The Dogs of God

by Chris Kennedy

  “Right.” She looked around the dashboard for small earbuds. She found a dirty pair. Rubbing them against the cloth of her space suit proved futile. She stuck them in her ears anyway. “Done.”

  “I loaded two crates of replacement parts for you to deliver to the space station,” he said, his voice crackling in her ears. “Now, commence start-up procedure.”

  “Commencing start-up procedure.” She flicked all the right switches, positioned her feet on the pedals, double-checked the calibration of the screens, checked the fuel levels, and grabbed hold of the control in front of her with both hands, just as she’d practiced in the simulator hundreds of times before. Everything looked right. Nevertheless, she went through the whole procedure again, from the top, twice more without finding anything she’d missed. “Enough with the OCD! For fuck’s sake!” she hissed under her breath.

  “Ready?” Holman’s voice crackled.

  Millie wanted to say no. “Yes. Ready.”

  “Cleared for takeoff!”

  “Affirmative.” Millie slowly maneuvered the ship out of the dock, far away from any personnel or small objects that could easily be overlooked and run over unintentionally. She wasn’t in the simulator anymore, where running over or crashing into something would just result in a red alert on the screen and a lesser score on her record. As opposed to its small body, the gunship’s wing span was impressive and called for exceptional watchfulness toward the surroundings on the ground. And the controls felt quite different from the simulator, too—they seemed less fine-tuned, had more backlash, were bigger, bulkier, and like the rest of the ship, looked like they had seen their fair share of battle.

  “A little less taxiing. We’ve got ships coming in, and I haven’t got all day, so time’s of the essence, Hunter. Put the pedal to the metal!” Holman’s voice crackled in her ears.

  “Affirmative.” Millie swallowed her fear, immediately pushing to maximum levitation and then acceleration before Holman had a chance to take her through the steps. The dark, low-hanging, lumpy mammatus clouds bombarded the windscreens with ice crystals and raindrops. Millie clenched her jaw and turned her attention fully to the screens—anything to rein in her fear of confined spaces. Soon she rose above the murky weather, where the Sun was shining in a clear blue sky, and the layer of clouds appeared calm as far as the eye could see. Having good visibility of the horizon finally put her anxiety to rest. She was fired up now; she felt high almost. Continually rising, she was soon free of the atmosphere.

  “Report,” Holman crackled over the coms.

  “I’m free of the atmosphere, aiming for the Moon.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now, once you get there, you’ll land on the…”

  “Yes, I remember,” Millie interrupted dryly. Holman had drilled her on the required test procedure what felt like hundreds of times, making her repeat the minute steps over and over. Roughly, it was a matter of landing on the Moon’s rough surface at the specified spot—randomly selected—turning everything off and on again to recalibrate the ship’s instruments to the Moon’s gravity and checking for equipment errors that might have occurred during the recent flight (turning the ship off completely was the quickest way to obtain error messages on everything from engine functionality to polarization of the windows), then flying to the space station near the Moon, docking there, and now also unloading the crates to save E-Corp an extra run, then finally return to Earth.

  “And, Hunter?” Holman barked back.

  “Yes?” Millie answered.

  “No moonwalking.”

  She had to crack a smile at that. It had been her first comment when she’d learned she’d have to be able to fly—a joke to make light of the terror that had immediately gripped her.

  Holman continued, “I’ll be here with you to take you through the procedures as necessary. For now, you just floor it, and report back to me when you arrive at the appointed landing zone.”

  “Roger.”

  “Hunter…?”

  “Affirmative.” Millie bit her lip. Even the restricted lingo she was required to use felt confining—not to mention the level of surveillance and security clearances at E-Corp, the Energy Corporation. But now there was time to freestyle. She played around, made the gunship tip, swirl, and loop. The wide expanse of space made her feel completely free. There were no confines to activate her anxiety, nobody watching her or tracking her every move, like on Earth. On top of that, getting comfortable with making both huge and minute maneuvers with the ship boosted her confidence. She was starting to enjoy the little patchwork gunship.

  By the time she entered the Moon’s field of gravity, she’d completely lost track of time, and also gotten a bit off course.

  “Verify position,” Holman crackled in her ear, startling her just as she began her approach.

  “Oh, right. I’m here, above the surface of the Moon, ready to land.”

  “What’s your position?” Holman checked it himself before Millie had a chance to respond. “You missed the appointed landing zone. Why didn’t you report back to me…?” Holman sounded displeased.

  “I only just got here.” Millie had already spotted another equally appropriate place to land on the sunny side of the Moon. “I’m sending you the coordinates for a new suggested landing zone. In fact I’m about to land now.”

  “Negative. You were supposed to approach the Moon and report back to me a lot sooner. It’s imperative that you land on the Earth-facing side of the Moon. Right now you’re too close to the far side facing away from Earth to be able to land on this side in time. The far side recco is down, so you’ll have to go around to where I can monitor you. Otherwise, I can’t pass you on this test.” Holman sounded agitated.

  “Recco?” At high speed, Millie approached the partly sunlit plain she’d picked. She felt confident, despite Holman’s negativity.

  “I’ll send you new coordinates. The signal booster on the far side of the Moon is down, so you need to…” Holman’s voice started breaking up over the coms. “Just…altitude until…get back…other side.”

  “Negative. Unable!” Millie’s stomach clenched. She was very close to the ground now, and she wasn’t entirely sure what Holman was trying to tell her exactly. She would just have to land here. She’d taken off without his directions, she’d practiced in the simulator hundreds of times—so landing quickly, capitalizing on the Moon’s low gravity, should be a piece of cake. That’s what she told herself, anyway.

  “Go around! GO AROU...” The crackle broke up, and the coms went dead.

  Millie had no choice but to start landing on what appeared to be a smooth dark stretch, but turned out to be a deep and dangerously jagged crater. At the last minute, she managed to pull the gunship up, and ended up having to fly sideways up over the perimeter of the crater to avoid ripping the gunship’s sides open. With her heart in her throat, she found a brightly lit and more level plain to land on. Finally, she landed survival style, facing the Sun, thankful that Holman hadn’t been able to oversee and grade her hazardous near-crash-landing maneuvers.

  The entire lunar landscape around the gunship was bathed in crisp, white light. “I actually survived the landing in one piece, so I can’t be entirely bad at this.” She smiled crookedly to herself. Then she turned off the coms and the engines, which prompted the polarization of the windows to reset. The sunlight flooded in through the windshields—it was blinding and disorienting. It wasn’t supposed to just reset like that with the rest of the settings upon engine shut-down. A malfunction to report when she got back.

  She fiddled with the manual offline settings to adjust the polarization without having to turn the whole ship back on just yet. Her semi-blinded eyes were hurting from the light exposure, and tears distorted her already impaired vision. She finally managed to turn the polarization as dark as possible, but it still seemed like there was too much light inside the ship. In fact, it seemed like the light was moving around inside the cabin. She got to her feet but almost toppled over. She w
as completely disoriented.

  “Shit!” Millie sat back down and covered her eyes with her hands. “Just relax, and it’ll pass shortly,” she reassured herself.

  She blinked, trying to restore her vision, and decided to try looking with her eyes half-open. The moving light inside the ship wouldn’t go away. “Crap!” she muttered and blinked again.

  Beware, a voice said.

  “Hello? Is somebody there?” Millie tried to open her eyes to locate where the voice came from. She was starting to lose her nerve and realized she hadn’t checked the ship for possible stowed passengers. That was the first task on her start-up procedure—she’d completely forgotten it.

  Look out, the voice said.

  “What the fuck!? Who’s there?” Millie staggered through the ship, fumbling her way forward, unable to really see anything with her welled up, almost blinded eyes, except a distorted white light.

  Brace yourself! the voice warned.

  “What the hell? Who’s here?” Millie managed to open a door to what seemed—for all she could tell with her burning eyes—to be an empty stockroom.

  Suddenly a whistling sound increased rapidly outside the ship. She staggered back towards the pilot seat, still semi-blinded. Then something exploded on the ground close to the ship, making the gunship tremor and tilt violently. She was thrown against the side of the cockpit and knocked to her knees on the floor. “Aaarrghhh!” Millie cried out as she crawled back to the pilot seat and immediately turned the coms back on. “Mayday! Mayday! What’s the hell’s going on?” she yelled in panic, tapping on one ear bud to see if it was on at all. Then she went through the start up procedure like greased lightning. Ready for lift off.

  “Confirm identity!” A male voice exclaimed over the coms.

  “Are you fucking shooting at me?”

  “Confirm identity!” the man repeated.

  “Stop firing at me, you motherfucking moron!!! This is an E-Corp vessel, and they’ll have your motherfucking ass on a tray if you don’t stop right now!!!” Millie screamed into the windscreen. She felt completely out of her depth and on the verge of crying—but if she was going down, it would be kicking and screaming. Her vision was starting to return to normal, and she found the attacking vessel’s position on the screens. It was close enough for her to be able to see it with the naked eye.

  “You’re flying a gunship. Confirm identity,” the man repeated again.

  “This is Hunter. On E-Corp business,” Millie snapped. “Now confirm YOUR identity, and state YOUR motherfucking business on the far side of the Moon!”

  There was no reply. The vessel took off.

  Millie’s predatory instincts kicked in—her name wasn’t Hunter for nothing. She immediately locked tracking on the ship and took off in pursuit of it. She checked the weapons section of the controls. The gunship was indeed loaded. Not fully, but enough to cause some damage. She had spent enough late nights trying to beat the gunner high score in the simulator to be familiar with the gunship’s weapons. The other ship wasn’t as fast as hers, so she quickly gained on it. It looked like a cargo ship, a heap of junk much like the patchwork gunship she was flying.

  “Confirm identity, or I’ll shoot you down with everything I’ve got!” Millie could see clearly again, and felt sharp as a razor. She powered up the gunship’s artillery.

  “Wait! You didn’t answer on the coms when I hailed. I only fired a warning shot to verify there was nobody onboard.” The man sounded somewhat anxious now.

  “Confirm identity,” Millie repeated calmly. She was getting her emotions under control again, the way she’d been taught during psych training.

  “I wasn’t even sure the ship was intact! From the looks of it, I assumed it was abandoned.”

  “Abandoned, huh? So you just thought a ship without a pilot was a free-for-all?” Millie snapped as she ran the specs of the cargo ship through her database. The adrenaline flooding her veins seemed to boost her with a new kind of bravado.

  “I was just checking,” the man objected.

  “So you’re a rotten looter?”

  There was no reply.

  The gunship’s computer came up with eleven options as to the identity of the cargo ship. Millie glanced at them and narrowed it down to three, purely by the shape of the ship’s body.

  “What’s your name?”

  Still no reply.

  “Confirm your identity…or I’ll return your warm welcome…and I won’t miss!” Millie prepared to fire.

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like what?”

  “Scavenger…”

  “Identity?”

  “Lazarus…” he said hesitantly.

  “…of the Wildfire Arc?” Millie completed his sentence. His ship was on her shortlist of possible ships, alright—the Lazarus of the Wildfire Arc. There were a few orange warning marks associated with the ship’s profile, meaning he probably had unpaid fines, or some kind of slightly worse violation. Clearly not clean as a whistle, by any means.

  “Affirmative.”

  “As in ‘the wildfire swallows up everything, and takes it to somewhere else to make a buck’?” Millie snorted quietly to herself before responding loud and clear, “Sure…and what’s your name?”

  They were getting very close to the Earth-facing side of the Moon.

  “…come in. Hunter, come in,” Holman’s voice crackled on the coms. “Do you hear me?”

  Millie muted the line with the Lazarus of the Wildfire Arc and answered Holman. “I hear you alright.”

  “What happened on the far side? You should’ve returned a while back.”

  “I landed and lifted without much trouble,” Millie said, thinking of how best to get her pilot license without delay.

  “Really? Aha…well, that explains the time lapse…”

  “Certifiable style, I’d say.”

  “Certifiable? I’m sure you’re certifiable, but if you don’t mind having another go under my supervision?” Holman said firmly.

  “Yeah, well, can it wait?”

  “Wait for what purpose? Don’t you want your license today?” Holman didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m sending you the new coordinates of an appropriate landing spot on the Earth-facing surface as we speak. Please confirm that you’ve got it.”

  “I have…but…”

  Holman cut her off. “Right. And you’re very close, so commence landing procedure immediately. I want to see precision.”

  Millie gritted her teeth, torn between continuing her pursuit of the Lazarus—she’d love to be the one to bring him in and make him clear whatever infraction had given him warning marks, since he’d had the audacity to shoot at her!—and the better choice of getting her pilot license today. She muted Holman’s line and unmuted the Lazarus. “Lazarus, you’re not off the hook, but I’ve got more important matters to attend to right now, so I can get this fricking license already. I’ll be seeing you around—you can count on that!” Millie switched off the weapons and dived toward the designated landing spot.

  “You’re not even out of traffic school?” He sounded amused.

  “See ya!” Millie started landing procedure.

  The Lazarus of the Wildfire Arc zipped off ahead of her, making half of a twirl as if in salute.

  Holman scrambled through the coms. “You’re approaching at breakneck speed. Slow your approach!”

  Millie landed the gunship firmly and securely on the lunar surface. “Done!”

  “I’m not sure I appreciate your newfound haste, Hunter.” Holman grunted. “Safety first!”

  “Right.” Millie wrinkled her nose. “So a little more taxiing after all? And now shut her down, and take off again, sir?”

  “Yes, and then dock at the space station near the Moon.”

  Millie turned everything off and went straight back online again. “Completed, and now off to the station.” Millie lifted off and headed for the E-Corp space station not too far from the Moon.

  “Affirmative, but
you need to slow down a whole lot more when docking.” Holman sounded vexed. “Don’t make me repeat myself!”

  Millie winced. “Affirmative.”

  * * *

  As soon as she reached the E-Corp space station near the Moon, she reported back to Holman. “I’m ready to dock.”

  “Cleared to dock. They’re expecting you,” Holman announced.

  Millie gently pulled into the designated dock and locked the gunship in. “Not a single bump, sir.”

  “Slowly does it,” Holman’s voice crackled dryly. “Now just deliver the two crates of spare parts at the station and come right back here.”

  “Affirmative. I’ll be back.” Millie turned off the ship and entered the station.

  She was met by a man quite a bit older than herself.

  “You’re here with spare parts?” The guy was pulling a cart.

  “Yes, two crates worth.” Millie showed him the way to the crates onboard the gunship.

  “Excellent, I’ll just take them off your hands.” The guy energetically loaded the crates onto his cart one by one.

  Millie noticed a few other ships docked further down the station’s docking line. She looked down the row of ships—a couple of regulation E-Corp cruisers, a transport, a pleasure cruiser—and there at the last dock, a cargo ship that looked a whole lot like the Lazarus of the Wildfire Arc she’d encountered earlier. “Who docks here? For what purpose?”

  The guy looked at her. “Mostly suppliers unloading fresh goods like food, equipment, parts for maintenance or new builds, but also travelers and people just passing through. We’ve got bars, restaurants, and hotel facilities here, so there’s room for leisure, too…even gambling, if you’re into that sort of thing…”

  “Really?” Millie made up her mind immediately. She knew Holman was expecting her back, and real soon, but she had a score to settle. If the pilot from the Lazarus was here, and if it was really his own cargo ship, she was dead certain where she’d find him. And she wanted to give him a piece of her mind. “Will you point me to the bar?”

  “Certainly. Follow me.”