Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  CHAPTER 14

  Rada’s heart railed against her ribs. She swore. There was only one way off the ship—the shuttle. And she’d disabled the entrance to try to keep Evans from escaping.

  Except she could still get to it by going out another airlock and traversing the ship. And there was a chance she could shut down the countdown and save the vessel from destruction. Either way, she was going to need help.

  She took off for the bridge. As she ran, she poked around Evans’ device. Most of it had been locked down, but it appeared to maintain its basic functionality. Good. Would save her a trip to pick up Moles’ device. She flipped it to the default channel and raised it to her suit’s mouth.

  “Come in, bridge.”

  “This is the bridge,” a voice replied. “Who is this?”

  “Not important,” Rada said. “Listen—”

  “Not important? You are currently using Admiral Evans’ device. What happened to him?”

  “What happened is that he’s set the ship to destruct. If we don’t help each other out, in nine minutes, we’re all dead.”

  The man paused. “Just a second.”

  Along with communications, the stolen device still allowed her access to a basic map of the ship. Rada hooked right at an intersection and made for the main hallway toward the bridge.

  “You’re right.” The man sounded strangled. “The ship has been rigged to detonate. Please identify yourself, caller?”

  “My name is Rada Pence,” she said, deciding what the hell. “Admiral Evans is dead. So is the security team.”

  “You killed them.”

  “Correct.”

  “Oh, in that case, we should definitely help you out of this jam.”

  “I am a member of the crew that first discovered this ship.” Rada spotted the bridge doors and slowed. “Evans murdered them all. I survived by luck. My vendetta was against him, not you.”

  The man—she now believed he was the captain—chuckled hoarsely. “Hobart Evans murdered your crew?”

  “Is it that hard to believe? He just condemned all of you to die. After executing Plan Red on Io.” She drew to a stop before the sealed doors. “How far out is the incoming fleet, Captain?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Because they’re my friends. Here to reclaim what’s mine. They’re going to be a lot more sympathetic to you if we get out of here together.”

  The captain sighed into his comm. “We’re going to need a minute, Pence.”

  “Decide fast. In eight minutes, none of this matters.”

  While she waited, she skipped around the device, trying to see if she could send a message through the ship’s transmitter, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything but talk and access a few surface-level files.

  “Here’s the situation,” the captain said twenty seconds later. “We can’t shut down the countdown. We’re locked out of the system and the explosive is inside the engines. There’s no way to get to it. We’ll have to take the shuttle.”

  “That could be a problem, Captain,” Rada said. “Entry from inside the ship is disabled. We’ll have to do a spacewalk.”

  “We don’t have time for that! We barely have time to prep and launch!”

  “There is another option.”

  He laughed, tired and amused. “Flush ourselves out the airlock and wait to get scooped up? No dice. Our escorts can’t turn around for us. Your friends would tear them apart.”

  “Let me inside. I’ll talk to my people.”

  “That’s a no go. Admiral Evans was thoughtful enough to lock down the whole ship. Comms are out. We can’t even steer.”

  “Do the airlocks work?”

  “That’s about the only thing that does. The honorable admiral must have intended to leave them for his escape.”

  “Then we don’t have a choice,” Rada said. “Suit up and let’s go.”

  “You’re armed, aren’t you, Pence?”

  “I’m out of ammo. Anyway, I need you to spring the airlock and you need me to provide the pickup. Whatever our differences, the only way we get out of this is together.”

  “Gods damn it,” the captain growled. “Put your weapon on the floor and step back.”

  She tossed it down and moved ten feet back. “Done.”

  The doors parted three inches and stopped. On the other side, a man with a shaved head and a gray beard eyed her, then the pistol. The doors resumed opening.

  “Come on,” he said over his shoulder. “Unless you’d rather go down with the ship.”

  A young man and a young woman moved in behind him, faces scared inside the masks of their suits.

  The captain picked up the gun, examined its readout, and tossed it aside. He jogged down the hall, offering Rada a wry smile. “I’m Gene. And this is about the strangest alliance I’ve been a part of.”

  “I think that means it’s an effective one.” She fell in beside him. “How much air have you got?”

  “Twelve hours apiece. How do you intend to reach your people?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “We’re sure there’s no aliens in here?” the young man said.

  “There are no monsters on this ship,” Rada said. “Except me.”

  They ran down the tunnels to the port-side airlock. Outside it, Gene fiddled with his device. He scowled. Tried again. The doors cranked open. The four of them piled inside. The captain closed the doors behind them.

  “Have any of you ever done this before?” Rada said.

  “Taken a flying leap from a booby-trapped ship?” The young man laughed. “Got to confess that’s a new one for me.”

  “Clip yourselves together. We’re going to have a ton of velocity behind us. If we get separated, we could wind up a million miles apart.”

  They used the suits’ tethers to tie up, then triple-checked each other’s seals. By the time they were set, the timer on Evans’ showed less than four minutes.

  “Everyone ready?” Gene glanced between them. “Opening doors.”

  The last of the atmosphere hissed from the room. The doors opened in perfect silence, exposing them to the endless night. Together, they moved to the platform outside the airlock. Rada glanced down the length of the ship to confirm there was nothing that would shred them apart as the vessel accelerated past.

  “Jump on three,” she said, extending her hands to Gene and the young man. “One. Two. Three.”

  She bent her knees and pushed off. So did the others. They tumbled away from the ship; the young man had jumped with more force, causing them to spin slowly, the stars wheeling around them. The alien vessel was a long, dark, multi-jointed finger. It continued to accelerate, drawing away.

  For what little good it would do, Rada flipped her comm to an emergency channel. “Simm. Toman. Any members of the Hive. Are you out there? This is Rada Pence. And I need a ride.”

  She repeated this a few times. The ship shrank against the backdrop of stars, its engines a white torch. The countdown ticked on. As it neared zero, Rada blacked out her mask, keeping her helmet’s video camera running, the feed displaying on the inside of her visor.

  A spearpoint of light bulged from the ship. It vanished in an aster of white and blue and orange. The others groaned as if watching a fireworks display. Rada thought she should feel sad—the ship was gone, irreplaceable, its mysteries stolen from human hands forever—but maybe that explained why she felt nothing but relief.

  The burst faded, twinkling away into nothing.

  “So,” Gene said. “Ready to let us in on the rest of your plan?”

  “There isn’t one.” Rada stared after the ship, trying to pick out the IRP escorts from the stars. “But my friends wanted that ship more than anything. We couldn’t have fired off a bigger flare.”

  “Who are these friends of yours, anyway?”

  “They won’t hurt you. They’re with the Hive.”

  “The Hive?” Gene’s mask was back to transparency. He frowned, gray brows knitting toge
ther. “I’ve always wanted to see that place.”

  Through a lot of trial and error, the four of them gestured themselves into stability, putting an end to their spin. She continued to broadcast, uncertain that her suit had the strength to project her signal across the distance. Even if it did, if the two forces met and started swapping missiles, her signal would be lost in the wash.

  But she had to trust they would come.

  Forty minutes later, faint specks appeared between the stars. Missiles or the deaths of ships, she couldn’t tell.

  “Hello,” a voice cut through her comm. “You people there, are you alive?”

  Rada searched the sky for the source of the voice. “Simm? Is that you?”

  “This is Simm,” he said, as if there were nothing unusual about being recognized by a random stranger floating around in the abyss. “Wait—Rada?”

  “It’s me,” she laughed. “What took you so long?”

  -o0o-

  The Tine was among the five-ship fleet, but it was the flagship that scooped them up. As Rada and the three IRP refugees exited the airlock, they were met by four marines pointing rifles at their chests.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Rada said. “They’re the only reason I’m alive.”

  The crewmen were led away. Rada was marched down the hall by two more marines. She stripped off her helmet, grateful for the stale yet circulatory smell of ship air. The marines stopped in front of a blue door and nodded to it.

  Rada opened it and shouted, stumbling back. The room wasn’t a room: it was vacuum, stars shining to all sides. Two desks and several chairs floated in sync. Bookshelves lined the only wall, the glass cases sealed against the rigors of flight. A man stood across the space gazing outward into the galaxy.

  Rada’s brain collapsed the scene into sense. It wasn’t vacuum; the floor and walls were lined with screenage, displaying the view from outside. She took an exaggerated step over the threshold and toed the floor. Her eyes told her it wasn’t there, but her foot insisted it was real. She stepped forward.

  At the far wall that didn’t look like a wall, Toman didn’t turn. “It’s gone, isn’t it?”

  Rada drifted forward. “The ship was taken by Hobart Evans, admiral of the IRP. He was on it today. When I came for him, he set the ship to explode. The crew and I barely made it off in time.”

  “He blew it up? On purpose?” He turned from the window, palms held out and up as if he were carrying a log. “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he was going to lose it.”

  “In what world is it better to smash a statue than to see it in someone else’s foyer? To kill a lost puppy rather than to hand it over to its rightful owner?”

  “In the same world where it’s better to kill hundreds of workers than to risk one of them talking.” She unlatched the device from her suit. “I took this from Evans. His personal device. I don’t know what’s on it, but it’s yours.”

  He walked across the starry floor and took the glossy square pad from her. “Encrypted to the gills, I’d wager.”

  “I’m sorry we lost the ship, Toman.”

  “It’s not your fault. Unless it was. How did you get out?”

  She explained, starting from the beginning. He’d heard most of the details from Ferri’s covert transmissions, however, and she was able to skip to that day, the execution of Plan Red and how she’d snuck onto the alien vessel. He looked equally parts horrified and enthralled by what had happened on the ship.

  “Why did you have to go after Evans?” he said once she was done. “You knew we were coming.”

  “Because I knew I wouldn’t have a second chance.”

  “If you were that intent on killing him, you could have assassinated him once he was in our custody. Meanwhile, I would have a priceless alien relic full of advanced technology.”

  “Sure,” Rada said. “Or he would have triggered the countdown as he was being arrested, you wouldn’t have known about it, and the explosion would have killed you, too. Because you’d have gone on board, right?”

  “Probably.” He turned back to the stars. “I don’t think they even had a chance to study it. Such a waste.”

  A moment passed. “Have you heard anything out of Ferri?”

  “I don’t think she made it. Her last transmission sounded like total anarchy. We’re sending in a team to be sure.”

  “Can you ask them to find out what happened to Sollivan? The man who got me out?”

  “We’ll find out.” He reached out as if to touch the stars, but his fingers were stopped by the screen. “That’s the worst of it, isn’t it? So many people fought and died, and at the end of the day, we’re no closer to answers than we were before.”

  She wanted to believe he was only talking about the loss of the ship. But looking out at all that nothing, the ocean of vacuum punctuated by gigantic balls of atomic fire, she believed he was talking about more than the events of the last few months.

  He was talking about everything.

  -o0o-

  Simm was on the Tine. Docking the ships mid-flight would have been an unnecessary risk, so she filled him in over video.

  “That,” he said, “is easily the most astounding story I’ve ever heard.”

  “Really?” Rada laughed. “Because you look like I just told you what I had for breakfast. In detail. Including the toppings on my oatmeal.”

  He smiled. Over video, he had a much easier time making eye contact. “It’s the toppings that make oatmeal.”

  “If you have any tips on how you stay so calm, I’d like to hear them.”

  “Oh, it’s very easy. First, never do anything half as crazy as you make a habit of doing. Second, come to terms with the fact we’re nothing more than accidental consciousness temporarily inhabiting a tube of walking gunk.”

  “On second thought, keep your tips to yourself.”

  As soon as they wrapped up, she flopped into her bunk and stayed there for twelve hours.

  Two days later, and halfway to the Hive, Toman invited her back to the starry room. There, he told her that Ferri was dead, and so was Sollivan.

  “I’m sorry,” they both said at once.

  Toman laughed with little humor. “Well, they both saved more lives than they took. What more can you do?”

  “Not die in a madman’s brutal purge?”

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  Rada gazed down through the floor. “How did they know you were coming?”

  “Turns out the Hive is home to more than busy bees. We had a mole, too. It’s since been dealt with.” He leaned against the invisible wall. “You’ve had a couple days to recover. Given any thought on what you’d like to do next?”

  “Aren’t we going back to the Hive?”

  “I meant in terms of the next phase of your life.”

  Rada snorted. “Is the genie granting wishes?”

  “That ship and all its ensuing properties should have been yours. Matters of cosmic justice aside, I think you’re pretty cool. As resourceful as a reef. As sharp as one, too. I can use that.” He shrugged. “If you don’t want to work for me, I’m happy to dropkick you wherever else you want to go.”

  “Know what?” She let her fingers touch the star-spangled screen. “I want to be a pilot.”

  “A pilot? Do you have any training?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t need to want to be one, would I?”

  “An awful lot of people want to be pilots.” Toman pushed off the wall and headed for his desk. “Then again, very few people have just left a trail of kicked asses across the entire system. I’ll see what I can do.”

  She kept herself from breaking down until she got back to her bunk and closed the door. Then she collapsed on the bed. She grieved in part for Stem, who had known nothing but to live roughly and had died doing the same. For Yed, who hadn’t figured out what he wanted or what he should become, and for Genner, who had found a niche that wasn’t nearly as safe as she believed. For Parson and Sollivan, for wanting to do
good against the indifference of physics and politics.

  And for herself, too. For witnessing things she didn’t want to see and for doing things she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of doing.

  She had done them, though. Although they weighed on her, they lifted her, too: because it meant she was stronger than she had believed. And she wasn’t sure she’d found her limits.

  -o0o-

  They arrived at the Hive. That same day, she was assigned to the piloting sims. She was quietly disappointed that she wasn’t allowed to practice on the Tine, but it had suffered a few scrapes and dings in the dust-up with the IRP fleet.

  She soon found she had nothing to complain about. The sims were mind-blowing. Completely immersive. So real that walking out of them left her disoriented, confused by the dimness of the physical world. She seemed to screw up nonstop, but her instructor, a woman named Val, assured Rada that she had all the talent necessary for the job. The only thing she had to do was practice.

  Gene and his two crewmen were processed and sent home. Wary of reprisals from IRP, the Hive stayed on high alert, ships ready on their pads. From what Rada picked up, the IRP was too involved with a massive internal shakeup to have any desire to spark a conflict with one of the system’s largest naval magnates.

  For several days, she didn’t see much of anyone besides Val and Simm, who was on leave but was more than happy to answer all the questions he could about operating a starship. Learning to pilot could be as easy as you wanted to make it—many of the hauling vessels in the Lanes had no crew whatsoever, operating entirely by autopilot—but Rada wanted to do it right. Anyway, focusing on the trade kept her mind from spinning away into the places she didn’t want it to go.

  One afternoon, Val ejected her from the sim mid-combat.

  Rada sat up from the lounger and pulled her headset away in confusion. “What’s the deal? I was right about to nail that Cobra!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll mark it on your scorecard, Ace.” Val gave her a dry look. “Toman wants to see you.”

  He awaited her at the shore of the lighthouse, grinning with a childish abandon Rada had never seen on him before.

  “Rada!” He squished down to help her from the amphibious cart. “You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?”