Longshots, p.1
Longshots, page 1
Table Of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER NOVELS BY JR ANDREWS
SOCIAL MEDIA
Longshots
Copyright © 2024 by Jason A. Rust
All rights reserved.
First Edition: 2024
Ebook: 978-1-963500-03-5
Paperback: 978-1-963500-04-2
Hardback: 978-1-963500-05-9
JR Andrews
jr@jrandrewsbooks.com
Website: http://jrandrewsbooks.com
Editor: Amanda Kruse at Red Adept Editing
Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
For everyone who looked up into the night sky as a kid and dreamt of what could be.
CHAPTER ONE
The Itzabella drifted through space, inching closer to the other ship’s hull. Chase Conrad, standing on his tiptoes, pressed his face against the window in the Bella’s airlock portal to get a better view. Well, he would have, anyway, if his face weren’t already covered by his spacesuit helmet. As it was, the glass of his visor smacked against the door’s glass with a clink.
The NTSS Trustworthy loomed in front of him, suspended in the dark, cold void of space, as his uncle’s salvage vessel shortened the distance between the two spaceships. He sighed in his helmet, his breath making fog bloom on the clear visor.
“I wish he’d hurry up. I don’t like being here,” Chase said to the shorter spacesuit beside him, currently occupied by his nine-year-old brother, Lock.
“Let me see. It’s my turn. You’re gonna make me miss it!” The younger boy pushed Chase’s side.
Chase pushed him back, forcing Lock to take a step away from him. “No, it isn’t, cel-brain. Remember last week? You traded your chance to watch the next docking maneuver for my sweet roll after Sunday supper. And this is the next docking maneuver.”
Lock frowned in his helmet. “Oh, crell. I forgot.”
“Sure you did,” Chase muttered, rolling his eyes.
“Well, tell me how close we’re getting. How much longer? I want to get over there and see what we can get.”
“Almost there. Maybe twenty meters. We’re just barely drifting, though. He could be doing this a lot faster.”
Lock frowned. “Do you think Uncle Harel’s flying the procedure himself this time?”
Chase shook his head. “No, I’m sure he’s got Sheila doing it. You know he’s probably watching a stream of the latest skipper-pod race. I think he bet a bunch of credits on it. Or he’s watching one of his other dumb shows. Whatever. Point is, he wouldn’t pilot Bella himself unless she was on fire.”
A loud chime rang out, drawing their attention back to the window. The panel beside the airlock door switched from red to green. The two ships had docked at last.
“All right, Lock, remember what we’re doing. We shouldn’t even be here. New Terran Command marked this whole quadrant of space off limits. We’ve got to get over there, grab what we can salvage for a few quick credits, then get back on board the Itzabella.”
Lock nodded. “I’m sure nobody will—”
Another voice cut in, booming in their earphones. “Boys, we’re hooked up, so go get ’em. There’s gotta be something of value over there. That’s one of the governor’s family vessels. It’s probably got all kinds of good junk we can sell. Remember, though, we aren’t supposed to be here, so you need to move fast.”
“Roger that, Uncle Harel,” Chase replied into his helmet mic. “How long do you figure we have?”
“Probably thirty minutes tops,” his uncle said.
“Okay. You did turn off the beacon, right?”
He meant the Bella’s emergency identification beacon. The New Terran Space Authority required every ship to carry a device that continually broadcast flight data about that vessel, including its current position. Having it on wouldn’t be the wisest choice at the moment, considering they were in a restricted part of New Terran space.
“Uh…” Harel started, “I, um…” For a few seconds, silence filled their helmets.
“He’s doing it now, isn’t he?” Lock asked his older brother with a sigh.
Chase echoed the sound of resignation. “I’m sure he is. I don’t know how he managed to make any money and not get arrested doing this salvage thing before we got here.”
They’d been living—and working—on the Itzabella as part of Uncle Harel’s salvage crew for three years. Shortly after Lock was born, their mother died during an epidemic of the Trelleum worm plague that had killed something like eighty percent of the adult women of the Trelleum Eight colony. After that, the boys and their father moved off world when their dad got a job doing ship maintenance on Terran Station, the enormous space station in orbit over New Terra.
They never had much in the way of credits, but they stuck together, even if Chase and Lock weren’t thrilled to be brothers every day. And living on station meant the young boys always had something interesting to get into.
They were happy with life, mostly, though they missed their mother terribly. But everything went upside down when Dad was called up for a mandatory five-year assignment in the New Terran Defense Corps. That was three years ago.
He’d tried to appeal at first, hoping to postpone the service period until the boys were older. After all, during the service period, a soldier effectively disappeared from his or her family’s life completely. They had no contact, no postcards, no vid streams on holidays. The best thing the kid of a mandatory soldier could hope for was to remember what good old Dad looked like when he came back five years later. Well, and not to get a visit from a fleet admiral with a somber look and some “terribly grave news” that usually meant an upcoming funeral.
Since then, the boys had been living and working with Uncle Harel, their mother’s brother and their only other living relative. It certainly wasn’t everything a nine- and twelve-year-old could hope for, but at least they hadn’t gotten any visits from an admiral yet.
Their headphones crackled. “Well, yes, of course I turned it off.”
“Whatever,” Chase replied. “We’re heading over now.”
“Roger that, little explorers,” his uncle said.
Gritting his teeth, Chase mumbled, “We’re not little.”
Lock pressed the green panel, and the airlock hatch in front of him slid up along the ceiling. The air leached out of the room with a whoosh, and the boys’ space suits puffed out. In a pressurized environment, they were like normal clothing, but in the void of space, without air, they inflated slightly.
“I’m ready, Lock. Hit the plank.”
The younger boy pressed another switch below the green panel, and what appeared to be a series of metal plates extended from the opening in the hatch to span the meter or two of open space between the hulls of each ship. Reaching the Trustworthy, it stopped, ready for the boys to cross.
Chase always went first when they “walked the plank” to another ship. Partially, that was because, at twelve, he was almost three years older than Lock. But more so, it was because he knew his brother still feared opening the hatch on the other side. Chase couldn’t blame him. They never could tell what they might find looking back at them on a strange vessel they intended to strip for parts.
Of course, Lock would never actually admit to being afraid, but that was beside the point.
Chase put a toe onto the plank. No matter how many times he’d collected material for Uncle Harel, he still half expected the thing to drop away beneath him. As with all the other times, though, it held beneath him.
He took light steps as he went, letting the electromagnets in his boots automatically activate and release with each footfall. Since they were outside the Bella and not yet to the other ship, no simulated gravity held him down. Instead, they relied on the boots to keep them from floating off into the black void of space. Of course, they could have moved much faster in the higher-end gravity boots he and Lock often drooled over when they were at a Terran space station shopping for supplies, but it would take years to save enough credits for those. The boots they used and depended on to keep them from floating away, Harel had gotten secondhand, at best, from some “old friend” of his who had an eye patch and a dirty face.
Oh well, c
Chase reached the Trustworthy’s hatch on the other side of the simple bridge and pressed the emergency release button. Nothing happened.
“She’s either got no power or running on backup,” Chase told his brother. “Hold on while I crank her open.”
He pressed a release button, and a panel in the hull popped open to reveal a single vertical bar. Chase grabbed it and alternated between pulling it toward him and pushing it away. With every motion, the ship’s outer door slid up a few inches.
Finally, with the hatch open all the way, he closed the panel and gave Lock a thumbs-up.
Nothing but darkness met him from inside the ship, and Chase let out the tiniest sigh of relief. He didn’t really believe that one day a giant man-eating space slug would be there to greet them with a slimy smile and a mouth full of sharp teeth, but sometimes, people were still afraid of things, no matter how ridiculous the possibility.
Not that he would ever admit that to Lock.
The Trustworthy seemed empty, exactly as Uncle Harel had promised. Chase stepped through the doorway onto the ship and turned around, waving at Lock to cross the plank. His brother hurried over, though no one could really hurry with cheap mag-boots.
“We’re aboard, Uncle, and getting to work,” Chase said.
“Fine,” their uncle replied, a little more static in the transmission since they were on a different ship. “Try to be back at the hatch in twenty minutes. Like I said, a quick snatch and dash.”
“Roger.” Chase looked at Lock and held up two gloved fingers.
Lock nodded and pressed a few buttons on his suit’s forearm control panel while Chase did the same to switch to comm channel two.
“I’m heading to the bridge deck,” Chase said. “You get to engineering and grab what you can. Don’t worry. Nobody’s in here but you and me.”
“How do you know?”
“Uncle scanned for life signs while we were suiting up. It’s empty.”
Lock nodded then turned away from his brother. “Keep talking, though, okay? Empty ships give me the creeps.”
Chase turned, too, and headed up the dark hallway toward the command bridge. “Stars, you’re such a baby.”
“Shut up. I heard you sigh when you stepped on board. You sounded pretty glad there weren’t any monsters to meet you,” Lock replied.
“Whatever. You made that up.”
“Right. Sure I did. Hey, what do you think about power in here? It looks like it’s gone. I’d hoped we’d at least find backup lights.”
“I don’t know,” Chase replied. “Primary power is definitely down, but I can’t tell if there’s backup or not. The good news is, the emergency system is still active, either way. So the doors should work, and the artificial gravity’s on.”
“Air? I’d love to take my helmet off.”
“Me too, Lock, but no way. The Bella’s sensors didn’t register much breathable air, and whatever there was just blew out when we opened the hatch, which is still open, by the way. So keep your helmet on.”
“Crell.”
Chase reached the end of the hall and turned to his right. Thankfully, he didn’t have far to go to reach the bridge. The spaceship was small for a military vessel, designed for a crew of only ten or eleven. Of course, that made it several times larger than their ship, the Itzabella, currently manned by just Chase, Lock, and their lazy uncle.
“What happened here, Chase?”
“I don’t know. Unc said something about it being in the news-stream feed he downloaded a few days ago, but he didn’t tell me why. And since we never get time on the stream viewer, I couldn’t check it myself.”
“I know. He’s a real Cel about that,” Lock agreed. “I wanted to watch something a few days ago, and he told me maybe next week, if I found some good junk. Oh, hey, I’m at Engineering.”
Chase stopped in front of a door labeled Command. “Good timing, I’m at the bridge.”
“Doors together?” his brother asked over the radio.
“Okay, on three. One… two… three!”
At the mark, Chase triggered the door, revealing a large room shrouded in shadow. A long bank of windows covered the wall opposite the doorway where he stood, looking out into the vast, inky black of space. Thousands of stars twinkled back at him.
“Engineering’s clear,” Lock told him.
“Bridge is too. Okay, we need to be out of here in fourteen minutes, so you’ve got eight, maybe nine, to find something we can sell.”
Lock was already breathing heavily into his microphone. “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m hurrying.”
Chase smiled to himself. At least Lock enjoyed looking for gadgets. Not to be outdone, Chase dashed up to the command chair and began rooting around for components that might be worth something.
Taking stock of the console’s condition, he let out a whistle. “Crell, it looks like the Trustworthy took a bit of a beating. Scorch marks all over up here. Maybe from system overloads?”
“I don’t know. Things seem fine down here. Nothing like that at all. Most everything’s intact. Well, except for the fuel core. That’s gone.”
“Crell, I hoped we might get lucky there. Uncle Harel says you can get a pretty credit for a fuel core. Even more for an NTSS one.”
“That’s okay. I’ve already picked up a few things that should be worth some credits. And some perks for Bella too.”
Lock liked to tinker with the Itzabella’s drive systems, so anytime they went on a salvage run, he looked for items he could adapt as well as things they could sell.
Chase checked console after console, but all the ship’s primary system components were either flashed beyond being functional or no longer there. Propulsion Control, Navigation, Weapons, Communications, all were either destroyed or stripped clean.
“Someone else was here before us,” Chase said.
“That’s funny. They left a lot down here,” Lock replied, confusion in his voice. “Hey! Look at this,” he added. “I found a data recorder down here. They usually keep those on the bridge. Is there one up there?”
A ship’s data recorder was pretty much exactly what it sounded like. It recorded and stored every single piece of information available about a ship’s flight, including navigation headings, flight speed, orders to the crew, and video and audio of anything happening on board or in the immediate area around the vessel. Chase had never seen or heard of a ship that kept it in Engineering.
He stepped over to a stack of panels embedded in the bulkhead wall close to the door and ran his hand over one particular panel at chest level. “Weird. Yeah, the recorder is here, but there’s no data stick in it. Someone must have taken it.”
“This one has a stick still,” Lock said. “Should I grab it?”
“Yeah, that might be worth…”
Chase was cut off by a voice booming in his helmet. “Attention, this is the NTSS Mercury! You are in violation of restricted space and trespassing on a quarantined NTSS military vessel. Prepare to surrender yourself for criminal charges. Proceed to Hatch 26-B for immediate arrest. Any attempt to hide or flee will result in the destruction of your vessel and the forfeit of your lives in accordance with New Terran Colonial Code V17-G!”
“Chase!” Lock yelled, his voice quivering. “What was that?”
“Trouble, Lock. Big trouble. Leave everything and head toward the hatch, but take your time. Let me get there first. And pray that Uncle Harel has something up his sleeve.”
CHAPTER TWO
As it turned out, the only thing Harel had up his sleeve was a tattoo of some alien girl from the Malden-X system named Na’alia. And unfortunately, that wasn’t any help in keeping him out of a detention cell on Terran Station, where they’d been transferred by the NTSS Mercury. The ship had been making regular sweeps of the restricted quadrant since the Trustworthy’s accident, which Harel probably should have thought about before they approached the wreckage. The captain of the Mercury, a man named Furo, had been furious to find two young boys trespassing and had read Harel the riot act for a solid hour and a half about the immorality of using minors to do illegal foreign body salvage in space.
