Unknown Cargo (The Meridian Crew Book 1)

by Blake B. Rivers

  “Indeed, it was,” said Benkei, “but it was most surprising to see an Imperial Protectorate ship this far from Earth.”

  “Yes,” said Aliadney, turning and looking out of the window, “we’re all still trying to figure out what to make of that little development. With comms between planets as bad as they are, we’re still not exactly sure what’s going on with dear ol’ Terra. Every planet is an ever-shifting landscape of empires, kingdoms, protectorates, and whatever other groups with an ideology and enough pull to scrape together an army and a fleet and decide they want to fill in this post-Federation vacuum we’re all dealing with.”

  “Could’ve been a scout ship,” said Amelia.

  Aliadney turned back towards the group and, with a dramatic sigh, fell back onto the bone-white seat behind him.

  “Please, don’t even say that. The last thing we need is to have some off-planet power thinking they’re going to move into Venus. God, just imagine.”

  But before he could expound, the elevator came to a stop, and the doors slid open.

  “But enough of that. Step into my office; I have a little errand I think you’ll all be more than interested to hear about.”

  Chapter 8

  “Come, come,” said Mr. Aliadney, leading the group from the elevator directly to his office, a massive open space of clean white walls, white floor, and minimalist décor. The walls of the room were clear and thick, affording him a sweeping panoramic view of the Ora skyline and the endless sea beyond. On one wall of the room was a square of viewscreens arrayed in neat rows, all with different financial programs, all on mute, the mouths of the talking heads speaking wordlessly. At the far end of the room was a white desk which was dwarfed by the height of the walls and the cityscape vista beyond. The air was clean, almost sterile, though a hint of lilacs hit Amelia’s nose as she entered.

  “Fuck,” said Sam, looking around as she walked in, “nice pad.”

  “Oh, this isn’t my pad,” Aliadney said, “just where I go during the day to get my needful done.”

  As the group walked in, the silent guards followed behind them, forming a line at the door as it slid shut. Amelia knew that this was standard protocol but, after the last doublecross, she was in a heightened state of awareness for anything that could be construed as a threat. By instinct, her hand moved to her pistol at her hip.

  “There’s no need for any of that, my dear,” said Aliadney. “We just can’t be too careful these days, what with the Scythians and every other ragtag band of barbarians trying to destroy what we’ve created. A shame, really.”

  “What you’ve created?” asked Benkei? “You mean, commandeering the Federation infrastructure and declaring yourselves the supreme force on Venus?”

  Aliadney raised his palms in mock shock.

  “Commandeering?” he asked. “Someone had to take it. And, believe me, the last thing that this system needs is one of these warlord groups running things. I heard the Carnarians practice human sacrifice. Can you believe it? I know things have been a little less civilized since the Federation collapsed, but with absolute brutes like them in charge, we’d be living in caves before the century’s out.”

  “But where are my manners?” he said, raising his hand towards the line of guards. “Um, C-42? Is it C-42?”

  One of the guards, the man the furthest on the left, stepped forward, his gleaming silver armor shifting and clanking as hemoved.

  “Ah yes, good. Can you bring my guests something to drink?”

  C-42 wordlessly left the room, his bulky gear clanging.

  “Aren’t they wonderful?” said Aliadney, looking at the row of silent, uniform guards with an expression of awed admiration. “Cost a goddamn fortune, but worth every scrip. And they don’t just stand around! You can get them to do whatever you want, really.”

  Sam approached one of the guards, looking him over with a skeptical eye.

  “Are they droids…or what?”

  “Ah, or what, might be the best way to put it.”

  Sam crooked her finger and poked the tip into the soft pink cheek of the guard she was standing in front of.

  “Not much going on in there, huh?” she asked, noticing that the guard didn’t respond to her touch.

  “Not…ah, at the moment. The guards are, well, to put it delicately, lower-class individuals looking to make their way in the world. We provide them with implants and augmentations, and they simply, well, turn off their consciousness for a time.”

  “You turn off their consciousness?” asked Sam.

  “More or less. They make better guards that way; no questioning orders and all that.”

  “Barbaric,” said Benkei, shaking his head, his brow knitted.

  “Barbaric? We turn them off for a while, load them up with gear, and, when they come to, assuming they do, they have a sizable salary waiting for them on the other end. And it goes by in flash,” he snapped his fingers. “Like waking up from a nap, but with, ah, limbs replaced. Everyone wins.”

  Sam waved her hand in front of the guard and, like before, it made no response.

  “Works out pretty well when someone racks up a debt, sounds like,” said Benkei, his eyes on the still and silent row of guards.

  “So, what’s this job?” said Amelia, falling back onto one of the couches and slipping a cigarette out of her pants pocket.

  “Oh, no, don’t li-” said Aliadney, waving his hands in Amelia’s direction.

  With a flick of her silver lighter, Amelia lit her cigarette and took a slow drag.

  “Ah, just, ah, never mind. Anyway, are any of you fine fellows familiar with the situation on Luna?”

  “You mean the moon?” asked Amelia.

  “The moon, Luna, whatever you want to call it.”

  “I was under the impression that it was a wasteland,” said Benkei. “Well, more of a wasteland than it would normally be considered.”

  “Well,” said Aliadney, with a flourish of his hand that concluded in a pointed finger, “then you would be precisely wrong.”

  Before he could finish his point, C-42 returned to the room, a black tray of drinks resting on his open palm.

  “Ah, goodie, goodie,” said Aliadney, his handsome face alight. “One for everyone, C-42.”

  The droid complied, the changing of its course towards the crew the only indication that it had heard the request.

  Each of the crew was served a tall, fizzing glass of an emerald-colored liquid, which each member of the crew received with the same level of apprehension. Aliadney was the last to be served, and he took his glass with almost childlike delight.

  “This, my friends, old and new, is a delightful cocktail that’s been all the rage in this particular supertower that I call home. Two parts flourinite gin, one part turned grindle cheese, and a dash of, ah, something from the ground-up tail of one of the uglier animals they imported to this place. That’s what gives it the fizz. Salut!”

  The team raised their glasses, though only Aliadney was looking at anyone else; the crew’s eyes were all locked on the bubbling, bilge-water drink they were about to sip.

  Amelia, a concerned look on her face, brought the drink to her lips and took a sip. It was tangy, it was mouth-numbing, it was peppery. But, to her surprise, it wasn’t bad.

  “Anyway, where were we?” asked Aliadney.

  “Luna,” said Amelia, taking another sip, the strange flavors playing on her palate. “And the condensed version would be nice.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Aliadney. “So, Luna is not barren, as one might think, what with the destruction of the supply lanes from Earth that were necessary to keep the colonies afloat. They’d actually just achieved self-sufficiency before the Sector War.”

  Aliadney leaned back on the span of his desk and crossed one leg over the other.

  “And they have big plans for sculpting the planet. Er, moon.”

  “Sculpt Luna?” asked Benkei, his voice skeptical. “It’s but a rock!”

  “Yeah,” said Amelia, �
��Venus was a nightmare to sculpt, but at least it had an atmosphere to work with.”

  “Well, normally, you’d both be right. But one of the colonies on the planet, the Lunar Initiative, I believe they’re called, seem to have some sort of atmospheric generation something-or-other. They’re a colony of scientists, you see, all from the Federation science colony on the far side of Luna.”

  “But here’s the thing: The other colony is some gaggle of dirty-haired hippies, Gray Gaia, Gray Luna, something like that. And they want to keep the moon just the way it is.”

  Amelia tossed the rest of her drink back.

  “And, let me guess, you want us to get right in the middle of that mess.”

  “There, my dear,” said Aliadney, leaning forward, “is where you are exactly right.”

  He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a simple gray box, no bigger than a shoebox, its surface covered in strange, engraved angles.

  “What’s that?” asked Amelia, walking over to inspect the strange item that Aliadney had retrieved from his desk.

  “This,” he said with a flourish of his hands, “is your next job.”

  Chapter 9

  A cargo drop. Nothing more than a quick delivery. More like a courier service than anything else. You all probably won’t fire off a single round - think of how much money you’ll save!

  Those were the lines that Aliadney used when describing the mission. All unprompted, of course, which only made Amelia more suspicious. But when he named the price, the nagging voice inside of her was quickly silenced.

  “Eighty-thousand Oran Credits,” said Benkei, his massive hand wrapped around a small glass of foaming, yellow beer. “There simply has to be a catch.”

  “No kidding,” said Amelia, snatching a dangling lock of jet-black hair away from her eye as she rolled her glass of bourbon on its rim. “But, goddamn, that’s a lot of coin to drop a package off.”

  “I didn’t like that fucking weirdo, and I don’t like this job. Not a goddamn bit,” said Sam, dabbing her finger into her vodka tonic and sticking it into her mouth.

  “Well, it’s either that or stick around in a city that looks like one big electronics convention for a few months, doing grunt work for these corporate assholes,” said Amelia.

  “Hmm,” said Benkei, lifting his beer from the small white table where they sat.

  The bar they’d found was, like just about every other place in Ora, packed with neon lights and animated advertisements. The space was filled with a good-sized crowd of the corporate-types that populated the city, all with slim, well-cut suits of muted neutral colors and all with tasteful, smart haircuts. The smell of the place seemed just as sterile as Aliadney’s office, and she was about ready to get back to the grime and clutter of the Meridian. But Aliadney had fronted them the Orans necessary to get the ship filled and mostly restocked, and, until then, they had to find someplace to cool their heels.

  “Have you guys seen these guards?” asked Sasha, an excited expression on his perfect features as he pointed towards an important-looking Oran flanked by a dozen guards as he walked with a kingly stride down the hallway outside of the bar. “I can’t believe how many augmentations they must have them loaded up with. Christ, I’d love to open up one of those things.”

  “Trust me, the less you know about those guards, the better,” said Sam, leaning her head forward and sipping her drink, letting the glass rest on the table.

  Amelia felt a buzz at her side, and pulled her slate out of her pocket.

  “Ship’s ready,” she said, taking her glass of bourbon from the table and preparing to finish it. “And I’m ready to get the hell out of this place.”

  “Absolutely agreed,” said Benkei. “As much as I would love to experience the culture of this city, I’m afraid the garishness is beginning to affect me on something of a spiritual level.”

  The crew finished their drinks, and, a quick shuttle ride down to the docking level later, they were back on the ship.

  The crew settled into their usual spots, with Amelia and Sam in the cockpit, Benkei in the small cubby that functioned as his reading room, and Sasha down in his quarters in the lower level.

  “Let’s go,” said Amelia.

  And with that, the Meridian launched, Sam piloting the ship with care out of the supertower landing dock, through the air traffic between buildings, and up into the atmosphere. Within minutes, they were back in space.

  “Now Sam, if you see any capital ships firing at each other -cruisers, dreadnoughts, battleships, -anything, really- go ahead and keep clear of them.”

  “Funny,” said Sam.

  “Meridian, you’re cleared to exit Venus space,” said a voice through the comms from Venus Station.

  “Let’s do it,” said Amelia.

  “You got it, cap,” said Sam, making the necessary inputs on herscreens.

  The jump began as a small pinpoint of light directly in front of the ship. Over the course of seconds, it expanded into a great white ring filled with brilliant sapphire swirls. Jump technology had been the key component to the Federation’s colonization of the solar system, and, to the good fortune of the hundreds of millions of citizens spread throughout the system, the knowledge and access to the technology were widespread and, most importantly, affordable.

  The swirling vortex grew larger and larger, the play of the white and blue filling the cockpit with a thrumming shifting of colors.

  “Jump gate open,” said Sam, her face flashing blue and white.

  With a gentle pullback of her control stick, the Meridian moved forward and entered the jump gate.

  Then, the ship jerked forward as if being pulled by a great string. Within seconds, the ship was in the jump.

  “Going all the way to Luna, huh?” said Sam, sitting back in her seat, her job done for the time being.

  “Anything for a payday, I guess,” said Amelia, unbuckling her harnesses in preparation for getting up.

  “When’s the last time you’ve even been to Earth space?” asked Sam, her elfin features in an expression of curiosity.

  “Not since Geist training,” Amelia said. “And I haven’t had much of a desire to go back.”

  “I can’t even imagine what Earth is like now,” said Sam. “The Sector War must’ve torn that place apart.”

  “Yeah, now it’s just like every other planet in the system, every two-bit wannabe emperor stepping over the next poor SOB to get to the top of the heap.”

  “No kidding,” said Sam.

  “Alright, I’m gonna stretch my legs,” said Amelia, standing.

  “You got it, cap,” said Sam, giving Amelia a playful salute.

  Amelia left the cockpit, the swirling azure and white giving way to the soft glow of the ship’s lighting. Her boots made the familiar clang on the metal of the ship’s floor, a sound which she now was beginning to feel was synonymous with being home. As close to “home” as the Meridian was for her, that is.

  She made her way through the main hub room of the ship, the dome-like shape of the room still and quiet. Turning down one of the hallways, she arrived at the small utility closet where Benkei liked to spend his hours when not busy on the ship. She gave a rap on the door, and his voice called from within.

  “Come in,” he said, the door sliding open.

  Amelia stepped into the cramped space, which, while much bigger than a typical supply closet, was fairly tight. And the neat stacks of books here and there only made the feeling worse.

  “I don’t know how you stand it in here,” said Amelia, crouching down under the soft orange light of the dangling bulb overhead.

  “It’s quiet, and cozy,” said Benkei, Amelia noting the top few buttons of his beige dress shirt were undone, exposing the top of the broad expanse of his stout chest. “And with the type of work we’re in, quiet and cozy are fairly hard to come by.”

  “What’re you reading?” asked Amelia, pointing to the slate in Benkei’s hand. “And I didn’t know you were the sla
te-reader type.”

  “I’m not,” he said, flicking the device off. “But I figured I’d do a little reading on the groups we’re about to get involved with.”

  “What’re you learning?”

  “The Lunar Initiative, the LI, as they’re known, is just as Aliadney said- some of the top researchers in the Federation. They’re types who probably didn’t care about the collapse, unless it meant that their work was going to be interrupted.”

  “Reminds me of Sasha.”

  “Perhaps, though I think our Slavic friend’s detachment from the world beyond his lab is more due to obliviousness than active disinterest.”

  Amelia snorted and nodded.

  “And the, what, Edens?” she asked, craning her head to look at Benkei’s slate.

  “Gray Eden,” he said, nodding his large head while scrolling down the slate with careful swipes. “About as different as you could imagine from the Luna Initiative. The colony, according to this, was something like a resort for some of Earth’s wealthiest; a place they could go to escape the crowds and chaos on the planet.”

  “They want to keep things there just how they are? Why?”

  Benkei shrugged.

  “Hard to say. Perhaps they’ve developed some sort of spiritual attachment to Luna, perhaps they don’t want to risk recreating the strife of Earth by altering Luna. Who knows.”

  Just as Benkei finished, the lights of the ship dimmed and brightened over the span of a second, followed by a lurching of the Meridian as it dropped from a high speed to a lower one.

  “We just got pulled out of the jump,” said Amelia, pulling her slate out of her pocket.

  “Could we already be there?” asked Benkei, standing up.

  “No. Either there’s something wrong with the ship, or…”

  “We’ve been pulled out.”

  Chapter 10

  “Am, get to the cockpit, now!” shouted the voice of Sam through Amelia’s slate.

  “Coming,” she responded before breaking into a quick jog down the curved hallways of the ship.