The Defiant’s common room consisted of a couple of lounge chairs and a long table for eating. Five doorways on each side of the room led to various crew quarters, a kitchen, a supply room, the ship’s armory, and a common latrine with four showers. A metal ladder at the back of the common room led down to the Defiant’s cargo hold. Also below deck was the lower anti-ship weapon’s array. The same ladder also led to the upper anti-ship’s weapons. A double door near the ladder opened to a corridor leading back to the engine room.
Richard turned to his left to face the front of the ship. A metal, doublewide stairway led up to the ship’s control room. Richard headed for the stairs.
Uh, Rick, said Nickelo. This is just a suggestion, but maybe you should put some clothes on first. You look like you’re getting ready to attend a toga party.
A what? Richard asked.
Never mind, said Nickelo. Just take my word for it. You should get dressed first.
Richard glanced down at the thin sheet wrapped around his body. He guessed he probably did look a little ridiculous. Turning away from the stairs, Richard headed for the center door across from the medical facility. A thick curtain served as a door for a cabin. Pulling back the curtain, Richard entered inside. The cabin was the crew-quarters assigned to him by Charlie.
His room was small. An upper and lower bunk was on one side of the cabin. Two metal half-lockers, one on top of the other, were attached to the bulkhead opposite from the bunks. A small desk and chair completed the cabin’s furnishings. As Sergeant Ron had often said, the Defiant was a recon ship, not a luxury liner. Richard didn’t mind the lack of physical comforts. Growing up in an orphanage followed by three years living on the streets had taught him to do without.
Richard noticed someone had laid his dimensional pack on the pillow of the lower bunk. He was tempted to summon a clean uniform from his pack, but he restrained himself. Richard had no idea how extensive the supplies were from his dimensional pack. He often worried about the day he would attempt to summon something, and it wouldn’t appear because he’d frittered it all away unnecessarily. Besides, he was extremely low on Power, and he couldn’t afford to waste any at the current time.
Opening the door to his locker, Richard pulled out a black jumpsuit of a wizard scout which was crumpled on the floor of the locker. The only color besides black on the jumpsuit was the golden-dragon insignia pinned to the suit’s collar. Richard took a quick sniff of the uniform. It wasn’t exactly clean, but Richard thought it didn’t seem too bad if he ignored the obvious wrinkles. He made a mental note to do his laundry before they got back to base. Reaching into the locker again, Richard grabbed his underwear, socks, hat, and boots.
Richard hurriedly got dressed. After he was finished, he used his passive scan to locate his battle suit. He spotted it in the cargo bay along with the rest of his gear. That is, except for his battle helmet. He sensed it was located in the control room near a single lifeform. Richard recognized the frequency of the lifeform as Sergeant Ron. Not counting the rats which seemed to infest all starships, the only other sign of life onboard was Charlie. The old lizard was currently in the engine room.
Reaching out with his mind, Richard willed his utility belt and attachments to him. A black military-belt appeared in the air near Richard’s hand. He grabbed it before it could fall to the deck. Attached to the utility belt were a holstered .44 caliber AutoMag with two clips of extra ammo, a canteen, an ammo pouch with two anti-personnel grenades, and his phase rod. Richard strapped the utility belt around his waist.
During his junior year at the Academy, the Commandant had shown Richard how to tag items with Power. Once an item was tagged, Richard could summon it to his location. It took a lot of Power to initially tag items. However, during his downtime since he’d left the Academy, he had made an effort to tag all of his standard equipment excluding ammo. Richard wasn’t sure how far away he could actually summon his tagged items, but he suspected it was quite a distance. The advantage of tagging an item was that after the initial outlay of Power to mark the item, it took no Power to summon the item afterwards. And the tagging effect was permanent. Of course, he did need to have at least a little Power in his reserve to make it work.
After making a final adjustment to his gear, Richard started to leave his quarters, but he stopped at the doorway. Turning back, he picked up his dimensional pack. After imagining a starburst grenade, Richard opened the flap and pulled the grenade out of his pack.
Smart, came Nickelo’s voice in Richard’s head. It’s part of your standard load, so it costs you nothing in Power to summon.
So, you’re admitting I can do some things right after all, eh, Nick? Richard said taking note of his battle computer’s rare praise.
On occasions, said Nickelo, rare though they may be.
Whatever, Richard said. He should have known his battle computer’s praise would come with a disclaimer.
After throwing his dimensional pack back onto his bunk and attaching the starburst grenade to his belt, Richard left his quarters and headed towards the control room. He found Sergeant Ron leaned back in the pilot’s chair with his feet propped up on the control panel. Richard noticed his battle helmet was hanging from the armrest of the copilot’s seat.
“Sergeant Ron,” Richard said. “The maid won’t like it if she finds your feet on her nice, clean, control panel.”
Sergeant Ron’s long, salt and pepper hair flew around as he twisted in his seat to look behind him. His skin was wrinkled and weather-beaten. But Sergeant Ron’s eyes gave a glint more in line with a mischievous teenager than an adult. Richard had never asked how old his maintenance chief was, but the look in his eyes gave the impression of a man who’d never grown up.
“Well, well,” said Sergeant Ron with a friendly grin. “Did you have a nice nap? You wizard scouts are too pampered. That’s why you’re always sleeping on the job while we hard-working sergeants have to take up the slack.”
Richard smiled back. “Yeah, I know, Sergeant Ron. The military is run by its non-commissioned officers.”
“Now you’re learning,” said Sergeant Ron still grinning. Then he lost his smile and said more seriously, “I thought we’d lost you there, old buddy. It looked like they had an entire armored battalion after you. They even had a bunch of ground pounders to boot. Not to mention a dozen or so attack shuttles circling around waiting to get a piece of your rear end.”
“So Nick told me,” Richard said. “Thanks for getting me out. But I did order you to abort. You’re supposed to be working for me, remember?”
“Ah, and what kind of sergeant would I be if I didn’t take care of my leader,” said Sergeant Ron with his grin back on his face. “My wife would never let me live it down if I let something happen to you. I think she’s still waiting for me to bring her an autographed picture of the genuine hero she’s heard so much about in the news.”
Richard blushed. After the fiasco at the Academy the previous year, Richard had found himself the center of attention of the Intergalactic Empire News. For a couple of months, it had been hard to watch a video broadcast without seeing his face splashed across the screen at some point. Richard had taken a lot of ribbing from his friends for his fifteen minutes of fame until the reporters found something more exciting to cover.
“Not funny, Sergeant Ron,” Richard said. “So where do you have this bucket of bolts headed? Back to the asteroid belt?”
The mercenary outfit where Richard was assigned was based in an asteroid belt in the Storis system in District 2. It was only a single hyper-jump between planet X3321 and Storis.
Starships had two types of propulsion. Using normal hyper-drive, a good starship could accelerate to about ten thousand times the speed of light. While seriously fast, a starship using its hyper-drive could still take weeks or even months to get to its destination.
For longer distances, or in emergency combat conditions, a starship could use its hyper-drive to jump between folds in the dimension. Since his gradua
tion from the Academy, Richard had taken up reading on a wide variety of topics during his free time. One area he’d found particularly interesting was dimensional theory. From what he’d read, dimensions were like pieces of paper someone had wadded into a tight ball. Under the right circumstances, a hyper-drive could allow a starship to jump from one fold in a dimension to another fold in the same dimension. Consequently, a starship could travel from one side of the galaxy to the other very quickly by jumping across any intersecting folds. For shorter distances, a single jump might get the starship to its destination. For longer distances, the trip might take several jumps.
The problem with using a starship’s hyper-drive to jump across folds was that it was very hard on a hyper-drive. For each jump, a hyper-drive’s fuel cells deteriorated approximately ten percent. Since overhauling a hyper-drive was expensive and time consuming, most starships refrained from making jumps except when absolutely necessary. Military ships were only allowed to make jumps with their hyper-drives when authorized by higher headquarters or when circumstances met a complicated set of rules of engagement.
Fortunately, the Defiant was not a military ship. Sergeant Ron had full control over when and how often he wanted to use the hyper-drive on the Defiant for jumps. And unlike most starships, the hyper-drive on the Defiant only deteriorated five percent when making jumps. The increased efficiency was a direct testimony to the maintenance skills of Sergeant Ron and Charlie.
Of course, since the Defiant wasn’t a military ship, the cost of any overhaul was fully upon Sergeant Ron and Richard. Since Richard tended to be broke much of the time, Sergeant Ron usually refrained from costly hyper-jumps when he could avoid them.
Taking his feet off the control panel, Sergeant Ron sat up in his seat and swiveled around to face Richard. He pointed at the copilot’s chair.
“Why don’t you take a load off your feet, Rick, and I’ll explain what’s going on,” said Sergeant Ron. “A lot has been happening while you were out playing hide and seek with your Trecorian friends.”
Before sitting down, Richard glanced around the control room.
“They’re by the navigator’s console,” said Sergeant Ron without explanation.
Richard didn’t need an explanation. The old sergeant had read his mind. Stepping over to the navigator’s chair, Richard reached out and picked up a small sack. He opened it up and looked inside. Several protein bars and snack packs of crackers greeted Richard. There was even a cup-sized plastic container with an attached spoon containing a dark paste. Richard recognized the paste as a pudding of some type.
“Thanks, Sergeant Ron,” Richard said appreciatively. “I am a little hungry.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Sergeant Ron. “When ain’t you hungry?”
Pointing at the copilot’s seat again, he added with a grin, “Now take a seat and try to pay attention while you’re stuffing your face.”
Taking no offense at Sergeant Ron’s comments, Richard took a seat and promptly opened a protein bar. He took a small bite and savored the taste in his mouth. In truth, Richard had to admit he was almost always hungry. On the night before his DNA baseline was taken, his TAC officer at the Academy, TAC Officer Gaston Myers, had put him on guard duty. As a result, he’d gotten minimal sleep, plus he’d missed breakfast that morning. Since a DNA baseline meant a wizard scout’s Power attempted to keep his or her body in the same physical condition, Richard normally had a case of the munchies. Plus, he usually felt like a short catnap would do him good. Fortunately, neither the feeling of hunger or tiredness was enough to affect his thinking or fighting ability. However, they were enough to be irksome. As a result, Richard tended to snack a lot and doze whenever he had the opportunity.
“So, where are we headed?” Richard said as he nibbled on a cheese cracker.
“To?” answered Sergeant Ron. “You’ve been summoned by the Imperial High Council, my boy. Looks like you’re going to be hobnobbing with the big boys.”
Sergeant Ron’s reply confused Richard. In the ten months since he’d left the Academy, neither the Imperial High Command nor the Imperial High Council had wanted much to do with him. He’d been assigned a couple of boring administrative assignment which could easily have been handled by normal soldiers. Assigning a valuable wizard scout to such mundane tasks was asinine as far as he was concerned. Six months ago, Richard had received additional orders attaching him to a mercenary outfit in District 2. The mercenary unit’s mission was to protect convoys and mining settlements from raids by Balorian pirates. While more interesting than his first two administrative assignments, it was still a waste of a wizard scout’s abilities.
It’s just as well, chimed in Nickelo. ‘The One’ has been sending you on his non-Empire missions every two or three weeks. You’ve needed the downtime between missions to recover.
Richard forced down a rising swell of anger. ‘The One’ was the bane of his existence. Both Nickelo and he agreed ‘The One’ was probably a network of computers using the tele-network to collaborate much of the galaxy’s computer resources towards some unknown purpose. Ever since Richard’s freshman year at the Academy, ‘the One’ had been sending him on missions back in time to the magical dimension. Most of the missions were on a planet called Portalus, but some were on other planets. Some were even in places so distant and obscure Nickelo couldn’t figure out where they were.
During Richard’s first mission for ‘the One’, he’d tried to rebel. Unauthorized authority figures irked him to no end. Richard had soon learned rebelling had a cost. ‘The One’ just kept sticking him on more difficult missions until he finally acquiesced to do the mission correctly.
During the last ten months, Richard had tried to be unusually accommodating on his missions. He had to be. His nephew and niece, Brachia and Dren, had been teleported back in time 157 years to the planet Portalus. Neither Richard nor Nickelo knew how to travel through time. Nickelo had finally convinced Richard his sole hope of rescuing his nephew and niece was to perform missions for ‘the One’ to the best of his ability. Hopefully, ‘the One’ would eventually send him to the time and place where his nephew and niece were located. After twenty missions in ten months, Richard was about ready to call his plan a failure.
Richard momentarily pushed aside thoughts of ‘the One’ to concentrate on the matters at hand. His recall to Risors by the Imperial High Council smacked of politics. Richard was a soldier. He hated politics.
“This makes no sense, Sergeant Ron,” Richard said growing frustrated at being jerked around by both ‘the One’ and the Imperial High Council.
“I hear you,” said Sergeant Ron. “But it is what it is.”
As Richard was taking a swallow from his canteen, he noticed Sergeant Ron giving him a strange look.
“What?” Richard said a little defensively. He liked Sergeant Ron, but sometimes his chief mechanic made him feel uncomfortable.
“Well,” drawled Sergeant Ron. “I was just thinking how you left on your mission in a Warcat scout. You may remember Charlie and I spent a lot of time getting the Warcat into topnotch condition. But when you came back, all you had was a battle suit with a hole in it.”
Richard coughed up some water which had suddenly gone down the wrong way. Sergeant Ron reached over and gave him a slap on the back.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Richard replied after he’d caught his breath. He really was sorry. Both Sergeant Ron and Charlie had spent many a late night modifying his Warcat until it was probably the best in the fleet.
“It was a trap,” Richard continued when Sergeant Ron said nothing and just continued staring at him. “I don’t think there was any information on a new DNA vent in the first place. The place was supposed to be lightly defended. Somebody must have gone to a lot of trouble to set up a stealth shield capable of concealing an armored battalion.”
“Yeah,” said Sergeant Ron as he drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “I was able to see part of the battle through video from the tele-bots.”
He was surprised. Tele-bots were microscopic robots capable of sending audio and video data back to higher headquarters via the tele-network. That some tele-bots had been with him wasn’t surprising. What surprised Richard was Sergeant Ron had apparently gotten access to the data. Since Nickelo was cut off from the tele-network, even Richard couldn’t get access.
“Yeah, I had access,” admitted Sergeant Ron. “Although I have to admit it wasn’t easy. I was able to sweet talk your friend Stella into having her battle computer relay the information to me.”
“What?” said Nickelo speaking out loud. “You have a communication’s link with Jonathan?”
Stella was one of Richard’s friends from his Academy days. She was a wizard scout now, and Jonathan was her battle computer. Stella was a Sterilian like Charlie. Even though she was one of the reptilian races, Richard and she had hit it off during their cadet days. They had each saved the other’s life more than once.
“Had,” corrected Sergeant Ron. “I had communications. I lost it when we made the jump with our hyper-drive.”
“Oh,” said Nickelo. “Can you re-establish communications?”
“Maybe,” said Sergeant Ron. “But not right now. The point I wanted to make is Charlie and I saw part of the battle, Rick. And you had more than one opportunity to get away unscathed. Why didn’t you?”
Richard mulled the question over for a few seconds while he nibbled on another cracker. His actions had been bothering him as well.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Richard hedged.
“Now, Rick,” chimed in Nickelo. “Are you sure that’s the truth. I calculate a sixty-seven percent probability you know the reason, but you’re afraid to admit it.”
Richard thought it over a few more seconds. He did have a theory. During the attack on the Academy the previous year, Richard had been called upon to assist Nickelo and Jonathan in hacking their way into the Crosioians’ Master computer. The hack had required Richard and Nickelo to merge their minds to an even greater extent than normal. During the merging, Richard had stumbled upon a ghost of a memory in Nickelo’s databanks. The memory, or dream as Nickelo called it, had revealed Richard’s heritage. He’d been taken out of his mother’s womb by ‘the One’ as a fertilized egg. Parts of DNA from several magical races had been spliced with his. One of the parts had been DNA from a gnome. Since his graduation from the Academy, Richard had spent a lot of time researching magical races whenever he’d been sent on a mission for ‘the One’. The gnomes on Portalus were known for their tendency to make sacrifices for others, even if it meant endangering their own lives.
Wizard Omega (Intergalactic Wizard Scout Chronicles Book 4) Page 7
