A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1

by Nick Webb

  “Incoming transmission,” said Sandy. AIs couldn’t give suggestions or advice, it was against their programming. “From Operations.”

  “Put it through,” I said.

  A floating box appeared in front of my eyes, labelled Anchorage. It was a vision of space, untwinkling white dots on a black field. At the centre of it, barely perceptible, was a ship.

  The optics zoomed, straining to show us more. The screen pixelated for a moment, and then in the harsh light of false-color optics, I could see a ship floating in space, tumbling slowly, unlit and unpowered. Even its emergency navigation lights were off, and it was surrounded by a sparkling field of debris, like the tail of a comet stretching out beyond the edges of the screen. Readouts showed no infra-red or electromagnetic activity. No radiation, either, so the reactor was intact. Just a lump of steel crying in the depths of the black.

  “What a fucking wreck,” said Stanco, blowing a low whistle‌—‌a prerecorded sound composed by his AI.

  The ship tumbled, revealing a jagged, oval gash along one side, about eight meters on its longest edge. It reached right to the name emblazoned on the side in stark white lettering. Anchorage.

  “I’m reading a pronounced hole in the starboard side,” said Angel. “That should serve as our entry point.”

  Gas plan. I looked over the information Sandy provided. “No sign of internal fuel or ammunition detonation,” I said. “No sign of external scoring, either, or buckling on the hull… no stress or micro-fractures. It wasn’t weapons fire or a high-speed impact.”

  “Something caused that big hole,” said Stanco. “What else but weapons fire?”

  “Maybe the crew cut it out,” I said. “It looks like the kind of damage an untrained worker with a plasma cutter would make. Could be they were trying to vent a section manually… “

  “Well,” said Stanco, “at least we know they weren’t attacked.”

  “They didn’t put up a fight,” said Angel. “There’s a difference.”

  Curious. “You saying whoever did this was invited in?”

  “No,” she said, “but it’s possible the Anchorage didn’t see them coming. Someone cutting on the hull might not have triggered their decompression alarms; passenger ships sometimes only treat their safety equipment with indifferent maintenance.”

  Silence reigned for a time, and I watched the corpse of the ship tumble over and over endlessly. There weren’t any other holes.

  “Asteroid impact, maybe?” said Stanco. “Something that slipped past their sensors? Or maybe they had a reactor leak. It’s possible they wanted to eject their reactor core, failed, so tried to cut it out… “

  All this guesswork was frustrating. “Maybe, maybe,” I said. “Does it really matter? We’re going in anyway, so let’s just focus on the mission until we get there.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” said Angel, then her portrait disappeared.

  “Wow,” said Stanco. “Rude.”

  “You know what she’s like,” I said.

  Stanco snorted. “She sounds like she needs a dicking.”

  “Not like you could do that,” I said, the words slipping out before I had a chance to rein them in.

  Silence. Angry silence. “You don’t need a dick to be a dude,” Stanco said. “Fucking Erisians.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” I said.

  “Yeah you did.”

  It was difficult to deny that. “Look,” I said, “I’m trying, okay?”

  “I know,” said Stanco, without any conviction at all.

  I probably should have let it go but I didn’t. “It doesn’t bother me what you identify as. I’m just saying… it’s weird enough seeing women and gays in the military, let alone trans people. There’s a reason most of Eris has their own units, rather than integrating with the rest of the Colonial armies.”

  “I know,” he said again, again, not believing a word I said. “It’s fine.”

  I took a breath‌—‌not something my suit could do, but the armour’s metal muscles and articulators moved in the same way‌—‌and used my implants to give my body a shot of a mild sedative.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I tried to genuinely mean it. I resisted the urge to add qualifiers after that. It was just how I was raised, I don’t know any better, I’m wrong but…

  “Yeah,” said Stanco, a little hint of levity returning. “It’s all gas, bro. Shit takes time to sink in. It just sucks when you get all the shit for being a guy, expectations of being a manly-man, but also shit for being trans, too. All the downsides, none of the perks. Makes you a little defensive. So, you know, I’m sorry too.”

  “I’m trying,” I said again, and then added, “bro.”

  “I appreciate that.” Stanco’s suit turned to face mine. “Don’t worry. Angel’s a bigger weirdo than you are.”

  Small comfort.

  I returned my attention to the feed of the Anchorage. The closer we got, the higher the resolution climbed.

  Closer and closer.

  * * *

  Six hours later

  The last of the air was sucked out of the hangar, hissing faintly around my suit’s microphones before fading to the eerie silence that was deep space.

  “Decompression complete,” said Angel. She’d rejoined our channel when it was time to do something productive. “Disable artificial gravity. Commence decoupling.”

  With a lurch, I felt gravity shut off. I sent a mental push that detached the cables that suspended my suit from the hangar’s ceiling. I floated in the zero gravity, small puffs of nitrogen from the EVA pack keeping my position steady. Attached to the pack were several emergency bulkheads, heavy and bulky.

  Silently, the hangar door began to open. Normally it would be groaning and loud, but with no atmosphere I could hear nothing.

  “Move out,” said Angel, and we flew slowly out the open doors into the void of space.

  Although I’d spent plenty of time in space, protected from the vacuum of space only by the metal of a ship’s hull, it was different being in a suit. A starship’s hull was measured in meters; the suit was substantially smaller than that. Although it was forged from advanced polymers and composite plates, my face‌—‌my real face‌—‌was only a meter or so away from the void.

  If something went wrong…

  I turned away from the Lahore and navigated towards the Anchorage. As I looked at it, Sandy outlined it in a box and zoomed in, giving me a clear look at the ship.

  I tried to focus on something other than my unconscious body encased within an armoured steel box, where even the tiniest hole would drain away my air and, thanks to my neural link to the suit, the first I’d know about it was when I started to pass out… way, way too late to do anything but die.

  “Your heart rate is increasing,” said Sandy, her voice tinged with genuine concern. “You okay, boss man?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Sounds like you need a drink,” she said.

  I definitely did not. Sobriety was one of the conditions of joining the Immortals. Golovanov knew my weakness. “Thanks,” I said, “but I don’t think you come equipped with a mini bar.”

  “Well,” she said, “I have full control of your implants at this point. I could give you a shot of alcohol, straight into your veins if you want, so you don’t even have to taste it.”

  “No thanks.”

  She laughed. “You sure? I mean, I could‌—‌”

  “No.” The fierceness in which I answered surprised even me.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sandy. “I won’t ask again.”

  I’d pissed off both Stanco and Sandy, and we hadn’t even reached the Anchorage yet. “It’s fine,” I said. “We can talk about it after the mission.”

  “If I had feelings,” said Sandy, “I’d think you were brushing me off.” Her voice turned chirpy. “But I don’t. So that’s fine.”

  The ship, our target, drew closer and closer. In my fish-eyed vision, I could see the Lahore behind us, shrinking
away. Soon it appeared in a box, zoomed in so I could see it clearly.

  Sandy was helping me out in subtle ways. Just like Sandhya, her namesake.

  Suddenly I missed her. Naming my AI after my dead lover was a stupid mistake. Stupid.

  “You okay?” asked Sandy. “Your heart rate is‌—‌”

  “I’m fine,” I said, giving myself another shot of mild sedative. “Just… please don’t ask me about my heart rate unless it’s much more serious than this.”

  “I’ll increase the threshold by 20%,” said Sandy.

  Closer. Closer. We drifted through the inky black, three hunchbacked suits of steel stabilised by puffs of gas. Behind us, the five other suits left the Lahore, taking up an escort formation.

  Although they were there to cover our approach, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also pointing weapons at our back.

  Soon, the zooming effect disappeared from my vision and I saw the ship au naturale. A flood of sensor information floated beside it. Minimal heat. Clouds of debris. Almost no atmosphere present in sections near the outer hull, smaller amounts within‌—‌maybe a few air pockets, but the temperature within was well below freezing.

  “This ship is a tomb,” I said. “Nobody’s alive over there.”

  “We’re here to investigate,” said Angel. “There are taxpayers on that ship.”

  “Taxpayer’s bodies,” said Stanco.

  Retrieving those was not even on our mission objectives, but I couldn’t see the harm. Civvies deserved a decent burial too.

  “So why us?” asked Stanco. “Why can’t the Coast Guard clean up this mess?”

  “Because,” said Angel, slightly condescendingly, “if your house is on fire, you can’t put it out from inside. There are some problems the Colonial agencies can’t fix. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Oh,” said Stanco. “Got it. By the way, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not anywhere near as stupid as you look.”

  “You are,” said Angel.

  Brutal.

  “Right,” said Stanco, clicking his tongue. “Whatever.”

  The Anchorage soon swallowed the stars below, the tumbling steel wall of its hull forming a floor. We aimed for the pivot point at the centre, EVA suits straining to push us forward, then slow us down. Sandy did all the work; piloting a metal suit through a field of sparkling debris, landing on a spinning and structurally compromised space ship, was a job better suited for computers.

  My boots clunked down on the metal, magnetising with a faint hum that vibrated throughout the entire suit.

  Angel’s voice filled my suit. “Lahore, this is the away team. We have reached the Anchorage.”

  “Confirmed,” said Golovanov. “Stabilise the ship.”

  We walked along the slowly spinning hull until we reached the stern. The three of us lined up at the edge of the ship and knelt down. I set my magnetized hands on the metal and locked my knees in against the hull. My suit’s EVA pack roared to life, firing at full power; Stanco’s and Angel’s did the same thing.

  The Anchorage strained in protest, slowed down its spin, and then, after a minute’s work, stopped completely in space.

  “Gas,” said Golovanov. “Proceed into the hull.”

  Angel, Stanco and I walked on the hull, from port to starboard, putting one magnetized foot in front of the other. As we got closer, we got a better look at the hole.

  It was nearly thirty meters wide and fifty long, roughly oval. The edges were melted, blackened and jagged, as though the metal had been dissolved. The floor below was pitted and scored, like the surface of Eris’s moon, or an asteroid; hundreds of tiny holes and divots were cut into the exposed bulkhead.

  Sandy drew a box over a section of the melted hull and enhanced it.

  “What kind of weapon could do this?” I asked her. “There’s no scorching away from the impact site. Not even the best Earthborn torpedoes could cause something like this.”

  “It looks like fluid erosion,” she said, confusion in her artificial voice. “Some kind of acid.”

  Angel looked to me. “No acid could possibly melt through starship hull. It would take days and days, weeks even. Surely someone would notice.”

  Nobody had any answers.

  “Lights are out,” Stanco observed. “Even emergency power has run out.”

  “Hello darkness my old friend,” I said.

  The tension evaporated. Stanco laughed. “Darkness never returns my damn calls. Sometimes I think I barely know her any more.”

  I couldn’t help but chortle. “Darkness is a strong black woman who don’t need no man.”

  “Cut the chatter,” said Angel. Humorless Uynovian. “Split up. Stanco, head toward the stern. Caddy, head toward the bow. I’ll make for the reactor at the core.”

  “In we go,” said Stanco, climbing down to the hole and swinging into the corridor. His huge suit had to crouch to move forward, magnetized limbs keeping him pressed against one of the walls.

  I crawled into the hole as well. Sandy magnetized my hands and I carefully made my way in the opposite direction.

  After a few minutes crawling, I came to a door. The centre of it had dissolved, leaving a hole almost a meter radius.

  No. Half that; one meter diameter. I had to remember I was twice as large as I normally was.

  “Got a bulkhead,” I said. “Emergency decompression door. Something burned its way through… looks to be whatever cut through the hull.”

  “Yeah,” said Stanco. “I got one too. Same deal.”

  “Employ a manual bypass,” said Angel. That was the euphemism of the day. Manual bypass.

  A simple instruction easily followed. I reached out with my hands, prying the metal. The suit’s articulators groaned faintly and, for a moment, I didn’t think it would bend; then the metal peeled back and the gap widened.

  I pulled myself in, wiggling and kicking, pushing through the metal gap. The metal of my suit’s armour scraped against the edges of the hole, but I fit.

  The corridor on the other side was stained with blood, splashed down with rust-colored gore and a strange black fluid. The bulkheads were riddled with holes from high velocity bullets. A rifle floated oddly in space, along with dozens of shell casings and debris. I recognized the type; standard civilian Polema issue Type 1. It wasn’t Earthborn.

  “Someone actually did put up a fight,” I said. “Got a gun and signs of a struggle.”

  “Act tough, die rough,” said Stanco. “Any Earthborn shit?”

  “Unless you want me to scrape their blood off the walls, no.”

  “Don’t disturb the bodies,” said Angel. “Note the location and have the Lahore retrieve them.”

  I looked around. The corridor had been stripped bare, leaving only stains on the metal. “There aren’t any. Just blood, and lots of it.”

  “Maybe they got sucked out,” said Stanco.

  “That’s blown out,” said Angel.

  “So, okay, maybe they got blown out. And I bet you know a fancy word for killed to death by space too.”

  It was unlikely the bodies had been either sucked or blown out. We’d have seen them by now. Anyway, before I’d widened it, the hole was barely big enough for a person to fit. Nothing made sense. “Getting a bit sick of hearing the word maybe,” I said, a little snappier than I intended.

  Sandy pinged my vision, drawing a red dot over something deeper in the ship and painting a red line on the corridor that lead toward it. “Nicholas, I’m reading a room with air. Sealed. Trace amounts of heat.”

  An intact room? “Pass it along to the others.” I changed direction. “Guys, got a room with atmo’. Looks to be about deck seven, ‘bout forty meters away from the hull.” Right at the core of the ship.

  “No way,” said Stanco. “Survivors?”

  “Who knows?” With a mental thrust I transferred the information Sandy had compiled for me to my team.

  “We’ll meet you there,” said Angel.

  Floating throu
gh bloodstained halls, I made my way further and further into the ruined hulk of the Anchorage, following the red line deeper into the ship’s heart.

  * * *

  I floated past a lot of things. I saw computer screens powered down and inert, I saw half-melted emergency bulkheads breached and useless, I saw personal effects floating in the nothingness and loose bulkheads and yellow oxygen masks drifting like tentacles, their precious cargo long ago discharged.

  But I saw no bodies. Personal effects, plenty. Weapons and shell casings, sure. Blood, and lots of it, including some that looked like the victims had been dragged. Not a single corpse.

  Finally, the red line led towards a thick blast door labelled Secure Hold. There was a button to open it, but the display glowed with an angry red hue and flashed the words decompression failure. The metal had the same acid scoring as every other door we’d seen, but this one had held up, probably due to its significant thickness and anti-theft reinforced polymers.

  The shipbuilders valued the passengers’ gold more than it valued their lives. Although, by booking passage with that particular ship, the paying customers were de-facto supporting them.

  Whatever. It wasn’t my job to feel sorry for anyone.

  “Man,” said Stanco as he crawled around the corner, “we are going to get so much free shit.”

  “Salvage of non-Earthborn items isn’t one of our objectives,” said Angel, appearing right behind him.

  “You kidding? What’s the point of being a Crisis Exacerbation Specialist if you don’t get to loot anything afterwards?”

  I shook my head. “Golovanov said we were Private Third-Party… something-or-rather Engineers.”

  “Golovanov,” said Angel, “can also hear you. The audio is piped into mission command.”

  “We’ve been through a lot,” I said. “He can handle a joke.”

  Stanco floated toward the door, peering in close.

  “Thoughts?” I asked.

  He extended a giant metal hand, reaching out and touching the pitted and scarred door. “Knock knock,” Stanco said, rapping silently on the metal. Anyone inside could hear us, but we had no hope of hearing them through the vacuum of space. “We should send through a probe first.”