Empire's End: Episode 1: The Senator's Daughter Page 5

  “We were short a crewman,” JaQuan replied. “I ran into a guy I knew from acclimation. I knew he had the skill set. I thought it was a happy coincidence.”

  “But it turned out to be neither.”

  JaQuan frowned. He took another quick swig of water, then faced Lanaliel.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was neither happy nor a coincidence,” the big Mandran answered.

  “‘Happy’ I understand. He turned out to be a terrorist and got us stuck in the middle of nowhere with maybe no way back. What do you mean by ‘not a coincidence’?”

  “If it were a coincidence, then Jim Brody would have been at Daxal Station with a kidnapped senator’s daughter in a cryo-stasis chamber, seeking to get her away without anyone knowing. Tell me, JaQuan, if you were a kidnapper, would you seize your victim and then just hope a convenient ship would come along?”

  JaQuan felt like someone had just belted him in the face. Lanaliel’s question was so simple and so obvious it knocked him over mentally. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  “No,” he admitted. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “It would seem then,” Lanaliel said, “that Jim Brody’s approach to you was not coincidental. It is logical to assume it was planned.”

  JaQuan’s mouth went dry again. Lanaliel had sucker-punched his mind a second time. He took another long draught of water.

  “But how could he have known I would be at Daxal?” JaQuan said. “How could he have known I’d have access to a ship he could use?”

  “I do not know the answers to those questions,” Lanaliel said. “But they are worth posing, are they not?”

  “Yeah,” JaQuan said, his voice far away. “Yeah, they most definitely are.”

  He’d known something was fishy about this whole affair. He’d been surprised to run into Brody on Daxal. Been stunned he was looking for work, that he was the guy who could at last make JaQuan’s desire to move up to pilot come true.

  And then suspicion had been nagging at him from the moment they got into trouble. His cockiness at the crew meeting had put JaQuan off. His going missing when he was supposed to be helping Lanaliel had triggered alarms in JaQuan’s head. JaQuan had known something was wrong all along. He just hadn’t known what.

  “But this is what I do not understand,” Lanaliel said. “Why would he do this in the first place?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kidnap the senator’s daughter. Manifest Destiny seeks to establish humans as full citizens of the Empire. Antagonizing the people with the ability to help them is the wrong approach.”

  “The idea is to try to make it so miserable to not comply that it would be easier to do what they want,” JaQuan answered.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Back on Earth, we had massive, powerful armies just like the Empire. And you’d get these guys who wanted to strike at the states that controlled them. Sometimes, the fights were over territory; sometimes, they were over ideology. But the groups who wanted the armies gone or the governments that controlled them overthrown didn’t have the firepower to take them on directly. They couldn’t fight the army. They’d get crushed.

  “So small groups of them would attack civilian targets. They’d bomb public transportation systems, or hijack a plane, or assassinate government officials. The whole goal was to spread terror. They wanted to make everyone feel unsafe, afraid. The hope was, if this went on long enough, the people they were fighting would decide it wasn’t worth it anymore and give up.”

  “And did this work?”

  “Not really,” JaQuan said with a sigh. “Hardliners in the government or the military would crack down. They’d commit atrocities to catch these guys. Of course, they could never get them all. If they killed an important leader of a major terrorist group, another one would just take his place.

  “But they couldn’t wipe the terrorists out, and the terrorists couldn’t make them go away. It just led to more and more bloodshed.”

  Lanaliel wore an expression of horror, confusion, and sadness. His stripe narrowed as he digested what JaQuan had told him.

  “But then why do this?” he asked. “If it is a futile method of waging war, why engage in it?”

  “Because these guys are fanatics. They believe in an extreme version of God, or they love their flag or the vision of their country so much that they believe they are exalted in their defense of it. The only way to free their people from tyranny is to murder the alleged oppressors.”

  “Ah, yes,” Lanaliel said. “This I understand. Fanaticism is not an exclusively human trait.”

  JaQuan drank the rest of his water. He wished Lanaliel were wrong. But he’d seen enough Elohim purists and Keepers of the Faith to know humanity had no monopoly on crazy.

  “Let’s check that last contact point,” he said.

  “Very good,” Lanaliel replied.

  JaQuan crossed the deck. The remaining tube was three feet up on the opposite wall. He hoisted himself in. Then he unclipped his flashlight and started inspecting the drive.

  There was more space in this tube, so he had better range of motion. He didn’t see anything unusual in the first few feet, so he climbed in farther.

  “Here’s a poser for you,” he said as he inspected the next stretch of drive. “Why did Kitekh run from those battlecruisers?”

  “The captain has no love of the Empire,” Lanaliel replied.

  “Yeah, but without knowing we had a kidnapping victim aboard, why risk running from warships? If they’d used particle cannon on us, we wouldn’t even be here to talk about this.”

  “True, but particle cannon would also have killed the hostage.”

  “Sure, but since she didn’t know they were trying to protect a hostage, Kitekh had no reason to believe they wouldn’t use the big guns. It’s a big fucking risk to run on an Imperial warship, let alone two.”

  “The captain’s story is her own,” Lanaliel said. “You will have to ask her for the details. But I will tell you she has perfectly good reasons for despising the Empire. When two Imperial warships ordered her to surrender her ship, she could not have seen any reason to trust them. She may not have known what they were after, but her decision turned out to be correct. Had she surrendered, the senator’s daughter would have been discovered, and we’d have all been charged with treason.”

  JaQuan snorted. He crawled deeper into the tube.

  “As opposed to stranding us in deep space with a busted hyperdrive?” he said.

  “At least out here we have a chance to repair the ship and escape. In the hands of the Empire, we would be condemned.”

  JaQuan didn’t doubt that. He had no illusions about what would happen if the Empire found them.

  He ran his flashlight beam over the surface of the hyperdrive, looking for damage. Finding nothing, he was about to move farther in, when he noticed a strange scent.

  “Damn, that’s foul,” he said, crinkling his nose.

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s some rank smell in here.”

  “What kind of smell?”

  Steeling himself, JaQuan cleared his mind then took in a deep breath. He wanted to vomit almost immediately. It was pungent, sickly-sweet. Almost like . . .

  “Like rotted flesh,” he said.

  Lanaliel paused before replying.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not completely, but that’s what it reminds me of,” JaQuan said.

  “I hope you are wrong, my friend. Turn your light up into the tunnel and do not advance if you cannot see.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if what I think you are smelling is up there, it is toxic, and you do not want it on your skin.”

  “Great,” JaQuan muttered. “Fucking great.”

  He turned the flashlight ahead of him and then began crawling slowly into the tube. He was no longer carefully inspecting the engine for damage. He moved ahead, looking for the source of the vile scent assaulting his nostrils.

&n
bsp; It didn’t take long. Just ahead, a viscous, yellow-green liquid that reminded him of pus leaked slowly into the tube. JaQuan couldn’t see where it was coming from. Cautiously, he inched his way forward, looking for the source. The smell got worse as he got closer.

  “Ugh,” he said. “What the fuck is this shit?”

  He re-aimed the flashlight at the drive. What he saw astounded him.

  “Lanaliel,” he shouted. “I think I’ve found the problem.”

  HORAY SAT AT HIS DESK, PORING over technical data on hyperspace travel. He needed to keep his mind occupied while the crew went through the tedium of questioning the officials in the Rijan System. There was little he could do while the interrogations occurred, while the space was scanned. It was best not to give his brain something else to worry about.

  Of course, studying hyperspace theory wasn’t exactly distracting. He understood most of the principles – the existence of hyperspace, how a jump point could be opened to enter it, how it made folding space and time possible, so that faster-than-light speeds were achievable. It was complex but entirely comprehensible to a patient and educated mind.

  But the physics of hyperspace and the operation of the drives that made travel through it possible were not what he was looking for. Instead, he was trying to determine what might happen if one’s hyperdrive were damaged while entering a jump point.

  The data on that was scarce. Most of what he’d found was largely speculative, and much of it was contradictory. There were no recorded cases of someone surviving such a mishap. So no one was sure whether the victims were destroyed, lost in space, or transported to some other place.

  Thus, the odds of finding Senator Mol’s daughter grew slimmer. Horay was clinging to hope for the simple sake of not giving up yet. But it was getting harder to believe this would turn out all right.

  His door chimed, interrupting his study. It was just as well. He was growing depressed.

  “Yes,” he called.

  The door slid open, and Zin stepped in and saluted.

  “Eskaton Station Control does not report any contact with Cataan’s Claw, sir,” he said. “Although they note that, if a freighter of that size were making a voyage from Daxal with a full load, they wouldn’t be due to arrive for another two days.”

  “Of course. What of the other stations?”

  “Eskaton is the main hub for receiving equipment and other goods,” Zin replied. “Virtually all commerce comes through it.”

  “But there are other, smaller stations, and if a group of terrorists who had survived an attack from an Imperial warship entered the system, they might not head straight for the most likely place we’d look, would they?”

  “No, sir,” Zin said, blushing in embarrassment. “I’ll conduct a thorough search of the other stations too.”

  “And then check the other worlds in the system. They may have filed Rijan IV as their destination as cover. I know none of the other planets is habitable, but that doesn’t mean a transport couldn’t be hiding at one of them to take the senator’s daughter somewhere else.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Zin saluted crisply and then went out. The door shut automatically behind him.

  Horay sighed. The terrorists weren’t due yet. There was no reason to panic. Indeed, they were likely to be late, limping through hyperspace with a damaged drive.

  But he just couldn’t shake the feeling they were gone forever, lost in that strange other dimension with no way back.

  JAQUAN LISTENED TO LANALIEL’S EXPLANATION OF the damage to the hyperdrive with a combination of fascination and dread. Kitekh, Rorgun, and Cooressa sat at the mess table as well, each with similar expressions of concern.

  “A Myollnar Crystal,” Lanaliel said, “is the very heart of a hyperdrive. It’s more than the fuel that makes it go; it’s the very thing that enables contact with hyperspace in the first place.”

  “Yes, I know, Lanaliel,” Kitekh said, sounding irritated. “I’m not new at this. I’ve been captain of this vessel alone for seven years. What’s the problem with our crystal?”

  “The beam that struck us as we were entering hyperspace penetrated the hull and hit the crystal, killing it,” Lanaliel answered.

  “Wait,” JaQuan said. “Killing it?”

  “Yes,” Cooressa said. “Myollnar Crystals are hybrid lifeforms. They are constructed externally of crystal rock that amplifies their emissions, and internally of organic material capable of prying open holes in normal space, through which hyperspace can be accessed.”

  “Correct,” Lanaliel said. “It’s not quite the same as having an actual creature in the drive. The living matter inside the crystal is neither sentient nor aware. But it is the tissue inside that makes opening a jump point possible and safely navigating the alternate dimension.”

  JaQuan shook his head. The concept of this made sense on a purely surface level. But the more he thought about it, the harder it became to grasp.

  “But we were in hyperspace,” Rorgun said. “We made the passage through the jump point, even though the crystal was destroyed. What happened?”

  “Based on the data I have examined from when we were in hyperspace and knowing that we were attempting to navigate it without a living Myollnar Crystal,” Cooressa said, “I believe the ship was bouncing around in hyperspace erratically. Picture a sailing ship in a storm that loses its rudder. It cannot steer and is at the mercy of where the waves push it.

  “This is extremely dangerous for a starship, since the laws of physics do not work the same way in hyperspace as in normal space. Instead of being simply pushed around like a rudderless ship in the ocean, we were also being pulled and bent and rolled in an infinite number of directions. Naturally, the ship’s structural integrity could not long withstand that sort of punishment. Hyperspace may defy physics as we understand them, but our ship cannot. The hyperdrive helps it travel safely on a predetermined course. Had JaQuan not disengaged the drive when he did, we might have been torn apart or transformed into unending singularities or suffered some similar horrible and unimaginable fate.”

  JaQuan shuddered. The more they talked about the dangers of hyperspace, the less he wanted to travel it ever again.

  “All this is true,” Lanaliel said. “The Imperial ship scored a direct hit on the most critical part of the hyperdrive, the one that makes everything else possible. We are very lucky to be alive.”

  Kitekh snorted. JaQuan shared the sentiment. They might be alive, but they were totally fucked. Did it matter that they had survived the Imperial attack?

  “What else did you learn?” Kitekh asked.

  “Well, the organic tissue in a Myollnar Crystal is apparently toxic,” JaQuan said. “The beamer shot that took it out caused the crystal to crack, spilling the living matter into the contact point. That melted the wiring that enables communication with the nav system, which explains why I can’t bring the hyperdrive online to even diagnose the extent of the damage. All that wiring and maybe the housing will have to be replaced before we can use the hyperdrive again.”

  “I’m afraid the situation is graver than that,” Lanaliel said. “Wiring and such we can cannibalize from other parts of the ship. If the issue were a board or a mechanical device, we could – What is the charming human term you told me?”

  “Kit-bash,” JaQuan said.

  “Yes,” Lanaliel said. “We could kit-bash something out of what we have available. But a Myollnar Crystal is not something that can be ‘whipped up.’ They contain living tissue that must be specifically grown for the purpose. The crystal must be replaced.

  “And until it is, we cannot go to hyperspace, let alone navigate the journey.”

  There it was – the death sentence. They were stuck at sublight speed. If they stripped down Cataan’s Claw, she could probably fly at .4C, .5C if they were lucky. There was no way to get between systems in a single lifetime.

  Kitekh drummed her claws on the metal tabletop. JaQuan watched as she considered their options.
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br />   “Tell me you’ve found something helpful in terms of our location,” she said to Cooressa.

  “As a point of fact, I have,” Cooressa said. “JaQuan’s scans reveal two things. First, we are far off-course. Either as a result of the impact of the beamer cannon or due to the spatial contortions from attempting to navigate hyperspace without a living Myollnar Crystal, we are nowhere near our intended destination or our point of origin.”

  “Great,” JaQuan said, dread settling more fully in his heart.

  “Actually, it is,” Cooressa said. “We came out of hyperspace near the Horari Belt.”

  “How near?” Kitekh asked.

  “The best possible scenario would be a three-day voyage at space-normal speed,” Cooressa said. “But that would require us moving at close to .3C, which I do not recommend. Even after we get the cracks in the hull patched, the structural integrity will still be questionable. To reduce stress, I recommend going no faster than .2C which would put us there in five days.”

  “I’ve not heard of this Horari Belt,” JaQuan said. “Are there settlements there?”

  “I wouldn’t call them settlements,” Rorgun replied.

  “It’s an asteroid belt,” Kitekh said. “Rich in ore, so there’s a lot of mining. There are multiple space stations.”

  “The belt is thick and difficult to navigate for any ship larger than a small freighter,” Lanaliel said. “Even a midsized ship risks being pummeled into space dust. Large vessels, especially warships, have no chance to survive inside.”

  “It’s also on the rim of civilized space,” Rorgun said. “The combination of remote location and inaccessibility to Imperial warships makes it a haven for smugglers and pirates. It’s every kind of dangerous you can imagine.”

  “But it will be a place we can conceivably effect repairs,” Cooressa said.

  “So long as we can acquire a new Myollnar Crystal,” Lanaliel said. “Getting to Horari means we won’t die of old age or asphyxiation in the middle of nowhere. But unless we can get a new crystal or a new ship, we won’t be going anywhere else.”