The hatch opened. Matt hurried into the compartment.
“Angela,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“She’s fine,” Carla said as Matt swept Angela into a hug. “What happened?”
“We crashed,” Matt said.
Angela’s mouth fell open. “We crashed?”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Carla said. She rubbed her head. “I’m having a hallucination, right?”
“No,” Matt said. “We’re on a whole new world.”
“Fuck,” Carla said.
Angela looked up at Matt. “Where? I mean . . . where are we?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Matt said. “But I can tell you that it’s definitely not a stage-two or above colony world. None of them could have missed us passing through their atmosphere and crashing on their planet.”
“Lucky they didn’t kill us on sight,” Carla offered. She stood, peering down at Finley’s corpse. “You think we’ll ever get home?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said.
“They did it,” Nancy said.
Angela looked down at her sister. Nancy was awake.
Matt loosened his grip on her. “What do you mean?”
“I was aware of them,” Nancy said. “I . . . they were big, so big I couldn’t really grasp them. But I could feel them. They were angry that we would dare to escape, that we would succeed. They did something . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything else.”
Matt frowned. “We might have to consider it later,” he said. “Right now . . . we have too many other problems.”
“I should say so,” Joan said. “Matt, report to the captain or whoever’s in charge up there; Carla, go with him if you feel up to it. Angela, you and Nancy can help me get the rest of the equipment online. We’ll have a lot of customers in a hurry.”
“Understood,” Matt said. He gave Angela a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll see you later.”
Angela smiled at him. “We could be anywhere, couldn’t we?”
“We could be thousands of light-years from home,” Matt agreed. “We might never see Tyre again.”
“Go,” Joan ordered.
Angela watched him leave, feeling conflicted. If she never went back to Tyre, she would never have to run the risk, again, of being married off to serve the family. She could build a new life somewhere else. But being on an alien world . . . who knew what would happen to them? She doubted survival would be easy. Supreme had become a battered wreck long before she crashed on their new home.
I’ll just have to wait and see, she decided. I have work to do.
CHAPTER FORTY
“The insurance company isn’t going to pay out on this,” Robert Cavendish said. He sounded oddly amused despite the situation. “What a fucking mess.”
Paul couldn’t disagree. Two days after Supreme had crash-landed, his remaining crew and passengers had started to build a settlement. It wasn’t much—he would have sold his soul for a colonist-carrier with all the tools and prefabricated buildings—but it was a start. Supreme was largely intact, yet her innards were a mess. There was no way they could live permanently in her hull, not for more than a year or two.
He looked down as the shuttle flew over the settlement. He’d ordered vessels to survey what they could of the alien world, but they’d found no trace of human life, or intelligent life in general. They were alone, as far as they could tell. And they still didn’t have the slightest idea where they were. The civilians might cling to hope of rescue, but the spacers knew it wasn’t going to happen. None of the stars Paul’s sensors had noted before they’d crashed into the upper atmosphere matched any recorded in the database. That suggested, at the very least, that they were on the far side of the galaxy. They could, in fact, be a great deal farther away.
“I don’t think we’re going to see an insurance company ever again,” he mused. “Or the Commonwealth.”
Cavendish smiled. “It won’t be that bad.”
Paul gave him a sharp look. “Really?”
“I spent much of my life battling to shore up a corporate structure that was constantly on the verge of collapse,” Cavendish said. “It was driving me insane. Balancing all those competing agendas, telling everyone that everything was fine and there was no reason to panic . . . I was sick of it, yet unable to leave. None of my potential replacements had the talent necessary to make the company hum.
“And now”—he waved a hand towards the settlement below—“I have a chance to start afresh and build something completely new.”
“Really,” Paul repeated dryly. He wanted to slap the older man . . . he could slap the older man. “Do you have any idea how bad it’s going to be?” He let out a long breath. “Our survival gear is based on the assumption that any trouble we encountered would be in space,” he said. “Most of our remaining tech is built to last, but not forever. We’ll have to harvest crops from this world to survive . . . and we’ll be screwed if we can’t find anything to eat. Survival here, My Lord, means rediscovering skills most of us have never bothered to study. It’s going to be a nightmare.”
“It won’t be easy,” Cavendish agreed.
“No, it won’t.” Paul said. “And you do realize that your title means nothing here? None of the titles mean anything. You’re no longer the man who gave up a dukedom to run a corporation. You’re one old man of limited value to the community.”
“I knew that the moment I realized we wouldn’t be going home,” Cavendish said tartly. “And I have no intention of forgetting it.”
Paul silently gave him points for honesty. At least he’d recognized the truth. Others hadn’t been so understanding. His men had already had to break up several fights between first-class and third-class passengers when the former hadn’t been able to adjust to their new circumstances. Losing all their servants, particularly when their servants had the talents necessary to survive on a whole new world, hadn’t helped. But then it had been only two days. Perhaps they’d get better.
Sure, he told himself. Keeping the former fanatics working might prevent them from brooding on their submission to the aliens, but it wasn’t easy. And perhaps pigs will fly.
“Very good,” Paul said. He doubted Cavendish would last long. He had a great deal of genetic engineering spliced into his DNA, but he’d never had to do physical labor for a living. “Try to make sure the others don’t forget it either.”
“Yes,” Cavendish said. He paused. “What do you think they were?”
Paul shrugged. Nancy Cavendish had insisted that the flickers had deliberately aimed Supreme at a planet, although it was just as likely they’d been trying to hurl the starship into a sun. Stars and planets did cast shadows into hyperspace, but if the flickers couldn’t see into realspace, they might not have been able to tell the difference. He suspected, in the end, that it didn’t matter. There was no way Supreme would ever fly again.
“I don’t know,” he said. He’d interviewed a number of people who’d been overwhelmed by the voices. They’d all agreed that the ever-increasing whispers had promised them whatever they wanted, but . . . they weren’t sure if the voices had been real or if they’d heard what they wanted to hear. “I think they were different. Aliens so different to us that they didn’t comprehend that we were intelligent, actualized beings.”
“They taunted us, in the end,” Cavendish said slowly. “I think they knew what we were. They just didn’t care.”
“Perhaps,” Paul said. “Or perhaps we thought they were taunting us.” He shook his head. “We were on the ship of the damned, weren’t we?”
“Someone set us up,” Cavendish agreed. He smiled rather thinly. “I don’t think it matters any longer, Captain.”
Paul nodded. The Commonwealth would realize, eventually, that Supreme and her passengers were missing. And then . . .
“It doesn’t matter,” he said as the shuttle came in to land. “We’ll never know what happened back home once they realized we were gone. This worl
d is our home now.”
“And we’d better get to work taming it,” Cavendish said. “It should be fun.”
Paul sighed. He knew it wouldn’t be remotely fun.
“All right,” Matt called. “Start shoveling in the dirt now.”
He picked up his shovel and tossed a hunk of dirt into the mass grave. The work party followed suit, a handful giving him nasty stares when they thought he wasn’t looking. He’d already had to squash two attempted mutinies when a few former first-class passengers, some of whom had been Finley’s cronies, had tried to argue that they were too good to do physical labor. Given that they were next to useless for anything else, Matt was convinced they were lucky they were getting fed at all.
“Not too bad,” Carla muttered. “But keep going.”
Matt nodded as the grave filled, the bodies being steadily buried under a pile of earth. The funeral had been basic—Captain VanGundy had said a few words—and he couldn’t help feeling bad about it, even though he knew the survivors had no choice. They just didn’t have the time to dig an individual grave for each body. He knew there were passengers who didn’t like it—he didn’t like it—but their feelings didn’t matter. The cold imperatives of survival were all that mattered.
They can come to pray at the graveside, he thought morbidly. Finley’s body was down there, somewhere. Or leave flowers for all the dead.
“Very good,” he said when the grave was finally covered. “Go back to the kitchen and collect some food.”
He watched as the workers hurried off, the former first-class passengers in the lead. They’d grab some food, then go back to work chopping up wood or drawing water from the nearby rivers. They weren’t very good at it, yet it was all they could do . . . at least until they received some proper training in basic survival techniques. Matt had heard that the captain was drawing up a training schedule, but it would take some time to get everyone on the rota. Until then . . .
Carla nudged him. “Are you going to speak to Angela?”
Matt looked back at her. “Do you think I should?”
“If you want to pop the question, then yes,” Carla said sardonically. “Not that I consider her to be much of a catch, of course . . .”
“She’s trying,” Matt defended her. “The doc said she was very useful.”
“She’s also completely untrained,” Carla said. She sighed. “But she will probably pair up with someone else if you don’t ask her.”
Matt swallowed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll go now.”
Carla slapped his back. “I’m always right,” she said. “And the sooner you realize that, the better.”
“You’re not always right,” Matt said. “You’re sometimes left.”
He winked at her, then hurried towards Supreme. The giant ship loomed over him, casting the entire settlement into shadow. There was something profoundly odd about looking at her, even though she was half-buried in the soil. Supreme didn’t belong on the ground, and everyone knew it. Matt pushed aside his feelings as he stepped through the airlock and navigated his way up to Sickbay.
At least the corridors are clearer now, he thought as he walked through the hatch. The work parties did some good there.
Angela was standing just inside Sickbay, speaking quietly to Susan as Joan ran a bone regenerator over her mother’s arm. The little girl seemed to have adapted well to her new situation, Matt noted, although the young were always adaptable. He’d seen too many spoiled brats—each one only a few years older than Susan—screaming that they shouldn’t have to work or they should have extra food. He hoped Susan wouldn’t go that way.
“Thank you,” Maris said when Joan had finished. “I feel better now.”
“Don’t put too much weight on that arm for a day or two,” Joan said. She glanced at Matt. “Are you here for a reason, Mr. Evans?”
“Yes,” Matt said. “Can I talk to Angela?”
Joan’s lips thinned. “It is close enough to her break,” she said. “Very well. But come back quickly.”
“Thank you,” Matt said. “Angela, can we go into the next room?”
“Sure.”
Matt took a moment to study her as they walked into the private chamber. Angela looked as lovely as ever, but she seemed to have grown up over the last few days. Her eyes were haunted, even though she hadn’t surrendered to the aliens. He couldn’t help thinking that she wasn’t in a good state . . . and yet, she was forcing herself to carry on anyway. There were other girls who’d been in first-class who weren’t carrying on, as far as he could tell. They hadn’t realized, yet, that there would be no going home.
“Angela,” he said. He took a breath. Why was it suddenly so hard to talk? “I . . . will you marry me?”
Angela gave him a long look. “I . . .” She gazed down at the deck for a long moment. When she looked up, she was smiling. “If you’ll have me, I’ll have you,” she said. “But . . . you do know you’ll be marrying my family?”
Matt looked back at her. “Does that matter any longer?”
Angela honestly didn’t know what to say. Her father seemed cheerful enough about winding up stranded on an uninhabited planet, while her mother had lapsed into a funk and refused to talk to anyone. But she wasn’t sure how to deal with being stranded. On one hand, she was free of society and the social obligations that came with it; on the other hand, she was trapped in a vastly different world. The entire universe had turned upside down. Part of the reason she’d thrown herself into working for the doctor was because she knew she had no survival skills, nothing that made her valuable for building a settlement . . .
And yet Matt wasn’t asking her for anything but herself.
They couldn’t have gotten married on Tyre. She knew that, beyond a shadow of a doubt. But here . . . maybe they could. And maybe it would be better for her to marry into the new aristocracy. Girls like her, and boys like Finley’s surviving cronies, were suddenly on the bottom, while their servants and the crew were on the top. No one cared who had been what on Tyre. All that mattered was what skills they had.
The irony gnawed at her even as she opened her mouth to give an answer. She’d escaped one marriage for the good of the family, only to fall right into a second . . . also for the good of the family. But it was also for her own good. She liked Matt, even loved him. She’d never expected the attraction to last—all the stories she’d heard about cruise-liner romances had ended with a parting and the lovers never seeing each other again—but they were stuck together now. There was no way they could go back to their separate lives . . .
And that, more than anything else, decided her.
“I will,” she said. They were trapped on an unsettled world. They might as well make the most of it. “I will marry you.”
And she leaned forward and kissed him.
Nancy was young, but she was no fool.
She’d spoken to dozens of people who’d been affected by the flickers, who’d heard the voices, ever since Supreme had crashed on the isolated world. Many of them—most of them—had chosen to believe that they’d imagined everything, that the combination of the alien realm, starvation, and panic had driven them temporarily insane. They blamed Brother John and his fellows for leading them into a desperate fight to keep Supreme from escaping the alien realm . . .
Nancy knew better.
The experience had a vague dreamlike quality, but she knew it had been real. The voices had been real. The sense of being surrounded by something much greater than herself had been real. And when they’d spoken through her, she’d sensed . . . something . . . that could have swatted her like a bug if it had truly understood her. The flickers had been so different that she couldn’t parse their thoughts.
But they were hungry.
She was in realspace now, but she could still hear them. They were hungry . . .
. . . and waiting, waiting for the next starship to enter their realm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher G. Nuttall has been planning
science-fiction books since he learned to read. Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, he studied history, which inspired him to imagine new worlds and create an alternate-history website. Those imaginings provided a solid base for storytelling and eventually led him to write novels. He’s published more than thirty novels and one novella through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, including the bestselling Ark Royal series. He has also published the Royal Sorceress series, the Bookworm series, A Life Less Ordinary, and Sufficiently Advanced Technology with Elsewhen Press, as well as the Schooled in Magic series through Twilight Times Books. He resides in Edinburgh with his partner, muse, and critic, Aisha. Visit his blog at www.chrishanger.wordpress.com and his website at www.chrishanger.net.
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