The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  Those two guns were magnetic accelerated MAX 2300, able to fire microscopic metal slugs at nearly ten miles per second, one of the most lethal space ship combat weapons available. They were also very expensive.

  “If we survive, your dad is going to owe me more than he thinks,” he stated.

  Ayia had no response. She wiped the blood from her face and that revealed a gash near the forehead. She held the bloody towel in place. Kale took out a small plastic bag and bent it. Ayia heard a snapping sound and Kale tossed the bag over to her. It was a cold pack and she quickly put it up to her head.

  FEI had already begun the startup process. The Hausen reactor hummed in the rear of the ship, charging the capacitors that would power all aspects of the ship. Two indicators popped up on the heads up display, two bars that were slowly filling up. The right side filled up before the left side, but when both indicators filled up, the AI called out that the ship was ready to go. Gravity suddenly set in, simulating the always comforting 100% Earth gravity. Kale felt himself settle into the chair. It was that familiar chair.

  “Are we completely charged?”

  “Thirteen seconds sir,” was the AI’s reply.

  “Plenty of time,” Kale stated, “Let’s move out slowly.”

  The ship released off the pier and was picked up by the station’s internal gravity tractor which would take it out of the dock and into cold space. Kale pulled a strap over his shoulders. He pointed out the same ones on Ayia’s chair.

  “Just to be sure,” he pointed out.

  His ship floated on imaginary air towards the exit of the sphere. The docking doors opened as they approached. Green lights were blinking above the exit indicating the way out. Kale glanced up as they went through the dock. A large numerical count down was being displayed on his main screen while a voice being directed from the station was counting down. In any ordinary situation, this was the release from the stations gravity belt. In this case, it was a countdown to death.

  “FEI, tell me it’s all ready,” Kale asked.

  “Yes sir,” was the answer.

  “Eight, seven, six,” rang the artificial voice.

  “Drop it on two FEI”

  “Four, three, two.”

  The cabin and all its lights went out. All the display screens blinked out. Gravity disappeared and they began floating in their chairs, held there by the seat straps.

  Kale grabbed his strap and laughed, “Told you we might need them.”

  “What happened?” she was looking around in shock, while still holding the cold pack to her face.

  “My magic wand,” started Kale, “well, I thought that would sound much funnier when I said it in my head.”

  Behind him, all the lights were out inside the station. Ahead of him, Kale could see three Tiger class 2, single man military hunter ships, and the favorite police ship for independent stations. They were fast lethal ships, capable of plenty of destruction. At the moment, they were simply floating there. Their cockpits were dark and there were no lights on anywhere.

  “What is going on?” shouted Ayia, “shouldn’t there be something, anything?”

  “I dropped a little surprise, a very expensive EMP mine I had attached to the outer hull to make it look like something else,” Kale was proud of his idea.

  “Doesn’t that leave us as equally dead in the water?” she asked, aghast at what she understood of EMP’s.

  “That it does. Now it’s just a race between who can restart their systems faster, and we have FEI.”

  “The AI? Isn’t he out?”

  “He can’t talk right now since everything else is out, but he is actually housed in a hardened compartment, along with some other important parts of the ship. We will be back online before they can and hopefully be on our way out of this system.”

  On cue, the lights started coming on all around the cabin. Behind them the sound of drives whirring could be heard and ahead of them the click and snap of displays flashing into life.

  “FEI, nice to have you back, are we ready to move?”

  “We are sir; the Hausen reactor is charging capacitors, nearly at 80% capacity.”

  “Are we going,” Ayia paused, “to kill them?”

  Kale was surprised by the question, but then realized what she was through.

  “No, nothing like that. It’s one thing to embarrass someone, and maybe someday this will come back to bite me. But no killing unless we need to.”

  Kale swung his chair to the right, sliding it across the floor. He tapped a button on a smaller screen and the main display brought up a large nav map.

  “FEI, is the dock door still open?”

  “It is sir. I calculate they have two more minutes before restart.”

  “Can you float a mine out into the door? Time it so they can catch it. No need for a mess, just need some time.”

  “Done.”

  A camera showed the small cylinder being ejected back behind their ship headed towards the open door of the station. Kale began to pilot the ship towards the three Tigers that would have executed them. He swung above them, and dropped two more mines that floated down right in front of their ships.

  “Sir, Nav point fifty six marked. Sling time is just over seven hours.”

  “Line it up then.”

  The ship began moving around, a small shimmering shield appearing in front of the ship, its gravity field moving it forward to line it up.

  Kale tapped the side screen and a small voice recorder program came up on display.

  “By now you can see that there are mines. They are 20 MGTs, more than enough to make a whole lot of mess. You could probably catch up to me, but I suggest you take the time and disarm them first. They are motion activated, so if you attempt to follow me, they will go off. I’d rather not anyone die today.”

  He clicked it off. The recording would go off in a few minutes. They were attached to the mines, so that they could hear it the moment they came online. It would take them a few hours to disarm those mines, and he hoped to be well out of this system by the time they came around. They might try to communicate to someone who hadn’t been hit by the

  EMP to try to intercept, but the odds of intercepting them once the jump was made was next to none.

  “Sling lined up sir,” came the AI’s voice.

  Kale swung around and this time smiled with ease at his passenger. Even he was surprised his plan worked.

  “Now we’re out.”

  With his back facing the main window, the Hausen reactor created a microscopic field of gravity in front of the ship so dense that it grabbed the ship and flung it out towards the jump point at around thirty AUs per hour. This kind of system travel was known as a Sling, from the effect the field had on the ship. The effect of traveling that fast melted the stars away. Inside, neither Kale nor Ayia felt a thing, other than the impact of all the objects that was thrown at them.

  “Need a shower?” he asked at first without looking at her. Then he turned and saw her “You ok?”

  Ayia was crying.

  3124 – Threaded Space, three days into a jump between Quator and Ayethti.

  “That’s looking a lot better,” he pointed out, handing Ayia a bowl of some kind of noodle.

  She spooned some of the food out onto her own plate. Steam rose from the noodles rapidly. The temperature was turned down in transit between systems to conserve energy. The small room that now served as the dining room was still comfortable at a cool 65 degrees by Earth standards. When he traveled alone, Kale would generally heat only the room he needed to be in, but when he had passengers he heated the entire ship. But then just enough to not be too cold for comfort. Despite this, he always suggested they wore warmer clothes.

  Kale pointed at the healing cut on her right temple.

  Ayia lifted up her hand for a moment, about to place it over the wound, and then lowered it again, catching herself mid stride.

  “I want to thank you. I don’t think I ever did,” she was looking down at her bo
wl and didn’t raise her eyes to meet his.

  “It’s ok. You are welcome. And to not make matters too uncomfortable but it is what I was paid to do,” he smiled in return, a smile she never saw.

  Kale finished his bowl quickly and served himself some more.

  “I can’t get enough of these things. I think tomorrow I’ll have some again. Maybe even the next day,” he joked. It wasn’t enough to break the ice.

  She remained completely closed into her own cabin the whole first day, never coming out. When she showed up for breakfast that second morning, she still hadn’t said a word. It wasn’t till that night, till Kale asked her about how she had ended up almost the bride in a far off space station that she offered up her story.

  “He was just supposed to be a distraction. He was very nice, very nice to me, I guess, when I was the most vulnerable to it. And he was good looking too. In all the time I had spent in school, and with the tutors and the sports trainings, fencing, I had never been allowed time to talk to boys or men. He felt like the right thing to do.”

  Kale laughed at the last phrase.

  “No, not like that. Well, yes, like that. But it’s just that I felt I needed to be someone else. But I had plans to move on. I knew someone in Alioth I was going to visit next. Of course, that man-boy had other ideas obviously.”

  Kale hadn’t asked too many questions. It really wasn’t his business. His business was delivering her back to Ayethti, getting paid, and moving on to the next gig. Things did get lonely out in threaded space though, and so he absorbed all of his social time with passengers. He found every story fascinating, every quest, mission or journey his passengers were on. At times he got jealous, and at other times fully realized the amazing position he was in for being the captain of his own space ship.

  “What’s the ships name?” she asked that third morning at breakfast, apparently ready for more social interactions.

  “She is the Midnight Oil,” was his proud reply.

  Her blank stare required more explanation.

  “There was a term in pre threaded space earth where if you stayed up beyond sunset working on whatever job you had, you were supposedly burning the midnight oil. I think it was a reference to a time when burning oil was probably the only way to produce light at night.”

  “Why choose that name?” she asked.

  “I had the ship for almost a month before I gave it her name. I was stuck without power orbiting a small planet on some small system; I can’t even remember the name anymore. I was stuck in orbit around this planet, and it was stuck just behind the sunset. The ship was chasing the sunset around the planet, just in the dark, and I remembered that phrase from a younger time in my life, and I knew then what her name would be.”

  It was beaten into him by a particularly vicious slave lord who had an affinity for Earth history.

  Kale’s full name was Kale Urt.3xc. He had no family name as he was born into slavery on the Dominion’s slave breeding planet Urt. He was given the current designation of 3xc. After fleeing to freedom, he thought of changing his name to spell Urthreix or some other similar variation, perhaps to cover up his background, but it never stuck. He instead elected to keep his slave name, mostly as an affront to the Dominion.

  Ayia had never met a former slave. Very few outside of the Dominion and its slave planets had ever seen one much less met one.

  “A slave with a ship?”

  “It’s a funny story.”

  It wasn’t though, and Kale offered no more that day. Instead he told stories of traveling to Earth, and docking on Earth’s gargantuan space station Valhalla. He showed his video of skimming the rings of Saturn, and jumping into the triple star Alpha Cigni system. He retold the same stories of dodging pirates along the frontier of the Iron sector and illegally docking onto Dominion cruisers making jumps into Commonwealth space to raid.

  His life after slavery was certainly one to write books about.

  The Midnight Oil came out of threaded space near its jump point on the edge of the Ayethti system and utter darkness greeted them. The ship used its gravity field to turn and line up to where the planet would be in about thirteen hours and the drive engaged another sling, sending them flying through space at incredible speeds.

  “You're not going to be in trouble with your father are you?” he asked, observing her as she bit her nails off. They were about an hour out from the planet.

  “I really don’t know. I was supposed to be the good kid. It’s not so much that he will be mad, which I'm sure he will be, but that he will be disappointed.”

  Kale wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “In my experience, you will be fine.”

  “You’ve returned many a wayward child to their parents?”

  Kale paused for a moment to make sure he had the best possible answer. He wanted something that wouldn’t offend her too much, or maybe the perfect lie to set him up with her father. She was cute though, and he never wanted to disappoint a beautiful face.

  “Yes.”

  There was no good answer, but that appeared to have satisfied her.

  The gravity field reengaged just out of planet orbit, on the light side of the planet. The planet filled the cockpit with blue and green and a hint of orange. Mondla was one of those planets that had its own natural life developed in its own evolutionary process as Earth had, with trees and animal life of its own, completely native to itself. Very few off world animals or plants managed to survive, a process that was proven over and over again in the planets that had their own natural ecosystem. And like those other planets, no shred of intelligent life was discovered on Mondla.

  When man discovered how to manipulated gravity and pierce space, they exploded outward from Earth in an era of exploration unlike any other. Thousands of systems were discovered and humanity was electrified to find out that Earth was not a lonely oasis in the desert of the universe. Many other planets were found with life in all stages of development. Some planets had wild savagery where plants ate animals and the even larger animals ate everything else. Other planets were ocean paradises with giant behemoths preying the waters in search of microscopic gardens of food. Some planets yet were docile, without any system of predation.

  In each system, the similarities were easily explained as the most logical progression of life. There was always a system to convert sunlight into energy by either plant, animal or something in between, and then this was to be used by other life beings. Each system had its own way to pass on its genetic information on to its children, in many ways similar to DNA, although in each case, the shape was different, some in strands, some in cubes, and others yet in even more complex shapes, but always serving the same function.

  But in all the life humanity found, they found themselves as alone as they began. On none of these countless planets with life was a single being found that could communicate, build a house, control fire, or worship gods of their own creation. There was no hint of civilization or even the remains of one long gone. While the universe flourished in life, only Earth developed a being that could discover the path to each of these oases.

  “I guess it is good to be home,” Ayia said with half a smile.

  Kale knew that smile.

  “FEI, find me a tug.”

  Kale could see Ayia’s confusion in the reflection of the screen in front of him.

  “Why not just fly the ship straight down?” she asked.

  “Way too expensive,” he replied.

  Kale, if anything, was a business man. Any ship that had a Hausen reactor could land safely on a planet without burning up in the atmosphere. It was a slow process, but effective.

  “Unfortunately,” Kale explained, “It’s horribly expensive.”

  Descending onto a planet using the gravity field would keep the drive on full blast for the entire descent, a half to whole day affair, using precious and valuable fuel to do so. If the space ship was actually designed to fly in an atmosphere aerodynamically, then it could reenter the old f
ashion way, by burning into the planet at high speed, and sometimes that speedy reentry was useful, but for the vast majority of times, ship captains simply employed tugs, as they were called, to descend them to the planet for a fraction of the cost.

  Tugs were owned by individuals who charged a nominal fee for their use. The ship itself was shaped like a large plate or plank. For all purposes, it was a large flat ship with no cargo capacity other than that which landed on it. Other ships would dock and lock onto it, and once the tug had a full enough load, it would use its own drive, usually a more powerful drive that required less fuel, to lower itself and its ship cargo onto the planet.

  “In my case, it allows me to just turn everything off and enjoy the trip down.”

  Many tugs were shaped in various ways, and the first one Kale found a spot on was shaped like a six pointed star. The Midnight Oil docked onto one of the arms and was quickly locked into place. Kale then got up and exited the cockpit. He headed for the dining room as Ayia followed.

  The table was put away, and Kale unfolded a large couch from the far wall, allowing time for the cushions to inflate their foam. Ayia stood by idly, wondering what she was supposed to do. Kale brought out a digital tablet and sat down on the couch. He tapped a few buttons on the tablet and above them the inner hull began sliding back into itself to reveal a clear hull beyond it, with a view out into space.

  “It’s about seven or eight hours down to Antan. Try to relax,” he stated, as if this were an obvious conclusion to reach.

  “Easy for you to say, you're not the one about to get grounded for seven years.”

  She sat down on a chair he showed to her, popping it up from the floor and sitting back on it to stare straight out of the domed window. She was thankful for not being married to a space Mongol, but was not looking forward to facing her father.

  Kale sent a message down to the CEO’s private video com when he first emerged above the planet. He actually expected the grim fathers face to appear on the screen, full of condemnation of his daughter’s actions, but he instead received only a small message reply: “Ok.” He checked his bank account and he noticed the deposit for the full amount already. The man was very trusting. Although Kale was sure that if he somehow took off with his daughter and money, he’d end up without any of it in the long run. It was one thing to trick frontier criminals. It was another thing entirely to take on a corporation. Besides, where there was one paycheck, more would be readily available.