by J. N. Chaney
"Why don’t you share some of that data you gathered from wherever?" I instructed.
"Human intel is up to you," X-37 said. "For example, you discussed the origin of this hulk with CSL Locke. I probe any electronic storage device we encounter, including the black boxes of long dead ships."
"Ghost ships," I volunteered.
"If that is what you wish to call them, I cannot stop you," X-37 said. "Most of the older ships have records of something called NetCom, which allows fleet ships to work together and mitigate system crashes. As a rule, that type of thing should be avoided in the void, especially if interstellar travel is a goal," X-37 said.
"That is truly fascinating, X," I said. "Can you tell me who built these things? Don’t tell me the scavengers have the technology and shipyards to construct something like this."
"The people who built the oldest of the wrecked ships in the area are called U19ZR00-EXPLOR-4567-399-299-001," X-37 said.
"Do you want me to explain how useless that is to me?" I asked.
"Will you grace the conversation with a large selection of profane words and other colorful metaphors?" X-37 retorted
"Yeah." I pulled up the location of Locke, Horvath, and Carrie Decker just to see if they were available for an away mission. Locke wasn’t my first choice—his injuries would slow him down, even if he refused to quit.
"Then I will pass, Reaper Cain. What is your decision?" X-37 asked.
"I’ll go with them," I decided.
"I predicted you would say that," my LAI replied in a knowing tone. "They have been alerted to your intention."
As spacewalks went, I was feeling good. The only light inside the guts of the old ship came from our EVA units. Horvath followed on my right, Carrie on my left. Locke and Path stayed back as a rescue team if things went wrong.
"Moving to the objective," I announced.
"Understood," Horvath answered.
"Are you going to be able to handle this?" I asked.
"I have a lot on my mind. No one promised joining Locke’s team would be easy, but I never expected to do it without Gunner," Horvath said.
"He was a good guy," Carrie told him. "Solid performer."
We moved in silence, shadows on top of shadows shifting as we used our EVA lights to search.
"The next room is a vault. Access is controlled by a combination keypad," X-37 advised.
"Is it too much to ask for you to have the code?"
"It is, Reaper Cain. My apologies," he replied.
Extending my arm blade, I studied the frame of the door.
Elise joined the conversation from the bridge of the Jellybird. "Why don’t you use your override wires?"
Horvath and Carrie looked at me.
"I don’t know what kind of tech they have here. That could be dangerous at worst or a waste of time at best," I said.
"Override wires?" Carrie Decker asked.
I retracted my blade and showed her the fine, hair-like wires I could extend from the palm of my cybernetic left hand. They twisted and turned but were barely visible.
"That is disturbing," Carrie said.
"Try it," Horvath said.
"Why the hell not. But don’t be surprised when my neural network gets fried by ancient technology none of us understands," I said, then put my palm to the edge of the locking mechanism.
"Proceed with caution, Reaper Cain," X-37 said advised.
21
"Hal, get up," a female voice said. "I want to go for a run before school."
"What?" I rolled into a sitting position. My sister, Hannah, stood over me, shoving running shoes at me.
"I want to run before school. You know how hard it is to get into the Union military. It’s important for me to be as fast as I can for the trials," she said.
"It’s not hard to enlist." I yawned.
"Not for you. You’ve always been strong." She smiled at me. "And too stubborn to quit. I want to get the hell off this planet, and the only way to do that is to enlist and qualify for the officer’s academy."
My mother yelled at me from the hall, but it never sounded like yelling the way she did it. "Run with your sister, Hal. It’s not safe in the dark. Too many gangs in this neighborhood."
"Enlisting in the Union military is unsafe," I pointed out.
My mother ushered a laundry bot into my room and pointed it toward my messy closet. "Just leave the stacks, Y-9. Hal will put everything away when he’s done with his other chores."
Y-9 beeped twice. It was an economy version that didn’t talk.
I stood up, stretching my arms over my head, which empathized how much larger I was than either my mother or my sister. "Why are we living here, Mom? You have like thirteen degrees and Dad’s service record is nearly perfect."
"There’s a reason for everything. You father did his service. Now he wants to do something else," my mother said.
I waited until Hannah left to start her warm-up. "But that’s not what you want, is it?"
She looked at me strangely and I knew I was in a dream. "You see too much, Hal. Be careful who you trust."
"Why did you stop?" Carrie asked. She was standing too close to where I worked on the door lock that had been frozen shut for decades or longer. I wanted her standing watch, ready to fight if we were attacked. There hadn’t been signs of scavengers, Union troops, or anyone or anything living—but that didn’t mean I let my guard down.
The moment I relaxed, every enemy imaginable would materialize to punch my ticket. My first instructor in Reaper school had told me that. He said, "Watch your six, Cain. The minute you let your guard down, enemies will materialize out of nowhere to punch your ticket."
I’d basically ignored him and was tased in the back each time he thought I’d slacked off. Good times.
Carrie’s question was valid, despite her lax situational awareness. So I answered. Because I’m a nice guy like that. "I was thinking about my sister."
"Oh, okay," Carrie said.
"I had a dream about her recently. And my mother," I said, pausing from my work. This wouldn’t be happening if I didn’t need a break. Long, intense concentration often caused me to think of things better forgotten.
"Do you dream often?" Horvath said from the doorway he was guarding. There were dark circles around his eyes as though he hadn’t slept for a while.
"I have nightmares," I said.
No one spoke. I went back to work and disabled the lock. Carrie, Horvath, and my friends still on the Jellybird watched as I snapped out my arm blade, just as I had when we started. "It’s unlocked, but the door is still wedged or frozen shut."
"Good luck, Reaper Cain," X-37 said.
"Thanks, X. You always know the right thing to say." I worked the blade into the seam of the door, assumed a wide stance, and started pushing. "Here goes nothing."
Horvath and Carrie, meaning well, stacked up beside me and pushed like we were in a sporting event. The tactic worked but placed an incredible amount of torque on my left shoulder.
"It’s open. Step back," I said, drawing my pistol and aiming through the narrow opening.
Horvath and Carrie drew their weapons and waited.
"I don’t see anything with my optics. I’m going in." Seconds later, I had cleared the room and found a charging station with five datapad-sized devices waiting to be stolen by a Reaper.
"Do they have power?" Carrie asked.
"Doesn’t look like it," I said. "Tom, can I remove these without damaging them?"
"Can you move closer and let me look at them?" Tom asked. "I really wish I’d come with you on this away mission."
"I’m not getting my only fix-it guy killed, not when I have these two for that," I said, jerking my thumb at Horvath and Carrie.
"Gee, thanks." Carrie rolled her eyes.
I did as Tom asked and waited for permission to steal the SIC devices.
"They’re good to move," Tom said. "I’ll contact Henshaw if possible and start working on a way to power them up."
> "Let me know what you come up with, but I plan to trade them to Rejon and his people," I said.
"In exchange for what?" Elise asked.
"The only thing that matters. Help destroying the Union."
The Jellybird wasn’t in good shape. We were going through ships almost as fast as I could steal them, a trend I hoped to arrest soon. Tom, Elise, and I manned the bridge. Locke, Horvath, and Carrie were standing in the doorway, since there wasn’t a lot of extra room. Path was meditating in his room last I checked. Novasdaughter and the Nightmare were still several hours from our location. When they arrived, they would have to look for the Dark Lance, stay hidden themselves, and be ready to fight to the death.
The Jellybird was the only ship available for this mission.
"Are you sure you can land on the surface?" I asked.
"We don’t have any shuttles," Jelly explained.
"Can. You. Land on the planet. Safely," I added.
"I have a high degree of confidence the ship will hold up," Jelly said. "The actual flying will be easy. The atmosphere is harsh and has been polluted by countless wars but not problematic for a landing. As long as there are no critical system failures within the ship, we should be fine."
"Can I land?" Elise asked.
"Let Jelly do it," I said without hesitation.
"I’d like to try it at least once under normal circumstances—like when we’re not getting shot at," Elise said.
"Jelly, what do you think?" I already suspected what the answer would be.
"I can always resume control of the ship if there is a serious problem," Jelly replied.
"Fine," I relented. "Elise, take us down to the planet. What the hell is this place called?"
"Rejon called it Xad," Tom offered. "We had a long talk on the observation deck."
Elise interrupted us. "Strap in. This might be a bit rougher than normal."
Penetrating the atmosphere of the planet took a while. Thunderhead clouds stood like a slow-moving army all across the surface of the planet. It was late in the day on this part of Xad and the sky had a green tint I didn’t like.
Elise flew smoothly downward, arching toward a large rock formation Jelly had marked as the most prominent structure we had witnessed during the scavengers’ use of the SIC against the Dark Lance. Silver foothills stretched away from majestic mountains with deadly, jagged peaks. All of them were snow capped but had that same greenish tint over most of their surface.
Silence held the bridge, broken only by Jelly updating Elise on flight telemetry and other useful information like altitude and what it was going to take not to smash into the rocky surface.
"It’s snowing," Horvath said from the door to the bridge. There wasn’t a section of the deck for observers like there was on the Nightmare. "But those clouds look like rain clouds."
"That may be ash," Jelly reported.
"Locke, can you prep some gear for an away team?" I asked.
"It would be an honor, Reaper Cain," Locke said. "Combat load out?"
"Absolutely," I said. "X, do we need environmental suits?"
"I am analyzing the data from Jelly’s sensors now. One moment." X-37 paused without any beeps or other indicators my LAI was struggling, which was a nice change. "The atmosphere can sustain human life, but you must bring your own food and water," X-37 advised.
Stepping off the Jellybird onto an actual planet felt good, despite how badly the place had been ruined. Terrestrial gravity was always better than what was available on a ship or space station. The air was breathable, but it made my eyes water and smelled metallic.
From the air, Xad looked scenic. On the ground, there were signs of stress everywhere. The sparse plant life was decayed around the edges. The soil was hard and brittle.
I'd left everyone but Horvath on the ship—Elise and Tom to fly the ship in an emergency, and Locke and the others to protect it if it were attacked by Union forces or scavengers.
Horvath carried the devices I intended to trade with Rejon’s people in exchange for their assistance against the Union. He was armed, but I was a better fighter and put myself in charge of security for this away mission.
"We're moving out," I said.
"We will maintain visual on your progress for as long as possible," Elise advised from the ship.
"Are you ready, Horvath?" I asked.
"I am," he said, his eyes scanning the environment.
I thought I knew what was on his mind. His hatred of the scavengers had only gotten worse since Gunner disappeared near one of their debris cloud settlements. Rejon had promised to deliver the body for a proper funeral but had yet to deliver. Then he'd stolen a shuttle and left.
With just the two of us on the ground, I was hoping to deal with this issue, confront him on the facts, and help him work through them. I knew what it was like to lose people on a mission. He was coping the best he could, but he was struggling.
We found the stolen shuttle and made sure Rejon wasn't inside of it. After that, it was a simple matter of tracking which way he had gone and working with X and Jelly to consolidate what I was seeing with what they had observed during our approach of the area.
"My HUD is pointing us toward those rocks," I said. "There should be the entrance to an underground shelter. Neither X nor Jelly were able to tell me how extensive it is down there."
Dusk arrived abruptly. Before long, darkness cloaked us. I looked up, spotting what I thought were debris clouds orbiting the planet. Miles away, I saw meteorites descending toward the planet leaving fiery trails where there wasn’t cloud cover. Here, that was probably a common sight.
Horvath began walking toward the bunker door. I held him back, motioning him to a stand of rocks and indicating that he should take cover. He complied without hesitation. The man had far different training than I was accustomed to, but he was still a soldier and knew how to take orders. I also thought his survival instincts were good.
Time passed like a slow glass of whiskey.
"What are we waiting for?" Horvath asked. He seemed more nervous than impatient. The stress of being on a new world could build up slowly.
"I'm playing a hunch," I said. "I'll bet you a Starbrand cigar that we are expected and probably being observed."
"That's not a bet I'd take," he said.
There was a hissing sound after the door opened, suggesting that the interior was sealed against the exterior environment. Over a foot thick, the door moved slowly. Dim red lights illuminated the room.
"They're trying to maintain their night vision," Horvath said.
I agreed but didn't comment. My Reaper optics gave me insights my companion on this mission didn't have. Inside, there were several armed men. Their weapons ranged from firearms to bike clubs.
Rejon emerged alone and approached me.
"You have a lot of nerve coming here, Reaper," Rejon said. "Thousands of my people have died from the bombardment of the salvage field."
I waited a few moments out of respect. Now wasn't the time for one of my flippant, profanity-laden responses. "The man who ordered that attack is a monster, but even I didn't expect him to go that far."
"You brought him to our system and provoked his wrath," Rejon said.
"I can't change that now," I said, then pointed toward Horvath. "I brought the same fate to this man’s people."
Rejon studied Horvath as though for the first time. After a thoughtful moment, he responded. "That is somewhat different from what your mechanic, Tom, told me. In his version of the story, you are a great savior of the people of Wallach."
"I guess it's a matter of perspective," I said. "The Union wants me dead and isn't afraid to kill or imprison people. That was just a taste of what they will do to get what they want. Xad is now on their map. No matter what happens to me, you can expect visitors. Next time, it won't be a commando fleet, but a full armada of warships and exploration vessels."
"At least you’re honest," he allowed.
"The man who ordered the bombardme
nt, Nebs, knows you have a weapon that can paralyze ships even when they are in stealth mode. He won’t stop until he has it for himself. Expect more bombings. Expect him to capture your people and torture them for information," I said.
Rejon seethed with rage, his eyes boring into mine like weapons.
"We came here to answer a distress call," Horvath said.
I hadn’t expected the man to talk and doubted he had training or experience as a negotiator. The emotion in his voice was convincing. Thankfully, it wasn’t hatred of the scavengers he thought were cannibals.
"We are friends of the Bold Freedom. Our efforts to help them were insufficient," Rejon said, thoughtful now but wary. "Wait here. I will speak to my people."
When he was gone, Horvath moved closer and spoke in a low voice. "Why didn’t you tell them we have the modules for their weapon?"
"Too soon, and now I’m worried they may not be as valuable as I’d hoped. These things will allow them to use the weapons while the ships that hold them are in space. If they lack the fuel to help the Bold Freedom, they probably can’t fly more than shuttles," I said.
"Which makes the SIC networkers useless," Horvath said.
"Maybe, maybe not," I said, watching the door where Rejon had disappeared. "Making assumptions at this point is dangerous. Let’s take it slow."
Horvath nodded, then looked at his feet. When he faced me again, I knew he was going to broach the subject of Gunner’s body. Which was another reason I’d brought only him on this mission. I needed to have a man-to-man conversation with him.
"I’m sorry," he said.
"What are you sorry about?" I knew what he was going to say. Horvath was a solid soldier with simple motivations—friends, family, and adventure. Unfortunately, combining these things hadn’t worked well.
"I’ve been really angry at the scavengers. Everyone from Carrie to your mechanic, Tom, has talked to me about it and explained that there really isn’t proof the scavengers are cannibals. Now that I know they have a planetary settlement, I guess they could have a place to get food. I don’t understand why they are underground, but I’m just a soldier. All I want is my friend back," Horvath said.
