Five Empires: An Epic Space Opera

by Steven J Shelley

  The dashboard pinged at him - the propulsion bulb was ready to send him into drift space. “Drift ready, motherfuckers,” Jake snarled into the general com. “Sit back or you’re comin’ with me.”

  Though drift technology had improved over the centuries, a single vessel still required a good half mile radius to do it safely. If any of these eagles strayed into the danger zone without prepping their own bulbs, they were liable to become ‘floaters’ in drift space - stuck in the heightened physical plane forever.

  As expected, the eagles backed off the corvette. Jake whooped with delight as the Stallion surged into the black, drift trails forming over the cockpit.

  came a silky female voice over the com.

  Jake felt tight all of a sudden, his stomach cramping furiously. It was her. He killed the com, swearing under his breath. Surely they wouldn’t send her to reel him in? Of all the tandems Ajon Prime might have chosen … why mess with his mind like that? But of course, it made perfect sense. The Nostroma leader couldn’t afford to have a loose cannon roaming around, not when the situation with the Cava05 was so delicate.

  Sweet Jean, tandem partner and lover in a former life, was the perfect hunter in this situation. Jake could hardly be expected to concentrate on his own quarry as long as she was trailing him.

  As the drift trails outside deepened, he realized he still had a task to complete. He headed into the lounge to check on Mandie before continuing to the airlock. The dogfight had clearly taken its toll - the chamber walls were strewn with vomit and bile. Nobblar and Basko were tangled in a crumpled pile in the corner.

  Jake dragged the men out to the lounge and strapped them into stasis chairs. Both were breathing. Having fulfilled his duty of care to a pair of men who hardly deserved it, Jake was halfway to the cockpit when a piercing blast rocked the rear of the corvette. One of the eagles had fired a torpedo as a goodbye kiss.

  Jake half expected to be pulled into the vacuum of space at any moment, but the corvette’s hull somehow maintained its integrity. The rear bedroom had probably been breached but the corvette had the luxury of compartmentalized life support. Jake sank into the pilot’s chair, several alarms pinging at once. He ignored all of them, shoving a couple of stasis pills in his mouth. They were cloyingly alkaline.

  The corvette surged a little as drift space enfolded it. Jake was thrown back in his chair as the vessel stepped beyond. Feeling sick to his core, the duellist kept his gaze trained on a blinking red sphere in his nav holograph. Tranda. He had a girl to rescue.

  34

  The inertia of drift transition raised Jack from his drug-fueled slumber. He checked diagnostics with bleary eyes - the corvette had fallen safely from drift space but there was now a serious problem with air integrity. It seemed the aft rupture had triggered a slow leak within the last few hours. Jake diverted all available power to rear shields, but they couldn’t stem the flow of air leaving the vessel.

  There was also an irregularity with the propulsion casing. Diagnostics suggested the torpedo blast had caused a vacuum fire that burned while they were in drift space. If the corvette didn’t receive urgent repairs it wasn’t going to handle another drift run.

  Jake checked the nav pane - they’d entered the Tranda system off the shoulder of Tranda IV, just as he’d planned. The milky gas giant was isolated from the usual trade routes and he would in theory be able to travel undetected. But what had seemed like a prudent measure six hours ago now posed a problem - at top speed the corvette was still a good four hours from Tranda IX.

  Whether it could go the distance in its current state was anyone’s guess. Jake punched in precise coordinates and sat back with a sigh. He’d never bothered to learn much about ship mechanics and doubted he had the ability to make running repairs to the ship. He knew Basko was quite handy with an astral wrench but he wasn’t about to let the pilot loose on the corvette.

  He padded into the lounge, stretching his tender muscles. Drift space always seemed to constrict his tendons somehow. Mandie was asleep and breathing regularly. Basko and Nobblar were conscious but the worse for wear. Despite being tossed around that airlock, they both seemed to have escaped structural damage.

  Making sure the bedroom door was firmly sealed, Jake returned to the cockpit and pondered the gas giant as it passed the port bow. He’d made it to Tranda. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of traffic through the system at large. Tranda II supported a couple of Nostroma-owned mining operations but there was little else to recommend these planets.

  Tranda itself was a hot white star, scorching even the rocky moons on the edge of the system. Jake’s destination was a mid-sized terrestrial planet hidden in the shadows of the methane giant Tranda XIII. The planet’s thin atmosphere compensated for the sun’s extreme heat, giving Tranda IX a dry, livable climate.

  There wasn’t much in the way of arable land, however, which explained why the place was mostly ignored by sentient beings. Apart from Fidelis Prime, Jake was aware of only one or two minor subjugate settlements on the wide, dusty lowlands near the equator.

  At length Jake grew tired of watching his diagnostics and praying that the hull held out for just a few more hours. Instead he headed back to the lounge where the others were still clawing their way out of stasis.

  “What do you hope to achieve, little sparrow?” Nobblar asked bitterly. “Ajon Prime will send his best people.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Jake said with a smile. “I’m just a wanderer who wants to be left alone.”

  Basko gave a derisive snort.

  “Instead of being negative,” Jake said, circling round behind them, “why don’t you help me get to Fidelis Prime?”

  “You still peddling that fantasy?” Nobblar spat. “We’ll do no such thing.”

  Jake smiled again. Nobblar must have been pretty banged up to respond in such a conventional manner.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll leave you with plenty of supplies,” Jake said with understated savagery. “Sweet Jean and my sister will find you soon enough.”

  Nobblar chuckled. “They’re sending the Cold Women after you? Ajon Prime has a wicked sense of humor.”

  “It’ll be just like old times,” Jake said. “Except this time I’m gonna win.”

  Nobblar shook his head slowly. Jake couldn’t help but find the gesture infuriating.

  “Come, come, we both know you’re useless when it comes to those women,” drawled the cybomancer. “They have some kind of hold on you.”

  Jake shoved the notion from his mind because he was half-inclined to believe it. He also knew that Nobblar was still needling him, probing his neural defenses. He had hoped the veteran would lay off those attacks. Deciding that Nobblar was going to be a pain in the ass, Jake struck him on the jaw, knocking him out.

  Basko struggled against his bonds but could only gaze at Jake with impotent rage.

  “Water,” Mandie croaked, “Please.”

  Jake had almost forgotten about the mercenary. He collected a bottle of water from the galley and handed it over. He knelt in front of Mandie, his hands on her thighs. Her eyes had a lost, haunted look. Nobblar’s mind worms were still lurking in there somewhere.

  “Look at me, Mandie,” Jake urged. It took her several moments to meet his gaze.

  “You’ve been attacked,” Jake said. “Mandie Flane will still be there when the storm passes. Do you understand?”

  Mandie nodded meekly - Jake was fairly certain she was buoyed by his words. Glaring at Basko, he climbed into his stasis chair. The pilot probably nursed a savage thirst, but Jake wasn’t in a generous mood. Besides, Nostroma could go a long time without hydration. Jake shut his eyes and let his mind wander, listening as Mandie rose and padded to the galley.

  “I need the head,” Basko announced.

  “I don’t give the slightest fuck,” Jake grumbled. He allowed himself to drift off to sleep, visualizing a smooth transition into Tranda IX’s thin atmosphere
.

  A warning from the cockpit dashboard drew Jake from his chair. He was intensely relieved to see a murky brown planet filling the cockpit window. Diagnostics blandly reported that the vessel was literally breaking apart as it neared Tranda IX. This was going to be a close-run thing.

  “Strap yourself in, Mandie,” Jake said over the com as he took control of the craft. He summoned a holographic projection of the planet and synced it with the corvette’s position. The Avene Mountains were currently shrouded in night on the far side.

  Jake was happy with that - it meant he could initiate a shallow entry through the atmosphere. He doubted the corvette would survive anything sharper. He plotted a conservative descent that allowed for manual control as necessary. The corvette approached the planet’s wide face gracefully enough, but Jake knew he would lose fragments of hull once they kissed the upper stratosphere.

  The corvette trembled as they began the gentlest of transitions. Keeping a sharp eye on the nav pane, Jake dipped the craft under the outer atmospheric shell to find a nice slipstream. The corvette settled with nothing more than a robust shake. Jake did what he could to manually ensure a smooth run - occasionally a craft would correct its position whilst on autopilot and Jake didn’t want any sudden surprises.

  The corvette sank through the stratosphere relatively unscathed. The sky was sparkling blue, though a bank of thick cloud rose to meet them. Jake cursed his luck - from what he could tell, cloud wasn’t a particularly common occurrence here. Diagnostics reported that the rear hull was dangerously brittle and might give way at any moment.

  Jake gripped the edge of the dashboard as the craft dipped into the upper troposphere. There was a loud bang out back and he turned to see objects flying into a great abyss. A blanket of soft white filled the gaping hole and the vessel began to spin laterally.

  “Fuck!” Jake shouted, strapping in and taking full control of the corvette. He pushed the steerage bar with desperate, pleading force - to no avail. The planet’s weather had taken control of the compromised ship and would do what it pleased. He whipped around to check on his passengers. The violently strong wind was threatening to rip the stasis chairs from their anchor points.

  “Stay where you are!” Jake shouted to Mandie, who’d gone deathly pale. “I’ll have us down before you know it.”

  Which was, of course, easy to say. The corvette actually began gaining speed as it spun through the cloud strata.

  Basko was also wide-eyed with fear - a most unusual sight. Jake took a deep breath and turned back to the steerage bar. He had absolutely no control over the vessel. The worst possible feeling a pilot could have. He pressed the bar forward and kept it there, hoping like hell the corvette slipped through the cloud bank before being ripped apart.

  The vessel, which had essentially become a shambolic mess of metal sheets and rivets, began its death rattle. A rending noise suggested a significant tear to aft. The duellist couldn’t even bring himself to turn around for fear that Mandie wouldn’t be there. Instead he focused on the edge of the dashboard, simply listening, hoping for a favorable change in air pressure.

  It came - gradually. The wind whistling through the corvette eased slightly. Then the wispy fingers of cloud clutching at the gaping hole disappeared, replaced by a distant brown landscape. The vessel dipped its nose, Jake’s pressure on the steerage bar finally telling. The duellist allowed the craft to spiral, hoping to drain a little altitude.

  Still spinning, the craft approached a wide, dusty plain at a terrible vector. Jake watched the ground approach, sweaty hands gripping the bar in queasy dread. The maneuver he was about to attempt wasn’t in any respectable piloting handbook, but it was the only one that offered a shred of hope.

  “Jake?”

  Something about Mandie’s voice filled the duellist with resolve. As the corvette dropped below 600 feet he pulled back on the steerage bar, riding the violent lurch that followed. Just as the craft threatened to flip head over heels he eased back, allowing the bar to return to a neutral position but still under his control. The corvette leveled out, still wobbling laterally but technically presentable for some kind of ramshackle landing.

  “Brace yourself!” he cried as the craft skidded across a series of dusty ridges. The port bow dipped below the next ridge and Jake’s heart sank. Their luck, so rich and syrupy in the last hour, had run dry. The corvette struck the sharp ridge flush on the port hull and flipped like a Catherine wheel. All Jake could do was hold onto his arm rests as his body was pulled in all directions. After several hair-raising impacts the corvette eventually, blessedly came to a standstill. The Seven Gods were now pissing on them, for they were inverted.

  Jake allowed a steady stream of bile to escape - it was all he had left in his system.

  “Stay there, Mandie,” he called, holding out a protective arm as he released his straps with the other. He fell to the cockpit ceiling, almost breaking his wrist on impact. Aching all over, he crawled through to the lounge. Mandie was waiting patiently in her chair, her eyes deadened by trauma. He released her carefully, catching her as she fell.

  Holding her close, he stumbled out the broken rear hull into a vast, open world. Enjoying the sensation of Mandie’s breath on his neck, he took a moment to drink in his surroundings. He’d been on several planets in his lifetime, but the first taste always felt a little surreal. The galaxy was so wildly varied that it never ceased to surprise him.

  This little corner of Tranda IX was, for the moment, wistfully silent. The plain that looked so flat from above was in fact lined with ridges two or three yards deep. Too irregular to be man-made, the dirt here had probably been scoured into grooves by the infrequent storms. A gentle breeze wafted in from the south, a welcome relief from the potent warmth offered by distant Tranda herself.

  The regal Avene mountain range rose to the north. Even at this distance Jake could see the verdant dry wood forests in its upper valleys and lower slopes. In the shimmering heat it was difficult to calculate how long it would take to reach the mountains.

  Jake lay Mandie down in the shade cast by the overturned corvette. He drew his battered optics from his utility belt. Training the terrain interps device on the mountains, he scanned the slopes for signs of habitation. The optics picked up signs of wildlife but not much else.

  As a precaution Jake scanned the other corners of the flat horizon. There was a plume of dust to the south but that didn’t necessarily represent danger. Could be a dust devil or a local transport of some kind. He didn’t especially want to interact with the local subjugate communities, but he certainly didn’t fear them either. Reaching the Fidelis Prime monastery as quickly as possible was his key priority. Tangling with locals could only spell trouble.

  Stowing his optics, Jake knelt alongside Mandie and looked into her slitted eyes.

  “Beaten up?” he asked dryly. The truth was she still looked like she’d been violated. Which, of course, she had. Jake considered the two Nostroma agents currently suspended upside down in their stasis chairs. What to do with them? It was fair to say that the corvette had run its race. Even if they could find a suitable repair facility, the cost would exceed the price of a ready-made second-hand ship. Not to mention the time it would take to rebuild the aft hull. Nobblar’s corvette was a complete write-off.

  “You able to walk?” he asked Mandie, eying the wisps of smoke rising from the vessel and keen to be on his way. The merc nodded. Jake squeezed her hand.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he promised.

  The duellist climbed back through the still-hot aft wreckage.

  “For fuck sake, Le Sondre, cut us down,” Nobblar said furiously. His pinched face had turned beetroot red. Jake drew a pistol with one hand and patted the men down with the other. He found a stiletto strapped to Basko’s inner thigh and a collection of poison nail darts sewn into the waist of Nobblar’s suit.

  Tossing both items aside, Jake deactivated the straps holding the men in place. They tumbled awkwardly to the upturn
ed ceiling, cursing the duellist vehemently. For a moment he thought they might try and regain their weapons, but they were barely able to rise to their feet. They made a show of stumbling toward Jake, who took a calm step backwards.

  “Don’t tell me the fuckin’ head was torn off as well,” Nobblar grumbled, pushing past Jake.

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Jake asked with a wry smile.

  Nobblar looked back at Jake in exasperation. It was the first time Jake had seen the veteran with his veneer of cold professionalism worn down.

  “I need to take a dump,” the cybomancer snarled. Jake believed it. On the few occasions he’d traveled without drift drugs he’d come out the other side needing a new pair of pants. But he wasn’t about to extend courtesies to the man who’d tried to take him against his will. And raped Mandie’s mind to boot.

  “Do it here,” he said in a dead voice. “In front of us.”

  Nobblar’s face screwed into a hard, dangerous frown. “Is that where we’re at, Little Sparrow?”

  It was a transparent appeal to the history they shared together. Jake nodded.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Nobblar drawled. “You really wanna get yourself killed.”

  He leered at Mandie as he drew his trousers down and squatted. He went about his business with a minimum of fuss. Jake made sure he kept watching. It was nothing perverse, just a simple matter of power. For the moment, Jake had it, Nobblar didn’t.

  The duellist was a man who believed in justice. Occasionally it was his own brand. He never claimed it to be consistent, but it had given his varied life a strong thread of purpose. Even though relations with Nobblar would now be decidedly prickly, he wanted to show Mandie that crimes had consequences. Even in his seedy world.

  Jake looked at Basko blandly.

  “You need to go too?”

  Basko shook his head, his eyes pits of hostility.

  “Younger bodies always hold out a little longer,” he said, more for Nobblar’s benefit. Jake waited until the older man had finished his business without the convenience of water. The cybomancer restored his trousers with a modicum of dignity, but Jake sensed a well of rage bubbling beneath.