The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (15 page)

Since she had been on the
Intrepid
, Tulula had altered Mach’s opinions of the vestan race considerably. So much so, that he now realized just how little he knew of them, how little he understood their ways. This pattern of cognition brought to him the singular feeling of pending grief. It struck him at the core of his being, a black hole of emotion from which beyond its event horizon there was no escape.
 

These people around him, his friends and colleagues—they were all he had in the universe. As maddening and unknowable as they were, as frustrating, obstinate, and plain infuriating at times, he loved every one of them dearly and he had put them all in danger. This could be his very last few days in their company before they were dragged into a singularity from which there’d be no hope, no escape. Just a void of nothingness, their particles collided and smashed, fragmented across whatever lay beyond the weapon’s black hole.
 

Mach looked down at his smart-screen. The ship’s various system updates flowed in a series of columns. The navigation subsystem was online, waiting for an instruction. Mach considered punching in coordinates for the nearest Salus Sphere star, hitting the LD at maximum power and getting the hell out of there. He lifted his right hand and moved it across his body until his trembling figures hovered over the controls. All it would take would be two presses of his fingers and they would be heading out of the atmosphere and into space, readying for an L-jump.
 

But what of the weapon? The shadows? It was obvious now the planet was not, in fact, barren, but inhabited by some alien force that wasn’t shy about firing upon anything that moved. The image of all those bodies in the quarry came to him… How could they leave a threat like that, knowing the bomb was still here, somewhere?

Mach didn’t get the chance to make the decision.

Lassea smashed her fist against the side of her chair and bellowed an expletive that caught Mach off guard. He leaned forward in his captain’s chair, guiltily hiding his left arm behind his back. “What’s wrong, Lass?”
 

“Damned fighter drone got shot down too. Heavy laser fire by the looks of it, though the video feed was too short to tell. It didn’t pick up anything other than a burst of light before we lost all signals—it seemed as if the craft flew off course, its vector interrupted by something.”

“Not even the emergency signal?” Babcock asked.
 

“Nothing,” Lassea said. “Like the drone, it’s completely dead.”
 

The team groaned in unison as Mach swore.
 

The unmanned fighter was a key component of
Intrepid’s
firepower. To lose it so soon in a battle they knew nothing about was yet another blow. Mach wondered for the briefest moment if he had, after all, made a mistake. If his devil-may-care attitude had finally caught up with him and decided to collect on decades of risk.
 

Adira and Babcock stood next to each other, their backs to their consoles, attentions on Mach. Likewise with Sanchez and Tulula. Only Lassea had her attention on the viewscreen. She worked to disseminate any useful data from the fighter’s brief video. Even Squid Two, hovering over Babcock’s shoulder, its eight limbs swaying as though manipulated by a thermal current of expectation, trained its little red eyes on Mach, waiting, expecting, and judging…

“I fucked up,” Mach said, blurting the words out.
 

Lassea turned and looked up at him, her eyes wide. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t used to Mach’s candor, but she admired him for his leadership, and for him to admit something like this would surely shake the faith she held in him.
 

“I want to do something that I should have done when we were still back on Fides Prime. I want to give you all a decision in what we do. It’s clear that the parameters of this mission have changed dramatically. If you guys want to go home, that’s cool with me. If you want to stay, then I’m with you.”

At first a heavy silence descended upon the bridge. The subsonic drone of the gamma drives rumbled through the ship’s panels and floors. The artificial gravity generators whined quietly beneath them, a ghostly breath reminding Mach that they were as far from home, and far from safety, as he had been all his adult life since leaving the CW a supposed war hero. But could anyone claim to be a hero back then? The Century War was a messy affair at best, and a brutal exercise of bloodlust at worst. Every soldier fell somewhere on that spectrum regardless of their individual triumphs.
 

Where Mach fell, he couldn’t tell; that was for others to judge.

“I’m staying,” Sanchez finally said. He wiped the back of his hand across his damp forehead. “Not sure how long I’ve got. I might as well try to do something with that time. Besides, we’ve got a predator to deal with. How could I turn that down?” He forced a smile that cut through Mach’s exterior like a monofilament nanoblade.

There was Mach’s old friend, finally coming through the shell of defiance he had worn since they left the capital.
 

Tulula’s face shifted, her eyes narrowing slightly. She gripped Sanchez’s upper forearm and nodded before looking up at Mach. “I’m staying too. My people have only just joined the CW; I don’t want to be an example of treachery if we leave and are held responsible for this weapon being used against the Salus Sphere. And… well, I’ve come to like this team.” She cast a quick glance at Sanchez, the corners of her mouth twisting up at the ends by a few millimeters—the vestan’s version of a smile.
 

“Kingsley?” Mach said, raising an eyebrow. The old scientist had barely spoken since they had got back from the planet’s surface. Squid Two chirped a few times in its strange staccato language that the original Squid and Babcock had developed during his exile on Minerva.
 

“Squid thinks there would be much to learn if we stay,” Babcock said. “I tend to agree with him. The other choice would likely mean exile for us all, and having done that once, I’ve come to enjoy the company of other fools and dreamers and would prefer to avoid exile—at least for now.”

Adira simply gave Mach a nod, like he knew she would, and of course, Lassea, in all her eagerness, was in without a millisecond of doubt. He saw leadership potential in her. Despite being the youngest and least experienced member of the crew, she showed a strong will and impressive initiative. For all of the CW’s faults, Mach had to give them credit for spotting the talent in her and training her in such a way as to bring out her best qualities.
 

“Okay,” Mach said, relaxing into his chair. “I guess we’re all finally on the same page.” He was about to apologize again for his assumption and deceit at the beginning of the mission but felt the desire to put it behind them, take this united team, and crack on with the task at hand. “Shields up, weapons online, let’s get closer to the surface and find out what the hell has fired on us. It’s time we show these bastards what the
Intrepid
and its crew can do.”
 

He waited for a moment as the crew smiled at his mini speech. “Well?” he shouted. “The enemy is down there; what are we waiting for?”
 

With that, the crew saluted him and turned to their respective stations. The
Intrepid
came alive with the roar of gamma drives, EM shields, and weapons coming online. The viewscreen flickered before resolving its high-definition visuals of both the ship’s feedback metrics and the view out beyond them.
 

Lassea’s coordinates blipped on the screen, a red reticule highlighting a section at the edge of a densely wooded area: the section that contained
Voyager
, along with the destroyed drone. The ship banked against the planet’s dense atmosphere, dipped its long, curved nose and shot towards the surface, sending Mach back into his chair, even as the AG generators tried to equalize the g-force of their dive.
 

“This is more like it,” Sanchez said as he manipulated the controls for the quad-laser battery, scanning for targets.
 

Mach agreed; it felt good to have his team onside, the introspective bullshit out in the open, and a focused task. Engage the enemy—recover the bomb, and kick the ass of anything or anyone who stood in their way. That was how the crew of
Intrepid
worked.

Chapter Fifteen

Lassea navigated the
Intrepid
down to the planet’s surface, every scanner and weapon looking for signs of conflict, ready to act on the slightest hint of alien hostility. But to Mach’s surprise, it didn’t come, though he wasn’t naïve enough to believe that it wouldn’t at some point.
 

The viewscreen filled with the ruined scar in the wooded area. “Slow to one percent, follow the tracks. Sanchez, Adira, blast anything that moves and isn’t wearing a CW uniform.”

“Aye, Captain,” both said, giving him a mock salute with their eager smirks.
 

Mach ground his teeth, his jaw muscles pulsing with anticipation.
 

Lassea was doing a fine job of keeping the
Intrepid
steady as it hovered over the chasm created by
Voyager
’s crash landing. It only took a further minute before the damaged craft appeared on the screen.
 

The bulky mining ship looked in decent shape, apart from the rear mid-stern section that had buckled under the impact. For over a quarter of a klick, a stream of debris lay scattered: radio dishes, landing gear that didn’t get a chance to deploy properly, and myriad other parts of the ship.

And then a dozen bodies—or what was left of them.

“Put us down there at the port side of
Voyager
,” Mach ordered.
 

“Consider it done,” Lassea replied.
 

Mach was proud of how quickly she had come along since her first mission with him. Especially considering the stakes of this particular mission. He didn’t credit the CWDF academy for her skill and resilience, though; that came from within her. He’d pushed her hard when she and her brother first joined up with him. She didn’t crack. She thrived and rose to the occasion to the point where he was comfortable giving up the pilot’s role, which had been solely his since his days in the CWDF.
 

She expertly handled the craft, engaging the landing thrusters to lower them slowly into position. The roar of the flames beneath them made the ship judder madly, rattling Mach’s teeth together before he clenched his jaw and anticipated the bump.
 

When they finally set down, their video feed on the viewscreen started to cut out.
 

“What is that?” Mach said, turning his attention to Tulula and Babcock to the right side of the bridge, where they sat at the communications and radio controls. Squid Two flittered about the pair of them, chirping in a concerned manner.
 

“What’s it saying?” Mach asked.
 

Babcock nodded to his little chrome familiar before explaining. “Active denial of radio signals coming from a position beyond the mountains, north of our position. Same thing that interrupted our connection with the drone and the fighter.”

“It’s especially strong,” Tulula added. “I’ve never seen a system quite like it. It’s interrupting across the entire spectrum; the power is incredible. We’re not going to be able to use our suit comms under that barrage.”

“This just gets increasingly more intriguing,” Mach said.
 

“I was thinking annoying,” Adira replied in her deadpan way.
 

“It’s not like you to be upset at us not being able to chitchat,” Mach said, giving her a wink. It wasn’t just for her benefit either. He wanted to make sure the crew kept their spirits up and their sense of curiosity as opposed to trepidation and fear. He needed them to make confident decisions without overly worrying about the consequences. That way led to self-doubt, and self-doubt led to getting a pulse rifle round in the face—or worse.
 

“I think I can clean up some of the interference,” Babcock said, lifting his spectacles and leaning closer to his holocontrol readouts. “The algorithm is a mutable one, which will prevent us from breaking through the signal jam completely anytime soon—not unless this ship has Mankovic Quantum Entity.”

“We don’t,” Mach said, rolling his eyes. The only organization to have one of those was, of course, the Commonwealth.

“None of this sounds like great news to me,” Sanchez growled, his thick eyebrows meeting above the bridge of his nose.
 

“It’s not all bad,” Tulula added with a soft tone. “Because it is shifting, we can possibly gain brief access to certain parts of the band.”

“But we need a signal router to carry out an interception,” Babcock said.
 

Mach sighed impatiently. “I just shoot guns and fly ships, Kingsley. Tell me what you need and let’s get it done. We need to investigate the crash site as soon as possible. Give me a solution.”

“What about Squid Two?” Lassea said.
 

The rest of the crew turned to face her. Mach was about to say that was a crazy idea when Babcock tapped his index finger against his chin and hummed for a moment as he looked up at his little floating companion. The chrome-bodied drone flickered its multiple limbs in a way that seemed to Mach as if imploring something to Babcock.
 

The scientist pointed at Lassea. “You’re more than just a pretty face and a great pilot, my girl. Squid Two would be perfect for this job.”
 

The little device beeped and hummed in what Mach thought wasn’t a polite exchange, given the way Babcock waved his hand at it. “Mach, we’ll send out Squid Two to explore the area. We can use my peer-to-peer transceivers to send back a line-of-sight signal, bypassing most of the jamming effect.”

“Do it,” Mach said. “Can its cameras be patched to the viewscreen?”

Babcock nodded and reached out for his spherical chrome invention. The drone hovered briefly above his hand, its limbs shaking, before setting down on Babcock’s palm. The scientist flipped a two-inch square lid and made some adjustments. Then, he let the drone hover back up again and headed to the bulkhead that led to the rear of the craft.