by Logan Jacobs
Lucky Number Seven responded to my touch like she had known it all her life. I smiled as the throttle purred in my hand, and I lifted off from the docking station. I wanted to play around and see what all she could do, but the radar beeped to let me know a wave of soldiers had just entered the hangar.
Exploring would just have to wait a minute.
I guided her into the middle of the hangar and started toward the exit. A few guns fired at me from behind, so I flipped the green switch and was pleased to see that I had guessed right. Immediately, the ship was shielded by a small force field, so the next projectiles that fired at me bounced right off.
Prototype Seven was about to be my favorite new ship.
I found the weapons system and took aim at the force field controls at the end of the hangar. A few quick laser rounds, and the controls hissed and sparked in the hangar before the force field collapsed. Honey Bee didn’t have to tell me the chaos that immediately followed. I could hear it for myself, even through the ship’s walls.
I flew Seven toward the hangar exit, while behind me, dock workers and soldiers all tried to run further back into the Alexandria to get away from the hole I had opened up. Unlike Grith’s other hangar, this force field was to the whole bay. When I landed the Skyhawk, they’d had to lower the force field, but just to the individual dock that I approached. There had been no danger of the whole force field disappearing from the entire hangar.
But with the damage I had just done to the controls here, all the dock workers in this secret hangar started to float up and out toward the hangar exit. They grabbed onto anything they passed, or they tried to, but I just guided Seven to the exit. The Alexandria’s emergency shields should kick on in a minute, as long as Grith hadn’t skimped on them, and the workers probably wouldn’t float into space before then.
Seven roared to life as we exited the Alexandria. We covered so much ground so fast that by the time I remembered I could use whatever the third engine was, the Alexandria was just a blip on the radar behind us. Then I found the power to the third engine, flipped it on, and shifted into the gear marked ‘X’ on the throttle.
The third engine sounded like a damn wildcat when it came on. There was no turbulence, but I could feel faint vibrations up from the third engine even through my boots. Seven screamed with excitement as I pressed down on the accelerator, and we tore across the sky.
We flew so fast that we must have looked like a goddamn shooting star. The light from the actual stars around us grew longer, almost like we were in hyperspace. But we most definitely weren’t in hyperspace, even though I couldn’t actually see anything around us other than the light. I felt like I was flying blind, and that feeling wasn’t helped by the fact that the throttle was less responsive than if she’d been in hyperdrive.
I wanted to see just how fast Seven could go, but I needed better control of the throttle before I did. I looked around to find the manual override of the automatic controls, but the radar pinged a warning at the same time that Seven gave a slight shudder.
I shifted out of X gear. We had flown so fast and so blind with the third engine that there was no telling what we were about to run into. As soon as I shifted out of it, I saw the problem.
“More like problems,” Honey Bee observed.
We had zipped away from the Alexandria so fast that we’d ended up right in the middle of an endless goddamn asteroid field.
Chapter 18
Every direction I looked, we were surrounded by huge chunks of rock. That meant, first of all, that I couldn’t engage the hyperdrive without exploding myself. And second of all, I couldn’t shift back into ‘X’ gear unless I wanted to run right smack into an asteroid.
It was only by a small miracle that the shields had managed to deflect the smaller asteroids we’d flown past already. I knew that if we ran into any of the bigger ones that drifted by us now, even Seven’s shields would be no match for their heavier weight. They’d smash us to pieces as soon as look at us, and I didn’t know what seemed more sad: the idea that me and Honey Bee could be smashed to bits, or the idea that Lucky Number Seven would be no more.
“I know which one I find more upsetting,” Honey Bee chimed calmly.
“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. “Maybe you could help me plot a course out of here instead of making such helpful observations.”
I shifted Seven into manual gear to have better control of the ship’s course and shook my head. Even a technologically advanced ship like this wasn’t perfect, and it certainly couldn’t run entirely on autopilot. Technically, maybe it could, but at the end of the day, it could never do everything a human pilot could.
“Do you still count yourself as a human pilot?” my chip asked.
“I still do, yeah,” I growled, “because I still am.”
“You have an interesting definition of human,” Honey Bee laughed. “We do not consider it human to be superiorly enhanced in the ways that you are.”
“I guess enhanced is one word to call it,” I muttered. “But enhanced doesn’t change what’s underneath. It’s just upgraded. It’s still me.”
“So you admit that we gave you an upgrade?” my chip challenged.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I answered, “and you damn well know it.”
“We know,” she laughed again, “but we think it is sweet how attached you humans are to being human when you can be a part of something so much more.”
“How about we talk a little less about how human I am, and a little more how we get the fuck out of this floating field of rocks?” I sighed.
“As you wish,” Honey Bee chimed.
I might not have put Lucky Number Seven in autopilot mode exactly, but I might as well have when I’d shifted her into whatever the hell X gear was. A ship couldn’t go that fast unless it ran mostly automatic in that gear, and that meant the Dominion were a bunch of cocky fucks who thought that their technology could replace pilots like me.
I grinned. Well, maybe not exactly like me, but not for all the reasons Honey Bee thought. But if the Dominion’s new technology was so badass, I wanted to ask them how in the hell I had ended up in the middle of an asteroid field. What was so great about their prototypes if they still ended up spitting you out of the frying pan and into the fire?
“Because they’re so very, very fast?” Honey Bee suggested.
“Yeah, you got me there,” I agreed.
After all, I’d never seen a ship fly this fast without the use of hyperdrive, and that didn’t count. Hyperspace was its own thing, and you couldn’t exactly compare it to normal space. All I knew was that before I shifted into ‘X’ gear again, I would have to disable some of the automatic controls for it first.
I guided Seven toward a huge asteroid. As soon as I reached the rock, I swung the nose of my craft up to skim along the surface of the asteroid. I was just feet above the rock’s surface, but I followed the slow drift of the asteroid’s spin until I reached the other side of the rock.
There were dozens more to navigate through on the other side. I exhaled, gripped the throttle, and slowed my speed to a crawl. Seven might be the fastest ship I’d ever seen, but speed wasn’t always what you needed. Sometimes, you just needed to take things nice and slow. I let the Dominion craft drift past the next asteroid before I tilted her gently to the left so that her right wingtip avoided another rock.
I kept her steady to pass through two more rocks at the same angle, and then I straightened her again to float over the top of a big son-of-a-bitch. I preferred the big ones, even if they were more likely to knock out my shields and grind me to a pulp. At least I could see them coming, for one thing, and whenever I steered around one, it was the only rock I had to worry about. Every time I passed into a section of the asteroid field with lots of small little fuckers, I had to damn near dance my way through.
The thing about asteroids was that they traveled through space in one direction, all the while they also rotated around like little mini planets. So I had to dodge them
as we drifted past each other, but I also had to keep a tight grip on the throttle so the individual rotations didn’t clip me.
It was all well and good for me to dodge an asteroid, but I might be fucked if it rotated before I was past it. If the little fucker had an uneven edge or a piece that jutted out too far, it’d clip me anyway, even after I thought I had dodged it.
Two asteroids came at me then, one from my right and one from my left. Both of them rotated faster than the other rocks around them, and they looked on track to smash into each other at just about the same time they crashed into me. I didn’t want to become an asteroid sandwich, so I weighed my options.
The asteroid underneath me was too big to dive that way, but there was a whole cluster of rocks above me. The two incoming asteroids rotated faster as they got closer to me, and I knew that meant I just had one option.
I pulled back on the throttle and aimed Lucky Number Seven straight up at the half a dozen smaller asteroids above me. I accelerated just enough to propel the ship up and away from the two colliding asteroids. The force of their impact against each other gave a little shake to Seven, but the ship’s shields kept out the worst of the debris.
I spun the ship into a quick roll to dodge the first of the smaller asteroids above us, and I veered a hard right to slip past the next two. I killed the right engine next, just for a second, and let the ship drift around another asteroid before I brought her fully back to life.
I could see open space up ahead. I guided Seven just above a large asteroid, and Honey Bee confirmed what I had guessed. The asteroid was drifting away from the others, toward the edge of the floating field of rocks. If I just stayed on top of it, I could ride it out of the asteroid field and into open space.
I shook my head. I had an even better plan. I floated Seven just above the large asteroid and then engaged the hover controls. It locked the ship onto the asteroid itself, so my grip on the throttle relaxed slightly. Then we just started to sail away through the rest of the asteroid field.
Seven swayed and dipped in the same rhythm as the big rock underneath us until we were almost at the edge of the asteroid field. I would accelerate away from the asteroid field just as soon as we reached open space, but I planned to only use the ship’s normal speed. I would have to hold off on X drive again until I had manual control over it. I wondered how many Dominion pilots had failed to fly these fuckers before the engineers decided to put in the automatic ‘X’ control.
“Perhaps they never trusted the human pilots to begin with,” Honey Bee suggested, with an emphasis on the word ‘human.’
“Then these bastards don’t deserve to have this ship anyway,” I declared.
“Then it is a lucky thing we stole it,” my chip laughed.
“I don’t know that luck had anything to do with it this time,” I told her. “I think this run might have been all skill.”
We were at the edge of the asteroid field now, and I moved to shift Seven off of hover. The controls didn’t respond to my touch. I adjusted my grip on the throttle and tried again, but we still didn’t move. It was like someone had done an override on my hover controls, so now we were stuck there until we ended up wherever the asteroid we were hooked onto took us.
“Well, that can’t be good,” I muttered.
“Perhaps they have tracked us and disabled us with some kind of gravity beam,” Honey Bee suggested.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “If that was the case, there would be something on our radar. I just hope we didn’t pick up an unfinished prototype.”
“I doubt we would have made it this far if we had,” my chip observed dryly.
“Fair enough,” I responded. “Then do you have any theories about why I suddenly can’t use any of the controls?”
“A stall lock,” she said, in the same instant that I realized the answer.
The asteroid we were hooked onto still floated along the edge of the rock field, but I trusted that it would either float on out into empty space or just stay on the edge where it was now. Either way, I didn’t have a choice. I had to leave the controls to go try to find the stall lock.
The good thing about a ship this size was that it was small enough to run through in just a minute or two. The bridge doubled as the main hold, and there was just a bulkhead that separated it from the rest of the interior. I twisted the wheel to open the door in the bulkhead and pass into the rest of the ship. On the other side of the bulkhead, the small but efficient galley was to the left, and to the right were the sleeping quarters.
On this size ship, the sleeping quarters were really just a room, but I was surprised that there were any at all. Fighter crafts didn’t usually have any sleeping quarters, much less a galley, and that made me all the more interested in the prototype I was flying.
“Go back to the bulkhead,” Honey Bee told me.
“You pick something up?” I asked.
When I reached the bulkhead again, she chimed.
“There is a different frequency here,” she announced.
I scanned the door and the wall but didn’t see anything that might be a stall lock. It was obviously here somewhere, or we wouldn’t be powerless on the edge of a goddamn asteroid field. Then I looked closer at the door.
“Of course,” I sighed.
The stall lock was in the door itself, in the wheel that you had to turn to open and close it. Unlike a docking brake, a stall lock didn’t keep you from taking off at all. Instead, it was designed to cripple you if you managed to take off in a ship that wasn’t technically yours. As soon as you paused somewhere to hover or dock, it kicked on, and then you couldn’t move the ship again until the stall lock was disabled.
“Help me out here, sweetness,” I told Honey Bee.
I put my ear against the wheel and turned it slowly like it was a combination lock. I heard the first click when I turned it to the left, and my chip detected the next click to the right. Two more followed on the left, one more came almost all the way back around, and then a soft hiss sounded from the door itself.
“That should do it,” I exhaled.
When I took my seat at the controls again, sure enough, the stall lock was disengaged. I took Seven out of hover, gripped the throttle, and moved slowly away from the asteroid field until I reached a safe distance. Then I leaned back in the pilot’s chair and took a breath as I admired the prototype I had stolen.
Lucky Number Seven really was a beautiful piece of work. And more importantly, she was an expensive one. As much as I wanted her for my very own, I didn’t love the idea of flying around forever in a Dominion prototype. It would be too easy for the government to track, and I didn’t need that kind of target on my back.
Those assholes already thought I was Leon Cotranis, thanks to Favian Grith. To be fair, I didn’t think the crime lord had always meant to try to pass me off as Leon and claim the bounty reward. It probably just occurred to him in what seemed like a good thought at the time, but I bet he was sorry for it now.
Not that I could do shit with somebody’s regrets. It still left me with that asshole smuggler’s name attached to myself. I didn’t particularly want the Dominion to know my real name, but of all the people they could think I was, of course it had to be that self-important scumbag. And now that I had stolen Lucky Number Seven, I wasn’t super eager to advertise my real name. Let them think Leon had done that too. The moment they found the real Leon and arrested him, they’d figure out just how wrong they were. But until then, it at least kept the name Trevor Onyx free and clear.
Either way, I needed to pawn Seven off on somebody who was willing to pay a pretty penny for such an advanced military prototype. It would have to be someone who was interested in Dominion military technology, and it wouldn’t hurt if they wanted to use the government’s own technology against them.
I grinned when I suddenly realized that I knew the perfect place to sell Lucky Number Seven.
I entered the coordinates into the ship’s system and was surprised to
see an additional option pop up. Seven offered to navigate me to the coordinates, but it also offered me the choice to call the coordinates at their given frequency.
“Well, sure,” I said with a smile. “Why not?”
Seven called the coordinates, and when someone answered on the other end, they appeared in a holographic image above the controls themselves.
“How did you get this number?” the man demanded. “Who are you?”
“Hi there,” I answered. “I’m a friend of Princess Orla Medalla, and I’d like very much to speak with her, if you don’t mind.”
“And just who--”
Someone interrupted him on the other end, and a moment later, his image faded and was replaced by the princess herself. She looked just about as mad as she had when I’d left her alone on the Napoleon. Her green eyes glared at me furiously, and I saw that she had piled her thick brown hair back on top of her head.
“Princesses always wear their hair up, right?” Honey Bee laughed.
I just grinned. She looked mad, but still, I took it as a good sign that she’d taken the call.
“Hiya, princess,” I said. “How ya been?”
“Absolutely fine,” she said quickly. “I don’t know how you’re even calling me right now, or what you think--”
“I got something for you,” I interrupted, “and I think you’re gonna like it.”
“Trevor,” the brunette groaned, “I don’t think this is the time or place for--”
“Oh, you’re too much,” I laughed. “This isn’t that kind of call. Unless you want it to be, of course. If that’s the case, then--”
“What do you want?” Orla sniffed. Even through the holographic projection, I could tell that her pale skin had turned bright red.
“I have some technology for you,” I told her. “A new Dominion ship that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“What kind of ship?” the princess asked.
“Military prototype, something new,” I told her. “It’s got this engine on it that I’ve never even seen before.”
