Broken Worlds- The Complete Series

by Jasper T. Scott

  Darius spotted a bright orange flare of light go streaking across his field of view. A shooting star? he wondered. Then he remembered that shooting stars were meteors burning up on entry to a planetary atmosphere.

  His ears registered the double chime that indicated a new contact had just been detected by the ship’s sensors. Tanik apparently heard it too, because he quickly spun his chair back to the fore to check his displays.

  Dyara ran over for a look, and Darius hurried to follow.

  “Cygnian or USO?” Dyara breathed.

  “Neither,” Tanik replied. His brow was deeply furrowed, his face glowing blue with reflected light from his displays. “It’s an Osprey. One of ours.”

  Darius frowned. The first thing that jumped to mind was that Riker had grown tired of waiting for them and he was heading back to Hades on his own.

  “No lifesigns detected,” Tanik said.

  “Then who’s flying it?” Dyara asked.

  “Something the computer doesn’t recognize as alive,” Tanik replied.

  “It’s Gatticus,” Darius said. “He’s leaving.”

  “Yes,” Tanik said.

  “Blake is going to lose it when he finds out,” Darius said.

  “Unless he went too,” Dyara said.

  Tanik shook his head. “No life signs detected, remember?”

  “Right,” Dyara said. “Good point.”

  “I wonder why he decided to leave without Blake?” Darius asked.

  “Maybe because he’s so annoying,” Dyara said. “Imagine being cooped up alone with him for a few days.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Darius replied.

  “Well, regardless, we have to jump somewhere else now,” Tanik said.

  “What?” Darius shook his head. “Why?”

  “Because when he arrives at the nearest USO world, the nav logs in his ship could lead a Union battle group right to us.”

  Darius scowled. “How long is this going to take?”

  Tanik glanced up from his displays. “The Alckam drive is still cooling, we won’t be able to leave for at least another hour.”

  Darius’s cheeks bulged with an angry reply, but Dyara stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Pick a rendezvous and give me the coordinates. We’ll meet you there on our way back.”

  Tanik nodded and pulled up a star map on his primary display. He rapidly scrolled the map and placed a bright green waypoint somewhere out in deep space. He pointed to it, and that green diamond grew suddenly larger and brighter. A set of three galactic grid coordinates appeared below it, each of them measured in light years from the galactic center to a precision of twelve decimal places.

  “How far away from here is that?” Dyara asked.

  Another number appeared above the waypoint with the annotation of r for range.

  “Point five six light years,” Tanik said, reading the number.

  “Good enough. We’ll see you at those coordinates in about a day. Darius, let’s go.”

  He stared at the coordinates a moment longer, trying to burn dozens of digits into his brain, but there was no way he’d be able to memorize them all.

  He caught up to Dyara on their way off the bridge. “Is Tanik going to send you the coordinates for the rendezvous before he leaves?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are you going to get there?”

  She tapped the side of her head. “I have an ESC, remember?”

  “An extra-sensory chip helps you remember things?”

  “It gives you perfect recall, like an android. We’d better get you chipped before we leave.”

  Darius frowned, not sure he liked the idea of having a microchip in his brain that could record everything he heard and saw. And he definitely didn’t want any more delays.

  “We need to go,” he said. “We’ve taken long enough to get back to Hades as it is.”

  “It won’t take long. I’ll administer the injection while we’re loading supplies. You’ll thank me if we get into trouble,” Dyara said.

  Darius sighed. “All right.”

  They walked on in silence until they reached a access chute. As they climbed down it to level five, Dyara said, “Is it strange that your friend left without saying goodbye?”

  It took Darius a moment to figure out who she was talking about. “You mean Gatticus? I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend. An acquaintance maybe.”

  “So it’s not strange?”

  “I guess not. He was probably just anxious to leave.”

  “Good.”

  They continued down the chute in silence for another minute before Darius began to wonder about those questions. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, it’s just that people have a way of going missing around Tanik.”

  “Missing as in...”

  “Missing,” Dyara said. “Gatticus didn’t seem too happy about Tanik taking over the ship. They might have had an argument over it.”

  “And then what? You think Tanik forced him to leave?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Short of knocking Gatticus out or tying him up, I don’t see how he could have done that. Besides, I’m not sure you can knock out an android. At least not without inflicting serious damage.”

  Dyara opened the hatch on level five and climbed out of the chute. Darius crawled through the hatch after her and activated his mag boots to stand up beside her.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Dyara asked.

  “In the mess hall, last night,” Darius said.

  “That was more than twelve hours ago,” Dyara said, nodding. “A lot can happen in that time.”

  Darius frowned. “Are there surveillance logs we can check to see what happened?”

  “Yes, but not all areas of the ship are covered by cameras. Crew quarters, for example, are not.”

  “So...”

  “So, maybe we should try to contact that runaway Osprey before we go to Hades.”

  “And if there’s no answer?”

  Dyara shrugged. “We could always board it and take a look around.”

  “Assuming it doesn’t jump to FTL before we have the chance,” Darius pointed out.

  “Yes.”

  Darius frowned. He didn’t like the idea of delaying his search for Cassandra, but finding out why Gatticus had left in such a hurry could be important. “What if we find Gatticus inside with a fresh hole in his head?”

  “Then, we might want to think twice about returning to the Deliverance,” Dyara replied.

  Chapter 40

  Dyara and Darius reached the amidships hangar and walked through the ruined doors. Darius looked around and saw the beat-up Starskimmer transport that Tanik had arrived on, but the Osprey Gatticus had used to take them to and from Hades was now gone. No doubt the android had taken that same ship now when he’d left the Deliverance.

  “Pick a Vulture,” Dyara said and pointed vaguely to some of the other ships landed inside the hangar.

  “A what?”

  “We’re taking SF-76 Vultures,” Dyara said and pointed to one of them.

  Darius followed that gesture to one of a few dozen matte black starfighters landed inside the hangar. Vultures looked vaguely like their namesake, with a transparent, beak-like cockpit at the front, and an elongated aerodynamic body, almost the shape of a missile. That tiny profile was spoiled by a pair of wings at the back, a few weapon hardpoints, and exhaust nozzles for the front-facing thrusters.

  Just looking at the fighter, Darius realized he already knew plenty about its capabilities without having to be told. The SF-76 was an FTL-capable, two man stealth fighter with a maximum range of thirty light years. It was capable of Mach 3 in atmosphere, and in space it could hit 55 Gs of acceleration for brief periods. But even with nanotech enhancements, the human body could only take around 40 Gs, and even then only for a few milliseconds.

  Captain Riker arrived while Darius was still studying the ships they were going to take. He came to stand beside them and nodded to the Vulture they were bo
th looking at. “We’re taking fighters?”

  Dyara nodded. “We’ll have a better chance of slipping past the Cygnian warships that chased us out of the system in stealth fighters than we will in an Osprey.”

  Darius frowned. “But they’re only two-man ships. If we take Vultures we’ll only have room for three passengers. What if we find more than three survivors?”

  Dyara hesitated. Darius could imagine what she was thinking. She didn’t think they were going to find any survivors, much less more than three. It was no coincidence that they were going to have room for exactly three passengers—Riker’s two kids plus Cassandra. Dyara was leaving just enough room for them to hold onto hope, but not enough room for that hope to breathe.

  “What if we take one Osprey and two stealth fighters?” Darius asked.

  Dyara shook her head. “The pilot of the bomber would never make it back, and he could compromise the entire operation.”

  Darius scowled. “Fine, but if we do find more than three survivors, we’re going back for them.”

  “Agreed,” Dyara said; then she turned and nodded to a heavily-armored recon and recovery ship, an RR-3 ‘Eagle.’ It was a blocky, rectangular ship sprouting sensor dishes and laser turrets from every side. “I could use some help transferring medical supplies to the fighters,” Dyara said.

  Darius and Riker followed her to the rear airlock of the Eagle and waited for her to open it. Eagles were loaded with a full compliment of emergency medical equipment, since their primary role besides reconnaissance was to recover ejected pilots from space.

  The Eagle’s airlock swished open and they all climbed inside. Dyara opened the inner doors and they walked through into a passenger compartment, situated right behind the cockpit. There were six front-facing acceleration harnesses, three to either side of the airlock. Along the sides of the compartment were two cryo tanks and a pair of hatchways leading to port and starboard laser turrets. Another pair of hatchways in the floor and ceiling led to the upper and lower turrets, while storage lockers lined the empty spaces in the walls and ceiling.

  Dyara walked over to one of the lockers and opened it. A drawer slid out with medical equipment inside. She removed a fat silver pen and turned to Darius. “You ready?”

  He stared dumbly at the device. “Ready for what?”

  “The injection—for your ESC, remember?”

  The Extra-Sensory Chip. “Oh, right.” He’d been imagining something worse than a simple injection. Darius held out his arm and rolled up the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “Go ahead.”

  Dyara held the pen to his forearm and depressed the button on the top of the device. He barely felt a thing, but the thought of millions of tiny machines invading his body made him shiver.

  “Done,” Dyara said. Darius stared at his arm and noted that he wasn’t even bleeding where the nanites had been injected. “In about five minutes, I want you to think: Activate ESC. That will turn it on. I added an ESC operation manual to your pilot’s training module, so you should already know how to use your chip.”

  Darius nodded slowly, realizing even as she said that, that he felt a certain sense of familiarity with the implant.

  “What do you need us to load onto the Vultures?” Riker asked.

  Dyara opened a few more drawers and swung open a pair of larger compartments. She withdrew four different packages and indicated for them to take those to the first Vulture and pack them in the storage compartment behind the co-pilot’s seat.

  When they returned, she already had the next two sets of supplies out and floating beside her. They took those supplies and packed them into the last two Vultures.

  “All right, let’s suit up,” Dyara said as soon as they were done. She nodded to a line of lockers along the rear wall of the hangar, and they walked over there together.

  There were flight suits and helmets on racks inside the lockers. Dyara didn’t have to tell Darius how to put his suit on; apparently that had been included with his flight training module. The suits were designed to be worn directly over their jumpsuits, but there was a waste management girdle for long trips that they had to wear instead of regular underwear, and that forced them all to strip naked.

  Darius spent the next few minutes minding his own business while he stripped out of his jumpsuit and underwear, but he peripherally noted that both Riker and Dyara seemed considerably more comfortable in their own skins.

  It took about five minutes for them to finish getting dressed. The last step, after re-strapping their mag boots, was to slip on their oxygen masks and helmets.

  Darius’s helmet came to life with a series of tones and chimes and a handful of glowing HUD icons appeared as he slid it over his head. One of the icons was a blinking O2 indicator, which told him he still had to attach his oxygen mask to an air supply. Right now there was just an open hole in the bottom of his helmet where an air hose should go.

  “Take spare suits with you,” Dyara said as she handed one to Darius. “You’ll need them for anyone we bring back with us,” she explained. Her voice was louder now, since it was being relayed directly to Darius’s ears through speakers inside his helmet.

  Taking the pieces of the flight suit back to his Vulture, he climbed the collapsing staircase beside the cockpit and packed the suit in with the medical supplies under the elastic webbing behind the co-pilot’s seat. That done, he climbed into the cockpit and secured his acceleration harness. The fighter’s harness was thinner and more flexible than the ones on the Deliverance, allowing him some freedom of movement, but there was also a part of the harness that formed a cage around his helmet. That was to prevent neck injury during high-G maneuvers.

  Drawing on his newfound pilot’s training, Darius flipped the ignition switch for his Vulture and heard the reactor whirring to life even as lights and holographic displays flicked on all around him. The flight stick between his legs came alive and auto-centered itself. Darius tested it, feeling a slight tug of resistance. He tested the rudder pedals under his feet. They controlled the fighter’s lateral maneuvering jets while in space, and actual control surfaces in planetary atmospheres.

  The flight stick provided pitch and roll in the same way. A lock switch enabled or disabled an additional three axes of movement, allowing him to slide the stick forward and back, side to side, or up and down. That gave him access to the ship’s docking jets—small thrusters that made it easier to line up for landings in space, but they were also helpful for vertical take-offs and landings in atmosphere. Finally, the throttle slider along the left side of the cockpit allowed him to control the fighter’s forward and backward-firing thrusters.

  In front of him, three configurable holographic displays gave Darius access to navigation, comms, weapons, countermeasures, targeting, and a variety of other systems. All of it felt vaguely familiar to him, even though this was the first time Darius had physically been in the cockpit of a starfighter.

  Darius hit the canopy open/close button and the beak-shaped canopy dropped down over his head with a pneumatic groan. Then he reached around and pulled out an air hose from under his chair and attached it to the opening in the chin of his helmet. As soon as he did that, the O2 symbol stopped blinking and displayed 100%/250h.

  He had two hundred and fifty hours before he’d run out of air.

  A chime sounded from the comms board, along with a blinking light, indicating activity on one of the channels. He switched to it and immediately heard Dyara’s voice.

  “This is Blue Leader to Blue Three, come in Blue Three...” Darius spent a moment staring dumbly at the display. “Blue Three... Darius!”

  He blinked. That must be his squadron designation. “I’m here,” he said.

  “Good. Have you activated your ESC yet?”

  “Sorry, I forgot. One second.” Activate ESC, he thought, and a flurry of data streamed before his eyes, too fast to track, like the run code of a program. After that a series of HUD icons appeared at the edges of his field of view, and a line of text appeared at the
bottom in a dark blue font:

  Available Networks

  He focused on that and a list of networks appeared. He selected his fighter: SF-76 (Blue Three) from the list of available networks. As soon as he did that, a new HUD appeared, this one relating to the operation of his Vulture. He found the throttle and speed display, the charge levels for the fighter’s lasers and countermeasure systems, as well as HUD icons for landing gear, mag clamps, sensors, and stealth settings.

  “You two ready to go?” Dyara asked.

  “Ready,” Riker said.

  “Ready...” Darius replied.

  “All right, launch your fighters. I’ll see you spaceside.”

  Darius found the launch control panel on his left holo display (LHD) and activated the fighter’s launch sequence. A clu-clunk sounded as locking bolts in the landing pad slid aside, followed by a pneumatic groan as the stairway leading up to the cockpit flattened. Then the landing pad began sinking into the vehicular airlock. The landing pad hit bottom with a thunk, and flashing crimson lights illuminated the airlock as deck sections slid shut overhead, sealing him inside. The airlock shut with a bang, and powerful fans whirred to life, sucking all of the air out of the compartment in a few seconds. Doors opened in front of the fighter, revealing the full length of the launch tube.

  A rising roar came shuddering through the Vulture’s engines, and Darius braced himself. Lights flashed down the length of the launch tube as an automated voice sounded inside Darius’s helmet:

  “Three, two, one—”

  The Vulture screamed down the launch tube, pinning Darius to the back of his flight chair. For a split second the pressure and weight on his chest was so intense that he couldn’t even breathe, but then the weight lifted and his fighter shot out into space.

  Stars gleamed on all sides. The glass cockpit made Darius feel exposed and somewhat agoraphobic, but his helmet helped reign in some of those feelings. Even if the canopy broke, he’d be okay. His air supply was contained. His flight suit was pressurized.