Heart of the Nebula

by Joe Vasicek

  “Through my contacts,” she said. “The delegates from Zeta Nabat.”

  “Isn’t that an old Imperial penal colony?”

  “Right. The Imperials used the system as a prison because of its location in a small spur of the Good Hope Nebula. Until the starlanes were built, the only way in or out was through old-style interstellar ramjets.”

  “Like the ones that brought the ancient patriarchs from Earth to Gaia Nova.”

  “Exactly.”

  James began to pace the narrow room. “So your father wants to send us into the heart of the Good Hope Nebula, using antiquated sublight transport ships bought from the Zeta Nabattans?”

  “It’s not as crazy as it seems. They still use the ships to get between Zeta Nabat and its neutron binary. The technology is sound.”

  “For mid-scale mining operations, perhaps. But this is an exodus we’re talking about—a voyage of almost twenty parsecs into the heart of the nebula. At sublight speeds, it’ll take over a hundred standard years to reach the Chira system. How can we possibly do it?”

  “Simple,” she said. “We put the majority of the population in cold storage and re-purpose the transports as generation ships. When the fleet arrives a hundred or so years later, our descendants thaw us out, and together we settle the new world.”

  James stopped pacing and glanced over at her, his expression skeptical. “And the Zeta Nabattans claim they have the right equipment for this?”

  “Yes,” Sara said, rising to her feet. “I just struck a deal with them—that was my contact. All we’ve got to do now is meet them at the rendezvous point.”

  She swallowed and held her breath as she waited for his response. His gaze was so piercing, it felt as if he were staring right through her.

  “Can you see now why we have to keep this a secret?” she asked. “If our plans got out, the Hameji could easily move to stop us. Our only hope is to jump out before they know what’s going on.”

  “But you do plan to put this through the General Assembly for a vote, right? You’re not just going to throw this on the people by dictatorial order?”

  “Yes, of course.” If we can.

  He took a deep breath and went back to pacing. After almost half a minute, he stopped and shook his head. “It’s just—it goes so far against our democratic principles. So many secrets…”

  “If there was another way to save the Colony, we would do it. Believe me.”

  Please believe me, James.

  He looked at her again, the anger deflating out of him. “You’re right.”

  “So you won’t go public with this? You’ll keep it off the record?”

  “For now, yeah. But when we get back to the Colony, I’m going to need some more answers.”

  “You’ll get them,” she promised, relief flooding over her. “You will.”

  * * * * *

  James’s feet felt heavy as he walked out of Sara’s quarters down the lavishly furnished main corridor of the Freedom Star. Now that he knew what she’d been hiding, the secret weighed on him like a thousand astral tonnes. He could understand why it was necessary to keep the existence of the station’s jump drive from public knowledge, but that didn’t change the way he felt about it.

  He reached the end of the corridor and descended the staircase to the observation room at the front of the ship. Lars sat alone, staring out at the infinite starscape. The faint, wispy tendrils of the Good Hope Nebula loomed in the distance, reflecting the orange-yellow light of Auriga Nova and the blue-white light of Belarius beyond.

  As James reached the base of the stairs, the view shifted ever so slightly, becoming more and more distant as the walls began to shrink. He took hold of the banister and held his breath as the rapid crescendo of nausea and disorientation swept over him. Shortly after reaching its climax, however, the sensation of jumpspace subsided and normalized.

  Like a true spacefarer, Lars hadn’t even flinched. He stared out at the milky-white starfield, his expression unchanged.

  “Attention, passengers” came Captain Jarvis’s voice over the ship-wide loudspeaker. “I would like to thank you for your patience and understanding during the last few maneuvers. Thanks to the brave efforts of our crew, as well as those of Lieutenant McCoy and Ensign Jones, we have successfully evaded Hameji pursuit. Our ship has sustained moderate damage, but our FTL drives are still fully functional, and should remain so for the duration of our voyage.”

  A ragged cheer sounded through the bulkheads, from the crew and other passengers alike. James was about to add his own voice to the others, but when he saw that Lars was silent, he held back.

  “Since we won’t be taking the starlanes, our return voyage will take significantly longer. Currently, we’re about one-point-one light years from Gaia Nova, in the direction of Tajjur Prime. We don’t anticipate that the Hameji will make any serious effort to interdict us, but as a precaution against that, we will make a series of short micro-jumps in the next twenty-four hours before redirecting our course for Karduna. If all goes well, I expect that we will arrive in a little less than four standard weeks. We may have to ration some of our stores, but our food synthesizers are more than adequate to sustain us.

  “On behalf of myself and the rest of the crew, I thank you for your patience and understanding during this crisis. We will do our best to provide for your safety and comfort, and will keep you apprised of any new developments as they occur.”

  The loudspeakers switched off, and the sound of applause trickled through the bulkheads. James joined in this time, but Lars remained conspicuously silent.

  “You all right there? We’re safe, now.”

  Lars shook his head. “What does it matter, when all our work has ended in failure? The Hameji, the conference—we have nothing left to hope for.”

  Of course, James thought, mentally kicking himself. Lars had staked everything on the outcome of the conference. The massacre must have left him devastated.

  “At least we escaped with our lives. You can’t win every battle, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost the war.”

  Lars narrowed his eyes. “You’re not much of a diplomat, are you? This isn’t like a military campaign, which you can break up into discrete engagements. It’s more like a construction project, where you build the framework and set it in motion before attaching the modules. Today, the entire framework that I’ve been building for the past five years has been utterly swept away.”

  “But surely you can start over.”

  Lars shook his head. “This conference was our one big chance to change things—not only for us, but for all the occupied systems. We knew the risks, of course, and we did all we could to mitigate them, but risks or no, we had to press forward. And now, we’ve lost everything.”

  Not everything, James wanted to tell him. The patrician has a plan—a good one, in fact. As much as he wanted to let him in on it, though, he knew that Lars would never keep it secret. In fact, he would probably use it as grounds for an impeachment hearing, since the secret deal with the Nabattans was a clear breach of executive authority.

  “If it’s any consolation, my sister did her best to prevent the massacre. It wasn’t Qasar who gave the kill order—it was a rogue faction within the Hameji ranks.”

  “But the Generals stood aside and let them do it. Now, there’s no way we can save our people.”

  You’re wrong, James wanted to tell him. There is another way. But if he told Lars now, the patrician’s plans would all be ruined.

  “We’ll find a way—we always have.”

  “Not after this,” said Lars, shaking his head. “We’ve been through a lot, but I don’t think our people can survive much longer.”

  “Cheer up,” said James, patting him on the shoulder. “We’re not dead yet.”

  Lars looked at him forlornly. “It’s not just our people I’m mourning, James. It’s our way of life. The Colony was an experiment in liberal democracy, and I fear that that experiment has failed. If our way of life can’t
survive the occupation, then our dream of freedom will die with us.”

  “You always were an idealist,” James said softly. And that’s exactly why I can’t tell you what I know.

  Lars sighed. “The thing I fear most is that my ideals will die before I do.”

  “They won’t, Lars—not if I can do anything about it.”

  “And if you can’t?”

  James left the answer unsaid.

  * * * * *

  Kyla lay on the bed and stared out the porthole window. The starfield was like an endless glittering blanket, or perhaps a curtain, veiling the darkness with its soft, milky light. She wondered how many people were looking out at the same stars right now, and what they were thinking. But then she realized that each star had its own set of worlds, and each world had its own cities and domes and space colonies. If anything, it was the stars looking out at her, not the other way around.

  She reached up as if to touch them, but the glass was cold against her fingertips, making her shiver. For all the countless stars and worlds out there, they offered cold comfort in the depths of space. Thousands of them all around her, yet none close enough to give any warmth.

  Just like people.

  Her stomach growled, reminding her how long it had been since she’d eaten. She tried to ignore it, but after gorging herself for the past few days, hunger seemed like an unbearable torture. Clutching her stomach and moaning softly, she managed to hold out for a little less than two hours before she could no longer resist.

  She cautiously opened the door and glanced in both directions before stepping out into the empty corridor. The ever-present hum of the ventilation systems punctuated the silence, but otherwise the ship seemed empty. Since the lights hadn’t dimmed, however, she knew that it was still upshift, which meant that the others were still awake. Probably they were in some kind of meeting—and since she didn’t hear any talking, that probably meant that no one was at the bar in the observation room.

  She hurried down the corridor and crept hastily down the stairs. Her stomach ached so much that she didn’t notice James and Lars until she was almost in front of them. For a second she froze, torn between running for cover and continuing on her way. Since they’d already seen her, however, there was no sense in running, so she took a deep breath and pretended to ignore them.

  “Hello there,” said James, shattering any chance of that. “Hungry?”

  “A little,” she mumbled. She walked up to the bar and began stabbing her way through the menu on the table-screen.

  “Here—care to sit down with us?”

  Kyla hesitated for a moment, glancing at the two men out of the corner of her eye. All she wanted was to take some food and get out, but the request seemed harmless enough.

  “Can’t stay long,” she mumbled as she sat down across the table from him.

  “Why? Got somewhere to go?”

  “No. Just—can’t.”

  “If it’s the Hameji you’re worried about, you can relax,” said James. “We’re far enough out that there’s no way they could catch us. From here on out, it’s a smooth flight all the way home.”

  “Right,” she said, sinking further into her chair. “Home.”

  He looked at her funny for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, we’ve got a while before we get there. Since we’re flying on our own jump drives now, it’ll take us almost a month to get back.”

  “A month?”

  “Yeah. We can’t take the starlanes, since the Hameji will be watching them. They can’t watch all of the space between here and Karduna, though, so as long as we stay in deep space, we should be clear.”

  The prospect of an extra month of travel gave Kyla little comfort if she was just going to end up where she had started. Not for the first time, she wished that James had never found her.

  They sat in silence for about a minute. James kept eying her, as if struggling to find something to say, but Lars only stared out the window at the myriad stars. He seemed even more melancholic than she did, which surprised her. These people had everything she would never have—plenty of food, plenty of money, a comfortable place to sleep, a beautiful starship, people who cared about them. What did they have to be sad about?

  “Hey,” she said, looking at Lars. “What’s your problem?”

  “My problem?” asked James.

  “No, his. What’s the matter with you?”

  Lars turned and regarded her coolly. “Do you know why we came out here?”

  “No,” she admitted, though she vaguely remembered them telling her before. “Why?”

  “We came out here for the people like you—the ones who are poor and starving. We wanted to change things, so that you wouldn’t have to run away. We had a dream to make all our worlds safe and prosperous, just like the days before the Hameji, but now, that dream is gone. The Hameji massacred it with the conference.”

  His words took Kyla aback. There was a strength of conviction in his voice, a charismatic fervor that nearly entranced her. At the same time, what could he know about the poor and starving people below decks? He wore the simple working-class clothes of a merchanter, but he was surrounded by more wealth and luxury than she’d ever known. Blood rushed to her cheeks, and she clenched her fists in rage.

  “What makes you think you know me?” she asked, surprising herself with her own forcefulness.

  “Whoa, calm down there,” said James. “He didn’t mean anything by—”

  “No, that’s all right,” said Lars, stopping him. “She has a right to know why I think I can speak for her.” He looked Kyla in the eye, his gaze surprisingly gentle. “The truth is, I can’t. Only you can speak for yourself. So please, speak your mind. Tell us about the change that you want to see.”

  Of all the things that Lars could have said, nothing was quite so effective at deflating her rage and anger. She blinked a few times before she realized that he was serious—that he really wanted to listen.

  “I just want a chance to start over,” she said softly. “You rich people don’t know what it’s like on the lower decks. When my mother died, life became a living hell.”

  “Why didn’t you just go to child services?” James asked.

  Kyla glared at him. “I’d rather go work in a brothel—at least there, I’d get paid.”

  “She’s got a point,” said Lars. “Social services reform has been far too long in coming. Some of the abuses of the system would make your skin crawl, though I was under the impression that they were isolated incidents. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “You people are wrong about a lot of things,” Kyla said, her anger starting to rise again. “You sit here in luxury, feasting on wine and animal-grown food, and you think you’re doing something to help the rest of us.”

  “Hey, that isn’t fair,” said James. “I’m a soldier—I put my life on the line with every mission. You think you’re starving now? I’d like to see how long you’d make it without any supply convoys.”

  “Oh, yeah? And I’d like to see how long you’d last as a girl in the underworld.”

  Lars sighed. “Please, let’s not fight. We aren’t enemies here. Kyla, you said you want a chance to start over, and we want you to as well. We’re trying to help you—imperfectly, of course, but as best we can. And not just you, but everyone else like you.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Sometimes it seems like you people just don’t care.”

  “But we do care,” said James. “We care enough to die for you, if that’s what it takes. It seems to me that you just don’t know how much we care.”

  Maybe.

  “I don’t need your help,” Kyla muttered. “I can get along fine on my own.”

  “On the contrary,” said Lars. “We all depend on each other: you and me on James to defend us, James and you on me for the proper oversight to protect our freedoms, and us on you to build a stable society. Without each other, everything would fall apart, and we’d all be left with nothing.”

  Jus
t like when my mother died? Though the words were unspoken, they hurt Kyla like a knife she’d plunged into her own chest. If she didn’t have anyone, she’d rather go to a place where her memories wouldn’t haunt her. And even if she did…

  “Look,” said James, “how old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Sixteen? Good. That’s old enough to find work, even as a minor.”

  “Why?” she asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It gives you a chance at that new start you said you’re looking for. When we get back to the station, I’ll apply for temporary guardianship over you. That ought to keep you out of child services long enough to get your feet back on the floor. And in two years when you’re eighteen, you’ll be an adult, free to come and go as you please. How does that sound?”

  Kyla eyes widened, and she frowned in a failed attempt to hide her own shock. “Why would you do that?”

  James rose to his feet as the serving bot came out with her food. “Because I care.”

  With that, he left. The spider-like serving bot laid a steaming hot plate of beans in front of her, while across the table Lars chuckled.

  “You’ll find that James will go to great lengths not to lose an argument. He’s a man of his word, though—you can trust that he means what he says.”

  “Maybe,” Kyla muttered, still stung. Even so, she didn’t know if she was ready to trust anyone.

  Chapter 10

  “Attention passengers and crew,” Captain Jarvis’s voice came over the Freedom Star’s speakers. “We are preparing to make the final jump in just a few moments. Our estimated time to arrival at the Colony is approximately forty-five standard minutes. Stand by.”

  Sara held her breath and closed her eyes as the universe began to spin around her. For a brief moment, she felt as if she were falling, or perhaps collapsing in on herself. The moment soon passed, though, and she opened her eyes to find herself staring out at a disk-shaped station amid a cluster of asteroids.