by Dan Worth
He sat for a while pondering his predicament when he felt the ship begin to move again. They were descending now. The Churchill must be moving out of the docking bay and back out into space. After a few moments heard the sounds of the ship alter as she jumped.
There was a chime from the console. Curious, Isaacs peered at the paper thin screen and noticed a blinking icon indicating that a message was waiting for him. He prodded the icon to activate it. The message was a recording made in another compartment of the vessel by the looks of things. The face of Steelscale stared back at him. As the K’Soth began to speak the console translated his words on the fly.
‘Captain Isaacs,’ he began. ‘I apologise that I am unable to thank you in person, however time is of the essence. We will be leaving the ship soon and Admiral Chen assures me that you are currently recovering from the exertions of our flight.’
So they had been monitoring him, thought Isaacs, his suspicions confirmed.
‘To this end I wish to use this message to express my gratitude at your bravery and piloting skills. You undoubtedly saved the lives of myself and my remaining clan members and you have helped all civilised races everywhere in ways you cannot begin to appreciate and which, alas, I am unable to fully explain to you. I wish you luck in your future ventures. Farewell, Captain.’ The message ended. The face of Steelscale was left frozen on the last frame.
So that’s what the rendezvous had been about, Isaacs mused. The K’Soth and their mysterious cargo had been offloaded onto one of the Arkaris’ deadliest vessels for transport to who knew where, no doubt somewhere heavily defended within the sphere of systems that they inhabited. But if the Arkari had decided that such a mission required such a degree of protection, just who or what the hell where they worried about? More to the point, what in god’s name was so important about the dead body Steelscale was in possession of?
God damn it, he hated a mystery. He felt that he was just scratching the surface of something major. The hints and warnings that Steelscale had given him, the behaviour of the crew of the Churchill and the appearance of the Arkari ship, all of them pointed towards something strange going on, but what?
There were rumoured to be plenty of things out there in the vastness of the unknown that neither humans, Arkari or anyone else had any knowledge or comprehension of. He’d heard some pretty wild tales over the years, most of them no doubt embellished in the telling or even completely made up, from those who’d dared to venture out into the unknown: Stories of ancient civilisations of unfathomable strangeness, dead planets filled with unbelievable technology, nightmare creatures that sucked the energy from black holes or wraiths that flitted between the clouds of nebulae. Most of the stories were about as credible as the ones about mermaids and sea monsters from the days of sailing ships on Earth. Maybe this was one of them, but maybe this one was actually real for a change. Whatever it was, if even the Arkari with their advanced technology and long space faring history were scared by it, then it had to be important. He’d seen one or two things in his time that fitted that description...
Isaacs was jolted from his musings by a chiming from the door. He got up and walked across to it, pressing the lock panel at the right hand side to open it. A junior officer was standing outside. She smiled brightly at him.
‘Captain Isaacs? The Admiral ordered me to escort you to her office, if you’d care to follow me.’
The junior officer, whose name-tag read ‘Zwick’, lead Isaacs through the labyrinthine gangways and lifts of the Churchill’s interior until they arrived at Admiral Chen’s office. Zwick opened the door and motioned him inside.
Chen was sitting at a large wooden desk working from the inbuilt console and a sheaf of papers. The desk was unadorned save for a small, framed photograph of a dark haired man in a naval uniform with Commander’s pips which stood next to an antique telescope, heavily blackened by carbon scoring. The walls of the room were adorned with the usual Navy crap, he noted. A portrait of the ship’s namesake glowered from one wall, whilst a number of citations with Chen’s name on them formed a row along another. Isaacs stood uneasily for a moment before the Admiral appeared to register his presence.
‘Captain Isaacs, have a seat,’ she indicated towards the small padded chair in front of her desk. ‘I trust you’re feeling better after your rest?’
‘I am, thanks.’
‘Good, good. I think it’s time we discussed your payment, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Well, that’s what got me into this in the first place.’
‘Quite. I believe the agreed sum was two hundred thousand?’ He nodded. ‘Well, in light of the increased danger to yourself that you experienced we’re willing to up your fee to three hundred, and we’ll also see to the repair of your ship.’
Isaacs felt his heart leap. Three hundred thousand!?
‘I, well, that’s very generous Admiral, thank you…’
‘There are a few conditions attached of course,’ she cut in.
‘There are?’
‘Yes. Firstly, you are to tell no-one about what you may have seen and heard during this trip.’
‘You mean all the stuff about mysterious cargoes, unmarked ships and enormous alien vessels that aren’t supposed to exist.’
‘Yes, precisely that.’
‘You know I was hoping on using this story as a way of drumming up drinks and impressing the ladies.’
‘Well, I’m sure with three hundred thousand credits you shouldn’t have too much trouble acquiring either. On the other hand, if you were to go telling people about this little adventure the only way you’d be impressing anyone would be if you bent down to pick the soap up in the cell-block showers.’
‘Ah.’
‘“Ah” indeed Captain. This operation was of the utmost secrecy and if you tell anyone about it at all you’ll be guilty of breaching all sorts of laws, so I’m sure you’ll agree that it is definitely in your interest if you keep quiet about it.’
‘Yes, I see your point.’
‘Very good. Of course we may call on your services in the future. As you can see, we pay well for the services of good pilots who can keep their mouths shut.’
‘I’ll certainly bear it in mind. I have to ask though, why me? How did you know I could be trusted? Why not use your own people?’
Chen gave him a sly look.
‘We have our sources Captain. You don’t think we didn’t do any background checks before you were approached with the job offer? We checked out a few other pilots too, but you were at the top of our list. Your service record had a lot to do with it, but we needed people who could slip in and out of enemy territory unnoticed, and the recent ceasefire precludes us from sending Navy ships across the border. You have a professional reputation as a man who can acquire things.’
‘My service record?’
She produced a slim manila folder from a desk drawer and tossed it onto the desk in front of him. Tentatively he opened the file and was greeted with a photograph of a rather younger, less haggard version of himself, though he still sported the same close cropped brown hair style and what he liked to think was a roguish expression. Below were lists of his postings and citations. The former was much longer than the latter. The file had been stamped with the word ‘discharged’ in red across the front page.
‘You had no right to,’ he muttered.
‘Why not Captain? These records are freely available to me. We had to be sure about you. According to these records you were a damn good pilot, almost a model student in flight school. Your loyalty and integrity were never in question. Your instructors had you marked down for great things and then… what happened to you?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Look in the fucking record if you’re so interested.’
‘I did, and there’s nothing there. Only that your discipline declined, that you ended up being shunted from one squadron to another because you couldn’t follow orders and eventually you went to pieces and quit altogether.’
&
nbsp; ‘Yeah well. I learnt the hard way that my loyalty wasn’t to be repaid,’ he said bitterly. ‘What happened to me was … I can’t talk about it.’
Chen gave him a searching look. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Captain, and for your services. I hope we can work together in the future. The ship will be arriving in Achernar in a few hours. We’ll drop you and your ship off at the naval station around Orinoco. I’ll order the repair crews there to see to your ship.’
Chen stood and shook Isaacs’ hand firmly, noting the unsettled look in his eyes.
After he had gone Chen accessed the ship’s comm. systems.
‘Andrews, get me the Navy Archives,’ she said. ‘Request that they grant me access to all classified records concerning a former pilot by the name of Caleb Isaacs. I’ll provide the necessary authorisation codes.’
Chapter 4
Hadar. The three brilliant stars had formed a single point of light in the southern skies of Earth for millennia before they were noticed, named and catalogued by the ever curious race of bipedal creatures that had sprung from that world, anxious to order the cosmos according to their rules and conventions.
Now the system was dying. The massive binary at the heart of the system had burned intensely for only a brief span of galactic history. The stars’ lives were but an eye-blink in the thirteen and half billion year span of the universe’s existence. Now, their hydrogen fuel almost spent, the two stars would begin to burn heavier elements, swelling outwards into cooler red giants, until the weight of their cores collapsed and the stars would cast off their outer layers in a beautiful but deadly display of radiation and ionised elements. The young planets newly formed around the stars would be extinguished before they had chance to bear life.
A third star orbited the doomed pair at a distance two hundred and ten times the radius of the Earth’s own orbit around the Sun. Hadar B was an impressive star in its own right; a class B star of five solar masses whose brilliance was such that for life to survive on any planet orbiting that inferno, the world’s orbit would need to equal that of Pluto’s around the Sun.
As luck would have it, such a world existed, though its surface conditions and the relative youthfulness of the planet precluded it from being a cradle of life. It was a yellowish, mottled moon of wind-swept volcanic wastes and silicate deserts wrapped in a mantle of noxious gases. It was here that humans had made their home on this southern outpost of the Commonwealth, over five hundred light years from the lush world that had spawned their race. A multitude of sparse towns and mining settlements had scattered themselves across the arid face of the world they had christened Rhyolite. In the space around the moon, a collection of orbital docks and depots described lazy orbits high above the deserts below, while further out, the larger Barstow orbital habitat sat at the Lagrange point between Rhyolite and its vast parent gas-giant, Beatty. Barstow’s great shining wheel turned slowly in the light from the three suns. A steady dribble of junk freighters, mining transports and less reputable craft moved between the various outposts of humanity dotted around Hadar and outwards to surrounding systems as well as back to the heart of the Commonwealth.
Looking back into that vast swathe of stars one could make out the blue-white point of Achernar, the distant shining beacon of Polaris over a thousand light years distant and somewhere in that sea of scattered jewels, the warm yellow star that had nurtured the ancestors of these hardy prospectors and adventurers that existed out here on the fringe.
Around the two central stars there were no such settlements. The barrage of heat and radiation was simply too intense to sustain habitation and the cost of constructing suitable environments capable of withstanding the furnace like-blast was considered to be too excessive on the ten hellish, barely solidified worlds that orbited the binary, their tidally locked faces forever subject to the barrage from the two stars, like mute observers eternally turned towards an onrushing storm. The only human presence here came in the shape of a ring of stations orbiting at the edge of the stars’ magnetospheres. These armoured and heat-shielded power stations bottled the energy flung out by the two suns and turned it into power cells and star-ship reactor fuel. A regular stream of freighters, armadillo-like behind their thick, heat-resistant hulls and energy shielding, ferried the finished goods to the naval station that floated at the Lagrange point between the binary and their companion star, from where they were escorted out of the system by the cruisers stationed there.
The Hadar system was not without its troubles. Far out on the edge of humanity’s domain, pirates, smugglers and other undesirables congregated far from the reach of conventional law enforcement agencies. A recent upsurge in piracy against ships in the system and those surrounding it had led to the Navy strengthening its presence in the system as an act of goodwill to the Commonwealth’s neighbours and out of commercial and strategic concern for the security of the system’s exports. A carrier battle group had been stationed in Hadar for the duration, strengthening the population of the system to the tune of ten thousand bored service personnel.
A worn-looking passenger liner emerged from its jump at the edge of the Barstow traffic control zone. The lozenge shaped craft began braking manoeuvres, slotting itself into the approach patterns of the station as it headed for the docking point on the far side of the central hub. Aboard, the passengers watched the great metal and glass wheel grow ever larger against the cloud streaked, mottled background of the planet. Moving with care and surprising grace, the large vessel arced in a steady curving path around the five kilometre wide wheel before aligning itself with the docking point on the station’s hub, matched the rotation speed of the station and slid itself gently sideways to mate with the broad docking tunnel that extended from the station to the liner’s amidships airlock.
Inside the station, two figures - a red haired human woman and an irate looking Arkari - emerged from a lift at the foot of one of the spokes that joined the ring-shaped habitation section to the hub. They stepped out into the terminal along with a stream of other assorted people from a dozen races.
‘Shit, I fucking hate those things,’ swore Rekkid, his face pale and drawn. ‘Why the bloody hell can’t they just install gravity generators in those docking hubs? Cheap bastards.’
‘Oh where’s your sense of adventure Rekkid?’ teased Katherine. ‘Besides, it wouldn’t be a proper field trip without you swearing and complaining all the time, now would it?’
Rekkid snorted, a peculiar gesture to Human eyes, since his nostrils were located on the sides of his elongated cranium. ‘I suppose I should just glad to be off that infernal ship,’ he replied. ‘Those cabin walls were far too thin and the Xeelin couple in the next cabin seemed to be on their honeymoon.’
‘It is their mating season you know.’
‘Fine, fine, but they seemed intent on letting the whole damn ship know about it. All that bloody singing, at least I think it was singing.’
‘I’m sure it was terribly romantic if you happen to be a Xeelin.’
‘Yeah well, none of my relationships have ever included operatic amphibians.’
‘What about your first wife?’
‘She was just cold blooded. Besides, it seems like you made a friend on the way over here. If you ever fancy being married to a borax miner…’
‘He was very… courteous.’
‘You mean he kept buying you drinks from the overpriced bar. I bet he couldn’t even pronounce xeno-archaeology, never mind spell it.’
‘Who ever said I was interested in his mind?’
Rekkid snorted again with derision.
The two of them showed their documents to a bored looking official manning the security barrier before passing into the main reception area, a circular space around the base of the spoke that opened out onto the street and which thronged with people.
‘Busy little place isn’t it?’ Katherine commented, changing the subject. ‘Lots of Commonwealth military types about.’
‘Appa
rently they’ve had something of a piracy problem in the system recently,’ Rekkid replied. ‘Still, that’s the last thing we need: a station full of drunken grunts to contend with.’
‘Doesn’t look like they’re staying here though,’ said Katherine, noticing the groups of boredom numbed troopers standing amidst their equipment. ‘This lot look like they’re awaiting transfer to somewhere else - the surface of the planet below maybe?’
‘Perhaps. There’s a base in the system too, half way between this star and the binary pair,’ Rekkid replied. ‘Can’t say I envy them if they’re going down to Rhyolite though. It doesn’t exactly look like the most fun place to be in the galaxy.’
As they passed through the terminal towards the bright street outside, Katherine noticed an eager-looking uniformed figure clutching a placard with their names written on it. She tapped Rekkid on the arm and pointed at the fair haired young man.
‘Looks like our ride.’
‘Who has misspelt my name, incidentally.’
‘I thought the way you spelled it using the Roman alphabet was “only a phonetic approximation anyway,” or so you told me.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Rekkid replied, silencing here with a half-joking, dismissive wave of his hand. He stepped up to the nervously grinning placard holder and stuck out his hand. ‘Good morning Lieutenant,’ he said, eyeing the man’s rank insignia. ‘I am Professor Cor, this is Doctor O’Reilly. It seems that you are here to meet us, judging from your little sign.’
