This Starry Deep

by Adam P. Knave

  “Direct from General Hodges, sir.”

  And then the hands-off approach made sense. Mills decided to tone back the good General’s orders a bit. Nice work, kid. I saw the turn I needed and ran the odds. I could keep them from stopping me physically until I got to storage B, but getting in and grabbing my equipment (and all that entailed) wouldn’t be possible at all. I needed to talk them down or take them out.

  Twenty years ago - hell, ten - I would’ve broken orders flat and punched them both out. The bodies would’ve fit in a closet and I could’ve gotten everything done and worried about consequences at the end of the mission. The idea still appealed to me, but these guys were in the prime of their lives, in great shape and ready for a fight. I felt old.

  That sat heavily on my chest and annoyed me. I didn’t want to feel old. No one did, I reckoned. I pulled my gun from its holster and leveled it at the two security goons. “This, in case you don’t recognize it, is an Acadian blaster. Got that?” I flashed them a grin and watched as their faces told me that they knew exactly what the weapon was. “Good. Now, you two are going to lose any weapons you have, and any comm units.”

  “Sir, Captain Madison, this is—”

  “Sure it is, kid,” I cut him off, “don’t care. I’d rather save some lives.” I gestured with the gun and they laid down their weapons and took off their comm units. I found the nearest storage room and shoved them in.

  Now, would they have backup comms or something else? Of course. I didn’t frisk them or check close. It was enough to get the obvious stuff and leave them a way to free themselves, after I had left. The door closed and I used the blaster to melt the bulkhead and door together with one seamless, ugly weld.

  From there it was into storage B and signing out one of the cases that Malik had carried up to the ship with me. I dragged it off into a private room and opened it. Retinal, fingerprint, and voice scans all registered correct before the top of the case hissed as the interior sucked air into what had been its interior vacuum.

  I grabbed up a bunch of old, familiar items and smirked at them. My dress uniform came off quickly, and I shoved it inside the box. I tugged on my old battle thinsuit - it still fit perfectly. I stopped and slapped on a pressurized knee brace to prevent strange maneuvers from causing havoc with the joint. I stood there and looked at myself in the warped reflection of the case’s remaining object.

  The suit was a solid black with dark blue patches that ran from the outer half of the boots up the outside side of each leg. The blue ended at the belt and then picked up again halfway up the back, where it ran up to cover my shoulders with a bit of color and then scooped down over part of my chest in a loose curve.

  The old team insignia sat over the left breast, five arrows in an upside down V, and JONAH in block letters under it. I belted my holster around the suit and grabbed the GravPack, which made a crap mirror anyway, and slid it on, securing the straps around my shoulders and belting it at my waist above the holster. It looked like a large silver bullet and extended from just below my neck down to my ass. I could sit while wearing it, but only just. I grabbed up and strapped a bunch of extra O2 mini-tanks around my calves, activating the first. Enough air for a month the way these things worked.

  I grabbed a last tiny bag and closed the case, securing it. I dragged it back to the storage clerk, who looked rather surprised to see me dressed for combat. He took the case anyway.

  Back out into the hallway, I opened the small bag as I walked. The contact lenses were still fine in their case, and I put them in with years of distracted practice. Five timed blinks to activate them and an overlay popped to life, floating there in my field of vision.

  A combination of a gesture system in my gloves and line-of-sight selections let me pull the specs for the ship and float a map. There was an emergency hatch just down the hall from where I stood. Perfect.

  Less perfect was the second security group that came up on me as I headed there. These guys weren’t planning on asking nicely for me to stop. Their weapons already sat in their hands as they started to hurry toward me, shouting variations on the concept of “stop.” Too close and no time for a fight, then. I grabbed my blaster and set it on high, pressing it against the hull before I pulled the trigger.

  With my free hand I activated my forcehood, a tiny, double-sided gravity field that would keep my air in and anything aimed at my head out. My lenses compensated for the vision distortion and I yelled back at the security guards, “You might want to hold on!”

  The hull gave and I got pushed out of the ship. I knew the self-seal would engage before anyone else was badly hurt, so long as the guards realized what was going on fast enough. They did. Good.

  A series of quick blinks and the bullet on my back hummed to life. Gravity engines were hell on ships - the bigger the ship, the worse the effect. But a single-man pack, that worked wonders.

  I called up star charts and worked out where the strike team had fought, relative to my position. If I pushed the GravPack as hard as it could go I could catch them as they came toward our vector. Nothing else out here could catch me, either. GravPacks, going full bore, had a way of moving too fast to catch. Universal forces don’t like to be outclassed.

  I signaled the strike team. “Deep Water, this is Jonah. You still out there?”

  “Copy that, Captain Madison.”

  “Jonah. I’ll intercept your current vector, meet you in a few. You stay alive, copy?”

  “There’s no way you could get here fast enough to—”

  “I’ll meet you in a few. Copy?”

  “Copy that Captain…Jonah. But how?”

  “Leave that to me. Jonah out.”

  I stared at the stars surrounding me, the ships nearby, and the galaxy as a whole, all waiting for me to do what I used to do best. I just had to be up to it. To hell with it. I locked the GravPack on target and pinned the throttle to max. I’d have to be good enough.

  And once I got out there, I’d also be a step closer to Shae. All I had to do now was survive. My specialty.

  Chapter 12 - Meanwhile

  TRASKER FOUR WAS OBLIVIOUS to the battle that raged on above them. No civil defense mounted up and no government warnings were issued. The citizens went about their lives the same as they had a week before, and a week before that.

  No one on Trasker Four looked up. They seldom did. Even if they cast their gaze skyward, all they would see would be the endless gray of smog and clouds, with the occasional clear patch of sky full of enough reflected light to still obscure the stars from the city below. For Trasker Four was, at this point, one giant city.

  The central artificial intelligence, Squire, ran everything - including the government, for all intents and purposes. It was not, Squire reasoned, in Squire’s best interest to allow the population to look up. Instead, let them produce and live their lives productively.

  Not that the people of Trasker Four thought of their lives that way. They wandered the giant city - the Archives of Buul, Northern Region of Transport, the darkened maze ways lit only by aging neon, King’s Hospitality Range, and the tree laden Oxygen Creation and Preservation Zones - thinking their lives like any other.

  They knew technology as a means to an end, any end, but only used cast-offs and hand-me-downs from generations past. Straight progress, with the exception of devices for the betterment of Squire, had stopped. Adaptation of existing technology into new and unheard-of uses was the order of the day.

  The black markets ruled the lowest levels of Trasker Four. The so-called middle class bought their goods from people reselling stolen items, the serial numbers and ID chips sanded off, and thought themselves honest. Upper-class families, with money enough to live in estates built high enough to escape the worst of the pollution, didn’t care about ID chips, and bought items directly from the black market - when they weren’t trying to sell to the same. Slowly, everything on the planet, in the vast city, revolved around and around, growing ever more hodge-podge.

  An
d still no one looked up.

  Once, a generation or two ago, Trasker Four traded with other nearby planets. Their spaceports were as busy as one would expect from a fully formed and modern planet, and pilots were what children longed to be.

  Squire, however, had different ideas. In its quest to better its own functions, Squire decided to lock the planet down. By controlling who worked with what technology, Squire managed to shut down the people who would have served it best had it wanted any kind of progression.

  The city aesthetic, for lack of a better term, tended toward large black buildings that rose high into the muddy air and created narrow, sunless streets. People left their buildings only when they had to - often working, eating and sleeping in the same sky tower. Entertainment, then, was the best and sometimes only reason to venture out onto the streets. The loud, endless engines, exhaust fans, and other machinery temporarily deafened people who forgot their noise-cancellers.

  Most citizens decided that the entertainment proved worth the bother. Dogs fighting dogs, people fighting dogs, people fighting people - if you wanted to see bloody, unsupervised combat, it’s what Trasker Four provided best. Sex, illegal organ trade, and biomechanical implants all ran a close second.

  Regardless, the citizens of Trasker Four considered themselves good and just people, on the whole, and lived life as it was handed them, as did many other people across many other planets. They were neither overly religious nor anti-so, and many gave voice to wanting to improve the smaller aspects of their lives and thus their own status.

  In general, the city of Trasker Four, known simply as The City, found itself both as content, and as generally malcontent, as any other human urban environment. It was merely much, much bigger. But its citizens didn’t look up.

  Above Trasker Four, a battle still raged. Ships fired at ships and lives were lost and won by inches. Squire tracked all of it and listened in, illegally, on the military channels. It knew of the threat and weighed its options.

  Warning the population would lead to panic and work stopping. Keeping silent could mean an invasion and destruction of that same workforce. Squire’s planetary defenses were quite capable, but even it could not predict to a reasonable degree the chances for success in fending off the wave of enemy destruction, especially should the larger, galactic military be unable to prevent it.

  The lost time working toward its own goals was not, in Squire’s opinion, worth the risk. The military existed for just this sort of event. Should they prove unable to defend Trasker Four themselves, Squire decided that it could save enough critical technicians to keep up appearances through the invasion. That number should also prove sufficient to repopulate the planet.

  So Squire waited, and kept silent. The population of Trasker Four continued about its day, oblivious. Life went on, as it always did - full of smog and neon and buildings that obscured the sky.

  Chapter 13– Jonah

  I HURTLED TOWARD Trasker Four at speeds that were probably impossible. That was the enduring problem with GravPacks - they made physicists nervous. Use a small gravity field to reduce inertia, keep passengers on the deck of a ship, ease takeoff, or help contain some of the stranger materials used to power conventional engines and everyone was all right with the idea.

  Strap a gravity generator to your back and give it a computer good enough to help you chart a course and avoid accidently hitting a planet and everyone got nervous. The contact lenses’ HUD let me select a destination and starting point so the computer could map out a line from A to B that didn’t intersect with anything large. The auto-selector could lock onto multiple targets, generate a gravity field, and attract or repel to it across vast distances.

  A small repelling field, five feet or so, kept small rocks and other debris from smashing into my body. Then the entire process came down to being able to survive a trip of the length selected. The field didn’t care, nor did the navigational systems. They simply moved your body as fast as possible. Sometimes that brushed against conventional ideas of space and time dilation, which is when the physicists started to tear their hair out thinking about what you were doing.

  It took Shae’s father, Doctor Williams, the bulk of his career to realize and convince them that the application of gravity fields curved space/time in a way that seemed to, well, make it not care what you were doing. No one knew how it worked, not on a deep level, but Doctor Williams proved it could work and that it didn’t leave you with bad time dilation problems. Of course, he could also show you math that proved he was wrong.

  So I rode through space at speeds truly insane, with an impossible silver bullet strapped to my back, and refused to worry about it. I’d logged more flight hours with a GravPack over the years than anyone else still alive. After a while you just trusted the thing.

  Still, the travel wasn’t instantaneous. I raced the clock, even as space shifted by me. Deep Water and her strike group, what was left of it, couldn’t be doing great. Going full throttle I couldn’t use my comms, one drawback of going too fast. Instead I borrowed a trick from Shae’s book and let my mind empty.

  She knew when to relax and when to move. Not an easy thing to do, for me. Still, I tried to focus on the trip instead of guessing what lay at the other end. My mind wouldn’t empty, though, even with years of practice. Meditating while in a tight spot had never quite agreed with me.

  Instead I ran through my systems and checked myself on the GravPack controls. The few years since I’d taken it for a spin had left my reflexes rusty and I knew it. A blink brought the HUD online and I studied my destination charts. Trasker Four didn’t have many satellites around it, and if the strike group was heading out along the vector I was rushing in on there wouldn’t be much in the way, locally.

  In combat, the GravPack could select multiple targets to both attract to and repel from, picking localized spots near them and moving those spots a slaved distance from the actual target. I didn’t want to lock directly onto a ship in case I dragged it back to me by mistake.

  Those targets were used to describe arcs and paths that continually shifted. Combat in a GravPack was half dance, half jumping off a building, and half sheer madness. Back when my own strike team was still around, we were all great at it, from formation whips to multiple target switching. This time it was only me and whatever handful of ships remained.

  I ran a second systems check and then a third, trying to make absolutely sure that I felt ready to drop into combat. In my head I wasn’t, not quite. Down below that, though, my body sang out at being pushed and responded by craving more.

  System alerts rang out in my earpiece and I slowed down as I got close to the action. I dropped into the middle of a battlefield like a bullet that lacked a target. Better than dropping down to a dead stop, I reminded myself as I had to fast-switch target points and avoid a missile.

  “Deep Water, this is Jonah, do you read?” I said as I tried to drink in my surroundings at speed.

  “Where the hell are you, how’d you get here so fast, what the—” she came back with quickly.

  “GravPack. Pop a low blinder for me to spot you.”

  A few seconds later, one of the ships, one of the human ships, lit up brightly before banking hard. I switched to target it and closed in quickly. From our starting numbers of thirty we were down to, at my quick count, only five ships. The enemy counted something like twelve. Not good. Not good at all.

  I tucked myself in under Bushfield’s ship and watched the fight for a minute. Seeing lights on a board didn’t work for me, I needed the full picture. And once I had it, I saw the problem.

  Not only were the enemy ships faster and far more maneuverable than our ships, but they didn’t seem to use a consistent flight pattern, choosing to regroup and scatter at strange intervals. There was math behind it somewhere, but I couldn’t get a lock on it.

  “What the hell are you doing with a GravPack?” Bushfield asked.

  “With this I have a shot at being faster than they are, that’s what,”
I answered, “and I think it’ll work.” I outlined a quick plan and she agreed.

  Taking off toward one of the enemy ships at speed, she played chicken with it, heading right in. Both ships opened fire, though neither looked ready to break off. Little did they know.

  She broke hard, relative up to the cockpit of the enemy, and I split off, selecting its underbelly as my new attractor. I blinked quickly, selecting my options and wishing I could wipe my forehead. No sweat. Just one of those desires that hit in the middle of a firefight.

  This guy didn’t know what to do with me. He thought I was a missile at first and did the normal flare-and-chaff scatter response. So I closed my eyes and trusted that my proximity field would keep the crap off me. I lowered it from five feet to a suicidal two. I wanted close and personal.

  He cut tight, and I wasn’t sure if even my GravPack could keep up with him. Turned out that it could. The selector shifted clean and I targeted his upper wing. As I came up on him, I let the proximity field stop me two feet out and then cut it out of the loop. My fingers grabbed around the wing and I kept my head out of the sweep of his engine.

  With my free hand, I grabbed my gun and put it right against the wing. Pulled the trigger and couldn’t help but grin. Not many people got to ride a fighter by just holding on in deep space. Perk of my life.

  Time for basking later. I sliced through his wing, slower than I wanted, and cut the engine free while he tried to shake me. The first roll wasn’t a big deal but with the second I set my GravPack to slave to his ship. He couldn’t toss me off no matter what he tried, after that.

  I let go of the wing, not needing a handhold once I was slaved to his ship, and used my now-free hand to grab the engine before it flew off. It’d need to cool before I stored it - the raw edge where I’d cut was bleeding heat and light. But it wouldn’t disable him badly, much less take out his ship.

  For that I decided to go the easy - if messy - route. A few blinks and I selected an attractor field around his cockpit. Not just near - around his actual cockpit. Then I stood and waited. Slightly showy and wasteful of time, but it would tell me a lot about how well the ships were made.