by Troy Osgood
Tui to Hoin, with the hops in between, was uneventful. Dresla spent most of the time down in the lower level with her people so it was just me and Kaylia in the bridge. Neither of us went down that much, just when needed.
I was glad to hop into the Hoin System. I wasn’t necessarily eager to see the Storwo gone but this trip had cost me a lot, in credits and time. As well as adding a new enemy to the list. I had to wonder when the good karma this should have earned me would arrive.
Hoin turned out to be a brown world. Not quite a desert planet, but close enough. Very different from Storw, which had been a water planet. That pretty much confirmed my suspicions that the Planetary Council had ulterior motives in relocating the Storwo here.
I could see some ships in orbit, larger passenger carriers and support ships. Shuttles moved between them and the surface. Lots of shuttles. The orbit was crowded. Beyond the passenger ships I could see heavy freighters and larger shuttles. Probably moving construction equipment and material. This many new residents needed places to live.
Wonder who was paying for that?
There was some blue on the planet and that was where I was being directed to.
In a way it proved lucky for my passengers that the Wind was the only ship around that could enter atmo. This meant they got on the surface faster and would be housed faster as well. I had no idea how many Storwo were still in orbit as facilities were being built for them, but it had to be thousands. My passengers would probably be in hastily built tents and shoddy buildings but at least they’d be on planet.
Which was a vastly different place from where they came from.
*****
The wind whipped across the plains, pushing the dust and dirt with it. Large and bare mountains, as brown as the ground, were visible in the distance.
Not a particularly welcoming place.
I walked back around the Wind to where the view was a little better.
There was a decent sized lake with large expanses of grass around it, a few trees. An oasis in the middle of the barren rocky land. The ship was parked on the edge of the grass, well away from where a collection of refugee housing was being built. The wind off the plains still cut through, pushing at the grass. A sharp wind, angry.
The buildings were all one story, square, plain and made of polyconc. It was a pretty common material. Pourable and hardened quickly. Common but cheap. The workers were all Storwo using borrowed machinery supplied by the Planetary Council. Beyond the homes I could see where some were starting to build a wall to help block the wind.
This was just one of a hundred or so similar new cities built around the oasises on Hoin. A lot of construction with cheap materials. Nothing like the new fancy port being built that we had passed over. A couple of gleaming new shipyards with the latest tech and what looked to be a landing deck twice the size of the one on Tui.
The Hoinite were making out pretty good on this deal.
Not like they needed the oasis. They all dwelled in the plains and liked it, tribes scattered across the planet. When we had first landed there had been a collection of them just on the edge, watching and waiting. They’d gotten bored and moved on.
Tall and gangly with long arms and legs. Thin looking arms and legs that were thicker at the joints: elbows, knees and shoulders. I couldn’t get a good look at their heads as they were wrapped in some kind of cloth robes that left their arms and legs exposed. They had ridden some kind of reddish beasts that looked like giant lizards.
This was the best planet the Council could find for the Storwo?
And what were the Hoinites really getting out of this? Did all of them even want it? How angry would they be with their new neighbors? Would they get along over time?
I watched a stream of Storwo walking down the Wind’s ramp. Kaylia was at the bottom, hugging some and laughing and poking the kids. Other, more official Storwo, were directing them on where to go. They were heading towards a large building closer to the lake’s shore. Some kind of community building.
It had been funny to see the self-important Cortl run immediately to the officials only to get brushed aside.
Dresla walked down the ramp still holding the Daelot. We hadn’t spoken since returning to the Wind on Tui. She paused on the ramp so our heads were level and looked out towards the lake.
“You were correct,” she finally said and paused, shaking her head before continuing. “I have always upheld Storwo law, followed it exactly. As I thought it should be. Torsi stole the Daelot because I followed the law exactly.”
No wonder she had taken it personally. She felt it was a failure. Not just her own but of the system she had upheld for so long. I knew what that was like, finding out the thing you held as sacred really wasn’t what you thought. I glanced at the Wind, the thing that had replaced my sacred following of being a soldier in the Earth Expeditionary Forces and wondered what Dresla would find.
Maybe she’d stay a cop. The settlements would need good ones.
“Leaving Torsi behind like that was not the letter of the law,” Dresla said and turned towards me. It was not exactly a question or statement, she was looking for validation.
“No, but it was justice,” I replied.
I looked out towards the new homes, watching the Storwo walk through the grass towards the larger building. There was no excitement about their new home. They were tired, disappointed and sad. A raw deal but at least they were alive and could rebuild.
“Sometimes the law and justice are not the same.”
ASTEROID RETURN
Originally Published:
January 26, 2019; eBook on Amazon
CHAPTER ONE
“They did what?” I asked, surprised, shocked and angry.
“They released Commander Arskli.”
I looked at the vidscreen, at the image of the Turesan Planetary Governor Yoterra, a Thesan. She was upset, almost as much as I was, that was obvious. We both had reason to be.
“A prisoner exchange,” she went on to say but it really didn’t matter.
The reason why it had happened didn’t matter. That it happened at all, that mattered.
Not like I wasn’t paranoid enough already.
“Thanks for the heads up,” I said and switched off the vidscreen, leaning back in my seat.
I stared out the Nomad’s Wind view window, watching the stars drift by. We’d stopped in this system long enough to get the download from the Feed. That was the plan until I had gotten Yoterra’s message to contact her.
Had to get going. We were heading to the Tuyo system for a job. It was the first job we’d had in a week and one we needed badly.
We being me and my crew.
The Nomad’s Wind could carry a crew of six but I had retrofitted it to be operated by a crew of one. Currently there was only two. Me, the captain, and a thirteen year old Thesan girl named Kaylia. For a long time there had been only one, me. But I’d picked up Kaylia a couple of months ago.
She was the reason that the release of Arskli was a problem. A Tiat, high ranking in their military, Arskli was responsible for me meeting Kaylia in the first place. She, Arskli, had kidnapped Kaylia and the kid had escaped, literally running into me on a mining asteroid in Deep Space. I’d been responsible for the Commander’s capture on the Thesan controlled planet of Turesa.
Tiat were not a forgiving people and they never could be relentless and brutal. As far as Yoterra, Kaylia’s legal guardian, and I knew the Tiat’s bounty on the kid had been removed. The Tiat seemed to no longer be interested in her. But I knew it was just a matter of time before Arksli came looking for revenge on me, and the kid as a bonus, for the loss of reputation she had suffered. Tiat were big on their version of honor and there was no way Arskli would let it go.
Something to look forward to. One more name on the long list of people out to get me. A list which, despite my best efforts, seemed to be growing. Lately it seemed I couldn’t go anywhere without picking up a new enemy. The latest was a Divutan black market
art dealer by the name of Gur. I’d gotten on his bad side by helping some refugees from a dying planet.
Would have thought doing a good deed would have helped my karma. Nope.
In the meantime, we’d stay as far away from the Tiat as we could. Which shouldn’t be a problem, I tried to avoid them anyways.
Tiat and Terrans weren’t allies, never would be. We’d fought against each other in the Third Galactic War and were engaged in a kind of cold war over new territories to this day. That was old news for me though. I hadn’t worried about the status of the war in five years, ever since I had left the Earth Expeditionary Forces Special Operations and became an independent freight hauler. I’d gotten my ship, the Nomad’s Wind, and set off into space.
Should I tell Kaylia about Arskli? Naw. No need to worry the kid. She had enough to deal with. The main reason the Tiat wanted her was that she was the last of a group of genetically modified Thesans. A kind of super trooper of the species. More feral, claws, speed. The works. Kaylia’s parents had been the ones whose DNA had been messed with. They’d passed it onto the kid.
An example of the Tiat not forgetting or forgiving. The Thesa Wilders had done some pretty nasty damage to the Tiat and it had taken years, but the Tiat had gotten their revenge. Or most of it. There was still Kaylia, alive and well and a reminder that they hadn’t killed all the Wilders. And that would never happen. Not on my watch.
So no telling her. Not now anyways.
“Kid,” I said turning on the ship’s intercom system. “Come on up. It’s hop time.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked out the viewwindow at the stars. Lots of small white dots, pinpricks in the blackness of space. In the distance was a small planet, the only one close enough to be visible by the eye. This system had no sentient species, or habitable planets, and was used mostly for mining. The Kry controlled it.
We were just stopping by, had only been here for thirty minutes or so. Long enough to get the updates from the Galactic Feed. That’s how I had known that Yoterra was looking for me. We would have been out of the system a while ago but I needed to get ahold of Yoterra.
Traveling from solar system to solar system is done in a series of hops. You hop into the space between systems, some kind of strange realm that is nicknamed Wildspace, and then hop out again somewhere else. Going from A to C means hopping to B and sometimes E. It takes time. Well in that in-between space, you can’t receive transmissions of any kind. Well you can, but they’re so garbled that there’s no understanding them or cleaning them up. So when a ship enters a system, there’s a rapid influx of downloads from the Feed, the galaxy wide information system. News, letters, videos, books. Takes awhile to go through it all, but what else are you going to do well hopping through wildspace?
It also means that by the time you get anything, it could be days old.
I turned as the door to the bridge slid open and Kaylia walked in. About five feet tall, slender, she looked like a humanoid cat. Gray and black striped fur, tufts at her wrists and ankles and long black hair that ran halfway down her back. Short and pointed ears, bright yellow eyes with green slit irises.
And a long tail that was always moving, swishing back and forth.
Only thirteen years old, or the equivalent of that anyways, she’d seen a lot in that life. I didn’t know why she had chosen me, but she had and I would do whatever I could to protect the kid.
She’d grown on me fast.
When I started out in space as a freight hauler, I never wanted a crew. It was always going to be just me. Going where I wanted, when I wanted. Then I met Kaylia and well it took some getting used to, I was now okay with a crew.
Just her though. No need for anyone else.
Smiling, she was always smiling, she sat down at the navigators station in front and down from me. The Wind’s bridge had four stations. The pilot’s on the right, co-pilots on the left and down a couple steps were the navigators and weapons/communications. Lots of screens, buttons, dials and controls. She busied herself with some of the buttons for a minute.
“Navorders all set,” I asked her, looking at the back of her head.
She flashed me a thumbs up over her shoulder, one of the first earth expressions I had taught her.
The kid was mute and primarily communicated through sign language.
I glanced at my station. Since I had everything rigged for a single crewer, my station had controls and readouts for all the ship’s systems and I looked quick to double check. She’d set up the hop perfectly.
Normally I’d set all the hops from the system where we left to the destination system and let the navcom make the adjustments as we traveled. No route was ever perfectly set in stone. The galaxy was in constant motion and things changed rapidly, so whenever a hop brought you to a new solar system there was some downtime as the navcomp made adjustments before hopping out. I’d been training Kaylia on how to do that manually, so now whenever we hopped in she would plot the course out.
She tapped on the console to get my attention.
Six hours.
Space travel was not quick.
I leaned back, put my feet up on the edge of the console and my hands behind my head.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
With a nod, smile and eyes bright with excitement Kaylia stood up and sat down in the co-pilots station next to mine, the small aisle between us. She adjusted a couple of dials, tapped some buttons and hit the controls. The Wind started moving forward, the distant planet growing a little bit in size. We couldn’t feel the motion inside the bridge, the inertia compensators working, but the stars started to elongate as we gained speed. I could feel the familiar vibrations through the metal decking of my ship. The white pinpricks became lines, more and more of them closer to together until the black was all gone and replaced with a landscape that was best described as fuzzy clouds of white.
The space between space. Wildspace.
Not all ships had view windows but I made sure mine did. I found the view of both, space and this wildspace, to be peaceful. It was where I belonged. The view here was unchanging, just the weird cloudy white, so it did get old after awhile but I tried to spend the first couple minutes of most hops just enjoying the view.
Out of the corner of my eyes I could see Kaylia shift to mimic my position. Feet up, hands behind her head, leaning back. I smiled and watched wildspace drift by.
*****
Tuyo System contained six planets, three of them were gas, another a ball of fire and two that were inhabited. None of the planets were capable of sustaining life but they had three colonies on the two planets. Since there was no life native to the system, the first settlers got to pick the planets names. Tuyo Major and Tuyo Minor.
Very imaginative.
Major had two mining operations from the Pierd, one in each hemisphere. Minor, our destination, had an operation run by the Huyit Trading Consortium. We’d left a system with mining operations by the Kry to come to one with operations by the Pierd and one of the galaxies many trade consortiums. There was a lot of mining done in the galaxy.
The Wind wasn’t capable of transporting ore. Too heavy for light freighters like my ship, an Earth made Castellan Model F497. The heavier transports did the bulk of the ore, those also usually belonged to whatever Trading Consortium or planetary government owned the mine. That left guys like me to deliver the cargo needed for the people working and running the mines.
It wasn’t big money but it kept me and my ship flying. That was all I wanted.
A little extra would be nice but can’t have everything.
We’d been traveling in-system for three hours when the first of the planets became visible to the eye. Star hopping brings you in at the far edge of a system and you have to use thrusters to get the rest of the way. They’re slow. At least it appears to be, but when talking the distances between planets, three hours really isn’t that bad.
Tuyo Major was coming up off to the port side. Our port anyways. With ships
in space, directions like up and down or left and right were kind of meaningless.
It was an ugly planet. Gray, cratered. No lights could be seen from this distance but there were plenty of ships in orbit. Large freighters and even a small space station, a long cylinder with a ring around the middle. It served as a terminal for ships as well as defense. I could see the weapons mounted on the ring.
My console lit up, telling me that we were being scanned. I hit a button and transmitted the ship’s ID and our purpose for being in Pierd controlled space. It was just a routine check.
We continued past Major with no problems. Hadn’t expected any, but can never tell. Last I had heard, things were fine between the Pierd and the Huyit Consortium. That wasn’t always the case, but for now it was. Which was good. I hated flying into warzones, I’d been in too many of them back in the soldiering days. The Wind had shields and some weapons but it was still a freighter, not good in a fight.
I could see some of the ships docked at the space station. Some light freighters like the Wind, lots of different makes and models, lots of different species. There were a couple heavy freighters drifting in orbit with the station. I could see smaller shuttles moving between them and the planet. Major couldn’t handle ships landing in atmo and most heavy freighters weren’t designed for landing and flying through atmosphere. Another benefit that my ship had.
Shuttles brought cargo and personnel up from the surface to the freighters or the station. The surface was nothing but gray rock, lots of cliffs and mountains. Barren and stormy. Not a fun place.
And Minor was worse.
It would be another six hours before we came upon Minor along its orbit on the far side of the system’s sun. We could have hopped in on that side, closer to the planet itself, but that would have required hopping to another two systems. More time and more fuel. In-system travel wasn’t that fast, but sometimes it was needed as it didn’t use up fuel as much as hopping. As we passed the sun, I tilted the ship so the viewwindow was away from the light. We were still light years away, a lot of them, but it was bright.
