Children Of Earth (Tales from the 23rd Century Book 1)

by Paul J. Fleming

  ‘I’m ready,’ she muttered nervously and then smiled timidly at Maddox through the transparent helmets they both wore. ‘I have to tell you that the last time I wrapped my legs around some bloke I had just met it ended rather badly,’ she said, trying to alleviate the absolute terror which filled her soul with a brief spurt of humour.

  Maddox smiled back at her in response, giving her the encouragement she needed to proceed with their endeavour.

  ‘Okay, I’m fair warned!’ He chuckled back. ‘Let’s hope this proves a more successful experience for us both! Pull the triggers now!’ he instructed as his gaze was drawn upwards and he spotted the silhouette of a humanoid figure appearing over the edge of the now wide open hatchway, weapon being levelled towards the embracing couple in the room below. Without a second thought, Maia squeezed as hard as she could on both triggers which sent a highly pressurised flow of gloopy foam blasting out of the hose of each extinguisher.

  Maddox aimed the hoses downward towards the floor by his booted feet and the resultant pressure had the desired effect he had sorely wished for. The embracing escapees were propelled upwards against the limited gravity, erratically veering left and right towards the open hatch and then emerging through the opening trailed by a steady stream of foamy globules which Maddox began to distribute widely as he wiggled the hoses about. It was a side-effect he had not anticipated, but the resultant floating mess in their wake was providing a decent amount of cover between them and the waiting Martians outside the hatch.

  ‘Hang on!’ he shouted over the comms as energy blasts began to stream about them, the Martians obviously angry at their elusive flight from capture.

  Maia released the triggers and threw her arms about his shoulders, hanging on for all her worth.

  Realising that the extinguishers were no longer firing and the increased pressure on his chest as his companion seemed to be trying to squeeze the life out of him, Maddox pushed both cylinders downward away from them and towards the assailants who were still persisting in firing energy bolts after them. Maybe plummeting extinguishers would distract them momentarily.

  One of the extinguishers strayed into the path of an oncoming bolt of energy, which burnt through the metal body as it struck, causing a sudden burst of foam to fire out of the new opening and the cylinder to spiral downward erratically. The result was the hasty scattering of Martian militia troopers as the distressed projectile descended rapidly towards their assembled ranks. If nothing else it bought them a temporary respite from being shot at.

  ‘Captain,’ Ezri’s voice broke through his feelings of asphyxiation and grabbed his attention. ‘I have you on the scope above the surface and ascending. I am inbound, have already lowered the loading ramp and raised the cargo nets. I should warn you that if this scheme plays out you will still have a rather painful and impromptu landing however. Estimate recovery in ten.. nine… eight…’

  A hiss of static burst over the communications channel which hurt Maddox’s eardrums and a quick glance at Maia’s face through the helmet demonstrated it was not just his ears that were suffering.

  ‘Ezri?’ he shouted over the deafening hiss.

  Sudden panic grabbed his conscious mind, something had gone wrong and now both Maia and himself were floating upwards into the blackness of space with no way of preventing their momentum. The asteroid had too weak a gravity field to prevent their drifting out into space as they had already crossed that threshold.

  Then something big and metal suddenly appeared all about them and he felt a sudden painful jolt in the back of his calf muscles which started to spin him and Maia about until his back connected with something solid and the two of them began to tumble very rapidly and uncontrollably across a metal floor before impacting against the criss-cross mesh of the cargo netting and crumpling into a rather unglamourous heap of arms and legs on the deck-plating.

  There was a crack in his helmet through which the limited atmosphere it was protecting him with was escaping, not to mention the agony shooting through his lower legs and back, but a deep seated instinct for survival pushed him onward to disentangle himself from Maia as quickly as he could and glance about to gain his bearings. Against so many odds his madcap scheme had worked.

  A deep judder in the deck-plating under his feet as he tentatively stood drove him to ignore the pain he was in and stumble across to the cargo berth control station, stabbing at the controls and raising the loading ramp. He was starting to feel light headed as his suit had lost its pressure through the fracture across the transparent dome of his helmet, but as he keyed the control panel to re-pressurise the bay he reached up and fumbled slightly with his free hand as his legs began to buckle. Sliding slowly down aside the control panel, his fingers finally activating the release and the helmet unsealing from the collar of his smart suit and as he raised it over his head and cast it aside, he felt the air rushing into the compartment. Gasping deeply he refilled his lungs and silently promised himself that it was the last time he knowingly volunteered to walk into a potential trap.

  Whilst sliding his gloves off, he opened his eyes to the sight of Maia crouched over him, her own helmet discarded and her red hair flowing freely about her face, he began to regret the panic of the previous event preventing him from properly enjoying her wrapped about his torso.

  ‘You’re alive,’ she almost gasped in relief. Then an angry look clouded across her face. ‘Never, ever, ever make me do that again!’

  As if to punctuate her statement she yanked each glove off with force and thrust them into her jacket pocket, standing up straight and shook her head slightly in disbelief at the events which had just transpired.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he grumbled back sarcastically as another judder through the deck plating re-focussed his attention. ‘Come on. I think we’re not quite out of this yet,’ he said as he pulled hard on the edge of the control panel to haul himself to his feet. For now the pain would have to wait.

  They seemed to still have some pressing problems.

  3 On The Run

  As both Maia and Maddox ascended the ladders and traversed the corridor which ran the length of the small aging tramp freighter, their progress was interrupted periodically by jolts being felt through the infrastructure of the ship, causing momentary loss of footing and resulted in both Maia and Maddox being flung from side to side dramatically as the ship obviously made rather severe course corrections.

  Maddox could hear the groaning from the bulkheads as they underwent abnormally high levels of stress during these manoeuvres and doubled his efforts to get up to the flight deck, whilst silently willing his ship to hold together and weather the storm. She was one of the older interplanetary freighters and as such, was quite robustly built to endure the rigours of both space encounters with debris and anomalies, as well as aggressors.

  It was quite obvious that someone was pounding his vessel in an effort to dissuade them from further evasion and in complete contradiction to their wishes it just made Maddox more resolved to fight even harder. He knew the Erstwhile was not a fighting ship, but it did not stop him wanting to turn and put a few good hits squarely on the nose of whoever was damaging his precious ship.

  This desire put added pace to his step and he almost bounded through the hatch onto the flight deck closely followed by Maia. With only a fleeting acknowledgement to Ezri who was too intent on her current evasive endeavours to return the greeting, he darted over to his waiting seat, almost falling into it as it pivoted on the support and presenting him with all of the flight controls laid out before him. A quick review of the panels by means of a hasty glance and the flashing alert lights present thereon gave him the overview of just how bad the situation was before any words passed between himself and his co-pilot.

  ‘Okay Ezri. Good job back there, now what’s our situation?’ he asked even though he could see from the scope to his left that there was a naval patrol cruiser dogging their every move.

  As Ezri began to respond an energy bolt struck the
hull amidships and sent the Erstwhile into a lurching spin momentarily before she quickly righted their course and then sent the ship off at a tangent, causing more groaning from the structure of their vessel and also from both Maia and Maddox who felt their stomachs lurching unpleasantly with the sudden movements.

  ‘As you can deduce Captain,’ she responded extremely calmly to the situation at hand. ‘The Martians in pursuit were quite aggrieved at my lack of response to their repeated requests and when they correctly predicted our course of action to enact your escape from under their noses they became even more insistent that we submit. I notice we are adopting strays now also by the presence of the person you were meant to be dealing with on the surface.’

  Maia shot Ezri a withering look. It had taken less than an hour for all her plans of a life amongst the stars to crumble and now she was on the run in a rather distressed looking ship under a barrage of fire from a more superior vessel. Insulting her just added to the myriad of disquiet in her mind at present.

  ‘Now Ezri, be nice,’ Maddox chided in quick response. ‘It was either leave her at the mercy of the Martians which her business partner seems to be in league with by the way, or bring her with us to continue enjoying a life of freedom amongst the stars…’

  His voiced tailed off as a cluster of explosions erupted in the path of the Erstwhile and Ezri rapidly adjusted their course to weave about them, causing further physical unpleasantness within her two companions.

  ‘I was a little worried when we lost contact,’ muttered Maddox as he stared into the readout on the screen before him, trying to work out a quick destination for their flight. ‘I take it that was to do with our friends back there making themselves known?’

  ‘Our communications relay overloaded along with a few minor subsystems after the ship took a direct hit as I was lining up on approach. There was nothing I could do to avoid it, else I would have risked either missing you entirely or impacting with you and causing your unfortunate demise across the hull,’ Ezri replied as she made a few more course adjustments.

  ‘Glad you chose to take the hit in that case,’ Maia interjected before Maddox could reply.

  Yet another burst of energy dissipated across the hull of the ship and the lighting on the flight deck fluctuated momentarily before returning to normal.

  ‘Speaking of taking hits, I’m not enjoying this much’ Maia said as her gaze cast about the lighting in the ceiling and then came to rest upon Maddox sat in his chair scrutinising the displays. ‘I’m assuming you have a well-conceived plan, just as you did before in that stock room?’

  Maddox simply nodded with an accompanying grunt as he scoured the data-banks of the navigation computer for local features they may be able to use to their advantage. The only issue he was having problems with was that the erratic nature of the asteroids in the belt and their location on the outer fringes of colonised space made such records sparse at best.

  Unlike the core worlds where there were detailed astrometric charts detailing potential hazards and space lane routes between colonies which updated frequently based on the orbits of the inner planets, the only people who frequented the belt with regularity were its inhabitants and quite a few of them did not want to be found easily. There were a few key outposts and installations marked, but the computer on the Erstwhile had their own annotated layer to overlay, of small holdings and minor operations scattered throughout the area which had to be updated for known orbital rotation. Normally it took only a short while to return the results, but with everything else the ship’s computer was being inundated with, the task seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time.

  ‘There!’ Maddox exclaimed stabbing a finger at the screen before him, before the layer had updated. There were some features he simply knew from experience, and one of those had just presented itself quite usefully. ‘Ezri bring up this local chart and look for the debris cloud surrounding a trio of small asteroids over to our starboard side and a short run from our present position. I do believe we have come upon the graveyard and that gives us our possible way out of this mess.’

  ‘Confirmed, Captain,’ Ezri replied as she examined the local chart on her own screen. ‘Adjusting course now.’

  ‘Graveyard? We’re going into a graveyard?’ Maia asked with a nervous lilt to her tone.

  Ezri seemed to ignore her comment as she made a few erratic swerves before diving the ship around in a loop to avoid another volley of explosions sent into their path, and then brought the ship about to a heading directly towards the debris field.

  Maddox unstrapped his belt and turned his chair away from the controls to face Ezri and Maia.

  ‘It’s just a name for that zone between the three asteroids which houses the region’s biggest scrap yard run by the McCarthy brothers. They bring old derelict hulks here, which are then stripped of any useful parts for vessels still in service. There are three stations established, one on each asteroid which pulse electromagnetic waves through the debris cloud to mess with a ship’s control systems and sensor array. The brothers don’t really like uninvited guests you see,’ he explained for Maia’s benefit, but the last few words did not inspire much confidence in her.

  ‘So when we fly in with a patrol cruiser on our tail, won’t that get their back up? I mean, that electromagnetic wave will screw with our systems as well as those on the patrol ship won’t it?’ she asked quite genuinely concerned.

  Maddox stood and made his way across to Ezri’s station, having to fight to retain his balance as Ezri pulled the ship into a lurching swoop around another explosion and then back to their original heading for the cloud. Maia had a tight hold on a pillar which jutted slightly out from the bulkhead at the rear of the flight deck which prevented her from stumbling to and fro, but Maddox was caught unawares and still had to lunge a little to grab the back of Ezri’s station to steady himself.

  ‘They definitely do not want us to go in there,’ Maia muttered as the deck plates juddered beneath her feet and she gripped the pillar even harder.

  ‘No, I’m sure they don’t which is why I want to go in there all the more. And yes, the brothers may get a bit hot under their collars, but we have an understanding which goes a way back before they became the success they are today,’ Maddox muttered as he moved around the end of Ezri’s control station and positioned himself behind her as he leaned over and brought up their current cargo hold manifest, scrolling the list before flicking the screen off and standing straight once more with a look of triumph on his face.

  ‘Right ladies, we have five navigational beacons stowed away below from some job or other, some time in the past. Anyway, point is all we need to do is get inside and then fire them out in different directions, making it look like the Erstwhile is leaving in five different directions. We just adjust the signal for the beacon to emulate the transponder on the Erstwhile and we have the patrol ship running all over the place trying to find us. In the meantime, we slip out and run for Sanctuary whilst they’re diverted.’

  ‘I had better go below and make the adjustments Captain, the systems on those beacons require fine tuning to make an exact duplicate of our transponder and I believe I am more capable in that area than you,’ Ezri said quite openly and not intending her statement as an insult but rather a simple factual point.

  ‘No problem,’ Maddox replied with a grin.

  ‘I’ll come along too if you don’t mind,’ Maia interjected.

  As the two crew-mates both turned in unison and looked at her quizzically, she found herself quantifying her presence in the beacon adjustment team.

  ‘I spent two whole seasons repairing shot navigational systems on tramp freighters back on Venus, so I’d rather be lending a hand doing something than just standing around here watching it all happen about me.’

  Maddox turned and looked at Ezri who raised her head slightly to meet his gaze.

  ‘Sure thing,’ he replied to Maia as he winked at his crew-mate. ‘Got to earn your meals somehow on this boa
t of mine.’ He paused momentarily as a thought strayed across his mind and then in a slightly lower tone whispered to Ezri. ‘Now be nice, you know how sometimes you can put people in an uneasy way of feeling.’

  Ezri nodded slightly in reply and turned her gaze to fall on Maia, furnishing her with a very practised smile.

  ‘Of course. We shall both go and adjust the beacons. That will be fun.’

  Maddox could only shake his head despairingly as he returned to his seat and assumed flight control from Ezri, leaving her to depart with Maia tagging along behind, still a great deal unsure as how to relate to the priggish crew-member.

  Ezri had many fine qualities, but diplomacy was not her strongest suit. Ever since she had started flying with him, her digital personality program had adapted and utilised the unique learning and growth algorithms imbued within her core matrix to better her understanding of the world away from the Martian Corporate headquarters where she had begun her existence. Sometimes Maddox felt she had learnt a great deal more than she let on, and was being awkward on purpose in some twisted digital sense of humour.

  Twitching the yoke to avoid yet another volley from their pursuers who were now starting to stream energy bolts after the fleeing trading vessel as well as send projectiles to explode in their path, Maddox checked his scope to gauge their proximity to the graveyard.

  Not too long to go before they entered the debris cloud and he hoped like hell the brothers had not updated their frequency modulation cycle of the EM wave. Maddox could charge their hull and deflect the majority of the waves disruptive effect on their own systems, but only if the data he had was current on their system rotation frequency.

  Gritting his teeth, he pushed the throttle wide open and the Erstwhile lurched forwards with eagerness to plough into the debris clouds.

  4 The Graveyard

  As Ezri slid down ladders and made haste along the corridors on her route to the aft section and cargo hold where the beacons were secured for transit, Maia did her best to match her new companion’s sure-footed pace whilst the ship about her lurched and dived. Quite obviously the patrol ship was upping its efforts to snare their quarry before they entered the debris cloud.