by Mark Wandrey
“Tokyo Starport flight control, this is private merc ship Vestoon, requesting permission to take off for laser orbital insertion.”
“Vestoon, this is Tokyo Starport flight control, you have been assigned to launch laser #2. You are 3rd in line. Take off is in 12 minutes. Coordinates for your launch window and alignment parameters are being transmitted now. Please send your payment code.”
Sato typed in the special account and verification code. His jaw moved, grinding his teeth as he waited. They had some credits on their Yacks, but not much. Laser-assisted launch could cost as much as 20,000 credits. Without the assist, they’d be forced to use the ship’s built-in ascent engines, which would necessitate refueling in orbit. The fusion torch could easily put them into space with very little fuel. It would also irradiate several square kilometers of prime Japanese real estate. Rick was reminded of the radioactive hell around areas of Sao Paulo after the Raknars had used fusion engines to land.
“Vestoon, codes accepted. A total of 9,500 credits has been deducted from your account for laser launch assist. Prepare to take off in T minus 11 minutes.”
“Acknowledged,” Sato said and cut the line. “Let’s run down the checklists.”
The checklist wasn’t overly large, and only provided one tense moment, when Sato flicked the control to open the laser target, a rocket-shaped nozzle on the rear of the ship that articulated over the fusion torch. It would be the target the ground laser would burn into. Megawatts of laser energy ablated away material at super high temperature, creating thrust, and boosting them into orbit at very little cost.
“It’s not responding,” Sato said after a second.
“What do we do?”
“Hold on,” the scientist said. He opened a panel and started looking around. “Ah,” he said and held up a fuse. “Must have come loose when I was working on it earlier.” He clipped it into place and tried the command again. There was a distant whine from the rear of the ship and a clank. A red indicator came on, red being a good color in many galactic designs. “There we go!” he said.
Before long, it was time, and Sato brought the flight controls online. The computer beeped with their coordinates. “What do I do?” Rick asked.
“Just make sure I’m lining us up correctly,” Sato replied. “I don’t want my new ship cut in half by a launch laser.”
Rick nodded profusely; he wholeheartedly agreed. Accidents with launch lasers were exceedingly rare. When they did happen, the results were usually spectacular. However, as long as the ship was in the right place, the laser did most of the work, as long as you flew a predictable course.
“Ascent engines on,” Sato said, and Vestoon shook as the ship’s nine rocket motors came alive. They’d topped off on reaction mass, hydrogen and oxygen, the previous day. It had been the cheapest part of the operation.
The engines rumbled for a few seconds as Sato examined the readouts. He frowned.
“Problem?” Rick asked.
“Number seven is running a little hot.” On a Tri-V, there was a graphic representation of the ship with nine pulsing blue circles, the ascent engines. One of them, under the left rear, had a green dot flashing in the center.
“What do we do?”
“Nothing. We can hover with seven, as long as we don’t lose two next to each other. I’ll add it to the list of shit to check in space. Taking off.”
The rumble turned into a roar, then into a banshee’s scream. Rick turned down the audio receptors. “Why’s it so fucking loud?”
“They didn’t bother with soundproofing,” Sato yelled, then shrugged. “It’s designed to spend most of its time in space.” A second later, he felt them take flight for the first time with a lurching near-tumble sideways.
“Holy fuck!” Rick blurted.
“I got it, I got it,” Sato said, and the ship stabilized immediately. His hands didn’t move on the arm rests, and his eyes were closed. Sato was operating the ship entirely with his pinplants. Rick knew in the logical part of his brain that Sato could do a thousand times more with his mind and pinplants than he could with his hands and eyes. His emotional side cringed; this wasn’t how you fly something!
The ship leveled off and began to move smoothly, climbing to 500 meters and leveling off.
“Give me a vector to the launch coordinates,” Sato said without opening his eyes.
“You can’t do it all yourself like that?”
“No,” Sato admitted. “The ship’s flight controls aren’t configured for a Human. I think it was Bakulu, or maybe Jeha. It’s taking a lot of my ability just to hover.”
“Okay,” Rick said and used the information flight control had sent, entering it into the navigation system, and then locking in the ship’s current position. “Steer 1-2-9, distance 1,900 meters.”
“Roger that,” Sato said. The ship spun around slowly and leaned forward, moving like a helicopter. “Watch the fuel consumption. Damn, everything is out of whack. We didn’t have time for flight tests.”
“We going to make it?”
“As long as there aren’t any delays,” Sato responded. “Damned good thing we didn’t try for direct ascent. I don’t think we would have made it.” A moment later, motors hummed, and the sound of rusty metal scraping echoed through the hull. “Extending flight surfaces.” They’d had time to test those, at least.
“Approaching position,” Rick said. Sato gave the slightest of nods. The ship slowed to a stop and Rick compared their position. “Fifty meters forward, eleven meters to starboard.” The ship moved. “Set and hold,” Rick said, and the ship stopped moving.
“Tokyo Starport flight control, Vestoon in position and standing by for orbital laser assist.”
“Stand by, Vestoon.”
Rick could see their fuel levels, and they were indeed going down precipitously. “Check fuel,” he said.
“Monitoring it. If we don’t have a push in 38 seconds, I’m going back to land again.”
To Rick, 38 seconds seemed long. However, he wasn’t wired in like Sato was, so he held his comment. The Tri-V flashed green, and ascent rocket number seven shut down. The ship yawed for a split second as Sato increased power to the other rockets.
“Make that 20 seconds,” Sato corrected.
The time ticked down. When only eight seconds were left, the radio came alive. “Vestoon, prepare for boost. Orbital laser initiating in five…four…three…two…”
They were punched in the rear as megawatts of power lit up the nozzle, and the old ship accelerated into the sky. Rick’s armor said they were pulling just over 3Gs, which was about normal for such a launch. Sato had cut the rockets the instant the launch laser hit, and they transitioned to vertical ascent.
“So much for not refueling in orbit,” Sato grumbled as his eyes opened with his reduced workload. This part of their trip to space was the easiest, he just had to follow an angular flightpath into LEO, low earth orbit. Nine minutes later, the laser cut out, and Sato brought the fusion torch online for a minute to circularize their orbit. “Easy as pie.”
“Never had that dangerous a pie,” Rick said, and both had a little tension relieving chuckle.
From there, the rest turned out to be easy, too. The strain of climbing to orbit caused a couple minor leaks, which Rick easily dealt with via his own built-in laser. Only one required Sato to help remove an electrical panel to access. They docked with a commercial fuel tanker two hours after entering orbit. The codes worked again, and they undocked with full reaction tanks once more. Sato was able to plot the course himself, and they rode the fusion torch out of orbit and toward the stargate.
In order to save fuel, they coasted most of the way. It was 12 hours to the stargate, plotted to arrive at the same time as gate activation. After a brief rest, they set about working on as much as they could.
Sato was most concerned about the dead ascent engine. They couldn’t work on it from inside the ship. This meant an EVA was necessary. Sato had bought three EVA suits, also known as s
pacesuits, before leaving. Like the ship’s stores, the spacesuit lockers were basically empty. But when Rick asked the scientist about his EVA experience, he didn’t get a straight answer.
“I did a lot of work EVA in shuttles and CASPers.”
“That’s not the same thing as a spacesuit,” Rick said. “CASPers are more like work pods, or little spaceships. A suit is a lot more dangerous. I’ll do the inspection.” He didn’t give Sato the option to argue, he just headed for the airlock. “Send me the specs.” A minute later, he was exiting into the black.
The armor was designed with universal Union-style data and power connection ports. All Rick had to do was take one of the zero-G maneuvering units and click it onto the back of his armor, trigger the suit’s vacuum operations through his interface, and go out into space.
Using puffs of compressed gas, the maneuvering unit let him easily fly under the coasting starship to examine the rocket engine.
“Its port is still open,” Rick reported. On most starships that could land, there were closable covers over ascent engines to protect them when not in use. As they were mounted within the hull, they provided easy access to interior structure and electronics, bypassing any armor.
“Okay,” Sato said. “Open the maintenance hatch, and let’s have a look.”
* * *
Rick set the maneuvering unit onto the shelf designed for it in the airlock. The ship’s systems would recharge the unit and repressurize the compressed gas thrusters. In all, he’d spent six hours in the black, first fixing the malfunctioning ascent rocket, then a half dozen other issues that had arisen during takeoff or since they’d left orbit.
When he arrived back on the bridge, Dakkar was half floating, half stuck to the computer/comms console, tapping controls with a tentacle. “Hello,” he flashed as Rick entered.
Rick stopped his flightpath by catching a handhold. “Where’s Sato?”
“He’s in engineering. I am working on a program for him.”
“Fine,” Rick said and floated back out. He located the scientist in the ship’s small engineering cubicle, a space three or so meters on a side, and five meters long. Its interior spaces were lined with parts storage racks, diagnostics tools, the ship’s emergency control systems (a minimal backup bridge), and all the controls for the fusion powerplants. It had taken hours for them to sort everything out before leaving. Sato floated in the center of the room, his legs in a lotus position, the Enigma cube in the space made by his legs.
“You okay?” Rick asked.
“Yes,” Sato said and opened his eyes. He looked tired. “Everything done outside?”
“Yeah, I reconnected those sensors and made sure the laser assist nozzle was properly stowed as you requested.”
“I could have done it myself.”
“Perhaps,” Rick said. “It looks like you’ve made use of the time. Have you figured out how to open it?”
“No,” Sato admitted. “I never had much luck with meditating. That is, until these new pinplants.” He tapped the side of his head. “I’m having some luck now.” He looked down at the cube in his lap. “Nothing with this, though.”
“Any of the instruments here able to scan inside it?”
“These tools aren’t made for delicate scanning,” he explained. “Vestoon isn’t a scout ship. It isn’t made to operate away from inhabited areas or without a fleet resupply ship within range. The instruments are just enough to get it running, then they’d limp to a depot. I tried to find a scout ship, but nothing was available. Strange. Last year you couldn’t give them away.” He shrugged.
“Worth a try, though?”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m down here. I just wanted to try to meditate on it for a few minutes. My mind has regurgitated a few interesting memories. Not this time.” He reached out and pushed himself over to a station, where he strapped the cube into a depression. “I have to be careful. If this is booby-trapped, or has delicate opto-electronics inside, an overly brutish scanning attempt could cook the insides.”
“I still think it’s strange you can remember what it’s called, but now how to use it.”
“You’re telling me? But remember, until a few days ago, you couldn’t remember your childhood best friend. Minds are strange that way, and it appears we both suffered traumatic brain injuries.”
Rick snorted. “The only one who doesn’t have a screwed-up brain is the psychotic squid.”
“True, Dakkar is healthy, just not of a conventional intelligence.”
Rick shook his head. “Someone should know how many Wrogul are out there in the galaxy, operating on everyone’s brains.”
“Like I said, nobody knows. Most are probably still on Azure. Many planets aren’t well suited to their unique living requirements.”
Probably a good thing, Rick thought. He knew there were quite a few, though. One was in Houston doing pinplants. He now remembered Jim going to get his when they were freshmen. He’d offered to pay for Rick to get them, too, but he’d balked. Rick hadn’t gotten his own until joining the Winged Hussars. It was Nemo who’d installed them, his first exposure to Wrogul tentacles in his brain.
A few months later, Nemo had worked on Rick’s brain again, this time to try to alleviate some of the laser damage. That was when Nemo had taken the samples of Rick’s genome and recorded his brain’s neural patterns to reproduce later. At least it had to be then, because Rick had no memory after that session.
“You know Dakkar is loose on the bridge?”
“Yes, he’s rewriting a subroutine. He finished his quarters and wanted something to do.” Sato looked up at Rick, who just stared. “It’s fine, he can’t do any damage.”
“Okay. So what’s next?”
“Let me run a slow series of surface scans,” Sato said. “It’ll take about 10 minutes.”
“I don’t have any other work to do right now,” Rick said. Sato nodded and began working with the instruments. As the scientist probed the Enigma, Rick used his first downtime to run a self-diagnostic on the Æsir. As he was doing the work, he remembered he had two stored recordings still saved.
Back in the museum, the moment he realized something was wrong, Rick had triggered the Æsir’s log to retain all sensor readings. He had the entire run through the facility, out the door, and the fight with the guards. More importantly, he had Sato taking on the four opSha.
The man was frozen in place for a fraction of a second, then moved with incredible speed. Rick wasn’t sure if he could move any faster, especially since the armor more than doubled his weight. More interesting were the types of moves Sato was performing. Simply put, they were fucking brutal.
Rick had studied martial arts from the day he began cadre training with Mickey Finn. Mercs wouldn’t always have the luxury of being suited up in a CASPer when a fight came calling. The sergeant major of cadre had always insisted on weekly unarmed combat sessions. He was a little Korean dude who could toss a 120-kilo man like a ragdoll, and do it all afternoon.
Some of Sato’s moves were clearly Ju Jitsu. Rick also recognized some Kung Fu and even Krav Maga. The latter he hadn’t expected, as they were power moves you saw more often with a large, strong fighter. The Israelis had developed Krav Maga centuries before by combining moves from many forms, including Judo, Aikido, and Karate. He knew quite a bit of it himself.
However, there was a series of moves Sato used against the opSha when two of them had him and were trying to get the diminutive scientist off his feet. They were strange, open-handed moves that curiously didn’t take advantage of his fingers. They were quite effective against the aliens, too. Rick replayed one sort of ‘chop block’ into an opSha’s arm a dozen times.
Is that move designed for use against an opSha? he wondered. Whatever the origin, Sato mixed in those moves with many other styles to turn the simian aliens’ attack against him into a wild, gyrating ballet of pain directed back at them.
Sato had dropped three of them, but the last one got a hit in, and Sato shuddered t
o a stop. Like a light switch, the ninja was gone, and the awkward scientist was back. Rick rewound the scene and replayed it several times. He’d only allocated a few sensors to watch Sato, and there wasn’t enough resolution to tell what the monkey had done to him. It looked like he’d just touched Sato’s head, and the scientist reset.
It wasn’t a drug, Rick knew. It had to have something to do with the cobweb glove. He decided if an opSha came at him, he’d shoot first and ask questions later. He reran the fight one more time, and was struck by Sato’s expression. It was calm, determined, and businesslike. He’d seen the look on mercs’ faces. The old guys who’d been in the shit more times than they could remember. The guys you didn’t fuck with. Ever.
He noticed Sato shaking his head and brought his entire attention back to the present. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” Sato said, glaring at the Enigma cube. “Sooner or later I’ll remember how to get into this thing.”
“Maybe it’s an enigma because there’s nothing inside?”
Sato laughed and looked at him, then frowned. He turned back to glare the cube. “I guess we’ll see.”
A few hours later, and with many more systems working properly, they adjusted their speed and course as stargate rendezvous became imminent.
“Stargate will open at exactly 13:33:39,” the stargate controller radioed. They’d wired the payment hours ago, otherwise they’d be facing a warning from the stargate. You could sneak through with other ships, or race through without the stargate control being able to do anything about it. However they would record the ship’s ID and pass the information on. It would be difficult to keep running your starship without being able to use a stargate ever again.
“Last chance to say goodbye to Earth,” Sato said. “I don’t think I’ll ever return.”
“Good seafood,” Dakkar said from the console he was still working on.
