Jewel

by Veronica Tower

  “Why would they do the latter, Mr. Exec?” the captain asked. “Ms. Aurora has just demonstrated that this station had children on it. Could their patriotism really have been so great that they would have preferred for these people to wither and die out here than to let them live under Armenite domination?”

  It was, Jewel thought, a surprisingly insightful question from the captain, and for once she spoke without first considering her reply. “They were hiding something, weren’t they? Something they didn’t want the Aremnites to have.”

  “Precisely my thinking,” the captain agreed. “And whatever it is, it must have been damn important for them to abandon families—families with children—here when things went to hell on their home world. Any idea what that might be, Mr. Exec?”

  “No…” Erik’s answer was superficially short, but Jewel would have bet serious money that his brain was spinning in overdrive trying to think of what the reason could be.

  “You know what else is bothering me?” Jewel asked. “There aren’t enough people on this station. So far, we’ve encountered four—two of them children. Where are all the others? No way this station had only two adults operating it.”

  “Another good question, Ms. Aurora,” the captain said. “Perhaps I’ve been underestimating your talents. I’ve got Mr. Peron scanning the surface of the moon we’re orbiting looking for a settlement. It could be a long process. It’s a mighty big world. But we’re beginning our survey by concentrating on areas beneath the satellites they’ve placed in geosynchronous orbit. We’ll see what we come up with. In the meantime, you keep searching that station.”

  * * * * *

  “Would you look at that beauty?” Jester asked.

  Jewel glanced at him sidewise, but he didn’t appear to be making another of his never-ending jokes.

  “That’s an old Meteorite model. You only see them in museums these days,” Jester said as he hurried forward to run his hand over the side of the only shuttle in the hangar bay.

  It was an old model—Jewel could tell that even without Jester’s museum comment—and even a cursory look showed it in serious need of basic maintenance.

  Jester ducked under the nose so he could examine the landing gear. “Wow, it’s really beat up,” he said. “Imagine someone modern like the Ymirians using one of these.”

  “What is he talking about?” Falco asked. “Jester, nobody understands you. Of course it’s old. This whole station’s been abandoned for something like twenty years.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Jester told her. “Look at this. You can still make out the letters on the side of the craft. It’s a Mark XVI. Who would have believed we’d find a functional Mark XVI in this day and age?”

  “I’m not familiar with this shuttle model,” she confessed. “Can you give me some of the relevant particulars?”

  Jester was only too happy to comply, rattling off the statistics in a crisp fashion that proved there was something besides dead children he could be absolutely serious about. “It’s an atmospheric landing craft—orbit to land mass—thus the name Meteorite. This model was first produced in 423 on Inverness. That’s an industrial giant back in—”

  “I know what Inverness is,” Jewel cut him off. “Did you say 423?”

  “Couldn’t be,” Falco cut in. “That’s nearly four centuries ago. Who would still be using such a thing? And where would they even get one these days?”

  Jewel thought the answer to that last question was patently obvious, but then Falco clearly wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. “They had to have gotten it from the colonizer. The real question is why were they using it?”

  “The shuttle had a reputation as a dependable workhorse,” Jester informed her. He was still looking over the shuttle like a child with a brand new toy. “Some people used to call it Old Reliable. But this one is in terrible shape. How long do we think this station was here? I mean, didn’t they know the words ‘basic maintenance’?”

  “We don’t know,” Jewel told him. “And we don’t know when that colonizer out there arrived either. This must have seemed like the farthest reaches of nowhere when that ship set out. I wonder if it got here before the Ymirians did?”

  “Joke was on them if they didn’t,” Jester said. “Can you imagine what it must be like to spend three or four centuries journeying to a far away planet, your own personal Garden of Eden, and find out that the tech has changed so much since you departed that the world of your dreams has already been settled by other people?”

  “Short end of the stick,” Falco said. “Everyone gets it most of the time—as far as I can tell.”

  “And it’s insights like that that make you such a pleasure to work with,” Jester teased her. He pressed a panel and the shuttle door opened. “Look, it’s still got power.”

  Falco scowled.

  Jewel peered into the interior of the shuttle. It was dirty—literally—globs of dirt covered the floor of the bay. “But what happened to all the colonists?” she asked—it wasn’t simply an academic question. After all, two separate groups of people had apparently disappeared in this solar system. It would be nice to know what happened to them. It just might keep the crew of the Euripides from disappearing too.

  “What do you mean?” Falco asked.

  Jewel turned around to face her. “I mean, that maybe I could imagine the Ymirians despairing and killing themselves when they realized they’d been cut off from the outside universe with no way to get home again, but that wouldn’t explain what happened to the original colonists, would it? They must have wanted to be isolated from everyone else. What other reason could they have had to come all the way out here? Suicide doesn’t make any sense for them.”

  Jester chuckled. “You never know, do you? A lot of those early colonists were religious fanatics—I mean you’d almost have to be one, wouldn’t you, to go careening off through space toward a star system you knew next to nothing about. A lot of times in those early days they couldn’t even be certain that the system they chose would have a habitable planet. That’s why those ancient colonizers had such large fuel reserves and the scoops to harvest more from gas giants if they needed to. It was crazy that they used to dismantle their ships in orbit once they found their dream planet, because they built these things to fly a thousand years or more. They didn’t ever wear out.”

  “You really know a lot about this, don’t you, Jester?” His depth of knowledge and interest surprised her.

  “I used to dream about these old ships when I was growing up,” Jester confessed. “I’d study their schematics and wish I could have been born on one, soaring out into the unknown stars. Today the cartels run everything. No one can escape their grasp for long.”

  “So what did happen to them?” Falco resurrected Jewel’s question before she could start feeling guilty again over what the cartels had done to the rest of the galaxy. “If they couldn’t leave, where did they go?”

  Something Jester had said bounced back into Jewel’s head. “Why couldn’t they leave? I mean, their starship is still out there. If it was built to last a thousand years like you said, Jester, then why couldn’t they leave?”

  It was a very good question with no immediately apparent answer.

  * * * * *

  “Peron has found a habitation on the moon’s surface,” Captain Kiara reported at their next com-link briefing. Jewel, Erik and Emmanuel Warrant sat in a chamber off the main Control Room of Brynhild Station, the open com-link on the table in front of them.

  Erik and Jewel had been on the station now for more than twenty-four hours. The temperature had risen to comfortable levels and they were starting to fill in a few of the gaps in the vast void in their knowledge of this system, but as to where the people had gone, they still didn’t have a clue.

  “It’s on an island in that northern sea,” Kiara explained. “It’s a stupid place to build a colony—terrible weather. I mean, no place on this world looks very promising for long-term settlement, but the north
ern sea looks like it hosts blizzards year round.”

  “I wonder why they chose that spot,” Jewel mused.

  “Was it a Ymirian settlement or was it started by the earlier colonists?” Erik asked. They were fairly certain that the antique starship had reached the solar system a good eighty years before the Ymirians had opened shop.

  “Don’t care and don’t care,” Kiara answered both of them. “If the settlement had been in a more accessible spot, I’d have sent you down to see what we could salvage, but I’m not risking a landing craft in white-out conditions with no idea what the payout might be.”

  That made a lot of sense, but Jewel suspected Erik would disagree for personal reasons.

  “Isn’t it worth it to find out what happened to these people?” he asked.

  “Not to me, it isn’t,” the captain told him. “My only concern is finding the supplies we need to get back to Arch. Since it now looks certain that we’re not going to find any fuel here, I want to concentrate on the items we can salvage. That includes taking a look at that ancient space hull they’ve got tied up to the far side of the station.”

  She paused for a moment before giving them their orders. “Mr. Exec, I want you and the purser to investigate that hull together. I don’t see any danger. If you find anything worth taking we can arrange for crew to pick it up later. In the meantime, the deck officer can continue to supervise the removal of the supplies already identified. Let’s do this quickly, people. Not only are we behind schedule, but those miners are getting restless in the passenger compartments.”

  The captain disconnected without waiting for questions or comments.

  Chapter Five

  “I guess there are no motion sensitive lights in here,” Jewel observed as they stepped out of the airlock and into the colonizer starship. The name stenciled on the prow of the ancient craft read Genesis—a rather typical and unimaginative name for a vessel in the business of planting new life on far off worlds.

  The ship was as large as she’d expected. The old style colonizers had to carry with them everything that could conceivably be needed, not only on the new world, but to get the colonists safely to that far off solar system. Still, that didn’t mean they’d find anything on the ship that would be marketable in the present day to people outside of museums and out of the way backwater worlds.

  Erik shone his flashlight around what looked to be a loading bay of some sort. “So, you noticed that?” he teased. He’d been trying to get Jewel to talk to him about something other than business since Kiara had first assigned the two of them to this task. Jewel, on the other hand, had been trying to figure out why the apparently jealous captain had arranged for the two of them to be alone together. It didn’t look good to her no matter which direction she examined it from. What was the captain thinking?

  “Come on,” Erik said, “that was a good one.”

  Jewel gave in a little on the subject of banter, mostly because they had to work together—not because she was ready to forgive Erik for the serious situation he had put her in on the Euripides. It didn’t mean she wasn’t angry. And it didn’t mean she liked him again, even if the corners of her mouth had threatened to turn upward at his lame little joke. “Perhaps I should have said I can’t see anything in here. I guess there’s no motion sensitive lighting,” she corrected herself.

  The humor in her voice sounded strained even to Jewel—cold like this starship. Fortunately, they’d correctly anticipated the problem and dressed appropriately in heavy winter parkas, thick cold-weather pants, gloves and even stocking-style caps that could be pulled down to cover their faces if the Genesis proved unbearably frigid. That last wasn’t an idle worry. If basic life support hadn’t been maintained, they could have easily found its interior frozen over at a few degrees above absolute zero. Luckily, that wasn’t the case and the ship had been maintained like Brynhild Station at roughly four degrees.

  “Look,” Erik said. “I realize I screwed up and you don’t want anything to do with me anymore, but…”

  “You should have told me about you and Ana,” Jewel reminded him.

  “I see that now,” Erik confessed. “I got too excited about you. I moved too fast. I hadn’t intended to, it’s just, with everything that was happening and the discovery that my countrymen were responsible for this settlement…”

  His voice trailed off even as his flashlight stopped searching the bay around them. He looked lost, confused and isolated.

  Despite her intention to keep her distance, Jewel felt sorry for him. Erik was obviously in pain. She knew that the more experienced man could be taking advantage of her sympathy, but she felt compelled to reach out to him anyway. There were a lot of times growing up when she would have liked someone to care, even a little bit, about what she was feeling.

  She stepped closer and touched his arm with her gloved hand. “This has been hard on you, hasn’t it? These were your people, after all.”

  Erik didn’t answer her right away. Instead he started working his flashlight again, playing it against the walls until he found a control panel set near the airlock door. He walked away from Jewel—which hurt—and crossed to the panel. A few moments later, lights flooded the bay.

  Jewel mentally kicked herself for reaching out to Erik. The large loading dock looked cold and barren, just like her heart suddenly felt. Why did she care about this man anyway? Sure he was handsome, but he’d taken advantage of her once already. She obviously couldn’t trust him. He was just—

  “It is hard,” Erik broke into her thoughts. He wasn’t looking at Jewel, but he wasn’t precisely looking at anything else either. “I know it’s foolish, but I keep expecting to find a thriving little community here—brave Ymirians who picked up and started over after disaster. You know, my home world is a frozen wasteland too. Ymir was a frost giant in our mythology—and his body was used to create the world. I just thought…”

  Jewel crossed to him and placed her hand on his arm again.

  “I just thought—”

  An almost sob interrupted him, heaving up from deep in Erik’s chest before he swallowed it back down again.

  Jewel couldn’t hold herself back anymore. She slipped her arms around Erik and hugged him tight through their parkas.

  Erik hugged her back—hard—maybe hard enough to bruise if they hadn’t been wearing the heavy coats. His voice was a ragged whisper. “Even after all these years it still hurts so bad.” He choked back another sob. “Those Armenite bastards came out of nowhere and conquered my planet. We didn’t even know we had a problem with them. There were no diplomatic incidents—no unfortunate misunderstandings spun into an excuse for conquest. Ymir wasn’t even physically close to the Hegemony twenty years ago.”

  That sob tried to escape again, but Erik clamped his mouth around it while he struggled to control his breathing.

  Jewel didn’t know what to say to him, so she just tried holding him tighter.

  “I was just nineteen standards old,” he whispered. He shifted his arms on her back so that one gloved hand cupped her head and held her face to his chest as if he was afraid she might step back and try to look at him. “Fresh out of the academy—I was so proud to be on my first deployment.”

  He groaned, squelching the sound once more, as if by hiding it he could deny his pain. “The Armenites brought an entire battle fleet. All we had to stop them with was a picket of secondhand destroyers—useful against pirates but not against even a second-class navy. We didn’t even bring them into our effective weapon range.”

  Bitterness cracked Erik’s voice. Even after twenty years of living with his loss, the memory was obviously still tearing out his insides. Jewel wondered how many times he’d told this story. Somehow it didn’t sound rehearsed to her. How much of this story had he even allowed himself to think about before the discovery of the Valkryie system had dredged it up again out of the deep recesses of his mind?

  She had to say something, prove to Erik that she was listening, show him that so
meone else cared about what had happened. “How did you escape?” Her question didn’t exactly cover all those needs, but it kept Erik talking so maybe it was all right.

  “A really brave merchant captain picked me up,” he told her. There was a hollow tone to his voice, as if in his mind he was reliving the incidents twenty years in the past. “He slipped in behind the invading fleet when every sensible voice in the universe would have shouted at him to run. He scooped up my life support capsule and maybe two dozen others and we ran for the Confederacy.”

  He shook his head, his chin rubbing against the hood of her parka. “I was so naïve. I really thought that the whole civilized galaxy would rise up and right the injustice, but no one cared. The Confederacy and the League issued protests, as if that would alter anything. The Cartel Worlds wouldn’t even do that much. Nobody cared about little Ymir. They were all too afraid of the mighty Armenite war machine to raise a fuss.”

  That wasn’t what they were afraid of, Jewel knew. Oh, it was doubtless part of their calculations, but military might wasn’t what made the Armenite Hegemony so widely feared. The Confederacy, the League and the Cartel worlds all had larger navies, even if they weren’t supposed to be as tough ship-to-ship as the Armenites. No, the real power of the Armenites lay in their monopoly over armenium—the fuel that made faster-than-light travel possible in the modern universe. Any nation that seriously opposed the Hegemony risked an embargo on all fuel sales to their territories. No one was going to risk that kind of economic devastation over a little world they’d never heard of somewhere out on the Fringe.

  “Damn them!” Erik muttered. “Damn them all!”

  By some strange feat of geometry, a wet tear slipped off his face and past Jewel’s hood to fall hot upon her nose.

  Startled, she lifted her eyes to Erik who stared unseeing, up toward the ceiling, tracks of water channeling down his cheeks.