what you may find when you get to where you may be going. Lots of instability in this system.”
Noa’s mouth dropped open. Was Li speaking of the gate?
“We want no trouble with the Fleet,” Li continued.
Across the ether, James asked, “Why would he expect trouble from the
Fleet?”
Noa sighed. “The people who find their way to uncharted settlements tend to be paranoid individualists, flat out criminals, or both.”
“We have food if you wish to come aboard,” Li said. “We are in your debt, Commander.”
The hairs on the back of Noa’s neck prickled. “Thank you, no,” she said coolly.
There was a crackle on the comm—a sigh, she realized. “Well, then,” said Li. “Thank you again for helping out during that moment of weakness. We greatly appreciate it.”
“No problem,” said Noa.
The Ark was poised like a dagger above the disk. Noa didn’t make a move to change the Ark’s position.
On the disk, the glowing barrels of the plasma cannons began to sink, and then wink out as trap doors slid across them. Over the comm, Li said, “I, um, hope you realize, you’re clear to go and we don’t intend to fire on you.”
“I do now,” Noa said, angling the Ark away from what would have been a fatal dive for everyone.
“Please let the Fleet know we didn’t impede you in any way!” Li said.
“Of course,” said Noa, her eyes on the skylight of the Ark. The disk was out of sight, and the window was filled with the glowing expanse of the Kanakah Cloud. Over the ether, she said, “Ghost, do you have a new course for us?”
Numbers for the new course started playing in front of her eyes. She glanced at Wren. He nodded and began entering them while Noa’s eyes swept the external monitors. The plasma cannons did not rise, but she noticed that there were more ticks crawling over the surface.
Over the ether, James said, “It’s like they’ve all come up from the underbelly to see us off.”
Noa’s hands tightened on the control wheel. “How did you know that Li wasn’t planning to attack us?”
There was a pause. For a moment, Noa thought the ether had gone down. And then James thought, “I'm a coward who chose uncertain death over a certain death.”
Noa huffed. James was grumpy and always one to point out the logical reason for inaction. Her skin prickled. That had been the old James though … She remembered him on Adam’s Station, prepared to die instead of be captured, and how he threw himself over the edge of a building, backward, to deliver a heart to Oliver, Manuel’s son. Beside her, Wren said, “We’re ready, Commander.”
Noa pulled back on the control wheel, and Li’s disk became just a pinprick behind them. The pins and needles in her skin didn’t disappear, though.
Chapter Six
In the airlock, Noa’s voice assailed James over the ether. “I hate this bucket of bolts, whoever designed its time band gauges has the brain of a lizzar left out in a Prime hailstorm!”
James’s lips would have quirked if they were capable. Noa’s tirades once exasperated him, but now he found them amusing. “It’s almost as though this bucket of bolts was built over three centuries ago,” James chided, giving the Ark’s Earth age.
“They could have updated since then,” Noa snapped back. “We should be at the gate by now, but the dust up has us parked in the middle of nowhere—even for the Kanakah Cloud. There's not a rock to hide behind.”
“Don't worry, I have it on good authority that the cloud is next to uninhabited,” James fired back.
The ethernet between them flickered, and he could picture Noa smiling despite herself.
Sounding less outraged, she said, “Manuel says it's an easy fix. I just wish we weren't stuck out here.” Noa asked.
A bright light went off in James's mind. He flipped up his visor as the inner airlock door opened with a whoosh and he found himself staring through the spectacles of Lieutenant Sterling of the Atlantian Local Guard. It must have been a relic of that other James, but whenever he saw the spectacles the man wore because, “takes too damnably long to switch between close and distant vision with my augments,” James always wanted to touch them, peer through them, and play with their delicate plastic arms.
Sterling’s face reddened, and he tapped the plastic frames. “Need 'em to put on the space suit. Too many little catches.”
“I’ll help you,” Gunny grunted. “James, take off your suit and get going. Your suit needs to be recharged and ya gotta be hungry.”
James wasn’t hungry. He’d kept his space suit heater at maximum the whole time—which was why it needed to be recharged. He didn’t complain, though. Stripping off the bulky suit, he saw a light that was Noa in his mind leaving the bridge via the access ladders. A moment later, she broadcast a bolt of joy as she braced her feet on either side of the ladder and slid down. It made no sense that a machine’s mind could feel sympathetic delight at the happiness of a human. It made him feel more than a machine, or even man. He felt connected to the larger universe.
Minutes later, he slipped into the tunnel himself. The distance between himself and Noa was painted in a bright cord of color in his mind growing shorter by the second. It made no sense that a machine should feel like he was being drawn toward her by a string. His hands and feet moved faster, and a moment later exited at the level of the galley.
Noa was already there. His eyes met hers as soon as he exited the ladder shaft, and he paused. She was scowling. Where was the joy she'd shared a moment ago? A red bolt of anger hit him across the ether, and then a moment later she tossed the bright ball of light they exchanged as a kiss. Somewhere in him, a subroutine wanted his lips to purse, but his lips never got the message. Was she happy or angry?
The ether erupted with Noa's thoughts. “I thought I lost you for a moment earlier.” She shook her head and began walking down the hallway toward the galley. As he stepped beside her, she bumped her shoulder against his. “Manuel said if that drone had hit the dome of the bridge in its death spiral, the glass composite might have cracked.”
“You’re welcome,” James said.
Noa stopped at the entrance to the galley, pivoted on her feet and looked up at him. She still looked angry … but even the circuits that served as a brain in him knew that it was because she cared.
“Don’t die on me, James.” Her voice was a whispered command. He’d seen it make men quiver in their boots.
A thousand breezy answers cycled through his mind, but none fit. “Don’t die on me either, Commander,” he responded in the same tone. It was, he thought, the closest they'd ever gotten to saying I love you.
Noa’s lips parted, and her expression softened. She nodded.
The lift pinged, and Noa and James turned.
Eliza came out of it, riding on a hover chair four very bored engineering students had made for her over the past month. On her lap was Manuel's son, Oliver. Sitting up when he saw James and Noa, he pulled a hand of aluminum and plastic out of his mouth, leaving a long trail of drool behind. “Hi!” he said brightly, and then slouched back against Eliza. The old woman patted the boy with a hand that was papery with age.
“Eliza,” Noa said. “I thought Sixty was watching Oliver.”
“Shixty on space shit,” Oliver murmured.
“6T9 is recharging,” Eliza said. “I’m watching him for a little bit.”
Noa’s brow furrowed.
Coming closer, Eliza smiled sadly. “Don’t worry, he won’t get away from me.” She pinged them over the ether. “He needs his new heart. He gets tired too quickly.”
Noa frowned, and James heard her swallow. James had escaped Luddeccean Intel agents on Atlantia with an artificial heart for the boy. They could replace his existing heart, but everyone had hoped the surgery could be delayed until the boy reached Sol. The Ark’s medbay wasn’t built for cybernetic heart transplants—the early Luddecceans hadn’t believed in cybernetic organs; some Luddeccean hardliners still did not.
Noa responded across the ether. “We’re almost to the gate. Let’s talk to Monica. If he can hold on just a few more days ...”
Eliza nodded. Over the shared channel, she said, “He’s got an appointment with her after dinner.” Aloud, she said cheerfully, “Let’s go get something to eat, Oliver.”
But Eliza floated the chair between them into the galley. Noa looked up at him, and then over the ether, Sterling’s voice cracked. “Commander, we got company.”
At Sterling’s thoughts, Noa spun and returned to the access tunnel, she tasted adrenaline on her tongue. “Gunny, I want your guys back in the turrets. Sterling, I’ll get Ao to man the cannon. You stay put. Your eyes work better out there.”
Beside her, James said, “And me?”
The laser focus faltered. Noa released a breath and looked up at him. “Take Ao’s place.” She wanted to order him on the cannon, but his augmented vision and reflexes better served the ship in the airlocks.
James gave her a nod. His jaw shifted as though he were trying to smile, and he gestured toward the ladder with his hand. Noa slipped into the tunnel and commanded over the general channel, “All hands to battle stations. Sterling, pipe me what you see.”
She blinked as the field of their wake filled her vision. It was a bifocal view, blurry at the edges. At first she saw nothing, and then she saw dark pinpricks dance in front of a dusty glowing cloud, their movements too erratic to be natural.
To the ship at large, she commanded, “All civilians to the galley!” and then into a channel for the crew she called out, “Ghost, any idea how big they are?” Her hands and feet moved up the ladder rungs in practiced movements.
She climbed a few more rungs. “Ghost?”
“What time is it?” Her computing officer's thoughts were a jumble over the ether; he'd been in his sleep cycle. “Wake up, Ghost, we've got company and need your help.”
Over the channel, James said, “Based on our distance from the asteroid cluster and Sterling's visual, I'd say they range in size from 1.2 meters to 4 meters.”
“Ticks!” Gunny thought, and Noa could feel his mental spit to the side. Her skin heated—was Prime Minister Li of the Kanakah Disk sending them as spies?