by Ben Wolf
But seeing Farcoast soldiers here, aboard the Nidus, meant Farcoast was at least on good terms with the Coalition—for now, anyway.
Another few minutes of awkward silence and waiting passed, and then the Farcoast soldiers began to file out of the ship just as they’d entered. One of them approached Officer Wendell and said something in his ear that Justin couldn’t hear.
Had they found something?
Officer Wendell nodded, then he turned to face the group. “It appears our soldiers have discovered some contraband aboard your ship.”
[Oh, snap. Someone’s gonna get fried,] Keontae quipped.
No kidding, Justin mused.
Officer Wendell held up a clear Plastrex bag of glowing red rocks. They looked like dying embers from a fire.
Tyval. A popular drug with homeless addicts and the incredibly wealthy alike. Justin had never seen it in person.
These rocks only gave off a faint light, which meant they were lower grade—cheap because they wouldn’t do as much as the brighter, more vibrant rocks. Either way, the drug was definitely still illegal, so as Keontae had said, someone was gonna fry for this.
Officer Wendell passed the Tyval back to the same soldier and pulled out a handscreen. “I take it your crew staff list has been properly and consistently updated, Captain?”
Captain Marlowe nodded. “Of course. Just updated it yesterday, in fact. Member of the crew died.”
“I see.” Officer Wendell scanned through it. “The drugs were found in a private chamber belonging to one of your crew. According to your records, the room belongs to…”
Private chamber? There were only a handful of those to begin with. Dr. Carrington, the ship’s doctor had one. Captain Marlowe and Arlie shared one. The ship’s science officer, a guy named Carey Hughes, had one as well. Aside from those, the only other person who had a private room was—
“Justin Barclay,” Officer Wendell said.
5
“What?” Justin nearly shouted. “Impossible. It’s not mine.”
“Said every person ever in possession of illegal drugs,” Officer Wendell countered. “Take him away.”
[Oh, hell no,] Keontae said. [I’d tell you to fight this, but they got you way outgunned, JB.]
“I said it’s not mine. I’ve never seen them before. Hey!”
A pair of the Farcoast soldiers grabbed him by his arms, pulled them behind his back, and clamped magnetic shackles around his wrists with ridiculous efficiency.
Justin looked back at Captain Marlowe. “Captain, come on! It’s not mine!”
Captain Marlowe just stared at him with an eyebrow raised.
Had Gerald stashed them before he died? Or had someone else dropped them in Justin’s room?
He scanned the crowd of rig-runners until his eyes met those of Rowley Pine. The bastard was smirking at Justin.
[That motherfucker,] Keontae said. [He set you up.]
“Scan him,” a female voice said.
“Who said that?” Officer Wendell surveyed the crowd until, to Justin’s absolute surprise, Lora stepped forward.
“Scan him. For the drug. You can do that, right?” Lora pressed. “You can test to see if it’s in his system.”
“They’re also capable of scanning his skin for trace amounts of the drug as residue,” Dr. Carrington added. He was a taller guy with short blond hair and glasses.
Officer Wendell hesitated and looked Justin over.
[Bastard’s decidin’ your fate right before your eyes.] Keontae added, [Our fate.]
“Sir.” Now Captain Marlowe stepped forward as well. “I think you should do the scan. If it’s not him, then I need to know who on my crew is bent and using so I can deal with them.”
Officer Wendell cleared his throat. “That’s all well and good, Captain, but it isn’t your call what happens from here on out.” He nodded to one of the soldiers holding a scanner. “Scan the suspect first. If he charts for usage or residue, there is no need to scan further, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier, a woman, said.
She approached Justin and held the scanner up to his head. It rightfully glowed white the whole time.
“He’s clean,” she reported.
Officer Wendell released an exasperated sigh. “Then release him, and scan the rest of them.”
As the soldiers removed the magnetic cuffs from Justin’s wrists, the other soldier with the scanner joined the first and began scanning the rest of the rig-runners. Now free, Justin turned back, determined to find out who’d left drugs in his room.
By that point, the smirk on Rowley Pine’s face had soured to a tense frown. And sure enough, the scanner’s light turned red when it swept over Rowley.
“It wasn’t me!” Rowley barked. “I’m innocent! I’ve never even touched the stuff!”
The same pair of soldiers who’d clamped shackles on Justin started toward Rowley, and Justin grinned.
“Hey—hey! You stay away from me, you hear?” Rowley unslung his pack and tried to swing it at the soldiers, but they batted it away, and it fell from Rowley’s hands.
He proceeded to try to run away—where to, Justin had no idea, since the docking bay was just a massive open space—but the soldiers caught him a few steps later and tackled his pudgy body to the hard concrete floor.
“Ow! Get off me, you bastards!” he yelped.
[No less than the prick deserves,] Keontae muttered.
“You said it,” Justin muttered back. Justice had never felt so good.
Rowley had devolved into a spitting, swearing mess, and though the soldiers had shackled him and gotten him back on his feet, he still strained and struggled against them.
“I’ve called another hovercraft to come and escort the three of you to the ship’s detention center,” Officer Wendell told the soldiers escorting Rowley. “Book him there, and then return to your usual duties. In the meantime, walk him toward the exit, and if he continues to resist, feel free to inspire him to be more cooperative.”
At that, Rowley’s mouth clapped shut, but only for a few seconds. He stared Officer Wendell dead in the eyes and said, “Go to Hell.”
Officer Wendell nodded to the two soldiers, and one of them brandished a stun baton. It activated and arced with swirls of purple electrical currents, and he whacked it into Rowley’s thigh.
Rowley jerked and then went slack, and his protests silenced indefinitely. Then they dragged him toward the exit and toward a now-approaching hovercraft.
“Scans are complete,” the female soldier reported. “Everyone else is clean.”
“A drug dealer and a user,” Captain Marlowe said to Arlie. “Looks like I made the right call after all.”
She remained silent and motionless, with her arms folded.
“Now that that’s resolved,” Officer Wendell motioned toward the hovercraft, “outside the docking bay, the hovertram line will take you to the ship’s main thoroughfare through Nidus City. From there, you are free to go where you wish. Please note that all Coalition laws apply equally here as they would on any Coalition planet. Welcome to the Nidus.”
Hallie blinked, and the light from the jump dissipated, leaving her vision scarred with the light’s negative, now a ghostly blur of non-color.
She quickly realized the ship was no longer shaking, and she was still alive and breathing—all good signs. Very good signs, given their situation only moments earlier.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We jumped,” Bryant said. “Successfully.”
“Everyone alright?” Hallie asked the other scientists.
They all muttered or mumbled affirmations, and Cecilia squeezed Hallie’s hand. She’d forgotten she’d taken ahold of it in the first place.
“What about you, Captain?” Hallie called.
She got no response.
“Captain?” she called again, this time a bit louder.
“Oh, shit!” Bryant yelped.
“What?” Hallie blinked, a
nd some of the scarring in her vision dissipated—enough to see the captain slumped to the side in his cockpit chair. Enough to see that the control screens in front of him were not only dark, but burnt and blackened with jagged edges. “Oh no…”
“Shit!” Bryant yelled again. “Oh, God… he’s… all that blood…”
Hallie hadn’t even noticed the blood at first, but then she saw a pool of it on the floor under Captain Dawes’s chair.
She tore at her harness to free herself. Once it released her, she rushed to the cockpit to check on him.
Bryant was on his feet as well, working the straps of Captain Dawes’s harness, trying to get him out so they could better examine him.
When Hallie got there, she saw the chunk of metal protruding from Captain Dawes’s chest and the blood running down into his lap, melding with the burgundy of his Coalition-issued uniform.
“Oh no,” she repeated. She turned back and shouted, “Luke! Get the medkit, now!”
“On it!” Luke replied.
Hallie already knew it would be too little, too late.
She helped Bryant get Captain Dawes out of the chair and out of the cockpit. Cecilia had gotten free of her harness as well and brought the hover-stretcher over for them. With Bryant handling most of the heavy lifting, they laid Captain Dawes on the stretcher, and then Hallie brought it up to waist height with a single tap on its control screen.
“What happened?” Cecilia covered her mouth with her hands.
“Cockpit screens and the console must’ve exploded somehow. Captain took the brunt of it,” Bryant said, his voice shaky. “I… I don’t know that I can do anything to help here. I’ve only had basic medical training…”
“You’re doing fine, but I need you back in the cockpit,” Hallie said. “Make sure they’re not following us. Get us flying again.”
Bryant gave her a small but resolute nod. Better for him to focus on something he was good at right now.
Luke produced the medkit—a blaze-orange case loaded with everything from basic medical supplies all the way to a smattering of surgical-grade medical tools.
The hover-stretcher displayed Captain Dawes’s vitals—or rather the total lack of them—on its control screen. Everything was flatlined, but Hallie checked his pulse with her fingers anyway. Sometimes these fancy medical devices didn’t always function properly…
But she felt no pulse.
“Epinephrine, and then we start compressions,” she told Luke, who grabbed a prefilled syringe from the medkit and handed it to her.
Hallie wasn’t a medical doctor—not in the classic sense of the word—but she understood human physiology better than most medical doctors ever would. She’d built her career on it, written volumes on it, helped to create procedures and technology that would reshape it forever… but even she couldn’t resurrect a man from the dead.
Still, if there was any chance to save Captain Dawes, she had to try. She pulled on some disposable gloves and got to work.
Fifteen minutes later, after compressions, epinephrine, and even defibrillations, nothing had changed. Captain Dawes’s blood dripped off the sides of the hover-stretcher onto the cold floor below, and his face had gone pale from exsanguination.
He was dead.
Hallie stepped back and pulled her gloves off. She set them next to Captain Dawes’s body on the hover-stretcher. She glanced at the blood on the cockpit floor. Perhaps she should’ve left the gloves on; they had a lot of cleanup to do.
“He saved us,” Cecilia said. “He saved us, and it cost him his life.”
“A true hero,” Luke added. “It should’ve been me instead.”
Hallie shook her head. “That’s a noble thought, Luke, but we need you. You’re a part of this project. Captain Dawes’s sacrifice won’t be in vain.”
“It might be if we’re stranded here,” Angela said.
“Don’t have to worry about that,” Bryant’s sullen voice called from the cockpit. “We’re on backup power until I can restore total power. Gonna take another few minutes, but we should be up and running soon. In the meantime, at least we’re still drifting in the right direction… more or less.”
“What do we do with him?” Luke asked.
“I… I don’t know,” Hallie replied as Bryant stepped out of the cockpit. “Are there regulations about this sort of thing?”
“Soldier’s last ride,” Bryant said. Everyone stared at him, so he added, “Burial in space. Not a fancy funeral, but that’s what we do. Keeps the bodies from stacking up.”
Hallie’s stomach churned at the thought. Perhaps that policy was advisable for periods of conflict or during wartime, but it didn’t seem right to treat Captain Dawes that way. He’d given his life to save theirs. He’d been someone Hallie could trust, absolutely, to help her get that cylinder where it needed to go—perhaps the only person she could truly trust.
And now they were supposed to expel him from the ship like trash? It wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right. He deserved so much better.
Bryant must’ve read the concern on her face. He looked down at her and said, “I’ll handle it. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“No,” she said. “We need you to get us on the move again. We don’t have any time to spare. They keep finding us, and now it has finally cost us big time. We need to get where we’re going, and fast. We’ll take care of the cleanup and Captain Dawes.”
“You got it,” Bryant said. With that, he headed into the aft section of the ship, past the suspension crate, and descended the metal staircase into the ship’s engine room below decks.
“Come on,” Hallie told the others. “If we do this, let’s do it right. We’ll send Captain Dawes off with as much honor as we can.”
About five minutes later, Bryant had the power reestablished throughout the ship, and he joined them for Captain Dawes’s send-off via the airlock. The sight of his body jettisoning into space made Hallie shudder, but she told herself to accept it as the harsh reality of this life.
It didn’t help.
Once the deed was done, Bryant returned to the cockpit and put them back on course.
While the others began cleaning up the hover-stretcher and the floor around it, Hallie began working on the pool of blood in the cockpit. The metallic scent soured in her nose and twisted her stomach, but she pushed through it.
“How close are we?” she asked.
Bryant set the autopilot, donned some gloves of his own, and bent down beside her to help sop up the captain’s blood with another rag. “A few hours. Six, at most.”
“Do we have that much time?” Hallie was afraid to hear his answer.
“No way to know for sure, but if not…” He gave her a sad grin and took her gloved hand in his. “…it’s been a hell of a ride.”
She matched his sad grin with one of her own and gently pulled her hand away. “Yeah. I hope it doesn’t end like that. It can’t. We’re so close to making it.”
“I still have hope,” Bryant said. “You should, too. I don’t think we would’ve come all this way, endured so much, only to fail now. I don’t think that’s our destiny.”
“Destiny isn’t real, Bryant,” Hallie said. “It’s an illusion. It’s not quantifiable or measurable in any way. It’s wishful thinking and optimism if things go well, and it’s pessimism and defeatism if things don’t.”
“Spoken like a true woman of science,” Bryant said. “Believe what you want. You won’t change my mind.”
Even though Hallie disagreed with his belief, she had to admit he had given her hope.
But would that hope be enough to see them through to the end?
The bloody rag in her hand said no. It was a physical manifestation of the random chance of the universe at work. Captain Dawes hadn’t expected to die before they’d jumped, but he’d died all the same. And he’d demonstrated more hope than any of them—after all, he’d initiated the jump.
Now he was gone, killed because of the intersection of his actions
, the actions of their pursuers, and a freak explosion in their ship.
Hope was as fleeting as ever.
Even so, she still wanted to believe otherwise.
The hovercraft ride from the docking bay toward the Nidus’s central area proved as clean yet as stale as the docking bay itself had been. But that all changed when the corridor opened up, and the ship’s red-orange dome came into view through the shielded windows on the hovercraft’s ceiling.
Justin still couldn’t see through it, but within moments, he was about to enter it and see it from the inside. He had some idea what to expect, but as they passed into the dome via an opening large enough for the hovercraft to fit through, all of Justin’s expectations blew out the airlock.
An entire city came into view, complete with skyscrapers, paved streets, and hovercraft darting to and fro in no discernible traffic pattern. Neon blue, purple, and green lights glowed from countless windows, buildings, and scrawling signs, casting a welcoming, if not alluring vibe throughout the space.
Overhead, the red-orange dome sealed everything in under a canopy of blue sky with sporadic clouds and even a distant, yet glowing sun. None of it was real, Justin knew—just a concerted effort to provide the illusion of fresh air and sunshine.
If he had to guess, the dome’s interior would shift throughout the course of the day and night, following the trajectory of the sun and providing appropriate light for a standard Coalition twenty-four-hour day. Justin had never seen anything like it.
The hovercraft stopped, and the Farcoast soldiers beckoned them to exit the vehicle and venture into Nidus City. Some of Justin’s coworkers tried to ask the soldiers for directions or information, but none of them offered any help. They just boarded the same hovercraft and disappeared deeper into the city.
“Look,” Captain Marlowe addressed them, “I don’t know how long the repairs will take. Just keep your portable comms handy so I can reach you when we’re getting ready to leave. Otherwise, you have some R&R time, so make the most of it.”
