Mission Pack 2: Missions 5-8 (Black Ocean Mission Pack)

by J. S. Morin

  Carl raised a finger and opened his mouth to object, but thought better of it. They were on the edge of falling into the void on this topic as it was. “Great. So what else do we know about this G—whatever it was—moon?”

  “Let’s just call it Ithaca,” Mort said. “Seems appropriate.”

  “Sure,” Carl said with an over-the-shoulder glance the wizard’s way. “Good as anything I guess.” Why Mort wanted to name it after an obscure college town a couple hundred klicks from Boston Prime was beyond him, but it didn’t matter. Anything was better than the galactic survey designation.

  Scarecrow brought back the image of the moon. “That’s it. There’s no surface scan. Long-range showed life signs—potentially human-habitable, pending biohazard scans. But that’s as close as it got.”

  “As close as…” Tanny said. “What are you trying to say? Something destroyed the probe?”

  Scarecrow nodded. “I’m thinking there are survivors. Or were. This data’s a couple years old. I just got a hold of it before I commed Blackjack. My scenario: Ship is damaged, puts down on this shithole moon after being stuck in astral for months. They can’t repair it; they’re too far to contact an astral relay to get word home, so they hunker down.”

  “And shoot the first sign of human contact they find?” Tanny said, skepticism dripping from her voice.

  Scarecrow’s smirk clued Carl in before she said a word. “Who said my data came from human poachers?”

  Carl didn’t want to know. “Great. So we hail the survivors, convince them not to shoot us—”

  “And cut them in on the action,” Scarecrow said. “They’re dead to ARGO. You think they put us through the mind-wash before letting us loose? These poor guys and gals are never seeing a sunset again if they go home. Six years, and Earth Navy left them alone on a back-galactic moon with ultra-top-secret A-tech… the brass-kissers will make sure that never hits the news feeds.”

  “And if they decide to shoot us before Mr. Charming can seduce them over the comm?” Tanny asked with a glance at Carl.

  “This is why we don’t let the marines in on the non-planetside tactical planning,” Scarecrow said. She zoomed the image out, showing the mother planet and its other moons. “This thing has shields. We hail from the shadow of one of those neighboring moons and raise the shields. If they fire on us, we duck completely behind cover and slip back into the astral. It’s not like they can maneuver on us. Smooth as the weaponry on the Odysseus might be, they don’t have anything that’ll punch a hole through a moon.”

  “If they choose to fight, do we?” Mriy asked.

  “Once we ID ourselves, I don’t see why they’d shoot at us,” Scarecrow said. “Hell, if I wasn’t bringing in Blackjack because he deserves a cut, I’d have come to him as a negotiator. Captain Hernandez knows him, and he can talk his way around a fight better than anyone I’ve met.”

  “The question lurks,” Mriy said, narrowing her pupils. It always freaked Carl out a little that she could do it consciously.

  “I’ve thrown together a few dozen scenarios. Nothing I’m eager to try out. You got any ideas, shoot.”

  Mriy nodded. “Shooting. That is my idea.”

  Carl stepped in front of the holovid and held up his hands. “Whoa. No one is shooting marooned Earth Navy personnel. We’re just going to show up, have a nice chat, and hammer out a deal to chop up their ship for profit. Done deal.”

  # # #

  Even with Mort’s astral trickery, it took them six days to reach the G5344 system. Scant intel meant scant preparation, and the Mobius crew exhausted any useful planning days ago. By the time they slowed on final approach to the fourth planet’s third moon, everyone was eager to find out what was really there.

  “Bring us close before dropping out of astral,” Scarecrow said, hovering behind the pilot’s chair and staring out the front window over Tanny’s shoulder. There was nothing but the gray of astral space to see, but that was about to change.

  “Gee, you think I might forget the plan we’ve gone over a dozen times?” Tanny snapped. “Carl, can you get her out of here?”

  “Kick her out yourself,” Carl replied. He reclined in the copilot’s chair with his fingers laced behind his head. “But you get out of that chair and I get in.” The prospect of him flying the Mobius at a critical moment was the best threat in Carl’s arsenal. When a silent fuming from the pilot’s chair was his only reply, Carl smirked. Leaning around to see down toward the common room he shouted, “Mort, get ready to bring us into realspace.”

  “Never seen it done manual before,” Scarecrow muttered. Even the prospect of watching a Convocation wizard wrench a ship out of astral wasn’t enough to divert her attention from the forward windows.

  Without warning, the ship lurched. The cockpit interior went dark. Every light, display panel, and indicator shut off at once. The astral gray snapped into the stark contrast of white stars on a black backdrop. Solar incandescence blazed in, more blinding than illuminating. UV filtering should have cut the glare, but it was an active system and offline like the rest.

  “Mort!” Carl shouted, scrambling from his seat. He pushed past Scarecrow and dashed for the common room. “Mort, what did you do?”

  “Nothing!” the wizard snapped back. Mort stood in the center of the common room, an orb of pale light perched in his hand, providing the only illumination. “Something snatched us back into realspace.”

  “Why is my ship dead?”

  “Magic.”

  “But I—”

  “Not my magic!” Mort thundered. “Something brooding and old—ornery, if I had to put a flavor to it. Now shut up while I try to counteract it.”

  “Won’t more magic make things worse?” Carl asked. He’d often suspected that some Mortish accident would be the death of them all. He’d never imagined that it would come on the eve of discovering the fate of the Odysseus, only to crash right alongside them.

  “Esper, get him out of here,” Mort ordered.

  She nodded, taking Carl by the arm. “Come on, let’s get you back to the cockpit.” For a woman with bones like a bird, her grip was remarkable. Carl found himself towed along despite himself, still desperate for answers from the only one on board likely to possess them.

  “Carl!” Tanny shouted from the front of the ship. “Get your ass up here!”

  Esper didn’t resist when Carl squirmed free of her grasp. He ran up to see what was further alarming Tanny.

  Tanny swallowed, staring at him wide-eyed when he arrived. “I think I know what happened to the Odysseus and that lost probe.”

  Looming before them was the fourth planet’s third moon—at least that’s what Carl assumed. Without scanners and computers, there was no way to be sure. The Mobius was tumbling, and the moon passed by the window only to appear several seconds later. It was a good thing that the on-board gravity was entirely magical, since the rotation would have been enough to plaster them to the walls of the ship otherwise.

  Carl turned to Scarecrow. “Get down to the engine room. Help Roddy any way you can. Shields are priority one.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” Scarecrow replied with a curt nod even before Carl finished speaking.

  “Tanny, scoot over,” Carl said. “If we’re going to crash, I’m taking us in.” He put a hand on her shoulder to speed her departure.

  Tanny rebuffed his attempt to gain the pilot’s seat with a stiff-arm to the chest. “Like hell you are. This isn’t a dogfight or a race.”

  “This isn’t a time for safe, gentle flying,” Carl said, batting away her hand.

  “No, it’s time for a controlled crash,” Tanny snapped, shoving Carl back down the corridor. “Assuming that worthless mechanic of yours is sober enough to fix the engines in time to matter.”

  Carl knew it wasn’t Roddy he needed to pull through—this was Mort’s guitar solo. Whatever magic had sucked them into realspace without warning and blanked their tech ship-wide, Mort had to cancel it out for them to have any shot. Still,
someone had to consider the “what next” if he pulled it off. “This isn’t about who’s supposed to fly the Mobius, it’s about the better pilot. Which means—”

  “You’ve never crashed a ship in your life, have you?”

  Carl opened his mouth, then shut it. She had a point, damn her! “Half the galaxy thinks I did.” When that failed to change the furious visage staring back at him, he changed the subject. “Eyeballing it, we going to make orbit?”

  Tanny squinted out the window. The moon they had named Ithaca tumbled past. “We’re not heading straight for it, but I don’t think so. We’re headed atmospheric.”

  “Oh,” Carl said, suppressing a smirk. “So you’ll use the atmospheric shields to guide us in?”

  Silence.

  “Good thing you’ve got practice on aerodynamic flight, right?”

  Angry silence.

  “Scoot over,” Carl said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll burn up before Roddy gets the shields working.”

  # # #

  Esper rushed back into the common room. As soon as she stopped—unsure whether to say anything to Mort or hold her tongue—Charlie careened past. Carl’s old navy buddy didn’t say a word to anyone and disappeared through the door to the cargo hold.

  “Head down there,” Mort said. His eyes were unfocused, staring off at something Esper couldn’t perceive. “Get to the gravity stone. Don’t let that monkey give you any guff.”

  “And do what?” Esper asked. She didn’t like where this was headed. Futzing with magical doodads while Mort watched over her still felt dangerous. Tampering with the ship’s gravity was something she hadn’t planned to learn mid-crash.

  Through the domed common room ceiling, a planet flashed by—or more accurately, a large moon. The Mobius was spinning, and only the overriding presence of the gravity stone kept them from feeling the centrifugal forces of that spin.

  “I’m dampening magic throughout the ship,” Mort replied. “I’ve almost got hold of science, and I’ll be putting it back in charge momentarily, suicidal as that sounds. I need you to go believe in that stone. You’re going to be the rain slicker against the shit storm I’m about to start.”

  “But I don’t know—”

  “Of course you do!” Mort snapped. “Just get that noggin of yours to remember walking around this boat with your feet firmly on the floor, about things dropping and going down, and remind it which way down is.”

  “But what if—”

  “GO!”

  Whether there was magic behind that shout or not, Esper’s feet moved without another thought. She followed Charlie’s path, ripping open the door to the cargo bay and slamming it shut in her wake. Even as she scampered down the grated metal stairs, she imagined that her steps were lighter than they should have been, that her feet weren’t hitting as hard as they ought to. Not pausing to dwell on how her own notice of that fact might exacerbate it, she swung her legs over the railing and jumped the rest of the way. No point in wasting low gravity.

  Esper hit the floor like it was made from foam instead of steel. Stumbling under the dizzying influence of the rapidly evaporating gravity, she bounded for the engine room, and the gravity stone that lay tucked in one corner.

  “Beat it, kid,” Roddy shouted as she entered. The engine room was lit by emergency phosphorescents—tech so low that no magic bothered it. Everything was washed in weak greenish light and shadows. “No time for tourists down here. I got a helper who knows her shit.”

  “Mort sent me,” Esper countered. She squeezed past Charlie, who had a dead diagnostic scanner in her hand and a wrench clamped between her teeth. What she hoped to accomplish, Esper had no idea. Esper couldn’t get sidetracked by ideas just then. She had a job, one that was going to require all her spare ideating. “I need to get to the gravity stone.”

  Just then, the lights flickered. “Halle-fuckin’-llujah,” Roddy shouted. “Just don’t go busting anything now that the systems are starting to come back online.” The laaku made room for Esper to squeeze past.

  Charlie mumbled something past the wrench in her mouth. Esper spared a glance and saw the scanner in her hands had come to life. There might be hope yet that they’d get the Mobius under power in time to avoid crashing.

  By the time Esper reached the gravity stone, she was pulling herself along the walls. Her feet were no longer contacting the floor of their own accord. She could only imagine what the rest of the ship looked like. The engine room was all tight quarters and hand holds. At least in the cockpit there were safety harnesses for the pilot and copilot. Other parts of the ship were likely experiencing zero gravity, which was better than feeling the forces from outside the ship—that would come soon if she didn’t do something.

  “Come on, little stone. You can do better than this,” Esper cooed, placing her hands on the surface of the roughly meter-diameter sphere of granite. Though technically illegal, this gravity stone was native to Earth. Mort had gotten it through black market channels years ago, or so he claimed. There wasn’t consensus within the Convocation, but many of its members believed that each stone removed from Earth took a tiny fraction of the planet’s gravity with it. Elementary physics agreed, of course, but the wizards seemed to hold that the planet would experience noticeable effects long before it ran out of mass.

  “My feet aren’t on the floor, and it’s all your fault. You’re not doing your job, and you should be ashamed of yourself. There’s a whole ship full of people here, and they should be touching the floors, not floating all willy-nilly because you’re having a bad day. Don’t listen to that wizard upstairs. He’s just a mean old bully, and he’s not talking to you right now; I am. Listen, maybe I don’t say it often enough. Maybe we all take you for granted a little. But we appreciate you. We need you—now more than ever. Don’t you think you can stiffen up, buckle down, and bring back that nice Earthy gravity we’re used to?”

  Gradually, Esper’s feet sank to the floor, her hands unmoving on the stone’s surface. “That’s a good boy. Now, I’ll stay with you, and we’ll get through this together. Just keep focused…”

  # # #

  Carl sat strapped into the pilot’s chair, staring out the front window of the Mobius. Every time the moon passed by his field of view, it was a smidge closer. A pale corona lit one horizon, illuminating the atmosphere. That was the part to worry about. Impact with the ground would have been a quick death, too quick to even notice. But once the Mobius hit atmosphere, it would start to cook with all of them inside it. Unless the engines came online soon, there wasn’t anything he could do but wait. His argument with Tanny over who would have the honor of guiding the crash landing would be moot at that point.

  Beside him in the copilot’s seat, Tanny was buckled in as well. Something had killed the ship’s gravity, whether it was something Mort did or the mysterious force that had ripped them out of astral. Either way, buckling in was the only way to stay at the controls in case power came back on. If not for that fact, Carl would have waited in a more comfortable position, slouched down with his feet up on the console. It took years of flying cramped single-seaters to make a pilot appreciate the luxury of legroom.

  Silence reigned in a bubble of co-occupied space. Down the corridor, Rhiannon was shouting obscenities as Mriy tried to wrangle her. Mort was having, if possible, an even more vulgar argument with the universe at large, using that guttural, soul-chilling language that only a few wizards spoke. But between Carl and his ex-wife, icy stillness. Helluva way to go.

  “If we don’t make it out of this,” Carl said, watching Tanny from the corner of his eye to gauge her reaction. “Want to go out having a good time?”

  “No.”

  About-to-die scenarios weren’t the gold mine that the holos made them out to be. Maybe if they came up less frequently, he’d have more luck. Or maybe Carl just needed to find a way to arrange more trysts in surreal mental constructs—preferably not curated by any wizard he knew. Being trapped together in Lloyd’s head had seemed
to work for her.

  Further exploration of the prospects of getting laid one last time before splattering across an uncharted moon would have to wait. The lights in the cockpit flickered, then stayed on. One by one, system after system showed live on the status panels.

  “Hot damn,” Carl said. “You don’t have to die disappointed today.” That hadn’t come out the way he intended, but anything he said to remedy it could only have made things worse.

  “Engines still offline,” Tanny said. She tried to run a diagnostic, but that was among the most advanced techs on the ship; it was still down.

  “Fuck the engines,” Carl said, grabbing the flight yoke. “Just give me shields.”

  “There’s still time to pull out of this,” Tanny said. She hit the intra-ship comm. “Roddy, can you hear me down there?”

  There was no response from the engine room. Carl smirked.

  “Damn that chimp!” Tanny snapped, slamming a fist on the console. She didn’t usually resort to speciesism under fire.

  The Mobius shook. Just on the other side of the windows, the hull was awash in fire. So this was it—the Mobius, going down in flames. The sweat breaking out all over Carl’s body might have been the first sign that the cabin was overheating, or it could have just been a fear response. Incongruously, the image of what they must look like from the moon’s surface flashed through his head. It was pretty smooth, the way he pictured it: a ball of flame streaking across the sky.

  Carl muttered song lyrics, giving them only a hint of melody. “Don’t you know that you are a shooting star…”

  “Can we at least die in peace?” Tanny snapped.

  Carl sighed. “I think we’ve got time for one last beer. Want me to float back and grab you one?”

  But no sooner had he spoken than the sensation of gravity returned. Carl’s backside sank firmly into his chair, and his feet flopped to the console, his boots thumping against the long-range scanner display. A slow, manic grin broke out on Carl’s face. “Never mind that beer. I’ve got a feeling…”