Twin Stars 1: Ascension

by Robyn Paterson

  The Linkspace conference Ping An was taking part in was in a virtual conference that looked and felt like a real place, but of course she was not actually there. From the point of view of the four pirate captains, they were standing on a semi-translucent platform in space slightly above the ships of their battle-group, each of them appearing as they did in reality to keep confusion to a minimum.

  Captain Michaels from the Clockwork God, a tall imposing man with dark, leathery skin and small eyes, gestured toward the ships around them- “Take a look for yourself, Bella. We’ve got seven ships left, all of them damaged except the Belleflower and the Stag Beetle.”

  The hawk-faced woman with the short black spiky hair cursed, “We might as well be dead already.”

  “Hold on!” Protested Captain Andrews of the Stag Beetle, “I got the escort carrier!”

  “For all the good it does you,” Bella St. James, Captain of the Castille sneered. “With all its systems locked down- it’s just more dead weight!”

  “My men are working on it now,” the skinny ginger haired man whined. “They…just need more time.”

  Michaels shook his head. “She’s right, Andrews. We don’t have time for salvage; we have to get out of here.”

  “I thought,” Ping An cut in. “We were going to fight?”

  “What?” Michaels held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “And, get cut to pieces by that cruiser? No thanks!”

  “So we run?” Ping An said, pressing her point. Between the group, a map of the star system appeared with glowing points representing the major elements. “The nearest jump point is two days away, and that’s at speed we don’t have. I say we head for the base.” She made a green halo appear around the location of the system supply base that had been the reason for the raid, and a dotted line course appear between them and it. A time of 36 hours, 14 minutes appeared as a transit time.

  “And then what?” Michaels asked. “Knock and ask them to let us in? You think it’s going to be that simple?”

  Ping An smiled sweetly, “Maybe it is.”

  Bella made a dismissive gesture and the course Ping An had plotted on the map disappeared. “Cut the crap, Zhang. We’re in a bad spot here.” A new course appeared, this one aimed at the nearest system jump point. “We’re going to make for the jump point. And, for the record, Lam and Veloski already said they’d vote with me, and Foss is in his sick bay.”

  “Oh, I see.” Ping An said, shaking her head. “How convenient for you.”

  That got an angry reaction from the other woman- “Are you challenging my word, Zhang?” She said icily.

  “Me?” Ping An said, laying a hand on her chest in mock innocence. “I’d never think of such a thing.” Then she snorted in derision. “I gotta hand it to you, Bella. You work fast.”

  “Hey!” Captain Andrews stepped in, “Don’t the rest of us a get a say?”

  “Captains who lose their ships don’t get a say.” Michaels commented, crossing his arms.

  “I found a new ship,” Whined Andrews, looking to each of the other Captains.

  “If you can call it that.” Michaels joked. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Enough!” Bella ordered. “I’m in charge, and that’s final. What we need to discuss is how we’re going to deal with that cruiser, and luckily for all of you, I have a plan.”

  Ping An shook her head. “This should be good.”

  Hearing the remark, Bella looked at her and smiled a wicked grin. “Well Zhang, since you’re so quick to jump in, I’m going to give you the starring role.”

  * * *

  “Hand me that joiner, will ya?”

  Vaela Smith had come to the ship’s bridge looking for Ping An, and had been about to leave when a hand had appeared from behind one of the consoles and waved to get her attention.

  Following the direction the hand indicated, Vaela stepped over to the railing that ran around the command section of the bridge and found three oddly shaped tools magnetically clipped to the red metal railing.

  “Ahh, which one is the joiner?”

  There was a sigh, and Leederman’s head popped up from behind the control panel to look at her. She cringed inwardly, he was one of the people she’d hoped to avoid.

  “Oh, hey Vaela.” He said, and pointed to the last one. “The one with the green handle, could you bring it here?”

  Vaela inwardly sighed, but nodded and did as she was told, hoping to make this a short encounter lest Leederman begin trying to chat her up again.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” He took it, and offered his thanks. “We lost a few conduits when that missile went off near the ship. I’m trying to get them all back online before trouble comes calling.”

  Then he ducked back down behind the panel and began to work again, leaving Vaela at first a bit relieved, but then she felt annoyed. Didn’t he consider her worth talking to anymore? Or, as she’d started to feel when she’d came on board, had she been declared the captain’s pet- to be surreptitiously ignored.

  She stood there for a time, trying to decide whether to stay or go, then suddenly his head popped back up and he looked at her curiously. “Was there…something I could help you with?”

  “Oh ah…” Vaela thought quickly, trying to come up with something to talk about. If she asked about Ping An, that would be the end of it, so she asked about the first thing that came into her head. “I was wondering…about that cruiser. Howcome it can just go where it wants, and we can’t? I thought you needed a jump point beacon to travel into hyperspace.”

  “Oh yeah, that.” He looked at her quizzically. “Didn’t you pay attention during your ship orientation classes?”

  “Umm…no…” She leaned back against the rail. “I didn’t take any.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “Well, the clan wanted me to start work as soon as I’d joined.” She said, feeling a little uncomfortable at talking about her past but deciding it was necessary. “I guess…they don’t get many cryptographers joining up.”

  Now that really had Leederman’s attention. “Cryptographer, eh?” He stood up, using a cloth to wipe sealant from his hands. “So, what kinda stuff do they have you doing?”

  “Leederman,” she said, and shook her head.

  “Oh!” He smiled sheepishly. “Right, you probably can’t talk about it. All secret and stuff. Well…Look, uh, it’s pretty simple.”

  Between them, he made a simple translucent 3D graphic of a solar system appear, then it shrunk down and another similar system appeared a short distance away from it. “Space between solar systems is too big to cross, right? So we duck into hyperspace instead and that lets us go fast enough it’s not a problem. Got it?”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  A little dotted line had appeared between the two solar systems, with a tiny green cylindrical starship icon sitting at one end. “Now, the only problem is, you can’t navigate in hyperspace- it’s an empty void with nothing to see, right? Plus there’s plasma currents and eddys, and even a little distance off course can be a big deal the farther you go.” Two bright blue dots had appeared at either end of the dotted line, and the little ship moved up to one of them and then became semi-translucent as it began to follow the line between systems. “That’s what the jump points beacons are, they’re like a string we follow to get us from A to B. You jump next to a jump point at the system edge, follow it to the other end, and then bang! You’re where you wanna be.”

  Vaela watched the little green ship icon reach the end of the line and then become bright again as it popped back into realspace. “Huh. So…if that’s true, why doesn’t that ship need a “string” to follow?”

  This got her a shrug. He didn’t know.

  “Imperial ships are different than the rest of ours. They have some system that lets them navigate in hyperspace without needing to follow a jump line. They can even make short jumps, y’no- like in-system? This lets them go wherever they want really fast while the rest of us have to chug it across space. Sure, gravitic driv
es are fast, but it still takes a couple days to get in-system most of the time.”

  She nodded, suddenly actually interested. “So, it’s like a mystery then?”

  “Yep, some big secret.” He agreed. “That’s how they stay on top. If everyone had their navigation system then they’d lose their edge. Sure, lots of people have tried to reverse engineer it, but so far no one I know’s done it.”

  A new holo-graphic appeared between them, this one showing a tiny image of their fleet hanging in space.

  “’Course, not every Imperial ship has this system, so that’s why the smaller ships we ambushed today didn’t just jump out. Also, it takes jump drives a while to recharge between jumps since they take so much power. Big ships usually have more than one jump drive, but because they’re so big it’s rarely more than two. It can jump in, and jump out, but it can’t just keep doing it nonstop.”

  Vaela nodded, understanding. “So that’s why he didn’t come back yet.”

  “Right, he’s probably out there recharging somewhere.” A little red ship icon appeared, circling the fleet like a shark. “Waiting for his chance to jump in and pick a few of us off before he jumps out again. We’re days away from a jump point, and he can pretty much come and go as he likes.”

  “Hold on!” Vaela raised a hand to stop him. “If he does that, why don’t we just jump to hyperspace? You know- force him to chase after us? We don’t need to move, just not be here.”

  “Well,” he scratched his chin as he considered it. “First, we’re almost blind in hyperspace. Second, we don’t know how blind he is. Third…well, there’s a big risk of us getting separated and we’ll be stuck in there for a while as our drives recharge.”

  “Isn’t it better than dying here?”

  Leederman shrugged. “Not up to me. Take it up with the captain.”

  Vaela wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly feeling very cold despite the temperature regulating smartsuit she wore. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

  “Well y’no, everyone’s gotta go sometime.” He said, making no attempt to reassure her. “But, I have seen Ping An get us out of worse.”

  Vaela shivered, shaking her head. “I wish I’d never agreed to come on this stupid mission!”

  Leederman grinned at her from across the holographic, the blue-green glow giving his face an almost demonic cast. “You shouldn’t have joined a pirate clan, we do stupid stuff like this all the time.”

  * * *

  Vaela found Ping An in the ship’s commissary, sipping a drink and looking thoughtfully at an image of the space outside superimposed over a wall to create the illusion of a window for a room in the middle of the ship. The Belleflower actually had very few real windows, but almost every room had a good view of the outside if the occupants wished it. Nearby, at a distance just barely visible, the Castille hung in space, it looked like a snail with three shells instead of one.

  “A crown for your thoughts?”

  There was a delay, then Ping An turned to look at Vaela as the latter sat down to join her Captain.

  “Hmmm?” She said sleepily, then gave a faint smile. “Oh, hey.”

  “You’re still in that conference link?” Vaela asked, taking a moment to put in an order for some coffee through her AR link.

  Ping An shook her head. “Nah,” she said. “That ended a while ago.”

  “Anything good?” Vaela asked, hopeful.

  Ping An’s sour look put a quick end to that idea.

  So, Vaela told her about her idea, the one about playing peek-a-boo using hyperspace to lose the cruiser. An old beat-up serving bot brought her coffee just as she was finishing.

  “Leederman’s right,” the pirate captain told her. “Won’t work. Plus, only the Belleflower and one other ship have more than one hyperdrive module, so we’d lose two ships, and then be even weaker when he came to finish us off. One ship could try it, maybe sit in Hyperspace and hide for a while, but not two or more.”

  “So, why don’t we just vanish, then?” Vaela asked. “Leave the rest of the fleet behind?”

  “I thought about it,” Ping An said. “Especially after I heard Bella’s plan. But, we don’t know if that thing can see us in hyperspace, and it’s too risky.”

  “Is Bella’s plan…that bad?”

  Ping An sighed. “You want the good news, or the bad news?”

  “Good news.”

  “Well,” Ping An said. “The good news is that our new leader -Bella- has a plan to try catch that ship the next time it pays us a visit. Which should be really soon.”

  Plans were good, Vaela was all for them. “And…the bad news?”

  “The plan is…that we’re going to make it look like we’re running for the jump point beacon. Most of the ships are going to travel ahead, but two ships are going to stay behind as bait. When he comes for the slow ships, the others will turn around and attack him. This is bad, by the way, because whoever stays behind will probably die before the other ships can arrive.”

  Vaela stared at her, aghast- “That’s a horrible plan!”

  “Yep,” said Ping An casually, taking a sip of her drink. “I thought so too.”

  “Wait,” a thought struck Vaela. “Who’s going to stay behind?”

  Ping An made an upward sweeping gesture of the room around them with one hand. “We can launch our drones the moment he arrives, and they’re to keep him busy. They’d be useless otherwise, it would take them too long to get here. The Stag Beetle is our escort- Bella is cleaning house and Captain Andrews made the list.”

  “A very horrible plan!”

  Ping An shrugged. “Tell that to our new boss.”

  They sat in silence for a time, Vaela weighing her options. She could ask for a transfer to one of the other ships, but how would Ping An take it? She hadn’t signed on for this, and she deserved as much.

  Ping An must have seen it on her face, because when the Captain finally spoke she said- “The plan’s chances of success are pretty good, if we can disable her drive sections. On the other hand, the chances of us surviving…not so much.” Then she looked at Vaela directly, “If you want off, just give the word. Nobody will think less of you for it.”

  It was her attitude that surprised Vaela- “How can you be so calm about this?!?” Vaela said, fighting to keep her feelings in check, and losing. “You’re going to die!”

  Again, Ping An made a nonchalant motion. “Been there, done that a few times. Still here.”

  “I don’t know how you can do it,” Vaela said, feeling the hot tears start. “How can you be so casual with your life?”

  Ping An took another sip from her drink, “Did I ever tell you I used to be a first officer in my colony’s defense fleet?”

  Vaela sniffed, “But, you’re so young?”

  “I was younger,” she said thoughtfully. “The Tester Auxiliary Home Defense Fleet was made up of volunteers from the different asteroid mining colonies in my home system. Just a bunch of kids and old people ferrying folks around and rescuing stray satellites.”

  “I joined up when I was fifteen to get out of my grandparent’s place, and by the time I was seventeen I was officer on one of their ships- the Naiad’s Kiss.” To Vaela’s surprise, Ping An smiled and she could see the happy memories expressed on her friend’s face. “Sure, she was old, but she was a great ship, and we were like family. Sophie, Solantro, Nan, Captain Weeks- we did it all. Nan used to be a real navy man, so he kept us kids in line. Never wanted to be an officer, though, so the Captain gave me the job.”

  Vaela, calming down, couldn’t help but be swept along in the story. “I bet you were pretty good at it.”

  “Yep,” Ping An said, still staring out at the stars. “I’d like to think so.”

  “So…What happened?” Vaela said, curiosity getting the better of her. “How did you go from there to…here?”

  The smile on Ping An’s face faded, she took another sip and then looked at Vaela sadly. “Taxes.”

  “Taxes?” Vael
a parroted.

  “Some fool in the colonial government decided he didn’t want to pay the new Imperial System Taxes,” Ping An let her gaze drift back to the stars, she must have seen the effect her anger was having on Vaela when the young woman pulled away. “He got all the people behind him- told them stories about how we just needed to stand up to them, declare our independence and they’d back off. Stupid.” She said the last word like a curse.

  “We sent word to the Empire telling them that we were through. We were so convinced they’d let us go. After all, we were just a small mining colony without any planets in the system. Nothing of value except a few rocks, and even those weren’t worth that much.”

  “But, they didn’t.” Vaela continued, knowing where this was going.

  “No,” Ping An took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “They didn’t. The government assembled us at the jump point, ready to fight. We knew we were going to die if they came through, but we’d heard the speeches and listened to the plans the admirals made. Admirals.” She laughed bitterly at that word. “Just a bunch of old men playing soldier like the rest of us.”

  “I was afraid, we all were, but none of us showed it. They were like a bunch of real fleet people, and I was so proud of them. I was sure we could win if we only tried. All they had to do was give us the chance, let us fight…”

  She looked at Vaela again, all traces of anger gone, and a deep, haunted look in her eyes. “The Imperial ships didn’t use the beacon, though, they just appeared right over our colonies and let them have it. They didn’t even offer surrender, they just destroyed half the colonies and then told the rest to get in line and smarten up.

  “It took us three days to get home from the jump point, and by the time we did it was all over. We listened, though. We listened and heard the whole thing as we rushed home. We could still contact our families- get the news from them, find out what was happening. But, one at a time, they just...stopped....answering....our links.”

  “Ping An,” Vaela reached out to touch her friend’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”