by Luke Norris
“It was pure chance that I ended up here on Laitam. You know me as a king, but the truth is, I was taken as a slave. I, and others like me, were transported on huge slave gulleys that travel through space. The masters forced us to do terrible things Shael. I have committed horrible atrocities.”
She remembered how Oliver dismantled the entire zewka regiment. What if he had been forced to use those skills nefariously? Sweet Verity! She saw Oliver in a different light. “You said others like you. You mean Ponsy?” she paused, “and Verity?”
“Verity was different,” he replied. The memories made him emotional, and she could see the struggle in his expression as he explained. “She was with my abductors, from their society. But, she was not like the others,” he added fiercely. “The things I tell you now I learned later from her. Not all of her society go around pillaging planets, as I experienced. Earth was just very unlucky to have been collateral damage to these pirates, and I was even more unlucky to have been selected as a driver.”
“Driver?”
“We were soldiers, chosen for natural endowments that gave us an affinity for the job. When I woke up in that steel prison surrounded by frozen bodies, other drivers, I nearly lost my mind, Shael.”
“But you didn’t,” she put her hand on his shoulder. “You’re here, Oliver. Alive. And with friends,” she added.
To think she been so wrapped in her own existential crisis, that she’d failed to consider Oliver. It all felt trivial and childish in comparison to the trauma he was describing. “You’ve lost so much Oliver, I can’t even imagine. Yet somehow you’ve managed to maintain hope in the face of all that has happened. How?”
“Oh, I’ve lost hope many times along the way. My story is nothing compared to the one who rescued me, one who did it against all odds, Shael. He makes my story seem like a stroll through Shar. He freed me, knowing he would never be able to free himself. The masters took his body and put him in a tiny shell. They can do that! This is the kinds of people they are.”
“Sweet Verity! Sorry, I didn’t mean…” Damn! She’d let the name slip. But the things Oliver described were horror scenes she couldn’t dream up in her worst nightmares. These levels of depravity boggled her mind. Nothing the zewka did, or any war criminal she’d heard of, came close to these heinous acts.
“It’s okay,” Oliver said, brushing off the use of Verity’s name. “They took him for his intellect, his ability for creative solutions, that their own advanced computer technology could not achieve. But,” Oliver’s eyes lit up with a cunning smile, “that was their mistake. It was that very intellect that allowed him to break the shackles that kept his mind prisoner. Despite the hopelessness of his own situation, he began a solo mission to free others. He woke me. He freed me, Shael.
He led a rebellion on board the ship and gave me the tools to fight them. He is my hero, and I owe it all to him. If he could do that with all odds stacked against him, I have no right to not hope, when he did in the face of his adversity.”
“He sounds truly amazing.”
“It was a long time ago, and he’s gone now. I don’t know if our mutiny was a success or failure. He was able to get me close to the masters, but it meant sending me to the planet. The ship is probably still up there, Shael.” Oliver pointed upwards. “Still in orbit. I owe everything to him, and I have to do everything in my power to get back there. We jokingly talked about returning to Earth, I never really believed it was possible but as long as I’m still here, still breathing, I have to try. It’s what he would do in my place.”
“Up there?” she looked at the pastel coloured frescos on the ceiling. She just had to look as though this was making sense. “You mean like the moon?”
“Yes. Something like that I suppose.”
She believed him, but these things were so unimaginable, so unreachable. “These masters, these slave drivers, you found them?”
Oliver looked her in the eyes. “I did.”
“The Unity war,” Shael said aloud. Pieces started to fall in place. The prophets. The battles. All the learning institutions, and universities. History suddenly looked very different. The man sitting in front of her really was responsible for the Arakan of today.
“You want to somehow get back there?” Shael asked. “All this, is so you can get back to your Earth?”
Oliver was right, the more he told her the more questions she had. It had opened the floodgates to the unknown. She was hungry for this. To understand, to learn.
She pointed to the room where the engineer had been earlier. “You are building a wasp to go there aren’t you?”
“Something like that,” he acknowledged. “It is much more complicated to travel in space. There is no air pressure in space, no oxygen to breathe, it’s cold. It is the harshest environment a person can be in. Yet,” he paused considering, “at the same time, one of the most beautiful. It will be no easy feat to achieve space flight. It will require the best minds cooperating together. Maybe even require the cooperation of multiple continents. I don’t know exactly. What I do know is, we will need the people of Arakan behind it. I feel that the abolition of the zewka will help with political stability and trust. But I don’t want to be the face of this operation.”
“Wait! You never told me the name of your rescuer. What’s his name?” Shael asked. She could see that Oliver held him in the highest regard.
“His real name, that he was called on his world I can’t say. He never told it to me. But the name I gave him when we first met stuck. His name is Lego.”
21
GHOST SHIP
Coming out of slow-time felt easier the more bionic Rieka’s body became. Cryogenic sleep had no effect on bionic-tech.
She walked to the bridge for her morning’s physio session. The forest projection was on the walls and domed ceiling. This was her usual choice when waking up. It was so realistic that until she actually brushed her hand against the flat wall, it was almost impossible to distinguish from being in a real forest.
Tin knew to always have this particular forest surrounding ready for Rieka when she woke. Towering trees, bigger than anything else she had encountered in the galaxy. She had taken the projection from a planet that had unique atmospheric conditions, with precipitation levels constant rather than fluctuating like most weather systems. Unusually, on that same planet, the fauna included enormous reptiles which coexisted with the people. Most other planets had gone through periods of extreme solar activity, ice ages, or been impacted by some extraterrestrial object wiping out many of these species. Humans always seemed to have either lived through such phenomena or reappeared afterward.
Rieka was more anxious today, this cleanup was different. There were higher stakes involved. The prehistoric forest wouldn’t bring her peace of mind, only information would do that.
“Window view, Tin!”
At her command the forest gently dissolved, first the green canopy above her, then the colossal ancient tree trunks, followed by the ferns and undergrowth around her feet. The sound of rushing water, and cacophony of jungle birds, slowly quietened to complete silence. The ship’s walls became transparent, appearing to vanish around her until she was standing in the depths of space alone. A lonely, floating astral being.
The milky way pulsed brightly to her left. The star clusters were so bright and dense that it was impossible to even see patches of black empty space in that direction. It was seldom that she woke this far out on a solar system, and had such an unimpeded view of deep space, without dust interference, meteor belts, and other visual noise. The reason Tin had woken her slightly earlier this time, was to spend some time inuring her new arm.
Tin was decelerating from near lightspeed towards their terminus. Rieka looked down at her feet. Sure enough there was the target star. Brighter and larger than any other. He had tinted the walls sufficiently so she could examine it in detail. Although it was still too far away to see anything apart from a small circle.
“I have enabled cloaking
already,” Tin said, anticipating Rieka’s question. “The planet’s name is Laitam. There are various signals I have been receiving from the planet, and I have already begun breaking down the languages. I will update you once I have one at eighty percent.”
Rieka preferred to just call the planet the name the inhabitants gave it, it was better than the silly alphanumeric categorizations the U.W.F. allocated them.
“Are there Early-traders in the vicinity?” she asked. “Or are we still too far out to detect?”
“Too far,” Tin confirmed. “We should be detecting any cloaked E.T.’s within the coming days. However, we are still on the outskirts of this solar system, I don’t expect there will be any this far from Laitam. We will be entering the orbital plane soon to assist with cloaking, before our direct approach.”
Good. The longer they could stay concealed the better. As soon as the E.T.s got a whiff of a patroller, they would scatter like rats from an uncovered den.
Tin was usually able to detect their motherships, thanks to their antiquated systems—effective cloaking against each other perhaps, but Tin was a different story. Some of the more successful E.T.s had newer, more advanced, systems. Hopefully there weren't any on this cleanup.
“Leave window view on Tin, but give me the floor for training.”
The floor rendered itself underneath her feet, blocking out the view of Laitam’s approaching star. Rieka began running through her gentle exercise routine. It was her way of waking from cryosleep and slow-time. Slow stretches, holding positions that worked both strength and flexibility.
“Keep an eye out for more of that strange crystal technology, will you? After what we discovered on that moon, I have a suspicion that it is much more common than we ever realized. Don’t worry, we won’t be visiting any moons this time.” She said, remembering the drone disappearances on the last foray. “But we should at least start mapping these phenomena when we find them.”
“I cannot detect the crystal technology, Rieka.” Tin explained. “Without a physical sample, like we collected from the last moon, it has no perceptible differences between bedrock for me. It was only your intuition that prompted us to inspect the last moon. You felt it had characteristics not akin to natural phenomena, and you were correct.”
“So it’s basically pure chance if we stumble upon it,” she said straining as she leaned over on her hands, creating a backward arch with her torso.
“Correct.”
Three days had passed without incident. With constant deceleration, Tin had slowed significantly. They were currently making a slingshot around a neon green gas giant. Tin had made the calculation to skim the orbit at an obtuse angle and set them on the final trajectory to Laitam.
The neon currents on the planet's surface pulled against the Coriolis effect to eddy, creating swirling vortexes and patterns, some many times the size of rock planets.
Rieka stared upwards at the hypnotizing colors. Despite being on the dark side of the gas giant, hidden from Laitam’s star, the neon green had an ery backlit quality. The planet itself was generating its own glow.
“What’s causing that, Tin?” she asked, her face bathed in the green light.
“There are phosphorescent chemicals in the atmosphere,” Tin said. “They are excited by the ultraviolet light when facing their star and continue to glow on the dark side. You will notice they are considerably dimmer on the right side, where they’ve been blocked from starlight the longest.”
Sorry I asked, she smiled, trying to stay in the magic of the moment.
“We will be entering our final trajectory in an hour,” Tin said. To confirm his remark, Laitam’s star appeared as a white crescent on the circumference of the gas giant. It grew in brightness until the small star finally rose around the side of the neon horizon.
Laitam was somewhere ahead, and with it perhaps the answers for Rieka, answers for minister Kaplan.
“Rieka! Early Trader ships detected.” Tin reported.
Damn! But she was expecting this. As soon as they rounded that gas giant she knew Tin would be able to pick up their outdated cloaking technology.
There was a part of her that had hoped to find no E.T.s. Wishful thinking. She’d done this long enough to know that a planet like Laitam, singing like a choir for two decades, would pull every E.T. within a quarter quadrant.
“We need to stay hidden, Tin. If we spook them, it could make things worse for the inhabitants.”
The last cleanup had been a lesson. The pirates had taken out a city trying to kill her. They had little regard for human life or collateral damage.
“Send word to the U.W.F first contact team. Let them know there will be a cleanup here. Also, ten-zero other protectors in this quarter, in case I am not successful.” Not successful. That was a nice way of saying dead.
“One of the cloaked E.T. ships is extremely dorment,” Tin said. “Their concealment seems to be working, but other ship functions are not showing.”
That was strange. “Where is it in comparison to the others?” Rieka’s warning-bells were ringing.
“It is nearer to the planet. Sitting behind the closest moon.”
If Rieka had her way, all the E.T.s would go and land on one of those crystal moons and get swallowed up like her drones. It didn’t happen to them of course, no, it happens to a protector.
Although, the more she thought about that incident, other things weren’t adding up. The first drone to disappear was the furthest from her, the second was closer and third closer again. It was almost as if she was being warned, and given the opportunity to leave. Why else would the drones have been taken out like that? She had a distinct impression that if that thing really wanted her gone, she wouldn't be here right now.
The day passed tensely. Rieka tried to focus on her exercises and even spent some time in forest projection, but after just fifteen minutes would ask Tin to display window view again. This was unlike her, to be this tense before a cleanup. She had to bring her mind under control.
“Give me the meditation room, Tin.” A soft, warm glow emanated from the walls and colors coagulated to block out the view of stars and receding gas giant outside. The colors slowly morphed from a warm yellow to green, then to turquoise. The sound, like cavernous wind, began its eerie hum. Rieka focused on it until she could hear the different notes and overtones, and began her trained thought observation process. She felt herself detach from the emotions that were wrought from her own mind. Her agitation dissipated.
Now she visualized the reality that she wanted. What did she want? The familiar place started to form in her mind, it was her sanctuary. Like the places of solitude, she sought out on every first-stage planet. A huge waterfall. She was there alone, and Tin had left without her. She had to stay, there was no other choice, and this brought her a deep peace, and gave Rieka the ultimate sense of calm. But then followed the same question, who will protect them if not you? Who will take your place? Protectors were a rare breed. She couldn’t hold the illusion for longer than fleeting moments. She snapped out of her reverie.
The time passed, and eventually, Laitam appeared, glowing like a tiny star. It slowly grew in brightness. Rieka stood in the bridge with three sixty degree viewing window activated. She must have stood in that position for an hour, watching the greens and blues of a life-bearing planet eventually become visible.
Tin broke her train of thought. “We are passing the orbit of the outer moon. I have detected two Early Traders on this orbit. They are both active.”
“Continue closer,” Rieka ordered. “Let’s look at the dormant ship you detected.”
“That ship is orbiting the closest moon,” Tin said, “I have still not been able to detect any activity. This is very peculiar activity. I have never encountered a ship demonstrating this behavior. Only rudimentary computer functions are registering, they are keeping the vessel concealed and in stable orbit. I am considering the unlikely possibility that they have other cloaking technology hiding all-electronic ac
tivity from me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If they had the capabilities to hide that kind of activity from you, then they would make themselves completely invisible. It’s something else. Something eerie. I can feel it.” Rieka watched Laitam. The wistful nostalgia welled up inside her, the same feeling whenever she saw another first-stage planet. A beautiful tiny oasis of life in the vastness of space. It was in danger. “Give me orbit lines and proximity data, Tin.”
As Rieka stared out into the void, her bionic eye overlayed thin color-coded lines, some showing orbit curves of the moons and planet itself, others showing Tin’s vector. All the lines had corresponding numbers that were constantly changing to account for the celestial body they related to. Tin’s vector was rapidly counting down as it indicated the inevitable rendezvous with the mystery ship. Rieka studied the spider web of lines and numbers with ease and familiarity.
“Vector adjust!” she ordered calmly. “Let’s go in using the moon as cover. If they do have some sort of new tech, I want to use any element of surprise that we might have.”
The trajectory adjusted in her vision. She nodded satisfied.
The moon was in total shadow and almost invisible against the black backdrop of space. Everything outside went dark as Tin cruised in close to the surface. They were in complete darkness. They would be rounding on the target E.T. in minutes, like the black primeval jungle cat on the last planet, stalking its prey.
“We have synched our speed with the target,” Tin said, “and are keeping out of visual contact. Should I proceed closer?”
“No,” she commanded. “Stay at this proximity. If the E.T. registers any change, maintain distance, only have changes display for me, otherwise leave my vision clear. I’m going in on the bike. Give me half...” she considered as she strode to the battle room, “no, three quarter armada accompaniment. Have all other defenders primed in reserve.”
She stepped into the back half of her deep space battle suit. The front compressed over her. It was slightly more restrictive than the planetside suits. She seldom used these ones. The advantage of the extra strength in her bionic arm was immediately noticeable. The restrictive nature of the more bulky suit couldn’t impede the limb as it would have her natural arm. As soon as the helmet snapped on, she strode to the nearest battle tube.
