The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  CHAPTER 4

  SOMEONE, WHICHEVER ONE of you is free, tell me where you hid the cargo?” Mud said once they got underway.

  “We left the cargo attached to that comet we passed coming in,” Olivet said. “Steelbox has a mapping of its trajectory.”

  The Arrow slid through the void easily, an elongated teardrop body sprouting multiple rotating Tsyfarian engines, the fastest known. Chellox threw them around open space, keeping any directional vector changes just under the limit of the ship’s gravity compensation.

  “Great,” Mud said, “I’m going to bandage this leg. Get me when it’s on board.” He limped aft, climbing into his small crew quarters. Just big enough for a bed, and enough space to hold clothes and change in—the accommodations weren’t great, but they were better than sleeping in your chair.

  Mud cleaned and bandaged his wound, taking his time and trying to not gaze longingly at his pillow. Bone tired, he found he could fight it easier with other people around—alone it felt all too easy to just tip sideways and let sleep take him. He fought back and stood, opening the door into the small hallway.

  “Cap, we’re good to go,” Steelbox’s voice came through the speaker set into the wall.

  Making his way to the hatch’s airlock, he stood with Olivet and Bee as they wrangled the canister on board. “Was this really the safest place to stick the cargo?”

  “It’s still here, right?” Bee asked. Mud nodded—he griped out of a need to gripe, rather than any particular complaint.

  Sitting in his chair, he keyed his mic, dialing in a homing frequency. “Ratzinger, this is the Arrow. Cargo acquired and secured. Headed back to base.”

  No reply. Mud rekeyed the mic and tried again. The same silence remained. “Bee, did the comm unit get bungled recently?”

  Bee returned to her seat and studied a few screens. “Everything’s working on this end. Ratzinger not getting back?”

  “Dead air,” Mud confirmed. “Could be a problem at base, or—”

  “Or nothing,” Bee finished for him.

  Mud closed his eyes, took off his goggles, and cleaned them without looking. “How often is it nothing?” he asked as he reseated them, blinking quickly a few times.

  “Full burn to base, Mud?” Chellox craned his head to look back at his captain.

  “Damn it, I guess so. And Bee, keep trying them. Olivet, make sure the cargo is secure. And everyone else, brace for, you know, Chellox’s flying.”

  “I resent—”

  “Oh shush, Chel,” Steelbox said, slapping the pilot on the shoulder, “he’s just jealous he can’t fly like you.”

  The crew settled in, straps secure, and braced for the engines to go full out. Chellox didn’t disappoint them, burning fuel hard and fast, taking turns that their internal gravity adjusters couldn’t always handle. Little lurches and spasms in local gravity made them all, with the exception of their Tsyfarian pilot, uneasy—but they trusted him. He could throw a ship through space with a grace normally reserved for angels and the theoretical.

  The five day trip remained otherwise uneventful. The crew passed the time as such teams have since the dawn of time: sleeping, eating, playing small games, and cheerily bickering with each other.

  No reply from the Ratzinger. The small-city sized ship housed some of the best the Gov had to offer, and served as the current home base to the Insertion Team. Recently floating out near Jupiter, in humanity’s home system, the Ratzinger had been restocked for a long-haul tour. They’d be underway not long after the Arrow returned, Mud knew, if everything stayed on schedule.

  Then they’d all be off for a five-year tour around some of the outer settlement planets, relieving the Dozier, while a sister ship, the Farnsworth, relieved the Swann, which would make the same loop counterclockwise.

  Lieutenant Commander Mills would be waiting for them by now. In fact, there should’ve been a message waiting, Mills bugging Mud about timetables on the current mission. Nothing, though. Silence, same as their attempts to reach back.

  “Hey Bee, patch me in to anyone?” Mud asked on day two of the trip. The absence of communication ate at him, even as he played it off with the others. He knew they didn’t buy it, regardless.

  “That’s a bit vague.”

  “Seriously, any ship in the fleet. Can we hear anything or talk to anyone at all? We need to know how localized this is.”

  Bee tried, and using long-range comms, nothing seemed to go in or out. She insisted the equipment worked. When Mud questioned her for the eighth time, she did a total tear down and rebuild on the unit, showing him the problem wasn’t on their end.

  On day three of the five-day trip they got a ping back. Going off in the middle of their designated night shift, Olivet caught the ping alone in the forward compartment of the Arrow. He considered waking Mud, or Bee, but held off long enough to answer, making sure the console knew to record.

  “This is the Arrow. Go ahead,” he said, hoping for the best.

  “Arrow, this is Ratzinger. Where are you?”

  “Identify, please,” he requested, still wary.

  “Olivet, is that you? It’s Brockston.”

  “Brockston. Good to hear you,” Olivet said. Brockston still owed him money, never having learned to refuse offers to gamble with someone who could occasionally see the future. A friendly voice settled Olivet down. “We’re two days out. Thought there was a problem, couldn’t get a message through.”

  “We know. Get here fastest.”

  “Chellox has us at a hard burn already,” Olivet said, starting to reach for the internal ship mic, to wake Mud.

  “Good, Ratzinger out,” Brockston said crisply, sounding stressed.

  “Wait,” Olivet said, “can you wait for me to wake the Captain and—”

  “Just get here. We’re not in danger, but get here. Soonest.” The unit clicked off, and Olivet double-checked the recording to make sure everything had worked before keying internal communications and waking Mud, and, on second thought, Bee.

  The three of them debated any meaning behind the message, at length. Brockston wasn’t surprised by the communication issues, so something widespread must have been going on, but a reassurance of no danger meant this could be possibly nothing more than a known glitch. If he hadn’t also asked for a return soonest. That spelled trouble.

  Trouble that the rest of his message denied. Which left them in a strange place. They needed to plan their approach. On the one hand, soonest meant soonest: you came in hard and fast, took no detours, and docked with engines still cooling off. On the other hand, the message could be taken to construe a need for stealth and erring on the side of caution.

  The contradiction stood out to the whole team, each coming in at different points in the debate as they woke up for their shifts. Mud knew at the end of the day his call would be the final one. But he’d learned long ago to listen, and to take advice from capable people seriously. If his own team members didn’t get a voice, why trust them enough to add them to the team in the first place?

  They’d started the team together, and it was with them that Mud had started finding his footing as a leader. He couldn’t just discount them now. Still, the group leaned toward stealth and caution, and something in Mud’s mind, a feeling he couldn’t pin down, told him to just go in as if the message caused no confusion at all. Just land as normal, as requested, and go from there.

  He also refused to call the Ratzinger back and talk to Mills. Either way—problem or not—nothing could be gained from that. And that gave Mud his reasoning. If there was a problem, Mills or one of his assistants would have reached out to the Arrow by now, back channel and subtle, to give them a heads up. If things were so odd and wrong that they couldn’t even do that, then any effort to act warned could put them in jeopardy.

  Reassured by his own logic, he laid out the thoughts to the crew and they agreed. Set on course, they headed into the unknown with a sense of resolve and at least half the start of a quarter of a plan. So, Mud
thought, everything remained normal.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE RATZINGER HUNG LARGE in front of them, growing larger as they sped toward it. Docking Bay Seven slid open, surrounding lights flashing clear, and Chellox came in fast enough to worry even Steelbox, reversing thrust hard at the last possible moment.

  “Bee, take the cargo to our normal operations room,” Mud said, already standing at the hatch before it opened. “I’ll go meet Mills and come back around with him. Let’s see what’s wrong.” He moved off the ship quickly, refusing to actually give in and run. A fast walk would be fine. No problem, Brockston said, they weren’t in trouble. So let them prove it.

  Mud burst into the General Ops room, scanning for Mills. Over in a corner, discussing something quietly with another officer, stood Mud’s boss, or liaison, or whatever he really was. The Insertion Team’s status in the Gov remained unclear on purpose, just as it always had back in the days Mud’s parents ran it. Mills, all five-foot-six of him, stood straight backed and sure of himself. He saw Mud coming toward him and moved away from his previous conversation.

  “Captain Madison—”

  “I’m not my dad. Mud, it’s Mud.”

  “And he’s Jonah and no one in your family seems to accept the use of rank or titles,” Mills said, touching Mud’s shoulder lightly. Mud tensed slightly—Mills never touched him, that wasn’t Mills at all. Which meant...something.

  Mills steered Mud out of the room and spoke quietly, leaning his head closer to Mud as they went. “Look,” Mills said, “let’s go brief your guys, but this isn’t common information yet. It will be soon, but not just now, all right?”

  “Sure thing, Mills,” Mud said, wondering if he even knew Mills’ first name. He’d never heard it, thinking back. He’d never asked. They were friendly and Mud considered Mills an actual friend, the sort you drink and hang out with late between missions, but despite stories told and card hands played, he couldn’t think of any time he’d heard the man’s first name. He’d have to ask him. Later.

  For now they had to debrief on their mission, as well as find out what needed them back so hot and fast. They entered Insertion Teams Ops, really just a ready room that no one else had claimed, Mills nodding as the rest of the team stood as he entered.

  “We don’t stand for Mills, guys. It’s Mills. You don’t even have official ranks,” Mud said, shaking his head.

  “You stand for me,” Mills said, waving his hands for them to sit back down, “because I’m your boss.”

  “Or something.”

  “Can we,” Steelbox asked, rolling his eyes, “get on with it?”

  “Of course,” Mills said, sitting down in a chair himself. “I’ll cut the preamble. Over the last few months we’ve had occasional issues with long-range communications. Blackouts lasting from a few minutes to a few hours, along various degrees of space at a time.”

  “Someone is managing to block Gov communications an entire degree worth of space at once?” Bee asked, leaning forward, elbows on knees.

  “Seems like it,” Mills said, nodding. “Which, of course, makes no sense. That is, plainly put, not a thing that can be done. There have been no traces left, no markers, no one claiming credit, nothing to show anything other than utter failure along a cone of space each time.”

  “All right,” Mud said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs out, “so how’re they doing it?”

  “No, we really have no idea. Not a single solitary clue. Except one. During this blackout, the one that hit you guys, we might have gotten our first break. We had a small fighter array on maneuvers in the same open degree. Like you—us, everyone affected—they lost all long-range communications. But they tried something no one else seems to have tried yet.”

  “Got out and pushed?” Steelbox asked.

  “Pushed...the transmission beam itself?” Chellox replied.

  “No one else would try it, right?”

  “They didn’t push,” Mills said, refusing to rise to the attempt to lighten the mood, “they supermagnetized their hull in an effort to focus all communications through one unit, using their engine as a starter and the magnetics as—”

  “Fighters aren’t ferrous hulled, you can’t magnetize one,” Olivet said, shaking his head.

  “Bee?” Mills asked, waiting.

  “You could if you played with the gravity shield and—” Bee cut herself off, a look of worry playing across her face quickly. “How is she?” she asked quickly.

  “Bushfield’s fine. Probably wishing she never listened to your ranting about strange fixes for problems that don’t exist, but she’s fine.”

  “So what happened?” Mud asked. He, too, was concerned about Bushfield, but they needed to work out the problem, and if Mills said she was fine, he had no reason to lie.

  “Her ship tore itself apart. She was prepped for hard vacuum so she’s fine, but it tore itself apart right under her. Like someone just grabbed it and pulled.”

  Mud sat up straight and felt his mouth open and close involuntarily a few times. “Say that again?” Mud stood, hands on the back of his chair, leaning hard on it. His team watched him, concerned.

  “Her ship tore itself apart. Just pulled apart like taffy,” Mills said.

  “Do you still have my old ship docked somewhere on this huge whale?” Mud asked.

  “The T194? It’s in a storage dock, but it should be untouched, sure. Why?”

  “I’ll be back. Guys, tell Mills about what just happened with our incoming cargo, and I’ll be back. If I’m right...I’m right, I know it.” Mud left the room without waiting to hear any complaints.

  Mills watched him go and shrugged, turning back to the rest of the group. “So, what happened and how many people are pissed?”

  “Well, we owe someone a small cruiser,” Bee said, still watching the door Mud had left by. “Had to steal it, then Mud made us crash. But we got the cargo.”

  “Splitting the team, getting us captured, stealing civilian vessels, and basically bungling through it,” Steelbox said, with a shake of the head. “But hey, we got the cargo.”

  “Details go in the full report,” Mills said. He shook off his annoyance at the team. They were still learning, and even so they’d pulled off a few missions no one else would have considered sane. He felt sure he could paper over any issues with this last excursion. “But the cargo is fine, you’re sure?”

  “What is it?” Chellox pointed at the table where the canister lay, safe and shiny.

  “A viable sample of an engineered disease the likes of which none of us want to think about.”

  “And you let us just carry it home?” Steelbox asked, angrily.

  “You knew to not open it,” Mills said.

  “What if the canister got damaged in transport, or during retrieval?” Bee felt her own anger rise to match Steelbox’s for a change.

  “Then the three sub-canisters would have contained it. And if the fourth had been so much as dented, it would have immolated everything inside. Which we hoped wouldn’t happen, and didn’t, it seems. So thanks.”

  “So now you will save this to wage your wars?” Chellox asked.

  “No, they will study it long enough to find a way to kill it, and then do so,” Olivet said softly.

  “Is that a premonition?” Mills asked him.

  “No, just a hope.”

  “Well, it’s still dead on,” Mills said, leaning back in his chair. Silence fell over the group. Mills told himself that his actions were one hundred percent correct, but a nagging doubt crept in. Mistrust, not giving full information to your teams, had proved to be a mistake in the past. He’d counted himself as better than that—right until he dived into the same issue. Why hadn’t he just told them? He ran the chain back through his mind. Fears that they would be overly cautious and not get the job done, that they were too new.

  Which was, he felt, also ridiculous; he used the team to do all sorts of things no new team should cope with. He couldn’t have it both ways, bu
t there he sat, trying to anyway. Deciding to not apologize but to do better in the future, Mills watched the team, trying to not stare but still get a read of the room. To see if this would cause problems down the road when they explained it all to Mud.

  Shaking his head, remaining silent, Mills swallowed his concerns as best he could and tried to focus on the new problem at hand. This new Insertion Team still faced pressure from above Mills’ pay grade. Higher-ups wanted them but didn’t like the relative autonomy they worked under—only one member technically even holding rank—and they certainly hated the cost.

  They got the job done, but that couldn’t be enough. Not for the high brass. Results alone, without low cost and easily explainable risks, worried the top end of the chain of command. Mills fought for them because he believed in them, never mind that his own career now lay tied into theirs.

  He looked around the room, sparse and simple, just a bunch of chairs in a large room, empty except for a table against one wall and a whiteboard stuck up next to a series of monitors opposite the entrance. They didn’t rate a better operations center, and honestly had never even asked for one.

  The team, for their part, sat waiting. Until Mud came back, none of them felt they could do anything useful. They couldn’t push back against Mills—not as hard as any of them wanted, not without their leader. They all knew it, without having to check with one another. They also couldn’t start briefing on the new matter, no more than had been said, until they knew why Mud had run off. So they sat at ease, as they did on long trips, only resisting the urge to find a mindless game to play. That didn’t feel appropriate given the tense air in the room, with Mills still there.

  So everyone in the room felt easier when Mud came back in, carrying a sealed bag. He walked over to the table across the room and tore the bag open. “Guys, Mills, come see this,” he said.