Star Rebels: Stories of Space Exploration, Alien Races, and Adventure

by Audrey Faye

  “I know,” Leonidas said, his voice thick. He was aware of all the blood on the floor, the blood still flowing from that wound. His sergeant was right. It was too late. Even if he sprinted to the hospital, they wouldn’t make it in time. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. Todd,” he corrected, remembering the man’s first name from the personnel reports, even if he’d never used it. “She was after me, not you.”

  “Ah.” Lancer’s brows rose slightly. A mystery solved? “After she shot me… said I wasn’t the… right one.” His gaze flicked toward a hover pallet floating near the wall. The woman must have intended to roll Leonidas onto it to take him in. She’d just shot Lancer because—for no good reason, damn it. “Makes sense,” Lancer added.

  “Because I’m an ass that everyone wants to kill?” Leonidas asked, trying to smile, to make Lancer forget about his impending death, at least for a moment. He eased one of his hands out from under him and pulled off his helmet. To hells with the gas—he wanted his sergeant to see his eyes, not just the reflection of his own pained expression in the faceplate.

  “Because you’re important.” Lancer managed the grin that Leonidas couldn’t.

  Leonidas snorted. “Hardly that. It’s because the Alliance thinks I know where someone is, someone I haven’t seen in six months.” His throat closed up again, refusing to let him speak further. It was just as well. Lancer didn’t need to know that his death had been for absolutely nothing. That the Alliance wanted Leonidas for information that was six months out of date and growing staler by the day.

  “Sir?” Lancer whispered, his voice barely audible now. His fingers twitched again. “Will you—” He broke off and coughed, blood dripping from his mouth. His eyes closed, and Leonidas feared that was the end.

  Leonidas clasped his hand. “What is it, Todd?”

  His eyes did not open again, but Lancer’s fingers wrapped around Leonidas’s hand weakly. “Let my mother know I’m—let her know… what happened. Only make it sound heroic. At least… respectable.”

  Leonidas tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. “I will.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Lancer managed another faint smile before taking his last breath, before dying in Leonidas’s arms.

  After a moment, Leonidas eased back, resting his man on the floor. He rose and stepped away, anger and frustration replacing his sorrow. He punched the wall, his armored fist knocking straight through it. He might have destroyed the whole place, but when he turned, thinking of kicking that hover pallet into pieces, he glimpsed Alisa standing near the front counter. She had risked herself to fight the bounty hunter, and none of his anger was for her, but he eyed her warily, anticipating some inappropriate display of humor.

  “I think I understand now,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Why you don’t laugh.” She looked toward Lancer’s body, then back to him, moisture glistening in her eyes. “Do you want me to wait outside?”

  He groped for an answer. Did he? He needed to take care of the body, arrange to send Lancer home for a proper funeral if he could, and he still needed to find someone to fix his armor. This wasn’t her mission. She’d just come along for a coffee.

  Alisa walked over to him, eyeing him a little warily, then reached up and put her arms around his shoulders and leaned against his chest, not seeming to care that he was wearing his armor and covered in blood. He returned the hug, figuring he must look like he needed it. Maybe he did.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She reached up, resting her hand against the back of his head, fingers lightly touching his hair. He’d never thought of himself as someone who needed comforting—he would go forward, dealing with the realities of being a soldier, as he always had—but he found himself appreciating having someone close. Having someone care. It almost startled him to realize that she did, considering what he was and especially considering he had pointed a gun at her chest the first time they met. She probably cared about a lot of things and just didn’t let it show. Usually.

  Alisa stepped back, resting the palm of her hand on his cheek before letting go. “I’ll wait outside.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, holding his gaze as she walked out the door. As he stood in the dark smithy, it slowly dawned on him that she had come along for reasons that had very little to do with coffee. He doubted he should encourage that, and didn’t know how he felt about it, but he admitted that at least for now, it was good not to be alone.

  ~END

  Want to find out how these characters met? And see where they go from here? Please check out the rest of my Fallen Empire series. Book 1, Star Nomad, is available now. You can also sign up for my newsletter and get another free short story in this series. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or visit my website to send me a note. I love to hear from readers!

  Luminescence

  An ISF-Allion World Story

  Patty Jansen

  Hadie learns the price of being an artificial human when her partner has an accident and becomes unresponsive.

  I

  Luminescence

  A bright flash turned the ice under my feet into a sheet of white.

  The inside of the inflatable dome blazed in X-ray vision as my visor’s auto-polariser cut in, providing me with a skeleton-view of the flexible struts that held up the fabric.

  A split second later, the murky orange hue of the Titanian atmosphere returned. Darker still inside our tent on the ice of Kraken Mare on Titan’s south pole.

  I depolarised my visor, heart thudding. Black spots danced in my vision. “Paul? Did you see that? Paul? Do you hear me?”

  I stared at the entry hole in the ice in the middle of the tent. The black surface rippled.

  “Paul!”

  There was no reply.

  The snaking hoses of the breathing apparatus and the heater were the only sign of Paul’s presence in that blackness. Through my suit’s helmet I couldn’t even hear the humming of the air compressor in the shed.

  Static crackled in my earphones. Paul’s words garbled into unintelligible mush, laced with excitement.

  “What is it? What do you see?”

  “It’s . . . beautiful. I can’t begin to describe it, Hadie. There’s colours and pictures and . . . it looks like a spider’s web. . . . Holy fuck!”

  The line went dead. I strode to the reception unit and pressed the reset with clumsy gloved hands. The roamer icon tracked over the screen and found . . .

  Nothing.

  Oh for fuck’s sake. This lousy radio never worked when you needed it.

  I waited. I told myself not to worry. Paul could take care of himself. The hoses still pulsed, and now—relief flooded me—the downrope was moving, a sign that he was climbing up the ladder.

  Sure enough, ten minutes later Paul’s helmet broke the surface, then his shoulders, followed by his be-suited arms. I hauled him up the last rungs of the ladder, the touch awkward through both our suits.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  Vapour rose from the suit, methane gas curling towards the roof of the tent, where it condensed against the fabric, ran down until it met the ice and froze in globby stalagmites.

  Paul dropped his sampling canisters, which he’d taken to collect samples from bacterial patches we had found living under the ice. My helmet receiver remained silent; I couldn’t see his face behind his visor. I cursed. This time when we got back to the habitat, I would complain to the Research Division—fuck the notes it would earn me against future promotion. It was one thing to let scientists work with substandard equipment when they worked in an environment where they could breathe the air and sit around waiting for a bail-out if things went wrong. We didn’t have that luxury. Small things about the Titanian atmosphere, like the general lack of oxygen and temperatures that would freeze your butt off, meant that any equipment malfunction quickly turned serious with big fat capital letters. The tight-arses could at least give us receivers that fucking wor
ked all the time, not just when they felt like it.

  I guided him across the tent. His steps were stiff, that all-too-familiar feeling that leg muscles had frozen senseless, through the suit and layers of insulating clothing.

  Into the air lock. I pulled shut the thick door and operated the panel. Waited. Just us in our suits, and a tiny light. Vapour rising off Paul’s suit, curling up to the vent in the ceiling. I hated the silence.

  Lights flashed; the inner door opened. I preceded Paul into the familiarity of the tiny lab of Research Station 5: a simple table and four straight-backed chairs, lab benches with stacks of sample tubes and an assortment of equipment parts: mostly spare parts for the dive gear, because the samples needed to be kept outside—too warm for them in here. A rack with protective clothing. Thermal under-suits.

  Monitoring and comm screens blinked warnings against the back wall. Initialisation sequence not detected. Unease clawed at the back of my mind.

  I flicked the heater up as far as it would go. Fans jolted into action. The pump hummed below the floor, sucking up methane from under the ice.

  The light was warm in here, and when I wriggled off my suit’s helmet, the air was heavy with the scent of synth-coffee. Empty cups still sat on the table.

  Paul sank down in one of the chairs. He reached for his helmet and I helped him unclip it.

  “Paul? What happened?”

  He said nothing, his hazel eyes staring at the opposite wall like a blind man’s.

  “Paul!”

  I swung one leg over his so I faced him. His expression remained blank. His skin looked marble-pale, his eyes wide open. Most of his curly hair lay plastered to his head, his lips dark with cold. Those lips I’d kissed before he went down.

  “For fuck’s sake, Paul, it’s not funny!”

  Still nothing.

  What to do now?

  Notify Emergency crews—was this an emergency?—notify base at the very least.

  I went to the bank of computers against the back wall and hit the screen. This would normally take me to the Base Operations menu.

  The screen said connection not detected.

  Oh for crying out loud! Nothing worked, and there was not a single human being within at least another fifty-odd kilometres. I was beginning to feel some urgency about making that distance considerably smaller.

  First: get Paul out of that fucking dive suit.

  With a great deal of cursing, I unzipped the suit. Shit from the bottom always clogged the zip, some sort of bacterial goop that went crazy in areas of higher temperature, such as the relatively poorly insulated zipper recess. It was hard enough undoing the suit when you were the person wearing it; trying to undo someone else’s was nigh impossible. But I managed to free his torso and his arms and then set about wriggling off his gloves.

  His hands were covered in . . . mud.

  That was impossible. That liquid down there didn’t much look like water because it wasn’t—it was liquid methane, all minus one hundred and seventy-three degrees of it. One did not touch it, no matter how briefly, without suffering a horrendous case of frostbite. Man, if his suit had leaked enough to let in this much mud, Paul should by rights be dead, because the suit would have depressurised, the methane would have evaporated, expanded inside the suit . . . ripped it . . . and left him snap-frozen like a mass-processed prawn. I shuddered.

  I examined the suit’s top which I’d tossed on the floor, but found no obvious flaws.

  When I wrestled his legs out of the bottom half of the suit, something fell out and rolled under the table. I dived after it, retrieving a ball that fitted neatly in the palm of my hand, cool and heavy and completely transparent.

  In Research Division’s museum of collections from the Titanian surface, they had a number of these balls, although the ones I had seen were murky. There were a great deal of theories about how they had formed, but no one had a definite answer on what they were, apart from the fact that they consisted of silica, in other words, were a glass of some kind.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Paul shivered. The muscles on his stomach jerked in a spasm, letting out a wet burp. His eyes were wide open, crazy almost.

  My sense of urgency increased. Somewhere in a hut on the methane ice of the Kraken Mare on Titan’s South Pole was not a good place to be stuck with an emergency. I had the medvac module in the truck, but it was programmed only to deal with cuts and bruises, the odd case of concussion maybe. I bet it said nothing about lightning strikes. Hell, we didn’t even know if there was lightning on Titan, let alone in about five metres of liquid methane—what the fuck had happened?

  I needed to know—like, now.

  No fucking radio.

  The medbase in the Envio 2 habitat was half an hour away if I made good time. Transmission might pick up along the way, but I couldn’t provide any treatment while I was driving the truck. The med-track on Earth was eight minutes via the relay, providing I had a datacaster strong enough to project my signal to the satellite. By the looks of the flashing screens on the walls, the one in here was at least temporarily dead, and I didn’t think the dinosaur in the truck was up to that task.

  Shit.

  The truck back to Envio 2 it was, then.

  I hauled Paul to his feet. He was much taller and heavier than me, but with the pathetic gravity, he almost hit his head on the low ceiling while I wriggled him into the thermal suit. Boy, it was awkward. His movements were jerky, uncontrolled; and where I held him, around the muscular part of his upper arm, he shivered as if he had a fever.

  I got him into the suit, out of the station and through the tube into the truck seat, and belted him up as tightly as I could. Then I slid behind the controls, clipping on the headphones.

  “Scout Hadie Kessler to Envio 2. I’m coming in with a medical emergency. Advise which tube to use.”

  Static crackled in my earphones.

  Nothing, yet. Shit.

  Not that reception became any better when the truck crested the ridge, tyres ploughing through knee-deep snow and sticky black tholins. The truck’s compressors worked full time, making it roar and shudder with their jackhammer-like jolts to stop the crap sticking to the undercarriage.

  At least I could see Envio 2 now, a shining bubble in the orange-yellow Titan plain, stark against the dusky yellow sky. Every time a ship of supplies landed, it brought more plasti-beads, which the small colony’s extruders promptly fashioned into another section of Dome. Go forth and multiply. Since I had come here, the colony had grown by thousands. One would almost think humanity wanted to swap the green continents of Earth for this fucking ice plain.

  The downward path was more of a slither-slide. Even the caterpillar wheels had little traction on the icy sand. The previously clear track dissolved in a series of scars made by vehicles slipping and sliding their way up or down.

  I still had no reception, and that puzzled me. It could of course be that the entire habitat was off-line—outages did happen every so often—but I was becoming suspicious that something had been rigged in the comm systems of the truck. The same undersea flash that injured Paul?

  He sat in the seat, mute and unresponsive, his eyes hollow. His throat worked, judging by his Adam’s apple going up and down. He was going to spew, I was certain of that. I wanted to be in the medbase when that happened. For all I knew he had internal damage and was bleeding inside.

  With the Dome now filling most of the front window, I still didn’t know which tube to connect to.

  My pocket comm beeped.

  That was strange; pocket comms were only used for within-dome communication. As I wrestled it out of my back pocket, stopping the truck to do so, I thought that perhaps its range extended to just outside the Dome. I had simply never tried.

  I answered, “Scout Kessler.”

  A warm female voice said, “Hadie, are you all right?” That was Shona. Inside the Dome, sure enough.

  “No, I’m not all right. Paul is . . . behaving strangely and
I’m not getting through to medbase. I requested med assistance, but I received no reply—” My voice choked. Paul was everything to me.

  “I am medbase at the moment, and comm base and relay base. The habitat is out of the relay. All off-world communications are cut.” That figured. The truck used the surface-to-air-to-surface relay. The comm still worked because it relied on direct transmission. One piece of the mystery solved.

  “Look, Shona, can you open an airlock pronto? Tell me which one to sucker onto.”

  “Is Paul in danger right now?”

  “I don’t think so, but whatever happened to him creeps me out. I want to get him into the medbase as soon as I can.”

  “I understand.” She did; she knew what I had given up to be with Paul. “Use tube 31. Someone will be there.”

  Thank heavens. Belatedly, I registered the apprehension in her voice.

  “Anything wrong in there?”

  “We’re rather stretched. The datacaster is down, too. We’re on manual.” Her words were controlled; her voice, however, told a different story.

  The reason for Shona’s apprehension became apparent as soon as I opened the door of the truck.

  Blaring sirens. Flashing lights.

  No running or screaming or swearing, just people charging down the corridor, faces grim. I, for one, had not the fuck of an idea what was going on. Habitat Operations was not my field. This, however, looked like a major outage.

  Just my luck. I had hoped for a satellite record of the light flash, with an analysis of light temperature, refraction and possible source; anything that might give me some answers—but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  Amidst the noise and goings-on, a common soldier in uniform helped me drag Paul down the tube into the body of the habitat. His gait was jerky, his knees locking with every step.

  “You picked a time to have a medical emergency,” the soldier said.