Violent Wonder

by Fredrick Niles

  “What if the Light Shield activated when we jumped?”

  He stared at her, uncomprehending. “So?”

  “So, it’s possible that when we hit the gate, the activating Light Shield interfered with our trajectory.”

  No one spoke. They all just looked out the viewport at the black space around them and the throbbing red star, old beyond all ability to measure.

  Traveling with Light Cores had always been a precarious thing. It was mostly safe, but every once in a while a ship would go through a gate and never be heard from again.

  When he really thought about it, the way Void travel worked was pretty terrifying. The gates they used were basically tears in space-time. If you were to try to pass through one without a Light Core or a giant Tesla Arc, then you’d end up just getting stuck there in the blackness. It was understood by people much smarter than Ritz that traveling from gate-to-gate required the ships to travel more space than was required if one were to simply travel there without a gate. Instead of making a straight line to a destination, Void travel was something more like making a huge winding arc.

  The reason it was faster than regular space travel was that time didn’t exist in the Void, so no matter how long it took you to get somewhere, it didn’t actually register back in reality. In fact, it was estimated that some paths through the Void—if time were to exist there—would actually take something like billions of years. But because time didn’t register, it felt more like simply walking from one room into another. You’d go through one gate and come out the other side, sometimes quadrillions of miles away.

  The very origin of the gates was unknown, but they were thought to have happened at the same time as the Dislocation.

  The Dislocation was an event that had taken place centuries ago. One day, everyone was living their normal lives on Earth, and then the next day people and houses and even cities were relocated to strange planets spread throughout the universe. Current estimates judged that about 80% of the people that were suddenly ripped off of Earth died instantly as they were thrust onto worlds so hostile to human existence that they were either frozen, incinerated, crushed by gravity, poisoned by a toxic atmosphere, or suffocated. It was then estimated that another 15% of the population was killed in the next five years by their environments, leaving 5% of the scattered population to rebuild humanity. The number didn’t seem high, but considering how hostile space and other planets are to human existence, some people said it bordered on the miraculous.

  As to the cause of the Dislocation, scientists’ best estimation was that Earth had been hit by something like a bolt of cosmic lightning, which had shattered the fabric of space-time into a million little pieces causing the planet and its inhabitants to be sprayed across the universe.

  From there, humanity had to scrabble together what it had and figure out a way to travel space. The sudden desperate need for technology that could handle such a demand created a massive intergalactic surge in technological development. The problem was that all the separate worlds were isolated from each other and trade and communication were virtually nonexistent.

  The break came when a man named Eugene Schwartz developed the Tesla Arc. The Tesla Arc was not only powerful enough to allow humanity to break a planet’s orbit without guzzling massive amounts of fossil fuels but also allowed them to travel the Void. There were massive amounts of failures and an almost countless number of people died or disappeared, but eventually, they were able to develop a method that allowed them to jump from system to system with minimal accidents.

  From there, societies were able to finally interact with each other and trade, which caused economies to skyrocket. A new capitalistic age of technological advancement and growth took off and it seemed like every day there was some new marvel being developed in the known universe.

  Not all good things can last however, and in no time at all the big businesses ended up getting tied up with big government. Inequality spiked as methods of wealth distribution became complicated and opaque, and eventually the entire governing system exploded and burned to the ground in the form of a violent revolution known as the Centralization War.

  When the war ended, the old system was replaced by a new one, which also burned to the ground. Three more variations of an interplanetary government came and went until one finally stuck.

  It began as a socialist republic founded on economic equality and wealth redistribution. This system worked well for a while but the range of planets and individual complexity of each of them resulted in complicated laws that—when all was said and done—ended up marginalizing one group or another. The constant fighting and legal disputes multiplied and overran the system until the government collapsed and reemerged as the People’s Union Coalition as it existed today: a society that had a reasonable standard of living—not as good as the peak capitalist society, but also not as bad as some of the planets’ during the last few decades—and the way that it was able to do this was through synthetics.

  Whether they were cybernetic or organic, synthetically fabricated people like the SEUs and combat synths all fell under the same designation: state property. They were viewed primarily as tools and were thus able to be used for everything from Black Ops wetwork to security to farming. People were fed and protected and defended all at the expense of synthetics, and the bureaucracy that comprised most of the PUC was so complicated and disconnected that most of the time, no one even knew what it took to uphold their lives.

  Ritz’s personal story was an all too common one. Its details were specific and unique to him but the overarching course of events was common.

  Raised as an Alnabatist—a sect of Islamic Sufism originating on the jungle planet of Morgiana—Riyaad Tariq, known by his friends as Ritz, grew up in a small but prosperous village along the stormy coast of Sarir. Their community hadn’t been harassed by the PUC until it was discovered that a plant unique to the slopes of their sacred mountain could be used to cure Limestone Lung, a terminal atmospheric sickness common to a string of industrial planets in the Onyx System. The disease had been all but wiped out by a recent development in atmospheric processors, but there were a large number of people who had contracted the disease prior and would suffer up to another seventeen years before their lungs hardened to the point of respiratory failure.

  At first, the PUC came in and simply took some samples and tried to grow them elsewhere, which in itself had been an extreme violation of a sacred space. But for reasons unknown, the unique climate of Morgiana was the only thing that could sustain the flower long enough for it to reach maturity, which also happened to be the point where it became medicinally useful.

  After that, trade negotiations opened up and the village elders were willing to distribute roughly three-quarters of the plants for pharmaceutical use. The plant had been sacred to the Alnabatist and had been used in healing rituals for centuries, so not only was its existence tied to their religious tradition but for the long-term health of their population.

  There was an interplanetary election the next year however, and the industrial population of the Onyx System massively outnumbered the meager numbers of Morgiana, and eventually, the political incentive to save as many voters’ lives as possible in the short term ended up outweighing the religious needs and long-term medical needs of the Morgianan people.

  The decision was voted on by a board of bureaucrats who had never stepped foot on Morgiana. The sacred mountain on the coastal village became the property of the PUC and any trespassing would be met with lethal force.

  The PUC didn’t wait for the Alnabatist elders to make the first move. Keywords like “protestor suppression” were too-easily latched onto by journalists, so the SEUs showed up one night unannounced and went house-to-house killing people in their beds.

  Seventeen-year-old Ritz hid in a small pantry compartment while his parents were hauled into the living room and executed.

  After walking 124 miles through the jungle, Ritz left Morgiana in a shipping container onbo
ard a cargo freighter. From there he went from news outlet to news outlet trying to tell his story. This ended up being much harder than he had anticipated, however. By the time the story had made its way to the media, Ritz’s village had been transformed from a small coastal village to a bustling underground of separatist militia members who had seized the mountain for themselves and utilized Islamic sympathies to defend the genocide of blue collar workers in industrial systems.

  When fringe media sources began to call “foul” on the whole thing they did so by fabricating evidence, distorting accounts, and perpetuating conspiracy theories. So by the time Ritz arrived with his story, the legitimacy of his account had become so obscured in the fog of conflicting accounts that, were anyone to hear it, whether they believed it or not simply came down to what they thought of the PUC as a whole.

  After trying for over a year to get his story published—an endeavor to which he saw some relative success among what were invariably unsuccessful media sources—he eventually got taken in by a radical separatist militia group called Kodiak.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that they were committing the exact same kind of atrocities he had witnessed in his village, only for the other side. He left after two years of stomach-churning operations, which had certainly been two years too many, but in that time he had met King and Hector. So when he finally—and literally—jumped ship one night while onboard a vessel passing through the Onyx System, they were the first two people he called.

  From there, they pooled their resources and did small on-the-ground smuggling runs until they had enough to buy the Leopold, a slick civilian cruiser that they were then able to outfit for smuggling and raids.

  Many years later, after adding Nadia and Kit to the crew, followed by Byzzie and then Raquel, the makeshift family that was the Leopold was making their way planet to planet, trying to bring freedom to a system where everyone was reasonably safe and prosperous.

  And where occasionally an entire village would disappear overnight and never be heard from again, registering as nothing more than a small informational blip on someone’s newsfeed.

  “Is it possible, Hector?” Ritz said after a time. The idea that their jump had sent them somewhere unintended was bad, but the fact that he had been the one to hit the button was even worse. “Is it possible that the Light Shield messed with our coordinates?”

  “Theoretically,” the pilot said slowly.

  “How?” The word was a challenge.

  “How? Well…I’m not sure exactly how, but?”

  “Hey, look,” King cut in. Ritz had almost forgotten he was there. He turned to look at the ship’s mechanic who was standing there with Nadia and Raquel, all three of them looking like they had just walked in on their parents fighting. “Why don’t we just go back through the gate? Why is this such a big deal?”

  “Would you like to tell him?” Ritz said, looking at Hector.

  Hector took a deep breath. “There’s no gate.”

  “Excuse me, what?” King said incredulously.

  “There’s no gate!” Hector said, his voice suddenly frantic. “Look around you! No gate! There’s no bloody gate!”

  “How can there not be a gate?” King shot back.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where we are and why there’s not a gate or anything for that matter. All I know is that suddenly we’re stuck in a sector of unknown space with no way back and no clue how we got here.”

  “Okay, let’s everyone calm down,” Nadia said her voice smooth and calm. “So there’s no gate and we don’t know where we are. What are we going to do about it?”

  “We could try to figure out what had happened and chart our way back,” Byzzie offered. “But I don’t know. There’s a lot of variables in that equation and I think that upon investigation, most of them are going to end up being unknown.”

  “Well, shit,” Ritz said, throwing his hands up. “What then? What else is there?”

  Hector shrugged. “We just fly. That’d be my suggestion. The Light Core is sustained by solar power so as long as we restrict our travel to this solar system, we should be good.”

  “And when you say ‘good,’ I take that to mean not-running-out-of-fuel-good rather than finding-our-way-home-good.”

  Hector nodded.

  “Mmmhmmm…” Ritz considered his options, which basically amounted to: die in this very spot while trying against-all-odds to navigate their way back or die a while later traveling the absolutely massive and incalculable distance from planet-to-planet, not to mention star-to-star. It could be years before they managed to come across an inhabited world and that’s if they were lucky. “I’ll tell ya what. How about we all think on it. I’m not gonna lie, we’re in a pretty bad spot. About the best we can hope for is to find something resembling a habitable planet that we might be able to stomach being marooned on for a while. Then maybe we find another. And another. We could also try to figure out what happened here, though by the sound of it, even with all of us working together it would take a while.” Ritz looked at his gunner. “Byzzie, how long would it take to do that?”

  Byzzie exhaled slowly, her eyes looking up at the ceiling. “It’s a lot of math. And even if we diagnose the problem, there’s no guarantee we could reverse engineer it. We ended up here without a gate, which shouldn’t be possible, so there’s no telling whether or not returning without a gate is possible.”

  “Can you give us a ballpark?”

  “Hard to say how accurate it would be, but I’d say no less than two weeks.” A few people groaned audibly. “Sorry folks, but that’s the reality. This isn’t like doing a long geometry problem here, this is plugging in what little information we have into an equation and then running numbers through the variable figures until we get something that makes sense. Our simulation programs are fast but we’re not dealing with much. It could take years. Our chances of retroactively plotting our course are just as good as finding an inhabited planet in this system.”

  “Not to throw us off-topic here,” Raquel said, “But how is that even possible in the first place? I mean, what information do we even have to work with?”

  “It mostly comes down to things like measuring star positions, ion and photon radiation, and stuff like that and then comparing against known systems in the database,” King said. “There are a lot of stars out there but if the computer can find something it recognizes then it can at least give us a reference point. If we can do that, then we might be able to compare it against the system we originated in and then trace our trajectory from there to here. The big part is simply finding out where ‘here’ is in relation to ‘there.’”

  “If we find ‘there’ then can’t we just go there?”

  But Byzzie was already shaking her head. “I know the Void Gates have made everything seem close, but let me assure you that these stars aren’t. If we were to travel to even the second nearest one, it could take us something like eighty years.”

  “And that’s if we didn’t run out of fuel,” Hector chimed in. “Which we would.”

  “Well…” Raquel said, looking down at her feet. “I guess that answers my question…”

  “If this is an uncharted system,” Nadia cut in. “Then what makes you think we’ll find a planet inhabited by people?”

  “Remember: the Dislocation sent people scattered all across the universe,” Hector responded. “From what we can tell, only about 5% of the planets that people ended up on still had people living on them 90 years later when the Tesla Arc was invented. That means that people were dropped all over the place and the vast majority of them died outright, whether it was due to uninhabitable atmospheres or gravity or whatever else, but there is a chance that some of those people who survived were never found, which would make sense in this case, seeing as there’s no gate here.”

  “I thought the gates were part of the Dislocation,” Nadia said. “I thought that every civilization that was found was found next to a gate.”

  “Ah, you’re c
onfusing correlation with causation. Every civilization that was found after the Tesla Arc was invented was found because of a gate, so naturally, we don’t have any data on systems that don’t have gates inside of them.”

  “So you’re saying there could be more human civilization out here that we haven’t found?”

  “Theoretically,” King said. “We don’t really understand the Dislocation or exactly what it entailed so we don’t really know how the gates play into that equation.”

  “Excuse me,” Byzzie said, holding up a finger, “but what does it matter if we find an inhabited planet. Finding some primitive society on another rock won’t get us home.”

  “It matters because it might keep us alive,” Ritz cut in. “But let’s worry about that when the time comes. For now, we just figure out our next step. Nadia: where’s Kit? Why isn’t he out here?”

  “He’s resting, sir.” A beat of silence passed. “I think he needs some time.”

  “Right.” Ritz nodded, remembering Kilo Base. “Why don’t you go talk to him. Let him know what’s up.” Nadia nodded and left the room, the hatch swishing closed behind her. “As for everyone else, meet back here at-” he looked at his watch, “-18:00 hours. That gives you about two hours to come to a decision.”

  5

  Marauders

  Nadia found Kit lying on his mattress on the floor of her living quarters, which is where she had expected to find him. Technically they both had their own spaces but they mainly used Kit’s for storing equipment. Nadia’s, on the other hand, was where they slept and kept their maintenance racks for their Arc Suits. This arrangement wasn’t sexual but rather, one that had developed from sleeping on floors together their whole lives as SEUs. In the programming facility where they had been raised and trained, they had slept on compact foam rolls that were just hard enough to get them ready for sleeping in the field and just soft enough not to give them permanent back damage.