Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  It was their first night on leave and unofficial rules insisted that everyone start the night together, including Genner, who almost certainly wouldn’t be there for night two. Lately, Skylon had been the Box Turtle’s de facto base of operations. Within it, Shine was their de facto bar. She didn’t feel the slightest tremor of surprise as Stem ordered the elevator down to the eighth level.

  After several stops, the door swished open to a plaza of relaxed dissipation. A handful of men sat on benches, enjoying the night, gazing into the trees and swigging from black plastic bottles. Down the maze-like streets, people yelled at each other, but it wasn’t aggressive. Just people too drunk to care how loud they were being.

  Stem crossed the plaza, stepping over crinkled food wrappers and spent vape cartridges. Residential holes surrounded the park, but within blocks, it was all bars, restaurants, theaters, and shops. The air smelled like perfume, stale sweat, fried soy, and spiced prot. Just as the crowds of miners, crewmen, and locals grew thick enough to require weaving through, Stem swerved inside the Shine.

  The interior was the same as the last time she’d seen it. Dim. Small trays on the tables to keep your device safe from spilled beer. For those who liked to know exactly what they were ordering, it had a dispenser, but the Shine drew its name from the prodigious quantity of home-distilled spirits it carried behind the counter. Everyone but Genner ordered the nightly special.

  The nightly special tasted a lot like pig with a splash of generic citrus. Not the maker’s finest effort. Rada didn’t care. For a while, their table didn’t talk much, or if they did, it was about what they thought they might do later in the night.

  She could see it on Stem’s face, though. She knew, long before he did, what his question would be.

  “So,” he said, flicking a shot glass across the table with a rattle. “Do you really think that thing’s Pre-Virus?”

  Rada shrugged. “That’s not what I told Parson, is it?”

  “Nope. But sometimes when you think a thing but you’re not one hundred percent sure, you pretend you don’t really think it. That way, if you’re wrong, no one will see it.”

  She stared across the table, aware of the other three watching them. “I forget, which school did you get your psych degree from again?”

  He took a moment to decide whether to get angry or to laugh, then waved his hand. “All I want to know is whether I’m about to be so rich I need to buy a suit.”

  “Chances are it’s an old freighter. But I think it’s worth taking a look.”

  “So there is a chance,” Yed said. “That means the PVs got into space? Then how’d the aliens nearly wipe them out?”

  She didn’t know if he was interested in the subject or in watching her talk, but her last drink had promoted her to Professor of All Subjects. Beyond that, it astounded her how little most people knew of the era. Sure, it had taken place a thousand years ago. But the Panhandler virus and the invasion had answered one of the biggest questions of all time: was there intelligent life outside Earth?

  The answer had been yes. And it had wanted humanity dead.

  “Pre-Virus, they explored for decades.” She held up her glass, pointing at the ceiling with her index finger. “But they hadn’t settled anywhere. All the Swimmers had to do to knock them out was hit Earth.”

  Yed frowned. “If they were in space for that long, why didn’t they inhabit it?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Records show their enthusiasm to explore dwindled fast. There’s some indication they might have been headed for a collapse even if the Swimmers hadn’t arrived—their economies were still oil-based, and their financial system was in ruins. Most historians think this sapped their will to embark on colossally expensive colonization efforts.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell them about the thing with the eggs and the baskets?”

  “It was a completely different time, Yed. No one knew that aliens were out there. The Swimmers haven’t been back since. You could argue that all the expansion we’ve scrambled to do has been a giant miscalculation.”

  He took a drink. “Yeah, but we’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Expanding was good process,” Genner said. “No matter what the results have been.”

  Karry smacked down his glass. “I don’t give a shit if the idiots from a thousand years ago were only kind of idiots or if they were real big idiots. Here’s what I want to know. Say that thing under the ice is a PV ship. What would it be worth?”

  “There’s nothing else like it in the system,” Rada said. “It would be literally priceless.”

  “And we all got a share.”

  The crew exchanged looks.

  “Or,” Stem said, “it could be a prehistoric PV cesspool. We’ll dig it up and walk out with nothing but shit.”

  Rada laughed, but he was right. She was getting ahead of herself. She didn’t know what they’d found. Until they got out there and started digging, the only reasonable course was to go on as if her life wouldn’t change at all.

  Some time later, as she was getting antsy to move on to another bar, she went up for a refill. The bartender was a few years younger than Rada, with smoky eyes and lean, hard-cut arms. As Rada waited for the woman to deliver her drink, a man in a tailored yet casual suit leaned beside her on the bar.

  “This will sound strange,” he said. “But are you Rada Pence?”

  She eyed him. “I am. And I’m not nearly famous enough to not wonder how you know that.”

  “I’m Rigel. Like the star.” He was handsome, with a nose that might have been large if it hadn’t been so well-proportioned to his face. “I represent Dison Concerns.”

  “You say that like I should care.”

  He laughed lightly. “Don’t you? You applied for a job with us.”

  The bartender delivered her drink, allowing Rada a moment to absorb this. “Since when do you hunt down your applicants in person?”

  “When we actually want to talk to them. Besides, I didn’t find you. I’m stationed on Skylon. Local talent scout, if you will. Just happened to recognize you.”

  “Small world, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes. So you want a job?”

  “A week ago? Absolutely. Right now, I can’t commit.”

  He raised an eyebrow, instantly turning himself into the archest thing in the Shine. “What changed?”

  Rada shook her head and sipped her drink. “Could be nothing. But I have a job to finish for my captain before I contemplate hopping ship.”

  “Is that what you’d consider your greatest flaw? Your unflagging loyalty?”

  “If I’ve got the job, why am I still being interviewed?”

  Rigel held up a palm. “Because you haven’t taken the job yet, have you?”

  “Give me your contact, and I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  He opened a line between his device and hers and sent over his info. “Good luck with your job, Rada. I look forward to speaking to you again under more formal circumstances.”

  She returned to their table. As she sat, Stem kept his eyes locked firmly on the bar. “Who was that?”

  “Who was what?” Rada glanced toward the bar, where Rigel was still stationed. “Just some guy.”

  “Some guy who wants to get thrown outside?”

  “You should be flattered, Stem. It means I’m desirable.”

  At the moment, she found his jealousy nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop her from wanting him when they stumbled to their apartment hours later. They’d been on the Turtle a long time. Anyway, the pirate attack had stirred up feelings that could only be dealt with through primal means.

  After, though, with the hormones draining from her brain to leave nothing but pure thought, she knew Stem was a dead end. Something she’d fallen into and hadn’t bothered to climb out of.

  Which more or less described her entire existence.

  It was time to make some changes. To reset the vector of her life. Whether or not the dig panned out, she had a ne
w job in hand. Flush with sudden enthusiasm, she took her device to the other room and started to write Rigel a letter—and to begin a second one to Stem—but after a few minutes, she shut down her device.

  This wasn’t the way to do it, typing drunkenly and wantonly in the dark, trying to torpedo all her problems with one furious attack. She needed to approach them one at a time. If the dig was a PV spacecraft, she could take her share of the profits and retire. Strike that—she could buy her own ship. Go and do as she pleased.

  If it turned out to be nothing, then she’d take the job with Dison Concerns. Changing ships would take care of the Stem issue. She could knock off the drinking, too. Study navigation, work her way up to a pilot’s chair.

  One thing at a time. Starting with the dig.

  -o0o-

  In the morning, she began a routine that would last her until the end of leave. When she woke—no earlier than late morning, and only then if she was too hungover to sleep—she hunted the net for all records of Pre-Virus spacecraft. These records, like all such things of the time, were incredibly spotty. Much of the era’s history had transitioned to digital shortly before the plague and had been lost when the world’s grid went dark. Between the wars, fires, and rot, paper records hadn’t fared much better.

  She didn’t care how hard it was, how little knowledge her efforts produced. The discovery had the power to change her life for good. Every minute of effort was worth it.

  Besides, it was the best way she had to kill the time.

  When the hour crossed the boundary between late afternoon and early evening, she went out with Stem and whichever members of the crew were fit enough to drag their carcasses out of their rooms. The nights were blurry. Fun, though. Besides, it would all stop soon enough. Why not make the most of what time she had left?

  During the rest of her leave, she watched Stem get in two fights, only one of which she deemed justified.

  Captain Parson reported that repairs on the engines were going as fast as could be hoped. He wanted the Box Turtle operational and the repair team off of Nereid before starting work on the object in the ice, but he estimated that would take no longer than two weeks. He would have all necessary materials assembled before then.

  She built her archive of PV spacefaring lore.

  She drank enough to kill most mammals.

  She dreamed that she met Rigel again and he bought her drinks and she spoke about the past, the future, how she wanted to become a pilot. He said she could, if she worked at it. She believed.

  She had a fight with Stem. She couldn’t remember what had started it, and it wasn’t physical, but it was in public (at Shine, in fact), and it was raucous enough that Stem had stormed off, leaving her in the tunnel outside with Yed.

  “I don’t get it,” Yed said. “Why are you with him?”

  “Because he asked.”

  “That’s all it takes?”

  “We all want somebody, don’t we?”

  “And you deserve better.”

  By which he meant him. Rada laughed, too drunk to care how she sounded. His face crumpled, but she wasn’t laughing at him. Just the absurdity of life. Why were people so afraid to try to get what they wanted?

  At last, Parson called them up to the port. The Box Turtle waited. Its stern was shredded and scorched, but they didn’t have to worry about aerodynamics or aesthetics.

  Rada settled into the bridge with the others. “Good to be back on board.”

  Parson grinned. “It’s good to have something to board.”

  Genner ran the countdown. They separated from the landing pad and boosted away, leaving the blocky habitats of Skylon behind. The chatter during the flight centered on recapping the funny things they’d seen and done on leave.

  “Shall we get to the subject we’ve been studiously avoiding?” Parson said during a lull. “The first thing we’re going to do is send a probe to the vessel. Make sure it is a vessel. Once that’s established, we’ll begin excavation. It’ll be just like a mining op—except instead of extracting ore, you’ll be digging out an egg. Any cracks to the shell could destroy what’s inside.”

  Stem snorted. “In other words, we’re gonna be there a while.”

  The captain smiled. “You have to earn your share somehow, don’t you?”

  The Turtle touched down on the surface of the tiny moon. The grounds were churned up and darkened from the repair team, but the landscape was otherwise identical to how they had left it. They took the carts to the site and unloaded the gear.

  Karry and Parson floated a long steel canister over to the ice sheet. From it, they withdrew a long cylinder with a conical nose, then stepped back. The automated drill gouged a path into the ice and disappeared. While it burrowed, the crew deployed a portable shelter, modified the mole for ice duty, and assembled a smaller excavator for when the mole got closer to the frozen vessel.

  The work was detail-oriented and labor-intensive. After the last two weeks in the bars of Skylon, it felt great. With no sun, Rada soon lost track of time; when Parson called a halt, she was surprised to see that six hours had passed. They headed back to the ship to eat and grab some sleep.

  “The probe should reach the hull in another three hours,” Parson informed them. “By morning, we’ll have a much better idea of what we’ve got here.”

  Rada wanted to stay up to hear the probe’s findings, but as soon as she hit her bunk, she passed out like she’d pounded a fifth of pig.

  She got up just ahead of her alarm. The ship lighting was set to predawn. She hit the head and padded down to the galley. Karry and Yed were already there.

  “Any news?” she said.

  “Nothing yet,” Yed said. “Although it will still be morning for a few hours. Technically speaking.”

  Karry dug into a bowl of pink All-Paste. “Genner and the captain been consulting in his cabin for hours. Either the two of them decided to quit mining this moon and start mining each other. Or they’ve got the news and they’re sittin’ on it.”

  Karry was a crusty lifer who drank more than the rest of them put together, but Rada had learned to listen when he spoke. She ate, cleaned up, dressed. With no word from Parson, she paged through her collection of pre-PV research.

  The announcement didn’t arrive until nine that morning. “Crew to the bridge.”

  Stem glanced up at the ceiling and laughed. “He sounds like someone just nuked his dog.”

  They jogged from their cabin and up to the bridge. There, Parson leaned over his desk, eyes sleepless and puffy, face sagging like they’d hit quadruple G. He waited for everyone to arrive, then looked up, gazing past them.

  “It’s not a Pre-Virus ship,” he said.

  Rada’s heart shrank. “How do you know that?”

  “We’ve spent hours going over the newest scans. It doesn’t match anything in the records of PV vessels. Not even close. The design is far too cohesive. Spacefaring.”

  “So what are we talking?” Stem said. “It’s just some old hulk?”

  “Probably.”

  The air seemed to leave the bridge. Rada felt her hopes contract. She still had the Dison job lined up, but this find could have changed everything. Along with the money, she would have become famous. Part of the team that found the relic from humanity’s first space age. Ships across the system would have lined up to take her onto their team. She could have vaulted straight into the stars.

  She lifted her chin sharply. “Wait, probably? If it’s not PV, and it’s not from the modern age, what else could it be?”

  “There is another option,” Genner said.

  Parson scowled. “It’s reckless to speculate until we know more.”

  “I hate secrets,” Stem said. “If you’re not going to spit it out, why call us here in the first place?”

  Parson sat back, sighed, and nodded at Genner.

  “I think,” Genner said, “that it could be alien.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Alien,” Rada said. The word felt funny i
n her mouth, like a nut she wasn’t sure had been shelled. “You’re talking about Swimmers?”

  “There’s no way to tell yet,” Genner said. “It isn’t necessarily from the invaders. Conceivably, it could be another species altogether.”

  Yed looked around the bridge. “Is this as big as it sounds?”

  “Bigger.” Rada ran a hand through her hair. “This is the only thing that could be more valuable than a Pre-Virus human ship. Nobody’s ever found an intact alien vessel. Everything from the invasion was destroyed in the war or torn up by scavengers. We know they had viable lasers. Drives that seemed to pluck their fuel right out of the air. Tech like that could be worth billions.”

  Stem’s mouth fell open as if in slow motion. “Did you say billions? With a ‘B’?”

  “‘B’ as in ‘Buy your own private moon.’”

  “We are making a lot of assumptions,” Parson said. “Starting with the very possibility it’s alien. Even if it is, chances are it’s damaged or destroyed. It’s been under the ice a long time. And something put it here in the first place.”

  Genner tipped her head to the side, shrugging. “Being under the ice could have preserved it.”

  “Preserved what, exactly? The aliens must be dead—probably—but what if the Panhandler virus isn’t?”

  “It killed everyone who wasn’t immune,” Rada said. “Every one of us is the offspring of the survivors. We should be immune, too.”

  “You’re willing to bet your life on that?” Parson clasped his hands. “The entire point is we don’t know what’s down there. Maybe that sounds exciting to you. But I’m the one who’s got to worry about people getting hurt.”