by Troy Osgood
I was looking at the Storwo through the lens of a Terran. I was expecting them to react as I knew my people would when faced with the same news.
Was one reaction better than the other? That kind of deep thinking is beyond me.
I was just glad no one was damaging my ship.
No way would I be able to get them to pay for the repairs and I didn’t have the extra money. The Wind isn’t the fanciest ship around and usually needs some kind of repair, but I try hard to not let her turn into a piece of junk. There are some that say it’s only what’s inside that counts, the engine and the strength of the ship, and well there is some truth to that the more important truth is that I have to live in the ship and take some pride in its appearance.
Everyone was silent, even the kids who picked up on their parents mood.
I had no idea what to say to them so I said nothing.
Torsi was in the lounge hugging another female Storwo as the vidscreen was on behind her. I recognized the same newscast as the one I had seen. It was now paused, the newsperson in mid-comment. I made my way through the crowded room and shut it off.
I saw Dresla walk in from the hold, wiping a hand across her face. She gave me a weak smile walking pass, stopping to talk quietly with a couple of the other Storwo. These ones followed her into the kitchen. I did as well and saw them start taking supplies out of the crates they had brought on board.
Smart woman. Get back into the routine. Give the people something else to think about.
I felt a vibration through the Nomad’s Wind as we hopped into wildspace for the trip from Yersk to Tuint, a six hour hop. The course had been programmed in so all Kaylia had to do was watch the controls and make sure no warnings popped up. She knew which button was the hop override and since I had heard no alarms, figured it was a good hop. I’d go up and double check in a few. It was also time for her to get some sleep.
The vidscreen was turned back on and I heard the sound of some kids show. The language sounded Storwoi. Where had they managed to find that? Could hear the sounds of kids talking and starting to laugh, shuffling around to watch the show.
They’d have a proper mourning for their world when they arrived at the refugee camp on Hoin.
I stood at the bottom of the spiral stairs for a minute or two watching the meal prep. There wasn’t any of the usually talking, sharing of stories. They were going through the motions, something that had to be done.
Everyone has experienced loss at one time or another. Death of a family member, a loved one or a friend. Hell, even a beloved family pet. But there is something different in experiencing the loss of a planet. There has to be.
There’s another race, the Derty, that lost their world to pollution a couple of centuries ago. Way before humans were wandering the galaxy. Without the benefit of a home world, or a place to call home and set up most of the population, the race starts to die out. It’s inevitable when there’s no one location to find others of your own kind. Interbreeding with other races, if it’s possible and it’s normally not, doesn’t help. No, for your race to survive, they needed to breed with others of their kind.
For most races, only a small percent of their population lives in space. The majority live on the homeworld, the colonies or the space stations. Some never even leave their place of birth.
I never heard why, but the Derty didn’t have a planet to evacuate to. They scattered across the galaxy and over time just started to die out. That’s why the Planetary Council tried so hard to find a place for the Storwo to go. There’s a lot of life in the galaxy and all of it is precious.
Dresla directed the silent Storwo, keeping them on track.
I watched for a little longer and then went back upstairs to relieve Kaylia and send her to bed.
Sitting in the pilot’s chair, watching the featureless and calming white of wildspace, I had time to think on fate and all that higher stuff but I try to leave that deeper thinking to others. I’m not a big picture kind of guy. Instead I thought about the galaxy and its people and how close we all were to disaster on a daily basis.
The Planetary Council, for the most part, is a waste of time and energy. They try to be big, come up with all these grand ideas and galactic law. The only true law is the basic law of society. You need people to live and help you survive so you don’t try to piss them off because someday you’ll probably need them.
A bit cynical, but true.
The Council is comprised of ambassadors from most of the major galactic races, at least those that have colonies outside their home system. Except the Tiat. They were invited and refused. No surprise. The group tries to have authority and some planets grant them more than others, but it’s really just the different empires pushing their own agendas.
Every race that travels the stars is expansionist at heart. They want more, that’s why they’re out there. Sure, some went to other planets because their own couldn’t support their growing populations anymore, but it’s still expansion.
Most races learned a long time ago to give space to the others. It’s a large galaxy, plenty of planets to go around. And that’s why us earthlings are almost galactically hated. When we expanded, we basically started a galactic war.
Good times.
So I had to wonder what the Planetary Council had promised the Hoinites to allow the Storwo to settle on their planet. Had to be something major. Hoin was a large planet with a small population and there had to be some reason they had kept it small. It was a grounder planet, no spacefaring tech of their own.
Maybe that was what the Council was giving them? The ability to hop the stars.
And a population of people indebted to them.
Yeah, that made sense.
And it sucked.
The Council, or whatever planets pushed for this resettlement, would be reaping some kind of reward. This felt like a Coulson plan. General, retired, Frank Coulson was the Terran Ambassador to the Planetary Council. The head one anyway, there were a couple of them, each representing a planet or colony that Earth controlled. Coulson was just the big guy with the others essentially following his lead. I’d run into him a couple times during my soldiering days. He was behind a lot of black ops that unfortunately I was involved in. We didn’t get along then and still didn’t.
Luckily, we ran in different circles. His was the bright lights of the Inner Core worlds and the Planetary Council. Mine was the wilds of Deep Space.
I liked my circle better.
Guaranteed that Coulson had his hand in this resettlement. No clue why. It would mean the government of Earth would be getting something out of it but Coulson would be personally getting more.
Not my concern.
The Storwo, or at least some of them, had to know they were ultimately getting a raw deal. But if it was that or lose your entire species? Easy choice to make.
I had to remind myself to just think small picture. I was saving a shipful of people. A very small amount in the grand scheme of things but at least they would live. Doing my part. And not getting paid.
The kid and I would have to work twice as hard for a month or two after this.
But it was worth it.
I’d remind myself of that when struggling to buy fuel for the Wind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The cloudy white of wildspace gave way to the black with millions of white dots of normal space. Same view as any other system. They all looked basically alike. Pilots had to rely on the navsystems to let them know what system they were in. Without it, they were blind.
Tuint was a large system. Twelve planets, making it one of the largest known, but only one inhabited or even livable. None of the other planets or even their moons could be lived on. Nothing even worth mining. Just the one lonely planet the furthest from its sun with the next nearest planet pretty far away. Tui, the only inhabited planet, was equidistant to its neighbor as it’s neighbor was to the sun.
Basically Tui was pretty damn far from the sun and pretty far from any of the gas g
iants that made up the system. It had one moon that was just standard rock and iron. Nothing special, nothing making it worth mining.
That and the Tuis themselves were very territorial when it came to their moon. They didn’t care to mine the sacred object and no way would they let anyone else. The surface was covered in the wrecks of those that had tried.
The strange part was that unlike most other systems, Tui wasn’t a ball of ice. In every other known system, the further a planet was from the sun the colder it was. The closer and the hotter it was. The dream zone, for life, was the third or fourth planets usually. But not in Tuint. The sun was so bright that the last planet was a pretty moderate climate.
Lots of green, trees and water.
A decent place to live.
Not a decent place to fly into.
The Tuis Dock Control was notoriously difficult to work with. I’d spent hours waiting for their customs people to show up before I could even start to think about unloading cargo and it was hours after before I could unload. They went through everything. Multiple times.
And the bribes. I had always thought Dynuit was the worse, until my first trip to Tui.
At least the Nomad’s Wind could enter the atmosphere and land on the planet. This was one planet where it paid to have a light freighter. There was no space station in the Tuint system, just the planet, so all large ships had to be unloaded in orbit. That added extra cost and time. Because of this, not many large trading guilds or companies wanted to travel to Tuint.
The bribes meant not many small freighters wanted to either.
There was talk of building a space station, but that had started a couple years ago with no momentum.
Tui didn’t have much to offer and the Tuis themselves were notoriously cheap.
I had no desire to stop there but the Wind’s fuel reserves said we were stopping.
Hearing some footsteps behind me, I turned and saw Torsi standing in the bridge’s doorway. She was looking out the view window at the starfield beyond. It would be an hour or so before the planet itself was visible, so the view was just lots and lots of stars.
“I thought I felt the shift out of wildspace,” she said motioning at the bridge.
I nodded, giving her permission to enter.
An old custom, not practiced by many. Besides no one being allowed to board a ship without the captain’s permission, an old custom that had fallen out of use, was the one where no one could enter the bridge without the captain’s permission. I’d heard it was still enforced on the passenger cruisers but everywhere else it had faded away.
Interesting that a Storwo would know of it.
“You’ve star hopped before?” I asked her turning my seat around again to check the controls.
“A couple times,” she replied coming to stand next to me between the pilots and co-pilots stations. “Not extensively, only to the next system.”
“How far out from the planet are we?” she asked after a bit of silence.
“Hour,” I replied. “We’ll be on planet for a while to refuel.”
From the corner of my eye I saw her glance over at Kahlia’s console and the chrono there. It was set to Terran time and had us midway through the Wind’s night cycle. Everyone else on board was asleep. Not sure why she was up.
“So we’ll be hopping out in a couple hours,” she stated and turned to leave. “Goodnight Captain,” Torsi said as she left the bridge.
When my instincts tell me to run, I run. And I’ve always been a decent judge of people. Something was making my instincts tell me that she was lying. Or at least not telling the full truth. I got enough of a read from her to know she was definitely hiding something.
Just like that I knew who the stowaway was.
There wasn’t one thing that told me that Torsi was the thief. It was a lot of little things.
Her interest was the big thing. The only Storwo besides Dresla to show an interest in me, the Wind, or the travel times. Dresla’s reasons were now known but the rest just tried to get through their days and it was understandable why they wouldn’t want to know exact times. Even the husband that I had saved.
I was convinced that Torsi was the thief.
Now how to convince Dresla.
I remembered the time and realized it would have to wait. Dresla was asleep somewhere in the cargo hold.
It could wait.
Afterall, it wasn’t like Torsi was going anywhere.
*****
I yawned. Tired.
Kaylia was at her station, adjusting the final navorders for bringing the Wind into the atmosphere of Tui as I watched the consoles and readouts. Everything was normal for planetary entry. No storms on our flight patch to Yorunital, the only major port on the planet. No other traffic, which was not a surprise.
Easy flight in and hopefully an easy flight out.
I should have been asleep in my bunk but the timing didn’t work out. Kaylia had never done a planetary entry and this wasn’t the time for her to do it solo. So here I was, awake after I don’t know how many hours, piloting a ship full of refugees onto a planet to get more fuel.
Concentrating on the controls, I put thoughts of bed out of mind.
Tui was a lot of green, the sphere coming closer with the moon beyond the curving horizon. I adjusted the ship, feeling it shudder a little as the thrusters changed our angle. The view started as half green at the bottom of the view window, the moon beyond and the stars filling up the upper part of the view window, and it shifted to more and more green as the Wind’s nose pointed down towards the planet.
Down was relative as from one viewpoint we could be flying up towards the planet, another could be flying sideways. But to us in the ship, we were going down.
There was a little shaking as we entered the atmosphere and entered the thin cloud cover. The view window filled with white, reminding me of wildspace, before we broke the barrier. Bright blue sky, green trees and blue of water filled our vision once past the clouds.
Like I had said, a good looking planet.
It looked pristine, almost untouched. The Tuis worked hard to keep it that way. They kept all off planet commerce in one location and maintained strict flight paths. There were around forty million beings on the planet, only a couple thousand not native and the amount of those that lived fulltime on the planet was even smaller.
I wasn’t used to seeing this much untouched land. Even Storwo had more cities and tech spread across the planet. Here it was just green. We flew over a couple thousand miles of land and never saw a single city. Yorunital had maybe twenty million living there, so where did the other twenty live?
Ahead, by scanner only, I could see the city. It would be a couple more minutes before the skyscrapers would be visible to the eye.
We could see a series of mountains, dark gray against the green, appearing off to the side when the alarm sounded.
I glanced down at my readouts, looking to see what the noise meant.
The airlock.
Again.
Someone was tampering with the lock.
Torsi.
Had to be.
Cursing I adjusted the Wind’s speed. I could have stopped the ship and put it in hover, but that would have made Tuis Ground Control contact us to see what was happening. A ship pausing in the flight path would delay their tightly controlled flight patterns. And Kaylia wouldn’t have been able to communicate them.
And I was going to be busy.
Instead I slowed the ship. We might still get a ping from Dock Control, but at least we were moving.
“Keep us straight,” I told Kaylia.
The poor kid looked panicked. The alarm, irregular sleeping, piloting the ship in atmo. It was a lot to put on her. I could see the questions, and the fear in her eyes. I tried to be as reassuring as I could be.
“You got this.”
I didn’t wait to see if she reacted and I bolted out of the bridge. I was down the corridor, down the stairs and in the galley in seconds. There was
only a couple Storwo, all trying to push against the far wall, away from the door to the lounge.
The lounge wasn’t as empty as the galley. Storwo hugging a few kids tight, crowding the edges. One woman was on her knees, hands outstretched and held back by two others. All were pushing and moving away from the airlock door. That space was clear except for three people.
Torsi, Dresla and a kid that Torsi was holding by the neck.
She had what looked like a knife, taken from my kitchen no doubt, held at the kids neck. I could see a thin line and a couple drops of blueish blood on the poor kid. He was terrified, eyes wide and crying. Looked to be only six or seven, maybe eight.
Dresla held both arms out, palms extended, so Torsi could see them at all times.
Both glanced at me as I walked into the room, Torsi’s grip tightening and her eyes dropping to my waist to see if I was armed. I wish. She was lucky. If I was armed I would have shot her right then and there. I hated people using children as shields.
“Release the kid,” I told Torsi.
I could see the faceplate for the airlock door controls had been ripped off the wall and some wires pulled, hastily spliced together. The door itself was open, she had one foot past the threshold and I could see a small wrapped object on the floor. The Daelot or whatever it was called.
“I didn’t want it to be like this,” Torsi said and I did believe her.
Her stance, her eyes, the hostage, all told me that this was something she had not anticipated. She had been hoping for a clean escape.
“Release the kid.”
“She’s the thief,” Dresla said angrily.
“I know.”
That earned a quick look from both. Each surprised.
I took a step closer. Torsi shifted back, pulling the kid who was too scared to struggle.
What was with beings and taking kids hostage lately? First Kaylia and now this?
More Storwo were appearing, crowding at the door to the hold. They were quiet, the whole place was quiet. It was surreal. I’d been in similar situations, sadly, and didn’t remember them being this silent.
