by S. H. Jucha
Both Tatia and Tomas felt as if they’d reached a delicate tipping point, and Tomas was hoping that whatever Tatia was about to suggest would start the rescue mission off on the right foot.
This time, the comm was filled with Tatia’s hearty laughter, as only the sound could erupt from a New Terran’s heavy body.
Haraken had three of the lethal warships, which possessed a beam lance many times more powerful than a fighter’s, could carry four travelers, and was equipped with both starship and grav engines. The design was a marvel of Haraken engineering.
There was a long pause, while Tatia and Tomas waited.
When Alex dropped off the comm, Tomas sent,
* * *
After receiving Asu’s message, Alex decided to wait until he reached home before he broke the news to Renée, but, engrossed in completing a launch list necessary to ship onboard before getting underway, he’d failed to consider the fact that the emergency comm had spread across the entire Hellébore system. Every Haraken knew about the expedition’s dire circumstances within a quarter-hour of the message hitting the farthest stations and mining posts. If any poor individuals were asleep, someone woke them to share the news.
Julien set the personal transport down beside Alex’s house. In the fading evening’s light, Alex could make out stacks of baggage on the broad porch and Renée perched on one of the larger bundles.
Without a preamble, Renée launched into a summary of her efforts. “I heard the news from Z. I’ve contacted your parents, and they’ll watch Julien and Cordelia’s young ones while we’re away. Captain Lumley commed me that he will be aboard the Rêveur soon and make preparations for getting underway, including readying the owner’s suite. His work is cut out for him since we haven’t used the liner in over half a year. Our belongings are packed, and we’re waiting for the arrival of one of the liner’s travelers for transport to the Rêveur.”
Alex listened to Renée reel off her accomplishments in a monotone fashion, and his heart lurched in sympathy for the pain she was enduring, knowing her son was in mortal danger. He strode up to her and swept his love into his arms, and Renée broke into tears, sobbing into Alex’s shoulder.
“I want our son back,” Renée said, her voice muffled by Alex’s jacket.
“We’ll do whatever is necessary to get him back safely, my love,” Alex replied, holding her tightly.
“But what if he’s already —”
“Don’t say it, and don’t think it, Renée,” Alex said, cutting her off. “We have to be patient and hope for the best. We’ll know more once we reach Celus-5.” Alex heard his own words, and they failed to convince him. Then again, the words weren’t meant for him.
As quickly as Renée started crying, she stopped. She snuffled a couple of times, and then announced, “Our ride is here.”
Alex set Renée down and glanced over his shoulder at the traveler landing 60 meters from the house, its grav drive enabling a noiseless approach. Julien was marching toward the shuttle, even as the hatch opened. The first boots on the ground were three crew members, who hustled over to the porch, nodded a greeting to Alex and Renée, and grabbed some of the couple’s belongings.
“Come, my love, time’s a wasting,” Renée announced, striding behind the first crew member, who was loaded down with several carryalls and making for the waiting shuttle.
Alex, still unsettled by his exchange with Renée, grabbed two large packs and followed in his partner’s wake. At the hatch, he threw the packs up to waiting hands and then clambered aboard.
Alex expected to find the traveler nearly empty. Instead, it was packed with bodies and bags, and Alex was forced to weave his way through the crowded aisle to reach the front of the main cabin. Ahead of him, he could see hands touching Renée in sympathy as she made her way forward.
As the emergency message spread across Haraken, Alex received comm after comm from close friends, but he’d ignored them. If they weren’t calls of sympathy, which he didn’t have time or the desire to entertain, then they would be requests to accompany him, and he knew he would find it difficult to refuse their offers. In his own incommunicative way, Alex tried to be faithful to his statement to Tomas that he would limit the number of civilians who would accompany him. More important, he didn’t wan
t his friends exposed to dangerous circumstances.
As Alex stepped past crew members, who were trying to find places for their baggage, he ran his implant’s locator app to see who was aboard. Crew were present, which he expected, but there were many others — human civilians.
Alex eased around some crates in the aisle. Mickey, Claude, Edmas, and Jodlyne sat in double pairs of facing seats. A small nanites-active pedestal was anchored to the deck between them, and a miniature holo-vid, a new Haraken invention, sat on the pedestal, displaying an intricate schematic.
The three men were engrossed in a discussion, with Jodlyne enjoying the fact that she was sitting next to Edmas. The two orphans had found each other in the ventilation tunnels of a Sol orbital station when they were young teenagers. It had taken Edmas longer than Jodlyne to realize that his feelings for her ran much deeper than that of a friend and fellow tunnel rat.
Claude, Z’s primary avatar fabrication technician, looked up when Alex paused beside them. “We’ve been working on some exciting new avatar developments with Z,” Claude said. “But you’re taking our primary advisor and most of our intended clients with you. So we’re following them out to Celus-5 and back in order not to lose R&D time.”
“And what rescue mission can’t use the best engineering team the planet has?” Mickey threw in.
Edmas, a graduate engineering student, nodded in agreement, and Jodlyne added an innocent and charming smile.
Alex’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he stared at each man without saying a word before he moved on. Julien and Cordelia sat together, and she stood up and gave Alex a warm hug when he reached their seats.
Miranda and Z sat opposite the other two SADEs, and Miranda took a turn hugging Alex. However, she added just a hint of hip movement, which caused Alex to pull his head back and eye her.
“It’s always best to distract a man from focusing too long and too hard on any one subject, dear,” Miranda said, touching Alex’s cheek and sitting down beside Z. The couple immediately returned to their conversation.
Alex found Emile Billings and Pia Sabine sitting together.
“The expedition might need an additional medical technician, especially with aliens firing slug-type weapons at our people,” Pia stated firmly.
Alex’s eyebrows rose in question. Pia knew that the Sojourn was well prepared for medical emergencies.
“Well, if truth be told,” Pia added, “I’m not letting Mickey jaunt off to an alien world without me. I’m here to ensure that my partner does nothing foolish.”
“As for me,” Billings quickly added, “I’m in the middle of an exciting breakthrough. The SADEs and engineers, who are assisting me, will be aboard the Rêveur, and I’m anxious to continue my work. Most of these crates are from my lab. The rest is on another shuttle.”
“And what does your wife say about you joining a rescue mission?” Alex asked.
Billings ducked his head and offered Alex a grin of embarrassment. “Janine said I’m to keep my butt safely aboard the Rêveur, and that if I get shot by an alien, she promises to finish the job if I’m not dead.”
Alex had to smile at that one, surprised that he could do so after hearing the news of his son’s capture. Keep your thoughts positive, Alex, he told himself mentally, just like you told Renée.
Renée was seated across from the twins, Étienne and Alain de Long, co-directors of the Haraken Security Directorate, initially responsible for the safety of the president and Assembly but, years later, expanding to become the planet’s security force.
“And does the president know that you two have abandoned your duties to join this mission?” Alex asked.
“The Security Directorate is in good hands,” Alain replied. “We’ve hired and trained superb subordinates. It’s a lesson we learned from a good friend.”
“And, as for the president, he’s aware that we are, as you once put it so succinctly, Ser, on vacation,” Étienne added with a grin.
“It occurred to us that a trip to an exotic new planet might make the perfect holiday trip,” Alain deadpanned.
“Exactly,” Étienne chimed in, “and since the Rêveur was headed in that direction, we asked Ser de Guirnon for a ride.”
“She was charmingly accommodating,” Alain said.
“We would have asked you, Alex,” Étienne said, and the humor went out of his eyes, “but you appeared to be distracted.”
“And you know how dangerous it is to be distracted on a critical mission,” Alain added, and he too was staring at Alex with a stern look.
“Point taken, Sers” Alex acknowledged. He moved on to the pilot’s cabin, missing Renée lean across the opening to place her hands on a knee of each twin. She smiled, and Étienne and Alain nodded their heads in acceptance.
Commanders Cohen and Valenko sat in the pilot and copilot seats. Alex knew about Franz, but Svetlana was unexpected.
“Commanders,” Alex said, by way of greeting the pair.
“I believe it’s allowed to hug a civilian,” Svetlana said, rising to greet Alex. “My sympathies, Ser,” she whispered in Alex’s ear. “We will get them back safely or the aliens will regret it.”
“They’ve made a mistake, Svetlana,” Alex said, as she returned to her seat. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the entire species has to pay the price.”
“Understood, Ser, but if you wish revenge, I’d be happy to deliver the punishment.”
“You’ll be the first to know, Commander,” Alex promised. That seemed to mollify Svetlana, who donned her helmet. Alex looked at Franz, who was wearing a slightly stricken face.
Franz sent back. The furrow in his brow never disappeared, as he pulled his helmet on and prepared for liftoff.
“Thank you, Tatia,” Alex whispered softly, as he returned to the main cabin. On this mission, his weapons master, Tatia, would be staying home. The discovery of more aliens had unsettled the population from the president down to the newest immigrant, and Admiral Tachenko would be ensuring the system was prepared to defend itself if there were more than just slug-throwing aliens in the Celus system. But Tatia was still taking care of him, having sent two of her best fighter commanders with him. Between Franz’s cool, calculating style and Svetlana’s out-of-the-box tactics, the rescue mission was well prepared, if force was required.
-9-
Alex and Reiko
Statements of condolences and well wishes for a safe return originated from Haraken and throughout the Hellébore system. Millions of messages poured into the Rêveur’s controller from those planetside and from hundreds of thousands of captains, officers, pilots, station personnel, and crew across the system, as the liner sailed out of the system.
First Julien and then Cordelia, Z, and Miranda, sought to take the comm load from the ship’s struggling controller. When even they were overwhelmed, Winston, Esther, Hector, and Didier picked up the slack.
Preparations to launch the Rêveur had proceeded at a phenomenal pace. The ship’s minimal crew merely stood back and watched as Julien, Cordelia, Z, and Miranda directed the Confederation SADEs in the offloading of travelers and the transporting of baggage and crates to their destinations.
Mickey, Claude, Edmas, and Emile wa
ited for their deliveries in the Rêveur’s engineering suite, which, in its last iteration, had been Billings’ biochemistry lab. It would become a lab once again, but of a different sort. The space would be shared between Emile’s project and the engineering tests of Claude and Mickey. Six holo-vid projectors were unpacked and linked into the ship’s controller.
The massive amount of data brought by the engineers and the biochemist was stored on portable crystals and was carefully handed over to SADEs to install under the suite’s control panels along with a secondary controller, which was designed to aid their research and prevent pulling on the ship’s controller. As the secondary controller came online and began a data integrity check, Mickey breathed a sigh of relief.
“Why were you so worried, Mickey?” Edmas asked. “If there were any problems with this controller, I’m sure Captain Lumley would have lent us access to the ship’s controller.”
“My young friend,” Mickey said, clapping an enormous hand on Edmas’ shoulder, “we’re sailing with Alex Racine. The last thing you want to do is interfere with his ability to call on this ship for everything it’s got when he needs it.”
Edmas blinked in confusion and glanced toward Jodlyne, who was directing SADEs in unpacking, then storing the empty crates. “But we’re just along for the ride, Mickey, aren’t we? It’s not like there’s any expectation of trouble while we sit in orbit.”
Mickey and Claude laughed so long and hard that Edmas blushed in embarrassment.
Claude was the first to recover and apologize to Edmas. “Ser, that man is the universe’s greatest lightning rod for the unfortunate and lost. If I had to guess, I’d say the trouble on Celus-5 is greater than a pinned traveler and some captured Harakens.”
“You can bet on that,” Mickey added. He was a major participant in Alex’s card games, of which the favorite one for New Terrans was poker.
Jodlyne paused in her efforts and stepped over to join the discussion. She left a female SADE, who had bright blue skin and long, orange hair gathered in a top knot, holding a 110-kilo crate in the air and waiting for further directions.
