Farlost: Arrival

by Mierau,John

  “How many species are trapped here?” Lou asked, catching herself watching the thing again, as it circled with a flick of its massive wings.

  “Let’s see,” Gruber said, looking off into the distance and scratching his grizzled beard. “You got your Manta," he pointed up at Whish, "your Skanen, your Tumblers, your Trees ,and Scarecrows, of course- and you got your Hydes, the ghosties, shifters, the dragons—”

  “Dragons?” Villanueva repeated from the airlock door.

  Lou nodded to her acting first officer, then cleared her throat. “Go on, Mister Gruber.”

  The engineer huffed and looked back at the screen. “Let’s just say humans are minority. Hi, new guy,” he said with a wave at Villanueva, crossing to his station.

  Villanueva waved back, then caught sight of Whish. He fumbled his grab for his chair and spiraled sideways.

  Travis scowled. “There’s a lot of us humans, though. We cause more than our share of trouble.”

  A white rectangle on Lou’s screen flashed: an update from Rodriguez that she was beginning docking maneuvers with the tram. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Speaking of trouble, Captain. My nav officer has pegged that white ship down there as an active bogey, not a wreck. Are we in immediate danger from it?”

  The captain and the engineer stared at each other. “Got no idea,” the engineer admitted. “It ain’t ever moved, not in thousands of years.”

  “It’s one of the oldest recorded hulks trapped in the Thorns,” Captain Travis added. “Nobody knows how it’s survived beneath the shatter zone, either.” Lou saw a gleam in the captain’s eyes. “Maybe now we’ll find out.”

  Lou thumped her fist on her chair arm, and snaked her fingers around automatically to stop her from floating in the opposite direction. “Okay. There’s aliens. There’s big spiky Thorns that trap and eat ships after zapping them here. What are you doing here, scavenging?”

  The engineer laughed. “Yep.”

  The captain grimaced. “I think of it more as beach combing.”

  “Why are you afraid to get caught here?” Lou asked.

  “Lady, did you miss the part about us breaking free before we can’t anymore?”

  “Are you criminals?” she asked.

  Travis and Gruber both froze on screen.

  Their silence didn’t comfort Lou.

  “Gentleman, if there are lots of humans and… others… why send just one ship to scavenge—“ she took a breath. “To beach comb what the gravity wave washes loose?”

  “It ain’t like ships show up every other day,” Gruber growled. “Can go decades without a new arrival, and most times they go down, they don’t come up. What does is mostly garbage, picked clean of valuable resources by now.”

  So, she though, they're eking out an existence. Fringers, grabbing what they can. Lou saw another white rectangle appear on her screen before she completed that thought. A message from Beacham, it read: careful, we still need their help.

  She looked at the physicist and nodded once, then back to the screen.

  “I’ve got a lot of questions, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do. How about we let your people and my people finish this high wire act, so we can dock with and get out of here, and you and I continue this discussion in private?”

  Captain Travis nodded. “Agreed, Commander.”

  Lou nodded back . “Keep this line open,” she called to Travis, then tapped the screen off from her display.

  “First officer, with me,” she called as she floated free of her station and kicked off toward the duty cabin.

  She opened the door and waited for Villanueva. Inside, Vice President Burkov sat at the nearest workstation, a buckle over his lap. His eyes were wide and he was shivering. “Are they going to kill us?” he half-sobbed.

  The display at the desk was on, freeze-framed on the alien Whish.

  She sighed. “We’re both busy staying alive right now, Mister Vice President. Can I trust you to return to your station, and stay on the calm side?”

  Burkov nodded meekly, undid the strap and floated past her. He watched the man go directly to his station and wordlessly begin to strap himself in.

  “What’s bothering you?” Villanueva murmured at her side. Lou waved him into the duty officer cabin. She turned to Rose Okoro’s station. Stan still floated there, doing work on a spare screen beside her. “Notify me of any change to ship’s status, or if the dock ing procedure gets mucked up any further.”

  Rose nodded. Stan looked up, his face alive and inquisitive. “The Betty’s computer uh, person, is live feeding us data sets. We can't sync computers for a timed burn but we're keeping on track. The gravity’s really fluctuating. So it’s not going to be pretty, but we’ll get there.”

  Unless something else happens, Lou thought sourly, but kept it to herself. Outwardly she smiled. “Very good, Mr. Renic. Nav Okoro, you have the conn.”

  Rose Okoro looked up, her eyes suddenly very wide. “Sir-Ma’am? Uh… yes M’a’am.”

  "You'll do fine." Lou kept the confident smile on her face until the door slid shut behind her.

  She let the smile turn upside down and floated over to the workstation beside Arnel Villanueva. “What’s bothering me,” she said, picking up from his last remark, “beyond everything else we’re facing, is that we don’t know what’s waiting for us up there.”

  Arnel raised his eyebrows quizzically. Lou slid her fingers across the screen, painting a symbol, the gesture blanked the screen, then populated it with a mirror of her locked command screens behind the door in C&C.

  She swiped over the data window Dina Rodriguez had sent. Villanueva leaned in closer, then jerked his head back up at her. “Another ship inbound? Why haven’t they mentioned—-?“

  Lou nodded. “Right. Why haven’t they?” She wiped her palms over her eye sockets, then held back onto the swing arm for the closest screen. “Christ, Arnel, we’re juggling too many grenades here.”

  “Let’s just ask,” Arnel said, sounding as tired as she felt.

  She swiped through windows until the live transmission from the Betty McKenna reappeared, then floated closer to Arnel to let the camera mounted above the screen catch them both .

  Travis was sitting there, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. He looked exhausted too.

  In that moment, seeing the weight of his crew’s lives play on Travis’s face, Lou recognized a kindred spirit.

  “We’ll get both our crews out of this, Captain,” she murmured.

  He looked up, surprised. A weary smile spread. “We just might, you know.”

  “Captian, who's heading toward us that you’re so afraid of.”

  The smile disappeared. “Your pilot. She found a ship, inbound?”

  Lou nodded and let her weariness out with a gusting sigh. “I don’t know what to ask, Travis,” she admitted softly. “How about you tell me?”

  Gruber reappeared, two small tools held in his mouth. He lifted Captain Travis’s right hand into view, blithely pushing his fingers inside the wrist and adjusting something inside. “The Guard,” he mouthed around the tools.

  Captain Travis nodded. “The Guard.”

  “Haskam Heliocentric Lab Six has matched The Betty’s velocity,” came the disembodied voice of Daisy. “The human Beacham is surprisingly capable.”

  Everyone ignored the voice, but Lou relaxed a little more, knowing they had a solid chance to survive long enough to face whatever was waiting for them above the Thorn’s gravity well.

  The honesty and exhaustion mirrored on the Betty's captain and engineer was comforting too.

  “The Guard aren’t friends of yours, Captain?” she asked.

  “Not friends of anyone, Commander,” Travis replied, his face growing haunted.

  “Then what are they,” Lou ground out. “Give me a break from twenty questions, we’re on a clock here!”

  There was a sizzle on the line. Captain Travis jerked and hissed.

  Gruber pulled a flap of skin back
over the hole in Travis’s hand. He spat the tools in his mouth out into his hand and laughed. “Pussy.”

  Travis gave his engineer a glare and rubbed his hand. “The Guard are the big boys on the block. They've been aggressively annexing ships and states going on thirty years. The game's been called, just some folks don't know it yet,” he said, his voice low.

  “Near everybody gave 'em the keys to the kingdom after they wiped out the Dragons,” Gruber said from somewhere off-screen. “Now, they’re just as bad as the scaly fuckers ever were.”

  Arnel leaned forward. “Again - sorry -… Dragons?!”

  Captain Travis stood and paced a few steps out of camera range, then turned back. “There are a few independent space-stations, rocks, even a couple free cities on the planets that have treaties with them, but most free states and self-run ships -like our Betty- have been scared into paying protection money to the Guard. Treaties mean nothing if you’re caught in neutral space and the Guard drops on you.”

  Whish descended into camera view from above. He tooted like a trombone, and jetted forward a few feet. “Guard made sweet deals to all the peoples, and everyone was too tired from fighting Dragons to be smart. Now, every other time we hit a port of call, we have to turn around and scat before a Guard ship demands we come to for inspection.”

  Travis shook his head. “Inspection is fancy talk for seizure.”

  “What happens then?” Lou asked.

  "You hear stories." Travis stopped pacing and looked down into the camera. “I don’t ever plan to find out.”

  Gruber reappeared. “We’ll give you the rest of the history lesson after we get outta here, lady. First things first huh? We boost outta here, we pick up our crew and we max-thrust it around the Thorn for cover and hide in the dark. The Captain promised you pax and he meant it.”

  “Pax, Haskam,” Travis said, by way of agreement. “Whatever we can do, we’ll do.”

  Muffled shouts came through the cracked open duty cabin door.

  “I'm on it,” Arnel said and slipped past Lou.

  Floating in place Lou put her hands together and cracked her knuckles. She stared at the man on the screen. He stared back, tired but calm, and resolute.

  Finally she asked. “We get our people back, we orbit around the Thorn, deviate and hide?”

  "Then we can have a history class." He nodded. “It’ll take some time to tell, but we'll be a while patching up. We'll have a proper shin-dig and a chin-wag while we lick our wounds.”

  Shin-dig? Chin-wag? Lou laughed. “It’s a date, Captain.”

  He cocked an eyebrow.

  “Commander,” Arnel called from the open door. “You’re needed.’

  She flicked a salute at the Captain. “Keep this line open.”

  He sketched a lazy salute back. “Will do.”

  She closed down her access to the terminal and followed Arnel back into C&C.

  Floating next to her station was Ron Taggart. His eyes were wide and he was trembling. And smiling, Lou noted, when he turned and fixed her with a rapturous gaze.

  “It's coming. Help is on the way!”

  36

  The sound of the Toad’s engines’ thrum didn’t reach inside Dina’s closed helmet, but its vibrations soaked through her feet and the back of her pilot’s chair and soothed her jangling nerves.

  “The Commander and Villanueva are poring over the imag es you sent, Dina,” Rose Okoro assured her, the young woman’s voice a comforting whisper in her helmet, despite the scratchy static.

  “That ship’s a long way out, but it’s moving fast. Real, fast,” Dina breathed.

  She eyed the counter, flashing down in big letters on the first display on the densely packed instrument panel to the right of the joysticks she would soon use to reach out and touch someone. Under fifty seconds now, before she’d reach out with the massive pincers at the front of the Toad and seize the tram hurtling ahead of her.

  Dina’s eyes saw the stars whirling, and the tram dead steady ahead in the white cross-hairs displayed on the inside of her cockpit. All steering done by her own grey matter, she thought proudly, and not the flight computers who’d repeatedly advised she let them handle it.

  “The Commander believes Captain Travis and the old…” Dina heard Rose cut off words she was sure would have been “homeless guy.”

  Dina had struck up a friendship with Rose, but still teased her constantly, about how she had been raised with silver spoons inserted in various openings. She clucked out loud at the nav officer, despite the strain of the situation. “Careful Spoons,” she teased.

  Rose Okoro was an unlikely kindred spirit: she’d had everything in her life handed to her, where Dina had fought for every scrap. That’s not fair, Dina corrected herself: the rich girl had gotten her pilot rating and her contract with Haskam on her own. Some things, like steering a few million tons of rich people’s stuff, you had to prove yourself to get to do.

  Rose certainly had proven herself.

  And she’d more than proven herself to Dina when she’d shown up at the Toad’s launch bay with a package an overzealous Haskam’s customs officer had removed from a resupply run and flagged for Second Officer Devine’s attention.

  It had never gotten to Devine’s desk. Rose Okoro had grabbed it first, saw what had been flagged as ‘contraband’ and carried the vacuum-sealed pack to Dina in person.

  Dina had almost ruined her ‘tough bitch’ rep with wet eyes when Rose handed her the vacuum sealed packs of golden brown naan bread, murmuring her apologies for the customs officers browning their nose for Devine.

  The naan bread was her Abuela’s special recipe. It came with a note she still kept in her cabin, tucked into the corner of a picture frame showing a much younger Dina Rodriguez and her plump, white haired grandmother. “Even in space, you should eat well!”

  Dina wondered if she’d ever see her grandmother again.

  “If we get our asses out of here, first thing I want answers to is what the hell’s coating that jumbo space shuttle of theirs,” Dina muttered, scanning diagnostics screens. She nodded. All was tight aboard her little Toad. “Sure as hell ain’t standard re-entry tile.”

  “Seven meters across, I measured one,” Rose whispered. “Whatever lizard dropped those scales, I don’t think I want to meet it.”

  The thirty second alert sounded, and banished every non-mission critical thought from her head.

  “Scale’s not the only reason I believe the Betty,” Dina said on the encrypted tight beam she’d initiated with HHL-6 after finding the bogey racing inbound. Dio, Dina thought -testing the joysticks and seeing long metal arms raise into view outside the cockpit. A gargantuan white ship rising from the depths of the Thorn, and a smaller black ship descending on Six and the Betty McKenna from above. Smaller, she calculated, but far beyond anything humans could possible create.

  In seconds, Dina had gone from missing her Abuela’s cooking to fearing she was about to become the chunky bits in a shit sandwich.

  “I mean, we’re in a whole new solar system. All those dead ships? And I caught freeze frames of that flying thing on the bridge when I boosted past the Betty!” Dina muttered as she fingered the fine piloting gloves tighter.

  “Besides, unless Beacham’s invented stronger engines to leapfrog us out of this gravity well before we get sucked down, we’re partners. Be nice to think they’re on our side.”

  “Rodriguez,” Rose scoffed, “are you being an optimist right now?”

  Dina smiled as she dragged an external cam view into a screen right behind the sticks, ready to make the tricky grab for the rusted old tram. “Yeah, let’s go with that. Stand by C&C, I’m gonna be a bit busy for the next few minutes.”

  “Understood, Toad. C&C standing by. Luck, Dina,” Rose whispered at the end.

  Dina tapped a closed feed open, and heard the rumbling air generation equipment and groaning metal of the tram fill her ears.

  “Toad to tram, it’s Rodriguez.”

  “Hel
lo, pilot,” Doug acknowledged. She heard the dry cracking sound that she guessed was Salix slapping his arms together.

  “Ready to try this, boys?” Dina called, feeling the same crazy smile grow on her face whenever she was biting off a mouthful.

  The ten second beep sounded, and then the nine, and the eight.

  “Whatever happens, pilot,” Doug’s deep voice came again, “thank you for helping us.”

  Dina’s head began to bob to music only she could hear. Time to dance. “You bet. Now grab your asses…or whatever you have,” she muttered.

  At three seconds the beep became a solid tone. She opened the Toad’s mechanical arms wide and waited..waited…

  First the left hand, and a millisecond later the right, both closed around heavy piping on what was normally the underside of the tram.

  “Ha!” Dina screamed as both hands made successful grabs, around what she guessed were solid alloy rods used for mooring. “I’ve got them!”

  Her teeth clattered together with the impact, and the air came out of her when the velocity differential of the two crafts worked itself out, knocking the air out of her chest.

  She shrieked her victory and rattled off a stream of rude and victorious words in Spanish, even as she locked the arms down and secured their hydraulics. She felt the Toad shudder as it was pulled in tighter to the arms, and then a boom as its body slammed tight against the tram.

  “Toad is secure and locked to the tram,” she reported. She couldn’t hear Okoro’s response over the wailing on the other line, quickly shushed and repeated with loud smacking sounds, these ones wet.

  Dina had heard the ones called Newark and Posk make those wet slapping sounds before, and from Doug’s own cheering reaction knew they were sounds of relief.

  What the hell kind of creature made those sounds, happy or mad, Dina hadn’t ever figured would be something she was about to find out.

  The universe sure had fooled her, she thought, grinning madly as the adrenaline bounced around inside her skin.

  She focused on the screen showing what looked like an black dome on a white background: an artificial horizon she’d calibrated just for this. “Beginning burn now,” she said through gritted teeth as she began to dance with the tram, stealing velocity from one axis to reapply it on another.