Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Two hours later, Lonnie shuffled onto the bridge, dropped into her seat, and belched. Rada watched as she ran through the scans, but they were still too far off. Rada continued to listen as Simm talked out possible solutions to the encryption.

  “Got something.” Lonnie pointed to the screen. It was too far off to resolve, but the scans had already identified it as an asteroid, an oblong nearly four hundred feet long and two hundred across. “I’m getting a bit of heat. Check out those signals—that’s not a rock. That’s a station.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s not registered on the charts.” Simm pursed his lips. “Well, that’s highly illegal.”

  “What are we seeing?” Rada said. “Is this where they’re keeping the ship?”

  Lonnie rubbed her chin. “How dashing are we feeling?”

  Simm’s face bent in suspicion. “Dashing?”

  “We can’t see anything from here. Tucked in that rock, they could be anyone. The only way we’re going to ID them is to get in closer or have a chat.”

  “Pretend we had a run-in with pirates,” Rada said. “Our life support’s critical and we need assistance.”

  “Roger.” Lonnie edged them closer. The scans homed in on the communication arrays on the outside of the asteroid, but this provided no useful intelligence.

  “Attention unidentified vessel.” A male voice cut through the bridge. “Divert course immediately.”

  Lonnie leaned forward. “Divert from where? Who am I speaking to?”

  “I repeat: divert course immediately.”

  “Are you on the rock? Listen, you’ve got to help me! We’ve been attacked. We’ve barely got enough O2 to fill a bathtub. Please, sir—”

  The man’s voice was perfectly level. “Final warning.”

  Lonnie glanced at Simm. “They’re not giving us a thing. I say we loop around, act like we’re detouring, and get as good a look as possible.”

  As she spoke the last syllable, the screen pinged. A green dot appeared on tactical, followed by a second, then a third.

  Lonnie leaned over her comm. “Uh, station, are those warships?”

  “The alien ship’s here,” Rada said. “They’re going to kill us. Same as they did the Box Turtle.”

  She swayed in her chair as Lonnie took control from the autopilot and veered from the incoming fighters. The Tine had a lot of forward momentum, though, and continued to sail toward the interceptors.

  “Least we’re getting a good shot of their fleet,” Lonnie said. “Between this and what Rada got on Nereid, we may be able to triangulate something. What do you think?”

  “Maybe.” Simm cleared his throat and pointed at tactical. “Is that saying we’re about to get shot at?”

  “Unless they’re bluffing. Launching drones.” The ship rocked slightly. On tactical, two orange dots joined the display, moving into position between the Tine and the enemy ships. A translucent sphere indicated the two sides were seconds away from effective range. “Everyone strapped in? Things are about to get fun.”

  The tactical readout chirped frantically as the three enemies unloaded a salvo of missiles. The Tine’s drones fired back. White-hot bursts daisy-chained the blackness of the void.

  CHAPTER 10

  Lonnie turned harder yet, smushing Rada’s head into the restraints. Tactical made a series of worried beeps. By the time the pressure eased enough to let Rada look up, one of the green enemy dots had vanished from the screen, along with one of the Tine’s orange drones.

  “Good news and bad,” Lonnie said. “The good news is we’re fighting drones. The bad news is they look nasty as hell.”

  One of the green dots broke free from the scrum and plunged toward the Tine. A fusillade of rockets leapt from the Tine, streaking toward it.

  “Sending a Needle,” Simm said flatly. “These ships are flashy. A far cry from the Bunker-class that hit Nereid. I expect the LOTR can ID them.”

  Rada wanted to like that. It meant they’d find out who was behind the murder of her friends. But the fact Simm was sending it now meant he wasn’t sure he’d be alive to do so later.

  The incoming ship fired a spray of rockets to intercept those coming from the Tine. One after another, the torpedoes met and exploded in fiery spheres. The Tine swung into the second half of its turn and finally put its tail to the attackers, but the enemy held pace.

  The second fighter was about to swing past their drone. Tactical recommended a firing plan; Lonnie swore, overrode it, and dumped the drone’s entire missile battery at the other ship. A swarm of small green dots bloomed from the enemy. As they moved toward the Tine, the bridge chirped repeatedly.

  “Oh shit,” Lonnie said. On screen, the second fighter vaporized in a storm of rockets. “I told Toman we needed more drones on this heap.”

  “What’s happening?” Rada said.

  “They launched everything, too. But they bypassed our drone and sent it at us.” Lonnie throttled forward even harder, pressing Rada into her chair. Lonnie swore again and eased back, returning gravity to something near normal. “Get on your suits. Now!”

  Rada reached under her chair and opened the emergency compartment. A white suit popped out. Smelling fresh plastic, she pulled it over her feet and wiggled it over her hips.

  “What about you?” Simm said.

  “I’ve got a ship to pilot.” Lonnie’s knuckles whitened on the controls. “Get on your gods damn suits!”

  The ship rocked. Rada braced herself against the chair and drew the suit over her shoulders. The ship bucked a second time. Rada flipped the hood over her head and sealed it. Beside her, Simm did the same. They gave each other a quick inspection and exchanged thumbs up.

  “Okay, Lonnie,” Simm said. “Time for—”

  “You’re buckled back in?” Without waiting for an answer, Lonnie swung the Tine into the sharpest turn yet.

  Rada’s chest squeezed the air from her lungs. Her restraints were the only thing keeping her head upright. The tactical display peeped and squealed. The Tine jolted forward, bulkheads groaning, then leapt forward again. Rada caught a blurry glimpse of flashing green pinpricks closing in on the center dot of the Tine.

  The ship rattled like a toolbox. Something flashed across the bridge in a shallow downward angle, followed by a roostertail of white dust. Wind howled over Rada’s suit. The dust flowed to both sides of the bridge, vacating the center. In her chair, Lonnie was out of her restraints, reaching for the suit in its base. The suit flapped madly, tore from her grasp, and sailed toward a jagged gash in the side of the bridge.

  “Take the helm!” The veins on Lonnie’s face bulged like she was screaming with all her might, but through the comm, her voice sounded frail, distant. “Rada!”

  Rada glanced to Simm, who lolled in his chair. Lonnie tapped her controls and a panel extended in front of Rada and thrust itself over her lap. Rada could no longer hear anything except the rasp of her breathing in the tightness of her hood, which had hardened into a helmet the instant the temperature dropped.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing!” Rada yelled.

  Lonnie’s body juddered. She typed her pad and Rada’s display changed, simplifying into a handful of readouts and a control system resembling those employed in piloting games across the system.

  Tactical showed a single green dot. The orange of the Tine’s drone trailed it, fighting to catch up; its missiles were out, but Rada recognized the other symbol listing its armaments. The Tine had been flipped by the explosions to point nose-first toward the incoming enemy. They were currently coasting on momentum. The natural move would have been to flip around and boost away, maintaining distance while peppering the enemy with whatever the Tine had left.

  Instead, Rada punched the accelerator. The Tine jolted as the engines fired against its momentum, braking hard. Her vision grayed. A red square popped up to warn her she was pushing past typical human physical tolerance.

  Programmed to maintain distance and let its rockets do the fighting, the enemy drone fli
pped and braked, too. Rada called up an aggressive attack pattern from the autopilot and let her missiles fly. The drone braked harder, streaming counters at Rada’s rockets.

  Meanwhile, the Tine’s drone closed on the enemy’s tail. Long before the drone would have been able to ram it, the enemy fired a trio of missiles at it. Rada let the drone inch nearer, then ordered it to empty its gun—the gun that was, in this era of long-range, smart missile-based combat, a complete rarity.

  The drone fired in a tight spiral, sending a cone of bullets tearing through the vacuum. An instant after its magazine went dry, the drone was struck by the first missile. It disappeared in a white sphere of heat. The enemy vessel made to dodge, but Rada’s stream of rockets hemmed it in, limiting its motions. Bullets shredded into its nose. Crippled, it was a sitting duck for the next arm of the spiraling hellfire.

  Rada flipped the Tine and instructed the autopilot to boost away as fast as tolerances allowed. Only then did she see Lonnie frozen in her chair, arms as stiff as two blades, her swollen, bloodshot eyes staring at the explosions fading on the screens.

  -o0o-

  The Tine accelerated so hard Rada wasn’t able to move the body before Simm recovered.

  “She’s dead,” he said. “But we’re not. What happened?”

  Rada filled him in. He supplemented her words with the ship’s log of the battle. When Rada finished, Simm lowered his face.

  “She saved us,” he said. “She turned the engines away from the blast. Took it on the chin instead.”

  “She turned us in to the missiles? Sounds like she was trying to get us killed!”

  “If the engines had gone down, we were flying corpses. They could have picked us off with a single missile.” He tried to stand, but the gravity was too intense. He thudded back into his chair. “She saved us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rada said. “Was she a friend?”

  “The only one I had.”

  Once they were well away from the asteroid and able to drop their acceleration, they moved the body to a container in the cargo hold. The entire ship was depressurized; they’d been hulled in multiple locations and were lucky no critical components had been damaged. The life support was still functional, however, and they were able to swap their O2 with refilled canisters whenever their suits ran low.

  Simm Needled everything that had happened to the Hive. While they waited for a response, he set course for Jindo, a smaller habitat sunward from Neptune that served as a rest and repair station on the way to the outskirts of the system. Rada used the time to go over the ship’s controls. A Needle came back from the Hive before they made port.

  “They’ve identified the station,” he said.

  Rada tried to scratch her ear and was stymied by the suit. “That was fast.”

  “Lonnie was right about their drones. They just came out this year. Cross-referenced against the profile LOTR built on the Bunker-class, as well as that asteroid station, and there’s only one match: the Immortal Republic of Poseidon.”

  “The IRP? On Triton? We got attacked by a government?”

  “If you can call it that,” Simm said. “Although I suppose they have as much right to the term as anyone else.”

  “They’re going to kill civilian miners—working men and women—over money?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.” His eyes shifted to her face, then away. “IRP is currently in a position of great instability. It owes billions to the companies who underwrote its expansion. If it can’t become solvent, it will have to levy an income tax, the one thing it swore it would never do. That would mean revolution, which to an institution such as a government is as good as death.”

  “Forgive my temporary naivete,” Rada laughed. “Even if they weren’t in debt to the point of being overthrown, we’re talking about lasers. Interstellar drives. Gods know what else. Whoever has the ship immediately becomes one of the biggest players in the system.”

  “Correct. The surprise isn’t that a government would kill for it. The surprise would be finding a government that wouldn’t.”

  “Or a corporation. Excluding Toman, of course.”

  Simm smiled, tight-lipped. “Of course.”

  “Speaking of, what’s his plan from here?”

  “In flux. The IRP isn’t a power on the order of Valiant or Dison, but they are large enough to be a handful. On top of that, they’re known for their intransigence. It isn’t believed that bullying them would be an effective strategy.”

  Rada sighed. “Sounds like more skulking around is in our future. How’s that been working out for us?”

  Simm’s cheek twitched. “How many more people do you think would have died if we’d charged in guns blazing? If we went after them like they went after your ship?”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Lonnie’s dead, too, Rada. Because we stuck out our neck. I don’t know if you talk like this because you’re angry or if this is just who you are. But if going slow and steady saves a single life, it’s worth all the time in the world.”

  She closed her eyes. “You’re right, Simm. I am angry. And I’m sorry. As long as we’re moving forward, that’s as much as I can ask.”

  He was quiet a moment. “You’ll be pleased to hear that Rigel’s death has not been mentioned in any official capacity.”

  “His IRP friends must have cleaned up the mess before the authorities noticed. Toman, did he have anything to say about it?”

  “He expressed two minds. First, he passed no moral judgment on the act. You say it was self-defense, and even if it wasn’t, he believed it was a justified eye for an eye.”

  “But?”

  Simm tugged the hair above his temple. “But he’s wary of what such an action says about the person who performed it. If that action were to be repeated another time, that person would be deemed an unacceptable risk to the goals of the Hive.”

  She couldn’t help her laughter. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a way with words?”

  “Usually, I’m told the opposite.”

  “Well, they’re wrong.” Rada grinned at him. “I’ll be good, Simm. Promise.

  -o0o-

  They made port at Jindo, a small, ring-shaped station floating in the middle of nowhere. The place was all business, with hangars and dry docks encrusting both the inner and outer surfaces of the ring. The Tine needed a hull job, nothing more, and this wasn’t expected to take more than a few days. Once the ship was back in action, they would act as Toman’s eyes on the scene, keeping tabs on the asteroid while the Hive plotted out the best way to wrest away the alien ship.

  According to Simm, while Toman was browbeating his people into figuring out how to do so elegantly and sneakily, no methods were off the table.

  While they waited for the mechanics to finish with the Tine, she and Simm wandered around Jindo. Though she couldn’t wait to get back up in vacuum, she was happy for the respite. Jindo had a culture of artisanal, hand-built vessels that contrasted with the mass-manufactured designs pumped out of the major shipyards, and Rada found she could get lost watching its craftsmen grind down the sweep of a wing or the curve of a nose. Most were geekishly happy to interrupt their work to show her the blueprints, concept art, and computer models. Simm made for a good companion, too. He didn’t talk much, but was knowledgeable without being overweening about it.

  On their third day on Jindo, Rada found herself being lectured by a portly woman with extremely strong opinions on the necessity of a proper starship paint job.

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” the woman said. “It could be a name. A pattern. A dragon fencing with a unicorn. All that matters is it’s not nothing.”

  “But almost no one’s going to see it,” Rada said. “Not unless you’re docking with them. Or they’ve got their nose pushed against the port glass.”

  “But you’ll know it’s there.” She leaned her face close to Rada’s, eyebrows raised. “And whenever you launch, whenever you voyage into the nothing protec
ted only by your thin metal shell, you’ll do so knowing exactly who you are—and that the universe had better sit up and take notice.”

  Simm touched his ear and walked out of the hangar. Ten minutes later, he returned, waited for the conversation to finish, and beckoned Rada outside.

  “I just heard from the Hive,” he said. “The asteroid—it’s moved.”

  “Moved? How do they know?”

  “Apparently Lonnie dropped a spy as soon as she figured out the asteroid was our mark. Her spy’s been running silent to avoid detection. Until a few hours ago, when four Bunkers helped tow the asteroid away.”

  “To Triton?”

  He shook his head. “Jupiter. The LOTR has strong reason to believe its final destination is Io.”

  Rada glanced back at the hangar, lowering her voice. “How do they figure? Did they decrypt Rigel’s device?”

  “Yes, but that hasn’t proven as helpful as hoped. They pulled this from a job posting. Turns out IRP is hiring.”

  “If this is a metaphor, I don’t understand it.”

  Simm began to walk down the quiet plastic street, gazing up at the buildings occupying the spacious interior of the ring. Mainly prefab, but most bore sculptures and paint jobs as quirky as the residents.

  “It’s no metaphor,” he said. “IRP has just put out a call for a large number of workers. They’re looking for construction, excavation, anyone with experience working in extreme environments. Must be willing to work on-site for several months. Single people preferred.”

  “And the site is on Io?”

  “The ad doesn’t say; strict NDAs are also a requirement. But the LOTR have dug into IRP’s holdings and found property there. Combined with the relocation of the alien vessel, and some further intel they haven’t seen fit to share with me, they’re positive the IRP intends to build a more permanent location for the ship. One that can’t be stumbled on by wandering interlopers.”

  “Io would be the place. Not much there but volcanos.” She bit her lip. “The Hive wants me to apply, don’t they?”