This Starry Deep (11 page)

Chapter 18 - Jonah

MY NEWFOUND MINIONS scurried around, trying to do the impossible. The problem was, I knew there couldn’t be a way to find a ship, convince the ruling council, gather the population, and evacuate a planet in the time left. I knew it. I just didn’t want to believe it.

There’s losing and then there’s never having a chance. We were deep into the no-chance zone and spiraling down. I was playing King of the Hill without a real point. At best I could save myself and a few of the folks closest here. That would be it. But how could I explain that to them? The answer to that escaped me, and always had. I didn’t like to lose. I liked this even less.

I stood up and kicked over the makeshift throne I’d inherited. Time to cut loses. Damn it. How could an entire operation go this far south this fast? Something didn’t gel right in my mind. I’d have to work it out along the way.

I stood there, feeling every inch of my age. I was a stupid old man who had gotten in the way of something far bigger than he’d suspected. I still had no idea where Shae was, I stood on a planet with a timer running down quickly, and something about the entire thing didn’t add up. I’m sure it could’ve looked worse to me, but I couldn’t see how.

“Hey, you two!” I called out, stopping a few of the Stone Hammer kids who were milling around trying to work out how to do anything I’d asked for. “Let’s focus on the ship, all right, what’ve you got for me?”

I leapt down off the little stage and smiled a false smile at them. They smiled back nervously and just as falsely. Great.

“Nothing, Boss. Off-planet is forbidden, there are no ships,” a kid told me, his shiny shaved head glinting a bit in the flickering light of the hall.

“Not good enough, since when do Stone Hammers listen to the cops? To the Council? No, someone here has a ship and we need to find it.”

Baldy nodded, his face grim, and ran off to talk to a few other people. As he did, a shy girl inched around, her feet shuffling and nervous. She wore a torn-up jumpsuit and had a rag tied around her head. She looked, honestly, like half the nerve-wracked techs I’d worked with. The ones who had answers but didn’t want to tell you because they weren’t the right answers.

“Tell me,” I said, moving to stand directly in front of her.

“Oh, Boss,” a tall, reedy guy interrupted, “you don’t want to listen to Bee. She’s not right, you know?”

“Thanks for that,” I told him, “but I’ll take my chances.” I smiled at the woman, “Bee?”

She looked at me and nodded. I could see courage deep in her eyes, but around here, around here she was the kook. No matter how good her info might be, it wouldn’t improve her standing with the group. She knew it as well as I did.

“Bee, if you got something,” I said, “open your mouth and get it out. If you don’t, stop staring and keep moving.”

“The junkyard,” she managed to get out, “might have something we can use.”

A bunch of people nearby laughed and started to repeat what she said, causing ripples of startled laughter. Me and Bee weren’t joining in. “Might? What kind of might are we talking here, kid?”

“There’s an old hull and some engines out there,” she said, staring at me hard, trying to will me to believe her, not knowing I already did. “We can maybe make them work if we had enough people who tinker…”

I sprang to life. “You heard her, people! We’re headed to the junkyard.” I thought about it a second. “Bee, how big is the hull?”

“Could hold ten or so, probably.”

Ten. Maybe ten people would be all that I could save. Ten people out of an entire planet. Though if I got off with them, once I was back in contact with the rest of the fleet there stood a slim chance of a miracle. Ten it would have to be.

“You find eight people, Bee,” I told her, “folks who can lift this stuff and folks who can fix it, along with you. You can fix it, can’t you?”

She smiled at that and nodded. “We’ve been keeping the rust out of all the best pieces. I once got all the lights to turn on in the hull,” she whispered like it was a great source of pride for her and a secret she wanted to keep.

“Go find us a crew, Bee,” I told her, and I turned to address everyone else. “You will all listen to Bee. I don’t care what you think, but she’s deciding a crew right now to head out to the junkyard and get us off this rock. Disobeying her is like disobeying me, and you saw what happened to your
old
leader, right?”

Actually I’d had to stun him again when no one was looking, just to make sure they continued thinking he was dead. I might be sentencing him to death anyway with this plan, but hopefully he’d wake up, take control again, and have a long life of being a miserable, tiny gang leader to look forward to.

I prodded Bee to round up folks faster and we were off to the junkyard. She led the way, still not used to being in charge of anything at all. We grabbed a few of their vehicles to get there - old, beaten-down things with four huge tires to get over obstacles. There were, of course, plenty of those, but we arrived at the junkyard fast enough, I suppose, considering we didn’t have any time at all.

The place looked like any junkyard I’d ever seen. Piles and piles of rusting metal and despair, lumped together to make a monument to waste. Bee and two others leapt from the transport and ran off, shouting at each other to keep up and giving directions to the rest. I told the convoy to follow them as best we could. Chances were, the parts of our vehicles would be needed. It wasn’t like we were coming back for them.

The techs - well, at least the folks Bee felt were techs - crawled over an old hull that had a small, reverent, junk-free area cleared around it. A quick glance at it didn’t fill me with confidence. The metal tube didn’t look like something that could be made airtight with a month’s worth of work, much less a few hours.

“Are you sure this’ll work?” I asked Bee, nodding at the wreck.

“No,” she said, “but it’s the only hull I’ve ever found around here.” Honesty. It’d have to do.

“Right then!” I yelled. “We don’t have much time so let’s get to work! Bee’s in charge.”

“Uhm,” she said low, “wouldn’t you rather be in charge? You’ve been in these before.”

“In them, yeah, built them from the ground up? Not so often. Just do your best, I’ll be right alongside.”

And I was. I used my Acadian blaster at mid-power, close range, to spot-weld the hull together and repair breaks. We pulled engines from the wheeled transports and mounted them to the inside of the hull. They would power life support and electrics inside.

Bee and her crew split off to find the larger engines they’d toyed with when they were pretty sure no one was watching. I got called over to help drag them back to the hull and mount them. We test fired them, one after the other, more to check whether the batteries worked and make sure the hookups weren’t backward than to see if they would generate enough lift. One of the hookups was reversed, actually, and it almost cost us the engine. We also lost one of our heavy lifting crew in the explosion. We didn’t, thankfully, lose the engine itself.

They were smart kids, all mechanics and tech-heads with obvious affection for what they kept calling antiques, which was fair enough. Soon, the crap old hull started to look like a very old, run-down ship of sorts. The transport engines gave us lights and heat and worked at filling the air tanks. The batteries on the lifting engines had enough charge to get us up with (hopefully) enough left over to move us around decently. My own suit could handle radio communications.

I ran down a mental checklist and it ended up not bad. We might even get to win this one. Spot welds were almost finished and we were loading some cargo, extra bits of machinery just in case, when the screaming began. I stopped work and looked around.

People were pointing up and my heart sank. I followed their points into the sky, where everything flashed red and yellow and white. The invasion had started while we sat on the ground helpless. It also meant that even if we launched, we’d have to go through an invasion fleet that could out-turn and out-pace cutting-edge ships. That cut launch time from somewhere in the next few hours to somewhere in the next five minutes, max.

“Guys, we gotta go!” I yelled, zipping down with my GravPack to find Bee. “They’re here. We gotta go and go now, or we won’t make it.”

“We might not make it anyway, Boss,” she said, full of fear.

“Call me Jonah,” I said without thinking, and added, “We’ll make it.”

“How can we? The ship isn’t ready, we aren’t ready, how can we possibly—”

“Bee, we’ll make it because if we don’t, a lot more planets are going to die this way. We’ll make it because my wife is out there and…you know what, this isn’t the time for speeches. Get everyone on board, I’ll do an outside check and we’re taking off!”

Bee grabbed her tool bag and ran for the hatch, stopping long enough to physically shove each crew member toward the opening as well. I flew around the hull and realized the ready lines hadn’t been disconnected. I started to grab them and rip them free, getting bucked off the hull intermittently by Bee starting a full systems check and launch sequence. Good. She was smart. Even if I didn’t make it inside, she knew enough to take off without me.

The last hose pulled free and I did a final scan, pulling out my blaster to do one last quick weld where I could see the metal bending a bit as the hull pressurized. We’d have to hope it’d all hold. With that, I opened the hatch and dove inside.

Bee and her second, a kid named Kem with a large shock of black hair that stuck up every which way, sat at the controls. I came up behind them and kicked Kem out of his seat, forcing Bee into it as I sat in the pilot’s chair. He pouted a bit, but moved.

“I can do it,” he insisted, hanging around behind Bee.

“I’m sure you can, kid, but let an old man have his kicks.” I wasn’t so sure this ship would even fly, and I didn’t want them at the controls solo if something blew.

The ship rumbled to life and I started a countdown to liftoff when Bee hit my shoulder. “What is it?” I asked, thinking she saw something hurtling toward us.

“The ship doesn’t have a name! It needs a name, isn’t it bad luck to fly without one?” she asked, perfectly serious.

I wanted to laugh but the hell with it, the kid needed something to reassure her. “She thing, Bee, sure. Let’s call her the
Don’t Crash
.”

“That’s a terrible name!” she insisted. I kept readying for takeoff, and asking her for data as I went, but the name issue was keeping her calm and I think we both knew it.

“How about Rust Bucket?” I offered.

“Don’t insult the ship, it’s our only hope.”

“She’s our only hope,” I corrected. “All ships are ‘she,’ just the way it is.”

“Fine, then she shouldn’t be insulted. Why don’t we call her—”

But I cut Bee off as the engines sprang to life beneath us. “Hang on!”

“That’ll do for a name!” she shouted back at me.

“It wasn’t a name, it was an order!” I yelled back, the engines deafening us.

“Well, it’s her name now,” Bee told me before turning around to look at everyone else. “Hang on to something!” she shouted at them.

The ship, apparently now named
Hang On
, lifted out of the junkyard slowly but with determination. Bee and her crew had done it. The question now was whether we would break orbit. We got higher and higher with no worries, and then the invasion force started to show up around us. They didn’t attack right away, unsure of what the hell we could be, I guessed.

Our luck didn’t hold for long, though. The sky around us turned to black, orbit was close enough I could taste it, and the ship lurched as one of the bird ships fired at us. We couldn’t take much of that, maybe not even a second hit. One of our lift engines cut out and the ship started to spiral off to one side. We’d miss an orbit break if we didn’t correct for it, but a correcting course would have to be clean and unhindered.

I rolled the ship around to shift the force and started to correct us when I saw we were aimed right at one of the invading ships. Fine, they could turn fast enough, let him get out of our way. Except he didn’t. The collision didn’t do us any favors, and the dent in the front of the ship was visible from where I sat. It also knocked us back and killed some of our momentum.

“I can reroute our internals to the blown engine and get at least one burst,” Kem shouted in my ear.

“Do it!” I told him. He was a good choice on Bee’s part.

“If he does, what will we breathe?” Bee asked, adding, “We’ll also freeze to death!”

She had a point, but if we didn’t try it, we would fall from the sky like a stone - if we weren’t blown up on the way down. Six of one, might as well try for orbit.

Kem shouted that he had managed it and for us to try the second engine again. It caught and we lifted, straining for the black.

Chapter 19 - Meanwhile

Bercuser drifted, as was its wont. No one knew, off of a chart, what its orbit truly was, or where the planet thought it might be. Not that anyone thought the planet was conscious. Not really. Planets are not conscious beings. Still, if there was one that would be the exception to the rule, that would have to be Bercuser.

Folks not from the planet, those who knew of the planet as more than a legend, told stories of a strange history involving a number of highly questionable scientific experiments. They said, often in hushed tones, that one of the experiments went horribly awry and that the planet itself broke off from reality as a result.

Others thought Bercuser to be one of the lost and fabled Wandering Planets. The first group insisted that the second group agreed with them, even if they didn’t know it, and that those tales were all examples of the same fate that had befallen Bercuser.

No one knew what really had happened. This was, in part, because many maps omitted Bercuser and the stories were told as legends. However, even the military, which did know about Bercuser, held its tongue about why the planet seemed to vanish from one system and appear in another with no obvious pattern.

What no one did was ask the people of Bercuser for a reason. Travel to the planet, when it appeared, was illegal, owing to the fact that no one knew how to get there or where they would be leaving from. There had been military incursions, peaceful and fact finding, throughout the years, but they could only discern two things.

The first, that Bercuser didn’t wander nearly as much as previously thought. How or why it wandered they didn’t understand, but they found only three different places where the planet would appear. People claimed to see the planet all across the galaxy, but truth be told, the planet had three separate orbits it could claim as its own. All three were near each other, system-wise, and though their orbits weren’t fully predictable, they were at least somewhat understood.

The second thing that the military learned was that the people of Bercuser didn’t care one bit about the supposed problems with their planet. They were content to treat the stars above their heads changing in perfectly unaccountable ways as one of life’s mysteries.

The people of Bercuser didn’t try to solve mysteries, in general. They rather enjoyed them. The more obscure the better. On Bercuser, the natives wandered from city to city and continent to continent in a state of openness toward life being a mystery. And by solving life you left yourself with nothing, they figured, so why should you risk solving any mystery much bigger than “Where did I leave my keys?”

Life on Bercuser was not, however, as strange as the classified reports made it seem. People lived and died, ate and slept, and lived as people do. Industry and culture, art and music and writing all, flourished on the planet outside the majority of galactic influence, creating things that no one else did.

Bercusans, as they called themselves, knew of space travel and dabbled in it, but they didn’t care for it overall. Their expeditions had a habit of never returning. This was not, of course, due to their own personal shortcomings. It was wholly due to the planet moving around and the expeditions becoming lost. And so such projects were scarce.

The strange tri-orbit of the planet also affected its weather. No one could predict it decently, and the weather in most areas of Bercuser changed as often as night and day, which were also of varied lengths.

No organized religion existed on Bercuser, the last of them having died out a generation back. Their sense of spirituality, on the other hand, was something that each Bercusan held close. Though they wouldn’t use the term mystics, they often behaved in ways that would be appropriate for the label. They drifted in their lives, accepting what came to them and ascribing many things to the unexplainable without spending much effort to explaining them. Many would predict the future (a few predicting the past instead) using the strange fogs that blanketed most of the planet. The fogs themselves were the result of the oceans being subject to things oceans are not often subject to: the weather, orbit shifting, and everything else about the planet.

Trapping The Fogs was the most popular ways of working out the past, present, and future of Bercuser, and it would be fair to say that every household had at least one Fogger per generation.

They were fairly decent at predicting the future, with a success rate good enough to worry some of the larger Galactic Government, though they also proved to be bizarrely bad about predicting the past.

A number of people on Bercuser started to predict doom around the same time, which worried many of the citizens. Others took it as one of life’s mysteries and waited. No one expected the planet to pop out into one of its orbits in the path of an invasion force. Luckily for them, the invasion force was busy with a different planet just then. Unluckily, the orbit that the planet drifted along would make it too easy a target to pass up. Bercuser’s days were numbered. A few of the citizens knew it. Some of the officials on the planet believed those few and contacted the wider Bercusan Government for assistance, only to find that they were already dealing with the problem to the best of their ability.

Bercuser readied itself for invasion and considered evacuation. They didn’t posses enough ships to get even a noticeable minority of its people off-planet. They also didn’t have weapons of the sort of quantity to fight off a full-scale invasion. Almost no planet did. Planets did not, after all, get invaded, as a general rule.

And so Bercuser found itself simply waiting. Foggers sought to see the future as accurately as possible, and everyone else walked about nervously, watching the skies.