Galactic Thunder

by Cameron Cooper

  “No inertial buffers,” Lyth warned.

  I reached for the edge of the nearest shell, apologized silently to its deceased occupant, and clung to the shell. Now I thought I understood why the bars were placed across the shells, even though the occupants were supposed to be frozen in place.

  “Keep them from rolling around!” Fiori cried, as she leaned over Mace and held him in place on the floor.

  The shuttle was juddering and jinking sideways. Even though the freight door or whatever it was, was open, we seemed to be having trouble passing through it.

  “Some sort of shield,” Jai murmured. “If the mothership has shields, they would have to lower them from the bridge in order for the shuttle to leave.” He exchanged worried glances with me.

  “Just keep ramming through,” I told Lyth. “It’s not a physical shield, or they wouldn’t bother with a hatch over the shuttle. Non-physical shields can be overcome by physical objects with enough inertia.”

  “We’re at a standing start,” Lyth pointed out. “I can’t build impetus in the space of a few meters.”

  Sauli shook his head. “Drive through it,” he told Lyth. “Have you found the accelerator, yet?”

  “That will drive us forward.” Lyth pointed. “Right into the bay wall.”

  I saw a thin line of black at the corner of the translucent screen. “Space!” I breathed, a thrill running through me. “You’re using some sort of maneuvering jet, yes?” I asked Lyth.

  “It’s automatic,” Lyth said. “I said go, and it’s doing the rest itself.”

  “In a skintight bay like this, you can’t afford to have a human pilot eyeball it,” Sauli said, his tone judicious.

  “What about steering?” I asked Lyth, my heart ramming in my chest. That chink of black space beckoned like a siren song. I could almost taste the silence and stillness out there. We were so close! “Can’t you accelerate and steer the nose around and out?”

  “You’re welcome to try this for yourself, captain,” Lyth said, his tone tight.

  I held up my hand and moved away. The chink of blackness seemed to be widening, which made it even harder to shut up.

  Sauli, though, stayed in place. “Actually, it’s not a bad idea,” he told Lyth. “Look, we’re edging out. A half meter more and the horizontal axis will have passed the edge of the bay. That gives you room to turn.”

  “Very little,” Lyth said shortly. “And we’re slowing. The shield is bouncing us back.”

  Which was true. I squeezed my fists, making my knuckles ache.

  “No, no, ram it, Lyth,” Sauli said. “Wrench the nose around and burn!”

  Lyth shook his head.

  “Trust me!” Sauli cried. “Go!”

  Lyth took a deep breath, his shoulders lifting. “Hold on!” he cried and slid his fingertips over the dashboard.

  The ship’s nose, where we stood, spun sideways, ramming me up against the shells. Sauli gripped the bottom of the dash and hung on.

  Starfield slid into view through the clear front end of the shuttle, but it was hazed over. The shield was obscuring it.

  Lyth ran two fingers down the dash.

  The shuttle jumped forward and almost immediately halted, as if something had hold of its tail. The roar of engines made the walls and floor shudder.

  Lyth slid his fingers down the controls once more.

  The ship surged forward, not by much.

  Then suddenly, it shot forward. The haze over the starfield evaporated and the roar of the shuttle’s engines cut off instantly. We were in vacuum.

  “Look for the Lythion!” I cried and lurched over to the dashboard. The clear floor to ceiling window was disconcerting. I was used to looking at real space, and not just via an internal screen, but the Lythion’s windows were solid, small apertures, not this giant room-sized opening. It made me feel vulnerable, but the view was unobstructed.

  “Under fire!” Lyth cried, as the shuttle lurched and jolted.

  “That wasn’t a direct hit,” Juliyana judged, her gaze upon the ceiling.

  “Dodge and weave, Lyth,” I told him. “And try to give us a full spherical view of local space while you’re at it. Sauli, look for the Lythion.”

  We pressed up against the window, on either side of the pilot board, and tried to peer around the edges, looking for the Lythion. The only problem was, that if she was at any great distance, she would be a matt black speck against a lot more blackness.

  “I’ve activated my beacon,” Juliyana called.

  “You still have it?” Lyth cried, not quite looking over his shoulder.

  “Look!” Jai shouted, pointing through the screen.

  We all looked.

  Lyth was turning and twisting the shuttle, dodging the weapon balls of the mothership. It brought the mothership itself spinning into view and it was a glorious sight to behold.

  The ship was on fire. Actually on fire. The shields that had held us inside the guts of it clearly held atmosphere inside them, too, and with oxygen, fire could burn. The side of the ship had a tiny rectangular dent in its lower side, and the fire bloomed from that vent.

  “That’s the bay we pulled out of,” Sauli said. “Lyssa fired right into it. I could kiss her. It’s a weak spot. That’s why they shield it.”

  “She must have fired the moment we broke through,” Sauli said. “But where is she?” He twisted his head, as the starfield whirled over us. Lyth was still jinking and dodging.

  Lyssa came over the top of us, casting a shadow over us that dimmed the interior of the shuttle, for she was between us and the red dwarf.

  Everyone who could speak broke out into cheers and cries of pleasure.

  She slowed as the bulk of her passed over us, then turned her tail, presenting her side to us.

  The freight ramp was down.

  “Not again,” I sighed.

  —36—

  Lyssa had been busy while we were on the mothership. Actually, she had busted out into action the moment the slavers had fired their snake-things. But we didn’t get to hear about her side of the story until we had dealt with the survivors from the Ige Ibas.

  Lyssa made that much simpler than it might have been by turning most of the interior of the ship into a hospital. She put herself into medical mode and nominated everyone who could stand on their feet as medical aides.

  Fiori got to work, directing us as we cleaned up the survivors and treated them. Mostly, her treatment of choice was to put them to sleep and pump them full of nutrients and liquids while they slept.

  “A full therapy center will be able to do better than I can,” Fiori admitted. “Even with Lyssa’s ability to print nearly everything I need, these poor people will need rehabilitation and expertise to help them through it that I can’t provide. I’m just a medic.”

  “You do okay,” I assured her, and peered over her shoulder at Mace, where he lay on the narrow cot. Dalton sat beside him, his head back, snoring softly. Already Mace looked far more human than he had, coming out of the shell. His face had filled out a bit and the skin looked like flesh once more. “But it might be a few days before we can take them to a therapy center.”

  She nodded. “They’ll last that long, now they have the essentials they need.”

  The delay was because we had not jumped away the moment Lyssa could fire up the crescent arms.

  “The mothership is still there,” she pointed out. “It hasn’t jumped away.”

  We all trooped onto the bridge to look at the far-away speck of metal, glinting red in the sun’s light.

  “Is it drifting?” Lyth asked, rubbing his chin.

  “It is locked in orbit around the gas planet,” Lyssa said.

  “Is the orbit degrading?” I asked.

  “It…might be. I need longer to know for sure.”

  I sighed. That put us in a dilemma.

  “They might all be dead, and there’s no one to correct the orbit,” Jai said, rubbing his chin.

  “They had a fire onboard. That’s
usually fatal,” Sauli pointed out. “Especially if they couldn’t all get into their suits fast enough.”

  “And if the slavers all died of asphyxiation,” I added, “the prisoners in the galleys might still be alive. The shuttles are airtight and they don’t need oxygen in their current state. We can’t leave them to go down with the ship…if it is going down.”

  “We can’t just pin a beacon on the ship and go home, either,” Marlow said. “We might end up having to tow the thing away from the gravity well.”

  “Maybe do that now and get it over with. Then we can go home,” Juliyana said.

  “If we get too close and they’re still alive, they’ll fire on us, and we’re not in a position to fight back,” I pointed out. “We have casualties aboard. We’re as wounded as they are at the moment.”

  “Ah, let the damn thing fall and burn,” Yoan muttered.

  “I understand why you might feel that way,” Jai told him, “but we are curious humans, on this ship. That mothership holds knowledge, information about the slaves, where they’re from and why they are here. And it holds at least a hundred of their prisoners, who don’t deserve to die because we don’t like what the slavers did to us.”

  Yoan grimaced. “Yeah, sorry.”

  So we waited, and watched the disabled mothership’s orbit.

  While we did that, Lyssa told us what had happened when the slavers had lashed out with their snake-things. Tethers, we decided to call them.

  “The charge delivered by the tethers doesn’t just knock out humans,” Lyssa explained. “It stuns my nanobots, too. The ordinary ones, at least. The heavy duty nanobots recover after a couple of seconds, but they don’t like the charge, either. And the parawolves really didn’t like them. They weren’t knocked out, but they couldn’t do much more than lie there and howl.” Lyssa wrinkled her nose. “It was very noisy.”

  Crippling the parawolves may have saved their lives, for the slavers had failed to see them as a threat. They had left them on the ship, picked us up with their tethers, and fired their weapons at the exit hatch until Lyssa was forced to open it and let them out. “Those weapons of theirs are thermic. I couldn’t let them melt through the hatch,” she told me.

  Then they had pulled us through their tunnel to their shuttle.

  I studied the shuttle on the footage Lyssa had faithfully recorded. It was the same sort of slave galley we had escaped upon. It was probably the same galley we had woken to find ourselves upon.

  “They used it to come over to the Lythion,” Sauli said, looking over my shoulder. He shook his head. “It’s…calculating, isn’t it?”

  “Efficient,” I added, feeling sick. “They’re practiced at this.”

  “They just left the three ships behind?” Jai added, sounding appalled. “They weren’t even interested in what they might find here?”

  “Not everyone is curious about everything, like you,” I chided him.

  Jai shook his head. “These people can’t be human. Curiosity is natural.”

  “They plundered four ships and took their crew,” Dalton said. “They would have learned a lot from those ships. Maybe they figured they’d seen it all.”

  “And they had cargo spoiling back on the mothership,” Sauli added, his tone dry.

  The slavers didn’t even bother to blow the ships up. Like the Ige Ibas, they left the three of them floating behind, apparently empty.

  Lyssa had considered her options for a moment or two after the slavers’ shuttle detached from her side. A few moments is a small lifetime for an AI. Then she spoke to the remaining crew on the Penthos and Captain Truda on the Omia and they had detached and jumped away while Lyssa stood guard.

  “They are going for help, and to raise the alarm,” Lyssa told us. “I stayed to watch the motherships, and to get you back, if I could, although I was still trying to decide how to do that when Juliyana’s beacon blipped at me. So I hurried closer, and saw the shuttle trying to bust through some sort of barrier and Juliyana’s beacon was on the shuttle. The barrier wasn’t molecular, it was too strong for that. So I opened fire just around the edges of the shuttle, then it broke through, so I fired a shot through the gap before it closed up.”

  Jai rested his hand on her shoulder, for she was using her avatar to tell us her story, while we all sat about the big table in the diner. It was a very crowded table, even extended in size. He smiled at her. “Only you, with your exceptional reaction times, could have managed it. Thank you.”

  Lyssa grinned. She didn’t bother trying to fake a blush. “Right after the shuttle escaped, I fired on the other two motherships to stop them from shooting at you. The mothership you came out of didn’t fire a single shot. Once I got between you and the ships, the other two motherships jumped away.”

  “They abandoned their wounded,” I said, with a grimace of distaste.

  “Their wounded ship and the cargo,” Jai said softly, thinking hard. “It shows a callousness I’ve rarely come across.”

  “And is that callousness just the slavers, or is everyone like that, where they come from?” Marlow added.

  That was a thought that left all of us uneasy.

  Barely twelve hours later, the first of a small armada of ships emerged into real space just off our starboard. It was the Omia.

  —37—

  That system and sub-section of space got very busy for a few weeks after that.

  Unlike the valiant captain of the Ige Ibas, who’d had the forethought to delete his ship’s systems and prevent the slavers from learning all about us, the slavers on the wounded mothership left us a small mountain of data and information to mine for details about them and their people.

  Once we had established that the ship’s orbit was degrading and that the ship was therefore helpless, three of the ships which had responded to the Omia’s call for help who were atmosphere-capable had risked getting close enough to grapple the mothership, drag it out of the gravity well and park it in space.

  Then we rolled up our sleeves and tried to figure out how to rouse the one hundred and forty-four sleeping prisoners. The best medical experts, with Fiori amongst them, decided that the prisoners had to be taken back to a full medical facility before trying to wake them. The shuttles were detached from the mothership, loaded into freight bays and jumped away.

  The patients on the Lythion were also transferred to a medical transport and taken to the clinic on New Phoenicia. Fiori went with them.

  Scientists, historians, anthropologists and a dozen different interest groups swarmed over the mothership. We learned that none of the slavers had survived, but not because of the fire. Lyssa’s volley had blown out the weak corridor side of the shuttle bay, and the ship had suffered explosive decompression. We found slavers without helmets and others with no suits at all. The few who happened to be wearing their full suits we figured were on duty when the explosion happened. But their suits were designed to use ambient atmosphere when it was available, and even though they had switched to suit-air only, they didn’t have enough air in the suits to last for long. They were the only slavers to die of asphyxiation.

  The bodies were shipped to the Laxman Institute, for Arnold Laxman had offered to autopsy them to see what we could learn about their physiology that might help us with the unconscious former prisoners, and also learn what was different about them that let the cryogenic shells work on them, but not on us.

  There were a thousand questions we all wanted answered yesterday.

  After a month in the quadrant, I’d had enough. I called everyone together for dinner, and asked Jai and Marlow in particular to be there, for the pair of them were in the very thick of all the discussions about humankind’s history and what our future might be, holding their own among all the planetary governors, mayors, prime ministers and more who had headed out to see for themselves the first sort-of-alien ship we’d ever come across.

  Even Kristiania was elbow deep in the political discussions, for if there was a spokesman for Darius Star city
at all, she was it. She was also the president of the Shipping Guild, who had a very strong interest in making sure none of their registered ships disappeared.

  Dalton was coopted by Jai and Marlow to work as their chief of staff, which was mostly a matter of diplomatically telling people they could not have “just ten minutes” with either of them. I understood why Jai had tapped Dalton for that, when I found out. He would have pissed off dignitaries within an hour. I would have lost my own temper long before the first hour was done.

  The area of space over the gas giant was as busy as Triga ever got, and Triga was still considered the physical center of the known worlds. Jai asked the captain of one of the bigger ships, a former Ranger carrier, to act as local traffic control and assign emerging areas, jumping lanes and hand out clearances, before someone arrived blind and emerged where another ship was already parked.

  It was as busy and chatty and populated as home…and I wasn’t even home.

  So I set up the dinner and everyone turned up. I had Lyssa build the boardroom into a luxury restaurant with a star dome that showed local space, with its intriguing ribbon of stars from the next arm of the galaxy over from ours. I even put on a dress, although it itched under my arms.

  It was a very good night, with a minimum of friction considering the strong personalities sitting around the big round table with its candles and white tablecloth. When I pointed that out to Jai, he shrugged, but he also smiled. “Sometimes, we can put up with each other because we are all friends.”

  True.

  I got to my feet, and thanked everyone for coming, then got down to brass knuckles. “Three days ago, Lyssa was asked to register her parking space and identify herself. There’s too many ships in this system and too many experts. Certainly, I’m not needed. So I’ve decided to head back to Melenia. I’ve got bills to pay and debts to clear.”

  No one around the table looked surprised.

  Sauli scratched under his chin. “If you don’t mind dropping me off on Darius, Danny, I’ll come with you. I have to make sure they’re still building ships according to the blueprints I left behind. Then I’ll bring the Omia back, so Kristiana can stay on top of things here.”