by Ralph Kern
“Everyone back home will have moved on and gotten older. Me? I’m still the same. What the hell can I bring to this mission? I don’t even know why I’m here!”
“We needed you to come with us,” Sihota said calmly, trying to placate me. “Look, I’m a pilot, a damn good one, too. But chasing a criminal, terrorist, or whatever Frain is? That’s what you, Vance, and Major Phillips are for. Hell, you and I wouldn’t even be standing on this rock and have uncovered the Mitchell lead if you hadn’t pushed to get us down here. The rest of us? We are just here to help you do it. Vance is probably going through the same thing you are.”
“Not Dexter?” I gave a weak smile.
“Frampton,” he said with a grin, “is probably loving every second of this.”
CHAPTER 44
TWILIGHT GARDEN
When I finished up with my ignoble wobble, Sihota suggested we grab a couple of hours rest while we waited for Gagarin to return. My good intentions to sleep it off didn’t quite work, though. I just lay on my creaky wooden bed in the tiny boardinghouse room and ruminated.
I’d always been pretty chill, able to roll with the punches, sometimes literally. To actually have a freak-out was pretty rare for me. The fact I had one alarmed me almost as much as the reason why.
Sixteen years for me—how long we’d actually be gone for. Sixteen years ago, subjectively, I had just finished university and had rolled up fresh faced for my first day at New Hendon, the training school for the Metropolitan Police, in an affluent, leafy part of London. For everyone back on Earth, that was now twenty-four years ago. If I were to turn around and go back through the gate right now, by the time I got back, that event would be thirty-two years in the past—that was almost my entire lifetime.
I’d known it rationally, but, as Sihota said, I’d only just processed it. To everyone I knew, I’d be a distant memory, that guy from way back when who’d disappeared on short notice. I wondered where they thought I had gone, what they thought had happened to me.
“Shit,” I murmured. I had completely forgotten my promise to my parents to send a message as soon as I could.
As I lay in bed, I opened up a HUDmail and began striving for some words. “Hey, Mother, Dad. Just getting settled in. Things are pretty good here. Life is a little basic, if you get my meaning.” I opened up a video feed and let it play around the sparsely appointed room, capturing the faux-wood desk, small holocube, and nondescript photo murals on the wall of green Earth scenes. “But it is nice to go back to basics. Anyway, just keeping my promise. I have to go back to work. Laters, Gaters,” I signed off with my customary goodbye to them.
I dragged myself into the shower, letting the warm water of another world flow over my body. That was the other weird thing. I’d shared the same casual childhood dream of many to travel to the stars, but I had never actually believed that one day I would be here on some icy rock circling a star that wasn’t our sun. And definitely not having a shower trillions of miles from home in a boardinghouse that wouldn’t look out of place in some country village.
Shutting down the shower, I hit dry. Drops of water ran off my body under the high powered fan. I got out, wincing when the mirror showed me the angry blue bruises that were still fading from my run-in with Frain.
With a groan, I pulled on a top and trousers, threw the few things I’d bought into my bag, and went across the hall to grab Sihota, who looked a hell of a lot better-rested than I felt. We checked out and started walking down one of the wooded boardwalks to the landing pad.
“I’ve done some more digging,” Sihota said once we were away from the other occasional pedestrians. “Out of the Big Five and UC, only three would have been in the position to make Jerry Mitchell any kind of offer: Universities Consolidated, Red Star, and Helios. The rest of them only had small survey teams in, certainly no expeditions big enough to have anything in the way of senior management with them, and definitely no one with the authority to cut a check big enough to shut up Mitchell for life.”
“Well, Red Star hasn’t exactly dazzled us with their moral compass recently,” I replied, rolling the thought around in my head. “Though, they said they gave us everything they had on the Io artifact. You don’t suppose they forgot to tell us they found a second artifact?”
“Maybe. If we take Red Star on face value, though, that leaves UC and Helios. Helios are still the golden boys and girls. Other than the odd blip, they’re purer than Caesar’s wife and pride themselves on being very ethically conscious.”
“And Universities Consolidated?” I asked.
“UC is a little more flexible in their practices, shall we say. Ultimately, though, by definition they have a lot of younger, more idealistic student types hovering around who tend to object to corporate shenanigans.”
“Shenanigans?” I smiled at Sihota, the oddness of the word coming out of his mouth amusing me.
“A Vanceism, I suspect.”
“Okay…We don’t have anything to challenge Red Star or UC with, though. Besides, even if they have staff here, they’re not likely to be the same bunch thirty or forty years later.”
Sihota nodded. “I doubt it.”
“Okay, let’s file figuring out who we can talk to under our to-do list and get space-side. We need to take a look at Iwa. Hopefully, Mrs. Langdon will have dug out the flight recorder by the time we get back, too.”
CHAPTER 45
GAGARIN
“Gagarin, we are on approach,” Sihota said.
“Roger that,” Vasily’s voice came over the link. “Sending the docking solution through now.”
The cockpit canopy lit up with a graphic that looked like a neon track leading to the bright star that was Gagarin hovering in high orbit around Twilight Garden. I heard and felt the rumble of the engines firing on automatic, pushing us toward the ship. Before long, the star morphed into Gagarin, and not long after, we were swooping along past her habitat ring toward the lock on the spine of the huge explorer ship. With a final thump, we clamped onto the docking port. Sihota glanced around at the cockpit and gave a final grunt of satisfaction. We were back to our adopted home.
***
“Akarga?” Vasily asked, confusion crossing his face. “The charts say there’s nothing there.”
“Unless you have a lead from one of your probes, that’s the best guess we have for the moment,” I said, having just filled them in on our chat with Ronnie.
I looked around the crowded bridge. Major Phillips cocked her head while Vance simply nodded.
“It can’t hurt to take a look. It’s all we have,” Vance said.
“Very well, I am merely the,—how do you say—designated driver?” Vasily gave a wry grin.
“There is every chance Frain will try to defend himself if he’s there,” Sihota said. “Are your preparations complete?”
“As completed as they can be.” The grin slipped from Vasily’s face. He wasn’t happy at the prospect that Frain might shoot back. Frankly, I couldn’t blame him. “The nano-factory has gone into overtime producing kinetic slugs for the rail launcher, and our coms lasers have been amplified as far as they can be. We have some teeth, but we aren’t one of your combat shuttles. For God’s sake, try talking before you get us into a shooting match.”
“My Hawk will give us an advantage there, Captain,” Phillips said, her surfer-girl look a contrast to her words. “She’s accurate enough to conduct surgical strikes against Erebus’s hull, but her S2S missiles can do some serious damage, so no worries.”
Vasily muttered something in Russian while shaking his head. I only caught the no worries somewhere in the middle. “Just remember,” Vasily said, switching back to English, “there is every chance that Erebus’s crew is still alive over there. Captain Tasker may be a hard-ass, but she’s also a friend and good captain. She’ll take care of her people. Not to mention, I presume Helios will want their ship back in one piece.”
“No one wants to see anyone get hurt. Frain and Drayton are on the run. If
we show that they can’t get away, hopefully they’ll roll over,” I said, sticking with my theory that Frain wasn’t a total lunatic. Still, my stomach knotted; I was betting a lot of lives on that.
“Be that as it may,” Vasily said firmly, “I am not going to jeopardize this ship.”
“And no one wants you to.” I held my hand out in what I hoped was a placating manner. “I think we can talk him down.”
Vasily grunted. “Heat dump will be complete in thirty minutes, then we will be ready to move. Get into the survival suits. If that bastard holes us, we will lose the ability to breathe very fast.”
I didn’t need much more incentive than that.
***
Sitting around the mess table in an uncomfortable survival suit waiting to go into a battle felt surreal. Sure, I’d done my share of sit-and-wait in my scout suit on Earth, but I was suited up to do battle in outer space—really outer space.
Vasily didn’t want the distraction of people getting under his feet, so he’d ordered the bridge cleared. The only two people allowed to speak directly to him were Group Captain Sihota, who was in the mess with us, and Major Phillips, who was in the Hawk ready to deploy.
We all watched a full tactical display hovering over the table and the walls, which were slaved to our HUDs, showing a glorious panoramic view of space from the ship’s sensors. Sihota and Frampton had set it up so we could monitor every aspect and moment of any engagement and what was happening on the bridge.
“We will be coming out of A-drive in ten seconds,” I heard Vasily call. “Three, two, one.”
The walls cleared to show an image of surrounding space. The huge, dark-purple gas giant Akarga loomed in view, magnificent rings spread like a halo around her.
“Begin emergency vent of the coolant, Dana. I want A-drive back ASAP.”
The display showed bright, burning geysers erupt out of the heat dumps on the side of the Gagarin, and she began twisting in a random evasive pattern, her engine firing hard. Frampton had already told me it wasn’t worth trying to be stealthy dropping out of A-drive. The deluge of exotic particles that would be shooting out when the Alcubierre bubble collapsed would give our position away from halfway across the system.
I felt myself being pushed around by the acceleration of the ship as we jinked randomly to make it harder for Erebus to hit us with any of her weapons as we raced toward the nearest rocky moon, Kakogan, our cover.
“Anything on actives, Dana?”
“Negative. Nothing transmitting or accelerating.”
“Understood. When we go round the back end of Kakogan, Dana, shut down all emissions. Nothing but passives, please.”
“Active transmission!” Dana suddenly called. “Kakogan polar orbit.”
“What do we have?” Vasily asked, the view of the bridge showed him leaning forward in his seat.
“Opticals are focusing. I have nothing big visible. Wait, I’m looking at…a satellite or small probe. It’s not on the system shipping manifest.”
“He’s here,” Sihota said. “He’s laid tripwires. Captain, I would suggest taking it out.”
Frain had been doing what we had, laying down a series of probes, satellites, and beacons to give him an improvised early-warning system.
“Agreed. Dana, find it and burn it down.”
“Searching…got it. Firing,” the engineer who was now our impromptu weapons officer called excitedly as she fired the laser.
A red line extended out toward the icon hovering above Kakogan. The laser wasn’t designed as a weapon, but it sure as hell would double as one when its output was ratcheted up. A small spark flared in the holotank where the satellite had been.
“We have some kind of flare. We must have ignited a fuel tank. The transmission has ceased,” Dana called.
“Good work. We will be out of view of the rest of the Akarga system in five minutes,” Vasily’s voice calmly emanated from the com.
The grey crater-punished moon, Kakogan, grew on the display at a sickening speed as we swept around the back of it, relative to the gas giant and its retinue of moons. When we were out of view, the most brutal push yet came as the engine fired hard for a few moments, and Gagarin catapulted out from behind the moon deeper into the Akarga system, only now she emitted nothing. No blue-hot plume of our engine and no radar pulses. We were running silent; even the exterior lights were off. Hopefully, we were now on a totally different vector to what Erebus would be expecting, making it hard for them to spot us visually or thermally.
“Any more trip wires?” Vasily asked.
“Negative. We seem clear,” Dana responded, still exuberant about her first “kill.”
“All hands, we are in play and making to slingshot around Aisu in seventy-two minutes.”
Gagarin was now drifting completely unpowered toward our next milestone—the sand-colored moon Aisu. We figured that Frain would have to assume that we knew where he was. He would be looking for us to make direct approach to Iwa. We were, hopefully, going to fool him by using the gravity of another large moon to slingshot in from a direction he wasn’t expecting.
“I’m going to make a coffee,” Sihota declared calmly, unbuckling himself from his seat. “Anyone want one?”
“Yeah, white with two, please,” Frampton called without even looking up from the feeds he was reviewing.
I couldn’t help but give a bemused smile. Space combat was a hell of a lot more chilled than I expected it to be.
***
“Closing on Aisu. Ten minutes until slingshot.”
Gagarin was racing toward the small yellow moon that she would loop around at a frightening speed. I hoped that Captain Vasily’s numbers were on the button. We didn’t want to use our engines at all for the next maneuver if we could help it. Even the incredible heat of our antimatter engine would have cooled by the time we swung around Aisu. We would be invisible to everything but sight.
“Any signs of trip wires?” Captain Vasily called.
“Negative. But I wouldn’t expect to spot it unless it’s transmitting,” Dana replied, a bit more calmly than the last round. “I think if there is one, it has missed us.”
“Very well,” Vasily replied. “Continue without emitting.”
We shot around the planet, looping around toward Akarga itself. We would skim close enough to travel between the rings and the gargantuan world, keeping as much cover between us and where we thought Erebus was as we could. Iwa was on the other side and, as long as Frain hadn’t spotted us, Gagarin would appear right on top of him.
We were making up the rules of space combat as we went along, here. There had been only two engagements between large spaceships in history, and one of those was Erebus taking a chunk out of Han Xin’s A-drive as she blasted out of the Jupiter system. The other was the tracking down of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, where the wannabe pirate ship had capitulated pretty much as soon as the Paracola Corporation vessel had fired a warning kinetic impactor across her bow.
Sihota and Phillips had alluded to a couple of off-the-book engagements that had occurred when nations had fought terrorist organizations in space, but this was the first time that two explorer ships were going head-to-head. One way or another, the Erebus and the Gagarin were going to be making history here—and not in a good way.
It was going to come down to whichever side spotted the other first. Whoever did that could knock their opponent out before a battle began. That’s why we were working so hard to spring on Erebus from out of the blue, or in this case, black. If she were indeed around Iwa, we had an advantage. We would have only a small area of space to search to find her, but Erebus would have to track everywhere at once with the only way to spot us being visually—a difficult proposition in the vastness of space.
Gagarin shot toward Akarga. From our perspective, the vast planetary rings were at an angle because of the tilted orbit of Aisu. The rings grew wider and wider on the wall screen as we raced forward, appearing solid, like a wall. We shot into the gap betwe
en the inner ring and the vast deep-purple bulk of Akarga. It was imposing, beautiful. Once again, I was reminded that I was a long way from home.
“Iwa will be in view in forty seconds. Come about ready for a burn and get the sensors positioned ready. I want to see what we can see. All hands, secure for maneuvering.”
We all buckled ourselves in. With a series of bangs, the thrusters spun Gagarin around so the antimatter torch was pointed ahead of us. On the screens and holo, I could see the tiny rock of Iwa drift into view from behind the huge gas giant.
“Searching,” Dana said as one of the wall displays focused in on the craggy rock that was the captured asteroid. It was tiny in the cosmic scale of things, barely a hundred miles long. Frampton had told me it was a moon only because it had wandered into orbit around Akarga millions of years ago and decided to stay.
“This is where it gets interesting,” Sihota murmured. “If we get the drop on Erebus here, we’ve won.”
“I’ve got an exhaust plume coming just above the surface of Iwa!” Dana practically shouted. “It’s small, probably a lander.”
“We’ve got him!” Vance gave a wolfish grin then thumbed the com. “Take him out.”
“Clear the channel,” Vasily barked. “Everything from the mess comes through the group captain! And no, I am not going to preemptively shoot someone out of the sky when I have no idea who they are. Dana, plot the course. See if the heading of the lander can clue us in on where Erebus is.”
“The lander’s skimming low. Wait…I have her—I have Erebus! She’s orbiting out from the other side of Iwa.”
The image zoomed, and Erebus sprang into view. We were far enough out that she appeared little more than a toy, her long spine stretching from bottom left to top right on the screen, broadside on.
“What’s the ETA of that lander to rendezvous with Erebus?” Vasily asked.
“Twelve minutes. It’s really hauling ass.”
