by Nick Webb
“Two. One. Shift.” The pilot tapped a button and looked up.
The frantic interior of the fighter deck disappeared in a blink, replaced by a star field. Jayce craned his neck down and saw the dusty brown planet far below. The pilot aimed the bow of the ship towards an unremarkable brown spot on the planet’s surface and gunned the gravitic accelerator.
“Beginning our descent,” said the pilot.
Volaski leaned forward again, tapping Jayce on the shoulder. “Here, let me talk to Velar. She’ll be expecting me. If I don’t check in, she’ll blast us out of the sky.”
“She has orbital defense cannons?” Jayce began to wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to mount a ground assault.
“Nothing that fancy, no. We’re just a mining operation, remember? But she’s got a few turrets, and by my count just three shots would do it.” He smiled wryly at Jayce, and motioned towards the comm. Jayce flipped it on and motioned Volaski to have at it.
The pirate captain leaned farther forward and entered in a comm band frequency. “Velar, this is Volaski. You copy?”
Several moments passed, but a woman answered the hail. “Velar here. Status?”
“I’ve got three shuttles coming down. Full of Phoenix crew members. Their best and brightest.”
Jayce snapped his head back to Volaski with a start and reached his hand down to the sidearm strapped to his thigh. Volaski didn’t seem to notice. Was he betraying them? If he was, would he be this obvious about it?
“Good. You’re cleared to land in the courtyard. Commence with the plan once you’re here. Velar out.”
Jayce grabbed Volaski’s shirt and wrenched the man towards the floor until he gasped. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? What plan?”
Volaski heaved, trying to breathe properly. “Velar expects you to attempt a rescue.” He struggled against Jayce’s firm grip, but to no avail. “I was sent to appear to assist you with the rescue, and once you were all within the compound you would be incapacitated and sent to the mines as slaves.”
Jayce loosened his grip, but only slightly. “And remind me again, how can I trust you? How do we know you’re not going to just deliver us into her hands like you did the Captain?”
“Because. When we approach the compound, rather than land in the courtyard we’re going to take out their turrets, and then land in three separate locations, just like we planned.”
Jayce swore and spat a brown wad into the corner, but kept a firm grip on Volaski, whom he held to the deckplate. “Why the hell didn’t you tell us about Velar expecting us? Seems like a pretty important detail to leave out.”
Volaski seemed to force himself to breathe. “Because, if I told you before, I didn’t think you’d trust me.”
Jayce sneered. “I don’t. And now I trust you less.”
“I understand,” said Volaski calmly. “But I couldn’t take that chance. I knew that if we could just get out here on the shuttles that you wouldn’t change your mind. Really, this changes nothing. We still go in guns blazing. The only difference is that Velar will be even more taken by surprise than you planned on. Trust me, she doesn’t see this coming.”
Jayce held the sneer, but released his grip, allowing the pirate to pull back and smooth out his jacket. “I’m warning you, pirate, if you double-cross us, I’ll put a bullet in your motherfucking head.”
Volaski pulled at his sidearm and checked its clip. “Believe me, Sergeant Logan Jayce, I have no intention of betraying anyone today but my captor of twelve years. Velar is the one who’ll see the inside of a cell for the next fifty years. Gods know she deserves it.” He peered out the viewport to his right and looked down. “We’re nearly there. Pilot, can you handle the missile controls while you fly or shall I target the turrets?”
Jayce waved him off. “I’ll handle it. Just tell me where they are.” As he pulled up the missile fire controls he began to get the feeling in his stomach that he always got before battle. The tense, hyper-alert sensation that came with the rush of adrenaline. He was built for battle—he lived for it. But it still made him edgy. And now, with the new revelation from Volaski, he felt even more on edge than usual.
***
Jake couldn’t sleep that night. He couldn’t tell if it was the fact that he was laying on bare rock, if his muscles were too sore from all the mining, or if his mind was simply too full to calm down enough to drift off. Stretching out on the flattest, least jagged section of floor he could find, he tried to keep his eyes closed and his mind clear.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about Alessandro’s achievement. Jake could hardly believe it—the man had worked on that omni-scanner for less than an hour, and had somehow managed to broadcast a signal that interrupted the pain signal sent out by the boss’s controller. The man with the half-mustache continually amazed him. One of these days Jake was sure that Alessandro would rip off a mask and reveal himself as a sentient AI or something.
But it wasn’t just Alessandro’s work that kept Jake up.
Tovra.
The man had roused in Jake an idea. Tovra spoke of the Void—the giant molecular cloud that was impossible to scan, and yet by everything Tovra had said it was most likely teeming with brown dwarfs and rogue planets. Maybe even a full-fledged star or two, completely veiled from outside eyes by the thick cloud of molecular dust—left over from the primordial supernovas that formed it.
Jake’s idea was simple. Hide in the cloud. Use it as a base of operations against the Empire. They couldn’t be hopping from one world to the next out in inhabited space—eventually their luck would run out. Indeed, in Jake’s mind it already had, and they’d only even visited one planet so far. Granted, it was Destiny—a hellhole of a world if he ever saw one, and he could kick himself for letting Velar and Volaski convince him to come, but it certainly didn’t bode well for the future. How long until Admiral Trajan had a fleet waiting for him at the next world the Phoenix shifted to?
“Friend. You awake?” Jake heard Alessandro’s voice whisper at him from several feet away.
“Yeah.”
“What do think we should do with this thing? The omni-scanner?”
Jake grinned in the darkness. “I thought you would have had our escape completely planned by now, Bernoulli. And come up with a new solution to the gravitic field equations. And proved Fermat’s last theorem. And maybe even come up with a recipe for—“
Alessandro’s quiet laughter interrupted him. “I’m sorry, friend, I can’t help it. That theorem was proven over 600 years ago.”
“It was?” Jake chuckled. “Well that just shows you why I became a space jock instead of a mathematician.”
“Or a historian,” Alessandro added.
“Right.”
Alessandro shifted on the floor next to him. It was nearly pitch black: the cavern was lit only by a small utility light hanging against the far wall, ostensibly only there so that the mass of slaves could use the buckets lining the wall to relieve themselves in the middle of the night. At least, Jake assumed it was night. There was really no way to tell buried under one hundred meters of rock and dust.
“Look, friend,” Alessandro continued, “I’m no tactician. I can juggle an equation and fix electronics, but I leave the escape plans to you. I just don’t have the head for it.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that. Your little handiwork there is sure going to help, but there’s more than the boss to worry about. He’s got two cronies with whips. And even if we get to the surface who’s to say that Velar’s transmitter isn’t more powerful than the boss’s? And she could do more than make us feel pain. With a flick of a switch, we’re dead—” His head jolted as he hit his word limit, but the image, still only a day old or so, of Suarez’s cross-eyed blank stare after the bomb in his head had done its job haunted his thoughts. Maybe that was the real reason he couldn’t sleep. Another man down. Because of him. Because of Jake. Because he’d lied and stolen command from his best friend. He let the pain wash over him like a ref
ining fire. His penance. He deserved it.
Alessandro pointed the controller at his own head, and started talking. “Actually, friend, we’re safer than you think with regards to that. You see, the omni-scanner is not just interfering with the pain signal sent by the boss or Velar. It’s actually interfering with the processor in your head. If I’m right, it can only handle so many commands at once, and so I sent it a stream of idle commands. About fifty trillion of them. They may even still be in the command buffer, but it’s more likely that the processor resets after a certain number of identical commands. So if it looks like Velar is going to kill us, I can just resend the commands and we’ll be safe for a time.”
Jake shrugged. “Sure, but that doesn’t mean she can’t just shoot us.”
Alessandro fell silent for a moment. “There is that. Also, did you notice how many words I just said?” He held the omni-scanner up to his eyes. “I think I just disrupted the algorithm that tracks my quota.”
Jake smiled. He wasn’t sure how his friend had managed the past several days having to rein in his speech. “I was thinking maybe we could cause a distraction once we’re back on the surface. Like maybe rig an explosion, like you did with those mines. I’m sure that’ll grab their attention long enough for us to jet.”
Someone coughed nearby—their cold hacking indicating the years of inhaled dust from the mining operations. Jake imagined himself in twenty years, still drilling away into the rock wall, old, toothless, haggard. He shuddered and vowed that it wouldn’t be.
“I had two more mines, but they took them when I was out cold,” said Alessandro. In the dim light of the single fixture, Jake could just make out the growing shadow on his face that seemed to now blend in with the mustache, making it look almost whole.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure we’ll—“
Alessandro grabbed Jake’s shirt. “Hold on!”
“What? What happened?”
“I’ve still got it!” Alessandro seemed excited about something.
“The mines?”
“No, friend, the capsule I took out of the mine I threw. The anti-matter!”
It slowly dawned on Jake what Alessandro was suggesting, and he couldn’t decide if he was crazy, brilliant, or just really tired. “You’re kidding.”
Even in the darkness Jake could see the wide grin brimming out onto his face. “I never kid. Ok, I always kid. But not about this. I never kid about anti-matter!”
“But what kind of an explosion would that generate?”
“Enough to take out a starship.”
“So … exactly how does that help us?”
Jake wasn’t understanding. An explosion that large would not only take out the mine, it would destroy the entire compound above them, and likely any building for miles around.
Alessandro hesitated. “I, uh, well I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
But the man was right. A picogram of exploding anti-matter, or however much was in that vial, would surely be enough to distract their captors long enough to escape the compound. And once they were out? Then what?
Jake knew what happened next. He had to find his best friend. They’d heard nothing about Ben since they arrived in the mine—none of the other slaves had seen anyone new come in recently, and the boss wasn’t much for conversation. He owed it to his friend. Even at the risk of his own life and the lives of the two men resting nearby.
“Captain?”
Jake’s head snapped to his left, from the direction of the raspy voice that called to him. Who in the world was calling him Captain? Avery was snoring loudly to his right, and Alessandro lay near his head. But the voice.…
“Tovra?”
As his eyes focused on the man’s face, he recognized the Oberanian he’d talked to earlier in the day.
“Why are you calling me Captain?” he whispered.
Tovra chuckled. “Because. You’re from Earth, you speak in an authoritative, almost cocky tone, and you’re here. I assume some Imperial commander has blacklisted you and arranged for your retirement. Am I wrong?”
Jake hesitated. “Cocky?”
Tovra brushed aside his question. “Look. I’ve heard some of what you’ve said. I know you’re planning something, and I want in. I can help—I’ve been here for ages and I know things. Things that might be useful to you.”
Jake weighed his next question, then decided it was alright to trust the man. “Like where we can set off a minor anti-matter explosion without killing all of us, and yet big enough to distract them while we escape?”
“That depends. Is your ship still in orbit?”
“I’d assume so. Why? Can you help?”
“I think so,” breathed Tovra. He glanced nervously over his shoulder towards the light, as if looking for trouble.
Jake watched him warily. “And what is it you want in return.”
“Safe passage is all. Back to the Oberon system. Trust me, you’ll be safe there too. At least for the short term. You’ll be able to rest, repair your ship, stock up on supplies. We’ve had recent problems with our aggressive neighbor, the Vikorhov Federation, but our fleet keeps them from doing more than beat their chests. Trust me, you want to go to my planet. You’ll find refuge.”
Jake nodded. “Very well, easy enough. That’s assuming we can even get out of the Destiny system. We were here for supplies to refit our gravitic drive, but our transaction hit a snag.”
“What kind of supplies?”
“Raw materials. Refined Neodymium.”
Tovra looked at Jake askance, as if he’d just overlooked something plainly obvious to the other man. “You do realize where we’re being held, right?”
“A uranium mine.” Jake paused. “But, that doesn’t mean…. Does it?” It seemed a little too good to be true.
“Of course it does. Lanthanides, Actinides, they’re like birds of a feather. Where you find one, you find the rest of them. Especially on a chunk of heavy rock like Destiny. All those reject bins we’ve been filling? Where do you think those end up? We refine them right here, in some other building in the compound. Neodymium, dysprosium, ytterbium … you name it.”
Alessandro, who had been listening in silence, interrupted. “How many nines?”
“Excuse me?” said Tovra.
“How many nines? Of refinement? How enriched is it? You know, is it ninety-nine percent? Ninety-nine point nine? How many?”
“Oh.” Tovra paused to think. “Well, honestly I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Jake slowly nodded his head towards Alessandro, warning him not to reveal too much information. Especially not about their next generation gravitic drive.
The scientist hesitated. “Oh. Well, it could be. My engines are new, and I want to put only the best material in them, you see.…”
Jake picked up where he left off. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll take what we can get, and if need be we’ll rig something on board to purify it to Mr. Bernoulli’s specs.”
“Of course,” said Alessandro and Tovra at the same time, though probably for different reasons. Alessandro aimed to change the subject while Tovra simply wanted the conversation to steer in the direction of taking him along on their escape.
“Well, Tovra, you’ve got yourself a ride. Just to Oberon, correct? Not to this Void you were talking about?”
“What void is this?” asked Alessandro.
“The molecular cloud between Antares and Vega,” began Tovra, before coughing and holding his chest through his tattered shirt. Clearly, the years were taking their toll. “It’s impossible to get a good view of what’s inside, but my people believe there to be a haven in the deep interior that one can shift to if one knows the coordinates. A place safe from the Empire. From the pirates. Some even say,” he lowered his voice to a near whisper, glancing around before turning back to Jake, “that there is a planet there with original vegetation. Native life. Not like all the rest of the Thousand Worlds with their transplants from Old Earth. All alien. Like nothing we’v
e ever seen. Greener than you can imagine. Waterfalls. Forests.” He sighed. “Peace. Verdant peace.”
Jake shrugged. “No one has ever found a planet with anything more than cyanobacteria on it. The governments of Earth agreed long ago to leave them be if they ever found any. But it’s never been an issue. Alien, you say? I think in the 500 or so years we’ve been in space we would have found aliens by now.”
Tovra let out a ridiculing breath. “No, not aliens. Not bug-eyed long-limbed green men. I’m talking about the vegetation. The animals. Like nothing we’ve ever seen. Many on my world are proposing a formal expedition to the government, but it’s probably folly. Especially with the recent Vikorhov aggression—we need all the ships we can get to convince the Vikorhov Federation we’re not worth their time.” He coughed again, and wiped his hand on his threadbare pants. “But no. I ask only to go to Oberon.”
“But didn’t you tell me that not even the Empire can reach Oberon because of its size?” said Jake.
“The capital ships, no. Most ships can’t make it under normal circumstances. Your engine to mass ratio must be—“
“But Oberon has a fleet, doesn’t it? It controls several systems in that sector if I remember my galactic history right. How do they get their capital ships in and out?”
A gleam in Tovra’s eye. At first Jake didn’t think the man would answer, but, glancing over his shoulder again he began in whisper, “It’s a secret. Our gravitic deck devices—you know the ones that create the artificial gravity within the ship? Basically a gravitic thruster projecting negative thrust across a two dimensional space? You know how they work, right?”
