The Star Collector

by Matthew William

  “I guess we have more in common than I thought,” Tammy said. “We both chose to worship something that doesn’t want us.”

  Cassandra was about to reject that notion until she realized it was true.

  Joe came back into the ship and stood there for a moment. Cassandra couldn't quite place the feeling he was having. Somewhere in between mortification and confusion on the regret end of the spectrum. Joe went and sat down in the driver’s seat without saying a word. He sighed heavily and stared out the view screen.

  “What’s wrong?” Cassandra asked.

  “I think I may have just started a jihad.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Joe glanced at up her, shrugged his shoulders and looked back out the window.

  The thing is, religions tend to go through a sort of life cycle. They are generally peaceful for the first few centuries of their existence. That’s phase 1. Phase 2 is when they turn militaristic, which can last another few centuries. Phase 3 is when then they become more or less benign. This phase lasts the longest and can drag out for thousands of years or more. Phase 4 is when they go extinct. It looked like Talashism had just made the jump from phase 1 to phase 2.

  21

  Joe snuck around the fountain and stood right next to Alistair Mezza, the infamous mob hitman, and waited nonchalantly for the man to notice him. Alistair was bragging to the small crowd around him about his Alpha Centauri handgun. The fact that it wasn’t from Alpha Centauri didn’t seem to bother Joe all that much anymore. What mattered to him was the fact that this idiot wasn’t noticing him standing less than a meter away from him. Joe stepped closer and closer into Alistair’s personal space until the man couldn’t help but notice.

  “I need some room here,” the man said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Joe replied.

  “It’s alright… Wait a second. Joe? From the diner?” Alistair asked. “What are you doing out here? I hope there’s no hard feelings.”

  “Alistair Mezza? What are you doing here? No, no hard feelings at all.”

  “Are you sure? I mean I was pretty rude to you.”

  “Were you rude?”

  “I threatened to shoot you.”

  “Oh… that happens more often than you think,” Joe said with a grin.

  Alistair laughed and holstered his blaster.

  The crowd that had been politely admiring the firearm slowly began to disperse.

  “You’re not here for payback, are you?” Alistair asked, he put his hand over his chest. “Because, Joe, this is a place of peace.”

  “No, no. I’m here on business…” Joe said. “Worship, I mean. Worship business.”

  “You’re a Talashamen too?” Alistair asked.

  “Bless the Great Specter,” Joe said, making the hand gesture that the Talashaa statue was making, pointing both his pinkies heavenward.

  “Now I feel really bad about the diner incident.”

  “It’s no big deal, my friend. But, hey I’m glad I found you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said. “Because I have a favor to ask.”

  The man looked on attentively, the smile lines creasing through the tear tattoos below his eyes.

  Joe was worried but continued, not really sure how he was going to make the turn from friendly banter to, ‘Hey can you do a heist for me?’.

  “Well, I’m sure you heard of what happened on Bolstra 5...” Joe began.

  He was met with a blank look on Alistair’s face.

  “And I was wondering...” Joe continued.

  “What are you talking about?” Alistair asked finally. The few people eavesdropping stopped pretending to not be listening and joined in on the conversation for real.

  “Yeah, what happened on Bolstra 5?” asked a nearby Persian. “I’ve been trying to contact my mother there. What’s going on?”

  “Um, don’t you guys watch the news?” Joe asked.

  “I watch the news all the time,” another onlooker said. “I watch literally all the news.”

  “And they’ve said nothing about Bolstra 5?” Joe asked, turning around, encountering only concerned faces.

  “Not a word,” a couch salesman replied.

  “Well... it’s gone,” Joe said. “The Chinese Galactic Empire destroyed it. How did that not make the news?”

  “You’re joking,” Alistair said.

  “They PBS’d it, man,” Joe said, spinning back to face Alistair, the man to whom this conversation was directed. “It’s more or less an asteroid field now.”

  Joe was met with another blank stare. So he continued.

  “So I was wondering…”

  Alistair fell to his knees and began to pound concrete.

  “…are you alright?” Joe asked.

  “Cynthianos…” he muttered. “My girl was there… on pilgrimage...”

  “Oh… oh, no. I’m so sorry, Alistair.”

  “She could have gotten off, right?” Alistair asked looking up at Joe, fighting back the tears in his eyes. “Were there survivors?”

  Joe was quiet for a moment, unsure if he should break the news to a man who had already threatened to kill him once. “I’m sorry, but no ships escaped.”

  The man’s lower lip quivered.

  “Not one,” Joe added.

  Alistair fell face down to the ground, his hands in fists against his forehead. “No!” he shouted into the dust.

  “It was a Chinese fleet,” Joe jumped in. “And you can’t let them get away with this.”

  Alistair stopped his blubbering and the crowd began to grumble in agreement.

  “And what better way to do that than to steal something valuable from them,” Joe said.

  “No man,” Alistair said, getting up from the ground with a red face and puffy eyes. “We’ll hit them back.”

  “No, violence won’t solve anything,” Joe said. “You’ve got to be strategic about this.”

  “Look!” a woman shouted. “There’s a Chinese man over there!”

  The crowd began to march angrily away from Joe. He craned his neck to see where they were headed. A man and his portable food cart was parked nearby. His eyes grew big as the mob approached.

  “No don’t!” Joe yelled. He sprinted past the crowd and stood before the cart with his arms outstretched. He had to somehow funnel their anger away from the man and towards the science facility. “This guy had nothing to do with it.”

  “The Chinese destroyed our holy world and we have to respond!” Alistair said, to cheers from the mob.

  “But it was the Galactic Empire that did it!”

  They pushed Joe aside and began to kick the man’s cart. The man tried to stop them, but Joe grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him away.

  “Better your cart than you,” Joe said.

  “How am I supposed to feed my family?” the man asked.

  Once the cart was sufficiently smashed the crowd turned their attention back to Joe and his newfound ward.

  “To the moon of Dalian!” a man from the crowd shouted.

  The moon of Dalian was a peaceful farming community where only poor Chinese peasants lived. Allowing the mob to go there would have been like letting them kill the vendor, only a million times worse.

  Joe grabbed Alistair by the arm. “They had nothing to do with this on the moon of Dalian.”

  “What do you expect us to do?” Alistair asked, looking around at the angry crowd.

  “Don’t you think it would be better to go after their science facility?”

  “Why?”

  “Just think,” Joe said. “It was their science that they used to destroy Bolstra 5.”

  Alistair’s face was confused. “I don’t see the connection.” He turned to the crowd and shouted, “To the moon of Dalian!”

  The crowd began to chant, “Dal-i-an! Dal-i-an! Dal-i-an!”

  “But the man who destroyed Bolstra 5 is at the science facility,” Joe shouted.

  “What?” Alistair asked, becoming interested again, while th
e rest of the crowd continued their chant.

  “The man in charge, the one who commanded the attack on Bolstra 5, he’s at the facility,” Joe lied. He didn’t know for sure, but it was an educated guess that Enoch Applebottom would be there. And what was the worst that could happen if they showed up and somehow made it into the facility and found out that Applebottom really wasn’t really there?

  “Who is he?” Alistair asked.

  Joe thought for a second. Might as well just go with the truth for this one. “Enoch Applebottom.”

  “The scientist? The man who blasphemed the prophet Merger?”

  “Yep,” Joe said, realizing he had just stumbled onto the holy war jackpot.

  “To the science facility!” Alistair shouted. “We will have our revenge!”

  “To the science facility!” Joe echoed and the crowd cheered. He began his march towards the parking lot. “Let’s go everybody!”

  Over the course of twenty minutes, Joe had managed to round up 583 ships and 1620 people for the assault on the secret base. Once it was all said and done, and the ships began to fly off, he began to feel slightly guilty about the whole thing.

  He sat in the Crown Vik and admitted everything to Cassandra and Tammy.

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” Cassandra said, finally.

  “I wish I was,” Joe said. “It was all so easy to just keep on growing my army. The power sort of went to my head.”

  “Don’t you feel bad about this?” Tammy asked.

  “Yeah, a little. Or I don’t know. Honestly, I’m a little unsure how to feel about all this – I’ve never started a jihad before. I might be saving the human race. Or I might just be getting all these guys killed for nothing.”

  Joe watched out the view screen as the last of the ships flew up into the sky. He had given them the facility’s location. They took the highway entrance and disappeared instantly into hyperspace. It was impossible to reach them now. There was no turning back from here.

  The communication system on Joe’s dashboard lit up. He was receiving a voice call.

  “Don’t tell me they got lost already,” he said.

  “Is that...” Tammy said, then stopped. She pointed to the caller ID. ‘Chinese Research Facility’. “Why are they calling you, Joe?” she asked nervously. “How did they even get your number? You don’t think they’ve heard about what you’ve done?”

  “We’ll just ignore the call,” Joe said.

  “Maybe it’s something important,” Cassandra said.

  “What could it possibly be?”

  Cassandra leaned up and pressed the answer button.

  “No!” groaned Joe.

  “Hello?” came the voice. “Is anyone there?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Joe whispered to the others.

  “I got your number from a man named Deniz,” the woman on the phone went on. “I take it, it was you who contacted my brother, Qin Feng?”

  Joe looked to the others and tried to discreetly press the end call button, but it was unresponsive. The science facility must have had a block against it.

  “Yes, we were,” Tammy spoke up.

  Joe smacked his forehead.

  The woman was quiet for a moment, probably considering her next move. Joe tried to think if the science facility could somehow access the self destruct command on his ship. Then he remembered his ship didn’t have a self destruct command, and breathed easy.

  “Then you might be the only ones who can help us,” the woman said. “You see... we’ve defected from our government. When they executed my brother for contacting the outside, the entire facility mutinied. And now the Chinese fleet is headed here to take the base back.”

  “And you still have the artifact?” Joe asked.

  “Yes… We all thought my brother was going crazy. But it was only because he was hiding his findings from us. Once he was killed, three of us were assigned to continue his work. And that’s when we learned what he knew about the artifact. Qin Feng wrote that you might know somebody who can disable it.”

  “We do,” Joe said. “How soon could you get to the Pillars of Creation?”

  “We have no ships,” the woman said. “And no way of leaving. You have to get here as soon as possible. The Chinese fleet is only seven hours away.”

  “We’ve got a rescue team coming,” Joe said. “I think.”

  “Please hurry,” she said and hung up.

  Joe went to call the jihad when he remembered that you can’t make a call to somebody in hyperspace.

  “Well… unless Alistair Mezza just calls me up to chat... then they won’t know what the situation is until they’re right on top of the base.”

  “Wait a second,” Tammy said. “How long before they get to the facility?”

  Joe consulted the star map and did the math in his head. “About seven hours.”

  “The same as the Chinese fleet. And for us?”

  “No highways...” Joe realized aloud. “So we can skip the junctions and go straight there… it’ll only take us five hours.”

  “We can go in, get the artifact and get out,” Tammy said.

  “And what about all those poor scientists?” Cassandra asked.

  “We’ll get them out of there too,” Joe said. “On the jihad ships. It’s perfect.”

  “It’s about time something worked out,” Tammy added.

  They buckled their seat-belts, lifted up off the planet and blasted into hyperspace in the direction of the science facility.

  22

  “What do you mean they’ve defected?” the Chairman asked.

  “They were spooked by the artifact,” Applebottom said. “You know this never would have happened if I was still there.”

  “You assembled these scientists,” the Chairman said, furiously.

  “And they were supposed to work under me, not under David.”

  “What happened to David anyway? I can’t reach him.”

  “They put a bomb in his ship and set him out on a security check. I take it they didn’t like his management style.”

  The Chairman groaned in mourning. “How far are you from the facility?”

  “Seven hours,” Applebottom said.

  “And if you take the secret highway?”

  “About five and a half hours,” Applebottom replied, consulting his star map.

  “Do it. I want the artifact back in our possession when I arrive.”

  “When you arrive?” Applebottom said.

  “My ship will be there in seven hours.”

  “You won’t be disappointed sir.”

  “I better not be,” the Chairman said and hung up.

  23

  Joe gripped the steering wheel tightly. The sweat gathered on his brow and under his arms as he flew the Crown Vik into the entrance of the science facility. He had the sneaking feeling that this was all some sort of elaborate trap that he had gullibly fallen into. But it was too late to turn back now.

  The hangar was massive and it seemed as if every person in the facility had come to watch their arrival. There were perhaps 500 scientists lined up on the far wall, staring in silence. Joe parked his ship on the side of the large docking bay.

  “It’s quite the reception,” Alma noted, newly awakened from her nap. Her face was paler than usual.

  “Maybe we could sign some autographs,” Joe said.

  Three scientists stepped forward to meet Joe as he climbed out from his craft.

  The woman in front with shoulder length jet black hair extended a hand. “I’m Lien. We spoke on the phone. These are my assistants, Yao and Tan.”

  The way she introduced the two men made it impossible to know who was who. Suffice to say, one had round glasses and the other had short hair.

  Joe nodded and gave handshakes all around. “Thanks for having us.” He squinted and scanned the rest of the scientists on the far wall. “Is Applebottom here?”

  “He was assigned elsewhere,” she answered, looking down at the floor, as if this was
a sore subject. “That’s the only reason we rebelled. We had too much respect for him to do so if he was here.”

  “But you still have the artifact?”

  “Yes,” she said, perking up. “I suppose you would like to see it?”

  “We’d like to take it with us, if possible,” Joe said, looking to the others.

  Alma clutched her chest and fell to the floor.

  “Alma? Alma!” Joe scrambled to her side.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Lien asked.

  “It’s Archibald syndrome,” Joe replied.

  Lien barked orders to Yao and Tan.

  The old woman’s eyes were clenched shut. All of a sudden her skin was gray and her lips were white. They carried her to the sick bay and carefully laid her on the first bed they came to.

  “She’s receiving treatments,” Joe said to Lien, looking in at his former mentor through the glass window to the room. “For the Archibald Syndrome.”

  “What do you mean?” Lien asked.

  “She’s taking medicine,” he said. With a quivering hand he took a receipt from his wallet and showed it to the doctor. “So you can make sure you don’t give her anything that might react with it.”

  “I’ll have a look,” she said, taking the receipt. “But just so you know, there are no real treatments for Archibald syndrome. Everything on the market is a scam.”

  “Not this one,” Joe said. “This one uses an Ica oil puree.”

  “That’s been proven noneffective in clinical trials.”

  “Really?” Joe asked.

  “Yes, really.”

  Joe looked through the window at Alma laying there on the bed. Questioning the medicine’s validity had never even occurred to him. Apparently, he wasn’t so skeptical if he wanted to believe something was true.

  Alma wasn’t old, strictly speaking, she had just turned 64. But she had lived her life at twice the speed. Thus the condition she had now. She was the closest thing Joe had to a mother – besides his own mother, of course – and Joe wasn’t ready to lose her.

  After the doctors had given her a saline drip, Joe went in and sat down on the bed. The room smelled of cleaning detergent and the linens were starchy.