Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Parson muted his comm and turned to the bridge. “We made the right decision. You all ready to fight?”

  “Absolutely,” Stem said.

  The others nodded, grunted, did their best to look stern. The thought of fighting boarders inside the ship made Rada sick, but this wasn’t the only feeling she found in her heart. There was something more primal there, too. And it looked forward to what would come next.

  The shuttle peeled away from the mining ship, fleeing into the void. The Scimitar-class leapt forward to intercept, gaining quickly. A sensor beeped as the enemy vessel crossed into effective engagement range of the Turtle. The other ship was L-shaped, its short leg aligned horizontally to form the bow, its long leg trailing behind. It was plain black, a shadow on the stars.

  Parson and Genner hovered over their controls, eyes locked on the screens. The Scimitar came up on the shuttle. It deployed a few missiles, leaving them out as a picket in case the life raft had any rockets of its own. The Scimitar eased closer until the two dots were nearly touching on the tactical screen.

  “Come on,” Parson murmured. “A little closer.”

  The Scimitar remained parked behind the shuttle. The comm stayed silent. The L-shaped vessel began to flip around to boost back toward the Box Turtle.

  “They smell a rat,” Parson said. “Detonate the shuttle.”

  Genner swung her head his way. “Sir, they’re still out of effective—”

  “I said punch it! Before they back off!”

  She tapped her device. On the screen, the shuttle vaporized in an expanding sphere of white fire. The sphere approached the Scimitar, stalled, and collapsed on itself, winking away. The Scimitar remained in one piece.

  “Well, that was a fun idea,” Parson said, all joy drained from his voice. “Genner, prepare to engage.”

  “Hold it.” Genner waved her hand above her device, zooming closer.

  The Scimitar was indeed in one piece, but smoke and gas were gushing from gashes in its hull. The shuttle’s shrapnel had punched holes across the Scimitar’s face. As Rada watched, pieces of the ship’s blunt bow peeled away, tumbling into the darkness.

  “That’s how you do it, Captain!” Stem said. “We got the assholes!”

  A tongue of fire spewed from the Scimitar’s flank. Cheers erupted across the bridge. More flames burst from its belly, but they didn’t look right. While Rada was still trying to understand what she was seeing, the screen screeched to warn them of incoming missiles.

  “Full evasion and counters!” Parson yelled. “They’re breaking apart. That’s everything they’ve got.”

  Genner gestured furiously. The Box Turtle flipped nose to tail to point its engines toward the dying pirates’ rockets. Rada’s stomach flipped, too. Then she was smashed into her chair by the Turtle accelerating as hard as its frame and the humans inside it could stand.

  Her vision went gray, then disappeared completely. The clamor of the bridge became garbled, like voices heard underwater.

  When her vision came back, the screen was a mess of streaks and blooms, missiles and counter-rockets exploding in strings. A second flock of counters drove forward, bursting across the incoming wave. Several of the enemy missiles veered around the scrum of fire.

  Genner’s hands clattered on the controls, firing the remainder of the Box Turtle’s defenses. The remaining missiles were picked off one by one—but two made it past the screen of rockets.

  “What have we got left?” Parson creaked.

  “Flares,” Genner said. “A couple of poppers.”

  “No sense saving them. If I had one, I’d be flicking my lighter at this point.”

  On the screen showing the view from the stern, blinding lights burned across the void. The two missiles drove inward. One went off, the fire of its death overwhelming the sensors. The Turtle jarred like it had been kicked, rattling Rada’s bones.

  “Incoming!” Genner yelled.

  The ship rolled across all three axes. The reactive supports of Rada’s chair gripped her, preventing her neck from snapping. Her vision pinholed and blipped off. She felt a moment of peace, like the way she lowered into sleep on the rare nights she was sober. The ship shook. Still semi-conscious, she flopped in her seat as the Box Turtle leapt forward harder than she had ever felt it move.

  -o0o-

  Pain. Taste of copper. She’d bitten her tongue. Flashing lights and blaring klaxons. The smell of smoke? The ship was juddering, shaking her erratically, but with nowhere near the force of the impact moments before. The bridge looked hazy, distorted. The captain lolled in his seat. Genner was gawping over her controls.

  Rada leaned to her right as the Turtle turned to port. As her senses sharpened to something approaching usefulness, the eerie blue of Neptune swept across the bow screen. Blue bands and spots mottled its surface. It slipped across the screen as Genner reoriented the ship toward Nereid.

  “What’s going on out there?” Stem said from the seats at the back of the bridge. “I mean, what the shit?”

  “We caught the last missile just off our tail,” Genner said. “All kinds of engine damage. Can’t afford to run them more than a few minutes more.”

  “So shut them off.” Rada gestured vaguely. “We can float here until rescue arrives, can’t we?”

  “The engines are leaking, Rada. If we stay, they’ll cook us with radiation. If they don’t explode first.”

  “Explode?” Yed said. “So what are we supposed to do?”

  “I’m setting us back down on Nereid,” Genner said. “Don’t know if I can maneuver us to the pad. Could be a rough landing.”

  Rada stared at the icy blob approaching on the screen. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

  “Hang on tight.”

  The moon grew on the screen. The Box Turtle’s engines stuttered. Captain Parson inhaled sharply and popped open his eyes. He demanded an immediate status report. Calmly, Genner informed him that she’d sent a distress call, the pirates were dead, the Turtle was dangerously compromised, and they were headed down to the moon.

  “Scan for the nearest safe spot to set down,” Parson said. “Rada, Karry, as soon as we touch down, I want you to prep the carts. Stem and Yed, grab up everything we’ll need for hostile environmental survival—air, food, water, supplies. Genner, how long until we make landfall?”

  Genner tapped commands into her device. “I’ve got a stable platform of bare rock dead ahead. Three minutes.”

  “Everyone, get suited up. Move!”

  The crew untangled themselves from their seats and rushed to acquire their suits. Rada helped Stem seal his, then turned to let him do the same.

  “We’re going to be just fine,” he said. “Triton ain’t far. Someone will come for us.”

  “I have no doubt,” she said.

  By the time they were back in their seats, the streaked and cratered surface of Nereid filled the screen. Genner counted down as the autopilot pulsed the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. Steam gushed across the screens. The Turtle set down with a hollow thud.

  Before it stopped rocking, Rada bolted from her chair and ran for the cargo hold. Gravity was nearly nonexistent and her strides were long and fluid. The ship’s computer had readied the carts, but she and Karry ran a manual check and cleared unnecessary equipment from their holds. Stem and Yed rushed in bearing a wagon loaded with sealed containers. Rada helped stack them inside.

  Parson arrived with Genner. He assigned Genner, Stem, and Karry to one cart, leaving himself, Rada, and Yed in the other.

  “Roll out, Genner,” he said. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  Genner drove into the airlock. The door closed behind them.

  While waiting for it to cycle, Parson passed Rada and Yed each a transparent pack of two green pills. “Don’t wait.”

  Rada fed hers into the suit’s hopper and took them with a swallow of water from her tube. “How much radiation did we take on?”

  “Enough to want to take our pills.”

&
nbsp; The airlock panel went green; the doors parted. Rada rolled them inside. The lock was hardly any larger than the cart. She felt a moment of claustrophobia. The doors opened, disgorging them onto the still, icy surface of the moon. Stars enclosed the horizons. Her claustrophobia abruptly became agoraphobia.

  Genner was on the move toward a shallow crater a few miles from the Turtle. There was no weather on Nereid, but the location would shelter them in the event the ship’s engines melted down. Keeping both eyes on the ice, Rada let the autopilot carry the cart along.

  In the middle seat, Yed twisted, trying futilely for a look behind them. “What happens if the ship goes up?”

  “Then I cry myself to sleep,” Parson said. “It can’t fly out of here in the shape it’s in. Either way, we’re depending on a rescue team.”

  Yed went silent. Rada thanked the stars. Ahead, Genner’s cart slowed as it ascended the long, shallow slope surrounding the crater. Once it reached the rim, it followed the crater’s circumference to a ramp of ice and rock leading down to the interior, which was floored with a solid sheet of ice. Snowflakes glittered in the cart’s wake, weak and blue in the dim light reflected from Neptune. Genner’s vehicle came to a stop. Rada’s parked beside it.

  “I’ve been in contact with a team on Triton,” Parson said across their comms. “It’s going to take them a couple hours to get ready and a few more to reach us. I can’t think of any good reason to leave these carts until then.”

  “What if they’re late?” Yed said. “Or decide it’s not worth it?”

  “What kind of questions are those?” Rada said. “Someone will come for us.”

  “You don’t know that. There’s no government on Triton besides IRP, and they don’t believe in giving help to outsiders. What if no else is willing? And we can’t offer them enough to risk it?”

  “Then we’re dead, aren’t we? Unless you learn to eat ice and breathe vacuum, we’re dead. What point is it to plan for something that can’t be escaped?”

  “Enough,” Parson said. “I’ve already negotiated with the team. If that falls through, we’ll find another one. Absurd-case scenario, I can offer someone the Turtle.”

  “‘Less it blows up,” Karry muttered.

  “Right,” Stem said. “Or they wait for us to die, then invoke the Law of the Inky Void and claim it gratis.”

  “Glad to know I hired such dauntless optimists.” Inside the cart’s cab, Parson turned to Rada and grimaced. “If the time comes to openly speculate about our own deaths, we’ll do so then. In the meantime? Kindly shut up.”

  Both carts fell silent. After a long pause, Karry burst out laughing. For an instant, Rada was senselessly enraged by him, and then she joined him, squeezing her eyes shut, doubled forward, the laughter of the whole crew pealing through the comm.

  It grew quiet again. They rehashed the run-in with the Scimitar, Parson relating the initial phase of the encounter to those who hadn’t been on the bridge at the time. Stem made some not-quite-jokes about wishing he’d filled his suit’s water pouch with pig, but despite the excitement—or perhaps because of it—Rada felt no particular yearning for a drink.

  The others were still talking, but she found herself nodding off. She jerked awake, heart racing, and checked her O2 levels. Seeing they were fine, she let herself drift to sleep.

  The first time she woke, the comms were silent, the inside of the crater perfectly motionless. The second time, Parson and Genner were talking softly, technical details about the state of the Box Turtle. As Rada awoke, she gathered that Genner believed the ship was unlikely to explode, but couldn’t yet rule it out. It sounded to Rada like they were going to have a long leave ahead of them.

  Captain didn’t say as such, but she knew that if repairs cost too much, she’d be out of a job. She opened her eyes to gaze out on the stillness of a place that was neither night nor day. At the moment, her job was her only tether to responsibility. Without it, it would be like being bounced from the surface of the tiny moon. She would float into darkness, into space without end, and vanish into the abyss surrounding everything.

  “Captain,” Genner said. “I think I’ve got … a ship.”

  Across the cab, Parson pressed his face to the window, looking up at the sky. “An unknown? Our team only left port a half hour ago.”

  “It’s unknown, all right. But you won’t find it up there.”

  “I pay you to help me understand whatever’s happening, Genner. Not to annoy me with cryptic hints.”

  “I’m sorry, Captain.” She hesitated. “The ship isn’t in the sky—it’s in the ice.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Genner,” the captain said slowly. “Please tell me you haven’t gone insane. I really don’t want to add ‘finding a non-crazy pilot’ to my lengthy list of things to do.”

  “It’s not for sure,” Genner said. “But that looks far too regular to be anything else. Nature doesn’t draw straight lines.”

  “So you think it’s a ship? Under the ice?” Behind his faceplate, Parson furrowed his brow. “We’ve scanned this entire moon. So have dozens of people before us. Why are we only seeing this now?”

  “If the scans were perfect, we wouldn’t be prospectors, would we? On top of that, it’s under multiple layers of ice. If we hadn’t hit it from the perfect angle, we never would have spotted it.”

  Parson bent over his device. “This is pretty vague. Could be nothing more than an intrusion of rock. Glaciers can carve out some strange shapes. How did you find this?”

  “It’s from the scans I took when we were looking to set down,” Genner said. “I was killing time going over them. Seeing if I could add any more landing pads to our map.”

  “Here’s the real question: even if there is a ship down there, is it worth digging up?”

  “The salvage could be worth something.”

  “Salvage on an obsolete ship?”

  “It’s not just the opportunity for salvage,” Rada butted in. “Anything buried that deep almost has to be old. Could be from the dawn of the Second Space Age. For all we know, it’s from the first.”

  Parson’s voice climbed an octave. “You think this could be Pre-Virus?”

  “I know that if it were, it would be worth millions.”

  “Millions?” Stem said.

  The captain sighed. “Is anyone not listening in?”

  “This supposed to be a private channel?” Karry said.

  “Patching up the Turtle’s gonna cost an ugly buck, Cap,” Stem said. “We already got the gear to dig it out.”

  Parson chuckled. “That gear is for grinding rock out of other rock. Digging a ship out intact, you’re talking about painstaking work.”

  “Law of the Inky Void,” Rada said. “Do you lay claim to this as our captain, sir? Or do you waive your rights to it?”

  “You people are serious, aren’t you? You realize this is probably nothing more than an iron-heavy meteorite. And that your enthusiasm for it is nothing more than a way to vent the emotions stirred up by the attack.”

  “Like make-up sex,” Karry said.

  Rada snorted. “Except with more pirates.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Answer the lady’s question!” Stem barked. “You want it or not?”

  “A couple hours ago, all you people could talk about was how we were about to die.” He cleared his throat. “I hereby claim this find in the name of the Box Turtle and its present crew.”

  A cheer erupted in both carts. Rada didn’t make a habit of ranking a sound’s appeal, but it was without doubt the best noise she’d heard in days.

  -o0o-

  The rescue came on schedule. The ship was an old bastard—not in the sense that it was ancient and beat up, though it was, but in the sense it had been designed to pull double duty as both a mining/hauling barge and as a general recon/transport vessel. Its crew were independents like themselves. They asked nine hundred different questions about the pirate attack, sympathizing mightily. The Box Tur
tle’s crew answered readily but kept mum about the shadow beneath the ice.

  Triton had a few settlements, but they were in the market for a repair crew, so the OB delivered them to Skylon, the moon’s major mining orbital. This had started life as a spin-gravity ring, but had been supplemented with a series of unsexy boxes as soon as it had gotten artificial gravity. They made port. While they thanked the rescue team, Parson paid up, which included a low upfront fee and a cut of their next few mining gigs. Rada sniffed the air. Skylon always smelled acidic, like a crude cleaning product.

  Once the OB’s people shuffled off, Parson turned to his crew. “I’m going to have my hands full overseeing the Turtle. Try not to get in too much trouble in the meantime, okay?”

  “Any idea how long it’ll take to patch it up?” Rada said.

  “You know how engines are. Could be three days, could be three months.”

  Genner tipped back her head. “Their first estimate sounded optimistic. ‘A few pinholes to plug up.’”

  “Assuming those didn’t cause any deeper damage.” He held up his palms. “I’ll keep you in the loop. Don’t be running off. Not if you want to see what Nereid’s been preserving for us.”

  Rada saluted informally, reaching across her body to touch the side of her hip where people had once worn swords. Parson returned the gesture and strode off, already making another call on his device.

  Stem spread his feet and crossed his arms, gazing at the elevators that would take them down to the inhabited levels. “Feels good to have solid metal under your boots again.”

  “How is this different than being on the Box Turtle?” Rada said.

  “For starters, the Turtle only has one bar. And it sucks.”

  He grinned and headed for the elevators. Rada wanted to protest it was too early, but her last “night” had been before they’d tried to leave Nereid with the ore. Besides, after the last 24 hours, she wouldn’t have cared if it was six-thirty in the morning.

  On their way to the elevators, they crossed a transparent floor that looked down on the upper layer of the station. The levels below it were your typical honeycomb, but the topmost floor could pass for a city on Earth: tight-packed apartments climbing toward the ceiling, their roofs a patchwork of gardens and (very small) swimming pools, the streets tight bands, most too narrow for cart traffic, stuffed instead with electric bikes, scooters, and boards. Walking above it was dizzying, but exhilarating, too, and it put Rada in the right mood for the descent to the more modest levels where people like her could afford to spend their time.