Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  “Nine…eight…seven.”

  “What’s your plan?” I ask.

  Venus’s head tilts slightly sideways in thought, like an attentive pup. “I haven’t quite decided yet.”

  “Venus…”

  “I could pull an Ivan, but we’d just end up dead in the air with no place to go but down.” She taps the control stick pensively. “Nah.”

  “Venus…” A bit more of an edge in my voice this time.

  “Maybe cut the engines, pop the air brakes, and let them fly on by?” She glances at me the way somebody asking for an opinion might—but really not. “No, that’s way overdone.”

  “Four…three.”

  “Dammit, Venus! Can we do anything like that with the power diverter on the fritz?”

  “Probably not. We’re probably going to die in a meteor of fire.” With that, she flashes me a quick grin and cocks an eyebrow. “Just playing, Aly-oop. We’re golden.”

  “One.”

  “Oh, sh—” I begin, but before I know what’s happening, g-forces slam me into my seat, cutting off my breath and slapping my head down with force enough I’d have bitten through my tongue if I weren’t lucky. Hope those kids are squared away. Apprehension—and a spine-crushing amount of g’s—make my throat tight.

  Venus yanks the stick hard back, firing us into an insanely steep climb straight up. The ship groans and shudders violently in protest but holds together. Venus’s hand darts to the throttles and flicks the port engine to idle. The Orika slews sideways. Impossibly, the g-forces get worse, and my grip on consciousness starts to slip.

  With barely a strain to her voice, she announces, “High-g pitch-back turn.” She glances out the port window. “Should put the sun at our backs too. The old ways still work, y’know?”

  She flings the ship hard uphill and turns the belly into the wind. Our airspeed drops to nothing, and the other ships shoot by, far underneath us.

  The world through the viewscreen spins wildly: ground, sky, cloud, a blinding flash of sunlight, now ground again. Through my diminishing vision, I see a double pulse of light and two streaking vapor trails.

  Venus grunts. “That’s two missiles we won’t have to worry about. Now, the fun part.”

  She straightens the controls and slams the port throttle forward again. Instantly the g’s relax, and I desperately suck in a breath. My vision comes back to normal, and our speed climbs rapidly as we dive back down like a bird of prey.

  Venus rolls the ship a few degrees, then pulls hard back on the stick again. The g’s hit once more but not quite as strong. Her eyes dart to the radar, then back to the viewscreen. Eyes narrowed in concentration, she calmly says, “Give me the ventral thrusters when I ask for them, please.”

  I’m already too sick and oxygen deprived to ask why. Then the enemy ships appear in our viewscreen, dead ahead. The thought suicide run flashes in my mind, but then she pops the nose of the ship up.

  “Ventral thrusters…now.”

  She flicks the throttles back with the dexterity of a concert pianist, and we level out barely meters above their ship, with the blast from our thrusters reflecting off their hull and against ours, giving just enough extra cushion to keep us from slamming into them. Even so, I think I felt the slightest impact, like we actually touched.

  Almost as if she’s in my head and hearing my thoughts, Venus says, “We did. I misjudged it by a couple meters.” She shrugs and continues straight on. “One of those scouts is a newer pilot. He wasted his missiles on a wild shot when we did our climb, then he couldn’t stick with us. His leader is smarter.” She grins her silly, slightly wild grin again. “So he wouldn’t fly into the blast of what he thought was a kamikaze run.”

  She snaps the controls hard over and jams the throttles to their stops. With a rending screech, we slide sideways off the top of the other ship, roll upside down, and pull hard up, down—shit, whatever—toward the ground. The world outside does another sickening psychedelic kaleidoscope routine, and I feel my last meal, maybe literally my last meal, looking for a way out.

  “Yep, here he comes again,” she calmly announces. “His angle on us isn’t too good, but it’s close enough that he’ll probably try a—yeah, thought so. Missiles inbound.” An earsplitting buzzer nearly drowns out her last few words. “They’ll be on us in a few seconds.”

  We’re pointing straight down at the ground with the engines screaming at full thrust. A thin layer of wispy clouds is in the distance, far below us, then all of the sudden it isn’t, and the ground is perfectly clear, colorful, and getting more so by the instant.

  “The nice thing about the really fast missiles,” Venus murmurs, “is that they don’t turn well.”

  I close my eyes, suck in a breath, and grit my teeth, just in time for another assault on my senses as she makes yet another maneuver that smashes all my internal organs into what feels like chunky tomato soup against my pelvis.

  Dammit, I wish he’d just shoot us down already.

  Through the pain and what I hope is a silent scream on my part, I feel a couple small jolts, like driving over bumps in the road.

  Venus says cheerfully, “Missed. I’ll bet that lead scout must be getting pretty frustrated by now. We’re over the city, by the way.”

  I open my eyes as the last hills and trees flash by our sides, and we break out over Bogotan, slowing and dropping in altitude enough to make shooting us down here guaranteed to damage the city. “That’s the craziest set of flying you’ve put me through yet,” I comment, my voice a reluctant rattle. “I hope everyone’s okay back there.”

  Venus replies, “They’ll be fine. I left the gravity compensators on full back in the hold.”

  “So you just needed to turn it off here in the cockpit?”

  “Yep.” She climbs to get a little bit more altitude and take the engines back from redline. Then she relaxes a bit more in her seat. “Well, no. I just thought it would be funny. You probably didn’t know it, but you can make some really nutty faces.” Without missing a beat, she keys the radio. “This is the Orika to Bogotan, requesting landing clearance. Or we can just slam into midtown. Thanks for your attention. Over.”

  Venus looks as relaxed as a cat in a sunbeam. If I could take the cue from her, I would, but my skeleton currently feels like it may have recently been used to support a skyscraper.

  “We’re on approach,” she notifies the crew. “Should be landing in about a minute. The kind people of Bogotan are more likely than not going to be welcoming us in full splendor, so I suggest we do the same. Out.”

  Our high-speed approach only allows for a limited glimpse of the infrastructure, but our nav scopes record everything and create an instant three-dimensional map. On the two-week trip here, the crew used every hour studying the archival images and prints of Bogotan. As a smaller city with limited manufacturing, it had missed most of the systematic destruction of first the uprising masses, then the Admin when they went through the system and razed all communication satellites.

  With a radius of just under five thousand kilometers and a surface of 75 percent water, Obal 6 is the smallest Obal in the system and had the lowest population density of the Admin-ruled planets—now, given its low priority during the war, it may have the highest. To citizens, it had always been thought of as the backwoods Obal, the kind of place an eccentric old aunt or moonshining pappy would have settled down.

  On my last trip, just before the war, we’d been brought here by Quantum to take advantage of the vast web of citizen-owned communication satellites, our intent being to blackmail T’Kai, former director of the Ministry of Science and Engineering—though now I think of him simply as the reason the human race just got blasted about a thousand years back toward the Stone Age. This time we’d dropped out of orbit into its atmosphere on the planet’s dark side and flown over two of its five major continents. The destruction, even from ten thousand meters, is unreal. Blackened craters mar the landscape where most of the major cities used to stand, and those that w
eren’t annihilated seem to have fallen to ruin through inside fighting, loss of civil structure and leadership, or just abandonment.

  Depending on what side people took after the mass-broadcast revelation of the Admin’s policy of using citizens and soldiers as biological test subjects, the cities had become too dangerous, especially for citizens who were known to have been former Corps or higher-ups in the Admin echelon. Some say half the system’s population died, some say more. What I know is—there’s no one left to take a head count.

  “Easy. Easy, now. Just cool your jets a little, people. We aren’t that scary.”

  Venus is talking to herself, but her audience could be the scouts now hovering on our wings as we glide to a landing zone on the settlement’s edge. Two smaller ships, retrofitted citizen-class compacts, were apparently also scrambled to “welcome” us, and the Orika is now covered from four angles, making escape impossible.

  The skids hit the earth and the hydraulics settle smoothly. Venus has already unstrapped her harness and heads toward the cockpit exit without a glance back. I unlock too and rise to my feet but have to blindly reach out and grab the back of the navigator’s seat to keep myself from pitching headfirst into the console. My legs take a couple of seconds to decide if they’re still part of the team, then I’m finally able to follow Venus out.

  Karl meets me in the cockpit’s antechamber, his face nearly as blanched as my own must be. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I give him a grin. “You?”

  “Someday I’ll get used to Venus’s flying.” I raise my eyebrow at him, and we both force a short giggle. “Or maybe not.” His face turns serious. “Look, Aly. I’m…I don’t know how to say this, but I want you to follow my lead on this. Eleanor’s not…herself, and Desto, well, you know. I don’t trust either of them to make sound choices right now, so I’m taking point.”

  I nod, feeling more relieved about his plan than I’d expected.

  “I’ll back you up too, bro,” David says, joining us from the crew deck below. “And I know Hoogs and Mason are on board. We all heard V…”

  He doesn’t have to elaborate. I’d told Karl about the way Vitruzzi had reacted when we crashed back on Eruo Pium, the way she froze up when the hovercraft attacked us. It’s clear the word got around. After her meltdown before leaving the mining colony, the rest of the crew isn’t taking chances.

  “They’ll be knocking on our door soon. Let’s get it together,” Karl says.

  The hold is secure for now, but anyone with the proper motivation and a high-output plasma torch can get inside in no time. The crew gathers, ready to implement part two of the plan.

  Which is to say—improvise.

  “Desto, I clearly remember you being present when we said we were going to try this with no guns. Did you forget how to count?” Karl says.

  The father-to-be stands in the hold next to the manual hatch release, waiting for us, and his body bristles with barrels and blades pointing in every direction.

  “You know they outnumber us by a few hundred. We’re not going to handle this thing like kamikazes,” Karl finishes.

  The hard set of Desto’s face makes me think this isn’t going to end well. The eight of us, nine if we count Ryan—but he strikes me as too smart to jump into this kind of fray—could restrain a man of Desto’s size, if we’re willing to take a few hits. After all, none of us wants to get shot before we even have a chance to get off the ship, but we’re guaranteed to be bruised and bloodied, and—

  Desto swings the Thresher over his shoulder and drops it on the deck, his eyes peering at the rest of us like a judge passing sentence on condemned heretics. The rifle clatters loudly in the tight space, and he sends a carbine and TorcherMax to follow it. His hand goes to the Sinbad on his right hip and stops there. No glare ever promised more pain if anyone steps up to challenge him.

  Drawing a breath that doesn’t quite hide his relief, Karl turns questioningly toward Vitruzzi. She has the four children drawn up around her like a squad of miniature soldiers. Despite their malnutrition, the most hollow set of eyes in the group is Vitruzzi’s. She stands near the rear of the hold, letting Karl run the show.

  “Why isn’t anyone demanding we open up?” I wonder aloud.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for an invitation,” David replies, surreptitiously pulling his jacket tighter around the pistol in his shoulder harness. In this crew, a decision against carrying guns is really a decision against carrying visible guns. Some people have lucky rabbits’ feet, others have lucky firepower.

  As if on cue, Desto depresses the hatch control and the ramp begins to lower.

  “Remember, they’re not our enemies,” Karl says quietly.

  Right, I think, because if they were, they would have fired missiles at us. But pointing out the obvious would be counterproductive at the moment.

  “Wait, where’s Venus?” I spin around, searching for her, but don’t see her anywhere.

  The ramp hits the tarmac outside, and no one says a word. Is she hiding? We hadn’t talked about leaving anyone on the ship—too late now.

  I shiver, suddenly hit by a blast of dry, cold air. It feels like the planet has been locked inside an icebox for the last year, but anywhere feels that way after Keum Libre’s humid sweatbox climate. My muscles clench in protest. Cold muscles slow down reaction time—I’ll need to keep moving to stay limber.

  From where we stand, the tarmac appears empty. If anyone waits for us, they’re holding back until we’re clear of the Orika’s relative cover.

  “Hello?” Karl calls into silence. Nothing. “We’re stepping outside. We are nine adults and four kids total. Our intentions are peaceful.”

  Another blast from the icebox whistles up the Orika’s crew deck corridor, but nothing else.

  Karl nods to me where I stand on his left, then to Desto and Mason, on his right, and we amble as a group down the ramp, our hands remaining visible. It feels like we’re walking off the edge of a cliff.

  I sense a movement far to my right and glance over. The older little girl, a blonde-haired one of about seven, has left the bunch circling Vitruzzi and moves up to Doug Mason. She grabs his big, rough hand in one of hers and squeezes it, as if she’s trying to reassure him. Doug smiles down at her. When he does, his face opens up in a way I’ve never seen—never even imagined—and for the first time, I realize that Mason could be someone’s kindly uncle, or their dad. He’d had a wife, another soldier, but she died in a friendly-fire accident prior to the Soldier’s Rebellion. This is the face of Mason who might have been—if so many things had turned out differently. The girl—was her name Cassandra?—tugs at his hand, then reaches up toward his neck. He squats and scoops her off the ground like she’s made of feathers and sets her in the crook of his arm. She leans in to hug him, and he rubs her back.

  Shaking off the odd feeling seeing this new, or, not new but other, Mason causes, I pull my attention back to the moment. Out on the landing tarmac, nothing stirs. The four ships standing guard on us maintain their hover but don’t land.

  The curly headed younger girl, with features close enough to Vitruzzi’s that she could be the doc’s daughter, looks around the empty tarmac. “What happens now?” she asks in a voice teetering between curiosity and fear.

  “What the fuck?” Desto says. “Is this some kind of ghost town?”

  “If it is, those scouts are some of the liveliest ghosts I’ve ever seen,” David replies. His head swivels as if on bearings, evaluating the locations of the sentry ships.

  Mason juts an elbow into Desto’s bicep. When Desto glances at him to see what’s up, Mason scowls, then glances meaningfully at the top of the girl’s head.

  “Shih—I mean, damn, sorry, man.”

  Everyone’s attention turns back toward our surroundings. Besides the scouts at our periphery, the place could be abandoned. But the breeze carries the sound of some kind of machinery, possibly the steel plant on the north end that we’d all seen on the town’s schematics.


  “I’m cold. Can we go back inside?” one of the little boys asks. His dark hair and the gleaming blue of his eyes remind me of Cross.

  “We can soon,” Vitruzzi promises him. “We just have to find whoever lives here first. They may have…a friend of ours may be here, and we need to find out.”

  The boy’s lip wrinkles back in resignation and he looks at the ground. Something about his childlike disappointment tickles my funny bone, and I grin. David gives me a curious glance. Shrugging, I say, “Well, if they’re not going to bring us a ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ fruit basket, we may as well go to them. Desto, you ready?”

  He starts to walk forward but stops when David rests a hand on his shoulder. Desto glances back at David, who slowly shakes his head. “It has to be a trap.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We’re here, they have all the advantage. We can’t just stand here with our thumbs up our asses and wait for them to bring us some nappies.” Desto’s severe expression communicates a resolve that nothing short of a missile through the middle of him will dampen. He’s right. There’s no changing our minds now.

  My voice sounds tinny in the cold air. “Let’s do this.”

  We’ve landed on the original docking tarmac. Forty meters ahead is a brick and steel berm, fifteen meters high, designed to protect the dock control buildings from the blasts of exploding engines or skidding out-of-control ships. A heavy steel gate, wide and tall enough to accommodate large track vehicles or trucks, leads through the berm to the town beyond. Both the gate and sections of the berm are marred by dents and gouges, showing the age and heavy use this airfield had seen, at least in the past, if not currently. Bogotan had once been a reasonably busy city, but Desto is right—it feels like a ghost town now.

  “Through there, let’s go,” Karl says, leading the way to the gate.

  Standing up close, it towers above us about six meters. There doesn’t seem to be a man-door anywhere, the gate the only way through. It remains as closed and sealed as an airlock at our approach, and David steps forward. He knocks. The ridiculousness of his maneuver is enough to burst the tension running through me, and I can’t help but chuckle. Shrugging and grinning too, he puts an ear to the door.