Edge of Conquest (The Restoration Armada Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  The price tag must be ridiculous. More credit put together than what Delagarza’d see in his entire life.

  And it didn’t matter one bit because there was no power in the known universe that could do anything to hide the heat of the fusion engines’ torch. Oryza-powered, and radioactive as fuck, it made the emissions even easier to detect than a normal, atmospheric-flight-only craft. The SA may be top dog in this part of the galaxy, but thermodynamics carried the leash.

  It was a perfect ship for the enforcers. Overpowered, overpriced, over-clocked, and it would only ever be useful in worlds they already ruled and where no one wanted (or could) bring them down.

  Besides, it looked like a black shark’s head. Personal vehicle of Major Nicholas Strauze, no doubt.

  “Whatever,” Krieger said, when the foreman left her side, “keep your local fairy tales to yourself. Focus on cracking that computer, so I don’t have to stay at your ice block planet any longer than I have to.”

  “Believe me, I’d hate to keep you any longer than you need to,” Delagarza told her, still smiling.

  He climbed the shuttle’s unfolded stairs before Krieger had a chance to mull over his words.

  A pilot waited at the cockpit already.

  “You’ll need to strap a pressure suit,” the pilot told him as Delagarza fought his way across the tight, cramped deck.

  “Aren’t we pressurized?” Delagarza had traveled in one of these only once in his life, the day he arrived at Dione, and the memory was fuzzy.

  “Wrong question,” the man said. He didn’t explain what the right question was, so Delagarza shrugged and did as he was told. The pressurized suits were kept in a locker at the end of the deck. He discovered that the suit wouldn’t fit over his reg-suit, so he had to undress and then slowly step into the pressure suit.

  After he finished, the shuttle was ready to launch. Delagarza strapped to his seat, listened to the pilot’s brief chatter with flight control, and watched in awe at the gigantic crane hand that enveloped the ship in long, loving fingers, before pushing it to open space.

  The pilot turned on the hydrogen thrusters just as gravity vanished.

  Three hours passed before the main engine came roaring to life. Delagarza saw the amazing blue torch shooting out of the shuttle’s tail, in complete silence, while they soared through the vacuum into the white expanse of Dione.

  “You don’t do this often, do you?” the pilot asked him at one point.

  “What gave it away?” Delagarza asked.

  “Your face. Looks like my kid’s during the holidays.”

  At the co-pilot seat, Krieger snickered.

  “Laugh if you want,” Delagarza told her, “where we’re going, you’ll be the fish out of water. By the way, no obvious enforcer weaponry, please, or there won’t be no one around to sell me the ‘ware I’m going to need.”

  Krieger shot him a dubious glare. She looked like a trout to Strauze’s shark. Small, tight mouth, oily black pupils, tufts of black hair insinuating themselves under her helmet.

  “I’m not telling you to go unarmed,” Delagarza said, “but consider bringing plastic, okay?”

  The woman shrugged and Delagarza allowed himself to relax a bit. He dreaded already what being seen next to an enforcer would do to his reputation.

  Re-entry was jumpy, but he expected it to be. Years upon years of movie dramas had given the entirety of the Edge’s population a pretty good idea of the forces involved during a standard atmospheric entry. He knew the fireball that surrounded the shuttle would love to slither inside the cabin and burn the ever-living shit out of him, and it would do so at the slightest chance.

  Not a reassuring fact in a ship built by people who thought you could hide an atomic reaction by trying to make the hull look like a race car’s chassis.

  Still, the shuttle didn’t explode, and the fireball disappeared to leave Delagarza with a computer-rendered sight of Dione from outside Alwinter’s dome.

  It wasn’t a breathtaking sight. But it was impressive. Dione was covered in white, its surface swatted at by a titanic snowstorm that had roared non-stop for a million years. Life was utterly impossible outside a dome, except for brief excursions with environmental suits. Machinery handled all the heavy-duty ice mining.

  Delagarza knew they were close to Alwinter, but there was no sight of the dome on screen, nor of the colossal mining equipment that littered the city’s surroundings.

  Just white. Everywhere.

  Delagarza shivered and looked away from the screens.

  They reached the landing pad, visible only through the computer’s promises that it was there. The pilot maneuvered the craft until an extendable airlock made contact with the cabin.

  “That’s all on my part,” said the pilot, “call me in a couple days and I’ll come pick you up,” he told Krieger.

  “Just make sure they don’t leave without me,” she said.

  She and Delagarza reached Alwinter through a series of semi-deserted maintenance tunnels and shafts. That Krieger had the authority to walk unimpeded through the entrails of Alwinter’s labyrinthine life-support system reminded Delagarza of the woman’s sheer reach. The hatches they walked through had red lines painted in their frames with a symbol everyone in the city knew by memory. It meant that anyone caught in this place without the proper credentials faced lifetime in prison.

  A couple of security drones and a pair of guards gave Delagarza the stink-eye when their wristbands and sensors marked him as someone who very much lacked the proper credentials, but they looked away at once when they scanned Krieger’s.

  Delagarza only relaxed after passing the last hatch and being buffeted by Alwinter’s freezing breeze. The faint hum of the industrial ventilators felt like coming home.

  “Where to, now?” Krieger asked.

  “Off to sleep, of course,” Delagarza said, glancing at his wristband. Dione had a year-long day-night cycle that Alwinter didn’t bother to follow. Its artificial day lasted ten hours, same as its artificial night. Between going up to Outlander in the morning, being interviewed by Strauze, and coming down again, the city was about to call it a day.

  “We hired you to work over the clock,” said Krieger, “don’t waste enforcer’s time.”

  “Listen, lady,” Delagarza said, “I don’t mind pulling extra hours, but going into Taiga Town at night is stupid. Haven’t you seen the soap operas?”

  Krieger’s eyes narrowed. Taiga Town was a startown that had long ago moved from its cozy section of Outlander into the colony below. Like all startowns across the Edge, its reputation had been romanticized and exaggerated by movies and shows, but most of it was well-earned.

  “Very well,” she said, “tomorrow at first hour.”

  She glanced around at the naked, stout buildings ordered in neat rows next to the traffic-filled street.

  “Know any good places to sleep around here?”

  “My apartment has great reviews,” Delagarza joked, giving her a meaningful smirk. “You can stay there for the night, if you want.”

  True, he didn’t particularly like Krieger, but Alwinter’s nights were best spent with someone to help you keep the sheets warm. Even if that person was an enforcer.

  At first, Krieger winced, like she smelled something nasty under her nose. Then, she shivered, and seemed to reach Delagarza’s conclusion.

  “Ah, what the hell,” she said with a shrug.

  Next morning, at first hour, Delagarza and Krieger met with Cooke at the GPS spot Delagarza had marked in their wristbands.

  “Sweet Reiner,” Cooke said when he caught sight of Delagarza, “you look like hell, Delagarza. How long have you been without sleep?”

  “Ain’t you a perceptive fellow,” Delagarza snapped back, without animosity.

  Last night’s romp with Krieger had gone as well as anyone could’ve guessed. It was like sleeping with a judgmental coworker who commented caustically on your performance the entire time. Afterward, Delagarza had consumed two da
y’s worth of water rations in a long, hot shower.

  “We’re here,” Krieger said, looking around, like Taiga Town would materialize in front of their noses, “but I don’t see this startown you mentioned.”

  “Not yet,” Delagarza said. He gestured at her and Cooke to huddle together, close to him.

  They looked like three grizzly bears with the amount of cold protection they wore over their reg-suits (Cooke had rented one at Delagarza’s insistence). Warm, yes, but also impractical for movement in a city where all empty space was a luxury.

  “You’ll need to wear these,” Delagarza said, handing each of them a pair of poly-plastic beans the size of a fingernail.

  “What are these?” Cooke asked, as he examined the soft surface of the beans.

  “Earplugs,” Krieger told him, “to nullify a sonic baton’s effects. They’re very illegal. I could send you to jail for this, Delagarza.”

  It was true. After all, only security personnel and enforcers used sonic batons. Why would a good citizen, with nothing to fear, need to protect himself against them?

  Delagarza shrugged. “You want to go into Taiga, you wear these,” Delagarza said. “Otherwise, you’ll wake up in a capsule-motel hooked up to a serum drip with your kidneys missing.”

  “Why did you need me for this?” asked Cooke, glancing at Delagarza and Krieger. No one bothered to answer him.

  Delagarza’s excuse had been that he was teaching Cooke how to profit and survive in Alwinter. It was true, but the main reason was that three people were less an interesting target than a man and woman.

  “They wouldn’t dare mess with an enforcer,” Krieger said.

  “Startown,” Delagarza reminded her, “and you aren’t going as an enforcer. When asked, you say you’re a security officer or shit will hit the life-support ventilator.”

  They put the earplugs on.

  Delagarza did the same with his own and waited a second for the devices’ ‘ware to connect to his wristband. The world muted itself during that second and then went back to normal.

  “Very well,” he told them, “follow me.”

  He led them to an alley between a sex shop and a foreclosed bar. The alley was a dead end, covered in litter and various fluids. Delagarza nodded a greeting at a homeless man who stared at him with dead eyes from a corner, reached the middle of the alley, and stopped.

  “Has he gone insane?” Krieger asked Cooke, somewhere behind Delagarza.

  “Believe me, this is normal with him. He’s always going into these random places that no one else knows about, and he knows all these people—”

  “This is a dead end,” Krieger interrupted him.

  Delagarza ignored them and reached the sewer hatch at the ground. All the sewer hatches in Alwinter were welded shut, with very, very few exceptions that the colony’s government had no knowledge about.

  He pulled at the rusty metal and lifted it without effort, assisted by hidden servos inside the floor next to the hatch.

  Krieger and Cooke’s conversation died. Delagarza turned to them with a smug smile in his face.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to Taiga Town.”

  From the darkness of the hole came faint bass-boosted vibrations of music.

  8

  Chapter Eight

  Clarke

  Since the dawn of spacefaring civilization, sailors could count on two constants during each faster than light trip. The first was: everything outside the ship kills you even faster than the vacuum of space. The ring will kill you, Hawking’s radiation will kill you, the crunch of space-time past the Drive’s protection will kill you so hard that, according to some physicists, you’d be dead before deciding to leave the ship. This hypothesis, currently, remains solely in the realm of speculation.

  Most sailors wised up to the deadliness of FTL real quick and focused their efforts on making sure the mechanical barriers that protected the ship’s population from certain and instant death functioned correctly.

  Other sailors, usually new and wide-eyed, wondered what the ship would look like if observed from outside. This was the second constant of space travel.

  “Wonder what the ship would look like if I were standing outside,” said the contractor sitting next to Clarke. They were at the mess hall, sharing the table with four other men and women with varying degrees of experience with FTL. All sailors were strapped to their chairs and had their military ration trays magnetized to the tables.

  “Would look like nothing, you’d be dead before you decided to jump out of the airlock,” said Gutierrez, a man with ten round trips under his belt.

  Clarke took a bite out of his sandwich and listened to a conversation he had witnessed a hundred times before unfold. While he did so, he set the sandwich beside his head. The piece of food spun lazily in the air.

  “That’s just a hypothesis, Gutierrez, hasn’t been proven,” said Lambert, a woman with seven years of trips under her belt, but with a soft side for wide-eyed idealism.

  “Because no one’s been stupid enough to try it,” Gutierrez said, his mouth full of MRS cooked beans. “Besides, the way it works, you wouldn’t see anyone jumping out the airlock, they’d just fall dead at a random time. People do die for no reason during a trip. It’s rare, but it happens.”

  “Obviously I don’t wanna jump out an airlock and see,” said the first contractor, “I know that shit would kill me. Just…hypothetically, alright? I’m curious.”

  What’s your name? Clarke thought, making an effort to remember. Remembering a name used to come naturally to him before. Nowadays, faces and names tended to mesh together.

  Mann something, he decided. Jules Mann.

  “Well,” Clarke asked Mann, “is the person standing outside the ring or inside?”

  “It changes things?”

  “Outside, it would look not entirely unlike a black hole,” Clarke explained, “only moving at fuck-your-soul speed, so more like a black…canyon…thing, expanding beyond what your eyes could see. Space would look all swirly around its edges.”

  Clarke even made a swirly gesture with his hands to illustrate his point.

  “Dear Reiner, we have a poet on board,” Lambert said as she pretended to faint. “Had I known, I’d have sped up my divorce.”

  “Leave the old timer alone,” Gutierrez said, flashing Clarke a grin. “At his age, stims will make his heart freeze with any strong emotion.”

  He made an obscene gesture with his hand to illustrate his point.

  Clarke laughed and said, “Ask your mother how healthy I am, I was just with her last time I was in port.”

  After the hollering had died, Clarke returned to Mann’s question:

  “From inside the energy-density ring, it’d depend on your position. In front of the ship, you’d see a soft white glow,” Clarke explained. He omitted the part where the ship would atomize the asshole standing in front of a ship. The way the ring worked, the ship kept the velocity it had before the Alcubierre Drive activated. For a commercial vessel, it meant about five percent the speed of light (.05c), and double that for military vessels at cruise speed.

  “What about…behind it?” asked Mann.

  “Ah, nothing,” Clarke said.

  “Nothing?” Mann looked disappointed. “Black, then. Like normal space.”

  “Oh, no,” said Gutierrez, with a grin. “You haven’t seen anything like that black, before.”

  Mann raised an eyebrow. Clarke finished his sandwich and explained:

  “Inside the ring, we’re moving at ‘normal’ speeds. Outside, we’re crossing space at several times the speed of light. Stand behind the ship, look at it, you’d see the ship’s afterimage. Look outside the ring, and you’d see nothing,” Clarke said, “because we’re outrunning light itself. No stars, not a thing. There’s no place in space as black as the black you’d see.”

  Mann blinked. “Is that bad?”

  “Imagine what it does to a person,” Gutierrez told him. “We evolved as a species to fear the da
rk, because of the dangers that lurk there. Absolute darkness represents absolute fear.”

  “Really?” Mann hunched over the table, towards Gutierrez, his eyes wide. The rest of the table exchanged knowing glances and hid their smirks.

  “There’s a reason the lower part of a ship lacks cameras,” Gutierrez went on, lowering his voice to a whisper. “In the beginning, during Earth’s first attempts at Alcubierre travel, spaceships had windows. Men could glance at the unfathomable dark. What they saw drove many insane. The surviving crew had to kill them to stop them when they tried to blow the reactors.”

  “Bull,” muttered Mann, pale, his MRS plate forgotten, half-eaten. “What about empty space would make a sailor try that?”

  Gutierrez smiled like a fisherman who just felt a fish swallow a hook and pull the line. “Ah, empty,” he said, “that’s not what they said, oh no. In their mad ravings, they talked about mouths lurking in the dark. Fangs as long as moons, many tongues slithering, hungering, speaking at them…”

  Gutierrez smashed the table without any warning, and Mann jumped so hard he almost tore the straps gluing him to his chair.

  When the sailors started to laugh, Mann flushed red. Lambert patted him in the back, but she was laughing too.

  “We have a poet and a horror screenwriter,” she said. “What an interesting crew.”

  There had never been any windows in Alcubierre-capable starships. Windows were structural weak points, and cameras did their job better. Gutierrez made the whole thing up. Stories like these abounded during the months-long trips, a pastime hailing from the times when humanity had hunched over campfires and told stories to each other. Clarke’s favorite version involved space ghosts waiting for unlucky salvage crews boarding derelict vessels.

  Clarke glanced at his wristband while Mann pretended he hadn’t been scared. A buzz alert meant he had an urgent message.

  It was from Antonov: