by J. N. Chaney
I see you.
Two common days had passed before TO-96 stepped the Indomitable down from three tiers of subspace. It was the farthest any of them had ever traveled. In fact, TO-96 calculated that it was farther than their collective journeys combined—not because he had detailed records of their travels but simply because there was no way any of them could have previously accomplished such distances, given their respective lines of work. These kinds of jumps were for explorers with death wishes, not weekend warriors hoping to visit some interesting sectors on their bucket lists.
“Do we have a visual on the quantum tunnel yet?” Awen asked, and TO-96 looked back at her. “What?”
“Awen,” the bot said as tenderly as she’d ever heard him, “I’m sorry to inform you, but you cannot see a quantum tunnel. They are, by very definition, unseeable—at least in so far as a quantum tunnel resembles a black hole with an event horizon—since not even light can escape its gravitational pull.”
Awen had learned that in school and now felt rather sheepish. “Right. Thank you for the reminder, Ninety-Six.”
“My pleasure.”
“Coming up on it,” Ezo said. “Looks like five minutes at our current speed before its gravity takes us.”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Okay,” Ezo said, making a few adjustments on the console. Then he turned to face Awen and the bot. “Now, before we do this, I just want to make sure we’re all good here.”
“What an interesting concept,” Awen said through thin lips. “If you mean still livid with someone for selling us out, then, no, we’re not all good here.”
“Listen, Awen,” Ezo said, lifting his palms. “She’s not going to come after us. It’s not her style. That little charade was just her means of satisfying her curiosity.”
“Charade?”
“And secondly, she doesn’t have a bot capable of doing what Ninety-Six here can do.”
“Actually, sir—”
“Can it, ’Six!”
“Seriously?” Awen said, looking between the two of them. “For the love of all the mystics, you’re seriously going to lie to me right now, Ezo?”
“In his defense,” TO-96 said, “he might not remember that he gave Sootriman a navigation bot as an engagement present.”
Awen closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples.
“Hey, hey, what are you doing?” Ezo asked. “Don’t go all Luma on Ezo now, okay? I really don’t think that Sootriman is—”
Awen opened her eyes and lowered her hand. “I’m not going to do anything to you, Ezo. I just need some time to process…” She paused. “All of you.”
“Ah, okay. Good to know.” He cleared his throat and smoothed his turtleneck. “Well, then, can we get back to the part about possibly getting crushed in a quantum event horizon again?” When Awen and TO-96 nodded, he continued. “So, as I was saying, I just want to make sure we’re all agreed with what we’re about to do. Since there doesn’t seem to be another quantum tunnel next to this one to spit us back out, we may be looking at a one-way trip if we survive.”
“I’m not sure I understand, sir,” TO-96 said. “I’ve already informed you that all systems are—”
“I understand,” Awen replied. “He’s making sure that we’re ready to stop existing as we know it.”
“Ah,” the bot said. “A fine question to posit.”
“Because, well,” Ezo said, licking his lips, “I’ve never done this. Splick, no one has ever done this that I know of, and I know of a lot of shady characters.”
“He really does,” TO-96 said to Awen.
“So this is it, I guess,” Ezo concluded. “I just, you know, wanted to double-check. It’s kind of a big deal.”
Awen felt she should say something. “The way I see it, there are some despicable people willing to kill innocent people to get to where we are right now. More than we can probably count. I burned my bridge to the Luma, and you’ve used up your last favor with your ex-wife.”
“Still wife,” TO-96 corrected.
“Right, still wife.” Awen stifled a smile. “There’s no way we can fight anyone in this rust bucket, and the mystics know I want to meet this new race. With regard to a return trip, I have to trust that these Novia Minoosh already have that worked out. Call it faith if you need to. So it seems that the only way out of this is to move forward. We get there before anyone else does and hope it’s the right call. I vote yes. Let’s do it.”
“I vote yes as well,” TO-96 said. “Let’s do it.”
Ezo looked between them. “You both know that we’re the craziest three beings in the galaxy, don’t you?” They nodded. Ezo clcked his tongue. “Let’s do this, then.” He accelerated the Indomitable toward the quantum tunnel’s gravity well.
“Oh, Awen?” Ezo turned back toward her with a sudden softness in his eyes as if he might cry.
The look almost overwhelmed her. Here, in their last moments together, Awen would catch a glimpse of the bounty hunter’s true self. “Yes, Ezo?”
“There’s a vomit bag under your seat.”
30
“Dammit, Nolan! Jettison the pods!” Magnus yelled over TACNET. He toggled his MAR30 to high frequency and reached around the forklift. He squeezed off several more bursts in a desperate effort to give Nolan time to launch the pods. Magnus pulled his weapon back and pressed himself behind cover. He looked across at Piper.
The little girl, still barely able to look over the lip of the viewing port, stared at him in panic. He could make out tears in those big blue eyes. Why wasn’t Nolan following orders? He was furious. Now this poor child would watch him be cut down by blaster fire and possibly not get away in time. Or worse still, he would watch her be captured or killed while he bled out, helpless to do anything about it.
Magnus would have walked across the corridor himself and pressed every launch button were it not for the fact that he’d be vaporized before getting halfway across. “Nolan! Do you copy?”
“I’m trying, Lieutenant!” Nolan sounded frustrated.
“What do you mean you’re trying?”
“The system’s not responding, sir.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. “They locked you out?” Magnus asked.
“Negative, sir. I’ve got access, it’s just not—I don’t know, sir.”
Magnus looked down and saw that his MAR30 was ready for another wide-displacement discharge. “Listen, Nolan, I’m going to create a window and then come across. I’ll hit as many of the launch buttons as I can, starting with the civilians. Whatever I don’t get—well, just keep trying.”
“Sir, no. I’ll figure this out.”
“I sure hope you do, for your sake, Nolan. Because if you don’t, I’m going to fill your head with plasma myself.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Here goes nothing.” Magnus toggled his MAR30’s fire-modes switch. As his arm brought the weapon around, Magnus caught sight of Piper again. He feared this would be the last glimpse he’d ever get of her. He hated that she looked afraid—that was no way to remember a child. But then again, he wouldn’t be living long enough to revisit any memories. Then he noticed her eyes. They were no longer panicked—they were filled with rage.
Magnus was so startled by Piper’s expression that he yanked his weapon back to his chest. She didn’t look like a child who was upset with an unreasonable parent or a school bully. No, she looked like she was a lioness about to maul an invading pack of hyenas who’d just taken her cubs. Her brow was furrowed, eyes bloodshot, and he was sure that if he could see her mouth, she would have been baring her teeth. It was, perhaps, the most arresting face he’d ever seen on a child. And it scared the living splick out of him.
A burst of brilliant-white energy exploded from Piper’s capsule as if someone had detonated a quantum warhead on the surface of a planet. The shock wave came at him so fast he didn’t even have time to flinch. His body was flung backward, colliding with the wall as searing light filled his helmet. Th
e action was followed by a subsonic blast of energy that compressed his chest and squeezed his temples. Even squinting, all Magnus could see was white.
What in all the cosmos was that?
Everything went silent. Well, except for the ringing in his ears. Magnus’s HUD was off-line. In fact, his entire system seemed dead, rendering the helmet inoperable. Given the low light, he couldn’t see a thing through his visor besides streaks of blaster fire. He pulled off the helmet and blinked several times.
The very first thing Magnus saw when his vision stabilized was Piper’s face, eyes staring across the hallway at him. Her look of anger relaxed the moment she noticed Magnus was moving.
Did she just… did she just do that? Magnus was utterly beside himself. He realized he’d been holding his breath and took in a deep lungful of air. Then he looked at the other capsules and saw most of the people slumped to the sides of their pods, each trying to find their bearings. Valerie seemed the most alert of them all, rubbing one of her temples and looking across at Magnus in surprise. The senator looked the worst. In fact, with the amount of blood coming out of his nose and mouth, Magnus was quite sure he was dead. What in the hell had happened to him? Magnus didn’t remember him getting shot.
Magnus rolled onto his hands and knees, pulled his MAR30 up from its sling, and carefully leaned around the forklift. To his utter astonishment, every enemy trooper at the opposite end of the corridor was laid out cold. Whether stunned or dead, he did not know.
He heard a fist pounding on glass and looked to where Nolan was slamming his pod’s cockpit window. He was mouthing the words “good to go” and raising his thumbs.
Magnus didn’t need any more prompting. He scrambled to his feet, bolted to the next open emergency capsule, and slid in. He jammed his MAR30 along his right leg and felt it maglock against his thigh. Then he wedged his helmet over his shoulder, buckled his harness, and punched the ready button. A moment later, all the pods launched from the Bull Wraith on Nolan’s command, and Magnus was thrown against the straps.
The scream of the pod’s main engine rattled above Magnus’s head as he shot away from the Bull Wraith. He was instantly immersed in the void, swallowed by a sea of stars—a sea of stars and a planet below his feet.
We’ve got a planet! Hope kindled in him. This was the best possible scenario, the one he’d hoped for but just assumed he wouldn’t be granted because… well, because that was just the way the universe acted. But apparently, not that day. Their luck seemed to continue, Magnus noted, as he strained to look over his shoulder, wondering if the Bull Wraith’s turrets would attempt to pick them off. It had been several seconds already, and no shots had been fired.
Magnus took a deep breath and leaned forward to see if he could identify the planet. Beneath the refracted pale blue of the bending horizon lay an endless sea of tan illuminated by the system’s star. No notable bodies of water, no polar caps, and very few mountain ranges as far as Magnus could tell. It looked just like…
Oosafar. Ho-ly splick. Magnus started scanning the orbits, his head swiveling wildly. His eyes caught dozens of dots orbiting roughly four hundred meters above the planet’s surface. Then another cluster. And another.
“The orbital blockade,” he said to no one in particular. It was Oosafar.
Magnus was called back to his pod’s limited flight controls when red warning lights started flashing at him. He flicked up on the small dashboard to see the atmospheric-entry indicator blinking. His capsule was plummeting toward Oosafar, and he needed to input some commands. He pressed the option to confirm entry—the alternative being a full reverse thrust that would send the pod back into the void—and felt the flight computer adjust the capsule’s angle of attack relative to the planet’s surface.
If Nolan had slaved the Stones’ capsules properly, they should be following the same command sequence. Magnus looked over his shoulder to see if he could spot them. Sure enough, three white pods trailed to his left, maybe three hundred meters of separation between each. He couldn’t tell who occupied which pod, but all three were executing a similar course change.
“Good job, Nolan,” Magnus said then made a mental note to buy the man a drink if they ever made it through this.
Already, the crimson sheet of fire was wrapping itself around Magnus’s pod. The small vehicle shook violently, so much so that Magnus was pretty sure it was going to split apart at any second. That, or it was just going to scramble his body to a pulp. His unsecured helmet smashed into his head several times, making him see stars and drawing blood. He fought to grab it and press it against his shoulder. If he’d had more room, he would have put the helmet back on, but the cramped confines of the pod didn’t allow for it. Forgetting to put it on before entering would have been a rookie mistake if it hadn’t been dead. It was also the first time he’d ever seen a nine-year-old girl do—whatever it was she’d done. Go nova, Awen might say. So he cut himself some slack.
Though the beating lasted for less than two minutes, Magnus felt like he’d endured a one-sided boxing match at the academy for an hour. All at once, the capsule sailed into thin air; only the sound of the wind whistled over the glass. The vehicle’s systems looked green, and so far as Magnus could tell, the Bull Wraith had made no attempt to hijack them. He glanced over his shoulder again and saw that the Stones’ pods had all survived as well. He searched as much of the rest of the sky as possible but couldn’t make out any other pods.
The flight computer’s limited sensors presented three different landing sites that fit its optimal profile. Without any reference to where they were on the planet, Magnus selected the first one and hoped the Stones’ pods would continue to adopt the same input. The small winglets on Magnus’s capsule rotated and sent the vehicle on a trajectory toward a flat expanse bordered by a low-lying mountain range to the west and a shallow canyon to the east.
He sailed through the upper atmosphere for a few more minutes as the wind noise became louder and louder. The computer displayed a definitive altitude, rapidly descending from ten thousand meters. He could also see the temperature rising, owing to the desert planet’s blistering daytime conditions—conditions Magnus couldn’t believe he was about to be subjected to again so soon after leaving.
Thermals buffeted his pod, knocking his helmet from his grasp. He noticed smears of red blood on the sides and visor. He secured the helmet yet again and touched his forehead, his lip, and his ear. Damn. He was going to need laser sutures after this.
Once he reached one thousand meters, the pod gave a single sonic and visual warning before deploying the parachute, which pitched the vehicle’s nose toward the sky. Magnus hadn’t been ready for the violent toss and, once again, banged his head on his helmet.
Magnus stood vertically now, staring out his pod’s cockpit window. He did his best to memorize as much of the geography as possible, knowing this might be his only topographical glimpse of their surroundings. He could see a sizable settlement in the east toward the canyon and another in the foothills of the mountain range to the west. He also noticed scorch marks—dozens of smaller ones and a few big ones. Orbital strikes. They had to be. Small black-ringed impact craters dotted the settlements, but two larger ones indicated where towns had once stood—now decimated by Republic LO9D cannon hits. Magnus wondered if maybe there had been a friendlier landing site on the list; he’d just assumed that the first one meant it was the best one. If this was the best, he didn’t want to know what the others looked like.
Suddenly, he realized only the Stones’ pods were slaved to his—at least, that was what he assumed from Nolan’s description. He wondered if the rest of the team’s vehicles had presented them with the same options. Magnus went from not expecting to make it out of the Bull Wraith to feeling wholly responsible for everyone’s survival. He had, after all, come up with this crazy plan. But the plan—good or bad—had gotten everyone off a hostile ship regardless of where it placed them on the planet. Well, almost everyone. He thought of Rawlson and the sena
tor then looked to his left, wondering if the senator was even alive to see this. While Oosafar was deadly down below, it was lovely from above.
Back on the dashboard, large numbers counted down from ten as the altitude indicator flashed the last two hundred meters. He held his helmet tight and braced for impact.
Magnus popped the canopy off his pod and pushed himself up. The hull still smoked from extreme heat, hissing and creaking as it settled. He slung his MAR30 and cradled his helmet as he ran toward the first capsule about three hundred meters away. When he got closer, he saw Valerie trying to push up her canopy.
“I gotcha, I gotcha,” he said, putting his helmet and weapon down and pulling the glass away.
“Piper.”
“I think she’s next,” he said, offering his hands. Valerie took them, and Magnus pulled her up. It seemed so surreal, lifting a gorgeous woman in a gown from a smoking escape pod in a desert. The woman was so light that Magnus thought he might break her.
No sooner had Valerie’s feet touched the ground than she began to run to the next pod. Magnus retrieved his helmet and weapon and caught up to her. To his relief, Piper was sitting upright, eyes focused on them as they ran toward her. Her face was red and smeared with tears. No matter how brave she’d been up until that point, her true age fully emerged as she saw her mother running toward her. As Magnus wrested the canopy from its mounts, he uncovered a child in anguish, sobbing as she reached for the safest place in the galaxy: her mother’s arms.
They rocked together, sitting in the sand in a dress and a nightgown. Valerie held Piper’s head with one hand and her torso with the other, comforting her with gentle words. Magnus felt out of place, as if he was intruding on some holy moment, desecrating it with his voyeuristic glances and bloodstained armor.
