Spaced

by Greg Curtis

  “Don't do it Doctor! Don't even think about it. You'd be lost forever even if you survive. And you need medical help!” The detective became desperate all of a sudden as she overheard what the ship was telling him.

  “And we both know I wouldn't survive it. You're trying to kill me, remember? The Navy’s already coming!”

  “Set for translation,” he told the ship, knowing that he would never be able to return. He didn't have time to work out a proper jump, as that would take many hours. The chances were he had minutes at most before they blew the Nightingale apart.

  “Carmichael –,” the ship began

  “No more! Just do it – that's an order!”

  “You can't do this! We can talk!” The police officer had heard him and knew what was coming next. She had to stop him. But she couldn't – it was too late.

  Carm had had enough of her. “I don't have a choice. You're going to kill me like you did Bree. Tell my family I love them. And I swear I didn't do what you sharding mutes are accusing me of. And tell Bree's family I'm sorry. I don't know why you shits murdered her but she didn't deserve it. She was a damned nice woman and a sharding stellar receptionist. She was my friend. She had children!”

  “No!” the detective screamed, guessing what was coming next.

  “Ship, jump.”

  “Carmichael –.”

  “I said jump!”

  Immediately the ship engaged its translation drive and the holo vanished. That was normal, and so was the sudden sense of being moved in a direction he couldn't identify. That was what translation was: every single atom was moving in a non-geometric direction. However the shuddering and screaming of the ship's hull a microsecond later wasn't, nor was the shower of sparks which drenched the bridge as console after console overloaded and burnt out just before the lights failed. The feeling of nausea that overcame him wasn’t normal either. Then the rest of the power fizzled out and that really scared him. Lost in space with no power? A nightmare scenario which set his heart racing again.

  It wasn't what was normal which mattered,- it was what he could do to survive. And to do that he needed power.

  “Ship!” he yelled at the darkness, but only silence answered. It wasn't surprising – if the power was gone so too was the ship's computer. It couldn't help him.

  Something was badly wrong. He’d been expecting it. If Carm was right they were now somewhere in space accompanied by a good chunk of the space-port. When the ship had jumped everything within the ship's field had been pulled along with it.

  Still, sitting in the darkness, he was grateful to be frightened. He couldn't be afraid if he was dead. He had air. That was better than he'd had any real hope of, and in time the back-up systems would be online again and he could work out how bad things were.

  Back in New Andreas he had no doubt the police and the dock authorities were cursing him. Calling him a mute and worse. He’d taken a good-sized piece of the space-port itself, and in its place had left a vacuum. Half a second later there would have been a massive thunderclap and every window for several klicks would have been blown out. That was yet another reason why jumps were always carried out in deep space.

  Sometime later the emergency lights came on. He breathed a sigh of relief when they did so. The jump hadn’t gone as badly wrong as he'd feared; the fact that he was alive was testament to that. But sitting in the dark and in pain, he'd still worried. The return of power, a few lights and even the consoles' flashing warning lights reassured him. It meant there was hope. And when he saw the ship's computer return to life, he gained a little more.

  “Ship, systems check and bring up the exterior view.”

  “Complying.” The ship didn't argue with him but that was only a temporary respite.

  It took a while for the ship to complete its checks, time enough for the medbot to remove the piece of metal from his shoulder and drop it clattering to the deck. At least the pain killers were working. He didn't feel a thing. Then again a lot of that might be more adrenaline. On the other hand he’d lost a lot of blood, and his eyes were becoming very heavy. He couldn't stop shaking either. It was like an uncontrollable, continuous muscle spasm. He was safe, though – no one was trying to kill him.

  He might even live. The medbot was gluing and cauterising every burst blood vessel it could find and the smell of burning flesh filled the air. Only some of it was from dead skin burnt by the policebot – the rest of it was fresh. But still there was air to smell.

  Conversely the holo, when he finally looked at it, showed him the depths of space. It wasn't quite empty – there were stars in the distance and some galaxies too, but nothing closer. He could only get a view from the underside of the ship, the other cameras having gone down – at least for the moment. Closer to the ship a huge slab of reinforced concrete which had been part of the New Andreas space-port floated alongside, the part of it which had been underneath the ship. It was drifting off. The springs in the landing struts had uncoiled and pushed it away. It would keep going, potentially forever.

  “Ship, retract the landing struts. And try to get full external views.”

  In a million or a billion years the slab would find its way into a system and perhaps become an asteroid, maybe even a meteor. And perhaps some alien race would wonder at the fact that such a strange piece of stone had found its way into space. Perhaps they'd even consider it as proof of extraterrestrial life. He’d be long gone before that happened.

  Looking at the readouts displaying the ever growing list of faults though, he suspected it might not be that much sooner before they were able to leave this place. There were a hell of a lot of faults flashing up, with more being found all the time. They might never be able to leave – that had always been one of the risks.

  It was better than being dead, he told himself. Besides, the true nightmare wasn't the faults, as they could be repaired. What couldn't be fixed so easily was that he was lost. Truly lost. He was spaced. There were over two hundred million galaxies in the known universe, and each of those galaxies, if similar in size to the Milky Way, contained two hundred million stars or more. They could be near any one of them. Conversely they could be nowhere near any of them.

  That was the power and the wonder of the translation drive – you could be anywhere in an instant. Getting back wasn't always so easy.

  From now on the ship's job was to locate known galaxies, to find three nearby examples that it recognised at every point they’d jumped to, despite viewing them from unexpected angles. From there they could plot their position relative to known worlds. If it could do that, if it found they were really close to somewhere they knew, then maybe he could go home. However, they also had to plot their translation coordinates, and those had only the slightest relationship to their spatial position. That was the true pain.

  If jump and spatial points matched up, he could have plotted a course the moment he had three. But they didn't. You could go neither left nor right, up nor down by jumping. If you pushed one inertial vector, it would take you one way on one occasion and another the next. Adding more power wouldn’t necessarily mean the ship would go further in any particular direction. There was no logic to it.

  So even if they knew their location, which was extremely unlikely, it would be a painful process to start jumping their way towards a known system. But with less than one thousandth of one percent of a single galaxy explored, the chances of finding they were close to anywhere they knew were minuscule at best.

  Their only other option was to start jumping randomly, in the hope that sooner or later they'd find something they recognised. And that was almost exactly what he was going to have to do. Jump and plot, jump and plot, and then pray they’d find a recognisable galaxy or system. The chances of that weren't much better – it was a microscopic needle in an interstellar haystack.

  The sad truth was that when ships were lost they stayed that way. None had ever returned. Being spaced was a life sentence, a spacer's worst nig
htmare. The stars alone knew how many people had ended up adrift among the vastness of the universe, living out their remaining lives on, or between, alien worlds.

  Eventually, after the ship had run out of power or systems couldn't be repaired, that would be him. Alone, never able to see his home or family again. It was too painful to think about. For the moment he had to concentrate on fixing himself and the ship.

  Once the medbot was satisfied with its first aid, it extended a bed from its vast round body and promptly picked him up and lay him down on it so it could take him away for more extensive surgery. Another thing for him to worry about. And yet, as the bot pumped him full of drugs designed to rob him of both his pain and his wits, he was grateful for the chance to close his eyes and forget everything.

  Carm watched the steel mesh ceiling run by above him while the medbot ferried him away down the ship's endless corridors, many questions ran through his mind. Why had the police accused him of blowing up a reserve? Why had they shot his receptionist? Why had they simply opened fire? Why had they done any of this? They were supposed to protect the innocent, not murder them.

  But, he supposed as darkness claimed him, he was never going to get any answers. He was after all, unlikely to find his way home.

  Chapter Two

  Detective Samara – Annalisse to her friends – was in a bad mood by the time she made it to the medic's office. Not only had she failed to stop the doctor from jumping and tearing apart New Andreas space-port in the process, but the entire mess had been played out on the mesh. As a result she was once more in the public eye.

  Reporters from thirty channels had tried to contact her, all wanting an interview. Naturally she'd refused – all they really wanted to do was interrogate her about how she’d screwed up. She would have to be from the dark side of the sun to think anything good would come from interviews. But they were the least of her problems. The channels respected some personal boundaries – citizen reporters didn't. When she'd left the station with her bot Thirteen, they’d been everywhere, hounding her, asking questions and accusing her of everything from incompetence to murder. They neither respected anyone nor anything. More had been waiting for her as she'd arrived at the office, all of them with their holo recorders floating above their heads, and every single one of them knowing her name.

  They had her name. They had her comms. Soon they would have her entire life history. They would no doubt be outside her apartment this evening bothering her neighbours. Even though they weren't allowed to walk on her property without permission the chances were their holo recorders would be doing it anyway. Her life was not going to be her own for a while, especially if she took the blame for the disaster. And she was the only one in the frame.

  By now all of her private communications would have been hacked, and probably her police comms too. Even though they did their best to keep things secure, with mesh-heads among the citizen reporters busily digging, there was no privacy. The chances were that her family would be harassed by the citizen reporters as well, as well as her friends. Initially they’d make direct approaches but would soon hack them too. Many citizen reporters were hackers, people who considered that there should be no such thing as privacy, certainly not for officials. Their view was that the people had the right to know.

  Many more were mesh-heads. Not content with having a simple sub-dermal implant on the backs of their hands to keep them connected, they’d had more augmentations, including brain enhancements. As a result they were connected to everything. Damned mesh-heads! Nothing would be hidden from them.

  The mesh! Some days she thought it had been a mistake connecting everything. Holo channels and games were one thing, but when it included your private communications, everything that could send a feed (like a hundred million or more holo recorders on Aquaria alone, and even your sharding toaster) it was too much. And when a good hacker could access all of your private life, it became a true pain.

  But this was the world she'd grown up in, just like her parents and grandparents and so many generations before them. There was no privacy, no true digital security. It hadn't bothered her as a child knowing that anyone could be watching her. It wasn’t until she'd become an officer, and then a detective, that she’d felt the bite of always being under scrutiny. It was only then that she'd become someone whom people actually wanted to watch. She was no mesh-lord, but every time she was involved in a murder she was scrutinised. Because there weren’t many murders here, those that did happen became instant primetime viewing.

  It had been a while since she’d last been front and centre in a high profile case. And even then she'd never had to deal with this level of intense observation. This one was a bombing, the first one in fifty plus years. It was also the first time a thermo-kinetic weapon had been used. A hydroponics reserve had been vaporised with fifty-three dead. And the fugitive had jumped wild. The story was so sensational that she’d be a mesh-lord for some time.

  Her communications with her Captain would be kept to a bare minimum. Microseconds if possible. Most would be relayed through her bot – the citizen reporters might be able to hack transmissions from policebots, but it would be hard to find hers when they were unable to tell which one of the thousands it had come from. Any longer messages would be on a holo chip physically couriered to her Captain.

  And there was the most basic rule of all: Every officer was taught to live life as if people were watching – they probably were.

  It was an annoyance, but it was the cost of living in the Commonwealth. She’d been through it before – though she suspected this was going to be much worse – and she would go through it again.

  Besides, there were some positives, at least one. Her Captain was a sharding mute with a temper as short as an outlier's principles. He went nova frequently and usually for no reason. Keeping her contact with the botbrain to a minimum was a good thing in her view. And for the moment she had an investigation to keep her out of his face.

  The office was a mess Annalisse thought after she finally made it there. She'd had to take the stairs because Thirteen couldn’t fit in a lift and she preferred to stay close to her partner. It’s proximity was comforting, even when its massive steel feet thumped on the reinforced concrete stairs behind her like cannon. Plus it was reassuring that if things went wrong the bot would be there to protect her.

  It had once been a fairly standard office, with deep woven carpets, functional furniture and beige walls. In short, boring, but still a hundred times nicer than the black hole the New Andreas central station resembled. It also occurred to her that it was a good-sized space, especially so close to the space-port where prices were elevated. And yet he probably used it only rarely. The doctor, it seemed, had plenty of credits.

  But then he was an extra-solar geologist – a prospector as they were more commonly known – and they did make the money. This was a place where deals were made and occasional meetings held when he was on Aquaria. The other half of his time he was off surveying worlds for geological riches, while his receptionist was left there with little to do. Annalisse guessed she’d arrive late, take long lunches, play around on the mesh, and leave early on those days.

  It would have been different if she could communicate with her boss while he was off-world, but that was impossible. The only way to do so was to jump. If her boss had been based on anywhere else, she would still have had regular contact with him. Ships jumped every day and every hour to every world and they carried updated mesh-dumps with them. It was how the Commonwealth stayed connected. But he didn't jump to Commonwealth worlds.

  The woman would have nothing to do until he returned. She would have been bored witless, as useless as an unplugged mesh head.

  Unfortunately boring had turned to bloody and, even though the bodies had been removed, the bloodstains and the sickening smell of burnt flesh remained. Most telling was the bloodspatter. Though the doctor had used a laser, the weapon still produced splatters as flesh suddenly heated thousa
nds of degrees and exploded. A laser was a deadly weapon.

  Lasers weren’t weapons that should be in the hands of civilians. On that the law agreed. The fact that the doctor had had one was something that needed to be investigated. It had to be a black market weapon she guessed. But how did a geologist, a respected outworld prospector, know where to buy it? Was he dealing with outliers? They would be able to get him such a weapon. And those connections wouldn’t be impossible for him.

  Some spacers did deal with them, even some of the more respectable members of the Spacer's Guild. Outliers, living on the periphery of the Commonwealth, only respected its laws when it suited them, and would often buy and sell contraband. Many of them had dealings with brigands and pirates. They also tended not to ask a lot of questions. A thousand years ago or more their ancestors had been called gypsies according to the holo dramas. And while they might no longer use the name or follow their customs, some things hadn't changed.

  But that was only one of many questions that she needed answers to. Looking around at the scene of carnage in the main reception area and the office beyond, she knew that they would be in short supply. The place looked like a warzone. Why? How could a simple arrest have turned into a battlefield? Granted the doctor was some sort of bomber, but they'd known that when they'd gone to arrest him.

  “I don't get it,” Annalisse voiced her confusion to the air, and not for the first time. It had been on her mind ever since the Nightingale had jumped. Others had been doing the same, like the port master.

  But at least he could repair the space-port. Some fill and steel-reinforced concrete, maybe a few channels for run-off, and it would be as good as new. There was nothing she could do to bring the dead back to life or bring the Doctor back to face trial. All she could do was tie up the details of the case and close the file. At that moment she couldn't even do that, mainly because things weren't adding up. They hadn't from the moment she'd been given the case.