by G. H. Holmes
The Australian came back just in time to harness himself into the navigator seat. As he did, he wondered about General Harrow, whom a sudden pall had befallen. He seemed downright dejected; Wakka wondered what was the matter with him. All things considered, the general had done a remarkably good job with the means he had at his disposal. For crying out loud, he had even turned a lowly tug into a war boat! He'd taken out two of the finest modern fighter craft with, of all things, tractor beams!
Why was he so gloomy now?
Ben stared at the screen in front of him, secretly glad that he had no time for introspection. This time he wasn't just sitting in a chair, waiting for the journey to be over. This time he was doing something. As the pilot, he was in charge; he had to see to it that the MARDET got home safely.
And still the terror haunted him.
Once again he was going out on that narrow bridge between two faraway places with nothing but an abyss to the left and to the right. And this was the largest one in existence. It was Dark Space.
While Ben was still thinking on these things, the tug hurtled onto the pylon road and soon was caught up in all its accompanying sound and fury.
During the first hour there were shouts and wails and screams as the tug skipped across the universe. But at the beginning of the second hour everything calmed down and Ben figured that the troops had either passed out or had grown accustomed to the phenomena of intergalactic travel. Too bad he couldn't just stop somewhere to let them recuperate. But there were no roadside cafés in deep space. And this time the ordeal would not last six, but at least seven hours, because the tug was slower as it was smaller than the big transport ships with their powerful boosters.
An x-jet on the other hand could have crossed from Terra Gemina to Kasaganaan in about an hour or perhaps two. But nobody would ever travel this road in a small craft like an x-jet. The risk of turning into energy for good was too great.
In the fourth hour, right when the tug skipped out of hyperspace and blue energy turned into solid matter once again, and the unnerving crazy opera singer toned down his song, right before the next jump, Ben sensed that something was wrong. He was already tense, but now tensed even more—when suddenly an incessant ping came on like that of a park distance control gone wild.
Outside, an object was getting too close.
Suddenly the tug bumped into something. For a split second, the blue keel of a ship seemed to slice through the ceiling of the command bridge. The tug shuddered and Ben immediately checked his control panel for aberrations, but found none. He discovered that his left hand had slapped the vector arrest button on the tabletop right in the moment of impact. By reflex he had fixed the coordinates of the object that had grazed them.
"What was that, Sir?" Wakka asked. Nervousness swung in his voice. His fingers dug into the armrest of his chair as the jump began again in earnest. The air was thick and charged with something akin to static.
Ben didn't reply. He stared into space.
An uncanny certainty crept into his gut. The thought felt like scalding water and Harrow cringed. An accident had happened and somebody coming towards them, flying towards Kasaganaan for whatever reason, had slammed into them and had been hurtled out into…
…deep space.
The realization hit Ben like an avalanche: somebody was now stuck out in the giant void—just like he'd been.
Immediately Ben's heart went out to that person. Perhaps they were many? Who were they? And why were they on their way to Kasaganaan?
He had to fight back tears that wanted to well up.
His mind was working overtime. The craft they'd rammed had to have been a small one, because if they would have crashed into one of the big transports, they'd be history now. But as it was, the sturdy tug had not sustained any damage. It barely budged. This fact showed Ben that whatever had banged into them was a small craft.
An x-jet…?
Why would anybody fly an x-jet out to Kasa? Who in his or her right mind would be so crazy as to do that?
The answer presented itself to Ben immediately: a young person. A person feeling left behind. A person eager to join the action. A person oblivious to the risk. A privileged person sure to get away with a folly like this.
When the crazy opera singer with his one note aria came on again and the world turned electric blue, Ben was certain that he'd pinpointed the person they'd just knocked into deep space.
She was Charity Jones. Lieutenant. Fighter pilot of the Terra Gemina Space Navy, alpha-certified.
Daniel von Schwarz's niece.
Recently rescued by the ghost of Harrow's Dale after messing with a foreign Delta fighter.
Ben's heart sank.
Chapter 22
The tug with the MARDET on board had barely landed on Gemina City's spaceport, military section, when it was surrounded by hovercarriers bringing medical personnel. One by one the members of the shaken MARDET filed out of the craft into the cool morning and were transported over to sick bay, where they got examined and received the care they desperately needed, considering that they'd just spent seven hours in intergalactic travel—standing up. Nobody present knew of another instance where anything like that had ever happened.
A flag hovercraft came and Ben was whisked over to the spaceport building, where he was ushered into the flag lounge. Admiral von Schwarz had been notified and was on his way.
Ben was still silent and remote because of the hardship the journey had inflicted on him when von Schwarz entered the room.
Harrow was the first to speak. "Daniel, where is Charity Jones?"
The admiral stopped in his tracks, stunned. "So, somebody has already told you?"
"Told me what?"
"That she ran away," the admiral said. "A few hours ago—in the dead of night—she checked herself out of the hospital, jumped into her jet and disappeared, presumably onto the pylon road."
Ben's shoulders slumped. So, he'd been correct. They'd bumped into Charity Jones on their way back to Terra Gemina.
Ben explained to his friend what had happened. The admiral's face became somber like that of a warrior who'd just lost a major battle.
"That means she's gone forever," he said. "Her foolishness has killed her."
"She may still live," Ben said. He wiped his face with both hands. "I fixed the coordinates of the crash. I need to go back and find her."
"Can you do that?" Daniel von Schwarz asked. "Are you certain you will find her? I don't mean to discourage you, Benedict. But even if you fixed her coordinates, you only have approximate values. You clocked them in hyperspace. I don't mean to say that I don't want Cherry back. Of course I do. What I mean is: I'd hate for you to get lost in deep space, too."
Ben drilled his gray eyes into his friend. "Daniel, your niece is experiencing right now what I experienced seventy years ago. You have no idea. I need to get to her before she despairs."
Ben's gaze sunk to the floor. His own words echoed in his ears. A young woman was now sharing his experience. His mind flashed back to the moment a few days ago when she'd come down out of the sky in her ejection seat, all tangled up in her parachute. He'd saved her life once. He'd be doing it again.
"Over on Bagong Lupa there's the prototype of a new ship," the admiral said. "It's much better suited for your endeavor than that tug in which you came. It's powerful. And much safer. You could take possession of it within a day and—"
"I have no patience," Ben said to the admiral. "I need to go. Can somebody drive me back out to the tug?"
Von Schwarz studied the face of his friend and saw that his mind was made up.
"Of course, Ben," he said. "If anybody can find Charity, it's you. Just make sure you come back."
The empty ejection seats of Rambler and Gargoyle still sat on the tarmac next to the tug when Ben arrived. The vitrum shells that had housed them had been placed off to one side. The chairs were deserted as was the tug. Ben entered the ungainly craft and was about to close its door, when he suddenly spo
tted Juggernaut in the twilight outside. He halted the door's ascent and asked, "What do you want, Lieutenant?"
"Request permission to come with you, Sir," Jug shouted, standing ramrod-straight.
How did he find out?
"Permission denied," Ben said. The door's hydraulics hissed and it rose and closed behind the general.
Once again Harrow sat down in the pilot's chair, where he fired up the tug's thruster engines.
The craft was lifted up on glowing pods, ascended into the hazy sky and soon entered the darkness of space.
The moment of impact, a cloud of bright blue sparks hit Charity Jones in the face and took over her vision. She could no longer see what was going on around her, but the sudden gyrations of her jet told her that something terrible was happening. She'd been thrown off the pylon road and into a cloud of glowing particles—or so it seemed. She didn't quite understand it all.
Hyperspace sure was a weird place.
By the feel of it, she was still traveling at an insane pace, but was slowing down. Cherry wrapped her hands around her HOTAS-stick. The high note that somebody seemed to be singing right behind her head got quieter as she tried to rectify her craft. The computer should have done this by itself, but it didn't, so Cherry had to go manual.
After a while the particle cloud got thinner, its light got paler, until it suddenly went out completely. Cherry no longer had the feeling of being tossed around; she had her x-jet under control once again. But what immediately struck her as she peered out through the vitrum canopy was the fact that there were no stars. There was nothing.
Charity gasped.
She'd never seen the universe without stars. Those above Terra Gemina were particularly pretty. Its Twins galaxy was a beautiful place. This on the other hand was like the inside of a sack and she was tempted to think that a blanket had been thrown over her cockpit. But who would have accomplished that feat? Ornery service crews were at home on the tarmac. There were none in space.
Charity realized that she was still flying at a high speed, but to where, she did not know. She checked the readouts on the navigation panel. But instead of showing a vector or at least some coordinates, the panel had turned black, too.
Where was she flying to?
She immediately cut her engines. Her gaze fell back down on the nav panel, but it remained unchanged. The surface was black and where the coordinates should have registered there was only a line of zeros.
She looked out into dark space again. The dim lights of her cockpit suddenly appeared much brighter to her than ever before.
A wave of nausea washed through her. Thoroughly seasick, she closed her eyes and swallowed hard. She had clearly underestimated what kind of torture the pylon road inflicted upon a person's stomach. Cherry blew up her cheeks, placed her hand on her stomach and exhaled in short gasps. This nausea was something else.
When she opened her eyes again and lifted her gaze and still saw no stars, she shouted at the dark void and her fist hit the canopy.
A coughing spell hit her.
When it was over, she checked her clock. But it, too, had died on her. It no longer showed the time at Gemina City and the expected arrival time at Kasaganaan. She blinked without understanding. She seemed to be stuck somewhere beyond time and space.
Well, the systems would surely come back on in a little while. They'd go back to functioning normally and then she would see where she was and where she needed to go in order to travel on.
Just thinking of this little plan steadied her stomach and the queasiness subsided. She leaned back in her seat, laid her head back, closed her eyes and breathed evenly. This wasn't so bad.
Another thought crept into her head. She readily acknowledged that she'd gone AWOL. She'd even stolen government property: the jet in which she presently sat. But the reason why she'd done these things was a noble one in her eyes: she wanted to join up with her wing and fly combat space patrol around Kasa Station while Ben Harrow and his troops searched the installation.
She wanted to see Ben again.
He was one of a kind. A special person, totally misunderstood by everybody on Terra Gemina—except her, and maybe her uncle. Cherry would have been happy to just sit and watch him from afar. Never had anybody touched her heart like he had. Neither Juggernaut nor Rambler, and definitely none of the other guys that she'd grown up with.
In the community where she grew up, children and youth spent most of their time away from their parents. Everybody, including the children, had his or her assigned task and the task was always more important than the bonds of family. At least that was what Charity gathered from observing the society in which she lived.
Life could be pretty hard for a child in the camp in which she grew up. There was always somebody a bit older and stronger who had to lord it over the smaller and weaker ones. The adults were so oblivious to many of the plights of their children that Cherry sometimes thought they didn't care. Many times she would have loved to run from the pressure but couldn't, because her mother was busy with some important task. Cherry would have loved to spend more time with her parents, but they weren't available, because what they were doing was so crucial for the colony's survival. She was neglected, but didn't know it. And now her mother and father were dead and she was no longer her parents' child, but her uncle's niece.
Which has its perks.
However, Cherry wanted to think that the bullies backed off from then on because she had learned to assert herself and not because her uncle was the admiral.
Her thoughts flashed back to the accident on the pylon road. Somehow she got derailed.
By whom?
She knew that the MARDET was scheduled to come back three days from now and not tonight. The transports hadn't knocked her off. They hadn't even left the spaceport. As a matter of fact, they had barely come back themselves before she left.
A spell of dizziness overtook her and she steadied herself in her seat.
Perhaps the aliens of Kasaganaan—she was certain there were aliens—had set up some kind of roadblock. Perhaps she'd run into a defense measure.
That would mean that Ben Harrow and to the MARDET were already history.
She squinted at her panels, but found no readouts.
A glance through the canopy revealed that there were still no stars. Oh, how she missed them now. Something ugly was hanging around out there; invisible maybe, but very present—at least in her mind. Cherry had the distinct feeling that the devil himself was looking in at her. She cast her eyes down.
It suddenly dawned on her that the same thing had happened to Ben Harrow so many years ago. He'd got knocked off the pylon road, too.
He had spent forty years here.
At the thought Cherry's stomach contracted. The convulsion was so bad that she held on to the armrests of her seat and coughed.
This was awful.
Compared to Ben Harrow she wouldn't be able to endure this for forty years. She was a mere human and was going to… die.
Her cockpit began to feel like a coffin. She leaned forward and shouted at the navigation panel, "Come back on!" But the panel ignored her. Its surface remained as black as the sky beyond her vitrum dome.
The blood seemed to drain from her head and she got woozy again. Shivers crept around on her skin. All she wanted was to see a few feeble stars. But nobody showed her any.
Uncle Daniel had told her that Ben Harrow got stuck in space for the relief of the people of Neo Babylonia. Mr. Harrow was emperor there and had been very hard on the folks. Since he had such outstanding powers, nobody could hold him accountable for anything he did. And then he suddenly found himself lost in space.
Well, she was lost in space now, too.
Was Terra Gemina a better place now because she was gone?
The thought was ludicrous. She was just a friendly fighter pilot, trying to get along with everybody—and succeeding, mind you. Just ask Jug or Ramb; they really liked her. They could vouch for her. She wasn't bad. She definite
ly was no willful empress. Whatever had happened to Ben Harrow back then had no bearing on her situation. There was no comparison.
Cherry suddenly sat up, wide-eyed.
She'd been insolent, too. She had gone AWOL because she'd believed that she'd get away with it. After all, the admiral was her uncle. She'd had no concern for the feelings of her uncle, who of course would be worried once he found out that she had flown into battle, most likely, without his consent.
And coming straight out of sick bay!
Cherry felt so stupid now. How she wished she could turn back time—but this place was beyond time. At that thought she gritted her teeth until they hurt.
This canopy!
Had always been that close?
It was pressing in on her right now. It had never done that before. Cherry took her fist and hit it again. She was close to getting claustrophobic—when she thought of something else: she had nothing to eat with her. And not much to drink, either. Good thing the CamelBak behind her was still mostly full. Its straw grew out of her shoulder harness. She drank a swig now and was thankful for it, because it made her feel alive again. She breathed deeply.
Uncle Daniel had found insolent Ben Harrow many years ago when he'd been stuck in deep space. Now her own insolence had catapulted her into the same giant prison cell.
Would somebody come and look for her?
Would somebody find her?
Would they even know where to search?
Momentarily her thoughts blurred and turned into a torrent of little worries, more felt than thought. Black flies seemed to fill her head. The tide of worries rose up out of her soul and coalesced into one big thought: she was going to die out here. The universe was a big empty place. It was mostly made up of nothing. What little matter there was consisted of seventy percent hydrogen, thirty percent helium and a tiny sliver that made up everything else.
It was a miracle that anything solid existed at all.
Nobody would find her.
