Blackstar Command 1: Prominence

by A. C. Hadfield

  “I know you two speak common, and I know you don’t want to die,” Bandar drawled. “Are you going to make me repeat myself?”

  “Do as he says, Sen,” Kai said. He dropped his P&G back onto the upturned bed and tried not to stare at the footlocker.

  Reluctantly, Senaya placed her pistols back into her pockets. She snarled at the older man, which elicited a smile, or perhaps a grimace, it was hard to tell behind the chrome prosthetic faceplate covering the entire right side of his face and the scar tissue disfiguring most of the left side.

  “Better,” Trace said, lowering his weapon a few inches. “At least we can be civil about this, right?” He stared straight at Kai, those dark dead eyes boring their way through Kai’s body as though he could see what he was hiding behind his back.

  “I guess the next thing,” Kai said, “would be to ask what you want.”

  Bandar inclined his head. “Aye, I guess that would.”

  A pause, the stench of ignition fluid stung the hairs in Kai's nostrils, the sharp acidic scent making him light-headed. But he couldn't move because to do that would be to reveal what he had, and he'd rather die right there than give up a clue to his father's whereabouts.

  “Well?” Senaya said with a sigh. “Are you going to give us a clue, or do we literally have to ask you what you want?”

  Kai tensed at her outburst.

  Trace just grimaced-smiled again and narrowed his eyes.

  “A mouth like yours is an efficient way to die fast,” the older man said. “But I don’t have the time to clean your smoldering remains off my ship.”

  “Your ship?” Senaya said, standing as tall as her short frame would allow.

  Kai glared at her. What the hell was she playing at? But as he looked into those wide eyes of hers, he saw it: pure fear.

  This was just her way of dealing with it.

  Fronting it out and hoping.

  “Let me make this easy for you kids. You clearly have no idea what you’re doing. I’ll be taking this ship and all that is left in it. I’ll also be salvaging the ground weapons out there, along with the broken fragments of your pathetic tug. In return, you kids get to fight another day. In the grand scheme of things, this is a good outcome for all concerned.”

  Senaya’s lips twitched.

  Kai spun to face Bandar and spoke before Senaya got them killed. “Fine, it’s just a crappy Host ship anyway. There’s nothing else of value. The pirates took it all. But how are we going to get home? You can’t just leave us out here to freeze to death. Where’s the good outcome in that?” He just hoped he’d have time to grab the artifact and the footlocker while Bandar was helping himself to everything else.

  Bandar's body tensed, and his strong hands gripped the barrel of his weapon ever so slightly tighter. "There's a ground buggy outside. I'll graciously leave that behind. You'll get home—eventually. Now, get the hell off my ship."

  It seemed negotiations were over.

  The flame blaster's barrel came up, and Bandar Trace stepped backward, allowing them passage through the door, which left Kai with a conundrum: he couldn't let go of the tetrahedron, but he wanted to take his rifle and the footlocker with him.

  He was about to speak when Trace clicked off the safety mechanism and glared directly at him. With no other option, Kai had to leave the P&G and the footlocker behind.

  Senaya stepped up behind him, and the pair moved toward the door.

  “Hands out front, kiddo,” Bandar growled.

  Kai raised his hands and slipped by the older man, suddenly feeling claustrophobic in the tightness of the passageway. He could even hear the reservoir of ignition fluid bubbling.

  One pull of the trigger and he and Senaya would be toast. Literally.

  The heat of the weapon pressed against his skin, making sweat bead and drip down his face. Senaya stayed close behind and followed Kai as they were led out of the ship.

  Once outside, Bandar Trace ordered them to stop. “Wait there,” he barked and slipped back inside the ship.

  A few seconds later, too quick a time for Kai to consider running for it, Trace exited the ship, the flame blaster now holstered behind his back. He was carrying the footlocker. He threw it at Kai. “Here, take that. I saw you looking at it, and well, don’t say that old Bandar isn’t generous. I’m keeping the P&G, though. That’s too nice to give up.”

  Kai caught the footlocker against his chest with a thud. He wanted to say something, but there was a curious look in Bandar’s eyes that Kai couldn’t quite make out.

  He sensed, though, that Trace knew more about it than he was letting on.

  Before Kai could further the conversation, Trace gestured a command over his wristband, and right above Kai, the whir of ion engines belched into life.

  A large black craft the shape of an arrowhead appeared in the dark sky, its shape picked out by a series of landing lights. A dozen or more grapple lines shot out from the hull and wrapped around the Host ship and the two sections of Kai’s tug.

  “We ought to have one of those,” Senaya said into Kai’s ears. “Would make this whole business a lot easier.”

  “Remind me when I’m rich. Oh, wait, don’t, because if I were rich, I wouldn’t be on this stinking planet getting hijacked by Bandar damned Trace.”

  The aforementioned rogue grabbed one of the grapple lines and shot up toward his ship as it retracted into the hull. Kai watched him expertly maneuver into the hatch.

  Senaya shook her head and stomped off into the desert in search of the ground buggy.

  Before Trace disappeared into his black arrow, he stopped and turned to look at Kai and then fished something from his pocket and let it drop.

  Kai caught the object and inspected it. It was a token, a matte black coin with a binary dot code stamped on its surface.

  “One favor, kid. Use it wisely,” Trace said before reentering his craft.

  Within seconds, the black ship roared upward, taking its cargo with it and then accelerating northwards into no-man’s-land.

  While Senaya was driving the rickety old ground buggy back towards him, Kai stared at the token and then at the footlocker.

  What did it mean?

  Why did Bandar Trace give him the box and this favor? Not that he was a man with whom you’d want to cash in a favor, because if you did that, then you were indebted.

  And no Zarundan wanted to be indebted to Bandar Trace.

  Senaya pulled up in front of him. The ground buggy had seen better days. Smoke poured from its exhaust, and the sound of the engine told him the pistons were likely on their way out. Its four tires were badly repaired with polymer strapping that would limit it to barely twenty kilometers an hour.

  “You coming, then?” Senaya asked. “I got your paperweight safe and sound. I suggest we get moving before we become Zarundan ice sculptures.”

  “Sure,” Kai said, taking the rear seat on the buggy and not even protesting about Senaya wanting to drive. He gripped his father’s footlocker and thought about Tallis and Bandar and how the hell he was going to win the Zarunda Classic now that he had no salvage or tech to speak of and a racing ship that could barely fly.

  “This has been one awful day,” Kai said.

  “I've had worse," Senaya replied under the roar of the engines as she throttled the buggy. A belch of black smoke shot out the back, and they rolled onward into the night, the start of a half-cycle journey back to Kai's workshop.

  “That doesn’t make things better, but at least we’re still alive,” Kai said.

  For how long, though, he couldn’t guess.

  With the blight getting worse and his prospects not looking good, the odds of dying on this planet were getting shorter by the day.

  Chapter 5

  When they eventually arrived at the workshop, having had to stop twice to repair the buggy and once to hitch a lift from a traveling pilgrimage, they found the place ransacked.

  The overhead strip lights flickered on and off in intervals. The shop’s pow
er supply had been tampered with, but thankfully it had enough juice to light and heat the place for now.

  Not that this helped much.

  It just meant he could see the damage more clearly, adding to his misery.

  Within the main garage, his tool chests were overturned. A lifetime’s collection of tools broken and strewn about the place. Many of them had been left to him by his father, the rest he’d had to salvage or repair with Senaya’s engineering skills.

  The chassis of his painstakingly restored G10-class racing ship lay on its stand, twisted out of shape and smoldering with plasma residue.

  Three long years of dedicated work all gone in a matter of a single night.

  Whoever had done this had bypassed his security system. That was no easy task, which spoke of a professional outfit. This wasn’t just pirates.

  Senaya walked around the components laid out on the workbenches lining the walls, tallying up the damage on a holoscroll. “They’ve wrecked the transmission conduits,” Senaya said. “And the propulsion computers have been destroyed. The memory cores have been fried to death.”

  Kai flopped into an old chair in the corner of the garage and placed his head between his hands. Rage filled him briefly before dissipating into a sense of resignation. At least he still had the tetrahedron. He had taken it from the footlocker and kept it in his pocket for the ride home, not willing to risk losing it on the way.

  “It’s my own fault,” he said. “For even trying. I should have known this would happen. Bad luck sticks to my boot like dung. The bigger teams would never have stood for an upstart like me trying to get in on the race. Let’s face it, we’re going to be stuck here forever, aren’t we?”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Senaya said. “I don’t know what, but we’ll sort it. Hey, we survived an encounter with Bandar Trace. If we can do that, we can find a way to compete.”

  “We only have two days left, and we have nothing to race in.”

  Senaya shrugged. “Something will turn up.”

  Kai was not convinced, but he didn’t have time to argue the point.

  His wristband vibrated with an incoming call. The ID said it was one of his pals.

  “Who’s that calling this early in the morning?” Senaya said.

  “Reykon.”

  “Odd time for him,” Senaya said. “He doesn’t usually surface from his pit until after midday.”

  Curious, Kai answered the call. “Hey, Reykon, what’s going on? It’s a bit early for you, isn’t it?” Kai set the call to speaker so Senaya could be in on the conversation.

  “I take it you guys haven’t heard yet? I’ve been trying to call for the last five hours.”

  “We were out of signal,” Kai said. “We had a little issue to deal with. Is it about my shop being wrecked, because if it is, I already know. I’m looking at the mess right now.”

  “What? That’s awful news,” Reykon said but without much conviction, then added, “I guess it’s a bad time for bad news right now. You didn’t hear about the Host attack on Haleedez and Calrion Sigma?”

  “Whoa, no, you sure it’s the Host?”

  “Look at the feeds, Kai, it's all over the Coalition media. The defense force has already started calling up reservists just in case. They're saying this was just a one-off terrorist attack, that the Host are nowhere near their former power, but they're putting the terror alert to the maximum in the meantime. It's a great way of getting off the planet, Kai. We've been given a great benefits package. Why don't you and Sen come and join us? We're only patrolling some of the outer-ring planets. Easy work, man."

  Senaya heard this and brought up a news feed on their holoprojector. That was at least one thing the saboteurs hadn’t destroyed.

  While Reykon was selling the idea of signing up as a Coalition reservist, Kai watched the video footage of the Host ship on Haleedez and then another on Calrion Sigma.

  In both cases, the defense network was bypassed.

  “This is crazy,” Senaya said. “Biggest thing in my lifetime.”

  “Right?” Reykon said. “Are you guys with us? I can pull some strings and get you on a subspace jump to our battle group. The old gang back together again, kicking Host’s ass.”

  Kai’s guts tightened. He thought back to the days of the last war. He was just a kid then and was shielded from most of it, but his parents fought in their own ways.

  Nothing about it was good.

  There was little ass kicking and hijinks. It ruined people’s lives.

  Ended many too.

  “I… don’t think so,” Kai said. “I’ve got a race to prepare for, and this is just a random attack. The Coalition has enough resources to deal with it. You saw how quickly the destroyers responded.”

  Senaya looked at Kai with an expression of disappointment on her face.

  “Look, Reykon, I've got to go. I've got another call on the line. I'll speak to you later," Kai said and hung up before his old friend could say anything else.

  It wasn’t another call as such, but a secured, scripted message from the Coalition GTU—Guerrilla Tactics Unit—which meant a message from his mother. It read:

  Kai Locke, your mother wishes to enquire of your status. She also wanted us to let you know that her safety is guaranteed. She’s en route to a Coalition rendezvous point where she’ll continue her work. Respond at your earliest opportunity with your status so we can forward this to your mother. Lastly, as per your last request, we have no additional intel on your father’s disappearance or his role with the GTU. I’m sorry we can’t help further.

  — Cpt. Lopek.

  Kai was disappointed at the news of the GTU’s lack of help regarding his father, but it was to be expected. Even if they did know something of their former captain, they’d never tell him.

  Most of the time, he didn’t even know where his mother was.

  He composed a message saying he was safe and okay and sent it back as requested.

  There was not much to say, really. Certainly nothing worth saying, as it wasn’t as if anyone was going to help him. He’d already asked for help to fund passage away from the planet, but that was never forthcoming. If they did it for him, they’d have to do it for the thousands of other children who were left behind by their parents.

  “Kai?” Senaya asked. “You okay? What was it?”

  Kai scrolled the message away. “Just a message from my mother. I need to report in. She’s worried about something. Listen, about this call-up…”

  “I think I want to go,” Senaya said. “There’s nothing here for us. With the reserve package, we could finally get off this planet, Kai. A new start.”

  “And how long will that start last, eh? What if this isn’t just a few random Host attacks? What if this is something bigger? War isn’t something to rush into, Sen.”

  “Look, I know you still miss your father and that the last war ripped your family apart, but you’ll still have me and the old gang. We’ll be together.”

  Kai got up, looked around at the mess of his garage and then at the looping video footage.

  “I’m sorry, Sen, I’m not going. But if you want to leave, I guess there’s nothing I can do to stop you. I don’t want you to go. I consider you my sister, my closest friend, but I know you’re desperate to leave Zarunda. And I guess this is one way of doing that.”

  “Then come with me,” she pleaded.

  “I can’t. There are other ways. We can still win that race.”

  Even as he said it, he knew it sounded ridiculous. They both knew it.

  “I’ll sleep on it,” Senaya said. “Let’s get some rest and talk about it later. We’re both tired.”

  “You're right. We'll chat later."

  “Until then…" Senaya held his gaze for a moment. Her shoulders sagged and, she turned toward her cabin on the east side of the workshop. Kai wanted to call out to her, but the words caught in his throat, and then she was gone.

  Kai left the garage and entered the small cabin that was h
is sleeping quarters. He slumped to the edge of the bed, retrieved the tetrahedron from his pocket and held it up to the light, considering the deal with the CDF.

  The main reason he didn’t want to join the reservists wasn’t just because he didn’t want to fight, but because it was a lifelong career. Whether that life got cut short by battle or not. If he was in the Coalition Defense Force for life, he’d have to give up his search for his father.

  And that, for him, was not an option.

  Chapter 6

  Kai woke after a dark and fragmented seven hours' sleep into midday—the sun hanging centrally in the sky and bathing the workshop in bright light. He dressed, showered, and got on with the day.

  Usually, he preferred being up and active before the dawn chorus. The time displacement gave him the sagging sense of space lag.

  Despite that, he had work to do and headed back into the garage to see if it was all a bad dream. Maybe things weren’t as bad as he had thought.

  They were, of course.

  He’d like, just for once, to be pleasantly surprised about something, for an awful experience to actually turn out to be a good one. Looking at the wreckage of his ship’s chassis quickly dispelled any hope that things weren’t as bad as they appeared.

  However, the place was tidier. Senaya must have come back and helped put things back in order. Her room on the opposite side of the shop was still in darkness. He’d leave her be, let her get her rest. She deserved it.

  In the meantime, he grabbed some breakfast and stimulants from the small kitchen area set up in the workshop and set about appraising the actual damage. The propulsion computer wasn’t a big deal; he could easily replace that, and the memory cores were repairable with the data backed up off-site.

  The biggest problem was the chassis itself. Supporting pillars in the fore and aft sections were melted and weakened with plasma. The accompanying air-suspension units were a smoldering mess of alloys and polymers that were not easy to replace.

  Then there was the engine.

  The saboteurs had flooded the combustion chambers with acidic gel. It would take at best three days to clean that out and re-skim the cylinders. And with just a day and a half left, that was clearly not possible.