They certainly hadn’t needed anymore food after their banquet in the tower, so Ayia began taking Kale from one bar to the next. Most of them had all sorts of live music events. Kale was actually amazed that despite a civil war that was ready to burst through the gates, everyone was relaxing to loud electronic music and percussion. As much as things changed, most wanted them to stay the same.
They eventually settled at a place called the Crooked Lights where a particularly beautiful blonde was singing songs with her band that used mostly brass instruments. Even with all the electronic wonders men had, just blowing air through something made the best music. It helped that it wasn’t nearly as loud as all the electronic stuff.
“What do you want to drink?” she asked him.
“I couldn’t even tell you what they might have. Surprise me,” he replied.
She motioned to the bartender and asked for two Rotten Eggs and Kale smiled. Every planet had their own silly names for drinks. He reached over and grabbed a bowl of what appeared to be some kind of nut, most likely native to Mondla. The rich planet had more than enough food to supply its entire population easily and had no need to import anything. Most self-sustaining planets usually found it insulting to import food from anywhere else.
He put a few in his mouth and was greeted by a salty yet fruity taste. He could even get used to it if he came back. These were the benefits of visiting so many systems.
Kale sat back on his stool and reflected quickly on how his life was good. The bartender returned with their drinks and Ayia slid it over to him. Kale took a big swig.
“Gah!!,” he gasped, “At least they have the name right.”
Ayia laughed and took a big drink from her glass, swallowing it down easily.
Kale noticed and drank again. He would never turn down a free drink.
“My father offered you a job,” she started.
“Now we’re getting to it.”
“Did he?”
“Listen Ayia, this, what you're going through, it’s normal. I really appreciate the free drink, and the food, but just be thankful that your father cared enough to go after you.”
“And rich enough.”
“There is nothing wrong with that.” Kale took another drink, forcing himself to swallow it. He hoped they had beer here as well.
“Would you consider working for him?”
“Of course I would. I did. I said no. It’s not what I do.”
Ayia finished her drink and moved the empty glass aside.
“How old are you? Any family?”
This was getting a little too serious for him.
“I'm old enough, and no family,” he indulged.
Ayia’s lip curled.
“Fine, I'm almost forty, I think. Maybe half way between that and thirty. I don’t know.”
She looked surprised.
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“I can’t know for sure, I don’t know when I was born.” Kale could tell this was probably going to broach topics he didn’t enjoy. She took it in stride though, and didn’t ask the obvious question.
A moment passed as Ayia seemed lost in thought. Kale had seen it before. He rescued rich kids before and had seen them lost in their parent’s shadows. They never knew just how lucky they were.
“I really don’t want to live here, to spend the rest of my life here,” she began after a minute.
“I think everyone is aware of that,” Kale mouthed the word beer to the bartender who shook his head in recognition.
“No, that, what I did, it was quite dumb,” Ayia noticed Kale shaking his head in agreement, “Yes. No, what I meant is, I'm not meant for this life. My father is the CEO, not the owner, it’s not like I'm going to inherit his position. His wealth and many of the assets, but not the company itself. I am not interested in what he does.”
“Then?” was all he had to ask.
“I don’t know, yet. I have studied arts, music, architecture, philosophy, history, genetic biology, quantum mechanics, piercing principles, astro-navigation…”
“Whoa…ok. I'm sitting right here. I prefer having my ego stroked, not humiliated.”
Ayia laughed.
“No, I meant, I just don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Ok, pep talk time. Listen, I think you have time, you’ll figure it out. Pep time over.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard it all before,” she sighed, “I just think that whatever it is it won’t be here.”
Kale stopped her, touching her arm, and pointing towards a commotion by the entrance. The local security guards had a small disheveled man by his arms and were dragging him kicking and screaming out to the exit. He was yelling at the top of his lungs.
“DEATH!! Death to the rapists of my planet!”
Ayia turned back and looked at Kale.
“There is a time for punishment and justice is forthcoming. The time is at hand for the temple of the defilers to come crashing down!!” he continued.
One of the guards pulled on the man hard enough to throw him down the ground.
“Get out.”
“The foreigners will be expelled or executed!”
The guard had enough, and picked up the small man and tossed him out the entrance, to the resounding cheers of many inside.
A loud whistling scream pierced the room, something far above going overhead. Kale knew that sound right away. He took Ayia by the hand and began walking towards the exit.
“What?” she asked, but stopped at one of the screens that had a news broadcast. In it buildings were on fire. A newscaster was talking about something, but neither of them could make it out above the bar noise. Ayia’s face turned white.
“I know those buildings,” she said, spinning around, “That’s around the northern section of Antan, Gorba suburbs, I, played games out there, I…”
Kale grabbed her again.
“We need to get out of here now. That sound we heard earlier was an anti-personnel rocket, a crowd buster, I’ve heard…”
Another scream ripped over the bar. They began running for the entrance. Around them people were looking around at each other, not sure what was going on.
“That one was really high above the city, target is far away. I think those rebels are even closer than we think.”
They rushed outside; chaos was beginning to reign. When they arrived, the traffic of vehicles, both grounded and flying, seemed orderly. Now they were all disorganized, flying or driving everywhere. They stood on the side of the Crooked Light as Ayia called for their chauffeur.
“You need to get back to your tower and I will make it back to my ship and get off the planet. No offense, but I don’t like how things are playing out.”
A large thunderous crack rang out behind them, up above the bar. They both spun around, facing the bar, the large blinking lights of the facility blinding them. A group of armed men came running past them, seven of them, and disappeared around a corner behind the bar. Not even ten seconds later, three large military trucks, one armed with a very large gun in the back, came rushing down the main avenue. Behind them following more slowly was what appeared to be an armored tank, hovering above the street. It had two large barreled guns mounted on it. As it passed them, Ayia and Kale took a step back. The gravity field under the tank hummed, bending the light that passed through it, giving it the appearance of a bowl under the tank in the street.
As soon as that the tank turned the corner, the sky was filled with the screams of three aircraft. They came flying above the buildings, quickly passing by, bringing in their wake a gust of wind that threw debris everywhere. No sooner had they passed that they heard the first whistling scream of the rockets, somewhere up above in the night sky.
Then the sirens went off.
Kale pulled Ayia back away towards the wall.
“Let’s just step back a bit.”
“Kale, what’s going on?”
Kale shrugged his shoulders.
“We can’t go up in the a
ir now. Let’s find a way to get to the tower on the ground,” he started, but just at that moment, the chauffeur came hovering down over the top of the bar, gently gliding down to the entrance. The side door opened before it even reach the ground and one of the men Kale recognized as the CEO’s bodyguards jumped out.
“Miss Agusto, we need to go now.”
Ayia looked back at Kale.
Kale walked past her. “You probably shouldn’t be flying around right now, really easy target.”
“Ma’am, we need to get you back to the tower now, there is a threat…”
Ayia looked undecided.
“You go with them. That’s what you have to do. But really, try to convince them to go along the street level, it’s going to get messy.”
As if he had predicted it, something went flying out of control over their tops, crashing down some blocks down. A second later the shockwave of the crash and the gravity field bursting nearly knocked them off their feet. Kale, on his knees, caught Ayia’s eyes, and shook his head.
She started towards the chauffer, then stopped. She looked back at Kale.
“Can you get me to the tower?”
“No, I can’t. But I can get you off planet. You’ll be safe there until this dies down.”
One of the bodyguards, sensing he was about to lose what he came after, drew a side arm and pointed it straight at Kale.
“Whoa, wait. Hey, I'm not doing anything,” he threw his hands up in the air.
Ayia jumped in front of Kale. The bodyguard continued to point his weapon straight at them.
“I bet he could still kill me if he wanted,” he thought.
The bodyguard was clearly debating his options. He wanted to hurry up and get Ayia, but if he somehow hit her, he might as well be dead himself. As he debated his next course of action, another guard shot his head out of the passenger side door.
“Just leave her. It’s all done here. We need to get out before it’s us.” He shouted.
The guard with the gun was having an internal moment.
“CMON!” shouted the other one.
The guard hesitated, pursed his lips, then put his gun away and jumped back in the hovercraft. He took one look at Ayia, and shook his head. The craft hovered for a moment, then shot off into the sky.
The two of them stood there for a moment.
“That was, tense. Can I get another Rotten Egg before we go?”
Kale managed, with FEI’s help, to locate a vehicle, that even had wheels, and was able to hack the server in it to allow him the driving function. They sped down the main avenue onto an elevated highway that headed east towards the space port. Most of the fighting seemed to be taking place behind them, to the west, and Kale was thankful for that.
The Space port was a large complex, capable of handling over seven hundred spacecraft at one time if needed. It was shaped in a hexagon, with thirty large landing pads directly on the ground for the large commercial vessels and hundreds of more segmented docking bays for all the smaller ships. The highway entered the port through a tunnel underneath the landing pads and up into the central terminal. At the far northern edge of the space port was the military base. As they approached the spaceport, they noticed a heavy amount of descending traffic onto the military base.
“Sec-Unit ships,” Kale pointed out.
“We’re going to need them,” Ayia replied.
They drove through the tunnel and up into the terminal and were instantly greeted by groups of armed men. They were stopped and asked to exit. Kale attempted to show them his docking credits but they weren’t interested. He walked back to the car.
“They aren’t letting anyone off. They are using all of traffic control for their descent,” Kale explained.
“Now what?”
“I'm not sure. Something isn’t right here. This is a very large space port. Even with a full on war, there is no way these Sec-units should have that much control.”
Ayia looked. Kale was right, the Sec-unit soldiers had locked everything down. No one was going in and out of a space port that easily handled tens of thousands of people a day not even counting the cargo.
“FEI, I need help getting to you,” Kale spoke into his communicator, a small chip implanted into his left ear.
“Working on it,” was the reply.
“I can call my father, see if he can get them to let us in,” Ayia suggested.
“No, not yet. I think it would be better if no one knew who you were.”
“Sir, entering navigation points into your vehicle, please drive it there,” came the software’s voice.
“What am I looking for there FEI?” Kale asked as he got back into the car.
“Working on it.”
The point FEI gave went back through the tunnel, out into highway, and making a turn off into a set of cargo buildings adjacent to the space port. When they arrived, just outside a large domed warehouse, Kale turned off the vehicle and waited.
“What’s the deal FEI?”
“Working on it.”
Kale turned and smiled at Ayia.
“What can I say, I didn’t teach him many words.”
Two minutes passed when the door to the warehouse began to open, and a small cargo carrying tram began hovering out. It was an automated cargo transfer tram. They were a set of hovering cargo carriers used to ferry shipments between the warehouses and the port.
“Your ride sir.”
FEI was able to override the locks the Sec-Units setup on all external access to the cargo tunnels and setup an automated cargo tram to make some runs between the warehouse and the space port.
“I have run the tram several times already to confuse the system and not make it an easy give away. I have also made it look like it was authorized by Sec-Unit Seventeen. It should take you straight to me.”
They crawled into one of the cargo compartments, barely big enough for the two of them.
“We’re not going to run out of air are we?” Ayia asked.
“Hold your breath?” Kale joked.
Each of the smaller hangars had two accesses to it. One was for the people and another one for the automated deliveries for the cargo. Vast tunnels and chutes ran throughout the whole complex, run automatically by the space ports computers, hauling cargo to and from the ships and the outside warehouses. It was very efficient and also very easy to monitor. Several checkpoints throughout the system continuously scanned the cargo trams of their contents.
They were also easy to hack if you were a cutting edge AI. FEI had rewritten the code so that the scanners skipped the cargo pod the two were in, scanning a second one twice and allowing it to be seen as the empty one. It had also known that once the two were inside the pod that he would not be able to communicate with them until they reached the hangar.
FEI had no control over humans. He monitored the video transmissions from inside the port to attempt to notice if any of the men monitoring the cargo hauling system would notice. The vast majority of all cargo hauling was coming to and from the military base. Since all the civilian ships were grounded, it would seem very unusual that a long cargo tram was headed up there, especially since it was enough cargo for a larger trading vessel, and the Midnight Oil was anything but.
FEI quickly scanned its ship again. It was an older model Corgen /Stars Stiletto class luxury passenger ship. It was built thirty two years ago in Alioth in the giant ship yards by Corgen/Stars, one of the galaxy’s premium small ship makers. Its original design was for shuttling VIP’s and other high end business men back and forth between corporation planets. Before it could be put to that use though, and have all of its luxury components added in, the 2995 War of Allied Planets broke out.
It was a rebellion of several planets against both the Dominion and Commonwealth. Sick and tired of having war, raids and destruction rain on their planets from the constant conflict between the two power houses, they declared their own alliance, bucking the reins of both powerhouses. The shipyards at Alioth had aligned with t
he alliance in the hopes that their position as a premium ship building hub would allow them to continue selling to the Dominion and Commonwealth after the war. They further hoped to have a new third power become their new customer. When that happened, nearly every ship being built there was pressed into service for an Alliance navy.
The Midnight Oil, nameless at the time, never got its luxury suites installed. Instead, its three point three GU Hausen reactor was replaced by a larger four point one drive. This allowed it to maintain combat flight longer, nearly forty five minutes worth of combat time. This was a necessity as most space fighters usually had sixty to one hundred and twenty minutes worth of combat flight time.
In space, combat was unwieldy. Physics didn’t allow for proper close combat and dogfighting as could be done in the atmosphere. But because long distance weapons were unreliable, close combat was a necessity. It wasn’t long after the Hausen reactor became powerful enough to launch ships across the galaxy that they were adapted to provide a field around the ship that could be used to move the ship as if it were flying in the atmosphere. This allowed skilled fighter pilots to translate their planetary flying skills into outer space. The downside was the massive amounts of energy required to maintain that gravity field. This meant that most space battles were usually over in an hour or less. The grand battles fought by humans in outer space usually ended in stalemates, because both sides ran out of power to fight.
Being stranded floating in space because you ran out of enough juice to return to your mothership usually meant being picked off by long range weapons.
To become effective in combat, the Midnight Oil was given a large enough drive to provide better combat time, at the expense of space inside the ship itself. After the war, there was no attempt to return the ship to its intended setting, and the drive remained.
Some weapons were added, although FEI had no data in the memory banks as to what they might have been. In the time it was installed, FEI went through several guns that Kale had installed, then removed to sell. What happened more often, his guns were confiscated and never returned. That was their predicament at the moment.
The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1) Page 5