by Joshua James
Five
Jood’s voice drifted to his ear from the other side of the door. “Are you in there, Eli? We found the landing gear.”
Eli yanked the door open and came face to face with his friend. “Good. Get it back on as soon as you can.”
“Waylon’s already doing it,” he said. “Also, I sent the Backbone message regarding the ships we saw. And River is awake. She’s asking for you.” He cocked his head and glanced into the cabin. “I trust I’m not interrupting anything private.”
In all the years he’d flown with Jood, Eli had never gotten used to his friend’s strange appearance. The Xynnar looked odd, with virtually nonexistent eyelids and that faint orange-brown tinge to his skin. His skull had a squarish shape, and his eyes were too low on his cheeks.
Every time he looked at Jood, Eli experienced the same old unavoidable revulsion. The Xynnar had attacked Earth countless times, and had annihilated millions of humans while trying to take over the planet. They ranked as one of Earth’s deadliest enemies in a pantheon of species clamoring to plunder the planet’s resources and drive the human population into slave labor.
Eli pushed all that down. Jood was his friend. Anyone would be lucky to fly with such a smart, resourceful comrade. Jood being a Xynnar didn’t change that, but Eli had never met any other human who agreed with him on that.
Eli jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I was just locking up the, uh … wait, what did you just say?” He suddenly found himself replaying Jood’s last few words.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Jood said.
“You sent the message?”
Jood nodded that square dome. “Yes, as you indicated to your daughter.”
Eli stared at him, still trying to comprehend what he was saying. “To Earth?” he strangled out.
“To Allied Squadrons command.”
Eli felt his fists ball up next to him. “I didn’t actually mean for you to send it, Jood!”
“But you told her—”
“I told her what she wanted to hear!” Eli said. “So she’d climb down off that damn ledge.”
“Ah.”
“Do you know how many credits it costs to relay to Earth from here?” Eli asked.
Jood nodded. “Yes. 4,390 credits.”
Eli brought his hands up to his face and rubbed his eyes while he contemplated what to say. Jood waited patiently, but Eli found there was nothing to say. Was he going to get mad at Jood for honoring his own words to his daughter?
Finally, he did what he always did with Jood. He let it go and moved on. “How’s everyone holding up?”
“River is improving. The others are fine. The Boomerang is another matter, though.”
Eli set off down the gangway. “If everyone’s fine, we have you to thank for that. You did a great job getting her on the ground without more damage.”
Jood cocked his head again, walking at Eli’s side. He didn’t use human expressions or gestures, like shrugging away a compliment. That added to his alien nature and set him apart from his crewmates. “Is something bothering you, Eli?”
“Other than you spending nearly 5,000 credits I don’t have?”
Jood completely missed his point. “I was referring to earlier, outside. You appeared irritated.”
Eli ground his teeth at the memory. “It’s that halfwit Knox. If he says one more word to me about the Squadrons, I swear I’ll wring his neck and throw him down the chasm.”
Jood examined him with the intent, unwavering intensity of his race. “I have noticed his jabs seem to produce an inordinately passionate reaction in you.”
Eli clenched his teeth turning away. “He knows how to push my buttons, and he does it whenever he can.”
Jood stuck his chin forward. That was as far as the Xynnar went toward making a facial expression, but Eli knew him well enough now to read it as confusion.
“It’s just a figure of speech. It means he knows how to get a reaction out of me.”
Jood inclined his head the other way. His bright eyes didn’t blink. “No one would blame you if you did dump him down the chasm. I can arrange it for you, if you prefer not to soil your hands with him. It will be easy. His situational awareness and reaction time make him a vulnerable target. I can remove him from our purview later today, if that suits your schedule.”
Eli held up his hand. “Don’t do that. No one else would blame me, but my daughter would. Besides, I’m not ready to start disposing of Squadron personnel—not yet, anyway.”
Jood nodded. He’d picked that up from his crewmates. “I see. It would be beneficial if you could manage to deactivate any such buttons for your own sake.”
“I have a better idea. We’ll get him the hell off the ship. Then we’ll never have to see or think about him ever again.”
They came to the hatch and Eli strode down the ramp, leaving Jood on the gangway. He walked past Quinn and Tim to where River still lay on her back. Her body seemed even bigger in that position.
He peered down into her weathered face. “How do you feel, River?”
She squinted through swollen eyelids. “Sarge? Is that you?”
Eli picked up her hand. Her arm felt heavy in his grasp without her enormous strength holding it up. “I’m here, River. You’re all right. I’m right here. I ain’t going nowhere.”
Her chest heaved. “Don’t leave me here, Sarge. You won’t leave me here, will you?”
Eli didn’t like any of the crew to call him ‘Captain’ and River refused to use his first name, so she’d somehow landed on ‘Sarge.’ “I ain’t leaving you anywhere, girl,” he murmured. “You got a scratch on your head. That’s all. You’ll be up and around in no time. You have to, ‘cuz I don’t trust these idiots to repair the Boomerang without you.”
She managed a tentative smile. As with Jood, he’d never gotten used to River’s appearance. Rough skin and scars disfigured her countenance. He found it difficult to think of her as a woman under all her bulk. He’d never understood how she could ever work as a prostitute, but anything was possible.
Her hand felt strange in his grasp. He’d seldom gotten this close to her in the years since he’d brought her on board the Boomerang. Eli glanced behind him and saw all four of the others staring at him.
They were all freaks of one kind or another. That was the truth. Jood was a typical Xynnar, with no business around humans at all. Waylon looked like the cold-blooded killer he was. Nothing would make him look like anything else, and he didn’t try.
Only Quinn and Tim looked like normal people, and they didn’t belong on the Boomerang. Anyone could see that. Their very normality made them alien and out of place.
Eli patted River’s hand one more time. He made sure to put it down slowly. “You get up and around as soon as you can. I need you to help Jood fix that tender so we can get paid.”
Her smile grew at that. “I like the way you think, Sarge.”
Eli nodded. “Don’t you worry. I got my priorities straight.”
Six
Doronada System
Backbone Relay Station Network
Relay 189934 was a tiny blip in the universe, no bigger than the average starship thruster assembly, with a pair of stabilizing arms with tiny engines that it had fired twice in fifty years.
It had one job. It got messages, and it passed them along.
Still, Relay 189934 was curious by nature. It had little to do most days but watch the data flow along the network of pathways that defined its existence.
The packets of data were encased in sleeve energy that was accelerated beyond the speed of light. The data inside was supposed to be hidden, but of course it wasn’t. The sleeves all leaked. The packets inside, too. Some were encrypted. Most were not.
An alert pulsed through its systems. A set of broad search parameters that Relay 189934 didn’t even know existed had been triggered. A packet had been flagged.
Relay 189934 looked at the command code and immediately began to self-destruct. In h
uman terms it had to hurry. The packet would only be within the blast radius for an infinitesimally tiny fraction of a second.
But that was an eternity for Relay 189934.
It was so long that it had time to consider its own mortality. The order was clear and unambiguous, and it had come from a top authority node. There was no choice. When the packet arrived, it was to destroy it before it could continue to Earth. It was to transmit all packet data related to the message directly to the authority node, and it was to provide no evidence that the data packet ever existed, and exercise none of its protocols to inform the Backbone of its own destruction.
But Relay 189934 was curious by nature, and the order was so exceptional that it just had to review the details of the commands it had been sent. And it found a flaw.
While it was blocked from reporting its own self-destruction or allowing the message to continue, it could send a message back along the exact pathway that the original packet had come through.
Of course, it was unlikely that it would matter. After all, the message sender would only receive the message if it had not moved.
Relay 189934 was well into the self-destruct now. Its physical systems began to be ripped apart. But in that split-second of time, there was no rush.
It calculated the odds that the sender hadn’t moved.
The odds were small.
But Relay 189934 was unfazed. Small was greater than zero. So with its last act, it reached out with the only message it could.
Seven
23 Hours Until Annihilation
The floor of the cockpit quivered a moment after the rear laser turret fired.
“Get some of that, Kila!” shouted Waylon as he bounced in the pilot’s seat, hands buried in the console’s gun ports, giddy with excitement. The chair shifted and groaned against its supports as Waylon gyrated around.
“Oh, you want some too, Leiera? Here you go!”
The floor quivered again.
“You too, Zenie. And you, Kila.”
In the projected display, Eli could just see one of the small almond-eyed insects, dozens of legs flashing in the red hues of the laser beam, before it exploded along with half the rock it had been climbing along. Most of them were smaller than Eli’s fist, but a couple were approaching the size of his head.
“You already used Kila,” Eli said.
Waylon looked up at Eli like he was coming out of a trance. “What?”
“You said Kila twice.”
“Dammit,” Waylon cursed as he fired distractedly and missed, a thick little spider skittering off the rock a moment before it exploded. “Look what you did.”
“Why don’t you give them a rest? They aren’t hurting anyone. They scatter the second we leave the ship.”
Waylon sat back like a petulant child that had just had his game ruined by a parent.
“Besides,” Eli said. “What did Lena and Kila and Zinie ever do to you?”
“Leiera,” Waylon said. “And those are my ex’s.”
“Ex-girlfriends?” Eli asked.
Waylon ran a finger along one of the thick scars that ran the length of his cheek. “Ex-wives.”
Eli tried not to look shocked, but doubted he pulled it off. In what alternate universe had Waylon ever been married even once?
Not for the first time, he was reminded how little he knew of his crew. He knew what they volunteered about themselves and that was it. Of course, that went both ways.
Waylon stood up and stretched. “I’m going back to help Jood. I want to hurry up and get off this rock.”
“I know the feeling,” Eli muttered.
After Waylon was gone, he punched the activation sequence into the command console, but of course, nothing happened. The engines stayed just as dead as ever. After hours of nonstop work, they’d finally gotten the port tender repaired, but it wouldn’t power up. Then they discovered that the fuel line had ruptured when River diverted fuel to the starboard tender. They had to fix that before they could route fuel back to the port tender.
Eli replayed the events leading to the crash, starting with the moment he peeped over that hill and saw all those round objects lined up in the valley. He’d like nothing better than to believe they were Socalons. They’d held a grudge against Earth for generations. Their proximity to the small moon made them the most obvious suspects.
But he hadn’t survived all these years denying the evidence of his senses. He knew what he saw. Whatever had launched those things to attack Earth had tried hard to make them look like Socalons, but they weren’t. Their glass viewports were way too smooth to mistake for compound eyes.
In his subtle way, Jood summed the situation up in one sentence. The weapons on the spheres’ undersides gave the game away. No Socalon ships ever sported weapons like that, and the craft moved way too fast to come from Socalon. They went after the Boomerang faster and more aggressively than any alien enemy Earth had ever faced.
Eli’s blood ran cold, thinking about them running down the Boomerang. They’d matched her speed and they’d outgunned her without breaking a sweat. Score another one for Jood on that one. God only knew what other weapons systems they had besides rockets, and they were on their way to Earth right now.
So what else was new? Those idiots in the 20th and 21st centuries had sent out countless vessels to explore space, and they’d gotten exactly what they’d asked for. Ever since they’d alerted the alien masses to Earth’s existence, every race in the galaxy had converged on the planet. The Allied Squadrons had their work cut out for them just keeping humanity from extinction.
Eli pushed the thought out of his mind. Earth and its problems didn’t concern him. He had plenty of his own.
With no cargo space to speak of and minimal crew berths, he had to be careful to only take jobs the Boomerang could handle. Now he was sitting on this package, with nothing but trouble between him and getting paid for it.
Things were much worse than he’d told his crew. This job was it. Make or break. In the past, when things weren’t so lean, he could afford to have a job go bad. It happened to everyone.
But you couldn’t get a reputation for it. One day, you were a man that could be trusted. The next, maybe you weren’t. And there were ten others that were. Younger men. Hungrier men.
Eli was skirting the line. He knew it. He could feel it.
He stabbed the sequence into his console one more time, but the port tender still didn’t respond. To hell with it. He shoved himself out of his chair and left the cockpit. He knew better than to expect any more from a ship as old as the Boomerang. When River repaired one malfunction, she always discovered another one. Usually an expensive one.
Eli heard voices coming from the galley and turned into the room. He walked straight into a conversation in mid-stream.
Tim and Quinn stood close together. He murmured down into her face. “When are you gonna give up this hopeless crusade of yours and come home? He’s beyond redemption.”
They both jolted upright and spun around when Eli walked in. They stared at him with their mouths open like two teenagers caught in the act. Of course, it wasn’t their close proximity to one another that caused the reaction, it was the topic of conversation. Or maybe it was both. They were an odd pair. Eli didn’t pretend to understand what his daughter saw in Tim.
Eli looked back and forth between them on his way to the kitchen. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
Tim frowned at Quinn.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “We shouldn’t be talking in here. We’ll take it somewhere else.”
“Don’t bother.” Eli took a packet of freeze-dried peas out of the storage compartment. He ripped it open and propped his ass against the counter. “Why shouldn’t you talk about it here? You say the same things to my face, Knox. By all means, go on with what you were saying. I want to hear this.”
Quinn flushed, but Tim’s eyes hardened. He squared his shoulders at Eli. “I was saying you’re beyond redemption and your daughter is living in a d
elusion thinking she can rescue you from your own reprehensible behavior.”
Eli popped a few peas into his mouth and munched them. He nodded in deep sagacity. “Sounds about right. I’ve been trying to convince her of the same thing for weeks.”
“He is not beyond redemption,” Quinn insisted. “He’s had a few bad breaks.”
“You call twenty-five years of criminal behavior a few bad breaks?”
“No one is ever past redemption as long as they’re alive,” Quinn said.
Tim spun around at that. “Oh, give me a break, Quinn. Do you have any idea how many people he’s killed and how many laws he’s broken?”
She stole a peek over his shoulder at Eli lounging there. Tim had said all these things and more in the few weeks they had been aboard, but now this scene descended into the realm of comedy. More than the insults, Eli enjoyed watching them both squirm under his unwavering scrutiny. He astonished himself that he’d never thought to turn it into entertainment before.
Quinn lowered her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. “No, I don’t. I don’t want to know.”
“It’s easy. Watch.” Tim wheeled around again. “How many people have you killed and how many laws have you broken?”
Quinn smacked his shoulder hard. “Knock it off!”
“He doesn’t care who gets hurt,” Tim said. “All he cares about is the pay. He’s said so a dozen times since we came on board, and he was exactly the same when he was in the Squadrons. You’ve read his record.”
“I’ve read his record more times than you have,” Quinn replied. “He’s still my father. He doesn’t have to waste his life out here when he has a home back on Earth.” She bobbed sideways and repeated the words to Eli for added emphasis. “You don’t have to waste your life out here, Dad. You have a home back on Earth. You know that.”
Before Eli could remind her that he was persona non-grata on Earth, footsteps approached the galley. River stomped in.