by Joe Vasicek
“Since when do star wanderers travel in pairs?”
With eight soldiers and the officer crammed onto the ship, it felt tighter than a vacuum pack. Isaac took a deep breath. In the narrow space, the claustrophobic sensation was almost overwhelming. He felt as if he were having trouble getting enough air—which wasn’t surprising since the Medea’s filters were only designed to handle three people, at most. If it had any effect on the officer, though, he certainly didn’t show it.
“It’s, ah, complicated. We’re not from the New Pleiades—we’re from the Oriana Cluster. I was supposed to leave on this ship alone, but a famine forced our family to flee, and, well, since we had the space—”
“Why did you come to the Colkhia system?”
“J-just to make some trades, sir,” said Isaac, his sweat turning cold under the officer’s unyielding gaze. The frown on his face was unmoved.
“What are they doing to our ship?” asked Aaron. All around them, the soldiers were going through compartments and poking their hands into any crevice or crack that looked like it might hold something. One of them had piled their clothes on the lower bunk and was systematically going through them.
“Does your brother have a question?”
“He, ah, wants to know if there’s a problem. We didn’t expect your men to go through our entire ship.”
“A problem?” said the officer, raising his voice ever so slightly. “Perhaps you have a complaint about the way you’re being treated?”
Yes. Yes, we do.
“We’re just wondering if there’s anything we can do to help,” said Isaac. He swallowed his nervousness and smiled, hoping that would be enough to disarm the man. It wasn’t, but it did diffuse some of the tension from the situation.
“That depends. It would be better to continue this conversation on board the Starfire.”
He nodded to the two soldiers holding them against the wall and turned to the airlock. The soldiers motioned with their guns to follow him.
“What the—where are they taking us?” said Aaron. “Are we leaving the ship? What’s going on?”
“Just stay calm,” said Isaac, taking him by the arm. The soldiers standing guard at the door fell in step, so that they had an escort both ahead of and behind them. Under the circumstances, he could see why Aaron was nervous. It seemed almost as if the Gaians were taking them prisoner.
“We’ve got to stay on our ship. If they take us off—”
“The officer wants to talk with us on his ship. So long as we comply, I think they’ll still let us off. It’s not like we’re in trouble.” Probably.
“I just—I don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” said Isaac, “but we don’t have much of a choice now, do we? Just play along. We can still talk our way out of this.”
Hopefully.
They followed the officer through the airlock and onto the Gaian Imperial starship. The floors were slightly wider than the ceiling, and the corridor was spacious enough for four people to walk abreast, with rooms branching off on either side. The lights that ran along the ceiling were painfully bright, making Isaac squint as his eyes got used to them.
The officer stopped at a heavy double door and input some sort of pass-code on the access panel. The doors clicked and slid slowly open, revealing a small room with nine barred hatches lined up along its walls. The air smelled slightly of ozone and electricity.
Aaron’s face turned white. “They’re taking us prisoner! Isaac, we’ve got to get back to the ship!”
He turned to run, but the soldiers grabbed him and forced him kicking and screaming into the nearest holding cell. Isaac’s stomach fell out from under him as he turned to face the Gaian officer.
“I thought you said we were going to talk!”
“We will,” said the officer as his men took Isaac by both arms. “Once we’ve determined that you aren’t a threat, we’ll be free to talk at your leisure. Until then, standard protocol demands that we hold you here.”
The soldiers opened a cell and started to push him in. Across the room, the door slammed shut on his brother with a loud clang.
“What makes you think we’re a threat? We’re just two unarmed star wanderers!”
“If what you say is true, you’ll be free to go within the hour.”
With that, the officer turned and left. Isaac reached up to grasp the bars to his cell, but an electric sizzle told him that was a bad idea.
* * * * *
“They aren’t going to let us out of here,” said Aaron from across the room. Isaac wished he could argue, but after what had to be more than an hour, he was beginning to believe it himself.
He sat on a hard metal slab that was probably meant to serve as a bed, though without a cushion or blanket it wasn’t much better than sleeping on the floor. It looked like it retracted into the wall, though he didn’t have the controls to open or close it. With nothing else to do but talk, he sat cross-legged with his arms folded across his chest, his back slouched against the hard metal wall.
“They’ve got to have found the girl by now,” Aaron continued. “What do you think they’ll do when they find her? Stars, I hope they don’t confiscate her.”
I’d be more worried about the data on my wrist console, Isaac thought. Of course, there was no use talking about it—not with the chance that their cells were probably bugged.
“Wait, do you think they’re listening to us?” Aaron asked. “Stars! Do you think I betrayed her?”
“I doubt it,” said Isaac. “Even if they are listening, Deltan is so obscure that they probably can’t translate it.”
“Even with auto-translators?”
“The best auto-translators don’t work well with Deltan. The database just isn’t big enough. No one speaks it anywhere else but home, and maybe a couple of other colonies in the Far Outworlds.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Aaron, his voice tinged with relief. “Because if I—no, better not mention it again.”
“We’re going to be fine,” said Isaac. “They have no reason to hold us. Once they realize we’re not a threat, they’ll let us go.” I hope.
“How in all the black holes of Hell could they possibly think we pose a threat? Did you see the size of their battleship? That thing is massive! No, they’re holding us because they don’t want us to leave and warn the resistance of what they’ve done here.”
A cold chill ran down Isaac’s back. His brother could be right. Even if they weren’t a threat, the Imperials would still want to hold them just to keep word of their takeover here from spreading too quickly.
“Even if that’s true, they’ll still let us go eventually,” he tried to argue. “What’s the use of holding us forever? News is going to spread.”
“Yeah, but even after the news gets out, they’ll want to hold us just to make sure we don’t go over to the resistance. And even if they do let us go, they’ll take our ship and leave us here, or force us to settle down in the Coreward Stars.”
Isaac’s palms started to feel clammy. He leaned forward and started nervously tapping his knee.
“Why didn’t you bring this up before, when we still had a chance to escape?”
“All I had before was a feeling. I get a lot of feelings, but I don’t always know why. Now that I’ve had a chance to think about it for a while, it’s all starting to make sense.”
“Sol, Earth, and Luna,” said Isaac, buring his face in his hands. “What have I done?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s my fault,” he continued, his breath coming short and quick as he quietly began to panic. “We should have never come here—no, I should have listened to you and jumped out while we still had the chance. We’re going to lose the Medea, and it’s my fault!”
“Hey, it’s all right. There’s no reason to beat yourself up about it. What’s done is done. Fretting won’t help us now.”
“And what will? Is there anything left we can do?”
“We’re still ki
cking, aren’t we? They haven’t beaten us yet. If we can get back to the ship somehow, maybe we can still pull out of this.”
The jump drive, Isaac thought to himself. It’s still charging.
At that moment, the door to the hallway hissed open, and the Gaian officer stepped in with two soldiers flanking him. Isaac stood up at once, taking a deep breath to clear away his anxiety. His legs felt numb and his heart was beating ferociously, but other than that he was fine.
“Captain Deltana,” the officer addressed him as one of the soldiers opened his cell. Across the room, the door swung open to Aaron’s as well. A small wave of pre-emptive relief swept over Isaac, though he knew they weren’t clear yet.
“Yes, sir,” said Isaac, doing his best to smile. “I trust you’re satisfied with your search of our ship?”
“Quite satisfied,” said the officer, his lips turning up in a cheerless grin. “We still have some questions, though. Please, come with me.”
He turned and left the room without waiting to see if they would follow. The soldiers kept their distance, but Isaac still fell in step, motioning for his brother to do the same.
“Where are we going?” Aaron asked under his breath.
“I don’t know. He said they still have some questions.”
“Questions, my ass. If we don’t bust out of here the first chance we get, we never will.”
I agree.
They walked down the long, white corridor with the soldiers following behind. Isaac calculated how far it was to the airlock and wondered whether the Gaians had locked it down.
The officer led them up a flight of narrow stairs and through a hatch into what looked to be some kind of hangar. A freight airlock took up all of one wall, with a loading claw off to one side and a couple of mini mag-wheelers for offloading in low gravity. Crates of cargo sat haphazardly across the center of the floor; upon closer inspection, Isaac realized that most, if not all of them, were theirs.
Then Aaron gasped, and he saw it. Off to one side, against the back wall, was the cyrotank with the henna girl.
“We found some contraband in your cargo,” said the officer, leading them over to where the cryotank sat propped on top of two smaller crates like a table. “I must say, she’s quite a find, though I’m rather surprised to find two star wanderers dealing in the slave trade.”
“She isn’t a slave,” said Isaac. His skin began to crawl as he watched the officer stare at her.
“Oh? Then what is she?”
“She’s a survivor. We picked her up in the Far Outworlds. Her people put her in cryofreeze just before they all died. We came to Colkhia because we heard there was equipment here that could thaw her.”
The officer ran a boney finger over the glass. “A likely story. Why should we believe you?”
He’s not going to let us leave with her, Isaac realized with a gut-sinking sensation. He’s going to confiscate her as slave contraband, even though the Gaians have no authority over the Outworlds. None besides the threat of force, which was really the only authority that mattered right now.
The officer turned to him and pulled out Isaac’s wrist console from his pocket. “We took this from you when we seized your ship, but there’s a pass-code preventing us from turning it on. Given enough time, our engineers could easily dismantle it and recover the data that’s stored there, but if you cooperate and give us the codes now, we’ll let you return to your ship.”
He’s lying.
Isaac swallowed and turned to his brother. Aaron’s eyes were wide, but his jaw was set and his hands clenched. Their gazes met, and in that instant, they both knew what they had to do.
Isaac lunged for the officer and snatched the wrist console out of his hand. The guards ran forward, but Aaron elbowed one in the face and grabbed his assault rifle. Shots went off, and the next thing Isaac knew he was rolling across the floor, gripping the console tightly with both hands.
“Stop them!” shouted the officer as he ducked behind a stack of crates. Shots filled the air around them, and Isaac ducked, covering his head until they stopped.
“Come on!” said Aaron. He grabbed Isaac by the arm and pulled him up.
As Isaac looked dazedly around, he saw that soldiers were both dead, lying in pools of their own blood. Somehow, Aaron had managed to shoot them both, one in the face, the other in the neck. The officer was nowhere in sight. Through the bulkheads, alarms began to sound.
“How are you doing?” his brother asked.
“A little shaken up, that’s all. You?”
“Not bad, considering. What’s the best way out of here?”
Isaac glanced hastily around the hangar. There were only a couple of entrances, including the one they’d come in through. No doubt the soldiers would come that way in just a few seconds. Even if they could get to the airlock, there was no guarantee they’d find it unlocked. It looked like they were trapped.
“What about those EVA suits over there?” Aaron asked, pointing with the rifle. Isaac looked next to the freight airlock and saw a pair of hatches with a small window on the side. They looked like backflaps for heavy duty EVA suits—the kind that you climbed into through a hatch, rather than suiting up inside and walking out. They probably had magnetic gripping points on the gloves and boots for climbing around on the ship’s hull.
The Imperial battleship—or the Medea.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” said Isaac. “I’ll start the autodocking routine remotely through my wrist console and set the jump drive to go off in two minutes, then we both get in the suits and make a run for the Medea. So long as we’re touching the hull when she jumps, we’ll get away with her.”
“But what about the henna girl? How do we get her out?”
Isaac glanced over at her, lying so peacefully in the tank above the two dead soldiers. His stomach fell, but there was nothing they could do for her, not with the alarms ringing.
“There’s not enough time,” he said. “We can’t get her to the airlock fast enough.”
“But if we vented the hangar somehow, we could—”
The door hissed open, and a squad of soldiers ran in. Aaron spun around and fired right into them, making them scatter. Adrenaline surged through Isaac’s veins, and he bolted around the crates to the EVA suits in the wall. A narrow bulkhead provided some cover, allowing him to switch on the wrist console.
“Come on,” he muttered as it started up. His fingers trembled as they flew across the keypad, but after an excruciating few seconds as the device tried to sync with the ship, he managed to get a connection and bring up the proper command menus. The drive was only fifty percent charged, but that would be enough to get them out of the system. He started up the autodocking subroutine and set the coordinates for a random point as far as the nav-computer safely advised, then commanded the AI to jump in two minutes.
Aaron slammed up against the wall just as he finished. Bullets ricocheted all around them, whistling loudly in the narrow space. As Isaac stood up, his brother screamed and fired, the muzzle flash singeing the hair on his arms.
“Get in there!” Isaac shouted, pointing to the hatch for the EVA suit. “Give me the gun—I’ll cover you!”
Aaron stopped firing and turned to him. “No, I’ll cover you. Don’t worry, I’ll be—”
“The hell you will,” said Isaac. He grabbed the rifle before his brother could protest and shoved him toward the hatch. “If I go first, you’ll do something stupid like try to save the girl. We’ve got two minutes before the Medea jumps out—now let’s move!”
For a second, it looked as if Aaron was going to protest. But then, the soldiers started firing again, making them both duck for cover. Aaron ducked behind the bulkhead, then opened the hatch and scrambled in head-first. A red light flashed on the hatch, but once he was completely in, it resealed automatically and stopped flashing.
Isaac didn’t know what he was firing at, but he kept it up anyway. The hangar was quickly filling with smoke, and he thought he could hear shout
s coming from three or four directions. Any second now, the soldiers would be there for him. He waited for a lull and made a dash for the second suit, hoping that no one shot him before he could climb in.
After a hair-raising struggle to get himself fitted, the hatch sealed shut behind him and the visor HUD lit up. A menu popped up, with an alert asking if he was ready to disengage. He slipped his fingers through the oversized gloves and flexed his hands to make sure they were working. A cursor popped up on the display, and by tapping his index finger to the visor he managed to hit “OK.”
The menu faded away, and a red light began to blink in the corner of his vision. When it blinked the third time, the suit shuddered, and he fell until his feet hit something solid. Evidently, he was in an airlock of some sort where the starship’s artificial gravity field was still in effect. The gunshots were almost completely inaudible now, a sign that he’d detached from the ship, which was confirmed when he took a step forward.
“Aaron?” he called. There was no time to callibrate the comm frequencies, though. He looked around for his brother and saw that the outer door of the small EVA airlock was already open. Aaron was nowhere in sight.
He walked to the edge of the airlock and looked out. Far below, the airless gray world of Colkhia glowed like an enormous moon. Its surface was pocked and cratered—and if he wasn’t careful, he could end up as another crater himself. The Medea was less than fifty meters away, nosing up as the autopilot put some distance between itself and the Imperial battleship. The cargo bays in the back were wide open, but that wouldn’t affect the jump—only the mass calibration would affect that. All the cargo being gone was going to have some effect, but that hardly mattered now. The only thing that mattered was getting away.
He checked the magnetic grip settings on his boots and made ready to jump, but just as he was ready to shove off, he noticed a spinning shape off to his right. It was his brother, tumbling wildly in his EVA suit. Isaac’s heart leaped in his throat—Aaron didn’t know Gaian, so of course he didn’t know how to operate the suit. He had probably just jumped and hadn’t been able to grab onto anything in time.
