“You honestly didn’t call them?” she questioned.
“How many times do I have to say it? No. The fake cops in Loftar 46? My guess is those were our guys, too.”
“But you said—”
“It’s a big fucking corporation. Left hand, right hand. I guess I just became the hand that offended, and had to be cut off.” Axel’s weak smile didn’t reach his eyes.
It’s his father’s corporation, she remembered. How must that feel?
“Damn, dude,” Tan said, shaking his head. “Good thing you had a getaway ship ready to go.”
The Shady Lady reared to the vertical, cutting short the conversation. They blasted off. Meg watched the spaceport shrink on her personal screen. Vehicles were converging on their parking space by land and sea. The launch blast forced them all to halt. She wondered if the sole surviving thug had managed to get the speedboat away in time to avoid being vaporized.
Gravity vanished. Freefall buoyed her against her straps. She waited for Colm to switch the AG on. With near-military specs, the Shady Lady had to have decent artificial gravity, despite its small size.
*
IN THE COCKPIT, COLM watched the limb of Gna come into view. Just a dark curve against the darkness of space. The cluster of lights around the Regnarosa Sea looked so tiny.
One of Gna’s great advantages was that you could go FTL almost immediately. Because the rogue planet was not near anything large, its zero-gravity point was close by. The zero-gravity point was not a specific location in space; it was more of a box to be ticked. Are you outside the gravity well of any large celestial body, such as a star or a gas giant? Yes? Then you’re good to go FTL without breaking your delta-V budget.
The muffled whine of the drive continued, pushing the Shady Lady further away from Gna. “I estimate fifteen minutes to zero-gravity field entry,” Colm told the others over the radio, and then his senses lit up. Targeting lasers skidded over his body, fastened on his sides, uncomfortably hot.
“This is the Days of Glory,” a crisp voice said. “Shady Lady, you are instructed to stabilize your orbit and await interception.”
Colm knew the Days of Glory. A Fleet frigate, it had returned to Gna after the fall of the Gliese system. It was currently assigned to orbital sentry duty. But because there was no role for orbital sentries in the war against the Ghosts, it functioned as an extension of the Gna Police Department.
“Shady Lady, do you read me?”
The guy on the radio was no fake cop. He was the real thing. With high-powered railguns.
Colm licked his lips. “This is the Shady Lady. I read you, Days of Glory. Please hold.” He switched to the internal channel. “Axel?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I right in thinking this ship is completely unarmed?”
“Well,” Axel said. “Technically, yeah.”
“Technically?”
“Check out the FTL drone launcher.”
Colm had noted the drone launch system, but skimmed over its specs. Now he dived into the operating parameters, while the Days of Glory comms officer grew irate.
“Shady Lady, you left three dead bodies on the launch pad. Wanna explain that?”
A standard drone launch system was a mini linear accelerator, for tossing drones into the zero-gravity field. This one was ... not so mini. Best must have paid for an illegal custom install.
“Have you identified the bodies?” Colm said, stalling for time.
“You barbecued them, asshole. Trying to destroy the evidence?”
That evidence might have saved them. Too late now. Colm rummaged in the drone magazine. Surprise, surprise. A couple of genuine drones ... and five heat-seeking explosive rounds. “Axel, I apologize sincerely.”
Best’s pained chuckle came over the internal comms. “For what? Wrecking my life? I’ll take full credit for that myself.”
“Nope. For forgetting you used to be in the Marines.” Colm dumped all the explosive rounds into the specially extended launch cradle.
“Thinking about shooting at somebody?” Best said.
“Shady Lady, we’re done dicking around here,” the Days of Glory said. “Quit burning and stabilize your orbit immediately, or we will disable your drive.”
Colm realized he was thinking about shooting at a Fleet warship. He froze up. He couldn’t do that. It was out of the question.
“Because if you are,” Best said, “you might want to also check out the anti-radar chaff system.”
“I don’t have to tell you,” the Days of Glory went on, “given the size of your ship, it’ll be extremely tricky to put a maser pulse through your drive cleanly. It might hit something else.” The targeting laser crawled over the Lady’s fuselage. “Such as your reactor.”
Colm could now see the Days of Glory with the ship’s composite eyes. The much larger, arrow-head shaped ship was orbiting Gna at a lower altitude, rapidly climbing to intersect the Shady Lady’s spiraling path away from the planet. It was going to reach him before he reached the zero-gravity point. And its kinetic rounds, of course, would travel even faster.
“Ask yourself,” the Days of Glory drawled, “whatever you’re running for, is it worth dying for?”
“Yeah,” Colm said. “It is. But I won’t be the one dying.”
He triggered the anti-radar chaff system.
Millions of pieces of reflective foil spurted from receptacles along the Lady’s streamlined fuselage. They would turn the Days of Glory’s radar image of the Lady into a cloud, impossible to target with pinpoint accuracy. The hot spots of targeting lasers vanished off his hull.
“Think you’re clever, asshole?” the Days of Glory snarled.
“No,” Colm said. “My mate Axel is the clever one. He knew before I did that the Fleet was going to do fuck-all to save humanity. It’s not your fault. You’re the wrong tool for the job. Go back and investigate those barbecued corpses. They had Best Industries logos on their chimp suits.”
“You’re dead in three, two ...”
Heart breaking, eyes blurring, Colm fired all five of the explosive rounds at the Days of Glory. He hoped the frigate’s point defenses would intercept them before they found their target. He couldn’t count on it. He didn’t wait to find out. He cut the throttle and re-routed the reactor’s entire electrical output to the zero-gravity field generator.
The lights momentarily dimmed, then came back on at full strength.
Colm’s vision filled with blinding snow. A roar of white noise deafened him.
The Shady Lady was now in the zero-gravity field, travelling at a significant multiple of light speed.
Hastily, he cut all exterior sensor feedback. Thank Christ his implant’s mute function worked now. He’d not have survived this otherwise.
It was even odds whether he’d survive it, regardless.
He returned slowly to his own body. Sweat had pooled inside his leathers. He jerked the seals down to his waist and rose from his couch, floating.
Meg met him at the door of the cockpit. “Hey, Collie Mack. When are we going to get some AG in here?”
“Think I’d better keep it off for a while. Save power.”
“Are you OK?”
He edged past her. “Sorry I bit your head off for being trigger-happy.”
“Huh?”
“Pot, kettle.”
The other two were floating in the cabin. Best said, “Did you hit anything?”
“I fired on a ship of the line. Dunno if I hit it.”
Tan went pale. “Guess we’re not going back to Gna.”
Meg, behind Colm, said, “We couldn’t have gone back, anyway. Not after I shot those guys.”
Colm glanced back at her. Her hair had come loose from its ponytail and floated around her head in a black halo. It was irrational, but he momentarily hated her for her unwavering supportiveness.
Axel rolled his shoulders. “So. Juradis,” he muttered.
Colm looked around at the other two, knowing he might have just ki
lled them. As if it wasn’t enough that Zhanna and Fitch were dead because of him. “Bad news: we still have a problem.”
“You don’t say,” Tan muttered.
“The life-support supplies on board are sufficient for one adult, for five years. But we’re not talking about one adult anymore. We’re talking about four.”
“Uh oh,” Meg said.
Best said dully, “We’ll be fine. The Lady can do the journey in sixteen months.” He had said 18 months before.
“On fifteen months of supplies?” Meg said.
Colm reached down deep for his heartiest first lieutenant’s voice. “It’s still doable. We conserve power. Reduce rations to 1700, 1800 calories a day. If worse comes to worst, we eat algae. ” He believed what he was saying. Sort of.
CHAPTER 29
“SO,” COLM SAID, SIXTEEN months later, “we’re going to make a pit stop.”
Meg and Tan greeted this with silence, chewing their lunch. 200 grams of algae each, reconstituted into a dripping, greyish-pink mass. This stuff was un-ruinable, terminally unpalatable: the ship’s biscuit of the space age. The Shady Lady had been provisioned with 50 freezedried kilograms of it, for emergency situations like the one they were in now. It grew in processed wastewater—a.k.a. sewage—and provided a spectrum of nutrients along with calories. Two cheers for Fleet nutritionists. In the Navy, they had called this stuff Pink Shit, for what it tasted like as well as where it came from.
Colm shovelled another spoonful into his mouth. “Opinions? Feedback? Jokes? Insults? Ruthless criticism of my abilities and character?”
Tan shrugged. “Sounds like a plan.”
Meg said, “We’re not going to make it otherwise. So, OK. Pit stop it is.”
Her tone held no trace of blame. But Colm knew their plight was all his fault. He glumly reviewed his mistakes as he chewed his algae. They were sitting at the table in the main cabin, its glass surface etched with a chess board and a Snakes & Ladders board—each scratch the work of several days, like graffiti carved by hand in the wall of a prison cell. The air was hot and stale. A single working LED at the apex of the ceiling dulled the unappetizing color of the Pink Shit.
The big 3D screen at the front of the cabin displayed empty space, 600 lightyears from Earth.
On one side of the screen glowed the red-tinted fireball of Betelgeuse, still 60 AUs away, but far brighter than Sol at the same distance.
Juradis?
Nowhere to be seen.
The problem was that Colm had given in on the artificial gravity, when he should have known better. And the showers.
The problem was that his delta-V calculations had left zero margin for error in the first place.
The problem was that Betelgeuse was a red giant. Its surviving planetoids orbited up to 60 AUs out, and Colm was fucked if he knew why sentient beings chose to live here ... but even that wasn’t the real problem.
A wall of gas and dust—a shock front from Betelgeuse’s initial expansion—lay between the red giant and Earth. There was nothing like that in Sol’s neighborhood. A milligram of dust per cubic centimeter, all of it moving in the same direction ... away from Betelgeuse.
When Colm calculated their flight plan, he’d used the default value of one nanogram of dust per cubic centimeter, which was what you got in Sol’s neighborhood. The zero-gravity field converted mass into energy: 1ng/cm3 = 10KW added to the energy of the field. So far, so good. More dust: less power gobbled by the field generator.
But then there was inertia.
In Sol’s neighborhood, cosmic dust wandered around on a random distribution curve—some coming in your direction, some moving away. It all cancelled out to a net impact of nothing on your FTL speed. The Betelgeuse shock front was a different story. The momentum of all that dust had rung the ship like a bell. Colm relived the panic of that moment. Everyone freaking out. Esthesia telling him all’s well, all’s well ... True, as far as that went. Cocooned within the zero-gravity field, the ship had been fine. They’d gone back to their routine, a bit spooked, but blissfully unaware that the shock front had imparted enough inertia to the Shady Lady to slow it down.
Colm had finally worked it out two days ago, when they popped out of the zero-gravity field into Einsteinian space-time, and Juradis wasn’t there.
Was, in fact, 2 AUs away.
Too far to get there coasting, unless they wanted to arrive as corpses in a couple of years’ time. They couldn’t enter the zero-gravity field again this close to Betelgeuse. They needed to burn STL, and because Colm had cut it so goddamn fine, they hadn’t enough reaction mass left.
A whole series of stupid, unforgivable errors. Blame it on the computer? Yeah, but a computer is only as good as the guy who programs it. Colm blamed himself, and he knew the others did, too, even if they weren’t saying so.
Tan had mused out loud about broadcasting a Mayday, hoping against hope the sentrienza would respond.
Colm had nixed that. If they broadcast their identities, Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth would find out they were here. Would have time to cover his tracks. To hide.
And there was one other way to reach Juradis.
Make a pit stop.
He covertly studied Meg and Tan. After a year and four months in the zero-gravity field, they looked like pirates. So did he, of course. They cut each other’s hair, inexpertly. The men had given up shaving to save water. They wore filthy tank tops and shorts, because doing laundry was also a waste of water. They smelled extremely pungent, for the same reason.
He reminded himself that the three of them were in relatively good shape. None of them had developed any psychological problems, apart from boredom.
Displaying the mundane telepathy of crewmates with a limited set of concerns, Tan said, “Have you told Axel about the pit stop?”
“No,” Colm said. “I only just told you.”
“Better tell him.”
Both men looked at Meg, who rolled her eyes. “Why is this my job?” She scraped her spoon around her bowl, swallowed the last lumps of Pink Shit, and got up.
She went aft and banged on the door of the men’s cabin. Axel came out. His hair hung well past his shoulders. His baggy t-shirt and sweats concealed how gaunt he’d got. Ever since their dietary options narrowed to Pink Shit with blueberry flavoring or Pink Shit with chili flavoring, he hadn’t been eating enough. That, however, was not why he spent so much time lying in bed and staring at the wall. The causation went the other way, Colm thought.
Axel went to the head. In the quiet, they heard him pissing. He ran the bathroom tap—forgetting, or defying, the ban on non-essential water use—then came back, face and hair wet, and plopped down at the table. “Yowza! Don’t tell me ... Pink Shit for breakfast?”
“This is lunch,” Meg said with a grin.
“Same difference. Where’s mine?”
Colm relaxed. Axel was back on form. This was the guy he’d increasingly come to lean on—not the guy who stayed in bed for days on end.
While Axel fixed himself a bowl of Pink Shit, Colm balanced on the back legs of his chair, one foot hooked under the table, and explained about the pit stop. “We need reaction mass. The only way to get it is to mine it for ourselves. We’ll have to DIY the mining gear ...”
“OK. I think I can do that,” Axel said, and asked the question that neither of the others had. “Where’ll we stop?”
Colm deliberately fell over backwards, landing on his hands. He kicked his feet over, sprang into a heroic pose, and pointed at the screen. “Ta-dah!” The underwhelming vista of empty space didn’t change. Everyone laughed. “Whoops, that didn’t work ...”
He was just kidding around, of course. With the Corvette’s electronic eyes, he could see dozens of icy rocks and rocky iceballs orbiting the still-distant red giant. The best candidates were those orbiting in the same plane as the Lady. “Take your pick.” He threw the scan results up on the screen.
Meg and Tan perked up at the sight of something, anything, that wasn’t
an empty void. A lively argument ensued as everyone picked their favorite iceball. Axel suggested they draw cards to choose the winner. Colm got his pack of cards out. They were dog-eared and fuzzy from the many hours he’d spent practicing his tricks, for want of any better way to pass the time.
Meg’s iceball won the draw. Colm went to the cockpit and programmed in a course which would get them there in a few hours.
He muted the esthesia hunger from the Shady Lady’s tanks, for the seventeenth time today.
Then he checked the radio.
Ever since they emerged from the zero-gravity field, they’d been eagerly scanning the radio waves for news from home. No human ship could have got here faster than the Shady Lady, but FTL comms drones could have. They might be able to learn what had been happening in the first months after the Shady Lady’s departure.
Juradis, Noom, and Brajoltan, the Big 3 inhabited worlds around Betelgeuse, broadcast a 24/7 slurry of alien transmissions. The Shady Lady’s computer had been searching this haystack around the clock for anything it could make sense of, be it words or images.
Colm squeezed his eyes shut as he clicked on the scan results. Then opened them.
He sagged.
Just a blizzard of alien hay.
Few human beings had ever come ths far from Earth. Colm had wanted to know what it would feel like.
Turned out it felt like missing home.
CHAPTER 30
MEG PUT ON HER leathers for the first time in sixteen months. “Oh jeez,” she cried, theatrically waving away the stink that arose from the long-unworn garment.
She looked around at the walls of her cabin and sighed. She was talking to herself. It often felt that way, even when the others could hear her.
There were two cabins. The men shared the larger one. They had a running joke about how lucky Meg was to have her own cabin, but she didn’t feel lucky. She felt lonely. She lay awake nights, even after doing her best to exhaust herself on the treadmill and weight-training machines, wondering if Axel would sneak in and crawl into her bunk with her. Sometimes, when he did, she’d kick him right back out again. But that just made her feel even lonelier.
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 18
