Chronicles of a Space Mercenary

by Ronald Wintrick

  “So what’s the plan, Einstein?” Bren demanded. His insubordination was beginning to tell on my nerves. Though he had spoken to me his helmet cam showed that he was watching the freighters own stern monitors where the Carrier was no longer visible to the naked eye, but was certainly still there.

  “Do you have a plan?” Bren asked when I did not answer.

  “Working on it. Hold tight.”

  “Oh yeah,” Bren said, “like I have a choice.”

  “Well Tanya,” I said, “what do we do? Take him off there and give it up? What other possibility is there? We certainly can’t fight an entire Carrier. That’s not an option.” I was doing a good job of convincing myself of the futility of further resistance, but I wasn’t quite sure I was succeeding with her.

  “We’ll fly it directly at the Kievor Trade Station. At full velocity.” Tanya said without pause, as if it should have been obvious to one and all. There were exclamations of outrage from every audio link as the crew heard what she said. Wordless exclamations of utter horror and surprise that words just simply could not encompass. Yet she was utterly serious.

  “That’s an intriguing idea, Tanya.” I said, liking it more and more as it soaked in. It was totally insane, but I also knew that the Kievors possessed extremely powerful gravity drives and tractor beams the sophistication of which made human technology seem like the stone ages. But were they powerful enough to stop us, and do it without hurting us, and further, would they do it? I supposed if they didn’t want to do it they’d just divert us, or move themselves out of the way, and we’d go on by none the worse for wear.

  “What do you think. Bren?” I asked, truly excited.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Bren screamed at me at once, as if it had been building up, but he had first to truly comprehend it, it having been too fantastical at first for his mind to truly believe. “You aren’t seriously considering this? You expect me to drive this thing at full speed into the Kievor Trade Station and hope they’ll stop us! Hope!”

  “I don’t think he likes the idea.” I said to Tanya. She smiled knowingly.

  “I’ll pilot it in.” She said. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was stunned at this turn of events. I thought it an intriguing idea, but I didn’t think there would be anyone actually willing to do it. I was wrong.

  I did the guppy a couple times as I took my own sweet time processing this new data. Sometimes the brain is an excellent computer, and sometimes it just freezes up and won’t compute a thing. Though I believed in the amazing technological abilities of the Kievors, I sat aghast at the outcome of this debate. Tanya was really going to do it. Of that, there could be no misunderstanding. Still;

  “Tanya, you are out of your mind!” I said, but she was already up and moving.

  “She’s out of her mind but you had been willing to let me do it?” Bren demanded.

  “Just shut up.” I told him.

  “Get us docked again while I suit up.” Tanya ordered me. Then she left without a backward glance.

  What could I do? I got us docked while she suited up and we did the exchange.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I always knew Tanya was insane, but this takes the cake.” Melanie said.

  “The com link is open, you know!” Tanya said from the freighter, which had now reached and passed apogee for rendezvous with the Kievor Trade Station. Even if we began deceleration now we would still bypass them, but there was no deceleration in the plans. Only continued acceleration. Anything else and the Katon Carrier would catch us.

  “Yes I know that!” Melanie said. “I’m not the one who’s insane.”

  “I hope you know what you are doing.” I told Tanya. “In case you do not, I am pulling Last Chance outside the collision parameters.” So saying, I began doing just that, in essence distancing myself from the freighter and Tanya. If Tanya crashed the freighter into the Kievors (an eventuality I did not for a second foresee) the rest of us were going to get a hell of a light show. If the Kievors did stop her, Last Chance would have no problem outrunning the Carrier and then turning around to rendezvous at the Station.

  “Figures.” Tanya sneered. “But don’t worry about me, I once saw the Kievors stop an escaping Hagorian Battleship that had defied their Protected Zone. Stopped it and drug it in like it was a toy. They’ll stop me, all right. I’ve no doubt of it.” Supremely confident.

  “Either that or they won’t.” Bren said, but he said it so quietly that I barely heard him and doubted the com would have relayed it. She didn’t respond as if she had heard.

  The hours crawled by as we waited, anticipating all kinds of gruesome outcomes to our insane plan. An hour short of our rendezvous (and even though the Carrier had a huge propulsion advantage, Bren calculated they would not be able to catch us before we reached the Kievor Trade Station) we shut down our engines and powered down the two ships. If the Kievors simply moved out of the way we would simply continue on, coasting in frictionless space, leaving no fusion trail behind for the Katons to follow, and maybe, hopefully, escape them in the confusion.

  Closer we sped. With bare minutes to spare, Bren sent a distress call ahead via tight beam laser com giving warning to get out of our projected path. We only hoped the Kievors wouldn’t. We sped on.

  The Kievor Trade Station finally appeared on close scan and began blowing up like a balloon. Nothing untoward happened as we raced on. No tractor beam flashed out to enclose the freighter and Tanya in its orange glow. No gravitational field began slowing her deadly plunge. She passed on into the Protected Zone. In normal circumstances the edge of the Protected Zone was still a goodly distance from the Kievor Trade Station yet, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Tanya was speeding at velocities nearing a quarter of the speed of light. The edge of the Protected Zone was therefore no distance at all from the Kievor Trade Station then. Onward she plunged. She was going to die.

  Then everything vanished and I was crushed by the restraining harness of my Captain’s Chair.

  The pressure was intense. More than I had ever experienced. I may have blacked out, I know I swam on the brink. I couldn’t understand what was happening nor understand why it was happening to me. Last Chance had a clear path. There had been nothing in her way. If I had thought for one second we were in any danger we could have entered warp and been gone. I did not understand what was happening.

  Alarms assailed my battered senses as stresses Last Chance hadn’t been designed to withstand tried to rip us apart. She was shaking and vibrating so violently despite the environmental gravity control that I felt sure we were going to disintegrate. I couldn’t imagine what Tanya was going through, or how the Katon freighter was holding up.

  As I gathered my wits I still did not know what was happening to us but it was obvious enough that the Kievors had done something to us. The treatment Tanya was getting for seemingly trying to ram them had been meted to us as well.

  Slowly the pressure began to ease and the black fog I was struggling through lessened. I was able finally to open my eyes and see that we were still alive (it would be a funny hell that left me in command of my ship) and that Last Chance had pulled through again, somehow unscathed, one more time.

  I struggled out of my restraining harness as the last of the pressure vanished, and glancing Bren’s way as I did so. His eyes were glued to the main screen monitor. I followed his look and was shocked by what I saw. We were traveling so rapidly that the stars on our screens were nothing more than horizontal blurs of the varying colors stars came in. A changing mélange of color and light that was more beautiful to look upon than anything I had ever before witnessed. If you could set aside for a moment that I had no idea what was happening to us and where we might be going. What it all meant. The feed from Tanya’s helmet cam was all static.

  It wasn’t exactly accurate that the stars were flowing past us either. They seemed to be curving around us, rather than flowing by in a straight line. They all curved one way, and then impossibly, curved
another. The first thing you learned when you went to space was that all things traveled in a straight line (at least what appeared to be a straight line) except when curving around a gravitational body. We shouldn’t have been curving around like we were. It seemed to defy all the laws.

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Bren asked, never taking his eyes from the monitor.

  “I see it.” I admitted. “How is that even possible?”

  “It’s not. Not by any of the known laws with which I am familiar.” Bren said. I could hear the awe in his voice.

  “Well, Tanya was right. They didn’t just let us crash into them.” I said.

  ‘But what are they doing to us?”

  “We’ll find out when they’re ready for us to know.” Melanie said.

  “I for one am in no hurry to find out.” Janice said.

  “I am.” I said. “We seem to be traveling some good distance.”

  “You think.” Bren remarked caustically. I ignored him. Responding would only reinforce the behavior, and wouldn’t do a bit of good anyway.

  Whatever the Kievors had decided to do with Tanya they were sending us along for the ride. I wasn’t sure yet if I should be thanking or cursing them. I guess that would depend on where we eventually wound up. I knew one thing and one thing only, and that was that I had never seen anything like what I was witnessing right now. Whatever medium we were traveling in, or through, or outside of, or somehow somewhere other than, normal space, we were obviously traveling at great velocities and traveling a great distance, as well. I had never seen the stars move by at such inhuman speeds and hoped we hadn’t angered the Kievors too much. I guessed they weren’t too happy with us, considering all we had done was hijack a load of Trinium that had been destined for them anyway, and then forced them to become involved in the theft.

  The feed from Tanya’s helmet cam suddenly blinked to life on several screens which were tuned to that signal. She was watching the freighter's screens. Watching space rip by. Whatever designs the Kievors had for us we were meant to suffer them together.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked Tanya. I looked at the side screen again where Tanya should have been but where I had not seen her before, off our stern where she had been before . . . and yes, she was there. The image of the freighter was indistinct and somehow hard to see, as if you wanted to look past it, or through it, and I guessed that a lot of things were off kilter here, wherever here was. I pointed the freighter out to Bren and after blinking he saw it too.

  “I read you.” Tanya replied belatedly. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

  “No idea.” I answered truthfully. “Looks like we got away from the Katons, though.”

  “Well that’s small consolation.” Tanya said.

  “It looks like we’re getting away from our whole Universe.” Melanie said.

  Last Chance had settled down and now there was little more than a slight vibration to remind us of the shaking we had just received. I didn’t want to know what it would have been like without environmental gravity. There is little doubt we would have been completely shaken apart. We would have come out of this, if ever we were to come out, looking like that Katon Destroyer which had been too near the Battleship when it got our Kievor nuke up its ass. Not a pretty sight.

  The course we were following seemed to be the course of least resistance, I thought. We seemed to speed up each time we moved into a new turn, or as the stars moving past us began to curve , in any case. I thought I could see differences in the speed at which those stars went by and they seemed to speed up each time we entered a new curve. As they slowed was when we seemed to make our changes of course, speeding into a new trough of least resistance. Or so it seemed to my insignificant senses.

  Last Chance had never spent even half this long in warp before. Any warp jumps within human occupied territory were necessarily short, because human space was a limited area, relatively speaking. So as we went into our seventh hour of this jump I was really beginning to sweat. Not only was this, by far, the longest jump I had ever made, there was also the velocity of the jump to be taken into consideration. I didn’t even want to think about the spans being traversed, and we completely powerless to do anything about it. We were not in warp of our own power.

  “I wonder how much the Kievors are going to charge you for a map home?” Bren asked with an amusement I did not share. He had been just chock full of humorous little tidbits over the last few hours of this crazy, insane ride. I was really starting to get annoyed but he had a maniacal look in his eyes I did not trust. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t losing his mind, and we could very well have need of him before this was all said and done. I didn’t want to push him over the edge.

  “Just why exactly do you say that?” I asked, just to amuse him.

  “Because we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “We have a hundred years of fuel and food, Bren.” I said, finally becoming exasperated. “We’re not entering the Twilight Zone, you know.” I had known he was using an analogy from one of those old video clips he was always watching in his free time but I wasn’t sure if I had gotten the right one. I didn’t care, either.

  “That’s the wrong analogy, Marc.” Bren said. “But it fits. We are!”

  “Are what?” I asked, certainly not understanding.

  “Entering the Twilight Zone.” He said exasperatedly. “Or at least its closest approximation. Nor do I think getting home is going to be as easy as you seem to think.”

  We didn’t get a chance to argue the point because suddenly the stars which had been whipping by for the previous seven hours suddenly began discernibly to slow. My eyes flickered to the clasps of my safety harness, expecting something drastic to happen, isn’t that the way it always works, but before I could even reach to test them the stars slowed and came to a halt. We were back in normal space. Just like that.

  “We’re back where we started!” Bren exclaimed, shocked. Everyone was talking at once and I couldn’t understand a thing anyone was saying. Indeed, there was the Kievor Trade Station, sitting right there in front of us. We had shed all of our inertia and we were at rest where we had begun.

  “Marc! Marc! Marc!” Melanie was trying to make herself heard over everyone's chatter.

  “Yes Melanie?” I asked.

  “Do you have the rear video patched through?”

  “No.” I answered, feeling uneasy right away.

  “You might want to patch it through.”

  I heard Bren gasp. I glanced at him. He was staring down at his scanner screen. I switched one of the rear cameras onto the left forward screen and just sat there stunned. All chatter had ceased. None of us could do anything other than stare at our respective screens, at the massive Red Giant star just behind and below us that we were now somehow orbiting.

  I had never been this close to a star before. Our orbit was so close that I couldn’t see anything on the screen but the star, even after I tried shrinking the magnification. There just wasn’t that much recession in the lens. We were right next to it. Impossibly.

  “How close are we, Bren?” I asked. This must be an old, cool star for us to be able to be so close without being burned up, and I was no scientist, yet I did not think it should have been possible. Old and cool or not, we were close!

  “I can’t get a scan. It’s not working. Something is absorbing the scan waves.” Bren said. “You want a guess?”

  “I guess.” I said. Here we were, these space faring evolutionary successes, reduced to little more than the impotent apes we evolved from.

  “About fifty clicks.” Bren said. “At the most.”

  I knew that could not be possible.

  “What’s going on?” Tanya asked over com. “There’s no way we’re in a stable orbit.”

  “We’re moving.” Janice said. Sure enough, we were surrounded now by the orange glow of the Kievor’s tractor beam and were now advancing on the Kievor Trade Station. There was no doubt that this was a Kievor Trade Station
, but it wasn’t the one we had left. There was no confusion about that.

  “You gotta see this!” Bren exclaimed. He hit several keys on his control panel and the other forward screen was replaced by a radar image of us, the Kievor Trade Station, and the myriad of other ships coming and going from the area. Ordinarily most of the blips which designated ships were tagged by Last Chance’s recognition program with the type of vessel, species of alien usually associated with that type of vessel, and if known, the name of the ship. Yet not one of these ships, not a single one, showed a designation tag. Not one of these ships had ever been categorized by Last Chance before.

  The Kievors drew both Last Chance and the freighter into the same gigantic docking bay and set us down next to one another. Though the freighter dwarfed Last Chance and was in itself massive, it was like a toy in the docking bay. The Kievors built in scale.

  “Captain Marc Deveroux.” The air said.

  “That didn’t come from the com.” Bren stated the obvious.

  “You seem to have me at a disadvantage.” I said.

  “Welcome to Kievor Trade Station Number One.” The voice said without apology. It came directly from the air again. Neither here nor there but everywhere at once. Around me.

  “No way!” Bren said.

  “Yes, unfortunately.” The voice said. “You left us very little choice. Every action has an equal but opposite reaction. We could not stop you. Your inertia was much too great. So we shunted you here, bleeding off your velocity along the way. We hope this has not inconvenienced you.”

  “What other options were there?” I asked.

  “We could have destroyed the freighter.” The voice said.

  “No. You did right.” I said. “But where are we?” There was no point in alienating them now, not when it was obvious we were going to need them. They knew it too, but it was a part of the negotiations which went without saying. The unspoken rules of the haggling which I knew were going to occur. It would have been funny if it weren’t for our situation.

  “What this place is called in our language would mean nothing to you, but suffice it to say that this is the Kievor Home System. This is where the Kievor race was born. This is our home. You are the first humans to visit it. Maybe the last.”