“I haven’t decided yet. I will contact her once I’ve settled on a location.”
“Do not wait long,” his mother suggested. “The Assembly advises moving quickly to solidify the initial emotional attachment.”
“I have uploaded the pre-screened locations for the initial meeting into your database,” his father added.
Karo felt his jaw tighten in annoyance, but managed to keep his voice neutral. “Thank you father. I will go choose a locale now.”
Karo bent his head out of respect to his parents, then headed down the short hall to his suite of personal rooms. He had to admit that his mother and father had been correct; the Assembly did recommend new pairs share their First Meeting right away.
He headed straight for his large console and tapped the surface to initiate the database. He knew from reading the Pairing Guide that it suggested the First Meeting take place in a restaurant where the focus could be on conversation with each other. Karo brought up a map of suggested eating establishments and chose one where he had eaten previously.
It was located close to his family’s residence, so Karo figured that since Aevum was from a lower class, she wouldn’t have eaten there before. He hoped that she would appreciate his thoughtfulness at choosing a restaurant with such high standards.
Karo made the reservation for the following evening, then sent the information to the contact Aevum had given him. He was confident in his decision of venue, but for some reason was nervous with anticipation as he waited for her reply.
After a few minutes he breathed a sigh of relief when she confirmed their First Meeting.
CHAPTER 2
Present day… across the galaxy from Siril.
Karincin came awake suddenly and jolted upright, a scream lodged in his throat. Cold. He was so cold that his entire body shook in attempts to warm himself. It wasn’t working.
Where am I? He tried desperately to remember, to search for something familiar, but his eyes were unfocused and all he saw were blurry shapes and colors. All he could hear was the loud thumping of his heart and his ragged breaths.
What’s wrong with me?!
Panicked, he scrambled to stand but his limbs felt heavy and laden. One foot finally found purchase but the other slipped, and suddenly he was falling. Karo braced himself for a hard impact, but instead of solid floor, he landed on a soft pad.
“Give yourself a moment,” a male voice said from somewhere close-by.
He knew that voice, but his memories were blurry; they jostled around without order. A sharp pain stabbed through his head and Karo yelled. He pushed his palms against his skull in an attempt to ease the pressure.
“Breathe,” the voice said again. “The pain is only temporary.”
Karo curled himself into a ball atop the pad and focused on his breathing. In and out. In and out. This was his world for several minutes until the pain began to ease. He opened his eyes and brushed the tears away that he hadn’t realized had fallen. His hands were still shaking.
“Start from the beginning, with what you know,” the voice told him.
“My name is Karincin.” His voice was weak and gravely so he cleared his throat and began again. “My name is Karo,” he repeated, stronger than before. “I’m a systems programmer.”
Memories came more easily and the fog in his mind began to clear. Determined to stand he tried again, this time with more caution.
“I work for the Department of Space.”
Using the surface he’d just been lying upon as leverage, he slowly pulled himself to stand. As his eyes cleared, he recognized his surroundings: he was in the main cabin of a ship that had been designed for long term space missions. His team had been in charge of programming the ship’s artificial intelligence.
“I’m a Scout on a mission in space.”
Karo used the flat surface he’d fallen from to anchor himself as he moved towards an attached console where information was displayed. His fingers fumbled, but he managed to enter the command to bring up the ship’s navigation. His heart fell. He was floating through a void in space where there were no stars for the computer to recognize.
“I’m lost.”
His mind reeled with the realization that he’d failed in his mission. He’d never failed before in his entire life—how could he have allowed it to happen now? Anger flooded his mind and he raised his fist. Before he could bring it down onto the console he heard the stranger’s voice.
“Stop.”
Karo quickly looked around but there was no one else in the room. A memory became clear and he knew that Scouts were alone on their missions. The voice was coming from the ship’s AI—LINK—not a fellow scientist.
“I’m alone,” Karo said in a pained voice, bracing his forearms on the console and hanging his head. “I’m lost and I’m alone.”
He remembered volunteering for this assignment with the grand idea that he was nobly dedicating his life to the safety of his people. The Sirilians had successfully been able to mitigate natural disasters on their homeworld, and had scanned every piece of debris orbiting in their star system. They’d been confident of their safety, but after barely avoiding annihilation from a massive solar flare, they had turned their attention to the space beyond.
They discovered that the greatest threat to their survival came from space: asteroids, black holes, radiation, solar flares, rogue planets—the list of possibilities was endless. In an attempt to identify the risks the Department of Space had sent Scouts on ships, each heading into a quadrant of space in a grid pattern, equidistant from each other.
Their mission—his mission—was to search for risks in their assigned space. They were to evaluate anything they came across; not only things that they believed may potentially be hazardous to their homeworld, but they were to map every corner of every quadrant they passed through. Their scientists wanted to know the trajectory, orbit, and mass of every piece of debris they came across; it didn’t matter if it was a small asteroid or a red giant.
Karo, along with eleven others, had left on their missions a long time ago—he couldn’t remember exactly how long.
“LINK, how long have we been in space?”
“We left Siril twenty years and sixty-two days ago.”
Twenty years. It certainly didn’t seem like he’d been gone twenty years.
He felt the cold surface of the platform from which he’d just fallen and knew that it was the cause of his disorientation. The flat surface was only a small part of the ship’s regeneration chamber. By far the most impressive piece of technology on board, it sustained his body, fixed any injuries, and kept him in stasis so that he didn’t age.
Karo wished he didn’t feel so horrible when he was pulled out of stasis, but he knew that this was the only way for him stay alive during his mission. As long as he used the chamber, he would age much slower than what was natural. The longer he lived, the farther he could travel, and the more information he could send back to his people.
That was the reason for his entire mission.
“Would you like clothing and sustenance?” LINK asked, bringing Karo out of his thoughts.
“Yes.”
He stood upright on wobbly feet and walked the few steps to a small table and single small bench that were connected to the wall. As he neared, a hatch nearby opened to reveal a single robe inside. He eagerly pulled it around his naked body, but it took him a moment of fumbling to maneuver his arms through the holes.
Finally the warm material was wrapped around him, and he sat heavily on the bench. He tapped a command into the table and within seconds his food sat inside the replicator.
He reached for the green block and hungrily took a bite. It didn't taste like much, but Karo knew that it contained all of the nutrients his body needed.
He ate the food bar slowly and took his time looking around the compact ship. There wasn’t much to see. In one corner was a small partitioned area that contained a closet, bathing chamber, and single bed.
The
bed caught his attention. It was disproportionally large for his compact ship—a fact he’d always wondered about but didn’t want to question. He was glad that the ship’s engineers hadn’t succumbed to logical efficiency in this matter. He liked to sprawl out when he slept.
The rest of the ship was a single room. At one end was the main command console, chair, and vid screens. The other end was full of cargo boxes, which were stacked neatly in a corner by the exit ramp and decompression chamber.
Karo grimaced. He hated space walks, and could guess that he’d be forced into doing at least one in the coming days.
Don’t think about that now, he told himself. Worry about it later.
In center of the ship’s interior was the single table and bench where he sat, both of which could be pushed flush into the wall to save space. The majority of the ship was dedicated to his regeneration chamber, and the sensors that were used to scan and store information about the space he traveled through.
It looked identical to the other eleven Scout ships, except for one glaring difference: attached to the ceiling of Karo’s ship were large robotic arms that were an extension of LINK.
Officially named the Live Intelligent Network—LINK for short—the ship’s AI was the brainchild of Karo’s team at the Sirilian Department of Space. He’d worked for years to complete LINK’s matrix, which had been in its early finishing stages when the Scouts had been sent on their missions from Siril.
Initially created to work as a co-pilot for the Scouts, Karo had filled empty hours working to expand its matrix and personality. With the addition of his robotic arms, LINK was now a near-fully-functioning crewman.
Karo had watched him grow beyond his original programming, and now he felt like a close friend. LINK had been the only companion Karo had had for many years. He relied on the AI, especially while he was in stasis and completely vulnerable.
He looked again at the regeneration chamber where he’d just awoken and chuckled at the fluffy pad that lay underneath. Apparently this wasn’t his first time falling off.
In the first year of his voyage, Karo hadn’t used the regeneration chamber much at all. But over the years his time in stasis had gradually increased. Karo now spent anywhere from weeks to months in stasis; he was only woken to perform maintenance on the ship, or if he encountered an alien race, which hadn’t happened in a very long time. During his twenty years in space he’d only been awake for roughly five of those years.
Karo’s head continued to clear, so he flexed his fingers and tapped the table to activate the built-in console. He scanned the system readouts and noticed a few repairs that immediately required his attention.
“All of this happened the few months I was in stasis?”
“Yes,” LINK replied.
“Well, the ship is getting older,” Karo said absently, then realized what he’d just muttered. “Don’t tell it I said that.”
He couldn’t help but think of his ship as an entity. He took care of it, made sure it was running properly and was well fed with supplies, and in return it kept him alive and able to continue his mission.
Sirilians believed in building things to last. With that in mind, his ship was made of composite material that would stand the test of time, and its circuitry was self-healing. If there was a break in a connection between two points, the circuitry automatically reformed itself to either fix the problem, or reroute around it. It was an impressive piece of machinery, but even it needed routine maintenance.
Not one to sit idle, Karo finished his block of food then stood—a little shakily—to change into clothes that were suitable for repairs. He spent the day working on various systems throughout the ship: he cleaned out the sensors, and was amazed at the debris that they could pick up traveling through the vacuum of space; he fabricated new parts and recycled old ones back into the replicators to replenish the energy supply; and he checked LINK’s systems to make sure they were running at optimal levels.
By the time Karo completed all of the pertinent maintenance he’d been awake for a full eighteen hours. He was tempted to go back into stasis, but there were a few other repairs that needed to be done. There was also something nagging at the back of his mind: he wanted to run a thorough diagnostic on the communications system. Guess I'll be sleeping the old fashioned way tonight, he thought as he climbed into the large bed and swiftly fell asleep.
CHAPTER 3
Instrumental music played in Karo’s ears. He’d hoped that it would produce a calming effect—it wasn’t working. Instead, his heart raced, sweat beaded on his brow, even his palms were sweaty.
LINK called it agoraphobia: the fear of wide open spaces. If that was true then Karo was shit-out-of-luck. You couldn’t get more wide open than the vastness of the universe, especially this part of the universe.
Karo and LINK had been traveling through a sector of space that was strangely devoid of stars. The inky blackness unnerved him, so they were traversing this sector as quickly as they could.
Unfortunately a panel on the outer hull had come loose. He’d wanted to ignore the problem and continue on as fast as his engines could carry them, but hull integrity was a serious matter. He’d been having a hard time keeping up with all of the ship’s maintenance lately, and knew that if he ignored the problem now, it could become a major hindrance later.
Karo had been forced to cut power to the engines, and was now outside of the ship floating in zero gravity. He hated this part of space travel; he avoided putting on his space suit at all costs. But—much to his dismay—there was no one else he could send to do the repairs.
He fumbled the tool he’d been holding and cursed the large gloves he was forced to wear. He reached and caught the instrument before it had the chance to float too far away. The replicator could always replace the tool, but that would involve him maneuvering back inside the ship, waiting for the replicator, then going back outside again. He wanted to finish the task as quickly as possible.
There was something very unnerving about being tethered to his ship by a single cable.
“I’m nearly done,” he told LINK. “Just need to seal the new panel.”
“Understood,” LINK replied.
Karo ran the tool along the outer seam to seal the edges. “Done. Test it for structural integrity.”
“Running the test now.”
Karo waited impatiently. He looked around at the open space surrounding them, but that only intensified his unease. It was bad enough to be exposed to the vacuum of space with only a suit to protect you, but this void was unnatural. The black nothingness taunted him.
Damn, I hate being outside the ship.
“The test showed no sign of breach. You’re free to come back.”
Karo breathed a sigh of relief. “Understood. Heading back now.”
His suit was equipped with a winch, but it was far too slow in Karo’s opinion. Instead, he pulled himself hand over hand along his tether back towards the ship’s airlock on the side of the vessel.
He was still several yards away when a beam of white light sailed over his right shoulder. It didn’t hit him, but came close enough that Karo could feel the heat the beam had emitted. His head jerked up and his stomach fell; there was a ship uncloaking close to his location.
I thought we were the only race with cloaking technology? he absently thought. Obviously his people had been wrong. The evidence of that was staring him right in the face.
The shape of the other ship was unlike anything Karo had ever seen. It appeared to be crudely pieced together from several different vessels, like a strange amalgamation of cultures.
As he watched, another beam shot from the nose of the ship, this time coming close to his right leg. He propelled into motion.
“LINK, shields!”
“Shields cannot be initiated until you’re inside the airlock,” LINK reminded him.
“Damn it!”
Karo pulled himself along the tether as quickly as he could. Several more shots were taken at his bod
y, but they all missed. The volley intensified in number the closer he got to the airlock. Finally he was inside and hit the control to close the outer hatch.
LINK initiated thrusters, but he felt the ship lurch with a hit. Karo braced his palm against the wall and counted the seconds as the room continued to pressurize.
“Shields are holding.”
The second the airlock door opened Karo tore inside and headed straight for the main controls. He flung off his helmet and began steering the ship in an evasive pattern. His eyes searched the sensors for a place to hide, for help, for anything that could be of use to them, while energy beams sailed past the ship on all sides.
“LINK, who the hell are they and why are they firing at us?”
“I’ve checked the database but their ship looks to be comprised of pieces from many vessels. It will be impossible to positively ID them solely based on that.”
“Let’s see if we can get them talking to us.” Karo opened a wide channel of communication. “This is Karincin Abishek of the planet Siril. I mean you no harm.” The ship lurched with another hit, as if to contradict his words, but there was no reply.
“Shields at eighty-five percent,” LINK informed him.
“Engage the cloak.”
“Understood, but it will do little good.”
“I know.”
Their cloak was next to useless when a vessel was already tracking their ship. They’d still be able to see the engine’s energy signature and follow that path just as easily, but Karo had a theory.
“I think they’re using us for target practice. If novices are at the weapons then maybe the cloak will give us a small advantage.”
“Engaged.”
He continued to rapidly weave through space—for once wishing that his ship had weaponry—and immediately the white beams were shot farther and farther away from his vessel. There was a moment of hope, but it was short-lived. His ship lurched as something ricocheted off of his hull.
Now they knew where he was, and were using more powerful weaponry.
Adrift (The Sirilians Book 1) Page 2
