The Soldier: Escape Vector

by Vaughn Heppner

  ***

  Sestos was a peaceful system. Ember’s orbital defenses were caught napping. Belatedly, they sent an alert to Sestos III. It took time, but system fighters lifted off from the inner terrestrial world and started for Sestos V.

  There were no Patrol ships in the outer system and Kuiper Belt. That was a break for Cade and Halifax. A little luck was always a good thing.

  The Descartes raced off the water moon, heading for deep space. Cade nodded to himself. This was going to work. He wiped sweat from his brow, the gunshot wound in his thigh giving him more trouble, making it difficult to think.

  At that point, the main comm unit began to beep.

  Cade glanced at it before looking at Halifax. The doctor’s head lolled to one side as he snored in exhaustion. The relief of escaping further torture and knowing he’d live must have acted as a mass dose of sleeping pills.

  Cade considered a moment and finally flipped on the comm viewer. A huge man with gray skin, black eyes and red-dyed hair spilling to the side stared at him.

  “Cade,” Tarragon Down said hoarsely.

  The soldier said nothing, just waited. The man was a slug, a taker and a criminal. The soldier carded little for the arms manufacturer now that he wouldn’t be dealing with Tarragon anymore.

  “You freed the little prick, did you?”

  “Makes us even,” Cade said.

  “Even?” Tarragon roared, slamming a huge fist against a desk. “You destroyed one of my armaments factories.”

  “You made a mistake trying to cheat us,” Cade said. “You should have delivered as we originally agreed.”

  Tarragon leaned toward the viewer, his black eyes glowing with hatred. “My people learned things from your babbling friend. I know you’re heading to Earth to find your missing wife. Did she leave you for another man?”

  The soldier kept a stoic face. The arms dealer was a slug, a taker and a criminal. Who cared what he said?

  “For what you did to me,” Tarragon said, “I’m going to contact Director Titus and tell him everything.”

  Cade felt his gut twist. He hadn’t thought about that. “That would be unwise of you,” he said, knowing it did no good saying it.

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  Cade thought about turning around. That would be crazy. It was best to say nothing more.

  Tarragon glared for a long moment, and then he started to blink. It was an odd performance. The gray-skinned man frowned, cocking his head to the left.

  “Forget something?” asked Cade.

  The blinking ceased. “No,” Tarragon said in a rote voice. He smiled in a weird way afterward. “You think—” The blinking increased. “No,” Tarragon said, as if speaking to himself, or some unseen person. “I’m not going to say. He screwed with me. No one screws with Tarragon Down and gets away with it.”

  “Sure,” Cade said.

  Tarragon smiled at him strangely. “You think you’ve won, don’t you? But you don’t understand. I could have squashed you like a bug between my fingers.” The monster of a man raised a hand, pressing his thumb and index fingertips together.

  Cade watched, trying to understand the man’s obscure meaning.

  “I’m going to get even with you,” Tarragon said.

  “You mean you’ll try,” Cade said. “You might lose a lot more than you have already.”

  The smile tightened. “You have no idea, you fool—no idea what’s really going on.”

  “You’re making empty threats. It’s all you have left.”

  “Oh, no, Cade, you’re wrong, so very wrong.” Tarragon chuckled nastily.

  His sound and manner grated on Cade. He reached to disconnect, but realized that something was off here. He paused as he studied the arms dealer, wondering if there was anything to the threats.

  “I know,” Tarragon whispered. “You want me to spill my guts. You think you can trick me into saying it. But I’m not going to do that. All I can hope is that the two of you kill each other.”

  Tarragon cut the connection.

  The soldier stared at the blank screen. What had that been about?

  Cade turned his attention to his leg. With a grunt and a heave of his shoulders, he propped himself upright. He put the ship on autopilot, activating the Nion XT Navigator. Then, Cade hobbled for the science chamber where he kept the medical supplies. It was time to dig out the bullet and apply some quick-heal.

  Chapter Six

  A week went by without mishap as the Descartes flew through space. Finally, the scout was far enough away from the huge gravitational forces any star for them to turn on the Intersplit engine. That put a green Intersplit Field around the craft as they began to travel at FTL speeds. The Sestos System fell far behind as they continued the journey to Earth.

  As a precaution against anything Tarragon’s people might have done, Cade and Halifax checked everything they could think of. The items replaced and fixed on Ember were in good working order, running smoothly and efficiently. There weren’t any hidden tracking devices installed or other giveaways of deliberate tampering that they could find.

  Hours turned into days and days into a week. Did they get sloppy regarding security? They fell into their regular shipboard routine, boredom the greatest threat to their wellbeing.

  The two men had learned from bitter experience that it was best to keep apart from each other as the days added up to weeks. Cade exercised, read about this future era and played military video games to pass the time and keep him thinking about tactics. Halifax’s ankles healed thanks to injections of quick-heal. He read, viewed far too much pornography and practiced mathematical puzzles. His mind was his greatest asset—in his not-so-humble opinion—and he was determined to keep it sharp so he could survive the coming dangers that were bound to occur.

  Unknown to them, there was one other mind on the ship. Well, mind might have been the wrong word. A unit waited for its chance to perform its function. A mind had given the unit scope and a mission. That mission was fast coming upon the unit.

  The Nion XT Navigator had a special built-in feature. The computer inside sensed when it was free of human supervision. That happened as the Descartes sped through a certain area of the Orion Arm.

  Obscure calculations occurred in the interior of the Nion XT. Special override codes activated. The Nion rerouted the ship, turning the scout toward the dark and dangerous Vellani Rift.

  The dead asteroid miner had traveled that region in his torchship after spending long hours staring into the tiny globe of stars and shifting nebulae. The program he’d written into the Nion XT had been beyond his understanding, but code he most certainly did.

  The Descartes went off course, increasing speed. The Nion XT wanted to reach the Vellani Rift before the two humans woke up and entered the piloting chamber. The coded program had a reason for doing this. The Nion XT guided the Descartes even as parts of the special program began to self-delete. There was a reason for that, too, a reason the Nion no longer knew and thus could not give away.

  ***

  Cade raced into the piloting chamber as Halifax switched off the klaxon. The doctor sat at piloting controls, absorbed in something as he flicked and pressed switches.

  Cade looked out the polarized window and blanched at what he saw.

  “It’s not my fault,” Halifax said.

  Cade turned to the doctor.

  “As far as I can tell,” Halifax said, “it’s this blasted nav, the Nion XT.”

  “What?”

  “The Nion XT Navigator,” Halifax said, slapping a gleaming console. “Tarragon’s people installed it, said it was latest thing in auto-piloting. The XT series are supposed to be some of the best around. You remember them telling us, right?”

  Cade shook his head.

  “Hmm,” Halifax said. “Maybe they only told me.” Once more, he smacked the console. “The XT is supposed to know where we’re going. Well, it does. But I do agree it should have avoided this region, gone around it, you k
now? Look at the blinking light.” The doctor pointed an accusing finger. “The Nion knows this is a dangerous region of space, but it was too stupid to warn us ahead of time.”

  Cade studied the blinking light.

  Navigation and piloting were the doctor’s responsibilities. The big man had been asleep. He’d heard the warning klaxon from his cot and had come to investigate the problem. Now, this… Cade turned back to the polarized window.

  The cramped piloting chamber had several panels and seats along with a large polarized window. Through it, Cade saw the sheen of the green Intersplit Field that circled the ship. Normally, he would have been able to see the stars through the green haze. Now, he eyed blackness with bizarre purple and red streaks appearing like lightning. Worse, the green field sizzled in places, the sizzles looking like black sparks, indicating that particles of some kind were striking the field.

  If the Intersplit field fell or collapsed because of the strange particles, they would automatically stop traveling at FTL speeds.

  Halifax made a production of straightening his skinny shoulders and manipulating flight controls, his intense features focused on a panel screen. He threw up his hands a moment later. “I have no idea what’s going on, what’s causing the black sparks. This is unprecedented.”

  “You directly used ship instruments to check,” Cade said. “Ask the computer to interpret the signals. That’s partly what the nav is for, right?”

  Halifax swiped a lock of dark hair out of his eyes, glanced at Cade sidelong, leaned over and manipulated a different panel. The doctor brightened as he read data. “Ah! That was a good idea. According to the computer, we’ve entered the Vellani Rift.”

  “Which is what exactly?” asked Cade.

  “Hmm…even though we know where we are now—in a general sense, at least—this doesn’t sound so good.” Halifax had continued reading the computer script. “The rift is full of spatial anomalies. I’m not sure you know what those are. In this instance, that includes wild, unpredictable radiation, intense gravitational distortions, black holes and—this is odd. It says there are spatial and possibly temporal vortices. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “No,” Cade said.

  “Oh dear,” Halifax said in a whisper.

  “You’d better elaborate on that.”

  Halifax looked up with frightened eyes. “The reason for the blinking light. The Nion says the rift contains disruptions to the very fabric of our space-time continuum.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That we have to get out of here quick before we’re sucked into a vortex and spit out somewhere else.”

  Cade thought a moment, remembering Tarragon’s final threat via comm. Their being in the Vellani Rift couldn’t have anything to do with the threat, could it? The Nion XT Navigator was just a normal piece of equipment. They’d checked it for tampering, and everything had been in diagnostic working order.

  Yet…maybe Tarragon had got one past them, undetectably sabotaged the thing’s programming.

  “Let’s take over manually,” Cade said. “A vortex sounds bad. We need to leave the rift immediately.”

  Halifax hesitated, with his hands hovering over the flight controls. He looked up again. “The, ah, only problem is that because the auto-navigation seems to have malfunctioned, the autopilot isn’t working like it’s supposed to.” The doctor ran his tongue across his lower lip. “I have a possible theory for the malfunction. Because we’re in the rift—a dark region—the Nion lacks any reference points to guide our flight. It can’t see any stars, anything, really, to triangulate our position.”

  “No more excuses,” Cade said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Don’t you understand? Normally, I look up a star system’s galactic coordinates. You know, where we want to go. I punch that in and the Nion takes care of the rest. We really have been lucky until now. We need a live navigator for exactly these sorts of events, and ideally we should have a captain as well.”

  “I gave you the ship. You’re the captain.”

  “I’m talking about a professional captain,” Halifax said. “Concerning space travel, you and I are amateurs, damn good ones, I agree, but amateurs just the same. Hell, we don’t even have an engineer aboard: one who could fix the Intersplit if it ever broke down.”

  “Back out the same way we came in,” Cade said.

  “What’s that?” Halifax asked, as he examined the piloting controls.

  “Reverse course, leaving by the same route we came in.”

  “Oh. I see what you’re suggesting. Naturally, that would assume we haven’t altered course while we were both asleep.”

  “You were asleep when this happened?” Cade demanded. “That means the Nion likely did warn us, but there was no one here to see or hear it.”

  “I feel I must protest, as your implications are grossly unfair. It’s just the two of us, and I’m not a machine. The truth is we need more crewmembers if we’re going to operate the scout efficiently. We know that now and—”

  “Never mind about that,” Cade said irritably. He shook his head, trying to shake off his slipping temper and the feeling that Tarragon had something to do with this. Anger wouldn’t help him get out of this. They had to think their way out. “Why do you believe the ship altered course once we entered the rift?”

  “Well—”

  “Is something wrong with the Nion?”

  “Not wrong exactly,” Halifax said. “It’s acting a little weird maybe—”

  “Explain that,” Cade snapped.

  “Sure, sure,” Halifax said. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. There are certain indications—”

  Before the doctor could complete his explanation, the entire ship began shaking. The compartment lights flickered, and a blizzard of black sparks sizzled in the green Intersplit Field. The compartment tilted hard to one side. The doctor grabbed a console, hanging on as he leaned dangerously sideways. Cade stumbled in the same direction, jumped to the side at the last second so he avoided crashing headlong against a stanchion. He clutched a different unit, hanging on, turning his head and watching the sparking green haze outside the ship. Beyond them, everything swirled blackly, madly, perhaps even chaotically.

  The shaking continued, becoming more violent. Dr. Halifax moaned in terror. Cade wondered if the ship would shake apart, if they’d entered one of the vortices. If so, it would be a bitter end to a—

  Abruptly, the sparking blizzard outside ceased, as did the swirling blackness. The ship stopped shaking and seemed to right itself. That indicated the gravity dampeners were working correctly again.

  “What just happened?” Cade asked.

  Halifax wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead with the sleeve of his smock. A moment later, he tapped controls, staring at a screen. “A spatial vortex,” he said hoarsely. “I imagine that’s what one would look like.”

  Cade leaned over to study the screen. He saw a dark swirling funnel or spatial tornado with purple and red lightning. It was eerie. It receded from them, indicating the ship moved away from it.

  “Were we just in that?” Cade asked.

  “I think so.”

  Cade peered through the polarized window. The darkness around them seemed different than earlier: dark gray instead of stark black, which might be why they could see the vortex. There were still no stars. If he stared long enough, it felt as if he saw tiny purple splotches in place of stars, but it was hard to be certain.

  Uneasiness settled upon him. He couldn’t quite pinpoint it. Then, a sense of unreality turned his stomach. He considered that.

  “Doctor, could the vortex have shifted us to a different space-time continuum?”

  “Eh?” Halifax asked, looking up from the controls.

  “You said the Vellani Rift has space-time distortions. Maybe the vortex threw us into a different one, a different dimension or something equally sinister.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “Look outside,” Cade d
emanded.

  Halifax did so. “And my doing this helps us how?”

  “Has space always been so gray?”

  Halifax laughed uneasily. “The power of suggestion, sir, that’s what’s frightening you.”

  “Has space always been that gray?” Cade said again.

  As Halifax stared out of the window, he grew pale, slowly shaking his head. “If we’re elsewhere, a different dimension or whatever…we’re doomed. It’s over for us, kaput.”

  Cade’s gut twisted and his mouth became dry. No! He wouldn’t accept defeat. Whatever it takes—however long—he was going to get to Earth to find his wife and brothers-in-arms. He was going home, as it were. He wouldn’t let himself get lost in a second horrible future or dimension.

  “You listen to me, Doctor. If the vortex shifted us here, it simply means we have to figure out how to reverse the process. Do you understand? Tell me you understand.”

  Halifax laughed shrilly, his eyes becoming wild. “What did I tell you before? Without the Nion, we can’t even navigate normally. How could we possibly know how to travel through a vortex and reach our own space-time continuum from here?”

  “We don’t know where we are,” Cade said stubbornly. “This place appears different from what we’re used to. But maybe that’s not even correct. Maybe the vortex merely altered the polarization of the window. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe we’re still sailing blind through the Vellani Rift.”

  A green comm-light caught Cade’s attention. That startled him badly. Who could possibly be trying to hail them? Ship-to-ship communication was considered impossible when one of the vessels had an Intersplit Field up. How could one communicate with a least one ship traveling faster than the speed of light? A radio wave could never catch up to the FTL-traveling vessel.

  Theories! Who cares about theories? He was a soldier first and refused to let theories or theses hinder his actions when his eyes or ears told him otherwise.

  Cade moved to the comm panel, sitting and adjusting controls. A moment later, a garbled, crackling transmission emitted from the speaker.