by C. Gockel
“She’s fine, thrilled to hear yous well enough to leave today.” Dactyl saluted Talos, fist to chest. “The Sequi’s ready to go, Captain. Except for the fuel cell.”
“I’m about to go buy it.” Talos stood with a sigh.
Craze knew he owed the aviarman for helping with the failed heist, for getting him out of custody, for giving him a place when he had none, and for not running off when things got rough. Nice things. Craze would keep his vow to return the kindnesses to Talos and Lepsi. “I have some really nice bottles of booze in my pack,” he said. “One or two should get what we need. Save your chips. Put option six back on the list.”
“Really?” Talos’s face brightened. “Running into you on that transport from Siegna turned out to be great fortune, mate. Life isn’t dull with you around. ‘N to think I didn’t want to be anywhere near you at first.” Laughing, he buzzed Lepsi on his tab, telling him to get Craze’s pack and meet them at the trader’s bay.
With Dactyl’s assistance, Talos helped Craze to the shop. Craze aided in negotiating the hooch for the propellant cell. His friends then guided him back to the Sequi, strapping him into his usual seat.
Rainly beamed at him. She wore a halter and shorts made from Dactyl’s coat with a patch over her heart that was Craze’s cuff. Over that bit of material she wore the lawman’s old badge, literally advertising her heart to the world. “You starting to look better. I’m so glad.” Her bruises were black as a cosmic void, but no darkness could tarnish her radiant disposition.
It made Craze smile, despite wishing most of his body parts would find new homes and leave him in peace. He squeezed her hand. “Good to see you, too.”
Sitting up so long made him moan, which led to thoughts of misery and the lost chocolates. They had left so much wealth behind on Wism. Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t. If they didn’t, that was a problem. One as big as the Rock Man and his brother. “What if most of those bars was mealworms? Those dudes will come for us. Won’t they?”
“As long as Quasser lives, we’ve nothing to worry about,” Dactyl said, settling into the chair beside Rainly’s.
“You ever goin’ to tell us who he is?” Craze would risk a slug or two to sate his curiosity.
“Yous may hear whispers of Quasser from time to time, but not from decent folks. He’s somebody yous don’t want to know. Not even by somebody else telling yous about him. Drop it, or we gonna talk for the next few hours about yous pa ‘n Yerness.”
Craze pressed his lips together, biting back his myriad questions. He didn’t want to pollute today or tomorrow with Bast and Yerness. Dactyl was right. The past was the past. “New beginnin’ right here. For all of us. Where we goin’, Captain?”
“Carry on!” Talos slapped the console. “We’ve been cleared for Danysovia. First stop on the list of possibilities.”
Craze peered at the planets Talos had pinged onto his tab. Little to no information besides the names and locations graced the InfoCy data files. After Danysovia was Lleteboor, Foradil, then a place called Pardeep Station. Exsix and Awjiscar were the last ports of opportunity.
Worries coated Craze’s palms in a cold, slick sheen. If Mortua and Wism lay outside their monetary means, what kind of holes in the galactic arm would these planets be? Shit. He wiped his hands off on his coveralls.
“Ready?” Talos clicked the course into the ship systems, taking the Sequi up toward the Lepper.
The streams of cobalt blue reached for the vessel to whisk Craze away from all the tragedies and failures, inspiring a resurgence of hope. Not every stop could end in disaster and disappointment. Could it? Nah.
And maybe there was nothing wrong with those six places besides being far out on the Edge. Just remote and unsettled, the new frontier, nothing worse. As the Backworlds healed from the war, they’d expand once again, and the Edge wouldn’t remain the boondocks forever. No. Untapped potential waited out there, and Craze would grab it along with his new-found brothers and sister.
“Danysovia here we come,” Lepsi sang out, waving Federoy’s image at the view out the spacecraft. “Give us chips. Give us chips.”
Dactyl held Rainly’s hand. They shared a smile, intimate and warm. Seemed they’d found something as precious as chocolate on Wism.
It made Craze miss Yerness for a split second. Then he realized it was the intimacy he longed for and not her. Someday he’d find the right gal. He knew that and knew he’d be OK. The aches for lost love, Siegna, and home eased. He’d lucked into a cozy new life with a new family. One that actually looked out for him and shared this same journey. On a quest for better and for healing, together they would find it. One of those worlds on Talos’s list would become home.
Craze felt a tinge of excitement, wondering which one. “Let’s go.”
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Sky Hunter
Targon Tales
Chris Reher
Air Command pilot Nova Whiteside is assigned to a remote outpost to guard the construction of a new orbiter, Skyranch Twelve against rebel sabotage. The difference between the well-ordered Union air fields and this dusty garrison is made painfully clear when she runs afoul a brutal commander of ground troops.
When she is trapped behind enemy lines in a bloody uprising she meets Djari, a civilian whose trust in the governing Union is shattered by what he has witnessed.
Her assignment takes her from the midst of a bloody uprising to the elegant new space station where she hopes to train for her Hunter Class pilot grade. But not all runs according to protocol and she soon suspects that more than farming is being done up there. When she uncovers the treacherous and illicit schemes taking place, it seems that local riots are the least of their troubles.
Thank You, as always, to Tracy Leach and Dee Solberg
Chapter One
The sight of nine Air Command Kites swooping around the towering buttes guarding the plains of Bellac Tau was either a thing of beauty or of terror, depending on whose side of the war observed the approach. The planes arrived, cloaked by technology as much as the dawn, to deliver their payload only hours after leaving the Union’s military base on the other side of the flatlands.
“Downtown is in sight,” Nova Whiteside said when the external cameras confirmed what her onboard navigator had found.
“But where is everybody?” her wingman’s voice came from the speakers in her helmet. “I thought this was going to be fun.”
The dusty settlement supposedly making a living by catering to the tribes of nomadic locals huddled empty and desolate in the lee of the foothills. They knew enough about this continent to expect open markets, animal pens, caravans and desert vehicles among the brick buildings. None of that in sight, nobody home. Something had compelled the plains people to heed their ancient instincts for self-preservation and move on to some other village.
“Going to have to poke a stick in it,” she said.
A scattering of metal sheds, much newer than the town, came into view and into her gun sights. They housed Rhuwacs, according to the scouts, barely-sentient creatures trained by the Shri-Lan rebels to invade towns and villages, maiming and destroying as directed by their handlers. Cheap, expendable, and easily-replaced cannon fodder imported to this remote planet for just that purpose.
“Chow time! I think someone’s noticed us now.”
Nova’s sensors showed a horde of them pouring out of the buildings when the attacking Air Command squad pounced onto the village. She did not zoom in for a closer look, knowing these people to be slow-moving mountains of muscle under skin so thick that it often cracked in places to give the appearance of scales. Armed with cudgels, simple ballistic weapons,
knives and massive teeth, they stood little chance against the airborne threat descending upon them. This was the third of such camps found and routed along the Rim.
“Whiteside, Tonda,” her flight lead’s voice reached her. “Check out the cave system Jack found before they scram. We’ll clean out the Rhuwacs.”
“Aye. Save me some, will you?” Nova replied and veered east, toward the coordinates provided by their scouts.
“Just get that bunker, Lieutenant.”
“Bunker, right,” she mumbled to herself. “Now where did they put that bunker?” The plane faithfully obeyed her mental commands, conveyed via the neural interface at her temple, to navigate while she consulted the sensors. They knew the location precisely and finding it was not the problem.
“Probably shielded,” Tonda said. His plane glided noiselessly beside her own Kite toward the sporadically forested hills edging the salt flats. “They know we’re coming.”
A steady ticking sound over their receivers indicated that someone had tapped into their communication. “I don’t know how Dakad expects us to find it up here,” she said to those who might be listening. “No one mentioned all those tree- things.” She turned her head and signaled to Tonda through her cockpit canopy. He veered away.
She swung the other way, her mind now entirely on directing the Kite toward the next valley where the rebels had hidden their important goodies below ground. Com arrays, weapons, senior members of the faction, likely valuables and contraband as well. The town they had left at the edge of the plains was as expendable as the Rhuwacs corralled there.
Shooting at a pack of mishandled Rhuwacs was a favorite bloodsport among her fellow soldiers and pilots but Nova was secretly glad not to have a part of that today. The creatures, although without empathy and trained to kill, were not animals and their role as enemy simply a matter of relentless and cruel conditioning. The Union’s xenologists had classified them as sentient, a Prime species, and none of this was of their making.
Worse yet, the ramshackle town that her squad was about to destroy surely also housed civilians, even if most of them seemed to have deserted it. A discouraging number of the red-skinned, white-haired Bellac natives had sided with the rebels, but most of the residents of this remote region cared nothing about either the Commonwealth of United Planets or the rebel factions that opposed it. She hoped that the presence of the Rhuwacs had driven the locals from the valley.
Nova shook herself out of these thoughts. “Blow stuff up, Nova,” she said. “Get back home in one piece. That’s it, that’s all.”
“Huh?” came Tonda’s startled reply.
“Going over my notes,” she said. She saw him approaching from the east now to rendezvous above the coordinates they had been given. At this distance, his Kite looked like a dark, graceful bird swooping over the treetops. Deploying the ordnance designed to penetrate shielding known to be used by rebels was not, unlike some of their other weaponry, a long- distance maneuver. “Do we have news?” she asked, both of him and her own systems in search of the shield’s configuration.
“Yep,” he said and she could almost see the grin on the Centauri’s face. “Calibrating now.”
“Clever, clever rebels,” Nova said when her sensors picked up the communications array embedded in the bare face of a cliff, invisible from afar. The entrance to the bunker would be at the foot of that rock, behind a line of trees. In this part of the planet the trees were little more than gaunt frames for long ropes of gray-green foliage but still dense enough to impede a clear vision of the ground. “Fire at will,” she said.
Instead of seeing tracers issue from his Kite, a much broader trail shot up from the ground just as her system warned of additional power sources below them. “Abort,” she shouted. “Shielded anti-aircraft positions. We’re too low. Abort!” She broke to the right, away from the valley, expecting Tonda to do likewise. “Whiteside to Dakad.” She switched her com system to reach her wing commander. “Taking fire from the ground. Looks like coilers. Requesting backup.”
The reply was a curse.
“Yessir,” she said. “Four launches.”
“Manage, Whiteside,” Captain Dakad snarled. “We’re taking fire, too. Someone knew we were coming long before we left the damn base.”
“Three now,” Tonda corrected. “Got one gone. Where the hell did they get those? What kind of lunatic uses coilers on the ground? Jack didn’t mention any of this. Remind me to kick his buttery ass when I—”
“Tonda!” Nova shouted when she saw the other Kite spin away. “Captain, he’s taken fire.” She veered to describe a wide arc around the likely range of the gun on the ground. Her weapons training did not include anticipating armament not even meant to work inside an atmosphere such as Bellac’s. When she saw the telltale tracer of another missile race toward her she rolled and returned fire. The explosion below her confirmed the hit.
“Going down,” Tonda yelled, his words distorted by panic. He was barely twenty-five, by Human terms, and this tour was his first aboard a Kite. “Got holed, elevators toasted. I can’t punch out!”
Nova watched him streak away from the valley in search of a place to land. She came about when her scanner reported another launch from the ground. The guns had an impressive reach but not enough speed for the Kite’s evasive maneuvers. She eluded that one as well and blanketed the location with a few missiles of her own. “Tonda! Did you bail? Tell me you made it.”
“Made it. Sort of,” he groaned. “Kite’s down and not in a good way. From what I can see through all the blood on the dash.”
Nova cursed and set after him. She found him in a clearing left by a long-ago rock slide. His Kite leaned drunkenly among some boulders but seemed largely intact. She hovered overhead. “Captain, Kite Four is down. Tonda’s still in it. Still talking.”
“Where?”
“Too close. If they have skimmers they’ll be here in minutes.” She scanned the area around the downed plane. To allow even a damaged Kite to fall into enemy hands was unthinkable.
There was a brief silence. “Mitigate.”
“By Cazun !” Tonda’s oath was a mere whimper.
“Sir?”
“Deal with it, Whiteside!” Dakad shouted.
Nova circled the wreck, knowing damn well that she was pointing out their location to anyone looking skyward even if their own scanners hadn’t shown them yet. Mitigate. Meaning, don’t leave the rebel with anything valuable. Not a plane and not a hostage. She glanced over her available arsenal.
“Gods, Nova,” Tonda said as if he could see her finger on the trigger.
She ground her teeth. “I’m not leaving you.” She took manual control over from her neural interface, expecting the Kite to refuse to land here. Indeed, her warning systems engaged peevishly while the vertical descent system hovered her Kite lower, into a clear space not far from Tonda’s plane. The camera at the belly of her plane found a few spots for the landing struts to settle among the rocks. She exhaled sharply. “Can you make it here, Tonda?”
“No. I’m stuck.”
She switched the Kite’s sensor output to the data sleeve on her forearm. Snatching up a gun, she climbed out of the cockpit and slid over the edge of the triangular wing onto the rocky ground. The loose scree sliding out from under her boots slowed her sprint to Tonda’s plane. A glance to her screen showed four vehicles approaching from her left, just above treetop elevation. “That’s what I get for saying ‘skimmer’ out loud,” she said to herself.
She climbed up to his cockpit canopy, already shattered by his attempt to eject. The missile had impacted somewhere below the pilot seat and warped pieces of the interior had cut deep into Tonda’s leg and right arm. “Damn,” Nova breathed when she saw the damage, again grudgingly impressed by the rebels’ ability to innovate. She leaned heavily against a piece of the starboard console that had wedged across Tonda’s knees, hoping that the ejectors didn’t choose this moment to deploy. “You Centauri are just too long for these sea
ts. Move!”
He heaved himself past her, out of the cockpit and onto the wing. With a groan, he let himself slide to the ground where he collapsed. She followed after entering a command code that would destroy the plane’s onboard programs and data storage. “Get up, they’re coming.” She grasped his parachute harness to pull him up again. His face was about as pale as a Centauri could get and the violet eyes had turned nearly gray. “Stay with me now,” she snapped.
They stumbled back to her plane where she pushed him up into the cockpit to crumple into the small space behind the pilot seat. The shock of his injuries had worn off and he howled in pain. Nova leaped into her seat and launched at once, somewhat unsteadily because of the terrain and the extra weight behind her but the Kite finally agreed to cooperate. She rose up and shot away from the wreck.
“What are you doing?” Tonda exclaimed.
She moved out of coiler range and focused on the plane’s sensors. “Did you nick an artery or something urgent?”
“What? No.”
“Then shut up a moment,” she said. “Don’t bleed on stuff.” She swung around in a wide circle, waiting, counting. The four skimmers had arrived at the downed plane now. Three more were closing in from the direction of the bunker. When they had all stopped she turned the Kite and raced back to the site. Wasting no time with a close approach, she lobbed an incendiary missile at the wreck which promptly exploded in spectacular fashion, disintegrating the skimmers and whatever number of rebels they had brought with them.
“Holy shit!” Tonda’s voice was a high-pitched squeal. He peered at the inferno below them as the mossy trees caught fire, fully aware that, if not for her abstract interpretation of Dakad’s orders, he would have gone up along with them.
