A Scout's tale

[Blue Ghost]

Richard Aston walked over to the poachers. Dead or unconscious, he couldn’t be sure, and he couldn’t recall his training to tell whether they were alive or not. As far as he was concerned, they were motionless, and might as well be dead for what they had tried to do to him.

It was an odd scene. The green dragon had waded into deeper waters to submerge itself momentarily, only to clamber up back on shore to shake off the moisture. A bit singed from what Aston guessed was acid, but none the worse for wear, unlike his sparring partner who was nearly immolated on a fine partially cloudy day.

Near the poachers was a large burlap sack. Several in fact, the size of potato sacks, but not as lumpy. In fact they were quite round. He pulled out his pocket knife and cut one open, when in the background he heard once more the sound of air rafts descending on his position. Several in fact, and with uniformed and armored starport security. And, for whatever reason, they ignored the big green dragon that came ambling up to their position.

As expected, mister “I’m here, and I want everyone to know about it” Herbineaux was with them, complete with his portly body and red hair. Again, he wasn’t a bad man, just a bit big for his britches; physically and emotionally.

Aston glanced at them and cut open the sack to reveal a large round mammoth sized egg. And, as if on cue, the shell was cracking open from within. A sharp beak like snout with two flared nostrils shattered the rest of the shell to reveal a young baby dragon that, aside from the beak, looked much like their larger green counterpart. It didn’t take a zoologist to make the connection.

And that’s when Aston figured he had been had once more. Ever since his going after the little Aslan boy in the cave some years back, he had been thrust into these situations unwittingly. He figured at some point they would come to an end. Then again …

“Good work, Richard.” Herbineaux was all smiles as he hopped down from the lead air raft. The other three unloaded starport security all the while another grav vehicle, a G-carrier, hummed onto the scene. More men in armor, more imperial sunbursts, more weapons, more handcuffs and zip ties. A medic assessed whether each one was dead or alive.

And that’s when Aston felt something rub against his leg. He looked down, and a wide eyed dino-child, cute for a dragon, was holding onto Aston’s leg and staring up at him with those same child like eyes. And, of course, the rest of the eggs were hatching, which meant for Aston to take out his knife once more and cut each sack open to reveal a new borne.

Aston looked at Herbineaux sheepishly, and gave him his best grimace, but Herbineaux was unfazed and continued his self satisfying smile as he then went off to exchange words with the local game warden and head of starport security.

The parent green dragon grunted to get Aston’s attention. Aston turned around and saw it staring at him with its head lying down on the grass, like a dog resting its head. For some reason Aston was able to understand what this thing wanted as it grinned at him from ear to ear. More self satisfaction, but almost as if Aston had passed some kind of test, though he wasn’t sure what for.

The other new borne dragons seem to flock to their parent, save for the one that found Aston so appealing. Aston locked gazes and smiles with the big green beast, and somehow seemed to understand that he was this newborn’s parent, or would be for the next year.

And what a year it was. At first Herbineaux and the rest of the crew couldn’t even see Aston’s new companion. Given the inaudible communication he had had with the mother or father dragon (whichever sex it was), it wasn’t until a month or so later that Aston realized that this world’s dragons were psionically talented. Apparently invisibility was an innate trait to newborns to help protect them from being devoured by other fauna, namely other breeds of dragons as well as poachers.

Over the next year deployed with Herbineaux and various crews, the thing grew to the size of a small cat, would alight on Aston’s shoulders, then to the size of a great dane, when once on a suitable planet, the crew were shocked to find it curled up on Aston’s bed in his cabin.

The separation was a sorrowful one, but also strangely joyous. Apparently this was how the species spread itself. And as payment it looked after Aston as much as he had looked after it until it was large enough to fend for itself. This particular dragon had a thing for hamburgers, fries and shakes, and fortunately, unlike other domesticated animals, wasn’t ravenous when it ate, but rather clean and well mannered. Still, it was another mouth too feed, and Aston was both heartbroken and happy when it revealed that it had found a new home and had to leave, but also very glad that he could help on several levels.

He stood on a world outside the Imperium, on a lush garden world with a type-E port, and watched the thing fly off into the distance, turning around to say its final farewell. A year had gone by, and the likes of Lady Lovelace, murderous poachers, mythological creatures come to life, and the clash of dragons on a medieval like grassy plain, were now a distant memory.

Not quite the story book ending he had expected, but one that perhaps suited him best.


The End

 

[Blue Ghost]

So, I actually had a Mad Max like story all ready to go, but it just struck me as kind of hokey and wonky ... out of place and out of character for Aston given what I was having him do in the thing ... though Vash really shined. This is just something that I started, and it seems pretty good to me. I'm not sure where it's going, though I had an idea of where I wanted it to go. But whether it does or doesn't achieve my goal for the thing is anyone's guess. Writing is an exploration. Whenever I write something it's always a new path forged. Not always. Sometimes I have a clear vision of what I want to write. Other times no. But here, I have a definite idea of how I wanted to start it, a good idea of what I would like it to go, but again, where it will actually wind up is something that I don't even know yet. It may end in a huge starship battle, wind up on a dinosaur planet ... maybe the sun'll go nova...I'm not sure More reasonably it'll end more or less kind of the way I want it to, but the trip there will be an adventure.

Cyborg Crisis

Captain Richard Aston stood on the balcony of Jewell’s startown Marriot, overlooking the many spires, domes, rectangles and pyramids that constituted the city scape, as a bright yellow orange sun set the sky and high stratospheric clouds afire with brilliant crimson, deep orange and yellow light. Jewell was listed as having a tainted yet breathable atmosphere, largely due to the high amounts of pollution spewed by the many industrial zones around the world. There had been efforts to clean the atmosphere, however the upshot of air heady with pollutants was that the particulate matter gave the world some of the most breathtaking sunsets Aston had ever seen. The whole sky was a rainbow of fiery colors rimmed with various graduating shades of blue. Nearer still, between him and the system’s star, were the luminal patchwork quilt of office and apartment lights, suddenly dotting small sub-cubicles as Jewell's central star dipped further below the horizon.

Dressed in his duty vest, a light shirt, cargo pants and service beret instead of his usual baseball cap, Aston clasped his hands, leaning on the railing as he looked out over the cityscape. Underneath his feat the sloping grade of hotel rooms extended outwards further and further, conforming to the hotel's pyramidal architecture, until the gilded gates leading to the ground traffic drive way stretched out to paved boulevards below.

Above the city streets were the usual streams of grav vehicles, regulated to specific tiers that constituted traffic corridors, mirroring much of the road network below. Occasionally an air-raft would break the rules to try and take a short cut, but there were enough automated grav-bots to give citations to make the effort an expensive gamble at best—one that could cost the operator his license and vehicle, depending on the number of infractions to his name.

Jewell itself was a hub of intrigue. It was almost about as close as one could get to Zhodani space without actually leaving the Imperium. Not entirely true. One jump over were Ruby and Emerald, sister systems of Jewell, each a naval and military stronghold against what Aston often heard referred to as “the evil mind flayers of the consulate proletariat”. Like all things, it all depended on the rhetoric one listened to.

Aston had no personal love for the Zhodani, nor did he really hate them for any reason. The truth was he had no real experience with the Zhodani, save one romantic interlude with a trim red head. She was a few inches shorter than him, slim, beautiful, though not really his type for any permanent relationship. Their interlude had been brief, and when she learned Aston was originally from Terra, over two years distant on the other side of Imperial space, she had become even more intrigued to learn about Earth, and specifically whether his fellow team mates, like Vash, were really an Imperial experiment to augment the emperor’s military. Again, it all depended on the rhetoric one listened to.

The wives’ tales on both sides of the border were thick, though Aston understood that perhaps Zho-space allegedly had a more open society when it came to information on its citizens. Not that he agreed with it, nor even believed it or the ramifications thereof, but that was the popular image the Consulate liked to give themselves. Aston figured the truth lay a few shades of gray underneath. As for him, he preferred privacy and other people not knowing what he was thinking or desired. Eolan, the red head in question, had been a psionic, or so he concluded. She did seem to know what he was thinking on occasion. At the time he chalked it up to female intuition, but a few years later, a few intelligent briefs under his belt, and he was a bit more wiser for the experience. He began to understand the resentment, though again he felt no real hatred for her or her talent.

Anti-psionic protests, on the other hand, tended to turn into violent demonstrations. Figures burned in effigy, riot police and riot droids were called out to surround the Zhodani embassy and consular general’s home during times of high tension. But it didn’t always stop mob violence, even knowing there was a permanent police presence around both embassy and apartments.

But Aston wasn’t a hardened veteran of the Marches, even though he had spent a good deal of time here in recent months. He understood the prejudices against Vash and Eolan, some of which were rationalized, but most of which were just the usual dislike for anyone different. And now he had an appreciation for the fear that sometimes crept into Vash’s persona.

Vash had been a bit freer, more open and more relaxed when in the heart of the Imperium. Even in Geonee, the heart of egotistical human space, he had a certain relaxed savoir-faire, but here he was both a bit more guarded, a bit more bold, and perhaps a bit more on edge. Not quite his old self, as if he had to prove something to whoever took a dislike to him, or was on guard for anyone who might express that said same dislike. Aston had to remind himself that the Zhodani often used Vargr as proxy forces against the Imperium, and that was on top of the usual commerce raiding by Vargr pirates (corsairs) that took place so often that it was just another crime statistic on the news, and hardly made headlines any more.

As such there was a natural suspicion and hatred for Vargr among certain social circles. Aston figured it had been that way for most minority populations throughout history. Whoever was on the bottom rung of the social ladder was given that societies dirty thankless jobs, and whatever disdain went along with the occupation. Yet for all that Aston often heard Vash tell him that he preferred human space to the comparative chaos of the Extents.

Vash’s own family had been political dissidents from a military dictatorship that didn’t exist anymore, and had probably been called several other names since its dissolution. Such were the Extents and their political mercurial existence. The fact that Vargr had a propensity for being disagreeable, a reputation for being undisciplined (largely false given their ability to build things like starships and vast urban metroplexes), and being criminals by way of raiding Imperial commerce, didn’t help Vash and other Vargr citizens, even though Vash himself wore his majesties uniform, was himself polite, and was normally in the company of other humans who also wore the Imperial sunburst. But for some humans the only good Vargr was a dead Vargr, and that was that.

Aston had found that out the hard way when he tried to defend his friend against a barrage of insults, but no amount of reasoning could penetrate the bigot’s curtain wall of prejudice. Even if Vash had rescued them from a burning building or some other disaster, they would only recognize Vash’s valor for the moment, and even then begrudgingly. In the end Aston was ridiculed and laughed at, and he wasn’t sure what their anger was against Vargr until he had spent more time in Regina space.

Well, Aston wasn’t a Sylean, he certainly wasn’t a Vargr, nor was he a Sword Worlder and definitely not a Zho. Yet all these people and others thrived here under a kind of social tension that he hadn’t seen since he was a teenager back on Terra, just before he joined the scouts and left for places unknown. So it was that Aston concluded that not just humans, but indeed people, regardless of species, had their own set of criteria for what was right, and to heck with everything else. Not everyone, but it certainly seemed like most people had the same prejudices wherever they went.

He heard the hotel room door open to reveal Vash and Alice Borro, the ship’s nurse, Amy Blancke and Greg Haswell, the senior team leader for this op. Each held two bags full of groceries. Vash seemed particularly pleased with a broad grin that bared his two canine incisors as he set down two brown bags and one plastic bag that had something other than groceries, but no less delicious--or so Aston guessed.

“You’ll never guess what I found downstairs outside the hotel entrance.” Vash announced as he unfurled the white plastic bag on the counter to reveal four chili dogs and a six pack of soda.

Aston came back inside, closing the sliding glass door, when another knock sounded on the door. Captain Haswell re-opened to door to reveal, the senior science officer for this assignment Samuel Reitman with his own armload of groceries, who then proceeded to the kitchen and jockeyed to find counter space.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aston couldn’t help but laugh, “I thought you guys just went out to get a few things.”

Vash picked up a chili dog and soda, and handed them to Aston, “Beware of Vargr bearing gifts.” He mused.

Aston furled his brow and smiled, “I didn’t know you read ancient Earth literature.”

Vash shrugged, “Eh, Homer’s a bit deeper than what my own people call classic literature. There's only so many times you can read about the great hunt. Eat up, oh wait! Here’s some cheese!” Vash was quick with a bag of mixed sharp cheddar and mozzarella, sprinkling some on Aston’s dog and his own, before sitting down to take a bight. “I can’t get enough of this stuff.”

Aston couldn’t disagree there as he bit into the wondrous flavor of meat, cheese, bread and tomato sauce which was adorned with spicy meat and beans. Delicious. Aston savored the mouthful, and then washed it down with a sweet refreshment.

Being on Jewell was like being home again, but for some reason, as Aston sat there between Vash and Amy while the news scrolled and flashed on the wall display, he felt restless. There was a whole galaxy to explore, some of which he had sampled. But he wanted more, yet right now his mind and subconscious told him that it was important to spend some down time in a major city with all of civilization’s familiar trappings.

Fast food, chili dogs in this case, major sporting events that ran the gamut from amateur to major leagues to motor sports, museums, restaurants, theatres, traffic, smog, ill tempered drivers, homelessness, graffiti and whatever else that constituted contemporary urban society.

Aston loved living on starships and travelling to new worlds, but downtime was something to be savored. He had seen his share of alien critters and environments for a while. And even though tensions were running high between the Imperium and the Zhos, Jewell was still a friendly port of call.

“Amy,” Haswell rummaged through the grocery bags, “where’s the ice cream?”

Amy Blancke was the ship’s science officer for this op, also with a specialty in cybernetics. Her job for the hop to the store was to grab desert. Aston had been voted out of the position because of his propensity for pastry and pies. The rest of the crew wanted variety instead of the same old Boston Chocolate Cream pie every night, a recipe that, like many things from Earth, had woven its way into the fabric of Ancient transplanted humanity across the Imperium and beyond. The same desert every night wore on Aston’s ship mates, ergo Amy's assignment to the position.

“I thought you got it?” Amy asked, ending a phrase as a question, a thing that annoyed Aston on occasion. Though right now he was smirking. He may have gotten the same desert every night, but he never forgot it.

“Ice cream?” Vash wondered out loud. "Is that like a chili dog?

Aston stifled a laugh, “No, not quite.”, then grinned impishly, “Less cheese.”

Vash perked his ears and hummed with intrigue, always up for a new flavor of human food. He then shrugged his shoulders and started on his second chili dog, only to perk his ears again, “You hear that?”

Aston wiped his mouth and washed down his meal with a soda, “Hear what?”

Vash licked his chops, straightened his posture and looked out the sliding door, “There’s a crowd gathering out there.”

It was Amy’s turn, “Hey, isn’t that our hotel?”

All looked at the screen showing a shot of the Marriot’s opulent front entrance with a gathering throng. A female field reporter looked into the camera and spoke about the gathering of protestors on Market and Main, the two avenues intersected the Marriot's northwest corner; “The main theme is anti AI, or pro-wetware, or pro-wets as some call themselves. Their main line of rhetoric states that biological evolution is superior to engineered electronic sentients. Their message is that they want the emperor to not give full citizenship status to legally recognized artificial sophonts. They say that Ay-Eyes will take away what biologics have, and will seek to dominate biological life forms. Now, there is a counter-demonstration taking place not more than a block away down Market street, where a mixture of humans and artificial intelligent beings are hoping to gather enough people to spread what they say is a more peaceful message of embracing what they call humanti’s offspring. The Metro PD and mayor are asking for backup from neighboring law enforcement as a precautionary measure. So far things are very verbal, but otherwise peaceful.”

Aston sat there on his bed with the rest of the crew standing or sitting at the coffee table, mesmerized at the sight or people getting worked up over robots and androids. It brought back memories of when MAX had been assigned to his crew, and his propensity for Terran folk song. MAX was still part of the IISS, though Aston was unsure of his status. A lot of the time sophont mechanicals were paraded as mechanical slaves for the pro-mech AI faction in politics. Not really true, nor untrue on a purely factual basis, but the term "slave" was often tossed about in media sound bights. Most AI didn’t have nerves nor desires, but had a basic programming that made them intelligent and compatible with humans. Max, to Aston, had been a friendly mechanical that was fun to have around, but he wasn’t sure he would call him a being of any kind. But then he thought about it some more, and wasn’t sure if he would deny the status to Max. Aston simply didn't know where he stood on the issue.

Regardless, both sides of the subject often fought, and the reporter on the screen raised the specter of a clash by quoting more police concerns. Then there was another faction, anti-psionic protesters who were trying to attach their movement with the anti-AI crowd.

“This looks ugly.” Haswell finally stated, voicing everyone’s unspoken concerns.

Reitman rummaged through the bags to pull up two quarts of chocolate chip mint. "Who grabbed this?"

Aston looked at Haswell who had a good twenty years on him, “Please tell me this isn’t another one of those ‘throw Aston into the pit’ again assignments … is it?”

“This,” Haswell ignored him and gestured at the screen, “was not part of the plan.”

“It’s getting bigger.” Vash commented. “People and mechanicals. Lots of ‘em down a block.”

Aston turned to Vash, “How come you can hear people in a city a mile away, but when we’re out in the field you get caught off guard more often than me?”

Vash levelled a cool gaze at Aston, “Are you saying I have selective hearing?”

“I’m not saying anything, I’m just saying…”

The first explosion sounded like a loud fire work than the terrorist bomb that it was. The second explosion had more kick, and the third explosion was distant clap a block away. Smoke clouds enveloped people and vehicles, covering several lanes.

Outside Aston’s room in the hotel hallways there were a few screams and concerned voices as people left their rooms running down the hallway to either run to the nearest exit or lock themselves back inside their rooms.

 

[Blue Ghost]

They all moved out onto the balcony seeing the clouds of white gray smoke billow and dissipate, only to be followed by three more explosions, each stemming from a store front, mowing down a swath of panicked pedestrians, until the entire block was clouded in destruction--shattered glass, concrete fragments, strewn twisted metal, and people knocked onto the pavement and concrete, some moving, others not.

“We're going down there. Kit up.” Haswell ducked back inside and grabbed his field radio. The rest followed, putting on field jackets. “Strap on your sidearms.” Haswell then grabbed his P-D-A, hit the emergency channel and launched into a coded dialogue with the local dispatcher.

Aston, Amy and Vash pulled their weapons from their dufflebags while Alice and Reitman put on medical packs as the rest strapped on their holsters, checked their voice-network, and then headed out into the hall with Haswell still talking code and coordinating with the local PD.

The Marriott's hallway was a sporadic mess of panicked and confused people, some running, some walking, some standing outside their rooms unsure of what to do and looking for guidance.

“Everyone, get back in your rooms, and secure the door! Now!” Haswell shouted the instruction to everyone, pointing fingers when necessary, asserting his authority, while Vash and Amy more gently coaxed other hotel patrons with essentially the same instruction but more concerned and softer tones.

Aston was halted by hotel security, but the security team were asking for guidance instead of issuing orders to Aston. The Imperial Sunburst carried that kind of weight. Aston exchanged words and acted as a half distance intermediary between security and Haswell who was at the far end of the hall still giving orders. Aston assured the security team that they had secured this floor, if only for the time being.

That’s when Haswell started jogging then running towards Aston’s position, grabbing Vash and Amy along the way. “We’re headed down. Alice, you and Jeff coordinate with the EMTs, we'll help secure a perimeter. Let’s go!”

Aston followed the team into the emergency stairwell, all half jumping most of the staircase all the way to the ground floor.

The lobby was half destroyed with clumps of terrified patrons, some trying to call cabs, others yelling in protest throwing their weight around to get a manager to do something or explain the situation. Still other patrons were helping in an effort to pull wounded and injured into the lobby to set up an emergency triage.

Outside sirens blared, EMT bots and droids arrived, ironically helping the injured and examining the dead among the anti-AI protesters as well as innocent bystanders caught in the blast. People milled about, some ran, some walked, some stood dazed, again others helped or tried, while still others merely left.

Aston immediately knelt next to the first blood covered person he saw. A young male whose shirt was stained with rose blood red splotches. Eyes closed he barely moved his mouth as he tried to turn his head. Aston hunted for his first aid kit on his field belt. This man’s injuries were far gone from anything the bactine and bandages that Aston was carrying could address.

Amy was better equipped and immediately went to work on another person, while Vash carried a young girl in one hand and led her slightly older brother with his other hand into the hotel lobby to hand them off to hotel security.

The once opulent hotel foyer with plush carpeting, chandeliers and ornate inlaid wood trim, had become a makeshift aid station with blood stained carpet that was now also partially covered with dust and debris dragged in from outdoors.

“Amy!” Aston called. Amy passed off her patient to a couple of EMT droids, then quickly stepped over to Aston’s patient as he tore open his shirt. “I think if we can just stop the bleeding down here…”

But Amy had her fore fingers to his jugular, and noted his greying color. “He’s gone.”

Aston continued to expose his wound, “No, he just looks it. I saw him turning his head—”

“Richard, he’s gone.”

Aston looked up at her bewildered.

“You caught him in his last moments. The bots or droids might be able to revive him, but he’s beyond my help.”

“Amy!” Haswell called, “I need you over here!”

Amy got up and bolted to Haswell who was also knelt next to another victim. Two EMT bots hovered next to Aston and cautiously loaded the body before ferrying it away.

Another thunderous explosion, like an aftershock to the quake of the first several explosions, spewed dust, metal, concrete and glass from its blast located a half block away. Several EMT bots shut down and several humans EMTs and law enforcement were felled or knocked off balance.

Haswell’s team and Aston looked away, covering their faces, then looked back at another huge cloud of white smoke pluming outwards and upwards, blotting out the remaining dwindling sunlight.

Aston couldn’t believe it. One explosion, maybe two, were cause enough to be alarmed. But a half dozen? It turned a simple terrorist attack into a veritable warzone. Then gunfire.

The smoke partially dissipated, and Aston beheld two large men locked in mortal combat. One clearly wearing the uniform of local law enforcement, the other torn a shredded leather jacket and jeans. But what caught Aston’s attention was that neither had skin, but metal frames underneath their clothes. One had a light almost silver like finish, the other in smoldering tattered clothing was slightly bulkier and darker, and grappled with the law enforcement droid, trying to gain leverage.

Aston recognized the larger of the two as an antiquated dual purpose construction and combat android meant to be deployed with main front line BD troops, and specifically meant to help build fortifications and fight off assaults. How it got here and what it was doing fighting one of Jewell’s own law enforcement cyborgs, Aston had no idea. He left Haswell and his team and drew his sidearm, then noticed as the smoke continued to clear a number of special assault law enforcement littering the boulevard in addition to scores of civilians.

Several EMT bots, battered, arcing with exposed circuits and panels blasted off their chassis, continued to attempt to carry the fallen out of harm’s way. Aston removed the magazine in the handle of his machine pistol, and replaced it with one loaded with armor piercing rounds, knowing full well that they probably wouldn’t do a thing against whatever this thing was.

He couldn’t out muscle it—it would tear him to shreds—it may or may not have built-in weaponry, and if it was tangling with law enforcement, then it was probably part of the terrorist attack, which meant its circuits had been compromised and that there was no reasoning with it.

Aston didn’t think about his own mortality. He had no time to. He saw an officer in trouble—mechanical or no—and he was duty bound to render whatever assistance he could. As a single body he could save maybe one or two of the injured laying on the street, but as an armed single reinforcement he could make himself a target and hopefully buy more time for both the cyborg and whatever additional forces were on their way.

There was a distant rumble which Aston figured was probably another bomb, but he couldn’t see its effect. More sirens wailed, clumps of flashing lights clogged the ends of the smoked boulevard strewn with debris and bodies.

The two androids tumbled and separated, then clashed again, though the combat model got the better of the law enforcement cyborg, hefting it above its head and hurling it into a jewelry store front, shattering the huge ballistic plate glass that had been protecting the merchant’s wares.

Aston knelt to one knee, took a careful bead on the android, and fired off his entire magazine.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I've done some minor editing to clean things up a bit. It's a good thing I never followed through on that engineering career

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aston’s weapon spewed high velocity lead in rapid succession in under a second. He let the magazine slip out of his weapon’s handle, reached for another, and then slapped it in, still trying to peer through the thinning smoke to gauge whether he had scored a hit or caused any damage.

The air was eerily still, the occasional siren still wailed, and shafts of blue and red strobe lights swamped the smoke, backlighting the combat droid with a kind of hellish aura as it turned its head towards Aston, then looked down at a smoldering hole and series of dents on its right breast plate.

Aston saw the thing look back up, and the familiar crimson glow of a targeting laser struck his eye. Aston rolled to the side, though needlessly. If the thing had been armed, then his human reflexes would have been no match for its light speed targeting routine. Needless to say Aston scrambled behind a dilapidated police grav cruiser, popped up and leveled his weapon over the door, and squeezed off several more bursts, leaving a few rounds in his magazine in case he needed to fire again.

Again it was useless, if he couldn’t bring it down with his comparative “pea shooter”, then no amount of tactical savvy would save him against a mechanical killing machine. It’s why human soldiers were still used, and it’s why they were put in battledress with heavy to nearly impossible to wield high energy weapons that could melt this thing within seconds. Battle androids’ shortcomings were few, but needing power and being susceptible to energy weapons were what kept them out of the Emperor’s arsenal as mainline soldiers. It was Aston’s one strategic advantage, but how long he would have to hold out, if he could hold out, was beyond his ken.

Aston fired off the rest of his magazine, ejected it, and replaced it with a new one. The rounds carved out another round indentation on the androids front, one or two of the rounds actually made it inside, and a trickle of smoke rose from the holes. It sprinted at Aston, and like a machine it accelerated and reached the grav car within seconds, giving Aston enough time to get up, but not enough time to try to hide behind another stricken cruiser.

Aston made it three steps before the battle-droid reached the vehicle. Aston spun around willing to fire, but was awestruck by the sight of the mechanical hefting several tons of police vehicle above its head. He was dead. That’s all Aston knew. That, and it would be excruciatingly painful. Aston leveled his weapon, and as the thing was about to level several tons of glass and steel on Aston, another series of rounds struck it’s head fouling its sensors.

Aston ran and saw Vash knelt with his own machinepistol leveled and smoke coming out of the end of the barrel. The battle-droid dropped the car on itself causing more structural damage as it intended to feel its “head” to assess the hits Vash had scored. It collapsed to its knees, then stumbled forward onto all fours as it pushed the cruiser off its hulk, the vehicle itself half rolling into the store front next to Aston.

Aston took cover behind another cruiser that had been caught in the blast, and didn’t see the officer’s body still at the controls until after he fired off several other bursts, this time aiming for the battle droid’s head, trying to foul up its sensors as Vash had expertly done. But Aston’s aim wasn’t as true as Vash’s, and he only scored several hits on its main chassis.

The thing got to its feet again and charged Aston one more time. Vash managed to let loose a stream of fire at the battle-droid’s side, but this time his bullets struck its arm and side plating. The thing reached the second cruiser and grabbed it with a vengeance.

“No.” Aston managed to utter in sheer fright, then tried to grab the officer’s body just before the battle-droid sunk its fingers like talons into the cruiser’s reinforced frame. It sounded every bit as like a wrecking claw as metal scrunched, compressed and were rend under this thing’s massive strength.

Aston could feel the vehicle lift several inches, then slam down in a metal crunching thud barely missing Aston’s toes as the cyborg, stripped of its uniform to reveal its metallic chassis, leapt from the jewelry store and tackled the battle-droid at the last minute. The collision of metallic bodies was like an iron ball smacking a plate of steel, creating a very inharmonious metallic ring, followed up the sound of metal striking reinforced stone as the two crashed onto the pavement and rolled like a boulder made of hyper-strong alloys as they grappled.

The light metallic cyborg was clearly visible now, two glowing red eyes, an almost skeletal like skull, machined exo-tendons binding its limbs. It used a basic wrestling move and pinned the battle-droid against the pavement, delivering blow upon blow against its metal frame with its own reinforced alloy steeled fist, until the battle-droid went limp with an audible powering down as it tapped the last of its energy reserves. The thing was effectively dead, lying like so many others that had fallen victim to it and whoever had planted the explosives.

That’s when Aston realized he was still holding onto the officer at the wheel. He did like Amy and touched his jugular with his forefingers—a pulse. He was still alive.

“Amy! Alice! Someone! Over here!” Aston called out. Amy arrived first with kit in hand.

“Help me get him out.” She said. Adroitly and carefully they dragged out his body from the driver’s seat, and laid him onto the hard pavement. Amy immediately went to work with her scanners. “He’s okay, but we need to get him out of here and to an aid station before he falls into a coma.” She called for any EMT bot, several arrived and attached life support gear to the officer’s body.

Aston straightened himself, glanced at Vash. The two exchanged non-verbal thanks. Vash then gestured with his head for Aston to look down the street. Two black male silhouettes. Aston holstered his weapon, but kept his hand on it as he jogged towards their position, Vash closing distance with Aston to follow and back him up.

The smoke had cleared enough for Aston to get a look at two black armored men, slightly taller than anyone else. Aston locked eyes with them briefly. “Hey, are you okay?”, their bodies shimmered with a blue glow, then winked out of existence.

Aston stood there with Vash following up. “Did you see that?” he asked Vash.

“I did.” Vash flatly replied. “We need to report this.”

“What was it? Who were they?” Aston felt his own naivete of the Marches coming to the fore.

“No time to explain. We need to get this to Haswell.” Vash urged his friend by the arm to run back with him.

All that was left were remnants of an attack that portended the tumult of things to come. The cyborg interacted with the mechanical disposal unit, while Haswell and Reitman helped setup an aid station with Alice.

Aston followed Vash for most of the way, but couldn’t help but stop and turn around to have another look back. Were the two men coming back? But all Aston saw were wrecked vehicles, bodies, broken glass, destroyed store fronts, crowds in the distance, and, he poetically wondered out loud, shattered dreams.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Captain Richard Aston could hear his own breathing and heartbeat as he stared out at the vast crater pocked gray regolith plains and hills. Beyond was a expansive field of infinite black where a sky would normally be. No stars, their light having been washed out by the system’s central star. Aston watched the automated excavator do its thing in the blazing temperatures and its own subzero shade as it scraped away top powder and impacted moon soil.

Distance and grade were difficult to make out on vacuum worlds, but it was strangely relaxing. It was work, but it didn’t feel like work. True, he was merely standing there supervising, waiting for the excavator to hit the magic spot that the previous survey team said was so important, but all the paper work, even the flight in jumpspace, and setting up basecamp on an airless gray world, it calmed him. He couldn’t describe it any other way.

It was like being in a forest, or out on a desert plain on a world with an atmosphere, or standing on an ocean shore. Wilderness, untouched. True, there were no trees, no animals, no air of any kind—poisonous or otherwise—but it was unblemished. Pristine. Maybe a pirate or prospector had flown over this spot, and another scout team had already surveyed the area from orbit, but no one had set down and walked upon this patch of regolith until now. No one but Aston—and the rest of the team—had been here, seen this world from this angle, this time of day, at this spot, like this, right now.

The whir of the suits micro-pumps colluded with Aston’s own natural sounds to create a deafening silence. The digger, for all its bulk and all of its work at removing layers of dust and impacted powdery dirt, was also absolutely silent. An almost satisfying juxtaposition compared to the racket it would have been making on a world with an atmosphere.

Aston casually turned away by rotating his suit to see the Bright Star, a one-hundred ton Florian class scout sitting on what amounted to compacted dust that was the world’s surface. Behind it was the blinding unfiltered central star gushing unimaginable amounts of radiation on all bands of the spectrum. Aston turned away, but couldn’t help but smile at the sight of the star blazing away behind the sleek arrowhead form of the Florian, giving her an ethereal aura as light exploded off her hull.

Aston checked the shielded pad on his gauntlet clad hand. The thing was encased in some kind of special material that, like the Florian itself, his vacc suit and the digger, was engineered to protect it from unfiltered radiation and the extreme differences in temperature between light and shadow. Aston almost felt denied being able to experience the raw environment encased in the bulk of the vaccsuit. There was a part of him that wished he could somehow withstand the elements and lack of air to feel the extreme heat and cold that would cook and freeze his body were he to leave its safety.

It was just another one of those poetic musings that crossed his mind every so often. Water worlds were fun, especially ones with beaches and spinning iron cores to keep a sun from blasting its atmosphere and allow visitors to enjoy the water. Populated desert worlds tended to be hubs for people skirting the law. Gas giants were either havens for the same or scientific and industrial hubs. But occasionally there was as a vacuum world that was nothing but magnificent desolation—Aston thought he heard someone describe the such from many centuries past, but he couldn’t place his finger on who.

The excavator stopped, extracted gas from the rock via its onboard mini-smelter that melted minerals, and blasted a rocket stream’s worth of air at a circular door with lots of etchings and other decorative carving, some of which looked functional.

“Good work.” Aston said, then reminded himself that the excavator wasn’t like Max from some years back, and was essentially a “dumb”-bot—able to follow instructions, give readouts and other data, but not much else. Aston stepped forward and looked at the outline of the door, or at least he assumed it was a door. For all he knew it might have been some kind of massive and exotic tunnel or coupling for a sewer. But, whatever it was, someone had made it. Whether they meant to bury it or not was anyone’s guess.

It didn’t look alive, it wasn’t bio-mechanical, nor was it ancient. It looked recent. Too recent, which meant that someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make it look like it was hidden by the world’s own natural formations.

 

[Blue Ghost]

There was a functionality to the carvings, or so it appeared. They were not just decorative filigree, nor did they appear to be any kind of writing. But what they were Aston had no clue.

“Ah, okay. Can you clear off the rest of the soil?”

The digger followed instructions, and with a combination of all its digging apparatus a mound of sorts was cleared. It was dark grey, darker than the regolith was excavating, but almost matching the soil at deeper depths. But it wasn’t just a mound, but an entry point to a larger structure that seemed to stretch a great distance, or so the scanning data indicated.

Aston felt a tinge of adrenaline shoot through his body. The last time he unearthed something big, black and buried it nearly cost him his ship and crew—some alien AI thing that hadn’t been cataloged, but was the size of a small moon. Not only was that thing alive, but it moved, grinding the worlds earth like a giant mace, which, come to think of it, was an apt description of the thing. In this instance the briefing stated that there was a low probability of technology, and even lower of there being any kind of life, biological or otherwise. Well, again, the last time Aston trusted any kind of briefing … he shirked the thought and refocused his attention back on the job at hand.

Aston took several steps forward for a closer look, waved his pad with its built in scanner over the thing, then dared to touch it. Even through the tightly woven air-tight fibers of his vaccsuit’s gauntlet it felt like stone or concrete. And unlike that other time he didn’t get any kind of tingling sensation. It just felt like some kind of carving that someone had left here uncounted eons ago.

That’s when Aston’s imagination started to work over time. Was this planet green at one time? Did it have water and suddenly succumb to some cataclysm? It was a mystery, and mysteries tended to send Aston’s imagination to places unknown. He would usually refocus his attention keeping in mind that he had to follow the fact and not let impressions and whimsical thoughts guide his rationale into dark irrational depths.

It was times like this that he wished he had MAX with him. He was one of those ever so cutesy utility robots—not really an android since he moved around on miniature tank treads—was kind of pleasant to have around, and unlike other ergonomically engineered personalities, MAX didn’t try to overly please anyone too much. He just did his job, sometimes a little extra anticipating what else might be asked of him, but nothing beyond that without instruction. In many ways the ideal AI companion.

The excavator, on the other hand, was merely a tool. It understood speech, but only understood what it was programmed to. It didn’t have MAX’s initiative, but then again it didn’t have MAX’s propensity for songs like The Wabash Cannonball or other songs from antiquity that seemed to persist in being revitalized and passed down through generations. No, MAX was not really an ideal companion, but an ideal AI companion that did its job, if there was such a thing.

Again, Aston refocused. “Uh, can you drill a hole in that thing so we can get a look inside?”

The excavator maneuvered itself, cleared a patch on the door, sealed it off with a cone like thing surrounding a drill, and went to work without giving any kind of audible or visual response.

Aston brought up the excavator’s perspective an his pad, and saw the image a tiny camera was gathering just above a hardened reinforced drill bit, spewing rock or concrete as it violently spun and bored a hole into the door just large enough for a pinhole sized camera. As expected, once the drill had successfully punctured through the thick stone door, there was a brief puff of atmosphere from a shadowy black chamber.

“Go ahead and snake your camera in there.”

The excavator did as it was told, and the flex arm camera light combination snaked like a mechanical serpent into the unknown. Aston was curious and filled with anticipation. He had no idea what would be in here. Ancient alien technology? A pirate’s horde—in which case he would have to report it to either the navy or the local marshal’s office, or just take it back himself and dump it into the nearest scout office holding area. Or was there something more exotic? Ruins? Aston had a sensation that there was a network of passages leading to something subterranean.

But, truth was stranger and ironically more prosaic, and in this case, tragic. Inside the chamber, or whatever it was, were the skeletal remains of a human still encased in a tattered vaccsuit with a crack in the faceplate. Next to him were personal possessions, a pick and shovel, and a note.

“Here lies Brian Le Roy. He was a good miner and my friend. We tried hard to find what he said would be here, but last night a micrometeorite hit his faceplate, and when we woke up for another day’s dig, he was dead. He had no family to speak of, but had lots of dreams and hopes. He told good stories, and made good coffee. We are leaving him here because we don’t know who to contact, and we are not sure if it is legal to be on this world. We hope he finds a better place.” It was signed “Brian’s Friends”.

Aston’s own cynicism replaced his imaginative hopefulness. Were they really his friends? Or was this just another miner dispute gone wrong, and someone was trying to cover their tracks? But if that was the case, then why leave him like this? Why not hide the body? It was then that Aston decided that Brian’s friends may have truly been his friends, though there was no real way to be sure.

And a thought occurred to Aston at that point. How many other Brians were there lost on some remote world without so much as a tombstone? Apparently this Brian had been lucky to have had someone who cared enough about him to leave him where he was. But, he would probably never know.

This would go down in the report as having found a missing person. But would there even be any records of him? Aston didn’t know. He ordered the excavator to seal up the hole and mark the spot for another group of official personnel to come take care of it. He had followed up on the survey, and his job was done.

“What did you find?” Vash’s familiar voice was welcome. “What is it?”

Aston thought of replying poetically, but decided better against it. Instead he was silent for a moment before saying, “A dead miner. I think we’re done here.”

He backed away from the door and let the excavator do its thing. All Aston could do was stare at the door, which now looked more and more like an ore bin door which had been sitting under the regolith and subjected to micrometeorite impacts and radiation so as to make it nearly unrecognizable.

This man had had a dream. He had led people who were willing to listen to him to the promise of finding a better tomorrow. And whether though a cruel act of betrayal or an honest quick of improbable fate, the man was gone, and had been for some time. Aston briefly wondered what the man’s last moments were, and how devastatingly cruel it was to put all hope into a venture, only to have his life ended on some far off world that no one visited.

What was it he heard an astronomer say? Space was big, cold and impersonal. It didn’t care for you, it didn’t feel for you, but provided all of what you needed to survive, and also unwittingly tried to kill you at every opportunity if you were not prepared.

The excavator backed away and signaled that it was ready for its next set of instructions. “Move to the ramp.” Aston told it, and it trudged forward back to the ship. “Vash, fire up the engines. We’re getting out of here.”


The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Battle Highway

Another Molotov cocktail splashed liquid fire against the side of the passenger trailer retrofitted with metal plating and barbed wire. The flames died almost instantaneously in the fifty mile an hour wind generated by the tractor rig hauling the train of three semi-trailers behind it on an old fashioned pocked paved highway. The two lane road ran through a desolate stretch of wasteland rimmed with distant black mountains, while overlooking all dark gray clouds dimmed the otherwise diffuse sunlight striking the planet, dulling the color of an otherwise red and tan desert landscape.

Third Lieutenant Richard Aston peered through the eye slits between retrofitted armor plates as he moved up and down the passenger trailer nested between the cargo and fuel trailers, trying to get a bead on the attacking vehicle. A pack of wasteland cars fitted with pintel mounted machine guns, ballistas and whatever else the remnants of this society could muster to employ as a weapon against their fellow man. Another arrow plinked off the armor siding, tumbling to the once black now dull gray pavement racing below.

Aston kept his laser pistol in his right hand, keeping a fresh battery in its hilt. He saw a half rusted pickup truck pulling alongside, three men strapped in the back, one holding another Molotov. Aston tried poking the muzzle of his weapon through the gap in the plating to squeeze off an aimed crimson beam, but even as the electronic snapping buzz report of the weapon sounded he knew he had missed. The beam sailed wide of any of the three bandits, and soon after another Molotov splashed with a glass shatter, and more liquid flame spread over the side of the trailer only to again be doused by the vehicles' collective speed.

More screams from the female passengers filled the trailer with a high pitched din. One of the older male passengers drew back his bow, and let loose a shaft that found its mark in the throat of one of the bandits. Similar twangs could be heard as other passengers armed with bows and crossbows tried to at least put on a show of force and defiance.

Aston found another slightly wider gap near the front of the trailer, and squeezed off another crimson beam, this time he scored a hit on a tire, shredding it and sending the vehicle careening off into the desert.

Outside two dozen vehicles surrounded the train, hammering any part of it with bricks, Molotov cocktails, crossbow bolts, arrows, and the occasional gunshot or shotgun blast. The pursuers, dressed in various garb left over from a society that had committed virtual suicide in a manmade cataclysm, were all that were left of this world’s once global and star faring society.

Aston’s orders were to make contact with one of the last surviving villages and bring them back to the free trader for transplant back to Imperial space. The Astral Mistress had to land at the remnants of the starport some miles off, with both Aston and his new scout partner Vash, a Vargr from the Marches, taking the ship’s air raft to see that the villagers were all packed up and ready to go. And as the villagers were all loaded and about to roll out of their fortified farm villa, the air raft was struck with a stick of dynamite strapped to an arrow shaft, effectively destroying it while leaving most of her frame intact. That's when Vash took the wheel and Aston secured the passenger car, yelling at Vash to floor it.

That's what the briefing failed to mention, or inappropriately dismiss as a threat was the fact that there were bandits. Lots and lots of bandits, each hell bent on destroying anyone who wouldn’t give them what they wanted; food, fuel, and often tearing the shirts off the backs of their victims before ending their lives.

The world had plummeted into the worst kind of savagery, where mankind preyed off of anyone in order to keep the blood circulating in their bodies, and their empty stomachs partially filled with anything they would call food.

Flora and fauna were essentially all gone, and what crops did survive were dormant for the season, possibly longer given the toxicity of chemicals and high amounts of radiation left over from the war.

Aston could not get a clear shot from the confines of the trailer. He hated to leave the occupants, but he had to get to a wider area. If nothing else he needed to make sure Vash was still alive at the wheel. Given that they were still barreling down the road it was a safe assumption he was. Even so Aston moved forward to the door.

The trailer had been designed as a passenger bus to fill a need to bring public transit into urban areas without manufacturing a whole new line of vehicles. That much was in the brief when Aston was prepping for the mission. This one had seen better days having a lot of bullet holes in it to begin with and copious amounts of rust on its frame. But it was the only thing on wheels that could fit all the villagers. The upshot was that it had a door at the front, but Aston, however tempted, held off on opening it to get a better shot.

Aston was tempted to draw his other sidearm, the extended barrel machine pistol, his preferred weapon, but he feared the recoil would cause him to shoot the interior of the trailer. He glanced at the forward cabin door and hatch once more.

There was a steady bang on the opposite side forcing more screams. One of the male villagers tried thrusting a spear through one of the gaps in the plating, but it was chopped off. Another tried loosing an arrow at the assailant, but the arrow struck the attacking vehicle’s frame instead.

Aston climbed over a woman and her two children to get to the gap in the window, and fired off a precariously aimed shot. The crimson beam lanced the attacker’s shoulder, forcing him to drop a makeshift mace. The vehicle veered off.

But the entire rig began to gently careen left and right. Vash. The trailer was filled with more screams as it rocked this way and that. Some of the men shouted for quiet and continued their careful exchange of arrows with road borne bandits, while other ignored the chorus of cries or themselves cowed behind seats.

Aston quickly made his way forward and climbed out the hatch amidst calls and cries for him to not leave and demands of where he was going. Aston didn’t think about falling and being strewn all over the road. The deadly pavement rushing by at lethal speeds mere feet below him was secondary. If he didn’t get to the cab to see what was happening with Vash they would all be dead.

One slip and he was a dead man. Again, Aston didn’t think about it. He merely leaned forward and grabbed the hand railed welded onto the end section of the flatbed, and climbed up and over fighting against the wind to pull the rest of his body over the flatbed’s oversized bracket. He heard the door clanging behind him, followed by another clang signifying that it was locked tight. That’s not what he had planned, but Aston didn’t have time nor the inclination to brave stepping back to the passenger trailer.

He heard several more dull thuds as bolts and arrows alike struck the metal sides of the trailer he was hanging onto. Another Molotov smacked against the passenger trailer, and the attacks continued. More rocks, more bricks, more mace strikes, striking the trailers with the rocks and bricks ending as battered tumbling rubble on the pavement.

That’s when Aston, hanging on for dear life to the nylon straps holding down the cargo on the flatbed, saw Vash’s cab being bracketed by a collection of wheeled trucks and cars, grav tech long since gone the way of all other technology on this world. Vash would crank the wheel in one direction, crash into a car sending it off into the desert, then swerved in the other direction to smack the vehicles opposite.

Aston clutched the nylon rigging, and had to force himself to aim his laser pistol, then take a sweeping shot, half unintentional as Vash swerved the vehicle again forcing and throwing off his aim.

The beam sliced into several tires and slashed across several bandits wearing only t-shirts or leather jackets, hardly armor against a high wattage focused beam of radiation.

 

[Blue Ghost]

In spite of having climbed over a steel wall as high as he was and braving the wind and speed to fire at the marauders, Aston found himself frozen in place. A moment ago it was child’s play. He wasn’t thinking about the danger, but now the situation and his mortality therein was all too apparent.

Aston squinted as hard as he could and clenched his jaw with equal herculean force, then forced his eyes wide open, feeling the cool air dry them as he stared out at the fast moving confrontation. Massive amounts of adrenaline pumped through his body, freezing him with energy verse getting him to move which is what the instinct had evolved to do. But Aston was a scientist at heart, not an action hero, yet here he was holding onto swift moving cargo on some far off world hoping to get to a fellow imperiled crewman.

Aston ignored the bricks, stones and arrows, some of which found their mark, fortunately they hit the reinforced field vest, some missing his hands, legs and head by mere inches. Even so he still felt the impacts on his body even if the vest absorbed most of the energy.

He didn’t shake out of fear as he moved, but his body seemed to vibrate as if energized with his adrenal gland working overtime. He kept his eyes wide open, focused on the next strap, grabbed it to pull himself forward, then clutching the rung for his life as Vash continued his evasive maneuvering. It was only when Vash kept the rig steady that Aston dared brave moving forward.

It was a deadly dichotomy, because when the rig was stable it gave the gang a chance to close distance. Even so Aston struggled to move forward against every frightful instinct telling him to stop and hang on to where he was because his life might end with one false step.

Tight lip and wide eyed, Aston fought every single one of those instincts amidst the assault of medieval era projectiles. The struggle intensified as more arrows and stones were aimed at him. Aston gritted his teeth and yelled through a clenched jaw as he grabbed the last nylon strap and pulled himself into the niche between the flatbed's forward bracket and the canvas covered cargo. He collapsed into a protective half fetal position as he checked his laser pistol, then leveled it at a closing truck with a pintel mounted arbalest in the tailgate. The crossbowman triggered the weapon, and the nearly man sized bolt struck the makeshift sheet metal armor bolted over the front wheel well, putting a tear in the jury rigged armor.

Aston checked the charge on his weapon, stretched out his arm and leveled the weapon at the truck’s hood. Aston squeezed the trigger and let the weapon burn the last of its untapped joules, searing a molten hole that transformed the puncture into a high energy rip. Smoke exploded, then gushed from the breach, followed by a flash of flame under the hood. The vehicle slowed and dropped back from the rest of the pack.

Out of sheer hope Aston drew another bead on another vehicle and squeezed the trigger again. Nothing. But he already knew what the result would be. Why he pulled the trigger he didn’t know; perhaps part of him hoped that the more accurate and lethal pistol had somehow misread the amount of energy in the pack, or that there was actually more energy than the specifications stated. Regardless he shoved the weapon back into the nylon holster before reaching for his machine pistol, and pulled back on the heat sink cowl to charge it. He felt the first round lock into place with a muted click, then looked out both sides of the cab for a target.

The MP200 carried a twenty round magazine that could be emptied in lest than a second. It used up ammunition at a prodigious rate, but unlike the laser weapon it shed mass with each round fired instead of leaving a weighty yet useless empty power cell in both weapon and pocket. Its other draw back was that like all percussion weapons, it had a kick. Aston didn’t like recoil. He preferred laser weapons, but he had a nasty habit of draining them faster than conventional weaponry. What he wouldn’t give for a huge hulking laser rifle back pack right now.

Vash swerved the rig one again, crashing into a sports car and crumpling its front side into a useless mass of light weight sheet metal and shredded black rubber, adding another victim to the tally of post-apocalyptic wreckage.

Aston held on by pushing his legs against the front bracket forcing his upper body against the canvas and cargo containers underneath. The jackknife composure and force thereof held him in place. When the truck resumed its straight path Aston held off on firing, and instead risked getting up and reaching over the front bracket for the external hand hold to pull himself up.

Out of sheer luck Vash happened to look in the rear view mirror and make eye contact. The two exchanged thumbs up, though Aston was terrified beyond belief even though his eye squinting to fight the effect of wind against his vision, for the moment, put on a façade of toughness that he simply did not have.

Men who laughed at danger got themselves killed. Aston wasn’t laughing, but had the mission objectives and just plain decency to give these people a chance for a better life at the front of his thoughts. Bandits, speeds that killed, weapons not used since mankind still thought coal and steam were huge technological breakthroughs, he tried to compartmentalize the dangers, and then looked both left and right for a target.

Another brick glanced off the forward part of his forehead, the angle and shape of his own brow helped deflect the energy, sending the artificial stone clanging onto the solid black coated iron trailer hitch and to the pavement below. Several other chunks of stone and brick were thrown, but most hit the flatbeds wall or the canvass. Aston noticed that the arsenal of stone and artificial aggregate mineral had eased up.

Vash slowed down, but the truck’s momentum fought the pressure applied to the disks and drums, causing a metal grinding squeal. Still, the rig’s slower movement caught the bandits off guard and gave Aston the confidence he needed to get up and climb around to the passenger side of the tractor itself.

Vash reached over the semiconscious form of the mad who had been riding shotgun, and helped push the passenger cab door open enough for Aston to climb in and secure himself. Aston looked at the village warrior, his bow and quiver angled oddly against his body and seat. Aston grabbed both weapon and arrows, then threw them out the window.

Another arrow speared the open driver’s side window, sticking into the roof of the cab just above Vash's brow. Vash, sidearm in his left hand, stuck what Aston noted to be a blood covered left arm out the window, and fired off several quick-fire self accelerating projectiles. Each was a miniature rocket that streamed a plume of fire and smoke, and exploded with a military viciousness that only a Vargr could love.

Vash snarled as he fired off another burst of three minirockets, smacking a sport’s vehicle of some kind. Each round detonated on impact, utterly destroying the car's tire, punching through the frame and spilling acid from the car battery, and then blowing off the outside panel cover of the passenger door in a fury of three rapid explosions.

Aston tried to examine the villager, but the vehicle was jostling too much from road and Vash’s driving for Aston to be certain of anything. “Is he dead?”

“I don’t know!” Vash growled.

Aston assumed he was alive though he wasn’t sure, but thought he heard the man wheeze and try to open his eyes. Whether it was his body trying to show signs of life or the truck’s movement, Aston simply didn’t know, but hoped beyond hope that he hadn’t passed on. Still, the blood coming out of his side from under his makeshift armor and clothing probably told a different story.

“Are you hit?” Aston gestured to Vash’s arm yelling above the air violently swirling in the cabin.

“I don’t care!” Vash replied, his full wolf’s fury now in full bloom. Though to Aston the anger and brovado seemed more forced, even for a Vargr.

Aston leveled his weapon out the right side passenger window, and fired off his entire magazine strafing a bandit laden vehicle. There was no immediate effect. Aston reloaded the weapon amidst hearing Vash squeezing off another three round launch burst of rockets, this time at a target much further out, and this time missing—though the impact with the desert forced the bandits of the target vehicle to rethink their approach.

“Why didn’t you speed up?! How come you were swerving all over?!”

“The dang thing has a governor on it! I can’t make it go any faster! Here! Take the wheel.” Vash let go of the wheel to pull out the rest of his rocket magazines, and threw them onto the dashboard as Aston quickly grabbed the wheel with his left hand stretching across the villager’s body to keep the truck under control.

“Okay, I got it!” Vash, reloaded, took the wheel, made certain that there were no bend or sharp curves ahead in the road, and unleashed another three round burst of rockets. Again they struck dirt instead of the target vehicle, but the pursuing bandits backed off.

But Aston still didn’t understand Vash’s answer, “What’s a governor?”

“It keeps this thing from going its top speed! I can floor it from here ‘til eternity, and it wouldn’t go any faster than this.” Vash pulled his bloodied arm back in. “They’re backing off.”

Aston noted that they had stopped going after the cab, but glancing back over his shoulder told that they hadn’t given up. Instead of going for the cab they had pulled along side the passenger trailer, but spears and arrows from the village warriors proved too much, and they eventually gave up on trying to take the villagers. The only thing left was the tanker.

 

[Blue Ghost]

“If we could only release that third trailer.” Aston shouted.

“I wish we had only taken the passenger trailer. The weight of those other two isn’t doing us any favors.”

The villager’s eyes fluttered, and through sheer will pointed at the series of lever controls on the dash just to the right of the wheel and above the gear shift.

“He’s alive!” Aston exclaimed. Aston could see him trying to say something, but couldn’t hear what. He lowered his head and ear to the man’s mouth. “What? The third lever?”

The villagers voice was weak, and his words were nearly imperceptible, but Aston was able to understand the man’s broken Galanglic amidst the wind and his voice and body on the verge of eternal bliss.

“Can we make it back to the tarmac with the fuel we got?”

“Yeah, and then some! We don’t need that thing weighing us down, if that’s what you mean.” Vash gave him a double take, “You’re not going to climb out there again, are ya?!”

“’Don’t think I’ll need to.” Aston again glanced back and saw the bandits matching the tractor trailer’s speed to chance a boarding action. Bandits armed with hand weapons and bows began crawling on the tanker like vermin, making their way forward.

Aston reached for the number three lever, then looked at the villager once more, “This one, right?!” Aston shouted at the man to make sure. The villager gave a weak half nod and tried pointing with an index finger that was nearly all drained of life.

Aston yanked hard on the lever, and saw the large silver tank cut loose from the passenger car, scrape the pavement sending up a terrific shower of sparks that reached three feet high. Then a combination of stress and weight fractured the forward section of the tanker. Aeriated fuel connected with the sparks, and the contents of the tanker erupted; the detonation blew off the tanker's end caps that clanged against the road and desert floor in a black smoke and fireball torrent that rose thirty meters. Whoever had been on the tanker or near it, was gone, or soon would be. But the bandits, whether caught in the blast or no, were no longer a factor. All that was left was a geyser of thick jet black smoke rising off at a sharp angle engulfing the fuel fed firestorm.

Aston wasn’t prone to fist pumping nor touting victory, but he couldn’t help but let out a brief stifled laugh as his mouth curled to one side in a slight smile thinking of the efforts that had been made to kill him. He then regained his composure, and found himself breathing hard for no reason whatsoever, and then calmed himself as he went to work on the villager, seeing if he couldn’t stop the bleeding and perhaps save his life.

The rest of the trip to the ruins of the city and starport was uneventful, but both IISS members were on edge as they drove through the blasted gate and onto the vast stretch of debris covered tarmac, and to the familiar sight of the Marava class merchant. Vash wheeled the vehicle parallel to the ship and brought the rig to a halt.

There were protests among the passengers, but the crew and a few armed IISS personnel both allayed and swayed fears and hopes. The villagers would not be taking their belongings which, like everything else were probably irradiated and tainted with numerous local bugs and chemicals.

More protests about the loss of the tanker, but the cots and food in the cargo area, along with warm blankets and fresh water eased more fears and anger. Another wave of fear struck the rescued when the merchants front loading ramp sealed up, sealing off sunlight with only the fluorescents overhead.

For a brief few seconds, when the engines fired up and the vessel first hefted itself off the ground, the deck shifted and swayed as if there were a mild earthquake. Again, screams and protests, but the deck settled, and the villagers settled once more.

And the one villager who had been mortally wounded had been placed in a cold berth. Instructing the passengers how to use the facilities was a job for the social workers. Aston, unlike Vash, kept himself locked up in his cabin for most of the trip back to Imperial space.

Again, it hadn’t been like the holovids or the comics and other books Aston used to read. And again it wasn’t what he had signed on for. The assignment mentioned a rescue. It mentioned a world that had bombed itself back to the stone age. Fine. Aston figured refugees would be a heart breaking assignment, but the combat had caught him and Vash off guard.

It was an assignment the navy nor the army with its lift fleet would not touch. The marshal’s service said it was out of their jurisdiction, and private non-profits didn’t have the resources to go outside the Imperium. That left the scouts.

Back on Earth, back in the recruiter’s office in the Imperial government center, Aston remembered telling the agent his dreams of leaving the world and doing science. He remembered saying how he wanted to visit other worlds and meet people and exotic beings from places distant. He remembered the sales points of exploration and discovery, with a mild mention of rescue ops, and an even smaller emphasis on being absorbed into the navy during times of crisis.

Was he bitter? Aston himself wasn’t sure. Had it been bad luck that he had drawn a large number of dangerous assignments? Or was there something else at work? The galaxy and universe were still wondrous, but the sheen of wonderment had been tempered by the reality that it was impersonal and fraught with danger.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

A repost from the great COTI purge/update a few weeks back. I was about to curse the internet gods (and sundry other personae dramatica) when I found the first installment a few minutes ago

Firestorm

Bullets plinked off the hull and hydraulic struts as Second Lieutenant Aston dove onto the Ice-Star’s ramp just as medical officer Peter Ray slapped the button to raise it and seal the ship. Several more full-automatic reports rang out and a hail of bullets stitched across both hull and ramp.

The Ice-Star was a Florian class scout, noted for high performance and luxury compared to other vessels in her range, she was also a capable miniature fortress and haven like most scout-vessels, keeping both bullets and radiation at bay when needed.

“Are you hit?!” Peter called out, the ship’s medic for this hop. In ancient times would be described as Amer-Asian with a thick shock of black hair and golden-brown skin was of mixed parentage, not very tall, but highly intelligent and caring, and right now he saw blood trickling from his friend’s shirt and coat.

Aston figured he might have been, but hadn’t felt anything. “Scan me if you want, but we’ve got to get out of here!” Aston scrambled to his feet and equally scrambled up the ladder leading from the Ice-Star’s cargo area to the main deck.

Peter tore after him up the ladder, reaching for his medical scanner tucked in his inner coat pocket.

Upstairs Aston caught site of Vash running aft from the bridge to the ship’s single double-barreled turret, brushing by Aston, “Engines are fired up! Karen’s at the controls.” Vash then quickly clamored into the ball and socket seat.

That’s when Aston started to feel a little light headed and noted that his shirt and sleeves were wet with vermillion red, but the sheer adrenaline pumping through his system kept him on his feet for the moment as he sprinted into the two seat bridge and strapped himself into the port-side pilot’s seat.

“It’s about time you showed up.” Karen glanced at him and noted his pale color.

Aston ignored her, and throttled up the engines regardless of the red warning lights telling him the ship wasn’t entirely sealed. He felt the twin massive thrusters thunder outside as the ship’s anti-grav plates gently hefted the Ice-Star off the ground, making the ship feel as if it were gently gliding on a calm sea.

That’s when the loud sharp rapid-fire snap of the ship’s twin lasers lanced out. Aston wasn’t sure what Vash was firing at, but if it kept anymore gunmen at bay, then so much the better. Even now amidst the ship’s engines thrumming at high volume and Vash unleashing the ship’s firepower, bullets striking the hull could be heard. At first it was small caliber stuff, but the plinking turned into a distinctive drumming. High velocity support weapons, probably fifty-cals were stitching a line of holes and indentations along the ship’s hull as she slowly moved mere meters above the crowd.

Aston felt himself getting tired, more light-headedness, almost as if he wanted to sleep. And about that time that’s when the adrenaline wore off and he felt the massive dull pain of bodily damage. “Why… why aren’t we … why aren’t going … any … faster…” His words trailed off, but he fought to stay conscious as he felt himself starting to black out.

“Richard?” Karen loudly asked. “Richard?!”

Aston felt a sharp pricking in his arm, and the sleepy drain was suddenly replaced with a new source of energy. Aston looked down at his forearm to see Peter furiously working on his arm and body, tearing at his clothing and stabbing his body with portable field surgery packs filled with all kinds of medical reagents.

His heart beat had been fading, his breathing slowing and growing shallow, permanent sleep beckoning, but now he felt as if he had been shot full of vitamins, which is essentially what had happened.

Aston instinctively shook his head, as if to fight off sleep, then smacked the ship’s intercom, “Vash! Why aren’t we taking off?! I can’t get anymore thrust!”

“Hang on.” Was the Vargr’s reply.

The Ice-Star rocked and violently careened to port, her deck angled a lean twenty degrees in the same direction, while outside her wingtip scraped up both parched soil and the occasional Vargr mob-member who was unfortunate to get in the wounded ship’s way, briefly scooped up and then thrown to the side as the Ice-Star continued on its violent motion.

Aft Vash climbed out of the turret and leapt into the Ice-Star’s relatively tiny engineering section, furiously working the controls and checking readouts.

Someone had hacked into the ship’s engineering section. Vash growled in both anger and bewilderment of what to do.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Vash worked dial, knob, switch and toggle, then felt the ship jolt and shudder. Struck by what he didn’t know, but the engineering station lit up the ship’s status panel like a Christmas Tree, flashing all kinds of colors that his wolf-heritage would allow him to see, as well as a cacophony of warnings and alarms.

Vash swore under his breath, gritted his teeth and snarled as he cross circuited one control and then another hoping beyond hope that he could outsmart both the ship and whoever had hacked into her to regain control. Right now the ship’s gravity hadn’t kicked in, and he was fighting a sloping deck as he heard his tools spill out of the cabinet, and careen in a cascading clinking of metal across the deck to the far side of the section.

Back in the cockpit Aston worked with his spirit re-invigorated, trying several times to restart the engines and ram the throttles forward, but all the Ice-star could do was carve a violent-lazy dust clouded circle across the terrain as hundreds if not thousands of Vargr tried to lasso her still extended gear to bring her down or keep her from taking off, all the while others kept taking shots at her with whatever weapons they could muster.

In the holo-vids they always showed the young hero mouthing off overconfident dialogue, as if no matter how bad the situation got he was always on top of it one way or another, and always had help from his boom companion, a hot looking female or cuddly alien. Well, Vash wasn’t cuddly and Karen was just your ordinary average plane-Jane female, neither of whom would pass muster at a casting agencies office, but he was sure that both had infinitely more knowledge and wisdom of how to deal with a city population of corsairs suddenly turned on them than any holo-vid studio producer.

Aston hauled back on the stick again after trying to tap power from the weapons. Something worked because the Ice-Star suddenly nosed up with the added energy , but it was a temporary victory as several of those small nearly barrel sized grav weapon platforms that Vargr in the Extents were so fond of suddenly glided into view.

One had a large caliber pintel mounted weapon of some kind with an angry grey-furred face manning the thing. Aston saw right down the black of the barrel, enough to make out the rifling detail just before it flashed to life with an angry stream of fifty-cal rounds that stitched across the Ice-Star’s front windscreen, each round was a dark gray disk permanently embedded in high tensile transparent alloy.

Aston smacked the intercom with his right hand, “Vash, what the heck is going on back there?!”

His tiny miniaturized voice came back over the speaker, “Someone hacked into the ship! I’m trying to hot-wire the controls right now!”

Aston looked up again to see several cables wrap over the Ice-Star’s nose, and just over the tip of her nose he could see large teams of Vargr hauling on the cables, as if they had caught a beast that refused to die.

“Karen, get on the turret.” Aston fought the controls to keep the nose up.

“Would you hold still!” Peter berated as he continued to work on Aston’s lower body and arm, all the while Karen got up and ran aft.

Another drumming of fire from all angles, and another loud impact. So far there were only overloads or warnings that wires and controls were too close to the hull, which probably meant that whatever the thugs were using outside as heavy artillery were putting some massive dents in the Ice-Stars fuselage. But so far no fuel loss, and no real damage that would keep her from flying if she could ever get off the ground.

The Florian Leagues engineers were geniuses at making a small one-hundred ton flyer a luxury accommodation, but Aston cursed them because they, like their Terran and Vilani counterparts, continued to put a large reinforcement dividing strut right smack down dab in the middle of the windscreen. Couldn’t anyone design a ship that had a full clear one-hundred-eighty degree view of the front?

Whatever, it was probably keeping the ship space worthy, as for all the warning indicators the ship was still showing as air tight.

Back in engineering Vash cursed some more, then finally out of rage smacked the control panel with his hard curled fur covered fist.

The ship got new life as everything powered up properly. The gravity came back, the lights were at full power, and the engines roared with new found power.

All Vash could do was step back wide eyed, his mouth slightly agape at what had just happened.

In the cockpit the Ice-Star pulled her bulldozer like wing out of the hard arid earth and righted herself just as Karen started to return fire with the ship’s turret.

Aston didn’t care who was hanging onto the ship with the cables, it could have been a girl scout troop straight from terra, he didn’t care. He rammed the throttles up to the stops once more and the Ice-Star surged forward like a thing unleashed, leaving a wake of swirling dust, heat and bewildered outlaw natives as her engines blasted deafening thunder.

The desert floor rushed by mere meters from the Ice-Star’s belly, and at mach-one the shockwave shook every living creature for miles around as Aston nosed her up and clawed for space.

The Ice-Star speared upwards on twin blue flames at high mach, all the while corsair interceptors were just getting the word to go after her, along with any full fledged corsair ship’s that happened to be in the vicinity.

Minutes later the light sun drenched teal of the horizon and sky melted away to a starry black. The sensor suite was damaged, the screens flickered with a jumble of a hundred false echoes and static, all the while the threat warning indicator was still active.

“They’re tracking us.” Aston announced to no one in particular, especially since Peter was the only other person in the cockpit. “I guess Vash managed to patch her up, but she’s far from tip top condition, I’ll say that right now.”

Peter chagrinned as he got up, putting the last of his medical tools into his kit, “I could say the same thing about you. You don’t know how lucky you are.” Peter then held up three blood coated bullets to Aston.

“Bill me later, doctor. I got my own patient to worry about right now.” Aston winced at the line. It wasn’t exactly Hollywood dialogue, and he had just given Peter the big brush off after his friend had saved his life, but Peter knew that Aston had to finish pulling their bacon out of the fire, or he was right, there would be no medical bill to pay.

That was when the first crimson beam lashed out at the Ice Star. Peter finished closing his kit and saw the laser. He and Aston had both been in their share of combat missions, but he was still no expert.

“Is that close?”

Aston didn’t reply immediately. He gave a half shake of his head as he glanced at the tactical display. It was just like every other monitor; a massive jumble of static and characters. “I can’t tell, but one laser is one laser too many.”

Peter let Aston collect his wits before saying anything else. “Look, I’m no expert, but their interceptors and patrol ships … aren’t they faster than we are?”

“They can out accelerate us, and eventually catch us, if that’s what you mean.” Aston didn’t feel like trying to play the Hollywood hero just now. “We got enough of a lead on them, but it’s going to be close.”

And it was close, but not close enough for pirate forces to catch up to Aston and his crew. After leaving the planet it was an uneventful escape, just nerve wracking as the ship continued to accelerate to her jump point all the while a flight of fighters and two full corsairs were in hot pursuit. But again, other than the chase, the transition to jump was routine.



Flight Captain George Weber sat under an umbrella in a dome covered outdoor café overlooking the scout aquatic landing facilties and hard pads off in the distance. The Ice-Star had been his baby. Florian scout ships were rare and prized among IISS personnel. Sleek, fast, comfortable, and unlike the venerable type-S, they had windows in the cabin that you could actually see out of. He had loaned his to Richard Aston for a recon-op to collect more data on Vargr corsair bases, just after giving her a minor overhaul and splurging on a paint touchup and protective coat. Weber was up for some time off, didn’t need the ship, and wanted to put it to good use while he took in the exotic undersea tours on Dentus.

Dentus, were it not for trace elements in her atmosphere that made it hard to breathe, was like being on an island paradise year round. Even so the tainted atmosphere kept tourism at a minimum, but it was still a thriving trade for people like Weber who were willing to shell out the cash for trip into the exotic underwater biosphere of Dentus’ oceans.

Sun, a good book, a tall sweet ice-cold drink set on a transparent glass table, his feet kicked up on a foot rest as he leaned back in the chair and donned his sunglasses. That’s when he heard the sound of twin engines off in the distance. He recognized the arrowhead shaped form as is spiraled down in the distance, gently touched down on the water, kicking up a white wake as the gentle ocean waters slowed her to a crawl.

Weber squinted. Was that his ship? He wondered and grinned. He watched with anticipation as the Florian scout arced her way across the surf and up onto a ramp leading her to a proper berth. Weber thought that it might be Aston returned. That’s when he noticed black and white smoke trickling up from various places, but she was too distant for him to see why.

He grabbed his binoculars, grin still on his face, and put them up to his eyes.

His expression soured.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Post 7000! Well, I did my homage to George Miller and his vision of the Aussie outback after a holocaust, so here's my next offering, or the opening chapter at least.

Terror in Hyperspace

Commander Richard Aston sat in the large plush circular area of the Astral Zephyr, a stock class private liner with the usual disk lounge crew area forward hull and bulky passenger section aft, that had been doing the grand tour of the Indy Triad—that region of space nested between the Imperium, the Hive Federation and the Terran Confederation (otherwise known as the Solomani Sphere of influence, or what was left of it). The holo-vid playing in the middle of the lounge was some mid range budget actioner that had bad acting, lots of money dumped into sets, props, costumes, but little in the way of actual direction or vision, and an even weaker story regarding some rare gems and family owned companies fighting over them. All the while outside the windows were the familiar ethereal silver streaks and stretched stars that constituted the world outside the ship’s jump bubble as she raced at faster than lights speeds, leaving a trail of light in her wake. Aston scrunched his lips and grunted as he watched romance, intrigue, and gunplay. The holo-vid had all the superficial factors of what should have made a night’s entertainment, but it simply wasn’t that good, and Aston found his eyes wandering towards the wraithlike shroud of jump space outside the lounge’s windows.

He let his body sink further into the extra plush sofa that seemed to wrap comfort around his body, pushed back the brim of his IISS ball cap with the sunburst logo, and took another sip of sweet liquid before lazily reaching for the complimentary tray of miniature pastry and popping another into his mouth. The inflight media selection was subpar, but at least the food was free.

Aston sighed as another chase sequence with more gunfire exchanged between the hero and villain played out. At this point Aston had lost track of what the actual story was about, but gave the holovid as much attention as possible, but the deep cushioned velvet soft sectional seemed to beckon slumber.

Coming out this far from the Imperium was nothing new. He had ventured deep into Zhodani space when the war was raging, and had been part of anti-piracy sweeps around Darrien space and the Sword Worlds, obviously as well as the Extents. Of course, there was a certain familiarity with the “north west” sector of the Imperium, as it was sometimes unofficially referred to by space charts hobbyists—otherwise spinward and coreward from where he and his team currently were. Yet this region was somehow different. Aston couldn’t put his finger on it, and it was perhaps something as intangible as the very emotion itself, but it felt different.

The Marches were full of confrontation, power plays, rogues of all stripes, and of course the two super powers with opposing philosophies clashing in space and on a hundred different worlds, with uncounted millions locked in mortal combat over systems and planets both rich and barren. But that was over two years ago. It was a conflict that Aston would just as soon forget.

The holovid’s fire fight scene was replaced by tender music and a couple exchanging solemn romantic moments amidst a field of flowers and other greenery. Aston smirked at the whole thing, then blew a disappointed sigh from pursed lips before popping another snack into his mouth.

“Who writes this junk.” Aston muttered.

“Are you still watching that thing?”

Aston stretched his body and neck over the brim of the couch and saw his medic Peter casually stride into the lounge with his usual light hearted and welcoming grin—somehwat unusual for a ship’s surgeon, or so Aston mused. Only on this op Peter was a passenger, someone to be pampered like the rest of the paying customers on this flight. The service was paying the freight via Imperial vouchers, which thankfully were recognized as currency and accepted in a region of space that, where military tensions weren’t as high as in the marches, racial animosities were just as deep.

Aston reclined again and shrugged his shoulders. “Eh, it was on the playlist. I’m too lazy to ask it to find something else.”

Peter’s expression then sobered, “Hey, is that guy around here?”

Aston knew who he was talking about, but didn’t feel the need to quiet his tone, “Oh, you mean that nut case? Nooo, I haven’t seen him. I think he’s talking to himself and his fifty personalities inside his cabin.”

Peter chagrined. “You shouldn’t make light of people like him. He needs help.”

Aston scrunched his lips. Their primary mission was to track down a rogue weapons’ designer who had setup shop on some island way out in the Sontra subsector. They found him, apprehended him, turned him over to an interstellar law-enforcement consortium and under the guise that it was a survey mission for his majesty, then went on their way without much more word than that. The Imperium was curious as to his fate, they had no real interest in holding him, ergo, job done. Anything beyond that, including raving passengers, was not in Aston’s job description. He had been the knight in shining armor enough times, and no amount of his emotional investment was going to change some paranoid’s mind on what was what, what was real and what was part of his self-made fantasy world.

Aston began to open his mouth in response to Peter, and dish out some verbal jujitsu, but begged off. Instead he dismissed Peter’s comment with a wave of his hand.

Peter shook his head, “I wish you would take public health more seriously.”

Aston turned on his side to make himself even more comfortable, “No amount of lithium or other placebo is going to change that guy’s thinking, nor what anybody thinks about him.”

Peter cautiously looked over his shoulder as if someone might be there, “I hope he doesn’t hear you. You never know how somebody like that is going to react to your off-handed comments.”

“Ahhh…” Aston’s protesting tone said it all, “…aren’t you supposed to be doing your writeup?”

There was a voice. Male, raised, then quieted, calm, rational, then exuberant boarding on hysteria.

Aston sighed heavily, “Ah, geeze.” He glanced up at Peter, “Don’t you have like a pill or a shot for that guy?” At onetime Aston might have been more forgiving and even frightened at dealing with someone who appeared to be suffering from some malady of the mind, but he had dealt with enough people in all strata of life, and no amount of his playing nice would change that man’s disposition.

“Shhh!” Peter admonished. Aston outranked Peter and also had seniority, but the two had known one another since before Aston had joined the service, and it was by pure chance the two had reconnected in Aslan space, separated by assignments, then reunited in the Marches. Whether it was fate or some higher-up recognized their comradery, Aston didn’t know, but the relationship was both professional and casual all at once, which seemed to work best for both personnel and the service.

“I swear, if that guy doesn’t shut up…” Aston began.

Peter noticed the bridge door slide open and two of the ship’s three stewards round the observation deck rimming the lounge area to head aft.

“There they go.” Peter replied with a certain resignation—he knew he could help, but company policy forbade it, lest someone decide to bring a lawsuit for a king’s ransom in settlement and legal fees.

Aston merely grunted as he scrunched his lips in an expression that was half smirk and half chagrin. The service wouldn’t let him take a ship out this far, even his own (for whatever reason), and having developed a dislike for public transportation because of a variety of emotionally unstable persons that utilized city services, he was sure that riding first class or high passage would situate him with reasonably normal clientele. But, as usual, his luck (or some IISS assignment specialist) had thrown together with what Aston was sure was “another person of interest.” A curveball, he mused.

Ah, baseball. One of the few things he missed from Terra. What he wouldn’t give to see a game, even a recorded one that was years old, on the holoprojector instead of some B-grade action-romance fiasco, highlighted with the ravings of an ill-tempered (and ill-mannered) passenger.

“I swear, when I get my hands on the scum bag that booked me on this flight…” Aston managed, just audible enough for Peter to hear.

“I wish I could go back there.” Peter half replied, acknowledging Aston but not really responding to him all at once.

Aston’s expression intensified, “I think I suggested the such a moment ago.”

“You wanted me to go back there and give him a sedative.”

Aston was silent for heartbeat, letting Peter have a chance to reconsider what he said, “I never mentioned anything about sedatives.”

It was Peter’s turn to chagrin. “You were thinking it.”

For whatever reason that brought a smile to Aston’s face, then in a playful tone, “I didn’t know you were a Zho. I ought to make a note on your dossier.” Aston kept his laughter internal, and waited for the fireworks.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t become a doctor.” Peter replied, lacking for any wit to toss back at Aston. “Your bedside manner would kill a flu patient.”

Aston couldn’t help himself, “Is that your professional opinion?” More smiles.

Peter merely shook his head.

Both heard the stewards knocking on the cabin door, and the voice quieted down. In the background both Aston and Peter could hear the stewards calmly talking with the passenger in question. The man had shut up, that much was certain, or at least quieted down. How long it would last was anyone’s guess.

 

[Blue Ghost]

“Talking to people helps keep them in good spirits.” Peter informed, unsure if Aston was interested or not, but hoping somehow that his friend and C O would absorb the factoid and be sympathetic.

“Like I care.”

So much for sympathy, Peter sighed.

“Someone ought to just go back there and beat the sh—”

“Is that guy still yammering his head off?” Vash strode into the lounge with a towel around his shoulders.

Peter looked at him, “Vash, do they have mental hospitals in the Extents?”

“What, you mean looney bins?”

Peter sighed again, “Psychiatric wards.” He half admonished.

“Not a real need for them.” Vash replied. “If a guy’s crazy enough, he usually signs on for a one way trip to the stars. They never come back.”

“That’s barbaric!” Peter’s shock underscored his doctor’s outrage.

Aston on the other hand, “That’s how I’d do it if I had my way.”—all smiles.

Vash caught the scent of sugar—human confectionary. “Any chocolate in those?” He pointed at the complimentary tray.

“Nope. None.” Aston replied, wondering if he should reach for the remote and scan the rest of the ship’s media banks. It was either that or go to his cabin and try to sleep or, a thought occurred to him as he looked at Vash. “You smell like wet dog.”

Vash eyed Aston as he grabbed a handful of appetizers, “And you smell like a pile of…”

“Gentlemen!” Peter cut in, “I’m thinking we should approach the captain and offer our services.”

Again, Aston shrugged, “You’re the doctor. You go offer your services. I’m staying here.” And with that Aston reached for the remote and started scanning the menu libraries as the movie continued to play. Maybe there was a pay channel that had a good A-grade historic epic. Pirates? No, it reminded him of his time with an over-sexed and starved sea serpent. Knights and castles? No, well, maybe…it reminded him of the dragon and its young offspring that befriended him after an attempt on his life. Killer robots? Again, too close to home.

Aston continued to flip through the menu, “Geeze, isn’t there anything on?”

“Can I try?”

Aston tossed the remote to Vash, then recalled his comment, “Why are you so wet anyway?”

Vash reclined on the sofa, the moisture from his grey fur staining the upholstery with a wet spot the size of his back, and running the length of his tail pushed off to the side. “There’s a sauna just before engineering, or did you forget?”

“It’s why the tickets were so expensive, Richard.” Peter put in.

Aston shrugged for what seemed the umpteenth time, “How would I know? This trip’s courtesy of the service.”

“Well,” Vash replied with satisfaction, “I sure worked out a lot of kinks in my joints.”

Aston looked at his friend, whom each year seemed to get more and more grey hairs over his body, and whose pelt seemed thinner in contrast to the soft furry friend he had known years back in the Heirate. Aston knew canines and wolves alike aged faster than humans, he hoped it would be different with Vargr. Aston put away grim notions of Vash’s mortality. But Vash’s physiological comment stuck with Aston. Vash was still a very lively crewmember, and extremely capable, but Aston wondered for how many more years he had left. Hopefully it would be decades. Hopefully.

“Okay, I’ll tell the captain.” The could hear the stewards’ voices grow in strength as they came back forward. Aston looked over his shoulder to see the stewards enter the lounge as Vash played with the remote scanning the menus. Aston frowned as he saw Peter approach the two.

“Hi, just an F Y I,” Peter began, “I’m a trained surgeon who interned at a psych ward. If there’s anything I can do… maybe talk to the captain…”

The head steward gave the usual company line about unruly passengers. Aston heard it, and had heard it before a few dozen times. Whether it was drunks or obnoxious alpha-males or alpha-male “wannabes”, the steward’s role and line was typically the same.

“Can’t you find anything?” Aston was getting impatient with Vash’s channel surfing.

The light’s flickered, dimmed, then blacked out briefly for a second before fluttering back to life.

All looked up, as if scanning the lights would offer an explanation.

“Bad cable?” Vash guessed, putting down the remote to towel off his head and snout.

“Gentlemen,” the head steward addressed, “we’ll be coming out of jump within the next hour. I suggest you make ready for debarkation.”

Aston blew air from his cheeks in resignation. And the noise he didn’t want to hear was coming towards the lounge.

“It’s happening! It’s happening!” Male, late thirties, possibly older. Aston didn’t care to guess the man’s age, all he wanted to do was to tell the idiot to shut up. “Where’s the captain? Where’s the captain?!” Then nearly shouting; “Where’s the captain?!”

Aston clenched his jaw, “You know, I’ve about had it with this moron.”

“Richard.” Peter’s cautionary tone spoke volumes.

“Ah! Don’t Richard me, that guy’s getting under my skin.” Aston squirmed to free himself from the sofa’s comforting clutches.

Vash rolled his eyes, picked up the remote once more and on his first selection found a concert of an old music group he listened to in his youth. He wagged his tail and smiled as he spread his arms out over the sofa to watch and listen.

The ship’s lights blinked out again, and the holo projector shut off as the ship listed to port.

“What the?” Aston managed to free himself from comfort, swung his legs down to sit on the sofa proper. He was about to push himself off when the ship’s gravity went back to normal, then lazily listed to starboard. He turned to Vash, “What the heck is going on?”

Vash seemed to look around with an engineer’s calm, burning thoughts to assess what might be wrong with the ship. “Feel’s like a vector problem with the ship’s AG.”

AG was spacer-speak for Artificial Gravity. The grid network that generated the envelope typically didn’t have many working parts.

Aston felt uneasy. Had there ever been a misjump during jump? The early jump capable vessels disappeared during experimentation with hyperspace, but that was, quite literally, millennia ago.

“I’m no expert.” Aston replied, “but isn’t the vector thing a factory preset?” Essentially Aston was asking how in the world could something so basic and fundamental go wrong.

Vash shrugged and pushed off from the couch, “It usually happens on Vargr ships every so often, but …”

“But what?” Aston pushed him.

“But on a human ship?” Vash continued, the puzzlement in his tone didn’t help Aston any.

Aston gave Vash a pointed look, “Don’t you have any racial pride in your people’s ability to build starships?”

“None. Why do you think I signed on for the scouts?” Vash continued to look around, his gaze still focused on the lights, but occasionally he looked out the windows or at the deck beneath his feet.

“Can’t you feel it?” the crazy man continued, his tone hushed, panicked and full of fret for what Aston surmised was something that would probably cause a few cases of queasy stomachs, but, hopefully, not much else. “They’re here.” He waited another few seconds before calling out, “They’re here!”

Aston smiled and took deliberate steps with intent towards the man, “Hi, I’m Richard.” Aston’s introduction had an undercurrent of hostility in spite of his all-smiles attitude as he extended his hand.

“Roy. Roy Paquette.” The man responded extending a nervous coated with a sheen of sweat that made it feel like Aston was shaking hands with algae.

“Well Roy….”

“Richard.” Peter tried to intervene.

But Aston would have his say as he merrily and angrily confronted Roy, “I’ve had enough of you mouthing off this entire flight. You got me? Because if I hear one more psychotic rant I’m going to…”

The ship’s lights winked out one more time and the deck keeled violently to port, sending everyone stumbling or sprawling across the lounge into either the sofas on the opposite side of the lounge, or into the ship’s bulkhead.

“Vash, get back to engineering!” Aston pushed himself away from Roy.

“Are you nuts?” Vash growled, then more clearly but still perturbed by the ship’s violent motion, “They’ll think I’m trying to hijack this tub!”

“My god! They’re trying to tear us apart!” Roy’s panic driven yammer got under Aston’s skin that much more.

The scout had had enough as he got in Roy’s face, “Shut up!”

The ship convulsed, sending everyone up in the air by two feet, only to suffer another AG shift, which sent everyone sprawling in the opposite direction.

“Vash…” Aston began, but caught himself before he spouted off at the mouth again.

One of the stewards emerged from the bridge as the ship’s AG slowly went back to normal. “Folks, if you could please return to your cabins, and if you have a safety seat, then strap yourself in it until we’re through this hyperspace turbulence.”

Hyperspace-turbulence? That was a new one for Aston, and for everyone else for that matter.

“That’s not going to save us!” Roy shouted. “We’ve got to exit jump now!”

Vash and Peter both rushed in between Aston and Roy seeing Aston’s body movement as a pretext for a right cross.

“Look,” Peter looked directly at Aston, “maybe we better just do as he says.”

Aston looked at both, then returned Peter’s smiling stare, “I swear, if part of our assignment was to deal with this idiot, and I find your name at the bottom of the dispatch…”

“It’s not my doing.” Peter protested.

“The fact that you’re protesting tells me otherwise.” Aston then saw Vash trying to stifle a smirk. “You too, huh?”

Vash could only smile, “Simian behavior isn’t my specialty.”

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aston pulled himself free from the dogpile, and pulled himself up against the starboard bulkhead to peer out the windows. He couldn’t see anything wrong with the ship, which meant that everything had to be focused in engineering. If the ship’s power was fluctuating this badly, then it meant the power plant was going bad. Vash was the engineer, Aston could fly a ship, even get the basics of ship’s engineering section going, but he couldn’t repair anything with any assured degree of professional competence. And this kind of malfunction was beyond his paygrade.

Aston looked at the steward who was also pulling himself up against the ship’s bulkhead. “Steward, can you let my man here go back and have a look at your ship’s drives?”

“Sir, we have a fully manned engineering crew that are the finest in their field. Now, if you would please go back to your cabin.”

The ship hefted again, this time accompanied by a banging sound on the outer hull. The ship’s lights flickered again creating a strobe effect that was akin to a discotheque, only there was no music, even Vash’s concert had winked out when the holovid projector shut down.

Peter looked up wide eyed, “What the heck is that?”

Aston grimaced, “Sounds like some junk got caught in the jump bubble and is hitting the hull.”

But Roy had lost it. Rolling on the deck with a tearful face, “No, no, no, no!”—each time he pounded the carpet. “The bridge. I’ve got to get to the bridge!” Roy pushed himself up and ran aft to the bridge, barreling through the steward before reaching the secure iris doorway. He frantically worked the controls, trying any combination of numbers to crack the lock, finally pounding his fist against the control panel.

Aston ran and tackled the man before he bloodied his fist and sealed the ship’s crew in the crew only section permanently.

“No!” Roy cried, struggling against Aston’s grip.

“Peter!” Aston fought to get his voice above Roy’s raving, “Get your kit! Give him a shot or something!”

Vash came to help Aston, but the vessel powered down again and careened to starboard. Vash’s nimbleness kept his balance as he grabbed a wall, all the while Peter held onto the sofa before heading aft when the ship righted itself again.

The lights flickered back on, but the powerplant struggled as it spun up with power only to thrum back down. The variations in tone echoed through the hull. The power plant’s output would increase in pitch and it found renewed strength, only to groan back into lower and lower tones as she was deprived energy or fuel for her inner workings.

Aston surmised that the ship hadn’t been serviced in a long time, and being outside in free-booting unregulated space this liner and millions other like her could operate without inspection or regular maintenance, and, Aston guessed, charge whatever they wanted and make a killing in profits. The downshot being that events like this would happen.

There was more clanging on the hull. Aston knew that the deprivation in energy would shift the bubble and suck in whatever junk was in normal space through a weakened transitional high energy layer—the very thing that allowed ships throughout known space to join worlds like islands in an ocean.

But there was another noise. A grinding. A twisting of metal.

Vash came to help Aston grapple with Roy as Roy shouted protests to let him go, calling out that they were all dead if they didn’t exit jump.

“Peter, get that kit now! I don’t care about a lawsuit, I’ll take the blame, just give this guy a shot of something!”

Peter struggled aft with the ship’s gravity now in full haywire mode, but still predominantly vectoring perpendicular to the ship’s deck.

The power seemed to cut one more time followed by more clanging on the hull.

“Someone, fire a laser! Get in the ship’s launch! Do something!”

“You’re right.” Vash grinned at Aston.

“About what?” It was Aston’s turn to growl.

“He won’t shut up.” Vash seemed to delight in the struggle. Aston guessed it was wolf genome fueling his behavior—reveling in the capture after a pack chase that never took place.

Then another noise, only Aston and Vash felt it more than heard it. The ship was under tremendous pressure, as if a giant’s hand were trying to wrench or twist the ship like a damn rag. Both passengers and the Steward as well could see the deck subtly twist, then go back to normal as the hull fought the forces exerted on it by a weakened jump bubble.

What a time for a malfunction, Aston grimly thought. So near the end of this leg of the journey only to die because of lax maintenance and a total lack of oversight of the local shipping industry.

Again the ship’s power plant fought to stay alive, and Aston and Vash both found themselves fighting harder and harder to keep Roy under control.

Then a warble, like that of some massive energy flux, that fluctuated in pictch, tone and volume reverberated throughout the ship. Aston and Vash instantly recognized the failure of a jump drive, but also knew that the drive had backup systems to maintain a ship’s jump field. The collision of a secondary jump field trying to integrate with the original bubble was playing havoc with the hull.

Aston didn’t see the first object fly at him, but saw it impact with the section of bulkhead just above his brow. “What now?”

Moments later more objects were flying in the lounge, some finding their way aft and struck the iris, others merely collided with the bulkhead, collapsed to the deck, only to be flung on their own.

Vash instinctively snarled, baring his canine incisors at something that was clearly not the result of a ship’s AG malfunction, while Aston just continued his grip on Roy as all three lay on the deck.

“Let. Me. Go!”

Aston was tempted to belt Roy, but to do so would mean to let him go and subject himself to not only Roy’s continued struggle to get free, but also the ship’s continued convulsion.

Aston looked at Vash, “There’s nothing to growl at. When Peter knocks this guy out we’re going to the engineering section. I don’t care what the consequences.”

Vash, ears folded back, hair on the back of his neck erect, “What if they’re armed?”

Aston shook his head, “We’re dead anyway if we don’t get whatever low wage scum bag they have running the show. This moron’s right about one thing, we’ve got to drop from jumpspace or we’ll never get back home.”

The steward stepped over the three men, punched a code into the control panel and disappeared through the iris door which sealed shut. The words “Emergency Lockdown” flashed in bright LED red on the display.

It was Aston’s turn to growl, “That sonofa—” The deck hefted again with another power down and re-powerup.

Peter staggered against the fluctuating gravity with a white fat oversized briefcase displaying the medical emblem of two blue serpents twisted around a blue scepter and facing one with fanged mouths.

Peter got to his knees and opened the kit to pull out a long silver injector with a bulbous head that had a thousand or more miniature needles capable of injecting molecular solutions with little pain. “I’ll give him a mild sedative. It’ll make him drowsy, but it won’t knock him out.”

Aston’s face contorted with anger, “We need this guy out like a light! Vash and I need to get aft to engineering, or we’ve all had it.”

Peter shook his head and kept his surgeon’s calm despite Aston’s tone, “I don’t have anything stronger. Just pain killers, and all those do is block his pain receptors. They won’t put him under.”

Peter tapped the dosage with the back of his index finger trying to settle the drug’s meniscus to get a proper read on how much he was using. He flipped the thing around once more just as the ship convulsed once more. Peter was thrown forward and somehow through sheer fate stabbed himself with his own medicine.

“Oh cripes.” Peter half shouted, then quickly prepared another dose and stabbed Roy in the arm.

Within minutes Peter relaxed and rolled against the inner wall separating the crew section from the rest of the ship, and fought off a drug induced smile. Most of the objects in the lounge dropped as Roy’s eyes rolled back, his mouth open in a kind of conscious snore.

“No…” he protested. “I … got … to … save us … warn … the cap..tain… no…” Aston watched Roy descend into a drug stupor, and noticed the rest of the objects flying about in the lounge hit the deck, some rolling with the continued flux in the ship’s artificial gravity.

Both Aston and Vash looked at one another with a sudden realization.

“Simian studies, huh?” Aston blurted at Vash for lack of saying anything that made the remotest of sense.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Vash looked back at Aston, “This man … he’s got my hair standing on end.”

Aston nodded but didn’t comment any further, “Do you remember the layout of this thing? Is there another way aft without having to cut through a bulkhead or scale the hull in a vaccsuit?”

“We can go through the hold. I think it’s divided into two or three sections. But we’ll have to work our way through the freight.”

“I don’t mind squirming through cargo containers, as long as we can get away from this guy and bring this ship back to norm.”

The decks violently shuddered as the ship was suddenly jostled left and right.

“But what about, Pete?” Vash reminded.

Aston scrunched his lips, “We’ll bring this idiot down with us, then seal the hatch once we’re down below.”

Roy pushed Aston off, then shoved Vash into a bulkhead, rose to his feet and stood there defiantly. “This ship, is, in, peril! Why don’t you understand this?!”

Vash pushed himself off the bulkhead, ears perked, he bared his fangs again. Aston, still on the carpet, rolled himself upright and stared at Roy’s assertion of power. All the objects that had flown around and fallen, slowly rose again.

Roy continued, “There is salvation.” He looked up at the ceiling, as if divining a power from beyond, and continued, somehow as if clear thought and unbridled bravery had infused his being. “I have fought them before many times.” His tone was calm and commanding. “Today, this night, this place, it shall be their last.”

Aston was amazed. He saw Peter pump the man full of drugs, and yet he fought off both himself and Vash and was now in some kind of theatrical soliloquy.

Roy strode the lounge windows with purpose, “Begone, foul demons! I command thee!”

But the ship only rolled in protest as the power plant once again fought to keep electricity flowing through the liner’s life giving circuitry.

“Begone!” Aston listened, and could swear that Roy’s voice had an echo to it as he watched him point his finger out the window at something that simply wasn’t there. Ash trays, remotes, various knick knacks scattered throughout the lounge raised as one, then were turned into high velocity projectiles and impacted with the multilayered reinforced glass, putting a crack in the inner most layer.

Vash’s hairs were now fully perpendicular to his skin, and his canines fully bared as were the rest of his teeth.

“Vash, no! Get below and go aft! I’ll take care of this guy.”

Vash growled at Aston, “Alone? Are you out of your mind?” Then nodding towards Roy, “He’s pumped up on psi-drug! He’ll tear you apart!”

“It won’t matter if my guts are scattered all over the place, because if this ship breaks apart we’ll be floating in a jump bubble for the rest of our lives, which’ll be a total of a few seconds!”

But Vash, this one time, didn’t pay Aston any attention and charged Roy. But Roy saw the Vargr’s blinding sprint, and was able to throw up some kind of force barrier, stopping and deflecting Vash’s momentum while also concussing him and sending his unconscious form to the carpet.

Roy and Aston briefly locked eyes, but Aston held his position on the carpet, and waited for Roy to look away before moving, and doing so with a cautious crawl towards Vash to make sure Vash wasn’t seriously hurt.

Outside the jump bubble took on a blue glow, a different appearance than its usual silver gray shimmer. The bubble had transformed into a swirl of blue streaks of light. Some seemed to come at the hull, and hug the windows in a blinding brilliance, enough to force Aston to shield his eyes.

“Begone!” Roy hollered, his voice booming as if it were in a canyon. The response from the light show outside was unearthly, like the howl of banshees.

Aston had seen holovids of individuals on drugs of all sorts, but this was out of his experience. The amount of psychokinetic energy being commanded was staggering, and if he wasn’t more than just cautious, potentially lethal as per Vash’s near death experience.

Aston pulled his friend out of sight behind the sofa, then cautiously rose and softly stepped towards Roy, who was still focused on the swirl of lights outside the lounge windows.

Only a few steps left, and Aston turned on the speed, once again barreling into Roy’s relatively thin form and knocking him over. The impact of bodies threw Roy’s concentration, and whatever was being hurled about by his amped up psi-power dropped like a stone. Law suits or no Aston had had enough of this man.

The two briefly grappled, with Aston working laterally against Roy’s intended motion, and with several micro-gyrations of his wrist using his fingers as moments of torque, put Roy’s right arm in a “chicken wing” sending a sharp pain up and down Roy’s right side and through his arm. Roy cried out in pain and pulled his arm back, giving Aston an opportunity to mount Roy’s chest and deliver blows to his face until the man refused to fight anymore.

Aston did not feel good in the least recalling the time he had been setup up by both the service and the local PD of some far off world to bring a gang leader to book who had been menacing the local borough and a prized songstress.

Roy seemed to collapse once more with his eyes rolled back, and again trying to utter something, but this time not even half uttered words came out, just a steady groan. His breathing grew shallow and rapid, and Aston got off of his chest to give the man a chance to breathe. Roy’s breathing continued like that for several seconds, then calmed. He closed his eyes and rolled his head to the side as consciousness left him.

The ship continued to shake and fight with power and lights as the light storm raged outside. But suddenly the calliope of blue strobing hues vanished and was replaced with familiar star studded black. The lights dimmed, then slowly grew in strength, then resumed their normal level of illumination as the deck steadied for the last time. And Aston was left standing there with a disheveled starship lounge and three unconscious or semi-conscious forms, two of them friends, the other a prisoner of his own fantasy and addiction.

Neither captain nor crew would come out for the final legs of the journey all the way to the downport. Upon landing the authorities stormed in and took custody of the tetched passenger.

Outside Aston stood next to Vash and Peter waiting for the hold to open up to claim their freight, the liner having kicked them off the flight. Aston, as he expected, saw a few asteroid impacts complete with light gray dust rays splaying out from relatively cleaner and circular impact zones.

“What are you thinking?” Peter asked.

Aston wasn’t sure how to reply. “Nothing really. Just how someone gets caught up on drugs that skew their thinking and actions to the point of ... I don’t know. Risking everyone’s lives.”

Aston couldn’t help but stare at the otherwise clean lines of the liner, the forward hull and lounge area looming over them by a complete story.

The chief steward, flanked by starport security—two humanoids dressed in some sort of light armor—approached Aston and his party. He pointed at several cases. “That’s all we have of your’s. Here are your stamped vouchers. The captain asks that you not fly with us again, and will refuse your vouchers if you attempt to book with us one more time.”

Aston politely grinned, and didn’t mention that it was their ship’s own lack of maintenance and willingness to book a passenger with known issues that caused the chaos during the flight’s final moments in jumpspace. Aston took the stamped vouchers, and motioned to Vash and Peter to grab their gear without a word.

The sun was high, the air was warm, and starship engines thundered in the background. They were still a couple of month’s travel time out from Imperial space, but would make it back somehow. Aston blew air from his cheeks once more. Free pastry didn’t make up for a complete lack of good holovids and a lunatic on drugs for a passenger.

Aston saw Peter and Vash grab their baggage, “Let’s go.”, and the trio walked away from the liner for the last time.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Infinite Glow

System 876-574
Five Sisters Subsector
Spinward Marches
Oort cloud
0500 ship time
Banshee 225

Commander George Ebersole panned his head left and right searching with his naval issued mark-1 wetware scanner, otherwise known as eyeballs in civ-doctor speak, hoping beyond hope that he would see whatever it was that the carrier had picked up on the sensors a half hour ago.

The twin pod thrusters mounted aft and nested amidst a foreshortened tri-wing assembly pushed the FA-Banshee (hull number two-two-five) faster and faster by kicking out millions of joules of force with each passing sliver-thin fraction of measured time. What her relative speed was to the carrier Ebersole didn’t bother to check. If all else failed, if he and his flight burnt out their engines, the carrier could always jump ahead of them and do a reverse intercept.

Right now his job was to track down and intercept that contact that had been menacing shipping out on the Imperium’s frontier, beyond any Zhodani naval base, far beyond the reach of any Sword Worlder, beyond the marauding clutches of Vargr corsairs, and even the more knowledgeable, friendly, yet insatiably curious Darriens—it would be just the kind of thing they would cook up. But all the way out here?

Ebersole glanced at his scanner suite, then resumed his hawk like scan of the black broken up by a dust like band of stars parsecs distant running horizontally across his field of view. As beautiful as the sheen of faint sparkling light was it wasn’t doing him nor his flight any favors in terms of trying to pick out a pin prick amongst a field of illuminated dust that was the Milky Way.

“Contact, three-six-three, z-minus zero-one-eight. Twelve-gee closure!” Sal Brand said, the young Weapon’s Intercept Officer’s tone was filled with excitement. Most of their deployments had been intercepting space junk, the odd derelict or wayward scout ship crewed by some rich man’s son taking his friends for a joyride, and the occasional pirate. But an actual bad guy ship? Well, this is what they trained for, still a rarity all the same.

Ebersole repeated the vector over the tactical channel, locked in the target, and nosed his Banshee towards the graphic bracket the contact on his HUD. He eased off on the throttle and the micro-thrusters that controlled yaw, pitch and roll did their thing to re-orient the fighter towards its intended target.

“Contact, zero angle.” Ebersole heard Second Lieutenant’s Edward Zanowsky affirm that he and his wingman had picked up the target and were following Ebersole’s lead.

“I can’t get a mass on her.” Brand stated anticipating Ebersole’s next question. Mass was the all important signifier that could hint at a target’s size and indicate its class and all the data that it implied. Correlated with its speed and any change in vector and a pilot didn’t need an IFF squawking on all frequencies to tell both sides in a conflict who the good guys and bad guys were.

“It’s moving away! It picked us up!” Brand did his best to stifle his tone, but the targets change in vector was radical, like a bulk wale in an ocean moving like a dancer in a studio with the speed of a race car. “I think it’s going to jump. I’m picking up spikes on all bands. A build up….like she’s going to …”

A white column of light sliced across the space off Two-Two-Five’s starboard, pulsated for several heart beats, then winked out.

“Geeze, what the heck was that?” Ebersole’s pilot’s engineering calm leapt aside to pure bewilderment. The column of light reappeared off to port, slicing through the middle of Ebersole’s formation, vaporizing Zanowsky’s ship and his three crewmen. “Break!”

Lieutenant Samuel Herzog pulled right on his stick and saw ship two-two-five diminish into the black still pointing in the relative same direction, his heart pounding several times faster than normal.

“Saber flight, saber two’s not squawking.” Ebersole heard CAG’s voice, but didn’t respond immediately.

“Pirate, engage!” Ebersole called out, Pirate was Herzog’s calsign, a name that was shorter and more economical than a pilot’s rank and actual last name which took up precious fractions of seconds of time to utter.

Ebersole flipped back the trigger guard, saw and heard the Banshee lock onto the target, and pulled the trigger. The deep thump reverberated through the hull as two-two-five unleashed its hyper-velocity tactical nuke. Ebersole let the second weapon lock on, and triggered it as well.

Both missiles shot away at incredible speeds that verged on relativistic, riding trails of blurred white light into infinity. Moments passed as both Ebersole and Herzog threw their Banshees into evasive patterns as more massive white beams lanced out, attempting to track both fighters, but ultimately missing until three distinct fireballs flared up in the black, jettisoning huge amounts of radiation by human standards, and engulfing the target.

“I think you got him, sir.” Brand’s voice was still excited, yet hopeful instilled with the fact that Imperial military engineering had done its job.

“Pirate, you got him?” Ebersole’s voice was calm but edged with the possibility that the fight might not be over.

“Too much snow on my end.” Herzog replied, his voice as tense as Brand’s.

Moments passed before the sensor cleared, only to reveal the contact was still moving.

“It’s… its’ still there!” Brand’s incredulity echoed over the tactical channel. “Geeze it’s moving hard! It’s accelerating!”

“Accelerating?” Ebersole couldn’t help but be puzzled. Being awed would have to wait and take back seat to more level headed assessment.

“Vector’s changing value. It’s changing course! At that speed?!”

“Save the commentary. Pirate, loose the rest of your payload. We’ll close and see if can’t bag him with lasers.”

“No offense skipper, but if we can’t nail him with nukes…”

“Understood, just do as I say.”

Moments later Ebersole’s last two high-tech lances sped away with deathly silence to chase down the mysterious contact, as well as Herzog’s three for a total of five high energy explosives capable of leveling a city, but designed for anti-shipping all the same.

“Picking up a jump signature, skipper! He’s trying to make a break for it!”

But Ebersole was silent. Herzog was right, if the missiles didn’t stop him, them, or whatever it was, then getting close to guns’ range would be useless, but it might give the carrier group valuable intel.

“Definite jump-sig, skipper! He’s going to jump!”

Five brilliant flashes strobed in series across space leaving the image of five orange balls of fire etched in Banshee flight’s mind and eyes. The static fuzzed up both fighters’ sensors, then cleared up leaving absolutely nothing to lock onto.

“Did we get him, sir? Do you think?”

Again, Ebersole didn’t immediately reply, but merely stared out at the Milky Way wondering what it was they had encountered. “I don’t know.” He finally uttered, then squawking over the tactical channel, “CAG, we’ve lost contact. We’re RTB.”





Second Lieutenant Richard Aston Stood on the tarmac overseeing the loading of the Albatross, a Pukharra class alleged fast scout. He called it alleged because he only ever heard bad things about the class, and nothing about its speed. It stood three stories tall, was by starship standards razor thin with a bulbous foreshortened horizontal wing assembly with huge vertical stabilizers mounted on each wing’s end. If nothing else she had huge engines which, again, boasted many times the amount of thrust of a Sulieman—boasted at least. Aston had no experience with the class, but heard Captain Edleman talk about the class with a mix of severe disdain and admiration, like a child out of wedlock that had succeeded in life.

A young Vargr, silver, black, and white with deep hazel eyes that were full of life, wearing an IISS jumpsuit no less, came up to Aston with an extended hand. “Engineer’s Mate, second class, Vash Gosh’agh reporting for duty, sir.”

Aston looked up from his manifest unsure of how to respond. He had seen Vargr from a distance back on Earth, none in Aslan space (or very few), but had never actually met nor interacted with one on any level.

Nevertheless Aston pulled his right hand from his clipboard and met the Vargr’s hand, “Second Lieutenant Richard Aston. I’m not the team leader, though. That would be Captain Ulysses Edleman. You’ll report to him.” Aston checked his clipboard again and looked for a Vargr sounding name. “Vash? You’ll be bunking in cabin four, and according to this you’re not an engineer’s mate, but chief.”

Vash’s eyes brightened and his bushy gray and silver-white tail wagged. “Chief?” A Vargr smile looked much like a human’s same expression, save for the dagger like wolf teeth, a holdover from hundreds of thousands of years evolution and uplift by a mysterious high-tech race that had vanished uncounted centuries ago. “No one told me.”

Aston gave an all-service professional grin as he re-shook Vash’s hand, “Welcome aboard, chief. And congratulations.”

“Uh, thank you, lieutenant. Uh, do I need permission to come aboard?” Vash was genuinely concerned. Humans could be fickle about things like protocol.

Aston remembered Patterson’s admonition, “We’re not the navy, Engineer. Just call me Richard. You can pack your bundle away in your cabin, hang out, or give us a hand as you see fit.”

Vash wagged his tail some more, the corners of his mouth upturned as he picked up his duffle bag from the tarmac before saying, “I’ll be down in a few to help out, … uh.”

“Richard.” Aston reminded him.

“Richard. Sorry, sir.”

“We’re not the navy.” Aston laughed.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Vash nodded, his mouth opened to unleash his tongue as he wagged his tail some more. “Okay.” Vash gave a half salute before scampering up the ramp past the cargo droids hefting containers filled with food and equipment into the hold.

The next gate over a sleek looking custom yacht with battle scars and missing a good third of her forward hull wound down her engines and came to a halt. The ship had “Glamorous Gennie” painted in big bright cursive letters on her bow. Just aft was a charred mass of twisted pipes, burnt wires, and fused hull plates. As if the yacht were a stick of butter, and a hot knife had sliced a diagonal section off her mid forward upper decks.

Moments later a flight of three type-Ts thundered overhead with wing tips in the down position. Aston signed off on the provisions and fuel, then couldn’t help but keep himself turned to look at the starship carnage the next bay over.

Several minutes went by before the owner and other occupants stepped from her gantry down onto the tarmac as a fleet of starport security vehicles and local PD came racing up to the ship’s underside. Moments later EMTa arrived in ambulances, and though the people looked none the worse for wear, several were placed in gurneys and flown away post haste amidst the traffic of starship’s landing and taxiing to berths.

A pirate attack?—Aston wondered, but had never seen a laser do that kind of damage. Had she been grazed by a spinal weapon? From what Aston understood about the behemoths, even being graced by the massive amounts of radiation from a spinal weapon spelled certain death.

“Something bothering you, lieutenant?” Tim Edleman’s voice was a mixture of veteran and concerned father.

Aston jolted himself out of his rubber-necking stupor and turned to face the ships C O. “Oh, ah, nothing, sir, it’s just that …” Aston searched for the right words, but figured to get back to business, “…I signed off on the fuel and provisions. I’m not sure the maintenance bots are done scanning the ship.”

Aston handed Edleman the clipboard with his signiature on several forms. Edleman stood just over six feet, peppered hair, clean shaven, unlike Aston he didn’t wear a ball cap with the sunburst. He took Aston’s clipboard, looked it over briefly then gestured with his chin towards the yacht, “What do you think happened to her?”

Aston had been given permission to gawk, but held off for a half second giving the yacht a double and triple take before turning back to stare at the destructive cleft left by some intense and precise heat.

“I don’t know.” Aston offered, nearly stammering his answer. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Nor has anyone else.” Replied Edleman, “But that’s what we’re here to find out.”

Carefully and quietly another presence made itself known by standing off to the side at the edge of human peripheral vision. Aston and Edleman both turned to see Vash standing there.

“And you are?” Edleman made a friendly demand.

“Oh, captain, this is our new chief engineer.”

Vash smiled briefly and gave a slight wag. His smile vanished as he extended his fur covered hand to Edleman. “Vash Gosh’agh, reporting for duty, captain.”

Edleman gave an all scout professional grin, much like Aston had earlier, “Welcome aboard, chief. Much experience with the Pukharra class?”

“Only by reputation, captain.” Vash replied.

“Just call me Grant. We’re not the navy.” Edleman replied offering another encouraging human smile. Vash grinned in return. “And if you’ve heard half of what I’ve heard, then none of it’s good.”

Vash wasn’t sure how to reply, “The Pukharra is supposed to be rated for top-g performance.” Vash hoped the statement would show his knowledge and faith in the engineers who designed her.

“As long as you can handle her, chief.” Edleman then gestured for Vash to have a look at the yacht. “Tell me chief, what do you make of that?”

But all Vash could do was imitate Aston in gawking at the damage to the yacht. “Some kind of high energy construction accident? Like maybe a welder for a naval hull caught her? I’m not sure, … uh, Grant.”

“Well,” Edleman resumed, “Like I was telling Richard, here. That’s our assignment.” Edleman noted both crewman staring at the scene. “I’ll let you guys soak that up.” Edleman quietly walked away letting the two continue to soak up the image.

 

[Blue Ghost]

The last droid loaded the last crate, and Vash sealed up the hold. The op didn’t require an air raft, technically anyway, allowing more provisions so the ship could stay on station longer if necessary. Nearly all of it was food with a percentage being dedicated to incidentals. A few containers held some gear, but nothing for work dirt-side. One even had a space cache of vaccsuits and support equipment.

Aston wasn’t sure what to make of it. He guessed they were either headed for a moon with low gravity or off to survey asteroids. Aston dismissed the idea. Whatever it was he would find out soon enough.

The Pukharra itself was highly responsive—like a sport’s car, she surged forward with a mere nudge of her throttle. Aston felt himself pushed back in his seat with each acceleration and was tempted to glance at Edleman sitting in the captain’s-navigator’s chair a meter directly behind him. The one advantage the ship had was a commanding view of the immediate area and for miles around of tarmac landing pads and runways.

Designed with wings, her engines were powerful enough to push her aloft through sheer vectored thrust and antigrav or repulssor assist, rendering gravity into icy-slick ethereal medium. The combination allowed starship’s to soar into the heavens and beyond.

Hours later in jump Aston was pushing himself passed the interior bow section to sit in the chair nearest the storage area, staring at gun camera footage from months ago projected by the portable holovid situated in the middle of the table. There were multiple shots, the dominant three were the pilots’ POV from the cockpit, then ancillary windows showing the dorsal gunner’s view and the view from the missiles as they closed with the contact. Aston watched intently—it was like seeing phantoms from an era long gone as the tactical chatter narrated the images.

“Contact, three-six-three, z-minus zero-one-eight. Twelve-gee closure!”
“Three-six-three, minus zero-one eight.”
“Contact, zero angle.”
The black and white image of the Milky Way rolled slowly from mid horizontal almost imperceptible ten degrees as the Banshee attack craft closed on target as a target blip flashed on the screen.
“I can’t get a mass on her.” Several beats passed, then. “It’s moving away! It picked us up!”
The dim luminescence of the Milky Way horizon continued its gradual roll when the Weapons Intercept Officer nearly shouted.
“I think it’s going to jump. I’m picking up a spike on all bands. A build up … like she’s going to …”
A column of blurred white nearly drowned out the images.
“Geeze, what the heck was that?”

Aston leaned forward, bighting his lower lip in fascination as another blinding column of light lanced out at the flight, with the result that one set of gun camera footage winked out, replaced by nothing but video black.

“Break!”
“’Flight, saber two’s not squawking.”
“Pirate, engage!”
Both remaining cameras showed the Milky Way horizon violently rotating in opposite directions with a flurry of numbers representing speed, vector, attitude and distance racing away from their previous values. The first missile closed with a ovular ball of white that was blurred at the edges, then winked out.

Edleman stopped the feed. “There’s more, but that’s pretty much all we have on it.” He looked around the table at Aston, Vash, and Charles Carlson, the medic for this operation. “Opinions?”

Aston was hesitant, but spoke first, “I’m unclear though. If the navy couldn’t take them on, then what are we supposed to do?”

“Our job is to go out there and look around. The navy’s scoured the place, but the service thinks there may be something left over. What I don’t know.” Edleman’s final statement was one of resignation. Edleman scrolled the footage back to just before the missile impacted.

And that’s what caught everyone’s attention. The contact in question was a ball of light—or seemingly. After several millennia of development, cameras had reached a “definition peak” as how much image they could accurately convey to a viewer, but even so there was no mistaking that the target was indiscernible.

“Is that a shot of their drives?” Aston put the question out there, though it was more aimed at Edleman he phrased it so that anyone could respond.

“That doesn’t look like an active exhaust.” Vash suggested.

“You have an opinion, chief?” Edleman’s tone was challenging, but also encouraging, as if testing the Vargr.

“I’m not sure, captain.” Vash shook his head ever so gently in disbelief, “Unless …” his voice trailed off as he scrunched his canine lips.

“Unless what?” Edleman wanted answers.

“Unless, it was a ship with ports wide open in overdrive. I’m not sure.”

Edleman looked at Charles, “Opinion, doctor?”

The ship’s medical officer gave a miserable muted half laugh, “It looks like a big ball of white light to me.”

“Uh, captain?” Aston ventured, “Might this be why we were assigned this ship and not a Sulieman?”

Edleman smiled grimly, “I’ll let you figure that one out. A Sulieman can’t outrun a fighter.”

“Nor can this ship.” Vash reminded.

“Nor can we.” Edleman confirmed. “But if we do run into something, the added kick this beast has in its drives, might save us in a pinch.” Edleman let that sink in, noting the worried looks on his three crewman.

Aston had an uneasy feeling in his stomach. His muscles in various parts of his body tensed, notably his gut, as if he were expected to get punched at any moment. “What are the odds of us running into something?”

Edleman looked at Aston, then glanced at the table. “I don’t know. But probably low. If that yacht we saw back in port is of any indication, then whatever it was has probably moved far from here. Off to find greener pastures.”

Aston felt compelled to ask the obvious, “Grant, there’s only four of us. We’re not hot-bunking with a survey team.” Aston let his observation convey his message.

“One other thing.” It was Vash’s turn, “My section’s got a lot of added hoses and conduit. I’m guessing, without giving my engines a once over, that four-gees is an official rating.” Vash’s tone was borderline wry.

“She felt a little jumpy taxing away from the pad.” Aston confirmed.

Edleman held back an inner expression, or so Aston surmised. “Gentlemen, we’re just here to survey the Oort cloud. Maybe grab some junk floating out here. In the meantime, I think it’s the good doctor’s turn to make pizza.” Edleman looked around at the astonished crew, then to the ship’s surgeon, “That’s an order doctor.”