Cargo (The Ascendants Book 1)

by V. M. Law

  “You said Vitrol causes dementia and memory loss—”

  “It’s also used as a stimulant.”

  “Even more reason to stop him.” She leaned back, knowing how Mantiss felt about synthetics. After a pause, she concluded, “I’m going to keep an eye on him. You can share the bounty when I become rich.”

  Chapter 5

  The next morning was Kasey’s first as an adjutant to the captain of the Age of Discovery. Her coffee—real, with real sugar—transported her forty million miles to Earth, evoking the smell of soil and the bitter acidity of a cigarette like the ones Corbin smoked in his younger years. Castor and Pollox hung in the black, and Arcturus below them; so far from the sun, which resembled a copper coin—tarnished, rusty, stepped over—the Oort cloud shrouded all. Pulsars and asteroids recalled the afterglow burn of fireflies hooded in willow.

  From her bunk, the iced-over window translucent with grime turned the stars into a false facsimile of the array painted before her. But here on the bridge, one could look at a million stars between sips of coffee, turning in the other direction to find another thousand galaxies. In the interminable blackness between worlds, the cosmos shone like a diamond mine with a radiance not to be found on Earth, under the blanket of an atmosphere, or anywhere else but in the unforgiving expanse of space. Steam rising from her mug emanated the fragrance of coffee bean oil drifting in pools on the surface of her drink.

  An urgent message reached the captain’s cabin, shaking him from a drunken sleep. Everyone on the bridge who was privy to the new information had the instinctual notion that no one on board, or on any vessel currently out of orbit, would ever set foot on Earth again.

  Whispers spread, and doom written on the faces of higher ranking crew members worked its way around to the midlevel officials, and finally reached the newest members of the bridge personnel. Kasey, when she heard, dropped her coffee onto her plate, unable to process the arrival of the extraterrestrial guests that had reached the human solar system.

  In short, the Terran Council faced a day of reckoning that had not been experienced since the Signal reached an old American satellite one hundred and thirty four years ago.

  As Kasey slept off the last night’s drinking, waiting to begin her new job in the morning, a race of aliens, possessed of technological advancement that baffled even the smartest physicists, entered the human solar system. They decimated mining facilities, transportation hubs, and research stations in the fourth quadrant of the star, on the moons of Neptune.

  Within hours, four of the eleven Terran space stations, the Monoliths, were reduced to clouds of space junk catching the sun in their endless oscillation. On the 9th of August, 2429, almost five centuries after humanity reached out of its crib, an expeditionary force belonging to the Ides, an inter-dimensional and incomprehensible race of beings, set down on the surface of Earth, in the region once known as Germany, and sent an ultimatum to the ambassadors of the Terran Council.

  Humanity would provide to the Ides the scientists, researchers and engineers, the lifeblood of MarsForm and the Terran Council, and the sole progenitors of the human race in the stars.

  The communication was delivered by a self-aware computer named Nigel that spoke in the accent of the Australian continent, which, by its analysis, would produce the most calming effect on the paltry leaders of Earth. It requested the smooth transfer of the human race onto the Ides personnel carriers, where they would be taken through a worm hole behind the Oort cloud and into the home system of the alien race, for experimentation, genetic engineering, and entertainment.

  Nigel hoped that none of this came at too inconvenient of a time.

  An ambassador of the Council, Milo Faber, offered protest to the insolent computer that levitated before the Council members in their oaken hall. He began informing Nigel in a bellicose manner that the sovereignty of the human empire existed pristine in nature and no amount of alien technology would ever dampen the human urge to remain free, to pursue their ends, to colonize the stars.

  Never breaking his Australian accent, even after multiple requests from the leaders of Earth, the floating computer emanated from a cavity that opened in its chest a beam of blinding light, obscuring everything in the room save the screams of the once stolid Council members. For just a portion of a second, the temperature in the Council chamber spiked, reaching delirious heights, drawing sweat from those who sat in Faber’s immediate vicinity. The sweat evaporated from their skins with the same rapidity with which it dribbled from their fearful pores.

  When the light faded and the eyes of four hundred and nineteen Earthen rulers adjusted to their comparatively dim lighting, Milo Faber could not be found anywhere, and the only trace evidence that he stood among them a few seconds prior was the stench of barbecued flesh and melted polyester rising from the scorched hole in the carpet where he had stood, uttering his foolish proclamations of war against the intruders.

  The remaining members of the Council fell in line with Nigel, marching behind him single file to the steps of the Council’s capitol building in ancient Brandenburg, and felt the same immolating heat that blasted Mr. Faber from the world of the living.

  Chapter 6

  Kasey had been on her way to see Mantiss, needing to know what lay behind his message and unable to decipher his intentionally vague wording, when news of the Ides’ arrival on humanity’s home planet reached the Age of Discovery. The vessel touched down at Europa Station, and by the time the doors fell open, thousands of people streamed from it, rioting, stampeding, fighting their way to any form of communication that would allow them to contact Earth, to learn of who died, who had been taken.

  Were the Annexes holding? What did the Ides look like, how did they smell, and what hideous yammering did their language consist of? These questions, doubtlessly uttered in the swirling confusion below, reverberated up to the executive offices of the Station, where she stood at the window, looking down, uncaring of the strife that ripped apart the crew of the Age, thinking only about Mantiss and the Annex.

  She watched the chaos, obliged to sit through a disastrous meeting of the ranking members of the ship’s staff with questions of her own burning. Her mind wandered from the commotion in the conference room, the bickering Ganymede and whether or not it could be safer than Europa, whether or not Terran Council members could be trusted. Everything brought her to the words Mantiss left in pencil on a bar napkin, shoved underneath the cover of her bunk’s keypad lock.

  Happy Birthday! I have a present for you at my place after work. Have a great day, birthday girl!

  Had he found something? He couldn’t have had a change of heart so soon, she thought, and it definitely wasn’t her birthday. They had left the bar in an awkward silence, him not knowing how to stop her from pursuing ill fated ends, and she unable to resist the adventure, the chase of a drug smuggler and the lauds of respect that would come afterward.

  Did he find something?

  Since the news reached her, she’d been plagued by nightmare visions of Corbin. Seeing him immolated, the holds of the Annexes collapsing beneath the weight of foreign and terrifying bombardment, whose noise could only be surpassed by the screaming of steel and granite collapsing on itself in the depths of the Earth.

  The teeming activity of the whole host of the Age was on the tarmac below, rushing about like insects fleeing the burning ray of a magnifying glass in summer. They were desperate for any way of communicating with Earth, to discover who had died, who had been taken, what the aliens looked like. Kasey imagined the roar of human speech drowned out everything else, even the mechanical bellowing of the reactors powering the station from deep beneath the Europan crust.

  And above it all, a rising tide of disgust for the slouchy and unruly captain, who treated everyone present, everyone except Gustav, as if they had no more say in where to go or how to react than the late Terran Council. Which, as Ajax furiously pointed out, would no longer be enforcing any of its lofty edicts. They can all be damned, and
they’re all dead anyway. He carried on in this manner until the whole meeting fell apart in ruin and disorder.

  “We won’t make it to Ganymede, not without more fuel, and by the time we get that, they’re going to be knocking,” he argued. “If they have wormhole technology, they can be on Ganymede right now. They could be hovering over us.”

  Despair sounded among the twelve present, all sighing or bemoaning the current state of affairs except Farrow, who betrayed none of the evil characteristics that Gustav and Ajax saw in her. She remained calm and nearly silent through most of Ajax’s rant, until he broke to gather his breath, to renew his assault on the intelligence and capacities of the engineers, the navigational crew, the communication wing, everyone that held an association with MarsForm.

  “We are going to Ganymede because I am taking executive command of the Age of Discovery.” Her threat elicited a slew of derision from Ajax that carried on until Gustav silenced him.

  “Ms. Farrow, with all due respect,” he said, impressing Kasey with his diplomacy. He seemed nothing at all like the man she first saw two nights before as they began their approach to Europa. “Captain Hardmason has a valid point about the speed at which the Age of Discovery can travel, and about how easily detectable it must be for an army that came to us through a wormhole. If the report is to be believed, we must go to ground. Here and now.”

  You don’t seem to want the Age in harm’s way, Kasey thought, concealing her suspicion by scanning the horizon, barely vegetated, scorched by radiation until only the faintest hint of grass survived from the old terraforming project.

  Gustav continued, “This facility is easily defensible and if the Annexes haven’t been penetrated, we have no reason to believe this facility could or will be either. It certainly gives us better odds than being out there.” He jerked his head to the window

  “You seem to think this matter is up for debate. I might remind you that the vessel you pilot is MarsForm’s property, and as the senior most member of the company present in this room—” she paused, as if waiting to see if anyone would challenge her statement, “I am issuing an executive order to all crewmembers that the Age of Discovery is to leave for Ganymede at local morning, in four hours, when the sun crests that ridge your mute secretary is so fascinated by.”

  “My crew is my crew. I will not lead them to a slaughter.”

  “You are doing just that by staying here,” muttered one of Farrow’s engineers. Kovel, Kasey thought, though she still had not learned their names and indeed found it hard to tell them apart by mannerism as well.

  A second engineer continued, “We have been ordered, sir. Ganymede is equally as defensible—”

  “We’ll never make it to Ganymede, dunce,” Ajax screamed, his face red. Gustav, uninvolved until now, leaned in and whispered something into Ajax’s ear, calming the man, making him fall back into his chair, swiveling around like a disciplined child.

  Kasey loathed him, his attitude and posture, the way he talked to people around him, probably a relic of his celebrity status on Earth that she found, since her time working with him began a few hours prior, to be completely farcical. In reality, he seemed vain, which was to be expected, but also shy and weak, irate when contradicted, and stubborn. All of which belied the gentle smile he offered to cameras, the sultry undertone of romance that permeated his voice when he made speeches.

  He reminded her of a goat, or a fat and lazy cow that existed only to have its udders rubbed and massaged, contributing sour milk for those that indulged it, and at the moment of his over exaggerated emphasis on the word “make,” Kasey knew that she needed to escape the meeting, leave Farrow and Ajax to their bickering, and find out what happened to her family, and Mantiss.

  ***

  As it happened, fortune granted her wish.

  The engineer who had been called a dunce—Rasputin, who reeked always of stale cigarettes that to Mantiss would have smelled of luxury—fumed into a rage, standing with such vigor that his chair flew from his ass and clattered to a skittering upended halt on the floor. Punching the table, he screamed at Ajax with the veins in his neck dancing to the pulse of his anger. “You idiot! You are a fucking swine, Hardmason. I told the Chairman that you were a liability when he agreed to hire you, and you have proven me correct at every turn!”

  Ajax responded with a violent and inarticulate scream that slowly formed itself into words. “I have been out here since you were fixing tractor motors. I won’t be steered from my course by the fear of a coward who hasn’t seen a pint of blood in his entire life.”

  “That is enough!” screamed Farrow, the quivering of her hawkish beak betraying the first signs of her unraveling frustration with Hardmason. Even Gustav seemed, from Kasey’s vantage, to be growing tired of the captain’s rage, his bravado in the face of those who wanted something other than his own ends. Farrow went on to threaten him with iron bars of the prisoner-hold below the Engine Room, where the insufferable din of constant fission drove men to smash their heads into pulp on the metal cages of their solitude.

  Kasey felt a wave of relief wash over her when Ajax stormed out of the meeting. He demanded Gustav and her to follow him, to be done with the cowards who lived their lives in offices. For the first time since the arrival of the Ides, she had to stifle a laugh at the overblown rhetoric of the captain, who appeared now old and lacking in vitality, defeated and scampering away like a dog with its tail between its legs.

  In the hall, he regained his composure and set to doling out tasks. Gustav was to ready the crew for a siege, gathering them away from the hangars which would be the first targets. Instead, he would be getting them into the subterranean vaults that housed crews who stayed around, sometimes for many years, preparing and waiting for a return flight to their home.

  Kasey, after she had been dispatched to follow Farrow and discover what that foul bitch’s plans were, welcomed the opportunity to wrestle herself from Ajax’s side and find Llewellyn. His words, his unsigned birthday card identifiable only by his cleverly disguised scrawl, still held her mind rapt, forcing her to think that if he did change his mind about pursuing Ajax and Gustav, maybe their plotting carried more weight than a drug ring could support.

  She thought again about what she heard in the cargo hold, what she didn’t tell Mantiss. Charybdis, the Jump, the Catacombs. Everything in her mind told her that Vitrol had nothing to do with the scheme the three conspirators revealed to her that night.

  She went off in search of Mantiss, confident that if she needed Morgyn Farrow, she would be able to find her aboard the Age of Discovery, preparing to leave Ajax and Gustav and any crewmembers that wished to stay, marooned on Europa after the last vessel departed for the safe haven on Ganymede.

  Chapter 7

  Kasey began her search for Llewellyn Mantiss in the residencies, expecting him to stay with his brother, Edgar. In her mind, a stand on Europa, even if it meant death for both of them and everyone else who stayed, would be preferable to dying in the company of MarsForm loyalists. Those patriots would venture out into space, sure of their defeat, simply because an official bulletin requested it.

  Edgar was a permanent resident of the facility, and by this point, the two might already be drunk somewhere. She began her search in the mess halls.

  The residencies were built into a range that, for a brief period, overlooked a manmade sea, which, in time, became a lake, and then a swamp. It finally dried up and became the hardpan that burned her now with radiating heat. She crossed it breathing through an oxygen tank and particle filter plugged into her nose, shielding her eyes from the salted sting of sediment on the wind. The intense heat surrounded Jovian Lunar Outpost 37B, which made it shimmer in the haze.

  Inside the caverns, supported by steel columns reaching the stalactites that must have once dripped with water, sounds of grief amplified against the basalt crashed into her ears. The noise obfuscated the sound of her screaming for Mantiss.

  She worked her way into the web of people in
the vast antechamber of the residency complex, a hive of hallways and descending ladders that crisscrossed and zagged deep into the crust. Mantiss told her once that the facility could house eighty thousand people for three years.

  People everywhere screamed over dead relatives and lost homes, the trauma of sudden, reality-shifting happenings that defy explanation or rationalization and leave those affected only with the burgeoning sense of randomness and estrangement from what had been normal the day before. She had seen earthquakes and flashfloods in the years before her town had been relocated to the refugee camps, and ultimately to the Annex. What passed before her, the sorrow and the apathy, the frantic hair pulling, the indigence of disbelief that pulled people into ineffective stupors as if they nodded on Sedats, reminded her of the months after the levies overflowed and the floodgates were opened on the valley.

  The throng opened before her, an ululation in the pulse of people crowding this way or that, stepping on each other and climbing the walls of the cave system to search for friends in the tide. Through the opening, the hulking figure of Edgar Mantiss looked around like an injured animal, his eyes wide and empty, taking in everything but seeing no shelter, no aid for what plagued his mind.

  She rushed to him, pushing people out of her way, eliciting rude responses from those whose feet she crushed. “Edgar!” He turned in her direction, unable to make out who called to him in the crowd. “Edgar, over here!”

  The crowd swallowed him, and she had trouble locating him again in the chaos, until he emerged from the flow and grabbed Kasey’s hand.

  “Kasey. They have him!”

  “What? Who?” People massed around them, forcing their way into the residency complex and down, as deep as they could make it. Their pushing squeezed Kasey’s ribs, and a sharp popping sound made her wince and draw in a painful, weak breath.