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Literature Text
THE LOST SHUTTLE
“Why me?” Frank Johnson kicked the floor of the Silver Streak’s vast hangar deck. Behind him, the shuttlecraft looked like a huge brick--a description that seemed more than usually apt now. He didn’t see how the craft would ever be able to maneuver, laden with an unreasonable supply of gold. Who measured wealth in gold nowadays anyway?
Well, obviously the colonists in the Omega Sector did. A closely packed group of solar systems in globular cluster M4, the Omega Sector was the Silver Streak’s most unusual colony--or group of colonies. Usually two hundred colonists were sent down to a planet to start a new life; but here, three separate planets had been colonized, and although each had its own government, their economic system was based on the mining of rich asteroids by private ventures. Whose idea that was Frank didn’t know. Certainly not Captain Cameron’s; Richard Cameron didn’t know the difference between an economic system and a zoo. Since each colony had its own independent government, it couldn’t have been any one of them. The Silver Streak had only colonized this area two years ago, so it was unlikely to have evolved naturally over time.
But whatever the case, the sector was in crisis. Frank didn’t know all the details, but he knew that the Jehovah Mining Asteroid had fallen short on its quota, and if it failed to ship the promised supply of gold to Eleanor VII, Rogan IX, and Dockwell IV, the economy of the sector would be thrown into chaos.
The solution? Typical Captain Richard Cameron: cheat. Frank would haul this supply of gold to the Jehovah Mining Asteroid for the miners to ship out under the pretense of it having been mined there. Where had the gold come from? Frank didn’t know. There wasn’t that much aboard ship, he knew that. It wasn’t fake; that would be detected right away.
Probably that brilliant scientist Philippe Stargazer had learned to transform lead into gold. Or Jack Hasta had found some asteroid made out of solid gold. It didn’t matter. All Frank Johnson knew was that he wasn’t looking forward to setting off all by himself in a shuttlecraft weighed down by a thousand pounds of gold while the Silver Streak flew off to attend to the sector’s other political crises.
Captain Richard Cameron came down to the hangar deck to see Frank off.
Frank just had one pertinent question: “Is this a dangerous mission?”
In his usual flippant way, Cameron said, “Oh, no, not at all.”
Not exactly reassuring; Cameron didn’t think black holes were dangerous. But Frank knew he had no choice. “Oh, okay good. See you later.”
“Later, Frank.”
Frank climbed into the shuttle. The gold was stacked in crates that filled the small cabin. It was really an insane way to fly. But Frank knew that was why he had been assigned to this mission; he was the best pilot Cameron knew. Jack Hasta could have done it, but Jack’s skills were needed at the helm of the Silver Streak. There were plenty of accomplished fighter pilots on board, but Cameron knew Frank’s skills firsthand; and moreover, this was a secret mission, so Cameron needed someone in his top tier. Frank understood the reasoning, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
He squeezed past the crates to the pilot’s seat. “Boy, when he said packed with gold, he really meant packed.”
He pivoted the shuttle so that it faced the launch tube, fired up the main engines, and pushed the translation hand controller forward. The shuttle hurtled down the launch tube and into a sky ablaze with stars.
Behind him, the thousand-foot length of the Silver Streak dropped away until it was no more than a barely discernable speck... then it was lost in the brilliance of the globular cluster.
Frank Johnson was on his own in a wild and dangerous sector of the galaxy.
And his troubles were just about to begin.
* * *
It was strange to walk onto the bridge without Frank Johnson. It seemed that wherever Cameron went, Frank was always there. Sometimes it was annoying to have his first officer forever beside him, questioning his every decision--but now, as he prepared to set sail across the stars, leaving his closest friend and confidant to navigate a small shuttle through a wild and unpredictable solar system, it occurred to Cameron how much he relied on Frank. He sat in his command chair, feeling lonely and vulnerable. “Report?”
Jack Hasta, who never seemed bothered by anything, boomed in his grating, guttural voice, “Frank’s shuttle is away.”
“All right, then, take us off toward the perimeter of the quadrant.”
Jack huffed. “Okay.”
Jack didn’t like such vague directions. It was easier to navigate a spacecraft when one knew the precise destination. Gravity didn’t know about sectors or quadrants; all gravity knew was where the massive bodies were, and that was what the Silver Streak, as a massive body, responded to. Yes, the course computer knew where the “perimeter of the quadrant” was, but the ship would still respond differently depending on whether there was a planet, star, space station, or absolutely nothing there.
But this mission was one of those unfortunate times when politics, rather than science or engineering, governed the ship’s course. The command crew of the Space Star Silver Streak had little use for politics. Cameron was a lifelong pilot who cared for nothing more than the freedom of flight; to him politics (and economics) was no more than an excuse to restrict freedom. Jack Hasta was a pilot and an engineer; he didn’t understand the power incorporeal ideas held over people. If he couldn’t put his hands on it, it didn’t exist. Philippe Stargazer was a scientist, all scientist. Politicians rarely had use for science, since it frequently made discoveries they found inconvenient for their political ends; Stargazer was baffled by denial of facts--it was no surprise, therefore, that he and Jack Hasta were the best of friends. Really, the whole bridge crew was close-knit, perhaps more so than most people would consider usual. Perhaps it was the circumstances--you don’t leave your home planet behind to be vaporized by a supernova without forming some close bonds of friendship. But given the dire stakes of their mission to colonize planets after the destruction of the Earth, it was certainly no surprise that they had little patience for politics.
But unfortunately the Silver Streak’s Civilian Section was run by politicians, as were the colonies. And so Cameron had to steer his ship not through unexplored space in search of unimagined mysteries, but through an already colonized sector in search of political compromises which would satisfy small-minded idiots in search of short-term gain.
Philippe Stargazer was an easygoing man, slow to anger, usually so absorbed in his science that he paid little attention to the goings-on around him, but Cameron detected some impatience in his thick French voice as he asked, “How long is this going to take?”
“It shouldn’t take too long. We’ll be back to pick him up before he can say ‘help!’”
“Why would he say ‘help’?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe he’ll spot a spider or something.”
“Oh.”
“On course,” Jack growled.
“All right, light speed factor one.”
“Factor one.”
As the distortion envelope squeezed spacetime into a bubble through which the Silver Streak could appear to travel faster than light, Cameron thought of his friend, trundling along by himself in a shuttle packed with the commodity on which this sector’s trade depended, and it occurred to him that this mission might be more dangerous than he had pretended.
* * *
If only I could keep this gold for myself. Frank Johnson grinned as he indulged in his fantasy. What could anyone do about it if he simply never showed up at the Jehovah Mining Asteroid? If he simply flew off to Eleanor VII and cashed in some of the gold for a big tract of land, used the rest to live a luxuriant life for all his days to come... escape from his monotonous duties, those tiresome planetary landings, and missions like this...
Not that he would ever actually do it, of course, but it was fun to ponder. Oh, well, life must have its quirks.
And one of those quirks presented itself sooner than he would have wished. The shuttle’s long-range sensor had picked up the Jehovah Mining Asteroid, but now the sensor had gone blank. Frank tapped it--not a terribly productive solution, but an instinctive one--then double checked his star readings. The external star tracker gave him a match on his original course instructions, but the virtual star tracker was blank. That ruled out the possibility of a sensor malfunction; someone was jamming his navigation systems.
Abruptly the radio came to life. “Space shuttlecraft ahead, respond.”
Frank checked the system and frequency; it was instafeed 22--short-range and photon-specific. No one could pick up what was said. “This is Shuttlecraft One from the Silver Streak, First Officer Frank Johnson speaking.”
“You’re surrounded by a fleet of fighters. You cannot escape. Our weapons are aimed against you.”
“Fighters?” Frank couldn’t verify that claim by his blank sensors, but out the window he saw the sparkle of a hull reflecting the sunlight of the nearest primary. Looking around, he saw other glints of light. He couldn’t make out the ships’ configuration, but under the circumstances he figured he’d better believe the voice for the present. “Who am I speaking to?”
“I’m Croft, leader of a gang of pirates.”
Croft. That name was familiar, but Frank couldn’t place it. “Pirates? Uh-oh...”
“You’d better say ‘uh-oh.’ We know about the delivery you’re making, and it’s my job not to let you make that delivery. I think we understand each other.”
“Yeah... we understand each other, Mr. Croft.”
“Well, good, I’m glad you do. Then you follow our directional vector and nobody will get hurt.”
“I see. Where are we going?”
“Never mind that. We’re just going. Is that understood?”
Frank bit his cheek. “Yeah, I guess... yeah, it is, sure. Uh-huh. Yeah.”
New course instructions had appeared on the navigation screen. Frank glanced out the window and saw the nearest ship more clearly, glinting and sparkling in the sunlight. It was a fighter, a standard Silver Streak ZR-130 Interceptor. As Frank watched, its engines came to life and it pulled ahead, its engines blazing with incandescence.
Croft’s aristocratic voice crackled with impatience. “Then let’s go. Move it!”
The shuttle had no chance against fighters. He knew he’d better obey. He punched in the new course instructions and pushed the translation hand controller forward.
* * *
MacCrosky wiped a lock of his black hair out of his eye, bouncing unconsciously in the slight gravity of the Jehovah Mining Asteroid. Here in the headquarters pod, things were a bit more comfortable than in the tunnels; at least the rock walls were covered with paneling, the ventilation was cool, and there was no flying solder or scalding rock fragments that could gouge out an eye. But despite the more pleasant physical atmosphere, MacCrosky would rather be in the tunnels. At least the miners were nice people--singing their traditional songs, joking, laughing, bonding in the way that men in physical labor had done since time began.
But here in the office of Nathan Rugsby, things were different. Here it was the cold machinations of economics that drove things, not the hardy camaraderie of an honest day’s work. And Nathan Rugsby himself was the most unpredictable, temperamental man MacCrosky had ever worked with.
Rugsby sat, stroking the bristles on his chin as though his obsessively trimmed beard was a pet, staring at his computer screen as though it contained the prophecy of his death. To his narrow mind, perhaps it did.
MacCrosky swallowed. “Mr. Chairman?”
Rugsby did not raise his eyes from his screen. Still petting his beloved beard, he said in his most imperious tone, “Yeah?”
“That shuttlecraft that was delivering supplies to us, it’s gone.”
“Gone?” Fortunately Rugsby’s voice remained mild; MacCrosky had feared one of his violent explosions.
“It was directed off-course, presumably by those pirates.”
With his free hand, Rugsby minimized whatever he was looking at. His other hand increased the affectionate doting on his beard. “All right, prepare a pursuit craft. Lock onto its fuel trails. We’re going to pursue.”
MacCrosky knew he was inviting trouble by questioning the chairman’s orders, but he also knew that even Rugsby had to answer to the Trade Regulator. “Are you sure that would be wise?”
“If we don’t catch these pirates, they’re going to continue to raid and plunder this asteroid until we have nothing left. Now, we have a quota to meet, and if we don’t have that gold, we don’t meet that quota--and I personally don’t like it when we don’t have our quota met.”
MacCrosky could have done without the melodramatic threat. Sometimes Rugsby sounded a little too much like one of the stereotypical mine lords from the old VR fantasies.
Growing impatient, Rugsby finally removed his hand from his beard, brought it down on his desk. “Now, prepare the pursuit craft!”
“Yes, sir.” MacCrosky hurried out of the office, unsure what kind of “pursuit craft” the chairman wanted. The shuttles were too slow to catch pirates, the cargo ships too vulnerable. Only Rugsby’s private yacht was truly up to the task, but surely he didn’t want that precious vehicle used. Well, perhaps a shuttle would do. It would be good enough to track the lost shuttle’s fuel trails; that, after all, was what Rugsby had ordered.
Oh, how MacCrosky missed working on the Silver Streak--working under rational people.
* * *
Frank Johnson had no idea where he was landing. The directional coordinates he had been given led him to a green planet that grew ahead of him until he was flying over a forest. Then there was a tilled field--no towns or cities, just what appeared to be a farm. It didn’t matter where he was, the important thing was that he land as soon as possible and slip away before the pirates could catch him. He could recover the gold later--maybe.
He threw the antigravity force field to full and nulled his forward velocity. The fighters shot ahead of him and he carefully lowered the shuttle to a landing. By the time the fighters backtracked, he would be long gone--he hoped.
The shuttle’s hatch opened and he peeked cautiously out. No sign of the pirates yet. He glanced over at the pilot’s console. “The emergency distress beacon.” He reached over, opened a checkered panel, and twisted a key. The shuttle would now be transmitting a beacon which would alert the Silver Streak that he was in trouble. No details, just a general cry for help. “That’s it, I’m outta here!”
Bent low, he ran through the overgrown, dry grass toward a structure he had spotted from the air. He had seen no sign of activity; if this was a farm, it had likely been abandoned. From what he knew of the warped economic system in this sector, the place had probably been farmed dry and the inhabitants moved on to the next planet.
But on the other hand, there might still be people living here. And if so, he could only hope they would help him rather than turn him in.
* * *
Harrison Croft was not a man who liked disobedience--whether on the part of his captives or his crew. When the shuttlecraft had suddenly braked and begun descending, he knew exactly what the pilot was up to; in fact, he had expected it. Unfortunately, not knowing exactly when Johnson would pull his clever little trick, it was impossible to do anything about it. He could only hope his prey was still inside the shuttlecraft.
Pushing ahead of his men, he peered through the open hatch. “He’s gone, but the gold is all here.”
“Yeah, a lot of good that will do us,” Takashima said. “He’s going to report our names, and once somebody knows our names, they’ll be able to come out after us--and that’ll be the end of your government position.”
Croft shot Takashima a warning glare. His government position was never to be discussed. “All right, then, let’s go find him. Come on!”
* * *
Frank Johnson had lost all sense of mission. He didn’t care at the moment what happened to the shuttle or the gold; he was interested only in eluding the pirates. He hoped they would be more interested in the gold than in him, but he had no interest in sticking around to find out. As he ducked through the tall grass, he heard the crunching and rustling of footfalls, heard the faint sound of human voices. But he found the farmhouse he had been seeking. From first glance it was obvious the place was deserted. A portion of the roof had caved in. The front window was shattered. Vines had grown up one whole side of the structure. It was hard to believe so much deterioration had occurred in the short time since this planet had been colonized.
But no matter the state of the house, it was a place to hide. Frank threw the front door open; it creaked loudly on rusted hinges. The interior was a maze of cobwebs and moth-eaten carpeting. Debris from the fallen roof littered the dusty floor. Frank crept through the room, past a rocking chair that seemed to be disintegrating into dust, and through a large doorway into what might once have been a dining room. “Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?” It was a courtesy; the place looked deserted, but you never knew. There was no answer.
Another doorway led into a modern kitchen. There was a table and chairs, but no freezer or proteinator. Not only was no one home, but there wasn’t much chance he could feed himself here. No, he would have to survive on his own until reinforcements arrived from the Silver Streak--which hopefully wouldn’t be long.
There was an open door that led to darkness. Stepping closer to it, he saw that it led down. Possibly to a wine cellar? There was a switch on the wall, but when he threw it nothing happened. Too dark down there for him to risk climbing down that lengthy staircase, especially with the condition this house was in.
He turned to continue his exploration, then froze.
Something had snaked into the kitchen from the direction of the dining room; a knobby head on the end of a long, silver, ropy body. At first he thought it was some sort of native animal, but then he recognized it--a dextroscope! The knobby head was actually a 3D camera. The long, ropy body was an artificial tentacle that connected the eye to a control mechanism outside. It was a sophisticated periscope, capable of probing around like a robot submarine on a tether. Someone out there was searching for him.
The camera’s only disadvantage was limited field of vision; despite its fisheye lens, he didn’t think it had sighted him. He dove under the table. He didn’t think these devices had audio receptors, but he tried to make as little noise as possible.
From the ball came the distorted voice of Croft. “Come out. We know you’re in there.”
If it can speak, maybe it can hear after all. Frank froze, said nothing.
“Come out!”
Or what? You’ll blow the house up?
Frank saw only one way out. Beside the table was a door that appeared to lead outside. When the eye was turned away from him, he could run for it.
He sat, waiting, hearing his heart pounding in his ear like a bass drum. The camera probed around the table, scanning back and forth, and moved toward the door to the cellar. Frank was about to pounce for the door, but then the camera stopped. The snaky tether had reached its maximum length. Slowly, the ball began to retreat. Holding still in his crouched position under the table, Frank watched with his eyes only. In the dim light, the camera couldn’t make out too many details; with any luck he was lost in blackness--unless it had infrared.
But now he saw the telltale on the ball was off. The operator had shut the camera down.
This was his chance. He sprang from under the table, toward the door. The unlatched door swung open with a mighty shriek. He found himself on a terraced porch. Three steps led down onto an overgrown lawn. He ran toward the shelter of an awning that ran along a bare path toward a set of shrubs that appeared to demarcate the lawn. Once clear of the awning, he was back in the tall grass. He saw no sign of the pirates.
Gasping for breath, his heart pounding, he ran, darting back and forth in as unpredictable and haphazard a pattern as he could.
Suddenly the earth gave beneath him. Soil, grass, dry leaves, and a hapless Frank Johnson plunged into a fifteen-foot-deep pit, and as he landed squarely on his tailbone, dirt poured in like rain to bury him alive.
* * *
“Dick?”
“Yeah, what is it, Stargazer?”
“I am picking up a disaster beacon.”
Cameron leaned forward. “Disaster beacon?”
“Yes, from Frank’s shuttle.”
“Could he have crashed?”
“I guess it is possible, but it is not coming from the area which he was sent into. In fact, it is nowhere near that mining asteroid.”
“Where is it coming from?”
Stargazer’s fingers moved over his touch-sensitive console. The three-dimensional image of the stars on screen switched to a chart of the Omega sector. Another touch on the console and a red mark appeared to the lower right. Cameron remembered surveying this area and if he was thinking of the right planet, it was a lovely little place with an oxygen atmosphere and a variety of plant and animal life compatible with human metabolism.
Jack huffed, gesturing at the screen with a flick of his wrist. “What’s he doing in that area? That idiot!”
Knowing Frank’s disdain for missions, Cameron doubted that his first officer would deliberately prolong or complicate his mission--not unless he had decided to ditch the shuttle and run away from the Silver Streak. But what Frank Johnson lacked in enthusiasm he made up for in loyalty. Cameron knew Frank would never do anything like that, no matter how tempting it might be. “He could be in trouble. If he’s setting off the disaster beacon, then... well, then, let’s go. Set course.”
Jack sighed. All those carefully calculated maneuvers and orientation checks lost. He recalculated the ship’s position, modified the course for a delta vee and a three-hour course to Omega XVIII, and to show his displeasure he let out a rude belch before answering, “Course set.”
“Light speed factor one.”
“One?”
“That’s right, we don’t want to overshoot.”
Jack growled. “All right.” He modified the course again, calculating a new, twenty-seven-hour trajectory.
As the distortion envelope loosened, reducing the ship’s evident speed to merely the speed of light, Stargazer said, “The chances of our overshooting are rather slim.”
Under his breath, Jack muttered, “I’ve never overshot anything, not by a fraction of an inch.”
“Yes, but if he’s in trouble we want to move slowly, so that we don’t run into the same danger.”
Jack laughed. “Slowly. Yeah, the speed of light is slowly. Hmph. Modern technology.”
“It could be anything,” Cameron went on.
“That is a good point,” Stargazer said.
Cameron sat back and watched the main screen as the star pattern shifted in that weird, kaleidoscopic way as the ship pivoted within its distortion envelope. He recalled telling Frank that this wasn’t a dangerous mission; now he felt like a liar and a traitor.
* * *
At the moment, Frank Johnson was not thinking about Richard Cameron’s broken promises. He was thinking more about his broken back. Gasping, he drew up his knees--okay, no broken back, but he wasn’t so sure about all his ribs. He took a few cautious breaths. No pain, no wheezing, no blood... Okay, he was none the worse for wear.
Sort of.
He stood, brushing dirt and leaves from his filthy, torn uniform. He saw no way out of this trap. If he tried to climb the walls, the soil would just collapse further.
Of course, as the soil collapsed, the bottom of the hole would raise; he might be able to gradually fill in the hole until he could scramble out.
A shadow passed over him. He looked up and saw a silhouetted figure. There was no mistaking its posture; a sidearm was pointed his way. But the voice, Frank was relieved to note, was not Croft’s. “All right, this is an authentic Silver Streak sidearm. Now, you stand up and you put your hands over your head.”
Frank moved to obey, but then the figure above jerked.
“Drop your weapon!”
He saw then that his sidearm had slipped halfway out of his pocket, his spread fingers primed to grasp it. It might well have looked as though he were reaching for the weapon. He nudged the sidearm and allowed it to fall into the leaves. He raised his hands. “All right, you’ve caught me, now just don’t shoot.”
“I’m not going to shoot. Now, you climb up out of there ever so gently.”
“I can’t!”
A rope ladder slipped from somewhere above, its wooden rungs flopping against Frank’s face. “Use the ladder.”
“Oh.” Frank gripped the ladder and climbed, half-expecting it to come loose from wherever it was moored and dump him once again into an undignified heap. But it held as he climbed up. As he poked his head into sunlight, he saw that the ladder was attached to the open hatch of a standard shuttlecraft. Cupping his hands over his eyes, he took in his opponent; a short, somewhat plump, red-faced man with an evenly trimmed beard. “Now, you’re under arrest,” the man said, still pointing the sidearm at him.
“Under arrest? For what?”
“I’m Nathan Rugsby, chairman of the Jehovah Mining Operation. You are under arrest for hijacking a shuttle carrying gold that would have helped us meet our quota.”
“I was flying that shuttle. I was the pilot.”
“Oh, you were the pilot? Mm-hmm.” Rugsby stroked his beard with something uncomfortably akin to affection. “And you dragged it off course. Well, I’m going to need to question you. Now, you come with me.”
Frank was outraged. What had been described to him as a simple and straightforward mission had turned into first a struggle for survival and now some sort of bureaucratic mess. As first officer of the Silver Streak, he didn’t have to take this. “My shuttle is off that way, it’s probably being pilfered by space pirates!”
Rugsby, evidently not accustomed to being second-guessed, turned a deep red and shouted, “We’ll check that out later! In the meantime I’m presuming that you are a pirate! I’ve never seen your face before.”
“I’m Frank Johnson!”
If the name meant anything to Rugsby, he gave no indication. He simply gestured with his sidearm. “Follow me. Come on!”
Frank huffed, then marched angrily toward the shuttle. Soon the Silver Streak would arrive to respond to his distress beacon, only to find an empty shuttle. What could be easily resolved would inevitably turn into a comedy of errors.
* * *
Harrison Croft wasn’t sure whether the clever pilot had avoided detection by the dextroscope or if he really wasn’t in the house. Croft had been sure he’d seen tracks leading there. Of course he’d seen the arrival and departure of Nathan Rugsby’s shuttle, but its visit had been too brief for him to think much of it. “Try around the back of the house!”
“I’ve found something!”
Croft perked his ears. Drawing his sidearm, he ran around the farmhouse, unconscious of Takashima following him.
Lyra Rini was standing over a disturbance in the soil. Nearby was the unmistakable square patch marking the spot where Rugsby’s shuttle had set down. He ran to Lyra’s side. “What’s going on?”
Takashima stepped up to the depression in the soil. “We’ve found a hole here.”
It was one of the oldest traps in human history; twigs and leaves cover a hole that traps a hapless victim who happens to come blundering along; Rugsby hadn’t had time to set this trap, so it must have been set by the former owners of this farmhouse, perhaps to trap pirates such as himself. The pilot had simply been unlucky. “He must’ve fallen into it. Who could have caught him? Did anybody here catch him?”
His fellow pirates shuffled around, trying not to be noticed.
“He might have been caught by Chairman Rugsby,” Takashima said. “I’m sure Jehovah was monitoring the flight and knew that the shuttle strayed off course.”
“Well, then, he’s detained. Maybe Rugsby thinks... let’s get back to that shuttle and get that gold.”
“What if he reveals our names?” Takashima asked. “You recall what will happen.”
Yes, Croft recalled what would happen. Did Takashima continually have to remind him of the obvious? “Of course I recall what will happen! All right, back to your fighters! We’re going to pursue all the way to the asteroid! Now!” The gold would still be here later. Right now the priority had to be stopping that pilot from revealing Croft’s name. And if in the meantime the Jehovah Mining Operation was destroyed, so much the better. Then Croft could collect the gold from here and become the distributor for the Omega Sector.
* * *
“So this is the Jehovah Mining Asteroid.” Frank Johnson had spent so much time in the one-gee environment of the Silver Streak and the close-to-one-gee environments of Earth-type planets, it was disconcerting to bounce in the negligible gravity of this tumbling rock. “Very impressive atmospheric controls.”
Here they were, standing outside Rugsby’s command post, unprotected, breathing the envelope of air that hugged the asteroid. Frank only hoped the outer force field screened out the solar radiation as efficiently as it kept in the air.
“Yes, we’re able to actually create and sustain an atmosphere around the asteroid.” Rugsby’s momentary pride in his technological accomplishments abruptly vanished and his temper boiled over. “Now, I didn’t bring you here to explain the science behind it!” He grabbed Frank by the back of his collar and shoved him through an open door into the command post.
Rugsby followed, shoved past Frank toward an open door at the end of the dimly lit hallway. “Sit down!”
“Where?”
“Never mind! Come on in here!”
It was a bare office. A desk with a softscreen, some charts on the walls showing (Frank presumed) the various mineshafts, and a door leading out into a cavern; the entrance to the mine, Frank guessed.
Rugsby kicked at a chair. “Now, sit in that chair!”
Frank sat.
“You have the right to remain silent...” Rugsby trailed off.
As the chief of a mining operation, Rugsby had no authority to arrest anyone, and now, to Frank’s amusement, the chairman evidently didn’t even remember the Miranda/Greenwald/Chi-Ho Rights. “Well... I don’t know your rights,” the chairman muttered. “Anyway, we have something very important we have to talk about.”
Rugsby was interrupted by a blaring siren. A light in the corner of the office flashed, alternating red to yellow to red.
Frank stood. “What’s going on?”
Rugsby rushed to the window. “A raid by space pirates!”
Frank approached Rugsby from behind. The chairman was so absorbed by what he was watching, Frank realized he could chop the man’s shoulder and run for it. But there would be no point; he would inevitably be caught by security. In any case, Rugsby was legally in charge here; Frank’s most logical course of action would be to prove that he really was the first officer of the Silver Streak and really had been forced down by pirates.
Then there was a flash. No beam was visible in the vacuum, but as soon as it intersected the force field the air molecules came to life with a white blaze. It was eerie to see the air over the rocky surface suddenly come to life with ghostly streaks as the fighters cruised overhead in solemn silence. Portions of the craggy rocks--they were too small to properly be called “mountains”--burst into slag. It was surreal to watch orange blossoms of fire mushroom into the air on what looked so much like an airless rock--and then to see them flatten out like thunderheads as they reached the upper boundary of the artificial atmosphere.
Rugsby turned from the carnage and shouted to his aide, “Man all weapons turrets! All anti-aircraft guns on maximum!”
“What’s happening here?” Frank cried. “What’s going on?”
“All right, so maybe you’re not a space pirate. Where did you leave your shuttle?”
Frank felt like whacking Rugsby across the back of his head. He wondered if this was how Captain Cameron felt when he had to deal with the Congressional Council. “On that planet! Omega XVIII!”
“Do you know the names of any of the pirates?”
Frank chewed his cheek, thinking. Yes, he was sure the commander had mentioned his name... assuming he’d been using his real name. “Yes, I do.”
“All right, then, tell me!”
“The leader’s name was Croft.”
“Croft?! Harrison Croft?”
“I didn’t get his first name.”
As though he hadn’t heard him, Rugsby raged on. “Are you kidding?! He’s the chief adviser to the governor of Eleanor VII!”
You can read the rest of this story in VOYAGE INTO THE UNKNOWN: VOLUME FOUR...
voyageintotheunknown.deviantar…
“Why me?” Frank Johnson kicked the floor of the Silver Streak’s vast hangar deck. Behind him, the shuttlecraft looked like a huge brick--a description that seemed more than usually apt now. He didn’t see how the craft would ever be able to maneuver, laden with an unreasonable supply of gold. Who measured wealth in gold nowadays anyway?
Well, obviously the colonists in the Omega Sector did. A closely packed group of solar systems in globular cluster M4, the Omega Sector was the Silver Streak’s most unusual colony--or group of colonies. Usually two hundred colonists were sent down to a planet to start a new life; but here, three separate planets had been colonized, and although each had its own government, their economic system was based on the mining of rich asteroids by private ventures. Whose idea that was Frank didn’t know. Certainly not Captain Cameron’s; Richard Cameron didn’t know the difference between an economic system and a zoo. Since each colony had its own independent government, it couldn’t have been any one of them. The Silver Streak had only colonized this area two years ago, so it was unlikely to have evolved naturally over time.
But whatever the case, the sector was in crisis. Frank didn’t know all the details, but he knew that the Jehovah Mining Asteroid had fallen short on its quota, and if it failed to ship the promised supply of gold to Eleanor VII, Rogan IX, and Dockwell IV, the economy of the sector would be thrown into chaos.
The solution? Typical Captain Richard Cameron: cheat. Frank would haul this supply of gold to the Jehovah Mining Asteroid for the miners to ship out under the pretense of it having been mined there. Where had the gold come from? Frank didn’t know. There wasn’t that much aboard ship, he knew that. It wasn’t fake; that would be detected right away.
Probably that brilliant scientist Philippe Stargazer had learned to transform lead into gold. Or Jack Hasta had found some asteroid made out of solid gold. It didn’t matter. All Frank Johnson knew was that he wasn’t looking forward to setting off all by himself in a shuttlecraft weighed down by a thousand pounds of gold while the Silver Streak flew off to attend to the sector’s other political crises.
Captain Richard Cameron came down to the hangar deck to see Frank off.
Frank just had one pertinent question: “Is this a dangerous mission?”
In his usual flippant way, Cameron said, “Oh, no, not at all.”
Not exactly reassuring; Cameron didn’t think black holes were dangerous. But Frank knew he had no choice. “Oh, okay good. See you later.”
“Later, Frank.”
Frank climbed into the shuttle. The gold was stacked in crates that filled the small cabin. It was really an insane way to fly. But Frank knew that was why he had been assigned to this mission; he was the best pilot Cameron knew. Jack Hasta could have done it, but Jack’s skills were needed at the helm of the Silver Streak. There were plenty of accomplished fighter pilots on board, but Cameron knew Frank’s skills firsthand; and moreover, this was a secret mission, so Cameron needed someone in his top tier. Frank understood the reasoning, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
He squeezed past the crates to the pilot’s seat. “Boy, when he said packed with gold, he really meant packed.”
He pivoted the shuttle so that it faced the launch tube, fired up the main engines, and pushed the translation hand controller forward. The shuttle hurtled down the launch tube and into a sky ablaze with stars.
Behind him, the thousand-foot length of the Silver Streak dropped away until it was no more than a barely discernable speck... then it was lost in the brilliance of the globular cluster.
Frank Johnson was on his own in a wild and dangerous sector of the galaxy.
And his troubles were just about to begin.
* * *
It was strange to walk onto the bridge without Frank Johnson. It seemed that wherever Cameron went, Frank was always there. Sometimes it was annoying to have his first officer forever beside him, questioning his every decision--but now, as he prepared to set sail across the stars, leaving his closest friend and confidant to navigate a small shuttle through a wild and unpredictable solar system, it occurred to Cameron how much he relied on Frank. He sat in his command chair, feeling lonely and vulnerable. “Report?”
Jack Hasta, who never seemed bothered by anything, boomed in his grating, guttural voice, “Frank’s shuttle is away.”
“All right, then, take us off toward the perimeter of the quadrant.”
Jack huffed. “Okay.”
Jack didn’t like such vague directions. It was easier to navigate a spacecraft when one knew the precise destination. Gravity didn’t know about sectors or quadrants; all gravity knew was where the massive bodies were, and that was what the Silver Streak, as a massive body, responded to. Yes, the course computer knew where the “perimeter of the quadrant” was, but the ship would still respond differently depending on whether there was a planet, star, space station, or absolutely nothing there.
But this mission was one of those unfortunate times when politics, rather than science or engineering, governed the ship’s course. The command crew of the Space Star Silver Streak had little use for politics. Cameron was a lifelong pilot who cared for nothing more than the freedom of flight; to him politics (and economics) was no more than an excuse to restrict freedom. Jack Hasta was a pilot and an engineer; he didn’t understand the power incorporeal ideas held over people. If he couldn’t put his hands on it, it didn’t exist. Philippe Stargazer was a scientist, all scientist. Politicians rarely had use for science, since it frequently made discoveries they found inconvenient for their political ends; Stargazer was baffled by denial of facts--it was no surprise, therefore, that he and Jack Hasta were the best of friends. Really, the whole bridge crew was close-knit, perhaps more so than most people would consider usual. Perhaps it was the circumstances--you don’t leave your home planet behind to be vaporized by a supernova without forming some close bonds of friendship. But given the dire stakes of their mission to colonize planets after the destruction of the Earth, it was certainly no surprise that they had little patience for politics.
But unfortunately the Silver Streak’s Civilian Section was run by politicians, as were the colonies. And so Cameron had to steer his ship not through unexplored space in search of unimagined mysteries, but through an already colonized sector in search of political compromises which would satisfy small-minded idiots in search of short-term gain.
Philippe Stargazer was an easygoing man, slow to anger, usually so absorbed in his science that he paid little attention to the goings-on around him, but Cameron detected some impatience in his thick French voice as he asked, “How long is this going to take?”
“It shouldn’t take too long. We’ll be back to pick him up before he can say ‘help!’”
“Why would he say ‘help’?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe he’ll spot a spider or something.”
“Oh.”
“On course,” Jack growled.
“All right, light speed factor one.”
“Factor one.”
As the distortion envelope squeezed spacetime into a bubble through which the Silver Streak could appear to travel faster than light, Cameron thought of his friend, trundling along by himself in a shuttle packed with the commodity on which this sector’s trade depended, and it occurred to him that this mission might be more dangerous than he had pretended.
* * *
If only I could keep this gold for myself. Frank Johnson grinned as he indulged in his fantasy. What could anyone do about it if he simply never showed up at the Jehovah Mining Asteroid? If he simply flew off to Eleanor VII and cashed in some of the gold for a big tract of land, used the rest to live a luxuriant life for all his days to come... escape from his monotonous duties, those tiresome planetary landings, and missions like this...
Not that he would ever actually do it, of course, but it was fun to ponder. Oh, well, life must have its quirks.
And one of those quirks presented itself sooner than he would have wished. The shuttle’s long-range sensor had picked up the Jehovah Mining Asteroid, but now the sensor had gone blank. Frank tapped it--not a terribly productive solution, but an instinctive one--then double checked his star readings. The external star tracker gave him a match on his original course instructions, but the virtual star tracker was blank. That ruled out the possibility of a sensor malfunction; someone was jamming his navigation systems.
Abruptly the radio came to life. “Space shuttlecraft ahead, respond.”
Frank checked the system and frequency; it was instafeed 22--short-range and photon-specific. No one could pick up what was said. “This is Shuttlecraft One from the Silver Streak, First Officer Frank Johnson speaking.”
“You’re surrounded by a fleet of fighters. You cannot escape. Our weapons are aimed against you.”
“Fighters?” Frank couldn’t verify that claim by his blank sensors, but out the window he saw the sparkle of a hull reflecting the sunlight of the nearest primary. Looking around, he saw other glints of light. He couldn’t make out the ships’ configuration, but under the circumstances he figured he’d better believe the voice for the present. “Who am I speaking to?”
“I’m Croft, leader of a gang of pirates.”
Croft. That name was familiar, but Frank couldn’t place it. “Pirates? Uh-oh...”
“You’d better say ‘uh-oh.’ We know about the delivery you’re making, and it’s my job not to let you make that delivery. I think we understand each other.”
“Yeah... we understand each other, Mr. Croft.”
“Well, good, I’m glad you do. Then you follow our directional vector and nobody will get hurt.”
“I see. Where are we going?”
“Never mind that. We’re just going. Is that understood?”
Frank bit his cheek. “Yeah, I guess... yeah, it is, sure. Uh-huh. Yeah.”
New course instructions had appeared on the navigation screen. Frank glanced out the window and saw the nearest ship more clearly, glinting and sparkling in the sunlight. It was a fighter, a standard Silver Streak ZR-130 Interceptor. As Frank watched, its engines came to life and it pulled ahead, its engines blazing with incandescence.
Croft’s aristocratic voice crackled with impatience. “Then let’s go. Move it!”
The shuttle had no chance against fighters. He knew he’d better obey. He punched in the new course instructions and pushed the translation hand controller forward.
* * *
MacCrosky wiped a lock of his black hair out of his eye, bouncing unconsciously in the slight gravity of the Jehovah Mining Asteroid. Here in the headquarters pod, things were a bit more comfortable than in the tunnels; at least the rock walls were covered with paneling, the ventilation was cool, and there was no flying solder or scalding rock fragments that could gouge out an eye. But despite the more pleasant physical atmosphere, MacCrosky would rather be in the tunnels. At least the miners were nice people--singing their traditional songs, joking, laughing, bonding in the way that men in physical labor had done since time began.
But here in the office of Nathan Rugsby, things were different. Here it was the cold machinations of economics that drove things, not the hardy camaraderie of an honest day’s work. And Nathan Rugsby himself was the most unpredictable, temperamental man MacCrosky had ever worked with.
Rugsby sat, stroking the bristles on his chin as though his obsessively trimmed beard was a pet, staring at his computer screen as though it contained the prophecy of his death. To his narrow mind, perhaps it did.
MacCrosky swallowed. “Mr. Chairman?”
Rugsby did not raise his eyes from his screen. Still petting his beloved beard, he said in his most imperious tone, “Yeah?”
“That shuttlecraft that was delivering supplies to us, it’s gone.”
“Gone?” Fortunately Rugsby’s voice remained mild; MacCrosky had feared one of his violent explosions.
“It was directed off-course, presumably by those pirates.”
With his free hand, Rugsby minimized whatever he was looking at. His other hand increased the affectionate doting on his beard. “All right, prepare a pursuit craft. Lock onto its fuel trails. We’re going to pursue.”
MacCrosky knew he was inviting trouble by questioning the chairman’s orders, but he also knew that even Rugsby had to answer to the Trade Regulator. “Are you sure that would be wise?”
“If we don’t catch these pirates, they’re going to continue to raid and plunder this asteroid until we have nothing left. Now, we have a quota to meet, and if we don’t have that gold, we don’t meet that quota--and I personally don’t like it when we don’t have our quota met.”
MacCrosky could have done without the melodramatic threat. Sometimes Rugsby sounded a little too much like one of the stereotypical mine lords from the old VR fantasies.
Growing impatient, Rugsby finally removed his hand from his beard, brought it down on his desk. “Now, prepare the pursuit craft!”
“Yes, sir.” MacCrosky hurried out of the office, unsure what kind of “pursuit craft” the chairman wanted. The shuttles were too slow to catch pirates, the cargo ships too vulnerable. Only Rugsby’s private yacht was truly up to the task, but surely he didn’t want that precious vehicle used. Well, perhaps a shuttle would do. It would be good enough to track the lost shuttle’s fuel trails; that, after all, was what Rugsby had ordered.
Oh, how MacCrosky missed working on the Silver Streak--working under rational people.
* * *
Frank Johnson had no idea where he was landing. The directional coordinates he had been given led him to a green planet that grew ahead of him until he was flying over a forest. Then there was a tilled field--no towns or cities, just what appeared to be a farm. It didn’t matter where he was, the important thing was that he land as soon as possible and slip away before the pirates could catch him. He could recover the gold later--maybe.
He threw the antigravity force field to full and nulled his forward velocity. The fighters shot ahead of him and he carefully lowered the shuttle to a landing. By the time the fighters backtracked, he would be long gone--he hoped.
The shuttle’s hatch opened and he peeked cautiously out. No sign of the pirates yet. He glanced over at the pilot’s console. “The emergency distress beacon.” He reached over, opened a checkered panel, and twisted a key. The shuttle would now be transmitting a beacon which would alert the Silver Streak that he was in trouble. No details, just a general cry for help. “That’s it, I’m outta here!”
Bent low, he ran through the overgrown, dry grass toward a structure he had spotted from the air. He had seen no sign of activity; if this was a farm, it had likely been abandoned. From what he knew of the warped economic system in this sector, the place had probably been farmed dry and the inhabitants moved on to the next planet.
But on the other hand, there might still be people living here. And if so, he could only hope they would help him rather than turn him in.
* * *
Harrison Croft was not a man who liked disobedience--whether on the part of his captives or his crew. When the shuttlecraft had suddenly braked and begun descending, he knew exactly what the pilot was up to; in fact, he had expected it. Unfortunately, not knowing exactly when Johnson would pull his clever little trick, it was impossible to do anything about it. He could only hope his prey was still inside the shuttlecraft.
Pushing ahead of his men, he peered through the open hatch. “He’s gone, but the gold is all here.”
“Yeah, a lot of good that will do us,” Takashima said. “He’s going to report our names, and once somebody knows our names, they’ll be able to come out after us--and that’ll be the end of your government position.”
Croft shot Takashima a warning glare. His government position was never to be discussed. “All right, then, let’s go find him. Come on!”
* * *
Frank Johnson had lost all sense of mission. He didn’t care at the moment what happened to the shuttle or the gold; he was interested only in eluding the pirates. He hoped they would be more interested in the gold than in him, but he had no interest in sticking around to find out. As he ducked through the tall grass, he heard the crunching and rustling of footfalls, heard the faint sound of human voices. But he found the farmhouse he had been seeking. From first glance it was obvious the place was deserted. A portion of the roof had caved in. The front window was shattered. Vines had grown up one whole side of the structure. It was hard to believe so much deterioration had occurred in the short time since this planet had been colonized.
But no matter the state of the house, it was a place to hide. Frank threw the front door open; it creaked loudly on rusted hinges. The interior was a maze of cobwebs and moth-eaten carpeting. Debris from the fallen roof littered the dusty floor. Frank crept through the room, past a rocking chair that seemed to be disintegrating into dust, and through a large doorway into what might once have been a dining room. “Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?” It was a courtesy; the place looked deserted, but you never knew. There was no answer.
Another doorway led into a modern kitchen. There was a table and chairs, but no freezer or proteinator. Not only was no one home, but there wasn’t much chance he could feed himself here. No, he would have to survive on his own until reinforcements arrived from the Silver Streak--which hopefully wouldn’t be long.
There was an open door that led to darkness. Stepping closer to it, he saw that it led down. Possibly to a wine cellar? There was a switch on the wall, but when he threw it nothing happened. Too dark down there for him to risk climbing down that lengthy staircase, especially with the condition this house was in.
He turned to continue his exploration, then froze.
Something had snaked into the kitchen from the direction of the dining room; a knobby head on the end of a long, silver, ropy body. At first he thought it was some sort of native animal, but then he recognized it--a dextroscope! The knobby head was actually a 3D camera. The long, ropy body was an artificial tentacle that connected the eye to a control mechanism outside. It was a sophisticated periscope, capable of probing around like a robot submarine on a tether. Someone out there was searching for him.
The camera’s only disadvantage was limited field of vision; despite its fisheye lens, he didn’t think it had sighted him. He dove under the table. He didn’t think these devices had audio receptors, but he tried to make as little noise as possible.
From the ball came the distorted voice of Croft. “Come out. We know you’re in there.”
If it can speak, maybe it can hear after all. Frank froze, said nothing.
“Come out!”
Or what? You’ll blow the house up?
Frank saw only one way out. Beside the table was a door that appeared to lead outside. When the eye was turned away from him, he could run for it.
He sat, waiting, hearing his heart pounding in his ear like a bass drum. The camera probed around the table, scanning back and forth, and moved toward the door to the cellar. Frank was about to pounce for the door, but then the camera stopped. The snaky tether had reached its maximum length. Slowly, the ball began to retreat. Holding still in his crouched position under the table, Frank watched with his eyes only. In the dim light, the camera couldn’t make out too many details; with any luck he was lost in blackness--unless it had infrared.
But now he saw the telltale on the ball was off. The operator had shut the camera down.
This was his chance. He sprang from under the table, toward the door. The unlatched door swung open with a mighty shriek. He found himself on a terraced porch. Three steps led down onto an overgrown lawn. He ran toward the shelter of an awning that ran along a bare path toward a set of shrubs that appeared to demarcate the lawn. Once clear of the awning, he was back in the tall grass. He saw no sign of the pirates.
Gasping for breath, his heart pounding, he ran, darting back and forth in as unpredictable and haphazard a pattern as he could.
Suddenly the earth gave beneath him. Soil, grass, dry leaves, and a hapless Frank Johnson plunged into a fifteen-foot-deep pit, and as he landed squarely on his tailbone, dirt poured in like rain to bury him alive.
* * *
“Dick?”
“Yeah, what is it, Stargazer?”
“I am picking up a disaster beacon.”
Cameron leaned forward. “Disaster beacon?”
“Yes, from Frank’s shuttle.”
“Could he have crashed?”
“I guess it is possible, but it is not coming from the area which he was sent into. In fact, it is nowhere near that mining asteroid.”
“Where is it coming from?”
Stargazer’s fingers moved over his touch-sensitive console. The three-dimensional image of the stars on screen switched to a chart of the Omega sector. Another touch on the console and a red mark appeared to the lower right. Cameron remembered surveying this area and if he was thinking of the right planet, it was a lovely little place with an oxygen atmosphere and a variety of plant and animal life compatible with human metabolism.
Jack huffed, gesturing at the screen with a flick of his wrist. “What’s he doing in that area? That idiot!”
Knowing Frank’s disdain for missions, Cameron doubted that his first officer would deliberately prolong or complicate his mission--not unless he had decided to ditch the shuttle and run away from the Silver Streak. But what Frank Johnson lacked in enthusiasm he made up for in loyalty. Cameron knew Frank would never do anything like that, no matter how tempting it might be. “He could be in trouble. If he’s setting off the disaster beacon, then... well, then, let’s go. Set course.”
Jack sighed. All those carefully calculated maneuvers and orientation checks lost. He recalculated the ship’s position, modified the course for a delta vee and a three-hour course to Omega XVIII, and to show his displeasure he let out a rude belch before answering, “Course set.”
“Light speed factor one.”
“One?”
“That’s right, we don’t want to overshoot.”
Jack growled. “All right.” He modified the course again, calculating a new, twenty-seven-hour trajectory.
As the distortion envelope loosened, reducing the ship’s evident speed to merely the speed of light, Stargazer said, “The chances of our overshooting are rather slim.”
Under his breath, Jack muttered, “I’ve never overshot anything, not by a fraction of an inch.”
“Yes, but if he’s in trouble we want to move slowly, so that we don’t run into the same danger.”
Jack laughed. “Slowly. Yeah, the speed of light is slowly. Hmph. Modern technology.”
“It could be anything,” Cameron went on.
“That is a good point,” Stargazer said.
Cameron sat back and watched the main screen as the star pattern shifted in that weird, kaleidoscopic way as the ship pivoted within its distortion envelope. He recalled telling Frank that this wasn’t a dangerous mission; now he felt like a liar and a traitor.
* * *
At the moment, Frank Johnson was not thinking about Richard Cameron’s broken promises. He was thinking more about his broken back. Gasping, he drew up his knees--okay, no broken back, but he wasn’t so sure about all his ribs. He took a few cautious breaths. No pain, no wheezing, no blood... Okay, he was none the worse for wear.
Sort of.
He stood, brushing dirt and leaves from his filthy, torn uniform. He saw no way out of this trap. If he tried to climb the walls, the soil would just collapse further.
Of course, as the soil collapsed, the bottom of the hole would raise; he might be able to gradually fill in the hole until he could scramble out.
A shadow passed over him. He looked up and saw a silhouetted figure. There was no mistaking its posture; a sidearm was pointed his way. But the voice, Frank was relieved to note, was not Croft’s. “All right, this is an authentic Silver Streak sidearm. Now, you stand up and you put your hands over your head.”
Frank moved to obey, but then the figure above jerked.
“Drop your weapon!”
He saw then that his sidearm had slipped halfway out of his pocket, his spread fingers primed to grasp it. It might well have looked as though he were reaching for the weapon. He nudged the sidearm and allowed it to fall into the leaves. He raised his hands. “All right, you’ve caught me, now just don’t shoot.”
“I’m not going to shoot. Now, you climb up out of there ever so gently.”
“I can’t!”
A rope ladder slipped from somewhere above, its wooden rungs flopping against Frank’s face. “Use the ladder.”
“Oh.” Frank gripped the ladder and climbed, half-expecting it to come loose from wherever it was moored and dump him once again into an undignified heap. But it held as he climbed up. As he poked his head into sunlight, he saw that the ladder was attached to the open hatch of a standard shuttlecraft. Cupping his hands over his eyes, he took in his opponent; a short, somewhat plump, red-faced man with an evenly trimmed beard. “Now, you’re under arrest,” the man said, still pointing the sidearm at him.
“Under arrest? For what?”
“I’m Nathan Rugsby, chairman of the Jehovah Mining Operation. You are under arrest for hijacking a shuttle carrying gold that would have helped us meet our quota.”
“I was flying that shuttle. I was the pilot.”
“Oh, you were the pilot? Mm-hmm.” Rugsby stroked his beard with something uncomfortably akin to affection. “And you dragged it off course. Well, I’m going to need to question you. Now, you come with me.”
Frank was outraged. What had been described to him as a simple and straightforward mission had turned into first a struggle for survival and now some sort of bureaucratic mess. As first officer of the Silver Streak, he didn’t have to take this. “My shuttle is off that way, it’s probably being pilfered by space pirates!”
Rugsby, evidently not accustomed to being second-guessed, turned a deep red and shouted, “We’ll check that out later! In the meantime I’m presuming that you are a pirate! I’ve never seen your face before.”
“I’m Frank Johnson!”
If the name meant anything to Rugsby, he gave no indication. He simply gestured with his sidearm. “Follow me. Come on!”
Frank huffed, then marched angrily toward the shuttle. Soon the Silver Streak would arrive to respond to his distress beacon, only to find an empty shuttle. What could be easily resolved would inevitably turn into a comedy of errors.
* * *
Harrison Croft wasn’t sure whether the clever pilot had avoided detection by the dextroscope or if he really wasn’t in the house. Croft had been sure he’d seen tracks leading there. Of course he’d seen the arrival and departure of Nathan Rugsby’s shuttle, but its visit had been too brief for him to think much of it. “Try around the back of the house!”
“I’ve found something!”
Croft perked his ears. Drawing his sidearm, he ran around the farmhouse, unconscious of Takashima following him.
Lyra Rini was standing over a disturbance in the soil. Nearby was the unmistakable square patch marking the spot where Rugsby’s shuttle had set down. He ran to Lyra’s side. “What’s going on?”
Takashima stepped up to the depression in the soil. “We’ve found a hole here.”
It was one of the oldest traps in human history; twigs and leaves cover a hole that traps a hapless victim who happens to come blundering along; Rugsby hadn’t had time to set this trap, so it must have been set by the former owners of this farmhouse, perhaps to trap pirates such as himself. The pilot had simply been unlucky. “He must’ve fallen into it. Who could have caught him? Did anybody here catch him?”
His fellow pirates shuffled around, trying not to be noticed.
“He might have been caught by Chairman Rugsby,” Takashima said. “I’m sure Jehovah was monitoring the flight and knew that the shuttle strayed off course.”
“Well, then, he’s detained. Maybe Rugsby thinks... let’s get back to that shuttle and get that gold.”
“What if he reveals our names?” Takashima asked. “You recall what will happen.”
Yes, Croft recalled what would happen. Did Takashima continually have to remind him of the obvious? “Of course I recall what will happen! All right, back to your fighters! We’re going to pursue all the way to the asteroid! Now!” The gold would still be here later. Right now the priority had to be stopping that pilot from revealing Croft’s name. And if in the meantime the Jehovah Mining Operation was destroyed, so much the better. Then Croft could collect the gold from here and become the distributor for the Omega Sector.
* * *
“So this is the Jehovah Mining Asteroid.” Frank Johnson had spent so much time in the one-gee environment of the Silver Streak and the close-to-one-gee environments of Earth-type planets, it was disconcerting to bounce in the negligible gravity of this tumbling rock. “Very impressive atmospheric controls.”
Here they were, standing outside Rugsby’s command post, unprotected, breathing the envelope of air that hugged the asteroid. Frank only hoped the outer force field screened out the solar radiation as efficiently as it kept in the air.
“Yes, we’re able to actually create and sustain an atmosphere around the asteroid.” Rugsby’s momentary pride in his technological accomplishments abruptly vanished and his temper boiled over. “Now, I didn’t bring you here to explain the science behind it!” He grabbed Frank by the back of his collar and shoved him through an open door into the command post.
Rugsby followed, shoved past Frank toward an open door at the end of the dimly lit hallway. “Sit down!”
“Where?”
“Never mind! Come on in here!”
It was a bare office. A desk with a softscreen, some charts on the walls showing (Frank presumed) the various mineshafts, and a door leading out into a cavern; the entrance to the mine, Frank guessed.
Rugsby kicked at a chair. “Now, sit in that chair!”
Frank sat.
“You have the right to remain silent...” Rugsby trailed off.
As the chief of a mining operation, Rugsby had no authority to arrest anyone, and now, to Frank’s amusement, the chairman evidently didn’t even remember the Miranda/Greenwald/Chi-Ho Rights. “Well... I don’t know your rights,” the chairman muttered. “Anyway, we have something very important we have to talk about.”
Rugsby was interrupted by a blaring siren. A light in the corner of the office flashed, alternating red to yellow to red.
Frank stood. “What’s going on?”
Rugsby rushed to the window. “A raid by space pirates!”
Frank approached Rugsby from behind. The chairman was so absorbed by what he was watching, Frank realized he could chop the man’s shoulder and run for it. But there would be no point; he would inevitably be caught by security. In any case, Rugsby was legally in charge here; Frank’s most logical course of action would be to prove that he really was the first officer of the Silver Streak and really had been forced down by pirates.
Then there was a flash. No beam was visible in the vacuum, but as soon as it intersected the force field the air molecules came to life with a white blaze. It was eerie to see the air over the rocky surface suddenly come to life with ghostly streaks as the fighters cruised overhead in solemn silence. Portions of the craggy rocks--they were too small to properly be called “mountains”--burst into slag. It was surreal to watch orange blossoms of fire mushroom into the air on what looked so much like an airless rock--and then to see them flatten out like thunderheads as they reached the upper boundary of the artificial atmosphere.
Rugsby turned from the carnage and shouted to his aide, “Man all weapons turrets! All anti-aircraft guns on maximum!”
“What’s happening here?” Frank cried. “What’s going on?”
“All right, so maybe you’re not a space pirate. Where did you leave your shuttle?”
Frank felt like whacking Rugsby across the back of his head. He wondered if this was how Captain Cameron felt when he had to deal with the Congressional Council. “On that planet! Omega XVIII!”
“Do you know the names of any of the pirates?”
Frank chewed his cheek, thinking. Yes, he was sure the commander had mentioned his name... assuming he’d been using his real name. “Yes, I do.”
“All right, then, tell me!”
“The leader’s name was Croft.”
“Croft?! Harrison Croft?”
“I didn’t get his first name.”
As though he hadn’t heard him, Rugsby raged on. “Are you kidding?! He’s the chief adviser to the governor of Eleanor VII!”
You can read the rest of this story in VOYAGE INTO THE UNKNOWN: VOLUME FOUR...
voyageintotheunknown.deviantar…
Frank Johnson sets off on a mission into a wild section of the galaxy where numerous mining outposts have been established--all at war with one another.
© 2014 - 2024 VoyageIntotheUnknown
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