Longshots, p.7
Longshots, page 7
Something tugged at the back of Chase’s mind, like a sense of déjà vu. He’d just heard something important, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. It was like a leaf floating on the wind, and the harder he swatted and grabbed at it, the farther from reach it got.
No time to worry about it, though. If it was important, it would come to him eventually.
“That’s great,” Chase said instead. “You get to be one big, happy family in no time. Lock, are we good to skip?”
“Sure thing. Sheila, set a course for Terran Station and hit the skip.”
“Acknowledged, First Officer.” Something mechanical—the engines, Chase assumed—hummed slightly at the far end of the ship. A few seconds later, the Itzabella shot in the direction of Terran Station, giving him that familiar, subtle pulling-away-then-catching-up sensation.
“How long until we get there?” Chase asked.
“Fourteen hours at this skip speed. The ship could fly a bit faster, though, and shave an hour or two off the trip, if time is a factor, Acting Captain.”
“Seems like a good idea to—”
“No, it’s not,” Lock cut in. “The skip engines might not like it. They could overheat or something.”
“Come on, Lock, it’ll be fine. Don’t be a baby. Let’s turn it up and really see what the old girl can do.”
Lock’s face got red. “It’s too risky. If the skip drive overheats, we’ll be stuck out here alone for who knows how long.” With a defiant look, he added, “And I’m not a baby. You’re an idiot.”
Chase turned on him. “Don’t call me an idiot, you little—”
Bree shoved her way between them. “Fourteen hours is fine with me. I’m not in that big of a hurry. But don’t fight.”
“Acting Captain, your orders?” Sheila asked.
Giving his brother another hard look, he turned away and said, “Fine, keep us at this skip speed.”
The others relaxed a little.
Chase sighed and went on, “Whatever, I guess I’m tired. It’s been a crazy day. We should probably all hit our bunks. Sheila can keep us flying for a while. Bree, we have a private room you can use.”
“Thanks, that’s very nice, but all I did on the Jupiter was sleep. I’m not very tired. Especially now that Daddy got me wondering what happened to my crew.”
“I’m not really tired either,” Lock said. “Hey, you know we have the data recording from the Trustworthy? We could play it back and find out what happened. We watched what happened when the Jupiter left the ship with you, but we didn’t see her arrive.”
“Yes! That’d be turbo!” Bree exclaimed. “But how did you get the flight data?”
Chase frowned. No use lying about. Might as well come clean. “We found it on the wreckage of your ship. The primary one from the bridge was gone—I bet Cain took it so no one would know it was him—but for some reason, Engineering had a second one.”
“Our chief engineer was always worried something bad would happen, so he had a second one installed down there.” She shrugged. “I guess he was right. But how did you get on board? You’re not…”
“No, no,” Chase replied. “We’re not one of them. We just… well, our uncle took us out there to see if we could salvage anything from the wreck.”
“Why?”
“You know, to sell. It’s hard being a little salvage ship without contacts. Uncle never has any money.”
Bree crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s like stealing New Terran property.”
Chase looked at Lock for help and found him staring at his boots, ignoring them.
He threw up his hands. “Look, all we took was the second data recording. And if we hadn’t, you couldn’t watch it now. Going out there was wrong, but it wasn’t our idea. We have to do what Uncle says.”
Bree squinted at him but eventually just sniffed. “Okay, fine. So, can I watch it, then?”
Chase smiled and opened a thin panel door marked Closet on the other side of the room. Ignoring the few cleaning supplies inside, he tapped a panel along the inside wall. It swished halfway open like a passageway door, revealing a handful of items, including several recording sticks and a quartet of ancient-looking books bound in leather. He selected one of the data sticks and tapped the partially open door again. It slid closed. “Here you go.”
Lock took it from his brother and pushed it into the video replay console. The same split-screen image appeared as before, frozen at the moment Bree was transferred to the Jupiter.
“We could watch it in reverse, but if you remember when you hit the bunk, it’d probably be faster to watch from that point forward.”
“Okay,” Bree said. “Um, it was early in the morning on Fourthday, I think. Maybe around the first hour? Let’s start there.”
“Okay. Sheila, back up to last Fourthday at the first morning hour.”
The video display went blank as Sheila rewound the video stream data. “Done,” Sheila said as the video resumed playback.
“There I am.” Bree pointed. “I’m in the galley. That’s before I went to sleep. Skip forward about an hour.”
The people in the video scurried around on screen hyperfast as the computer fast-forwarded to the requested time.
“Perfect, there I am!” Bree pointed to a different feed in the grid, showing her and two older ladies in New Terran uniforms standing in a hallway. “That’s Dellina and Beryl, my chaperones for the trip. They’ve been my tutors since I was a little girl.” The screen version of Bree waved to the pair of women and activated a door in the passage where they stood. “That was my cabin on the Trustworthy. I remember being tired and falling right to sleep pretty much, which is funny since I hardly ever do that. It used to drive Mom crazy that I’d stay up playing with my dolls or reading for hours after she put me to bed.”
Their eyes stayed glued to the display as the time code raced ahead on video with nothing happening.
“Let’s move along,” Chase suggested. “Sheila, forward at four times normal speed, please.”
Again, the people on screen in the various video feeds scurried around the ship, seeing to their respective duties. Finally, after they’d skipped ahead at least two full hours, the familiar-looking gray bulk of the Jupiter appeared on screen in the same windows where’d they found it earlier, sliding closer and closer to the Trustworthy.
Chase eyed the list of ship commands that scrolled past. “Pause,” he said, and everyone and everything on screen froze in place.
He put his finger to the screen. “See, here? Cain requested clearance to couple up to the Trustworthy and come aboard. The captain’s remarks say, ‘Admiral claims to be carrying a personal message for the governor’s daughter.’” He pointed to the next line. “They gave him clearance right away. Sheila, resume play, twice normal.”
The video sprang back to life, and the Jupiter closed the black space between the ships in a few seconds. Then she extended the docking tunnel. In the feed showing the external hatch on the Trustworthy, four people lined up in military fashion, all in spotless NT naval uniforms.
The next five minutes of video were the most horrible thing any of them had ever watched.
The hatch slid open, but instead of Cain coming on board, a dozen black-clad Shock Troops dashed through the hatchway and shot the naval officers in fast-forward.
Bree gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “Oh no!”
Eight of the first dozen troops picked up the officers and dragged them to another room. Three dozen additional Shock Troops ran through the Trustworthy’s hatch next, finally followed by Cain, easily recognizable by the color of his hair.
He made a single motion with his hand, and the troops took off at a run throughout ship. As they ran from passage to passage, room to room, they slipped from one video feed to another. In each one, whenever they came across a member of the Trustworthy’s crew, they shot without hesitation. And each time, Bree gasped, her voice catching in her throat.
When tears quietly began to streak down her cheeks, Chase leaned into his brother. “Turn it off.”
Lock reached for the playback console, but Bree’s hand covered his.
“No,” she said, voice thick with emotion. “I need to see what that soulless son of a Celian did so I can tell my father.”
“If you’re sure,” Lock said.
Bree nodded, and he retrieved his arm.
Just as the last crew member in a naval uniform fell to the ground, lifeless, Cain, flanked by a pair of the soldiers, strode through the same hallway leading to Bree’s cabin. One of the two women from earlier stood outside her room.
“Oh, novas, not Beryl. No!” Bree whimpered.
But instead of being shot like the others, she saluted the admiral. He saluted in return and clapped briefly before stepping closer to the woman and giving her an enormous hug.
“Beryl, what are you doing?” the girl whispered then watched as the woman separated herself from Cain and punched a few buttons beside Bree’s door.
It slid open, and Cain looked in. Smiling, he turned back to Beryl and gave her a sad look and said something. She took on a shocked expression but didn’t even have time to raise her hand before one of the black-clad troopers shot her too.
Bree cried out as the limp body fell. “How could you, Beryl? How could you?”
Cain walked through the dark door of Bree’s cabin just as a second pair of Shock Troops arrived, towing a floating cot. The admiral came back out of the room almost immediately, carrying Bree in his arms. He set her carefully on the cot and strapped her down.
The small group left the video feed watching that hallway and appeared a half minute later on another one. Watching the doors carefully as they traversed the hall, Cain put his hand up right in front of one, and his troops stopped immediately with the floating cot. The admiral tapped a code on the panel beside the door in question, and it opened. The two soldiers not managing the cot carrying the sleeping version of Bree entered the room and came out a few seconds later with a disheveled-looking man between them.
The thin man was dressed in the familiar teal-and-silver uniform of the New Terran Navy with a well-lined faced, and salt-and-pepper hair that sprang up in several places. He blinked sleepily at the admiral then, recognizing the senior officer, saluted.
Cain waved off the salute, and one of the troopers pulled the man’s arms behind his back and bound them.
“It looks like they’re arresting him instead of… you know. Who is he?” Lock asked.
Bree wrinkled her brows in confusion. “That’s the Trustworthy’s chief engineer. His name is Salen.”
“We saw him before!” Chase exclaimed. “He’s the guy with Cain when they leave your ship.”
“What would Cain need my chief engineer for? He has his own. And what was so important that the admiral would take all this risk just to kidnap me and him? I don’t get it.”
Chase yawned again. “We’re missing something. Something weird is definitely going on.”
“How far from the Catapult are we?” Bree asked.
“Why, what are you thinking?” He cocked his head thoughtfully.
The Catapult, as it was called, was also known as the New Terran Interstellar Transportation Conduit. It was a nearly miraculous—not to mention enormous—device built two hundred years before by the colonies’ settlers, the First Explorers, who happened to be the governor’s and Bree’s ancestors. Those first settlers left Old Earth two-hundred-plus years before that even and traveled by skip drive all the way to their current part of the universe while living their entire lives on board a huge transport vessel, the Mayflower.
They had chosen the territory for the New Terran settlement as their destination because they knew of a black hole nearby. Bree’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, a man named Keppler, left Earth intending to harness the gravitational power of that black hole to build a machine that would allow travelers to make the journey back to Earth in mere minutes rather than the centuries it took by skip drive.
Sadly, Keppler died on board the Mayflower, but his grandchildren fulfilled his dream, building a device capable of allowing ships to make jumps of unthinkable length, to blink and find themselves almost in Old Earth’s orbit.
Commerce between New Terra and Old Earth flourished because of the Catapult, and Bree’s family had effectively remained in control of the New Terra colonial confederacy ever since. Their fortune and fame grew with each additional New Terran colony dedicated to the memory of humanity’s original home, and a boom of new colonists still arrived every day from the old planet half a universe away.
Lock checked the nav console. “If we stop now and turn around, we’re eight hours from the ’Pult.”
“I don’t want to go home yet. I need to go to Catapult Station. Will you take me?”
“Are you crazy?” Chase asked, not quite yelling. “No, we can’t take you to the ’Pult. Your dad, who I’d like to remind you is the governor of the entire crelling New Terran Confederacy, will have our hides, our ship, and what tiny sliver of hope remains for our future if we don’t get you back to him as fast as our little ship will carry us.”
“Oh, I can handle Daddy.” She waved away his concerns. “But that awful man is planning to do something at the Catapult, and I want to stop him.” She wiped the remains of her tears from her cheeks. “He killed almost every single person on my ship, people I’ve known since I was a little, little girl, people who I consider family. Somebody has to stop him, and I’m going to help.”
“Your father sent the prime minister to Catapult Station to deal with that. He’s a pretty important guy, so obviously, your dad is just as interested in getting to the bottom of this as you are. Let’s just get you home safely, and let the prime minister take care of it.”
“Worrell’s an idiot. He’s not good for much of anything besides kissing Daddy’s boots. Plus, he kind of gives me the creeps. I don’t trust him. But I bet we could figure it out!”
“How?” Chase spread his arms. “What do we know? We’re just a couple of kids in a salvage ship. For pennies, we collect junk that nobody cares about. You’re talking about getting to the bottom of a rebel group that’s been sneaking around for who knows how long?”
“You figured out how to save me,” Bree argued.
“That’s a load of Celian slime, and you know it. Sure, we figured out what ship you were on because we happened to try salvaging junk from the wreckage of your ship, and you happened to have a second security feed running. But what happened after that? We got locked up by the same guy that locked you up, and if not for your magic command words that can make Shock Troops dance like puppets, we’d still be stuck there. Save you, princess? I don’t think so. You saved us.”
“Don’t call me princess!” Bree screamed. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Regaining her composure, she went on. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. But you saw what he did. I can’t just let that go and run back to my daddy. I want to save my chief engineer, if he’s still alive. And I want to ruin Cain’s horrible plans and see the look on his face when he realizes it was three kids who messed them up.”
Lock looked at Chase. “Why don’t we help her? At least just see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
Chase shook his head. “Look, Bree, I’m sorry. I swear. But we can’t. We got our own problems. And half of those problems will go away as soon as I get you home to your dad. But if we screw that up and don’t get you home, we’ll be ruined from here to Old Earth and back. We’re flying to Terran Station so your mom and dad can have you back, and that’s it.”
Bree’s bottom lip quivered, but she fought back the tears welling in her eyes. “I thought you were a better person than that. I thought you would know what was really important, that you’d want to make things right. I guess I was wrong about you. Well, at least about one of you.”
Chase looked at his feet, not sure what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
The governor’s daughter shot him a burning look. “You already said that. Lock, would you show me to that room you said I could use? I’m not really tired, but I think I’d like to be alone.”
Lock stood. “Sure, follow me.”
The pair walked away in silence, the swish of the doors the only sound as they left Chase alone on the bridge.
“Sheila,” he said, after a few minutes of thought, “revoke Passenger Bree’s command authority.” The last thing he needed was for her to try to take control of his ship.
“Acknowledged, Acting Captain.”
“You’re killing me. Would you please call me Chase, or just Captain?”
The ship’s digitized voice offered no reply.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The chilling sound of alarm bells startled Chase awake. He’d fallen asleep in the comms chair, staring at the frozen video display of the Trustworthy’s data recording. The bells meant something, but his half-sleeping brain couldn’t quite grasp what.
“Five more minutes.” He slapped the console half-heartedly, hoping to hit a button to turn off the alarm.
“Acting Captain!” Sheila yelled over the din of the alarm.
“Just five more minutes. That’s all I need.”
The bridge doors flew open, and Lock ran into the command center, wiping sleep from his eyes. “Chase!” he screamed. “Wake up! It’s the proximity alarm!”
Chase opened one eye and looked groggily at the double image of his brother panting in front of him. “Huh?”
Lock grabbed him by both shoulders and shook him hard. “Wake up!”
Finally, Chase’s mind cleared of sleep. “What’s going on?”
“The proximity alarm, that’s what!”
“But the proximity alarm means a ship is closing in.”
