by Jamie Sawyer
“Have you checked the gear?” Dervla asked.
“Everything we requested is there,” Moleg said. “And all the packs are loaded correctly.”
Dervla smiled. There was a tone in his voice that implied that some repacking had taken place. She glanced up as the airboat passed by one of the huge cables that kept Cawl-Vesh suspended over that canyon. Details resolved out of the shadows above, grimy pipes, weld-lines joining heavy plating, protruding support spars onto which metal hawsers had been bolted, hawsers that were holding up entire sections of Cellartown. There was a metallic scrape, then rusty creaks as a large pair of doors swung open to reveal a dimly lit vertical shaft.
“Not far to go, eh, Derv?” said Ancil.
“Are you an optimist or a masochist?” she said. “We still have to carry the gear up two floors.”
“S’all right, boss,” said Kref. “Ans’ll volunteer me, then say a bunch of tricky words to get me to laugh, and then I’ll feel okay about carrying everyone’s stuff!”
“Now, now,” she said. “We all need to remember the big damn burden that Ancil’s carrying—it can’t be easy getting in and out of doors with that huge bloody ego of his.”
Ancil nodded at the sniggering that came his way. “Mockery and disrespect, eh?—for this I gave up concert nanosurgery!”
Their louder laughter was muffled as the shadowy shaft swallowed the airboat.
if you enjoyed
THE ETERNITY WAR: EXODUS
look out for
ADRIFT
by
Rob Boffard
“An edge-of-the-seat epic of survival and adventure in deep space.”—Gareth L. Powell, BSFA Award–winning author
Sigma Station. The ultimate luxury hotel, in the far reaches of space.
For one small group, a tour of the Horsehead Nebula is meant to be a short but stunning highlight in the trip of a lifetime.
But when a mysterious ship destroys Sigma Station and everyone on it, suddenly their tourist shuttle is stranded.
They have no weapons. No food. No water. No one back home knows they’re alive.
And the mysterious ship is hunting them.
CHAPTER ONE
Rainmaker’s heads-up display is a nightmare.
The alerts are coming faster than she can dismiss them. Lock indicators. Proximity warnings. Fuel signals. Created by her neurochip, appearing directly in front of her.
The world outside her fighter’s cockpit is alive, torn with streaking missiles and twisting ships. In the distance, a nuke detonates against a frigate, a baby sun tearing its way into life. The Horsehead Nebula glitters behind it.
Rainmaker twists her ship away from the heatwave, making it dance with precise, controlled thoughts. As she does so, she gets a full view of the battle: a thousand Frontier Scorpion fighters, flipping and turning and destroying each other in an arena bordered by the hulking frigates.
The Colony forces thought they could hold the area around Sigma Orionis—they thought they could take control of the jump gate and shut down all movement into this sector. They didn’t bank on an early victory at Proxima freeing up a third of the Frontier Navy, and now they’re backed into a corner, fighting like hell to stay alive.
Maybe this’ll be the battle that does it. Maybe this is the one that finally stops the Colonies for good.
Rainmaker’s path has taken her away from the main thrust of the battle, out towards the edge of the sector. Her targeting systems find a lone enemy: a black Colony fighter, streaking towards her. She’s about to fire when she stops, cutting off the thought.
Something’s not right.
“Control, this is Rainmaker.” Despite the chaos, her voice is calm. “I have locked on incoming. Why’s he alone? Over.”
The reply is clipped and urgent. “Rainmaker, this is Frontier Control: evade, evade, evade. Do not engage. You have multiple bogies closing in on your six. They’re trying to lock the door on you, over.”
Rainmaker doesn’t bother to respond. Her radar systems were damaged earlier in the fight, and she has to rely on Control for the bandits she can’t see. She breaks her lock, twisting her craft away as more warnings bloom on her console. “Twin, Blackbird, anybody. I’ve got multiples inbound, need a pickup, over.”
The sarcastic voice of one of her wingmen comes over the comms. “Can’t handle ’em yourself? I’m disappointed.”
“Not a good time, Omen,” she replies, burning her thrusters. “Can you help me or not? Over.”
“Negative. Got three customers to deal with over here. Get in line.”
A second, older voice comes over her comms. “Rainmaker, this is Blackbird. What’s your twenty? Over.”
Her neurochip recognises the words, both flashing up the info on her display and automatically sending it to Blackbird’s. “Quadrant thirty-one,” she says anyway, speaking through gritted teeth.
“Roger,” says Blackbird. “I got ’em. Just sit tight. I’ll handle it for y—Shit, I’m hit! I—”
“Eric!” Rainmaker shouts Blackbird’s real name, her voice so loud it distorts the channel. But he’s already gone. An impactor streaks past her, close enough for her to see the launch burns on its surface.
“Control, Rainmaker,” she says. “Confirm Blackbird’s position, I’ve lost contact!”
Control doesn’t reply. Why would they? They’re fighting a thousand fires at once, advising hundreds of Scorpion fighters. Forget the callsigns that command makes them use: Blackbird is a number to them, and so is she, and unless she does something right now, she’s going to join him.
She twists her ship, forcing the two chasing Colony fighters to face her head-on. They’re a bigger threat than the lone one ahead. Now they’re coming in from her eleven and one o’clock, curving towards her, already opening fire. She guns the ship, aiming for the tiny space in the middle, racing to make the gap before their impactors close her out.
“Thread the needle,” she whispers. “Come on, thread the needle, thr—”
Everything freezes.
The battle falls silent.
And a blinking-red error box appears above one of the missiles.
“Oh. Um.” Hannah Elliott’s voice cuts through the silence. “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen. One second.”
The box goes away—only to reappear a split second later, like a fly buzzing back to the place it was swatted. This time, the simulation gives a muted ding, as if annoyed that Hannah can’t grasp the point.
She rips the slim goggles from her head. She’s not used to them—she forgot to put her lens in after she woke up, which meant she had to rely on the VR room’s antiquated backup system. A strand of her long red hair catches on the strap, and she has to yank it loose, looking down at the ancient console in front of her.
“Sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” she says again. “Won’t be a minute.”
Her worried face is reflected on the dark screen, her freckles making her look even younger than she is. She uses her finger this time, stabbing at the box’s confirm button on the small access terminal on the desk. It comes back with a friend, a second, identical error box superimposed over the first. Beyond it, an impactor sits frozen in Rainmaker’s viewport.
“Sorry.” Stop saying sorry. She tries again, still failing to bring up the main menu. “It’s my first day.” Stony silence. The twenty tourists in the darkened room before her are strapped into reclining motion seats with frayed belts. Most have their eyes closed, their personal lenses still displaying the frozen sim. A few are blinking, looking faintly annoyed. One of them, an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard, catches Hannah’s eye with a scowl.
She looks down, back at the error boxes. She can barely make out the writing on them—the VR’s depth of field has made the letters as tiny as the ones on the bottom line of an eye chart.
She should reset the sim. But how? Does that mean it will start from scratch? Can she fast-forward? The supervisor who showed it to her that morning was trying to wrangle about fi
fteen new tour guides, and the instructions she gave amounted to watching the volume levels and making sure none of the tourists threw up when Rainmaker turned too hard.
Hannah gives the screen an experimental tap, and breathes a sigh of relief when a menu pops up: a list of files. There. Now she just has to—
But which one is it? The supervisor turned the sim on, and Hannah doesn’t know which file she used. Their names are meaningless.
She taps the first one. Bouncy music explodes from the room’s speakers, loud enough to make a couple of the tourists jump. She pulls the goggles back on, to be greeted by an animated, space-suited lizard firing lasers at a huge, tentacled alien. A booming voice echoes across the music. “Adventurers! Enter the world of Reptar as he saves the galaxy from—”
Hannah stops Reptar saving the galaxy. In the silence that follows, she can feel her cheeks turning red.
She gives the screen a final, helpless look, and leaps to her feet. She’ll figure this out. Somehow. They wouldn’t have given her this job if they didn’t think she could deal with the unexpected.
“OK!” She claps her hands together. “Sorry for the mix-up. I think there’s a bit of a glitch in the old sim there.”
Her laugh gets precisely zero reaction. Swallowing, she soldiers on.
“So, as you saw, that was the Battle of Sigma Orionis, which took place fifteen years ago, which would be …” She thinks hard. “2157, in the space around the hotel we’re now in. Hopefully our historical sim gave you a good idea of the conditions our pilots faced—it was taken directly from one of their neurochip feeds.
“Coincidentally, the battle took place almost exactly a hundred years after we first managed to send a probe through a wormhole, which, as you … which fuelled the Great Expansion, and led to the permanent, long-range gates, like the one you came in on.”
“We know,” says the man with the salt-and-pepper beard. He reminds Hannah of a particularly grumpy high school teacher she once had. “It was in the intro you played us.”
“Right.” Hannah nods, like he’s made an excellent point. She’d forgotten about the damn intro video, her jump-lag from the day before fuzzing her memory. All she can remember is a voice-over that was way, way too perky for someone discussing a battle as brutal as Sigma Orionis.
She decides to keep going. “So, the … the Colonies lost that particular fight, but the war actually kept going for five years after the Frontier captured the space around Sigma.”
They know this already, too. Why is she telling them? Heat creeps up her cheeks, a sensation she does her best to ignore.
“Anyway, if you’ve got any questions about the early days of the Expansion, while we were still constructing the jump gates, then I’m your girl. I actually did my dissertation on—”
Movement, behind her. She turns to see one of the other tour guides, a big dude with a tribal tattoo poking out of the collar of his red company shirt.
“Oh, thank God,” Hannah hisses at him. “Do you know how to fix the sim?”
He ignores her. “OK, folks,” he says to the room, smooth and loud. “That concludes our VR demonstration. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them while our next group of guests are getting set up.”
Before Hannah can say anything, he turns to her, his smile melting away. “Your sim slot was over five minutes ago. Get out of here.”
He bends down, and with an effortless series of commands, resets the simulator. As the tourists file out, the bearded man glances at her, shaking his head.
Hannah digs in her back pocket, her face still hot and prickly. “Sorry. The sim’s really good, and I got kind of wrapped up in it, so …” She says the words with a smile, which fades as the other guide continues to ignore her.
She doesn’t even know what she’s doing—the sim wasn’t good. It was creepy. Learning about a battle was one thing—actually being there, watching people get blown to pieces …
Sighing, she pulls her crumpled tab out of her pocket and unfolds it. Her schedule is faithfully written out on it, copied off her lens—a habit she picked up when she was a kid, after her mom’s lens glitched and they missed a swimming trial. “Can you tell me how to get to the dock?”
The other guide glances at the outdated tab, his mouth forming a moue of distaste. “There should be a map on your lens.”
“Haven’t synced it to the station yet.” She’s a little too embarrassed to tell him that it’s still in its solution above the tiny sink in her quarters, and she forgot to go back for it before her shift started.
She would give a kidney to go back now, and not just for the lens. Her staff cabin might be small enough for her to touch all four walls at once without stretching, but it has a bed in it. With sheets. They might be scratchy and thin and smell of bleach, but the thought of pulling them over her head and drifting off is intoxicating.
The next group is pushing inside the VR room, clustered in twos and threes, eyeing the somewhat threadbare motion seats. The guide has already forgotten Hannah, striding towards the incoming tourists, booming a welcome.
“Thanks for your help,” Hannah mutters as she slips out of the room.
The dock. She was there yesterday, wasn’t she? Coming off the intake shuttle. How hard could it be to find a second time? She turns right out of the VR room, heading for where she thinks the main station atrium is. According to her tab, she isn’t late, but she picks up her pace all the same.
The wide, gently curved walkway is bordered by a floor-to-ceiling window taller than the house Hannah grew up in. The space is packed with more tourists. Most of them are clustered at the apex, admiring the view dominated by the Horsehead Nebula.
Hannah barely caught a glimpse when they arrived last night, which was filled with safety briefings and room assignments and roster changes and staff canteen conversations that were way too loud. She had sat at a table to one side, both hoping that someone would come and talk to her and hoping they wouldn’t.
In the end, with something like relief, she’d managed to slink off for a few hours of disturbed sleep.
The station she’s on used to be plain old Sigma XV—a big, boring, industrial mining outpost that the Colony and the Frontier fought over during the war. They still did mining here—helium-3, mostly, for fusion reactors—but it was now also known as the Sigma Hotel and Luxury Resort.
It always amazed Hannah just how quickly it had all happened. It felt like the second the war ended; the tour operators were lobbying the Frontier Senate for franchise rights. Now, Sigma held ten thousand tourists, who streamed in through the big jump gate from a dozen different worlds and moons, excited to finally be able to travel, hoping for a glimpse of the Neb.
Like the war never happened. Like there weren’t a hundred different small conflicts and breakaway factions still dotted across both Frontier and Colonies. The aftershocks of war, making themselves known.
Not that Sigma Station was the only one in on the action. It was happening everywhere—apparently there was even a tour company out Phobos way that took people inside a wrecked Colony frigate that hadn’t been hauled back for salvage yet.
As much as Hannah feels uncomfortable with the idea of setting up a hotel here, so soon after the fighting, she needs this job. It’s the only one her useless history degree would get her, and at least it means that she doesn’t have to sit at the table at her parents’ house on Titan, listening to her sister talk about how fast her company is growing.
The walkway she’s on takes a sharp right, away from the windows, opening up into an airy plaza. The space is enormous, climbing up ten whole levels. A glittering light fixture the size of a truck hangs from the ceiling, and in the centre of the floor there’s a large fountain, fake marble cherubs and dragons spouting water streams that criss-cross in midair.
The plaza is packed with more tourists, milling around the fountain or chatting on benches or meandering in and out of the shops and restaurants that line the edges.
Hannah has to slow down, sorry-ing and excuse-me-ing her way through.
The wash of sensations almost overwhelms her, and she can’t help thinking about the sheets again. White. Cool. Light enough to slide under and—
No. Come on. Be professional.
Does she go left from here, or is it on the other side of the fountain? Recalling the station map she looked at while they were jumping is like trying to decipher something in Sanskrit. Then she sees a sign above one of the paths leading off the plaza. Ship Dock B. That’s the one.
Three minutes later, she’s there. The dock is small, a spartan mustering area with four gangways leading out from the station to the airlock berths. There aren’t many people around, although there are still a few sitting on benches. One of them, a little girl, is asleep: curled up with her hands tucked between shoulder and cheek, legs pulled up to her chest. Her mom—or the person Hannah thinks is her mom—sits next to her, blinking at something on her lens.
There are four tour ships visible through the glass, brightly lit against the inky black. Hannah’s been on plenty of tours, and she still can’t help thinking that every ship she’s ever been on is ugly as hell. She’s seen these ones before: they look like flattened, upside-down elephant droppings, a bulbous protrusion sticking out over each of the cockpits.
Hannah jams her hand in her jeans pocket for the tab. She wrote the ship’s name for the shift in tiny capitals next to the start time: RED PANDA. Her gaze flicks between the four ships, but it takes her a second to find the right one. The name is printed on the side in big, stencilled letters, with a numbered designation in smaller script underneath.
