Flight of the Magnus

by L S Roebuck

  “I don’t think Mission Commander Macready chose to press charges, though I would encourage you to stay away from the bottle in the future,” Moreno said, leaning back in her chair, absentmindedly rubbing a newly minted silver lock in her otherwise shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Yes ma’am, but what mission?”

  “What you are about to hear is highly classified. I’ll let Mission Commander Macready brief you,” Moreno said.

  Amberly proceeded to explain about the message from North, the desire to create a survival contingency should Chasm return in force, and about the likelihood of secret Chasm Hawks still operating on Magellan.

  “The threat is real,” Amberly explained. “Wong, Waypoint Cortes is gone.”

  “What?”

  “Show him the video, Amberly,” Moreno instructed. Amberly pulled Verne out of a grey satchel. Verne played the footage recovered from the Ironman. Floating fragments of the waypoint superstructure mingled with broken furniture, micro-manufacturing equipment, toys and suddenly-exposed-to-the-vacuum-of-space flash-frozen bodies. Wong saw both fully intact people and limbs torn from adults and children gracefully float in an eternal dance with the flotsam. His clenched right fist trembled, as a single tear escaped his left eye.

  “We can’t let Chasm win,” Amberly explained. “We must protect the people we love on Magellan and honor those we have lost by being prepared. An active Fuentes Station that Chasm doesn’t know about will give us the advantage.”

  “And it will help keep us indefinitely viable with supplies from Arara cut off,” Moreno said. “We used to be just one and a half light years from terra firma – three years of travel. We must assume that Arara is ether cut off from us now, with the destruction of Cortes, or worse, that Chasm has or will soon have control of the planet. The closest safe ground is eight light years away. Sixteen years from a home.”

  Wong looked troubled, and Moreno could read him like an infopad. “Speak your mind, Private.”

  “My misgivings about Miss Macready’s character aside,” Wong turned to Amberly, “no offense,” and then back to Moreno, “why would you put someone that young and inexperienced in charge of a such critical mission?”

  “Well, if she even has half the talent of her mother, she’ll do well. I’ve seen Amberly in adversity, and I’ve seen her slow and steady servant leadership helping us rebuild Magellan,” Moreno said evenly. “But more importantly, I trust her, and because she is a daughter of Magellan,” Moreno said, waving her finger at the ceiling and walls. “She’s loyal to this place. Magellan is her home.”

  “Magellan is our home,” Amberly said firmly, a carefully measured correction to Moreno. “Wong, I need someone I know is loyal to Earth and Magellan to provide our security and lead the Marine detachment. No one is more loyal to Earth than you.”

  “North trusted Amberly with his critical message. You should trust her, too,” Moreno looked hard.

  Wong stood up, which prompted Amberly to do the same. Moreno remained seated. The Marine stuck his hand out in front of Amberly. She reciprocated, and Moreno smiled slightly as the pair shared a firm handshake.

  “Mission Commander Macready, I’m in,” he said.

  “Good,” Moreno interjected. “Because I was going to order you to help, anyway.”

  Wong ignored his superior officer, and still holding Amberly’s hand, pulled the petite woman closer. His gaze hardened. “If you betray us again, I promise I will follow my moral duty to put a bullet in your head.”

  “Then I’m counting on your moral duty,” Amberly said.

  Lydia sat at Amberly’s vanity, while the redhead stretched out on her bed. The last three weeks had been long, full of secret meetings, supply level simulations, ore processing lessons and contingency planning. There seemed to be no end to list of potential bad things that could happen, and Verne, Amberly’s VI, had been expanded with some military-grade protocols to help Amberly be prepared with the hundreds of “what if” scenarios.

  “Lydia, it was downright macabre,” Amberly sighed. “I mean, Verne kept coming at me with scenarios: What if the food supply was contaminated? What if an uncharted asteroid fragment crashed into Fuentes Station and destroyed half of the living quarters? What if a team member goes crazy and starts shooting everyone?”

  “Shooting everyone?”

  “Yes, that’s what ended the last attempt to colonize Sonnet,” Amberly rolled over on her front side, facing Lydia and propped her head on her arms.

  “I must have skipped that day of history class,” Lydia mused. “How has the rest of your recruiting been going.”

  “Skylar is locked in to be my administrative lieutenant and communications officer,” Amberly said.

  “Ha! It’s so sweet to think that cutie is going to be answering to you,” Lydia joked.

  “Sweet? How is it sweet?”

  Lydia just smirked a reply. Amberly sighed, sat up and continued. “Midas is going to be facilities manager. Mars and Maria Dino are coming as well. He’ll head up the mining operations; she’s in charge of the mess. I am not sure if you know any of the others well. You could come, too, you know?”

  “My dear friend, we’ve been through this a dozen times. It’s tempting, but I would get too claustrophobic on Fuentes Station. It’s not that big,” Lydia said. “Also, I don’t think the Science Corps could take losing you and me. Your people are going to freak out when they find out you are gone. Has Moreno and the Governor told you who is going to replace you when you leave as director?”

  “No, and we still haven’t figured out a good cover story to explain our sudden disappearance. The best idea they had was a fake death,” Amberly said.

  “Really,” Lydia said, reclining on the bed next to Amberly. “Like your mother?”

  “Honestly, with 28 people leaving, I don’t know how we are going to keep people from finding out what is really going on. It’s going to be hard to keep this secret from any Chasm agents that may be hiding among us.”

  “Did you get your security team put together?” Lydia said. “Did you really ask that crazy Wong after what he did to you?”

  “Yes, several weeks ago in Moreno’s office,” Amberly recalled. “You should have seen the look on his face.”

  “Did he say yes?”

  “He did,” Amberly answered. “He also said he would personally put a bullet in my head if I ‘betrayed’ Magellan again.”

  “I don’t know, Amberly, maybe Moreno is wrong and bringing him is a bad –” Lydia was interrupted by the door chime.

  “Verne, who is it?” Amberly spoke to her VI.

  “Skip is here to see you, Amberly.”

  “Oh, my man is here,” Lydia said, with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Things not going well with you and Skip?” Amberly stopped moving to open the door.

  “It’s fine, who knows, I don’t know,” Lydia said. “This is why you date, right, to find out if you are compatible for better things.”

  Amberly shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. Ask Kora.”

  Amberly looked at the green light next to the portal, indicating air pressure on the opposite side, and pressed the open button, to reveal a flush Skip, who had obviously been running.

  “Amberly! You’ve got to –” Skip interrupted himself, “Lydia, I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Skip, you don’t have to always know where I am,” Lydia said firmly.

  Amberly thought she felt a chill from Lydia’s direction. “Skip, what’s up?”

  “You won’t believe this. You’d better sit down,” Skip said excitedly.

  “Won’t believe this. Better sit down? Quit being so dramatic, Skip,” Lydia chastised her boyfriend.

  “Fine. Whatever,” Skip turned his attention to Amberly. “We just received a transmission in Cencomm from the American Spirit. The ship is derelict. Chasm launched a coup.”

  “How? What happened?!” Lydia gasped.

  “Apparently the coup failed, but not before Chas
m managed to destroy to the antimatter drive and kill most of the bridge officers, including Captain Eaton,” Skip continued.

  “Oh no… April,” Amberly said, barely audible.

  “Moreno is calling her officers together now to see if we can stage a rescue,” Skip explained. “I’m on my way over to Marine HQ, but Amberly, I needed to tell you in person.”

  “No. No-no-no,” Amberly said as an emotional shock hit her system. She immediately thought of Dek. The rogue who had almost won her heart. The romantic revolutionary that just wanted to make everything perfect, and then betrayed everything he valued for her. She had tricked Dek, a good man who believed in a new, better order.

  She sat down on the edge of her bed and called out after Skip, who was already heading out the door to Marine HQ. “Wait, Skip. Who is in charge of the American Spirit now?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The American Spirit, Deep Space en route from Waypoint Magellan to Waypoint Gilbert, August 10, 2603, Earth date, 10 months after the Battle of Magellan.

  Sweat dripped from the woman’s short more-pepper-than-salt hair. She wiped at her face ineffectively with her red-gloved hand, and the sweat made her eyes sting. At 160 centimeters, she was at least a third of a meter shorter than the young man she was squaring off against, Chavez Ortega. Ortega handled civilian and bridge communications on the American Sprit. Ortega smirked with bravado as he took a swing at the woman with a broad left-hand stroke. The woman stepped out the way and Ortega’s glove only tasted air. With Ortega off balance, the woman extended her left leg in a sweeping motion that made the man lose his footing entirely, and Ortega fell to the cushioned floor of the netted arena.

  Several onlookers laughed at the sight of the boisterous Ortega kissing the mat.

  “Nice one, captain!” The woman recognized the voice of Duke Todum, the American Sprit’s ghostly pale chief engineer’s mate, emanating from the spectators’ booth.

  Captain April Eaton was a competitive woman. At a half-century old, she regularly beat members of her bridge crew half her age in the American Spirit’s sparring arena. Eaton was born on the U.S.S. Texas, the largest deep space cargo carrier ever built, just two years after it made berth from Earth carrying a cargo of Corvette and Valkyrie-class spacecraft, seed, livestock, and rare minerals (needed for antimatter core maintenance) among the nearly million tons of supplies.

  Eaton moved quickly across the black mat to attempt to put a finishing pin to end the match. Ortega’s pride spurred him on, and he scrambled up just before Eaton threw herself into Ortega.

  The communications officer avoided the pin, but he was shoved up against the net, where Eaton was able to get in three successive punches to Ortega’s head. The third punch knocked out his mouthpiece, which caused Eaton to drop her hands. Ortega put up one of his gloved hands to indicate a time out while he recovered his mouthpiece and placed it in his mouth.”

  “You spat that out to get a rest, didn’t you?” Eaton said with a smirk through her own mouthpiece. After Ortega had replaced his mouthpiece, he dropped into an athletic stance and put both his hands in front of his torso to indicate his readiness to proceed.

  Eaton quickly went at his head again and Ortega raised his mitts to block. But the upper body strikes she was signaling were feigns, and she tried another leg sweep. Ortega anticipated the sweep, however, and hopped over to flank Eaton. He landed a mean punch into her shoulder blade and followed by throwing his whole body into hers, flinging her face-first into the net. She ricocheted off the wall and onto the mat.

  Eaton was a teenager when her family settled on Waypoint Magellan, and she had pursued a career in the academy. She spent her 20s at the Waypoint University on Gilbert, where she gained notoriety for her research and groundbreaking theories on the unique aspects of organizational leadership in deep space. How does the psychological impact of years of confinement on an interstellar ship impact leadership ability? What organizational structures worked best to ensure the mental health of deep space voyagers? Eaton literally wrote the book on the subject.

  Nearly face down on the mat, Eaton knew Ortega would attempt to make a pin, so she randomly rolled to the right hoping to get some space between herself and the young man.

  Eaton moved back to Magellan when she was 36 to care for her aging parents. On the year-long return trip she met and married an asteroid minor, who perished in an accident in the Spencer Belt two years later. A few years later, she became the superintendent of education on Magellan, and made friends with Kimberly Macready, mother of one of the waypoint’s brightest students, Amberly. Macready introduced Eaton to a Marine officer friend of hers, Rita Moreno. Macready and Moreno were workout partners, and they also enjoyed playing competitive strategy games like chess and go. Eaton fit in, and for many years, the trio were inseparable. Eaton became particularly close to Kimberly and her husband, Alroy, when Eaton’s parents both died within a few months of each other. She was especially fond of the Macready’s precocious older daughter, Kora.

  The captain’s roll maneuver didn’t buy her much time. She was still on her back and Ortega was about to bring his significant weight advantage to bear. Using only her legs and torso muscles, Eaton flung herself upward from a prone position, landing on her two feet, and immediately headbutted Ortega.

  “Mother of —”

  Ortega was disorientated, and Eaton leaped and tacked him to the mat, with one knee grinding into his torso, while her second leg provided leverage to force him down on the floor. She quickly seized his wrist, and though Ortega buckled, he could not overcome Eaton from this position of strength.

  “Someone, grab me the dye pen,” Eaton said. The chuckling Todum had it with him, and started to reach through the net and hand it to Eaton.

  “Say it,” Eaton laughed at Ortega.

  “Awww crap, how did I lose again?” Ortega resigned and stop resisting. “Uncle.”

  The small group of onlookers gave cheers and laughs as Eaton took the dye pen and scribbled a red ‘A’ on his forehead.

  “I love it when she brands them,” a Marine onlooker told Todum. “A for April’s bit–”

  An artificial male voice came over the intercom. “Captain Eaton to the bridge. Priority beta. All bridge officers report for duty, priority beta.”

  “Well, I wonder what that’s all about?” Eaton said, as she stood up and offered Ortega a hand. “You heard the VI. Let’s get to the bridge and see what the trouble is.”

  Eaton was still hot and sweaty by the time she had ascended the five decks up to the bridge from American Spirit’s gymnasium. “You had to interrupt my sparring victory? What’s the situation?”

  “Ma’am, security is reporting some sort of … hostage situation,” said Von Bumble, the pale-skinned 24-year-old Ensign who had the current command shift on the bridge.

  “How do you have a hostage situation on a deep space ship?” said Ortega, who had trouble keeping up with Eaton.

  “Can you route the security feed to my infopad, please?” Eaton asked her communication officer. He complied and within a few sections she was able to see images of a small exterior port she knew to be the toward the back of the ship. She saw one of her security officers with his stun weapon drawn, pointed to the opposite end of the room. At the other side of the room, she saw Alan Martinez, a school teacher she vaguely recognized, and he held a young girl, maybe four or five years old.

  Eaton’s eyes widened when she saw Martinez had his hand on the port access button, and it was primed to open. Adrenaline hit her.

  “Get me audio, dammit,” Eaton growled. “He’s going to blow them all out into space.”

  “How is that port door even able to be opened? Isn’t it only accessible when connected to a gangway?” Von Bumble asked, seeming not as impacted by the situation as Eaton.

  “Shut up and get down there with a Marine squad,” Eaton shouted.

  “Yes ma’am,” Von Bumble straightened up and headed for the bridge portal. As he exited, the American
Spirit’s executive officer, Snodgrass, entered the bridge.

  “What’s this beta alert all about?” Snodgrass asked, scratching the back of his neck through his long black hair.

  Eaton didn’t answer. “Where’s my audio, Ortega?”

  “You’re hot now, captain.”

  “Alan. This is Captain Eaton,” April’s voice was instantly carried over the intercom into the aft portal room. “Alan. I need you to let the girl go and then you need to step away from the portal.”

  “Captain Eaton, good. Good,” Alan spoke into the air, knowing that the American Spirit surveillance systems would be relaying his message directly to Eaton.

  “I’m glad I have your attention. Let’s negotiate.”

  “There’s nothing to negotiate, captain,” Martinez said. “If you do not agree to my demands fully and immediately, I will release the portal and myself and the girl will be sucked out into space.”

  “Howzabout I stun you and take the girl,” Eaton heard the security guard saying. Eaton rubbed her temples.

  “I think you would find that quite fatal, because you too would join us in space,” Alan said to the guard.

  Eaton quietly signaled her XO. She whispered to him, “I don’t know anything about Alan. Pull everything we have on him. Find me someone who knows him. I’m flying a little blind here.”

  Snodgrass started executing the captain’s orders, and Eaton spoke again with the hostage taker.

  “Alan, you know that door cannot be opened. It has a failsafe mechanism and is sealed from the bridge,” Eaton said, calmly. “Why don’t you surrender the girl and let’s talk.”

  “If the door can’t be opened why are you scared to come and take the girl,” Martinez said. “Is it because you know I have it? You know I have Macready’s code slicer.”