by Adam Carter
“We could always hand Darkthorne over to them,” Tarne suggested from beneath the far console.
“Not a bad idea,” Kiel said as Darkthorne leaned across her. “Would you get out of my face?”
“They’re coming about for another pass,” Darkthorne warned.
“I know; I do have eyes, Darkthorne. Now get back to your seat.”
“Brace yourselves,” Darkthorne shouted, grabbing hold of the back of Kiel’s chair. She could see the small craft hurtling towards her and banked at the last moment, so its missiles went wide. She kicked down on the speed and prayed they would be able to put some distance between them and their pursuers. Several lights flashed green upon the console before her, however, and told her this was hardly a likely occurrence.
“Heather,” Kiel shouted over her shoulder. “Rear suspension cohesion just went out.”
“Yeah, like that’s more important than keeping the engine cool,” Tarne muttered from beneath the console.
“There they are again,” Darkthorne shouted, pointing directly out the window and obstructing Kiel’s vision.
“You crazy ... get out of my way,” she shouted.
“Bank left, bank left!”
“You want the controls?”
“Just bank left!”
“I said you want the controls?”
“No, just turn, woman!”
Kiel removed her hands from the controls and folded her arms determinedly. “Controls are yours if you want them, but if you want me to fly this thing, you’re going to have to stop shouting at me.”
“Just bank!”
“All yours if you want them.”
Something hit the side of their vessel and again Darkthorne barely managed to stay on his feet. Tarne screamed a muffled “ouch” from the far side of the room. “You want to start dodging those missiles, guys?” she asked without sliding out.
“Take the controls,” Darkthorne said urgently to Kiel.
“You going to sit down yet?”
“I can’t believe you’re ... at a time like ... I ...” He set his jaw firm then and marched back a few paces. “This is me taking a seat; now can you please just get us out of this mess?”
“Gladly, Captain.” Kiel took the controls and pushed them forward. Hard. The craft changed direction immediately, veering off just as the fighters returned to make their next assault. There were small fires everywhere about the control room, and consoles were exploding at irregular intervals. Some wires fell down close to Darkthorne’s head and he ducked as they hissed at him like disturbed snakes.
“I think I got it now,” Kiel said to herself.
“Got what?” Darkthorne asked, his voice sounding very desperate all of a sudden.
“I’m going to give them exactly what they want.”
“But they want us dead.”
“Pity you didn’t figure that out last night, Captain.”
Darkthorne had no idea what she was planning, although knew better than to argue. If she released the controls in a sulk, they would be blown out of the sky.
Sky?
“Since when was there sky outside?” he asked.
“Since we broke the atmosphere,” Kiel told him without turning.
“And when did we do that?”
“When we banked down, now would you please sit quietly? Some of us are trying to work here.”
The funny thing Kiel had always found about atmospheres was that they were what one might call a double-edged sword. Without an atmosphere, a planet was little more than a ball of rock and gases. Add an atmosphere and you achieved the ability to create complex chemical compounds, and that aided the stirrings of life. However, to plough speedily through the atmosphere was to burn up through the various forces of friction at work and die. No atmosphere meant you could never live, have an atmosphere and it would kill you.
That was why it was safer to stay on a planet once you were there, for instance if you were born there. Unless you were struck on the head by something which had fallen through the atmosphere. Or be in the general vicinity of something which had fallen through the atmosphere if it was very large. Or be upon the same world as something which had fallen through the atmosphere if it was very, very large.
Which invalidated the entire argument because it made leaving the planet via the atmosphere the safest option of all.
Kiel tried not to think about these sorts of things as she piloted her craft through life-or-death situations; it generally detracted from her ability to concentrate on where she was and what she was doing, which were always two handy things to think about while trying to escape from the aforementioned life-or-death situation.
“Where was I?” she asked aloud.
Pressed back against his chair, Darkthorne managed to say, “About two feet from the ground.”
“Aha,” Kiel said, flipping a switch and pushing forward on the throttle at the same time. The switch was a door release for one of the cargo holds, and every box not tied down, which happened to be all of them, suddenly flew out the craft even as the vessel itself shot down and away from them. Unshielded as they were, they began to break up a lot more quickly than did the craft, although Kiel wanted to be certain the desired effect was achieved. She therefore programmed one missile with the specific destination of those crates, and fired it. The resultant explosion (considering many of those crates contained various types of grenades) was more than enough to convince the fighters that the Princess Aurellia had been destroyed. Assuming of course they could get out of sight within the next few seconds.
Kiel banked the craft sharply and shot off at the steadiest angle the craft would allow her, dropping quickly below the red-and-black cloud cover. She could see no sign of the fighters, and assumed they had gone home.
Now came the part of landing, to which Kiel was hardly looking forward. Evading enemy fighters was like poker, whilst landing was more akin to roulette. Or in other words there was skill involved in fighting off the enemy, but whether anyone would survive a tempestuous crash would be down to blind luck.
“You might want to rekindle your faith in something,” Kiel warned. “It looks like we’re going to be kissing earth any moment now.”
The ground came up to greet them, although kissing was perhaps the wrong metaphor. Even a slap in the face would have been far too light a thing to have said. The craft pitched as it struck the ground and skidded through the rock, and Darkthorne was finally thrown to the floor. It was a small victory for Kiel, but she reasoned that if the last thing she ever did was knock Jagrad Darkthorne flat on his face, then hers had been a life worth living. As it was, she realised they had stopped moving, which meant they were no longer crashing, which meant of course they were all still alive.
“Any landing you can walk away from,” Kiel said, standing from her chair and almost stepping on Darkthorne. “Oh, do excuse me, I didn’t see you down there on the floor, Captain.”
Darkthorne grumbled something unintelligible and rose, rubbing his head.
“Got it,” Tarne said, sliding out on her dolly. She tossed her spanner to one side and wiped her greasy hands and face upon an already soiled rag. Her gaze travelled about the room and her smile faded almost entirely. “What a mess,” she shouted. “What the hell have you people been doing out here while I was fixing the engine?”
Darkthorne frowned. “Maybe I was hit on the head a bit hard, but isn’t the engine down the corridor towards the rear of the vessel?”
“Yeah,” Kiel said, “but at least thanks to Heather we can now enjoy a nice cup of coffee. Two sugars with mine, please.”
Tarne gave the machine she had repaired a scolding glare. “I wondered why there was a strange brown liquid flowing through the tubes.”
“First things first,’ Darkthorne said, moving across the room, “we need to get this vessel operational again.”
“Does that have an apostrophe?” Tarne wondered.
“Does what?” Darkthorne asked.
“Well, is
it ‘first things first’ as in first-things-are-to-be-done-first or is it ‘first thing’s first’ as in the-first-thing-is-to-be-done-first? One’s singular, the other’s plural, as well, so it makes a whole heap of difference.”
“I didn’t write it, I said it,” Darkthorne replied. “Besides, I think right now I’m more worried about saving my life than worrying over the correct use of apostrophes.”
“Your life?” Kiel snorted. “That’s it, always thinking of yourself.”
“Now see what you started?” Darkthorne said. “Heather, I want you outside and assessing damage. The air’s toxic and hot enough to melt your eyeballs, so I’d suggest taking a suit. Sara, stay in here and do what you can. Liaise with Heather and test the systems as she asks you to.”
“Where will you be?” Kiel asked.
“With Sparky. I need to know how bad the damage was to the engines and whether it’s going to be repairable.”
Neither woman argued with their assigned task, of which Darkthorne was glad. Too often of late had his crew seemed all too eager to talk back to him. Mutiny was a word he would not have liked to have spoken aloud, although there was certainly the air of bitterness about his people. He would not have been at all surprised to find they were unhappy enough to turn him over to the authorities.
He shoved thoughts of the two women far from his mind, however, as he made his way towards the back of the craft, where he knew he would find the most dishonest member, and conversely the most loyal, of his crew. Sparky had been a wastrel child when Darkthorne had found him and given the lad a job and a purpose, along with an engine which never seemed to work properly. Not that Sparky was an engineer, but he was good with his hands. Usually those hands were busy rooting through other people’s pockets, although Damian ‘Sparky’ Parkes had shown great affinity with the Princess and thus had her captain entrusted the youth with her heart.
Sparky was in his early twenties now and had grown to love the Princess Aurellia, which was fortunate for Darkthorne, for it meant he would likely never leave her.
Darkthorne was grateful when he reached the engine room, for all the corridors looked alike to him. He often got lost and then had to claim he was just taking in the sights of his own vessel. Infuriatingly enough, none of the others ever seemed to get lost, although finding the engine room was usually easier than finding the way back; the constant hum of the engine acted like an audible star to guide his way.
The engine room was a mess, but then that was to be expected since they had fallen under heavy fire. Sparky, thankfully, seemed to have scraped through it all right, and he was busily trying to refit some of the older components so they would not have to buy or construct new ones. Annoyingly, he was refitting them by bashing them with a hammer, and even worse he seemed to be using an old piece of missile casting on which to do it. In Darkthorne’s experience, old disused pieces of missile casing tended to have scraps of powder left in them.
“Sparky,” he said as he entered. “How’s things?”
“You get the girl shot up and ask me how’s things?” Sparky asked. “What are you, nuts?”
“Captain actually, in case you wanted to show any respect, Sparky.”
“Captain Nuts then, going down in history right alongside Captain Bananas.”
“Well I think ...”
“Crazy old Captain Bananas, swinging through the trees with his hands reaching out for vines.” He thumped the metal casing again with the hammer.
“Sparky, perhaps we should ...”
“Nutty old nut Captain Nuts himself following right behind him.”
“Sparky, enough.”
Sparky banged the hammer down one final time before tossing aside the metal he was trying to unbend. “The metal gets bent out of shape by a direct hit from a high-yield anti-people missile and I have the audacity to reckon I can beat it back into form with just my bare hands and a mallet? Hey, maybe I should be running underneath the trees, watching Captain Nuts and his ...”
“Sparky, is there any chance of getting these engines repaired before those fighter-craft come down for a closer look at the wreckage?”
“Is it my job to fix everything on this vessel?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Well in that case, sure. I’ll have the engine up and running within the hour; it wasn’t hit too bad, actually. What about the rest of her highness?”
Darkthorne looked at him strangely. “Sparky, it’s a pile of metal parts, not an actual woman. You do realise that, don’t you?”
“Not an actual woman?” Sparky asked. “She’s not a woman, she’s a lady, Captain. And royalty to boot.”
“But she’s not a ... actually, forget it. I really don’t have the time to argue the toss with you on this one. Just do what you can with the engine and give me a bell once you’ve managed to get everything back to working order. We need to raise ship as soon as possible.”
“Aye aye, Skippy.”
“Skipper. Skippy was the bush kangaroo, Sparky.”
“Yeah, but she’d never let you down when you were in trouble, right?”
Darkthorne opened his mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again, then decided he really didn’t want to bother and walked off.
“Should I give out an all-over-craft call when I’m through with the engine?” Sparky shouted after him.
“No need. I’ll be in the control room.”
“Oh. Just wondered whether you’d be taking another of your ... uh ... solitary tours of the vessel.”
Captain Darkthorne ignored him and kept walking.
*
Outside the vessel, Tarne could see the damage was more severe. Much of the hull had been torn away and what remained was scorched beyond blackness. Any external system had been burned off during re-entry, and if they wanted to repair those she knew they would have to find a whole lot of money and a decent mechanic shop.
Tarne had met Jagrad Darkthorne under very ordinary circumstances, although their lives since that day had been anything but. Heather Tarne was one of the few military officers found to possess supersensitive capabilities. The mind was a fascinating place and had been for millennia, with scientists all over the world and all throughout time trying to work out just what went on inside the human brain. Eventually, about a century ago, there had been some real money pumped into a programme designed to isolate the unique brainwaves emitted by those whose senses were sharper than most. These few were put through a gruelling process of mental training, whereby they would be taught how to tap into their hidden potential. It was hard work, and the drugs and the probing with needles weren’t their strongest selling points.
There were three basic types of super-sense, or so the programme had determined fairly early on in its research. Telepathic, telekinetic and psychic. The first could read minds, the second move objects by thinking hard at them and the psychics could see the future. It may not have been the original use of the term, but centuries after the word was coined it was what it meant presently. Heather Tarne was found to be one of these, a psychic.
However, she was only a low-level psychic, and she was informed that there were all sorts of levels. There were those who could accurately predict wars, or find hidden weapons, or know how the world was eventually going to end. In fact, a lot of these went insane, with good reason. Then there were the middle psychics (there was probably a better term for them than that, although Tarne didn’t know it). These could predict the outcomes of battles, could act as early-warning systems for when enemy missiles were launched, and could often pick out next Saturday’s lottery numbers. These middle-psychics tended to be very rich people.
Then there was what was known as a low-level psychic, of which Tarne was one. She could tell you whether a hurled fist was going to hurt, that you shouldn’t have trodden on that land-mine, and that Elvis was going to make his big comeback just as soon as he stopped working in the local Tesco. Needless to say, the low-level psychics were not taken seriously.
Tarne h
ad met Darkthorne shortly after she was determined a low-level psychic and had been sent back to work. He had been on her military base in Australia at the time and she had had an odd feeling about him and followed him. She would very much have liked to say that her odd feeling stemmed from some vivid vision of the future, but actually he had been humming “she’ll he coming round the mountain when she comes” and she had never seen anyone so jolly working at her base. Or in Australia as a whole, come to think of it.
There had been an incident following this involving her accidentally helping him to load stolen cargo aboard a lorry while she was trying to get him to talk about what dodgy business he had planned with the army. After this, she had been faced with the choice of court-martial or throwing her lot in with Darkthorne’s crew (which was Darkthorne and no one else back in those days), and she had opted for the latter.
Floating outside and wearing a cumbersome anti-gravity suit as she was, she was beginning to wish she had possessed just enough foresight to have chosen the firing squad.
The planet was fairly pretty, which she would have noticed, had she been looking in its direction. The horizon was a morass of oranges and reds as the sun slowly set, although Tarne was more concerned with not floating away. Why she was wearing an antigravity suit was beyond her reasoning, although she had never been able to find the off-switch for the suit and so floated about aimlessly. They also doubled as gravity suits, so she would be able to lock herself down in space if she was ever forced outside like this, although if that setting was applied within a real gravity, it would likely squash her very flat indeed. There was a middle-ground, although none of the dials ever worked for her, and Tarne was never one to admit she did not know something.
“You sure you need the anti-gravity on?” Kiel asked from inside the vessel.
“Makes it easier to move around this way,” Tarne told her through her helmet radio.
“Well if you’re sure.”
“Sure I’m suuure!” Tarne let go of the hull for a moment and almost floated up like a helium-filled balloon. She caught Kiel staring at her through the frontal window, and forced a smile. “No probs,” Tarne said, offering the other woman a thumbs-up.
