This Starry Deep

by Adam P. Knave

  The light passed over me again, quicker this time. A third time and I would worry, but the second hopefully indicated nothing more than a passing turn. So far so good, except now I had to do something other than hide: I had to use the situation to my advantage.

  The idea was crazy, but insane felt about as good as it’d get. Shae was still out there and these were the guys who knew where. A ship full of unready, gang-pressed recruits was running around on my say-so, trying to save lives they couldn’t be expected to save. Bushfield and Frogger and the rest were somehow surviving an impossible fight just because they had to. Entire planets were at stake. I couldn’t do less.

  Unsure whether these brightly painted ships could detect gravity engines - we knew so little - I twitched on my GravPack on the lowest setting. Like taking a strong, controlled jump. The ships each sported four engines in a cross pattern, but the connecting point was empty. No engines, no lights, and no visible sensors.

  My GravPack couldn’t change vectors enough to keep up with this sort of design, even if I pushed the pack to max on a full battery. I shed the torn outer suit I’d been wearing and watched the ships.

  I snuck up on one of them as they seemed to prepare to leave the Washburne to history, and I grabbed hold. My pack cancelled any addition to gravity I might have made if the ships had an artificial field of their own, but I didn’t detect one while clutching tight.

  This would only work if the ships flew in formation, with my hitched ride in the back, and if no other ship got behind us. Basically, it wouldn’t work well at all. Still, it was all I had.

  We left the wreckage and started to sweep up, a vector taking us over the field of battle. There were three dimensions out here to use and any good pilot learned to use them all as a matter of course, but even so, battles only range so far. Most of them end up looking elliptical while they’re in full swing, many of them approximating a three-dimensional sphere with the shape of the orbit of Earth, actually. I wasn’t sure if that was significant or meant anything at all other than that the universe is a strange place, but I’d noticed it years ago.

  These are the sort of things you think about while holding on to the back of a speeding space fighter. Well, that and Shae. Every second I hung on was a second I grew closer to finding her. I lost myself in thoughts of her, like a stupid old man, just long enough to almost miss another ship coming up behind us.

  I let go, dropping off my hitched ride, and let myself drift off their vector a bit, decreasing my visibility. My target screen blinked online and I lashed myself to the new ship, just to keep up. If all my thinking was right, their base ship shouldn’t be too far. These smaller fighters couldn’t have the fuel to go that far on their own.

  All my communications had to remain off so no signal would give me away. I set my life support on down to the lowest sustainable setting and let myself get towed by an invisible strand of gravity. Where they went, I would go. Napping was out of the question, though vaguely tempting.

  How many times had I been in a situation like this before? Not exactly like, of course, but set and drifting with nothing to do but wait. Too many. You learned to take cat naps when you could afford them, to store up needed energy. Except I couldn’t afford to this time. If the ship I was following broke off I’d have to be aware of it, and I still needed to get closer onto one of them before they docked, to try and work out how I could possibly get inside whatever they decided to dock with.

  Not every maneuver in a fight is exciting. Some of them are just holding on tight and hoping. This was one of those. The fifth ship, the one that had joined us along the way, started to peel off. I caught a whiff of the vector adjustment before it happened, a wiggle in the gravity, more than enough time to switch ships again. I relashed my GravPack to the ship I had first held onto and snuck back up on it.

  I reeled in and held onto the rear cross of my original ride. I could see, on my display, a large gravity mass coming up on us, just out of plane with our flight vector. Too small to be a planet or moon, and with the teardrop shape of a ship. Engines weighed more - even with gravity buffering, they warped a ship’s profile. They definitely had some kind of gravity-based shielding, just enough to make life on their ship manageable, but no more than that. The signals were too weak for anything else.

  The formation cut hard, realigning their vector, and sped up. They cut away, going anywhere other than their obvious landing point, making impossible turns. I got confused for a minute until I realized they were on a last ditch effort to lose any automatic sensors trailing them. No need to ever lead anything to their ship. They worried about it that much.

  I started to wonder exactly how badly they worried when the lights came on. Blinding, startling lights, from drones I hadn’t been able to spot, all glared at me, making a show of the human barnacle.

  Well, that answered the question of whether or not they would spot me. I was bust, and out of moves. Even with a full tank and extra charges for my gun I wouldn’t have stood a chance against a fleet of this size and speed, much less their mother ship, much less both at once.

  Sighing, I flipped on my communications array and let go of my stolen ride. Floating there, visually pinned and tracked by lights, I wondered if they would shoot first or be smart enough to want to know exactly who else knew where they were.

  A burst of green light washed over me. I felt like my blood had been replaced by fire. I screamed, not from the pain, but from rage that I wouldn’t get to see Shae again if this beam killed me on the spot. Then the world sunk into black, fast enough it couldn’t even make a sound.

  Chapter 26 - Mud

  A GLANCE BEHIND ME to make sure Mom still followed. Of course she did, the perfect distance away, too. Close enough to touch me with half a lunge, but far enough away that if something took me out it wouldn’t get her as well, not with the first shot.

  We needed to get into a vertical shaft and head up a few levels, but the problem so far had been finding one we could access. Which is to say the hallway we snuck down flashed red constantly. They knew that Mom had escaped. Or they knew I’d snuck on board. Possibly both. Probably both, if I wanted to be honest about it. And they’d stopped caring who knew it.

  Not the best at this, really. I mean, I wasn’t horrible, easily in the top few percent, but when it came to sneaking in and out of Government battleships, near the top didn’t help much. You had to be the best, and I wasn’t. My mother, however, was.

  “Mom,” I whispered, “we can’t stay out in the open like this.” It was true. There were security patrols scanning the whole ship and camera feeds being actively watched. We had only minutes, at a max, before we found ourselves spotted and grabbed. But the access shaft we needed wasn’t close enough to just make a break for it and hope.

  “Unless we make sure they can’t get to us,” she replied, drawing close enough to touch my elbow.

  Turning to look at her, I raised an eyebrow. “That’d tell them right where we are,” I said.

  “But not,” she said, “where we’re going. We just have to make it look like we’re headed somewhere else.”

  “So we blow the security cameras, wreck the hall, and make it look like we went down?”

  “Pretty much,” she agreed.

  “But don’t we want to go down, later?”

  “That’s later. We can worry about later when it’s right in front of us, but we won’t even get that far unless we focus on the right-this-second.”

  “Seems a bit slapdash, Mom.” I loved her and knew she’d done this sort of thing a million more times than I had, but she was the planner. Dad would rush in and work things out as he went, not her. She always worked out her angles before making the first move. Which meant, I guess, the angles weren’t workable just yet. So she fell back on Dad’s playbook.

  We kept moving along the hallway until we came to a door. Mom touched my shoulder to stop me. She opened the door. I’m not sure how, actually - she did something to the lock I couldn’t see. I wonde
red how she’d overridden the handprint lock so fast but dropped the thought when she yanked me into the dark room and shut the door behind us.

  “What do you have, explosive-wise?” she asked.

  “Four blast cores, three handfuls of exploding paste, highgrade. Past that, some charges for a standard sonic gun.” I mentally ran through the inventory of each pocket as I spoke, making sure I didn’t miss anything. Then I touched each pocket as well, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to pack anything I thought I had. Nope, my count was right.

  “All right,” Mom said. “Now, they’ll track for prints and heat residue, as well as for the usual signs, to tell where we went. So if we bring the corridor down around us and leave a big hole leading down, then we can go up.”

  “Wait, how will we go up at all? We have to get to an access shaft, and that’s past this hallway. If we bring it down while we’re standing here, we can’t just waltz right through.”

  Mom laughed. “Well I’m hoping they’ll think the same,” she said. “Here’s the thing of it. They know I escaped.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re not sure if they know about your break-in as well.”

  “Of course,” I said, “no way to know that, so I’m assuming they do.”

  “I’m guessing the same thing. But they also don’t know who you are or what you’ve done since. You’re not bad at this, Mud. You’re actually really good. So all they know is that someone cycled an airlock, at best.”

  “All right, then let’s assume that.”

  “Which means they can try and track you and me and assume a lot of things, but right now they don’t know anything much for certain outside of an airlock cycle nowhere near me and that I escaped and left some blood and ash behind.”

  “So we blow the corridor and convince them you’re alone?”

  “Exactly. We spread the paste along the ceiling, and a joint of the wall that faces the maintenance shaft, then some extra on the floor.”

  “We blow it in order and they think you went down.”

  “Sure, but that isn’t enough to fool them and make them think it was only me.”

  “What will, then?”

  “Blood.”

  “Mom!”

  “I’m bleeding, Mud, it happens, and we can use it. Now. Go spread paste and get ready to run.”

  I sighed and left the closet alone, pulling a wad of explosive pastes from a pocket. I couldn’t reach the ceiling without jumping and must have looked completely ridiculous leaping and smearing my hand along the ceiling as I went. Skipping down the hallway, I suppose. Not very stealthy, but we were out of time.

  I spread it down along the wall as well and then stuck in two blast cores, one at each end. As I spread a half-handful on the floor in a pattern, Mom snuck out of the closet. I’m not sure why she bothered to leave sneakily - if my antics hadn’t gotten us caught yet, she certainly wouldn’t have tipped the balance, but old habits die hard, I guess.

  She pulled back the bandage around one shoulder and pressed it into the wound, wincing. I pulled her over to where we could hopefully stand safely and nodded at her, offering her the detonator with my free hand. She shook her head at me. Fine. I’d press it.

  Sound stopped having meaning, standing that close to the explosion of the ceiling and wall. The pressure wave from it flung debris at us with speed, ripping and slicing open clothing and skin. My ears rang, my eyes stung, and my skin ached.

  I hit the second detonation anyway. Smaller, but still painful, added to the first. Sure did make a good-sized hole in the floor, even as it sent the debris from the ceiling bouncing again. I took a chunk to the shoulder and spun around from the force of it.

  Mom was moving forward as fast as she could, the dust still settling. She rubbed the bandage along part of the edge of the hole in the floor and then dropped it down. “That should convince them I’m alone and gone down that way.”

  “Won’t they still wonder about the airlock cycle?” I asked as we ducked into the now-open maintenance shaft for a bit and started to move again. I wasn’t sure if I screamed or whispered, my ears still full of bells.

  “They’ll assume it was a short circuit from my messing with the lock in my cell.”

  “You hope.”

  “I hope,” she said.

  We ducked out of the maintenance shaft and took off down the hallway as fast as we could. Everyone would be deploying toward the explosion, and though some might pass us, it was a risk we’d have to take.

  We almost made it to the access shaft we needed to go up before security came directly at us. They were surprised, and surprised people don’t always think fast enough. As the one in front keyed his mic to let command know he’d spotted us, not only Mom but me, which would have blown every plan and made exploding a hallway with ourselves in it a worthless gesture, I pounced.

  We went down, landing with my elbow braced against his face. I felt something crunch and rolled forward, intending to come up directly into the next guy’s solar plexus. Luckily I managed to stop myself short when I caught sight of my mother’s bandaged foot going by the corner of my eye.

  The second security goon crumpled and Mom put him down for a while with a short jab to the temple. She grabbed his helmet fully off his head, from where she winged it sidearm at the third guard. He ducked, bringing up his sonic sidearm - the thought of letting command know about us all forgotten. I let him get his gun out but not raised before I tangled myself in his legs, shouldering him in the inside of his hip joint. I felt a wet pop and Mom had his face covered before he could scream.

  We both stood and started to move, without a word. We hit the access shaft door and grabbed the ladder, climbing without discussing it. We’d been rumbled, and even if they didn’t get discovered quickly they would be eventually, and that’d let the whole ship know we weren’t down levels, but had been heading away from the explosion.

  They would also, fairly easily, guess Mom wasn’t alone after all. No, we’d been made, and now it was only a matter of time before we got pinned down somewhere. Outnumbered by hundreds, possessing a handful and a half of explosive paste and three full sonic gun charges wouldn’t even begin to twitch our odds toward acceptable.

  Our best bet would be to go up an extra few levels and confuse them, and then fight and sneak our way back down to the navigation backup rooms that would tell us everything we needed to know. From there we could, hopefully, find a communications room as well and work out what had happened to Dad. Mom didn’t seem worried, but I edged that way, myself.

  For now, though. It was ladders and quickness, and trying to not bleed all over the place. I also longed for my ears to stop ringing. Made it a lot harder to hear anyone coming up on us like this.

  I glanced down to make sure Mom was still behind me. Of course she was. I could be sure of that, and her slight manic grin reassured me. This had turned sideways in almost every way possible and she was starting to enjoy herself. Which, history told me, meant there would be a lot more explosions coming, and sooner than I might like.

  Chapter 27 - Meanwhile

  ONE SMALL SHIP dodged and spun in the blackness. It drifted between the wreckage of the Washburne and the ongoing battle approaching Trasker Four. The acting ship’s pilot worked to keep as clear of everything going on as she could.

  Her navigator spotted the life pods that shot out of the Washburne before they’d even showed up. He would spot them and find coordinates for Bee. She would maneuver the ship as best she could, the controls never quite feeling comfortable under her hands, and pull up alongside them.

  The non-specialized crew would manage the airlock matching and pull people from the escape pod into ship, then seal everything up again so they could continue on their way, looking for the next pod.

  They focused on the damaged units first. There was no way, they each knew, that they could hope to hold everyone. So they prioritized as best they could, without proper, full scans, and saved who they could.

 
They did their best. Not only for themselves, so they could sleep at night and not see the demons of dead, the floating bodies dancing before their eyes, but for their leader, though he wasn’t present. He’d brought them together and treated them as a compliment under his command, as a team, and they wanted to live up to that.

  The last thing any of the four wanted was for him to return and be disappointed in their progress, considering how hard he had worked himself to save what they held dear. So they flew carefully, trying to stay off the sensor arrays of anyone on either side at first, and picked up the people they could.

  None of their rescues went as planned, of course. They considered themselves a team but did not act like one. Worse yet, they knew it, and saw the gulf between what they expected and were doing, letting the frustration gnaw at them.

  Their inability to work together combined with their inability to work with a defined military presence and protocol. The frustration levels rose, and rose yet again until in-fighting broke out amongst the crew. That lasted exactly as long as it took for them to find another pod that needed their help. The work centered them and reminded them of who they were and what they were doing.

  Through it all, the saved crew members of the Washburne stood watching, silent. They’d been surprised by the attack and subsequent destruction of their ship, their home while on duty. Adding emotional insult to injury was the rescue from damaged escape pods by a ship full of non-combatants, who were also utterly unequipped to handle the ship they flew. So the tattered remnants of the Washburne crew found themselves incapable of doing anything to help or hinder. Confusion made them mute, and shock made them not care about the confusion.

  All told, this strange, underpowered, and under-coordinated ship made a difference despite itself. Its crew, as well, made a difference to each other, and by the time the military envoys contacted them to take them out of active rescue duty, they had become something of the team they thought they could be. Not proven in many ways, but established in their heads and instincts as a unit of people who could work together and gave a damn.