MAIDEN VOYAGE
A short story set in the universe of the Seryys Chronicles
Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Nicholson
Edited by Chelsea Pullano
Cover Copyright © 2013 by Clockwork Quills
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Seryys Chronicles: Maiden Voyage
“The captain will never go for that!” Char’Lyyn Stryyn protested, her intense green eyes drilling holes into her copilot, Stryyk’Draal Stryyn’s, forehead.
“What choice do we have?” he shot back, as they both looked out the forward canopy at the planet looming up at them.
With a hard buck and an explosion, a piece of hull plating came off the nose of the ship and ricocheted off the canopy. The ship was burning up in the atmosphere and had no reverse thrusters available. The thrusters had gone after they had collided with a rouge asteroid that appeared in their way when they emerged from a mico-black hole created by their Event Horizon Drive, or Eve’Zon Drive. It was a means of instantaneous intergalactic travel, by way of controlled black holes.
They had worked feverishly for hours trying to repair the damage done to the engines, when the asteroid came at them from their dorsal view and clipped the engine pods of the ship. They were drifting ever closer to the planet, as its gravity reached up and grasped the vessel with a firm grip.
“Where would we go?” Char asked, brushing her red hair away from her eyes.
“Back to Seryys,” Stryyk answered.
“The coordinates are already locked into the navigational computer. It would simply be a matter of hitting a button! The ship has had enough time to recharge; we’ve been drifting toward this planet for hours!”
Since the propulsion and Eve’Zon Drive were separate systems, they could work independently from one another. This meant that, even if they couldn’t get the engines back online, the Eve’Zon Drive could still get them back to Seryys for rescue. The only kicker was that it had never been done in the atmosphere of a planet before. They had no way of knowing exactly what would happen. The black hole could suck part of the planet in, or suck all of the air out of the atmosphere, killing all life on the planet, or cause the whole planet to implode and, most importantly, kill every person on that ship.
“Look,” Stryyk said to drive his point home, “we don’t have time to put it to a vote! The thrusters aren’t firing and we’re falling to our deaths!”
“Fine,” Char scoffed.
“Just remember that it’ll be you who has to answer the captain when we’re dead!”
“Dully noted!” Stryyk said, as he engaged the Eve’Zon Drive.
Accelerated particles collided before them with a thunderous clap that rocked the ship and her crew to their bones. A maw yawned ahead of them as they fell out of the sky. With no grace whatsoever, the ship fell into the black hole and entered black space for all of about half of a second, and appeared in the space just outside Seryys’ gravity well. The crew was shaken, but alive.
When they heard the port authority hailing them, they opened their eyes and looked around. With the elation of being alive, they embraced with a passionate kiss. Not only were they copilots, they were husband and wife. Their kiss was broken up when the Captain barged into the cockpit, grease stains marring his usually dashing countenance.
“Stryyk!” he nearly shouted. “What in the name of the Founders were you thinking?”
“I’m too young to die?” he responded.
“Is everything a joke to you?” the Captain asked.
“Almost, sir,” he responded honestly, prompting a very angry look. “What’re you worried about, Cap’n? I saved your life today.”
“By possibly getting us all killed!” he retorted angrily.
“There are thirty people aboard this ship! Those lives are my responsibility! Had you asked me, I would’ve told you that we would take our chances on the planet, rather than make a jump in the atmosphere!”
“And what chance would we have had if we died on impact?” Stryyk asked.
“Which was going to happen. We had no way to slow our descent! It’s possible that we would’ve burned up before finishing reentry!”
“You don’t make the calls on this ship,” he shot back. “I do!”
“It’s a wonder we all still here,” Stryyk mumbled under his breath.
“What?” the Captain boomed in the small confines of the cockpit.
“Nothing, sir,” he said.
“Get us docked with the closest orbital platform and then the both of you get off my ship!”
“Yes, sir,” Stryyk said with a goofy voice.
That goaded the Captain even more. “Stryyk, I know every ship captain from here to the Quarmann Sector. I’ll see to it personally that neither of you ever put another person’s life in danger again! Maybe I’ll contact Fleet Admiral Sarryyl, he’s close personal friend of mine, and see if I can’t get you flying trash barges for the rest of your life!”
“Been there, done that,” Stryyk mumbled. The captain stormed out of the cockpit and slammed the hatch shut behind him.
“Such a pleasant working environment,” Stryyk said.
Char leaned forward and hit the communications console switch. “Hello Port Authority, this is Under the Radar requesting assistance. We have suffered complete engine failure and need a ride.”
“Copy that, Under the Radar. We are dispatching a ship now to bring you in. Please hold current course and await assistance.”
“Roger that,” Stryyk said and cut the channel. “Not like we’re going anywhere.”
In short order, the Radar was towed to dock and moored manually. Then Char and Stryyk packed up their stuff and caught a ride back to Lanthraad, a city of about a million people on the other side of the planet from the capital, Seryys City.
Stryyk threw his duffle bag on the fold-down bed and slumped into a rickety chair next to the bed. Five feet away, Char sat at the kitchen table and buried her face in her hands. They both knew that rent was due in the next week and they had nothing to offer. They’d been down on their luck for nearly a year. It started when Stryyk lost his job as a load hauler pilot for the Windarr Construction Company. Unfortunately the company was seized by the Government for tax evasion. In a very public, very despicable press release, WCC stated that they were hiding from their taxes because their workers we
re secretly striking for more money, and they were forced to comply with their demands for higher wages. With that little white lie out there, none of the construction companies would touch him—or any of his coworkers—with a ten-foot lightning rod. He had made good money doing what he was doing—good enough to live in an upscale neighborhood.
His wife, Char, was gainfully employed as a pilot through a private airline service that transported the wealthy via Atmospheric Cruisers, or ACs. These were barge-like, pleasure vessels that sat on huge hoverpads and slowly glided over thousands of miles while the occupants drank, danced, napped, and did whatever they pleased. It was a posh—and sometimes boring—job for a crack pilot who only barely flunked out of naval school. Her expulsion wasn’t based on grades or ability, but attitude. She had no respect for the chain of command and had gone over her CO’s head. That being said, she was practically blacklisted. It was only by the grace of the Founders that she landed the job she had, her hirer being the friend of a friend of a friend.
That was when Stryyk found a ship looking for pilots: the Under the Radar, captained by a man who went by only Captain Xaal— one of his business associates was the one who had brokered the deal between the captain and Stryyk. With the Government pushing hard for expansion, they were paying top dollar for anything discovered, to whoever found it. Captain Xaal promised twenty percent of the paycheck. With each star system bringing in close to two million credits, twenty percent would put them up for quite a while! Only a fool would pass up an offer like that. Every other day they saw ships discovering new planets or star systems or nebulae on the Net’Vyyd.
They didn’t actually do the math, though. At any given time there were between ten and fifteen thousand ships out in the Unknown Regions. If even four reports came through a week, the chances of them finding anything were about the same as winning the lottery—only winning entailed having the skill, knowhow, drive and luck.
Three months later, they had to leave their comfortable home for a single room with a kitchenette and a fold-down bed. After six months, they had to sell of their hovercars to make ends meet, as each trip out to farthest reaches of Seryys Space ended in failure and disappointment. At the nine-month mark, they had gotten their first eviction notice and Char had had to face her overly-scrutinizing mother for money and get an earful about her “deadbeat husband.” With another month of rent paid, they held their breath the next break.
This last trip out had had the potential for greatness. They found their star system. And though it wasn’t a grand star system with multiple planets like the Seryys System, twenty percent of anything was better than twenty percent of zero. That was until the wayward asteroid clipped the aft end of their ship less than five seconds after emerging from black space. They had had the star system within their grasp and lost it, possibly killing every living thing on the planet into which they almost crashed.
Now they were unemployed and nearly homeless.
“You would think with a hundred ships leaving Seryys daily to explore the Unknown Regions, there’d be a niche for pilots!” Stryyk said at length just to break the silence in their very, very small apartment.
“Why do you have to be so brash?” Char asked, ignoring his statement and cutting to what was bothering her.
“I’m not doing this with you right now, Char,” Stryyk warned. “I’m not in the mood.”
“So what?” Char asked. “We’re just going to ignore it hope it goes away?”
“No,” Stryyk said, standing up and heading for the door. “I plan to go to The Dive downstairs, stake a claim on a barstool and drink until I black out. And when I wake up the next morning in jail, at least I’ll have breakfast before they cut me loose.”
Char was so shocked by his honesty that she had nothing to say. She only stared at him, slack jawed and furious. When she gathered her wits about her, she shouted, well after he had left and the door had slammed shut, “Fine!”
She sat, crying and look down at her shoes. With a sudden burst of rage, she stood and flipped the table over. She was not prone to violent outbursts, but this particular problem had plagued them for a year, and had caused such frustration and anger to build that if she didn’t break something and release her anger, she thought she might actually physically explode.
The items on the table scattered to the floor, some breaking, including a glass frame with a precious picture in it. As tears streamed down her face, she knelt to pick up the pieces of the frame and regarded the picture within. The people in the photo she scarcely recognized, but they were indeed her and Stryyk. The big, joyful smiles on their faces were something that she almost had forgotten how to make, forgotten what they even looked like. The picture was taken the day they got married, the day they ceased to be two individuals and became one family.
It was supposed to be an outside wedding, but in true form, it had rained and forced them inside. Her mother had continuously dropped under-her-breath comments about marrying a garbage hauler the whole time she got ready. Char’s sister, who was supposed to escort Stryyk down the aisle, got a stomach bug two hours before the wedding and was rushed to the hospital—insisting the whole time to be left to walk down the aisle and, most importantly, to not cancel the wedding. Her three-year-old niece decided, twenty minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start, that that was the perfect time to play hide-and-go-seek. Char, her other sister—the little girl’s mom—and their mother checked under every couch, in every cabinet and found her, fast asleep, in a dumb waiter. Despite all that, when she and Stryyk were standing before their friends and family, looking into each other’s eyes and she saw the love and passion that burned within Stryyk’s, everything else in the world disappeared and it was only her and the love of her life. It was still the happiest day of her life. That day she swore to love Stryyk unconditionally for the rest of her life, in good times and in bad. And this definitely qualified as bad times. The only time that things had been this bad was three years prior—five years after getting married—when she lost her child to a miscarriage and subsequently was unable to conceive again. Stryyk was there, leading her through her sorrow every step of the way. They considered adoption. It was, after all, saving a child from forced enrollment into the military. However, shortly after they started that process, Char was hired on as an AC captain of the Solar Winds. Knowing that she would be gone for weeks at a time, they opted to stay a family of two, and they were happy with that.
So, wiping the tears from her face, she stood, holding onto the picture. She walked to the bathroom, placed the picture on the counter and checked herself in the mirror. With a little freshening up, she drew in a deep breath and said, to her doppelganger in the mirror, “Okay, girl. Time to get your drink on!”
She left the room that posed as their apartment and took the lift down to the third floor lobby. In there were a few shops and a bar called The Dive. From where she was standing she could see Stryyk sitting alone at the bar, a glass of something amber in color before him. He downed it and pointed at the countertop for another.
As she approached the bar, she heard Stryyk talking to the bored-looking barkeep. “… statistically speaking, is about the same as getting attacked by a shark… no, two sharks… at the same time.”
“I’ll have what he’s having,” Char said, sliding onto the stool next to him. He gave her a surprised, drunken look.
“Oh hi,” he said, squinting at her. “I was just telling my buddy here what the chances of finding a star system were. What’re you doing down here?”
“If you’re going to drink yourself into a coma, I coming, too. Plain and simple.”
Two glasses of amber liquid were dropped in front of them. Stryyk raised his glass to his wife, downed in three gulps, and put the glass down. Char did the same, only not as gracefully. After the second gulp, the burning caused her stop and cough.
“What is this?” she asked, regarding the remaining gulp in her glass.
“Allamindaar Brandy,” he answered, tap
ping the countertop for two more. “Drink up.”
She finished it and slammed it down on the counter just in time for another one to appear in front of her. They both downed them, and his head began to swim.
“This is some good stuff!” she said, wobbling on her stool.
“Just wait,” he said back to her. “It hasn’t hit you just yet.”
That evening was the most fun they’d had in a year! They drank, they danced, they sang, they stumbled over a person’s table and started a fight that escalated into full-blown bedlam. They had completely forgotten about their woes, the bill collectors nipping at their backsides, the jerk-off captain that had fired them for saving his skin, Char’s overbearing and overly-critical mother, and had the time of their lives.
They awoke the next morning together in a jail cell, not remembering how they got there.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the two lovebirds,” the cell cop said. “You two caused quite a stir from what I heard. The Dive was totaled in the brawl that you two started.”
“Just looking for good time,” Stryyk said.
“Well you found it,” the cop said. “When you were brought in, you were cuffed.”
“Sounds pretty typical of being arrested, officer,” Char countered.
“Yeah, but not when the detainees come without a fight,” the cop shot back. “You started bumping—if you know what I mean—in the back of the squad car. They had to cuff you just to keep your hands off of each other!”
“By the Founders!” Char gasped. “Did they really?”
“Yep, and that was all before you got here,” he continued. “The cuffs weren’t going to stop you, not even the Founders could’ve stopped you. The last thing I saw before I finally put a few blankets over you and put on a pair of headphones on was the tattoo you have just above your rear.”
“Fortunately, there weren’t any other occupants in the cells on either side of you.”
“Oh no,” Char said, rubbing her temples to try to get rid of the terrible hangover she was enduring. She looked over at Stryyk, who had a boyish, devilish grin on his face. “And you!” she said, pointing an accusing, yet playful, finger at her husband. “This is your fault!”
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