Pledge Allegiance

by Rider England

  “Of course I am. We’re going to get my daughter back. I wouldn’t miss that for the world.”

  I nodded but felt my heart sink. Vess was likely to be a liability. This mission could be dangerous and I was in no mood to babysit an old man.

  I noticed a grin spread across Baltimore’s face. She liked the fact that I was flustered.

  “Don’t worry,” Vess said. “I’ll stay on the ship when we get to Savarea. I don’t want to be a burden to you. But I want to see Georgia as soon as I can, and that means coming with you. Did you think I was going to wait on my own ship until you brought her back?”

  Actually, that was exactly what I’d thought but I couldn’t argue with him on that point. Solomon Vess was running the show. It was his money that was paying for all of this and it was his daughter who was stranded on Savarea. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to come along. I’d be the same if I had a family member stuck on a planet in alien space.

  I pressed the button that patched me into the ship’s intercom. “All hands, we are about to embark on a mission to Savarea to search for survivors from the Imperium Star Ship Oregon. I don’t expect this to be a walk in the park. We will be entering Horde space. Hopefully, they won’t pay much attention to a lone Avis class fighter. If we do run into trouble, I have faith that every man and woman on this ship will do their utmost to protect the Finch and their fellow crew members on board. Now, let’s get this job done.” I clicked off the intercom.

  “Morrow,” I said, “set a course for the first gate.”

  “Course locked in, Captain.”

  I wondered how much it pained him to address me by my title.

  “Full ahead,” I said. “Let’s see what the old girl can do. If she can handle full power for a while, then we’ll jump to FTL.”

  “Full ahead, aye, sir.” He pressed the buttons that signaled the engine room we wanted full power. I imagined Tegan Prime down there giving orders to her team.

  I felt a slight tremor in the floor beneath my feet as the engines flared to life and then the Finch began to move forward through space.

  CHAPTER 6

  “ESTIMATED TIME before we reach the first gate, Mr. Morrow?” I asked after we had been traveling for an hour.

  He checked his screen. “If we jump to FTL, our ETA is approximately five hours and thirty-four minutes, Captain.”

  “Make the jump,” I said. I was beginning to feel nauseous and I wasn’t sure if it was from the space travel or the realization that I was in charge of a ship again.

  Morrow nodded. “Initiating FTL drive now.”

  A slight tremor shook the ship as the drive engaged, pushing the Finch into faster-than-light speed.

  I got out of my chair and said, “I’ll be in my quarters.” I left the bridge and walked quickly to the transporter, feeling another wave of nausea come over me. I pressed the button for the crew quarters’ deck and leaned my forehead against the cool metal wall of the transporter, willing myself not to be sick until I was in my quarters.

  When the doors opened, I ran to my quarters, punched a string of zeroes into the digital lock and rushed to the bathroom. As soon as I was in there and the overhead lights came on automatically, I leaned over the toilet and puked. When I was done, I rinsed my mouth with cold water from the sink and staggered into the bedroom.

  I sat heavily on the bed, looking out at the stars. My head felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton wool. I was disoriented and dizzy.

  Everything had happened so fast that I’d barely had time to think. A few hours ago, I’d been sitting in a doorway with all my possessions in a plastic box. Now, I was in space, commanding a crew of expert fighters, pilots, and engineers. I could hardly believe the strange turn of events.

  Yet here I was. Back in space.

  I couldn’t deny that being in charge of a ship again felt good, despite my only order so far being to take-off and set a course for the nearest gate. And Morrow had already done that task. In truth, once the course was set, the Finch would fly herself to her destination without any human intervention at all.

  It was only if we flew into trouble that the bridge crew would be needed. If that happened, if we were attacked by pirates for example, the captain’s role became one of tactical decision making. The pilot was needed for evasive maneuvers.

  But as long as we avoided trouble, I could rest here and try to come to terms with my new position.

  A low beeping sound in the living area caught my attention. I got up and went in there to search for the source. It sounded again, near the door, and I realized that it was a doorbell. I went to the door and pressed the button to open it.

  Tegan Prime stood outside. She smiled when she saw me. “Captain, may I come in?”

  “Of course,” I said, stepping aside to let her enter. “Is there a problem?””

  A worried look flashed across her face but only for a second before it was replaced by a more relaxed expression. “I don’t think so. I…don’t know.”

  “Take a seat,” I offered. She sat on the sofa. The worried look reappeared on her face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing but I was carrying out a diagnostic on the main engine after we were underway and I discovered some…irregularities.”

  I sat in the easy chair and leaned forward to face her. “What kind of irregularities?”

  She paused and I guessed she was trying to figure out a way to explain her problem in layman’s terms.

  “Because we set off at full power,” she said, “I decided to check on the main engine’s efficiency while it was running. I noticed something strange while I was making a visual scan of the pipes underneath one of the turbines. There’s a device there. It wasn’t there a few days ago when I did the same visual check just after the pipes were installed for the engine upgrade.”

  “A device?”

  She nodded. “I think it’s a tracking device.”

  A tracking device? Who would put a tracking device in the Finch, and why? It wasn’t as if we were flying to an unknown destination; we were headed for Savarea. The only reason to put a tracking device on the ship would be to know our exact location in space at all times.

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” I asked Tegan.

  She shook her head. “No. Not even Vess.”

  “And it isn’t something that he had installed for some reason?”

  “Definitely not. Vess knows nothing about engines. The entire upgrade was left in my hands. I was in charge of everything. Someone put that device there in the last couple of days and tried to hide it under the turbine.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  She nodded and we left my room. While Tegan called the transporter, I took a moment to change the passcode on the lock to my quarters. If someone had planted an unknown device in the engine room, that person could still be on board the ship. I wasn’t going to risk leaving my room open to intruders. I chose random digits and memorized them, repeating them over and over in my head until I was sure I would remember them.

  When I joined Tegan at the transporter, the door was already open and waiting. We stepped in and it took us to Engineering.

  “How many people are on your crew?” I asked her while we waited for the transporter to descend to the correct level.

  “Three.”

  “And none of them could have put the device on the engine?”

  She shrugged. “If you mean did they have an opportunity to place it there, then yes, of course they did. But I’ve worked with all three of them for years. I trust them. They wouldn’t do anything like this without telling me.”

  The transporter door opened and we walked out onto a suspended steel walkway that ran across a large room. Below, the engine pulsed with a deep hum. Its turbine gave off a ghostly blue glow that lit the entire room.

  “Down here,” Tegan said, descending a set of metal steps toward the monstrous piece of machinery. I followed her down to a floor that was a metal gr
ille. Half of the engine was below us in the blue-tainted shadows.

  Tegan opened a hatch in the floor and dropped down onto a ladder. As she began to climb down, I felt dizzy watching her. I wasn’t afraid of heights but my nausea from earlier was coming back to haunt me and staring down at the ladder that descended into the humming darkness made my stomach lurch.

  I gritted my teeth and lowered myself through the hatch. When my boots contacted the first metal rung, I stepped down gingerly until I was below the grille floor and climbing down into darkness.

  The low thrum of the engine seemed to resonate through my entire body, making my stomach and limbs feel heavy. I wondered if it affected the machinery that made up the left half of Tegan’s body. I wasn’t going to ask her. If she wanted to talk about her mechanical modifications, that was up to her but until then, I wasn’t going to force her into a conversation she might be uncomfortable with.

  I finally reached the steel floor at the bottom of the ladder and stepped onto it, grateful that I hadn’t puked on the way down.

  Tegan took a flashlight from her belt and turned it on, playing the beam across the curved underside of the engine. She crouched down and shone the light between an array of steel pipes that snaked under the turbine.

  I got down on my hands and knees and peered at the place where the light hit steel. I didn’t know anything about engineering beyond the basics I’d been taught at the academy, but I knew that the device I was looking at now did not belong on the Finch’s engine.

  It was shaped like a dome, maybe a foot in diameter and half that in height, and made of dark gray metal. A tiny red light was illuminated on the metallic surface, probably to show that the device was functioning.

  One thing was certain: it didn’t look like a bomb or the detonator for a bomb. There were no wires running from the dome to any explosive material. The device was self-contained and sitting among the pipes, perhaps attached by magnets on its base.

  At first I told myself that I was paranoid if I thought someone was trying to blow up the Finch, but then I reminded myself that somebody had put this device here in secret. It had some purpose. If it wasn’t here to blow us up, it was here to track us through space. But why? It made no sense.

  “It looks like a tracking device,” I said to Tegan, “but not like any tracking device I’ve seen before.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it either,” she said. “So what do we do? Who put it there? Why are they tracking our ship?”

  I got to my feet. “If the device was placed there recently, do you think the person who put it there is still on board?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. But a lot of technicians, engineers and mechanics have been on the ship lately. Even after the engines were upgraded and I performed my last diagnostic check, the onboard weapons systems were still being worked on, as were the crew quarters and the bridge. The Finch has had a total refit and that takes a lot of work. There must have been hundreds of people on board.”

  I pointed to the shadows beneath the turbine. “But only one of them planted this device.”

  She nodded, her long red hair tumbling over her face. She brushed it away and said, “Should we disarm it?”

  I thought about that for a moment. If we disarmed the device, we might not be trackable anymore but we would tip off whoever had put this here that we’d found it. Even if we took this device out of action, there could be others hidden elsewhere on the ship.

  “We should leave it for now,” I said. “There could be others, so disarming this one won’t achieve anything.”

  Tegan looked around us at the massive engine with its pipes and cables, and the dark corners of the huge room. There must be a thousand places to hide tracking devices down here. “So what do we do, Captain?”

  “What do you know about the people on board the Finch?” I asked her. “Who do you trust?”

  “My crew,” she said. “I trust them totally.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Her green eyes gazed into the darkness as she thought about that. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t know anyone else on board the ship.” Then she added, “I trust you.”

  She didn’t need to add that last part; after all, she had shown the device to me and she wouldn’t have done that if she thought I was involved in planting it there somehow. But I liked that she had told me plainly about her trust in me.

  “Don’t tell anyone else about this,” I said. “Not even your crew.” I needed time to think about the implications of the tracker’s presence on the Finch. I didn’t need anyone to start panicking. I was sure I could trust Tegan to remain calm; she seemed level-headed enough.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to tell anyone? Are you going to tell Vess?”

  “Not right now, no.”

  “But he owns the ship.”

  “And I’m the ship’s captain. If I tell Vess about this, he might tell others. He might unknowingly tell the person who planted the device. Then they’d know we were on to them.”

  “But we’re not on to them,” she said. “We don’t know anything about who they are or why they put this here. We don’t even know if they’re still on the Finch. They could be long gone by now.”

  “I realize that but until we know for sure, we need to keep this to ourselves. At least for now, okay?”

  She nodded but looked uncertain.

  “You said you trusted me,” I said.

  “I do.”

  “So trust me to handle this.”

  She nodded again, this time looking more confident. “I will, Captain.”

  “I’m going back to my quarters,” I said. “If you discover anything else out of the ordinary, report it to me, no matter how trivial it might seem.”

  “Of course.”

  I went back to the ladder but then stopped. “Just one more question, Ms. Prime.”

  “Yes, Captain?” Her green eyes shone in the blue aura emitted by the turbine.

  “If I ask you to disarm that device, do you think you’ll be able to do it?”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s an unfamiliar design but most of these things work the same way once you pull them apart.”

  “Good.” At least I knew that if we had to disarm it we could. I climbed up the ladder, feeling a little less sick than I had on the way down. Tegan followed me up to the next level but said she was going to continue her diagnostic checks when I began to ascend the stairs to the transporter.

  I knew what she really meant; she was going to hunt for more devices.

  I gave her an understanding nod and rode the transporter back to my room.

  After punching in the new passcode, I went to the bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling for a while, supported by the mattress that made me feel like I was floating. Beyond the window, the stars shone in their unchanging patterns.

  I pondered the problem of the tracking device until I eventually drifted into a deep sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  LATER, a low-pitched chirping sound woke me. I sat up in bed, the mattress adjusting itself beneath my moving form. The chirping sound came from speakers somewhere in the room. I wasn’t familiar with this particular call sound but I was aware that it was the ship’s comms system calling me. Someone wanted to speak with me. The ship’s computer knew where I was and was directing the call to my bedroom.

  “Captain Blake,” I said into the room. Stating your name was usually enough to get the computer to recognize that you were answering the call.

  Morrow’s voice came out of the speakers. “Captain, we’re approaching the first gate. I thought you’d like to know.”

  “I’ll be there shortly,” I said.

  Sliding off the bed, I went through the living area to the door but then hesitated before opening it. I returned to the bedroom and opened the closet. Since I was captain of this ship, I might as well look like it. I took a uniform from one of the hangers and laid it carefully on the bed. Next to the uniform, I placed the belt a
nd a blaster pistol.

  Then I went into the bathroom and took a quick, hot shower before dressing in the form-fitting blue uniform and adjusting the belt so that the pistol sat comfortably at my hip. After checking myself in the mirror, I strode out of my quarters to the transporter.

  When I arrived on the bridge, Morrow and Vess were sitting where I’d left them over nine hours ago. I hoped they’d taken a break since then. Baltimore was gone, perhaps taking a break of her own right now.

  “ETA two minutes to the gate,” Morrow said when he saw me take my seat.

  Vess gave me a wave and then turned his attention to the windows. I didn’t know why he looked so excited because he must have traveled through at least three gates just to get to Iton-3. I guessed that going through the gate meant we were one step closer to his daughter and that was the cause for his excitement. I wondered if he’d be so excited if he knew about the tracker on board the Finch.

  Ahead, I could see the four bright blue lights set in a square pattern that indicated the presence of the gate. “Any other ships in the area?” I asked Morrow.

  He shook his head. “All clear, Captain.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  He nodded and brought us out of FTL before typing something into the navigational computer. As the ship slowed, I felt a slight lurch in the pit of my stomach. That was totally normal on these older ships.

  A thought occurred to me. If the person tracking us was on this side of the gate, then they wouldn’t be able to track us once we went through. The moment we passed through the gate, the Finch would be light years away from our current location. No tracking device in the galaxy could transmit over that distance.

  So maybe whoever was monitoring the tracking device was on the other side.

  “How many gates do we pass through before we get to Savarea?” I asked Morrow.

  “Two, Captain.”

  So there were three sections of space, all light years away from each other, that we would be traveling across. This was the first section, from Iton-3 to the first gate. There would be little point tracking us for that short distance, and since we’d arrived at the gate without incident, I surmised that it was unlikely our trackers were interested in us yet.