by Randy Noble
The other ships from Lancer surrounded the five.
“They’re not going to take over, are they?” Paula asked John.
“No, no. Just an escort, an extra precaution in case the runner breaks free. Don’t worry. We’ll get to escort the runner into Lancer.”
Paula smiled, a small twitch when she did. She kept her head straight and tried, from the corner of her eyes, to see if John looked at her. It relieved her that he didn’t, that he never felt the need to watch over her shoulder. That would be too nerve wracking and had caused her to mess up in the past with other leaders and instructors. So much time in a simulator but she still did not have the confidence she hoped she would have had by now.
*****
In Mary and Brett’s ship, Mary stared forward as she piloted the ship. Brett had nothing to do but wait and let his anger fester. He turned and stared at Mary with searing eyes. He couldn’t help but think hateful things. Things like what a wench she was, and how if he had been partnered with anyone else, they would not have taken control away from him. Only a controlling bitch would do such a thing and that’s just what she was.
Mary, not turning to look at him, said, “Quit sulking, Brett. You’ll never get anywhere in this outfit if you can’t take orders. Deal with it or I’ll find a replacement for you and knock you down to cleaning toilets with a toothbrush.”
Brett turned away, closed his eyes, and gritted his teeth, wondering if he said any of that out loud, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t. He tried to calm himself down, as he had no doubt Mary could knock him down in rank and place him wherever she felt.
He had heard stories about a young officer telling her to “fuck off,” and Mary got his rank reduced from a 7 to a 10. The kid ended up bagging piss and shit on a frozen wasteland of a planet, used for training, until he abandoned his position after only a week of doing it. Authorities found him in a bar on another planet and sent him to a military prison for three years.
Brett took a deep breath and kept his eyes forward.
*****
Travis smiled at George as he spoke with him. George stared forward, concentrating on keeping the runner in formation, not smiling, but that didn’t stop Travis from trying to get one out of him.
“Come on. You’re like a hundred years old. You must have been with two women at one point or another?” Nope, no smile. Nada. Zip. Zero.
“Do you ever wonder why you’re still a rank of 4?” George asked.
“Nah, that don’t bother me. Seriously man, I know you’re married and all, but two women, come on?”
“It ain’t gonna happen. One, I love my wife and would never even think of it, and two, I’m not the picture of youth.”
“You don’t have to be young. I know a place you can go, and it’s not even that expensive.” Travis beamed.
George turned and gave him a weak smile, which Travis gladly accepted as victory.
“The day I pay for sex,” George said, “is the day you don’t.”
“Oooh, good one. I’ll have you know I lived with a chick for two years. But kudos, sir. Well played.”
George turned forward again, but Travis didn’t miss the corners of George’s mouth lifting higher into one of the biggest smiles he had seen the man ever make.
“Yeah,” George said, “but did you stop paying for it with other women?”
He shoots, he scores. “Sure.”
“Yeah, right.”
*****
Michael and Cindy flew in silence. Cindy, only twenty-two, thought of how she could work her way up the ranks as quickly as possible, like Michael did. But she knew she could not make his rank in only six years time. He started earlier than she had. She admired him and knew that she could learn a lot just watching him.
He showed no signs of stress, so relaxed as he throttled up and down with ease, subtle movements on the yoke, countering every effort the runner made to break free. Effortless. He looked lost in thought to her.
She wondered if he ever had any fun outside work, knowing he had not taken a vacation day in the year she had known him and was pretty sure he never did. So dedicated and disciplined. She had so much work to do to catch up.
As they neared Lancer, a large door, three stories high and wide, opened up just above where the SPARS ships came off the platforms.
The runner attempted a hard stop again. Nobody screwed up this time. At least not that Cindy could tell by the three-dimensional radar image before her of all the ships in the vicinity, including Lancer. The runner was going nowhere but inside Lancer.
Inside Lancer’s docking bay, a large open area revealed itself, with a glass ceiling, a glass floor, and four glass walls. Below the glass floor, another level, with over twenty SPARS ships parked on individual platforms.
Above the glass ceiling, over twenty people stood and watched the spectacle below them.
The four escort ships did not follow the others into the bay.
As soon as they entered the bay, the door slowly closed. The four ships surrounding the runner hovered in mid-air, keeping the runner in check as the large door closed.
With a loud THUD, the large bay door finally sealed them in.
Cindy watched Michael hit a release button for the magnetic tow, as she was sure all the others did.
Michael, George, Mary, and Paula separated and each went to a corner of the massive bay.
The runner hovered for awhile, not knowing what to do, Cindy figured. There was nowhere to go.
The other four started coming down, as if for a landing, and then four panels slid open and they all came down to the level below and landed on platforms.
Before the others could land, the runner sped towards one of the openings, but it was too late. The panel closed, and whoever flew the runner was screwed.
Frantic and out of options, the ship flew all around the bay, colliding with the ceiling at one point, causing some of the observers above to jump back. Cindy had never been through one of these before, so it was entertaining to watch it all take place. She tried watching from the cockpit, through the glass in the roof of their ship, but couldn’t catch everything. Michael nodded at her and she knew that was his okay for her to go outside and get a better vantage point. He didn’t follow her, but that was his way. He would probably square everything away, shut down procedures, locking couplers, before he would leave. She wanted to be like him, but sometimes you just need to cut loose and enjoy what’s in front of you.
Before Cindy made it out of their ship, George’s voice rumbled in her ears, but not from her glasses this time. His voice boomed out in the ship bay. “We are on the ground, and the doors are sealed. You are good to go.”
The runner ship continued its barrage on the walls of its prison. Cindy made it outside just as water started to pour into the glass bay from every side except the one with the bay door. Water jetted in from fist-sized holes lined along the walls, ten feet from the floor.
When the water level rose to eight feet in under a minute, the runner settled down, hovering a foot above water level.
Lancer was one of the first precinct ships, and had not yet been retrofitted with an anti-gravity trapper bay, but she did know it was on the short list. Filling a bay with water was the old school way of doing things, and since she had never witnessed it before, it was cool to see before it became a thing of the past.
The water stopped and, a second later, the runner dropped like a stone and splashed into the water, after someone, somewhere on Lancer pressed a button that sent an electromagnetic pulse throughout the glass bay. The runner ship sank, plunking into the bottom of the bay, part of the ship sticking out of the water. Its landing gear never protracted and the front end fell a little further. Cindy could see movement through the cockpit glass but could not make out how many or who they might be.
As soon as it hit bottom, the water began to drain out from holes along the bottom of the three walls.
Cindy smiled. She doubted she would ever get the chance to see that again.
&
nbsp; Chapter 15
Regina didn’t run from the sound of footsteps snapping branches behind her, but she did walk more quickly, her head down watching every step before she took it, making sure she didn’t make the same mistake of whoever was behind her. Either they wanted her to know they were there or they were stupid. Her hunch suggested the latter.
The footsteps quickened. She turned to look, seeing nothing. It was possible somebody else could have been hiding and ran when they heard Regina, and also happened to go the same way she did. Her instincts said different. Regina kept her gun at her side, at the ready. Any quick movement towards her and she could bring the gun up faster than the blink of an eye. She quickened her pace.
Regina looked to her right to see if anyone followed outside the trees. Nobody.
The footsteps quickened again.
Regina ran, whipping around trees, not caring anymore about stealth. They already knew where she was. As she ran, branches snapped and cracked under her feet, and she could no longer hear anyone, but had no doubt that they were there, close behind.
As she ran, a light to her left caught her eye. Regina turned and ran towards it on instinct. The source of the light came from the front porch of a two-storey cottage. The cottage looked rustic and quaint, limestone rock adorned the façade, and a three-storey turret loomed on the left side of the house. It featured several sash windows and a couple large Palladian windows, and it had a high, steeped roof, thatched with straw.
There were no lights on inside, just two Victorian lamplights sitting atop eight-foot poles on either side of the wooden stairwell to the front porch.
Regina ran for the stairs, without a glance behind her, and through the unlocked, front door. After a quick glance at her surroundings -- an open foyer with a wooden spiral staircase leading up to the second level, an open dining area to her left, and past that, the first level of the tower -- she looked to her right and saw exactly what she needed. Going right offered shadows and darkness, but she saw enough through the murkiness for her purpose.
She walked into a large L-shaped living room; a stone fireplace, with openings on all four sides, decorated the middle of the first section. Couches and chairs faced the fireplace on all sides.
She glanced around the corner, seeing three black walls that she thought strange at first, because they didn’t go with the mushroom brown color in the other section, and then she realized why. Three grey sofas surrounded a ten-by-ten flat black panel, which looked like it lay on the ground. It was the biggest holographic viewer she had ever seen. Regina looked up and saw a thin slit along the ceiling, where a wall would go to separate the two sections, and then on the floor where a similar thin slit aligned with the one above.
Regina walked to the right side of the holographic room and pressed a circular, blue button on the wall. As soon as she did, a glass partition slid up from the floor and down from the ceiling and joined to enclose the room. A second later, the glass transformed from crystal clear to brown, matching the other walls. She could no longer see into the holographic section.
Regina walked over to a large bay window, closed the slatted blinds, came back, and jumped behind a light brown sofa, her running shoes squeaking as she landed on the hardwood floor. The sofa offered a nice hiding spot, at a forty-five degree angle against two walls, facing the fireplace. She pointed her gun over the edge of it, keeping herself as close to the living room entrance wall as she could.
Ten minutes passed and Regina heard nothing. No one approached and no one tried to get into the cottage. Leave or stay? Were they waiting for her to come out? She cursed to herself. Wait, it was.
Another couple minutes passed and then the porch floorboards creaked.
Fear nothing for fear breeds mistakes. That was one of her father’s mantras and one she often repeated to herself in such situations.
Regina steadied herself on her feet and hunkered down. Her right arm rested on the couch and the gun pointed at the door.
The porch floorboards creaked again.
Chapter 16
George, Mary, and Michael waited in a large boardroom. A large window overlooked the docking bay they had just chased the runner into.
George and Mary sat at a massive oak table fitted with twenty high-backed leather chairs.
Michael stood by the window, watching the activity in the docking bay. The runner ship sat askew in the now waterless upper glass bay.
The room’s walls were plastered with maps of star systems, gates, and pictures of Alpha leaders who had previously been in control of precinct ship Lancer.
Lights hung from cables, suspended from the ceiling, dimmed down and throwing Mary and George’s shadows in long, narrow shapes across the table.
“I knew they would be kids,” Mary said.
“SPARS kids, no less,” George said. “Only two, thank God.”
“Why,” Mary said. “Who cares how many there were?”
“Fewer pissed off parents,” Michael said. George’s lips pursed into what looked like a thin smile. “The thing that really surprised me was that they were both girls and only fourteen.”
“Well, if I were their parents, they’d be grounded for four years,” Mary said.
George nodded. “It will be worse after the SPARS council finishes with the parents, reaming them out over how their kids knew the controls in the ship. They will probably be demoted and put on suspension for awhile.”
“Yeah, they are --“ Michael stopped himself when the door opened and a short man with a gray mustache and gray, wavy hair walked in, looking about the same age as George.
“Good day, people,” said the man as he walked in, carrying a small rectangular device in his right hand, about the size of a paperback book.
“Hello, Brad,” George said.
The others nodded to Brad as he looked up at them, and then took a seat at the head of the table, putting the device down in front of him.
Michael came away from the window and sat down at the other end of the table from Brad.
They all waited patiently as Brad got ready. “Screens,” Brad said, and instantly twenty glass screens, as flat as paper, popped up through openings in the table. Everyone had his or her own screen to view. There was one for every chair at the table. “Give me a second.” Brad fiddled with the device he put down on the table. His device was a smaller version of the screens before them, clear as glass and paper-thin. He talked into it. “Pyramid Cruise Line case file. Slide one, please.”
A picture of the Pyramid Cruise ship appeared on all the screens. It looked like an Egyptian pyramid had been cut in half, from the top down and then flipped on its side so the flat part from the slice faced up, and then the whole thing got stretched out. There was a rounded dome on the whole top section. The levels of the ship were like levels on a pyramid, with the shortest level at the bottom and the longest level at the top.
Brad let them study the image of the ship for a few seconds and then said, “In case you haven’t guessed already, your team is being pulled from the Planetary Games security patrol to a new assignment.” Brad placed his handheld device onto the table in front of him. “Your control devices have been updated with the same information --“
Brad nodded towards his device.
“-- that this one has.”
Michael watched his screen. The image of the ship rotated. It looked like a model representation of the real thing. There was no detail on it. And no stars in the background. Just the image rotating on a black background.
Brad leaned in a little and spoke into his device. “Next slide.”
A mapping image popped onto the screens, revealing a small picture of the Pyramid ship, gates, and planets.
Brad continued. “If you look at your screen, you can see the path the Pyramid has taken, and where it is supposed to be right now.”
Michael noticed a lined path from one planet to a planet in another system, where the Planetary Games happened to be about to take place. But the ship’s path onl
y went three quarters of the way there.
“We got a call,” Brad said, “from Pyramid headquarters that they lost contact with their ship over eight hours ago, and have not been able to reach them.”
“They’re the only ship in the fleet so far,” Mary said. “Not the maiden voyage, but pretty close. Probably some bugs in the system still.”
Brad looked over at Mary, his eyebrows furrowed. “That’s what their headquarters think. They said there have been no problems with communications before, but they did just have some software upgraded and think it may be the culprit.” Brad looked over at George, his eyebrows back to normal, his brown eyes soft and kind. “It’s probably nothing, but I need you to take your team and track them down and make sure they’re okay. But -- “
Michael knew it before Brad said it.
“-- you’re on your own. I need all available resources for security at the games. Those idiots who organized it did not count on how many planets would want to participate. They grossly underestimated the security needed.”
“You can’t spare one extra team, Brad?” George said.
“No, I can’t. Half the ships are already at the games, and half of the ones left in the bay are under repair. Plus, we have to maintain our regular security posts. As it is, all the other military branches are chipping in and we’re still not at a number we should be.”
Michael felt a rant coming on, Brad trying to justify why they had to go out on a hunt that, if it was what Brad was saying it was, could have been checked out by the nearest gate patrol. All they had to do was follow the matchstick road.
Sure enough, after a deep inhale, Brad continued. “It’s a cluster fuck with billions of people en route or already there, and thousands upon thousands of ships of all sizes. The rest of the precinct ships will be on their way soon. Lancer will be moving to the nearest gate by the games. I’m sorry, George, but that’s why I picked your team. Your team combined has the most field experience.” Brad sighed. “There’s one other thing.”