The guard handed Jack a small stack of paper documents. Jack sighed. He would have much preferred a digital copy.
He went to leave with Klik, Rogan and Tuner in tow.
“Oh, and Jack Bishop?” said Sek.
Jack turned around in the doorway.
“Bring my daughter back in one piece,” he said.
5
(Thermonuclear) Family
Rogan didn’t possess the neurotransmitters required to develop anxiety as such, but she had been wired to feel concern regarding both the safety of others and her own self-preservation.
Now, sitting alone in the engine room of the Adeona, the protocols in her head were going haywire.
What the hell was Jack thinking, agreeing to such a dangerous plan? Sure, they’d taken risks before. Flying through Ceros-VI – a cracked planet full of gravity wells and colossal, tentacled monsters – had been far from ideal. But they’d had no choice back then. They weren’t running from danger anymore. Yet Jack seemed intent on running to it, as if there was no other direction he could go.
Was this a human trait? Were they all this insane?
She could understand his desperation. But was settling for a life out here in the galaxy really that bad?
He might not be with his own kind, but he had her, and Tuner, and Brackitt. Not to mention the ship! A family… one he seemed all too happy to put at deadly risk for only the slimmest chance of getting back to his old one.
Rogan studied the intricate gears turning beneath the metal plates covering her mechanical hands. Despite possessing a brain like a supercomputer, she wondered if she lacked the capacity to understand the complex emotions a creature of flesh and blood could feel.
“Adi? Are you there?”
The ship’s voice replied over the speakers. “Yes, Rogan?”
“What are your thoughts on this plan of Jack’s?”
“Jack is the Captain. I’m happy to fly him wherever he wants to go.”
“That’s not an answer, Adi.”
The Adeona took a second to think before she replied again.
“I think it’s a stupid plan. A reckless one. I think he’s going to get himself killed, which will make me very…”
She paused, trying to process the right word.
“…sad.”
“You and me both.”
“But then I think about how unhappy Jack would be, knowing that he’d thrown away his only chance to get back to the woman he loves… and I think that idea makes me even sadder.”
“Maybe you’re right. I suppose he did risk his life to save ours, even if he was saving his own in the process.” Rogan stood up. “Where are the rest of the crew now?”
“Brackitt’s in the cockpit. Jack and Tuner are in the rec room with the new girl.” The Adeona’s voice took on a mischievous tone. “Do you want to hear what they’re saying?”
Rogan uttered a dry laugh.
“No, I’ll go up there and join them. Thanks, Adi.”
“No problem, Rogan. Us antiques have to look out for each other.”
Jack idly turned the cup in his hands. It had once been full of something resembling green tea. Now only a soggy clump of herbal dregs lay at the bottom.
“Was it hard, growing up part of the Krettelian resistance?”
Klik looked up from her own drink, then back down at it as she contemplated the question.
“I’m not sure. Hard to say, really. The resistance is all I’ve ever known.” She shrugged. “I’m sure it was easier than growing up a slave.”
“Being forced into hiding can be a bit like slavery too,” said Tuner. “Always on the run. Always looking over your shoulder. That’s not true freedom, is it?”
“Puts humanity’s problems into perspective, doesn’t it?” Jack huffed. “Not that we haven’t had plenty of trouble with slavery ourselves…”
“I don’t miss being property,” said Tuner. “I don’t miss being a fugitive, either.”
“What’s changed?” Klik took a sip of her drink, then swallowed it quickly. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be blunt. But before, a person gave you orders. Now you do what Jack says. Is that really any different?”
Jack felt his arm hair bristle. He’d never looked at his arrangement with the automata that way.
“Of course it’s different!” The light of Tuner’s yellow eyes glowed brighter. “I follow Jack because that’s what I choose to do. He’s my friend. And besides… he’s only the captain because us automata let him be.”
Jack laughed, relieved.
“That’s true. Without Tuner, I’d be…” He almost mentioned that without the support of the automata he’d probably still be marooned on Detri… but stopped himself in time. The sanctuary was a secret that nobody, not even Jack, was supposed to know. “Well, I’d be a frozen husk floating out in uncharted space, that’s what.”
“He would,” Tuner emphatically agreed.
Klik laughed quietly. They fell silent for a second before Tuner spoke again.
“So, you were born into the resistance. What about your father? Has he always been the leader?”
Klik shook her head.
“Only the past couple of years. He’s always helped out with gathering intelligence though. Well, not always.” Her black eyes glistened. “He was a slave for a while, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They kept him in the Department of Records until he was in his early twenties. That’s when he met my mother. She was in the resistance already, and he used to sneak out whatever information he could. Like… sometimes a wealthy Mansa would die, and he’d let the resistance know so they could rescue the slaves before they were sold off to a new owner. That sort of thing.”
“That was brave of him.”
Klik smiled and shrugged. “I think he just used it as an excuse to keep seeing my mother. One day she came for him instead of intel. She got him out, and then a little while later they had me.”
“Where’s your mother now?” asked Tuner, cautiously.
“The Mansa caught her making a routine run for food supplies.” Klik lowered her gaze again. “She wasn’t registered. They took her away.”
“That’s terrible.” Tuner slumped in his chair. “Do you know what happened to her after?”
“They killed her,” replied Klik, matter-of-factly. “I mean, we don’t know for sure. It’s not like you ever get to see that sort of thing. But we know they killed her. That’s what they do to everybody.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jack.
“Don’t be.” She nursed her cup. “Like I said, the Mansa do it to everybody. You rarely ever see a Krettelian reach old age.”
They all went back to staring at their drinks.
Rogan reached the recreation room just as the conversation started to pick back up again. She paused outside the door.
“I bet you can’t wait to get back to Earth, right?”
She didn’t need to look inside the room to tell it was Klik who had asked the question.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” said Jack. He sounded both tired and excited, as if he was looking out at a beautiful view having climbed to the summit of a mountain. “I can’t… I can’t describe it. It’s like there’s this pressure growing in my chest, a great big bubble that won’t burst until I get back home. The stories I can tell them, the things that I’ve seen…”
He took a deep breath.
“Everything will change. We have no idea there’s a whole galactic community out here. The skip drive technology on this ship alone could save billions of human lives back on my planet. And…”
“And?” This time it was Tuner’s voice.
“And I miss them. I miss humanity. Never thought I’d hear myself say that out loud. Kind of hated it while I was there. But it’s hard, feeling like you’re all alone in your species. And I know I don’t shut up about it, but being away from Amber is killing me. I can’t bear to think what she must be feeling. Worse than me, I bet.”
&nbs
p; “This Amber… is she your life-partner?” asked Klik.
A pause. Jack must have been nodding.
“My wife. My everything, really.”
“Didn’t you have anyone else? Parents? Children?”
“No, not really. Nobody else.”
“Sounds kind of lonely,” said Tuner.
“Not with her, I wasn’t.”
Rogan slumped against the wall beside the door. She didn’t feel as sad for herself as she did for Tuner. Perhaps it was difficult for Jack to tell – fleshies often had trouble reading automata emotions – or maybe Jack was too distracted by the possibility of finding his home world. Either way, he didn’t seem to notice.
Tuner would do anything for Jack… even if that meant putting himself in mortal danger.
But if Jack got what he wanted – if Jack went home – Tuner would be devastated.
Nobody else. Rogan shook her head.
Of course Jack had somebody else. He had the whole crew.
But if he found Earth, he’d be gone.
6
Stealing a Star
The Adeona lingered in the shadow of Penin-III. They’d arrived a little over two hours before the Mansa supply convoy was due. The Penin system consisted of two rocky inner worlds and four large gas giants, none of which were populated. All was eerily quiet.
The ship’s scanners searched the system for traffic.
“Are you sure the intel your father gave us is accurate?” asked Jack, tapping his foot. He was already in his spacesuit, ready to bolt downstairs at a moment’s notice.
“No.” Klik fidgeted with her cloak on the other side of the cockpit door. “But it’s all we have to go on.”
“Very reassuring.”
Tuner approached them.
“Are you ready?” he asked Jack.
“Not in the slightest.” Jack felt sick with nerves. He was starting to have second thoughts. Or first thoughts, given how little thought he’d put into the plan to begin with. “You’re sure there’s no other way to do this?”
Tuner shook his head.
“I went over all the files twice. Don’t worry. Providing everything’s the same as the schematics, this’ll be a piece of cake. Did I use that phrase right?”
Jack sighed.
“Yes, you did. Christ. What I wouldn’t do for a Victoria sponge right about now…”
“Excuse me,” said the Adeona. “Sorry to interrupt, but my long range scanners have picked up a signal a couple million klicks from our position.”
“Can you bring up a magnified view on the displays?” asked Rogan, glancing up from the hologram table.
The windows at the front of the cockpit changed to show a small, impossibly-distant patch of dark and empty space. Then, as the Adeona’s external cameras switched filters, a line of ships came slowly into focus.
Bringing up the front and rear of the convoy were two Mansa attack ships, each large enough for a single pilot and nothing more. They were sharp and nimble like racing cruisers. Each registered as barely more than a glint of light on the monitors.
Between them floated three enormous, rectangular cuboids. Much like the hovering buildings of Ankhir, they travelled without any clear source of propulsion – neither rocket engines, electromagnets, or even particle beams. There was no mistaking their planet of origin, either. Their seemingly featureless exteriors shimmered a familiar gold as they caught the passing eye of Penin’s angry red sun.
“That’s them,” said Rogan, spinning round to face Jack. “Get in position! Go!”
Jack sprinted out of the cockpit and down the stairs that led into the loading bay. He thought he heard Klik shout “good luck” as the cockpit doors sealed shut behind him, but he couldn’t be certain. His mind was elsewhere.
Rogan was right. This was insane.
He’d be lucky not to die.
But like it or not, there was no turning back now.
Unfathomably complex calculations ran through the back of the Adeona’s artificial mind.
To her it came as naturally as tossing a football.
She used her assortment of scanners, radars and sensors to determine the Mansa convoy’s velocity and trajectory. Microscopic bursts from the air thrusters lining her flanks put her into position.
It was time to go.
She really hoped this worked. Spending a few centuries as sentient space debris wasn’t her idea of a good time.
“Jack? Are you ready?”
She heard Jack respond in the affirmative, though his wavering voice told her the opposite. That was fine. So long as he was in position, his degree of readiness was largely irrelevant.
“The rest of you, strap in. It’s going to get bumpy.”
She aimed at the convoy and activated her skip drive.
Jack crossed his arms over his chest so that he wasn’t tempted to grab hold of anything.
He didn’t want to lose any fingers.
The Adeona had just asked him if he was okay. He doubted his reply convinced her. It didn’t seem to matter. The loading ramp in front of him was descending anyway.
Before him stretched an endless, heart-stopping nothingness.
And then it stretched to blue.
Two million kilometres was but an inch in subspace. As soon as the Adeona skipped in, she skipped right back out of it.
She came to an abrupt stop, though she was careful to mitigate the resulting jolt with her artificial gravity stabilisers. The last thing she wanted was for Jack to splatter like a bug against a windshield.
Her calculations had been correct, as had Tuner’s prediction about the skip drive – the Mansa convoy was large enough to drag them out of subspace and back into the regular plain of spacetime. The centre-most supply ship drifted past them like a golden whale, its colossal mass disguising the terrific speeds at which it was travelling.
A second later, she swung her thrusters down and launched herself upwards. The Mansa attack ships were already alerted to her presence – she could hear their alarmed chattering across half a dozen radio frequencies. She snapped her loading ramp shut and disappeared back into subspace with a twinkle of light like the tail from a shooting star.
Good luck, Jack. You’re going to need it.
Jack’s first-hand view of subspace lasted for little more than a second. Before he could register that the stars had returned, he found himself flung out the Adeona towards them.
Or rather, towards the giant Mansa supply ship in front of which the Adeona had so bluntly stopped.
He screamed into the inside of his helmet.
He’d almost had a heart attack the last time he found himself adrift in empty space. Planned or not, he wasn’t finding this a much nicer experience.
His breathing was too short, too rapid. He needed to calm down. Admittedly, a hard thing to do given the circumstances. He was still eighteen or nineteen seconds out. His spacesuit carried plenty of oxygen, so he took a moment to suck a long drag of air into his lungs.
There wasn’t time to panic.
The looming mass of the supply ship grew closer. Its golden hide flashed in the sun, and Jack’s visor dimmed accordingly. If he came at it too fast its defensive forcefield would either disintegrate him or send him skimming off into space, depending on his angle of approach. But if he came at it too slowly, he’d miss his window entirely.
There was no chance to turn around, to check that the Adeona had managed to skip back into subspace without incident. They couldn’t risk communicating with one another in case one of the Mansa attack ships picked up their signal, either. From here on out, he was on his own.
His heads-up display kicked in automatically. Various bars and statistics popped up in the corners and around the sides of his visor. The speeds he was clocking made him feel sick… but, if he remembered Tuner’s advice correctly, were well within acceptable parameters.
Now he just had to aim for the right part of the ship… and then slow himself down enough to avoid becoming a stain on its
hull.
During their two-day journey from Paryx to the Penin system, Tuner had made a couple of minor alterations to Jack’s suit… the first of which Jack now deployed.
Small jets of air burst out from nozzles lining the palms of his gloves, leeching from his in-suit oxygen supply. Jack used these jets to first stabilise his slowly spiralling trajectory and then to adjust his course ever so slightly to the left. He deployed them sparingly. Even the slightest miscalculation could have sent him rocketing off-target.
His heart was firing like a machine gun. There was no way of knowing whether he would pass through the forcefield or not until he hit it. Or didn’t, as the case may be. It wasn’t as if he could even see the damn thing.
Was he already through?
He guessed he was. He was seconds from landing on the supply ship – its golden hide now swallowed his entire field of vision. What first appeared to be a flawlessly smooth surface gradually revealed itself to be anything but; intricate channels – ancient and symbolic in nature – wove through and around vents and nodules like threads in a great, golden tapestry.
Jack felt a wave of relief. The schematics had told him to expect as much.
There. With a flurry of terrified excitement, he saw it. A hatch installed close to the ship’s topside. The Mansa may have had all sorts of technological marvels when it came to boarding and unloading the ships headed for their new colonies, but they weren’t so arrogant that they didn’t install a few old-fashioned backups just in case.
That was his way in.
Provided he could slow himself down in time.
He stuck out both palms and let out twin jets of air. There was no danger of being launched away from the supply ship – this was a case of lowering his speed, not reversing it. The impact-dampeners in his spacesuit would have to take care of the rest.
Another piece of Tuner’s engineering into which he had to put his trust. Great.
Thief of Stars (Final Dawn, Book 2) Page 5