Cast of Nova

by S J McLaughlin

  “What the hell is this about?” Kendal asked.

  Tearly waited a slow second before he turned around. His stare sent a chill up Kendal’s spine. All the adrenaline he had built faded and he became uncomfortably aware of his surroundings.

  Kendal realized his mistake and his anger melted into fear.

  “I didn’t permit you to approach,” Tearly said. His voice was low, calm, and cold. He inched towards Kendal, one step at a time, until he stopped a few feet short. Tearly cleared his throat. “I’m going to ignore the last few seconds, and you’re going to shut up and pretend you earned that rank of yours.”

  On the way here, Kendal had been rehearing all the things he wanted to say to the admiral. Now that he had the chance, he’d lost his nerve to say anything. He could only nod his head and listen.

  “One of the smaller teams is going to Benith Town. A shuttle is dropping with one hundred marines. We believe that Miss Ross might be clever enough to avoid an orbital battle and head straight for the terrain. We want troops in the major cities to make sure we cover all ends. You will be going down with them.”

  Kendal tried to hide the disdain from his face. “What am I supposed to do in Benith Town?”

  “You’re there to make sure it’s a smooth operation. To make sure that everyone does their job properly, and to keep me up to date on anything I should know. I have my personal frequency set to your channel, and you’re not to skip out on this. You’ve spent the last three years as a disappointment. Don’t dig a deeper hole than you’re already in.”

  Tearly looked over Kendal’s shoulder at General Devon, who’d been waiting at the bottom of the steps with Blake. “Please escort our lieutenant to the shuttle. And don’t let him wander. Accept no delays.”

  The general walked up the steps and grabbed Kendal by the arm, gentle enough not to hurt, but firm enough for Kendal to know he couldn’t pull away.

  The admiral didn’t say another word as he was escorted out.

  Kendal’s skin burned under his thick layers of clothes, and his face was no doubt red. There would be laughter and whispers about this for months to come. Kendal knew he’d be scrutinized when he returned from Benith Town. He’d be no more respected than a janitor.

  It was a long trip from the bridge to the hanger. Half the length of the Morana, with Devon keeping close and not letting Kendal out of arm’s reach. Kendal felt like Devon was leading him to an execution rather than a simple planetside venture.

  Through the halls he passed by familiar crew. Officers he’d worked with for years, all watching him and whispering to each other when they thought Kendal was out of earshot. Lieutenants weren’t supposed to be led around by generals like a dog on a leash.

  They stopped at the gravshaft that would bring them to the hanger. Devon let Kendal go in first, making sure to put himself between Kendal and the exit until the door closed. As if Kendal was going to make a run for it. The hangers were well below the main decks, and it would take a few minutes to arrive. The gravshaft was compact, but had enough space that Kendal could stand at the other end and not have Devon breathing on him.

  “I’m only following orders,” Devon said, trying to sound calm and rational. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “Everything is personal,” Kendal muttered. The floor vibrated under his feet as the gravshaft lowered. He heard the gentle hum of electricity and the whooshing of air as it compacted against the falling cylinder.

  “Is it true?” Devon asked. “About you and her?”

  Kendal looked down at himself, not wanting Devon to see his reddening face. He felt like he was in handcuffs and that Devon had a gun on him.

  About me and her, he thought. What about me and her?

  Devon kept looking at him, expecting an answer, but Kendal said nothing. He didn’t owe him anything, and as soon as he was on Nau Cedik he’d go his own way and hope never to see General Devon again.

  The hangar was the biggest room on the Morana. Three times taller than the bridge and wide enough that Kendal couldn’t see one end from the other. Rows of shuttles were set up and they were in the final stages of inspection. The marines were already out and preparing for launch. Tearly had said a hundred, but Kendal counted far less than that.

  Devon brought him through the groups of marines. They looked at Kendal as he passed, cutting off their conversations and clearing a path for them. Kendal was as tall as most of them, but their broad shoulders and tank-like builds dwarfed him. They were used to carrying heavy EG-packs and wear kinetic absorbing armor, and were always pushing themselves physically. Their gear was worn down from years of combat. Scorch marks and scuffs all over. Each uniform had the Union logo on it. A simple triangle pointing upwards with the height taller than the width. Kendal had that same logo on the side of his boots, colored red for his position in the fleet, and also had one on the shoulders of his coat.

  They stopped at a shuttle that looked no different than the other. Shaped like a cylinder cut in half and laying on the flat side, with thrusters built into the ends and a clear window cabin arced down in the front. They all sat on launchers which would thrust them from the ship once they were ready for takeoff.

  Kendal climbed up the foot-high ledge onto the shuttle and rested a hand against the door frame to keep his balance on the wobbly floor. He waited for Devon who’d been about to climb up when one of the marines stopped him stopped him.

  “He’s riding with us?” the marine asked. She was a scruffy blonde with a white Union logo on her armor, as opposed to the deep gray the other marines wore, and her armor looked cleaner than the rest. Kendal guessed she was higher ranking, but couldn’t be sure.

  “Admiral’s orders,” Devon said. “He wants him down there with us. Not sure why.”

  The marine shrugged. “Seems a strange thing to want done,” she said, giving Kendal a glance up and down. “Maybe he’s here to keep an eye on us.”

  “Who knows,” Devon said. The marine smiled at them before going back to loading up her pack with ammo and ration packs.

  Once Devon climbed up, Kendal followed him through the shuttle, walking past the rows of empty seats towards the cockpit at front. Each shuttle held thirty marines, all packed in narrow benches. Having that many people in such a small vessel broke humane travel laws, but since it took less than a half-hour from load-up to departure, it wasn’t considered an issue as far as the Union was concerned.

  The pilot was already in his seat. A bearded man with slicked back hair and a denim jacket over his Union shirt. He was checking over the dials and screens, preparing for take-off.

  The cockpit had two seats and not much room aside from that. Kendal had to duck and squeeze between the chair and the wall to sit down in the co-pilot seat. Devon stayed back where the rest of the marines would sit, taking a seat beside the cockpit door.

  The shuttle sunk and wobbled as the marines all packed themselves inside. They muttered small talk as they found their seats and packed themselves in. Kendal had his hands folded on his lap. He loosened his gloves where they’d stuck from sweat, but they still felt tight.

  The outside doors shut, then the cockpit door shut as well and blocked Kendal off from Devon and the rest of the shuttle. The pilot flicked switches on the dashboard and the engine came to life. Kendal’s chair rattled, and he felt a rush of air blow through the room as the shuttle transitioned from the Morana’s air supply to its own.

  “You might wanna buckle up!” the pilot shouted over the sounds of the engine. He grinned at Kendal before throwing on his headset and putting attention to the controls.

  Kendal pulled the straps over his shoulders and waist, then buckled them and fastened himself as tight to the seat as he could.

  The large hangar doors split apart and opened, showing just how close they were to Nau Cedik. The giant gray and green planet with barely ten thousand people on it took up most of their view and shined bright.

  The launcher gave the shuttle a push, and they shot from the Mora
na and hurled into space.

  The straps caught Kendal, digging into his shoulders and waist as he was thrown back and forth. He tightened his grip on the edge of his chair and tried to keep himself steady and conscious.

  Sharp acceleration rocked through the shuttle, throwing everything back and forth. Kendal opened his eyes a second, wanting to catch a glance of the Morana before they were too far away to see, but all he saw out the window was Nau Cedik spiraling around them. The pilot was calm and focused, hands dancing graceful over the controls like he was playing the piano.

  The shuttle stopped spinning, but the g-force still wrecked against his body. His chest hurt and it was hard to take in a breath.

  It felt like hours before the acceleration stopped and the shuttle went into a steady freefall. Kendal felt weightlessness as every loose object in the room suspended where it was. He looked around and saw his jacket floating inches over his shoulders and the laces on his shoes motionless in mid-air.

  The pilot took off his headset and put it on the armrest. “Twenty-three minutes till landing,” he said, then chuckled. “You look like you’ve never been in a shuttle before.”

  “It’s been a while,” Kendal said. It’d been three years since he’d gone planetside. He kept to space as often as he could.

  The pilot tried to make small talk, but Kendal wasn’t into it.

  Eventually he gave up and kept to himself.

  Nau Cedik soon took up all of the window space. A thick of spiraling clouds and dense atmosphere they’d settle into. The cabin itself was dark, with the only light above the pilot’s controls, which made it easy for him to notice that his communicator was blinking. A bright blue light that lit the corner of the cabin to let him know he had a message.

  Who the hell’s sending me messages at this time?

  He took off his communicator and blinked to focus on such a bright screen in a dim room.

  Don’t go to Nau Cedik.

  He looked over the message, reading it again and again. The number was unknown. No Union tag, or anything to track or look up. He thought it might have been an officer, but why wouldn’t they use their ID? And certainly it wasn’t the admiral backing out and wanting Kendal back so soon. All he knew was that whoever sent the message knew him, or at lease knew about him.

  Don’t go to Nau Cedik.

  He ignored the message and tried not to think about it. Impact was going to be rough and he needed to have a calm mind. He looked out the shuttle window. It was rare for him to see a planet through a window, rather than a feed. Half an inch between him and the vacuum of space.

  The shuttle hit atmosphere and everything lurched upwards.

  Kendal felt like his head had snapped backwards as the ship regained gravity, only this gravity pushing up as the ship slowed its decent. The pilot looked as calm as ever as the planet rushed towards them and clouds engulfed the ship.

  Gravity vanished as they hit another freefall and descended below the clouds.

  Kendal saw an endless marsh that wrapped the planet all the way to the curved horizon. He closed his eyes, unable to take it the spinning vista any further. He felt his stomach lurch up and down and the seatbelt digging into his hips and shoulders as they dropped.

  In the last few seconds he felt like he’d run headfirst into a wall. The shuttle jolted and rocked as they set down and nestled into the planet’s gravity.

  Water splashed over the cockpit window, then rolled down the glass as the shuttle settled against the ground.

  The marines cleared first while Kendal waited with the pilot. He unbuckled his seatbelt and rubbed the sore spots where they had dug in during flight.

  It wasn’t long before the door snapped open and Devon gave Kendal a tap on the shoulder.

  “You go out,” he said. “Me and the pilot have some words.”

  Kendal didn’t argue and left the shuttle as quick as he could. He didn’t know what Devon and the pilot had to discuss, but he didn’t care.

  They had landed in the marsh instead of a port. The shuttle was partially submerged in the water, with a metal plank laid between the door and the packed dirt the town sat on. He stepped out, careful to keep his balance on the wobbly plank, then wandered into town.

  To his surprise, they hadn’t landed in Benith Town, exactly. Instead, they were in a place called South Port, half a mile from Benith Town. While the locals might have considered the two to be separate towns, all the maps labeled them the same.

  Benith Town and South Port were the only two landmarks in the hemisphere.

  The gravity felt off and the air was too thick for his lungs. He hated being planetside. Fluctuations in temperatures made him ill, and the strange way the light would dim and brighten at random from clouds passing over the suns was disorienting.

  Kendal spent most of his life in space. He was born in space, and assumed he would die there as well. Any time he’d go planetside, everything felt wrong around him. Space was where he belonged, not here.

  The air was thick with half clung droplets of water and the light from the two suns seemed to scatter through the air, bouncing off itself and lighting whatever it felt. The whole town looked gray and brown, and was built on a bed sand that smothered the marsh and had a single road which stretched a quarter mile.

  The dirt beneath his feet was packed solid and had gravel sprinkled to keep it from being slippery mud. Since nothing could be dug, the buildings were two to three floors upwards. Most had front decks and balconies with awnings over top to keep the rain off.

  There wasn’t a single building not made of wood. Most looked new, but the harsh moisture in the air was already rotting them. The only ship aside from the Union shuttles was an older-model transport set down between two buildings.

  That ship would have been old when I was kid, Kendal thought as he wandered down the single road, looking each building up and down as he passed.

  Kendal sighed and adjusted his uniform, feeling it stick in a few places from sweat. “This is going to be a long day.”

  Chapter 4

  The locals had put a dirt path between South Port and Benith Town. This was the only way to get between the two places on foot. The path was only a few feet wide and unstable near the edges were the marsh had been eating at it. Ever odd step Kendal would feel his foot compacting the dirt and make the trail a few centimeters narrower.

  The twenty-minute walk felt like an hour. The planet had no hills or valleys, mountains or elevations. Just an endless flat terrain. The large size of the planet made for a shallow curve and you could see for thousands of miles around. Even at the edge of South Port, he could see Benith Town in all of its detail despite how far away it was. As he walked, he town seemed to stand in place, like a poster on the sky that moved with him. He felt like he was walking in place.

  Benith Town was bigger than South Port. It had less houses and less people, but each building was spaced out and the road was excessively wide. An oak forest wrapped around the whole town in the shape of a horseshoe with the path leading into the opening.

  All the Union marines had stationing in rows around town. Most were back in South Port, but they felt the need to station a few here as well. Kendal realized that despite Benith Town being the name on the map, South Port was the real town between the two.

  There were more civilians than marines. The locals wore cattle stitched leather and crude cotton clothes that looked handed down from older generations and had been wearing those same clothes every day of their lives.

  Kendal hadn’t been to many planets in his life, but he was sure this wasn’t standard across the system. Most had to be better than this.

  The calm sprinkling rain picked up into a steady pour.

  He felt the warm drops against his scalp and heard them bouncing off his Union jacket. He buttoned up and raised his collar to keep the water from running down into his shirt.

  I’m not sleeping out in this, he thought, seeing the sun already vanishing beyond the horizon. Most planets
had two kinds of nights. The Central Sun gave off most of the light, but the Ven Star was bright enough to cast twilight when it was up. The first was called ‘soft night’, when only the Ven Star was up. The second was ‘hard night’, where both suns were down and the planet was too dark to see your hand in front of your face.

  Most of the buildings were unlabeled. Residential units, from what he guessed. A few had signs on them. Barber, butcher, market, clinic, pub, and so on. He read each building until he found one labeled ‘inn’. He briefly considered getting a drink, but decided to put it off until he got some sleep.

  The inn looked more like the foyer of someone’s house than a hotel lobby. A short room with a counter at the end and a doorway behind that. The room had a staircase and a few paintings of much nicer planets hung up and framed.

  It felt nice to be out of the rain. Kendal brushed the water off his coat and ran his fingers through his hair to unflatten it.

  It was quiet and empty.

  “Hello?” Kendal said, looking up the staircase and through the doorways, always keeping one foot in the lobby. He looked over the counter, and saw a box with a button on top, connected to a computer with a wire. A note in front said, “ring for assistance.” He pushed the button and waited.

  He heard creaking from the staircase as a woman walked down and climbed over the counter to meet him. “Can I help you?” she said, then added, “officer?”

  “Looking for a room,” he said. “For the night, or until I get out of here.”

  “I thought you guys were to stay on patrol outside,” she said and opened a book to mark in his stay. Kendal noticed the last booking was over a month ago. “That’s what that soldier told me when I asked if they needed some rooms.”

  Kendal shrugged and gave her his credit card. She had to look to see how to scan it, then handed it back.

  “Upstairs,” she said and gave him a metal key with a number 1 on it. “Third door from the left.”