Farlost: Arrival Page 8

  "Yes, Captain," Daisy acknowledged, and the image floating in the large holo-tank in the center of the circular bridge winked out, replaced instantly by a topside view of the solar system.

  Whish beat his wings and rolled in a circle around the holo, taking it in.

  Sam stepped down two metal steps and leaned both hands against the back of his captain's chair. He watched as the updated weather pattern the Ery and Martel satellites had traded him for his sensor ping data were overlaid with the unchanging view of the solar system.

  Sure enough, both networks' assembled data fragments, collected from dozens of other ships and outposts just like 'The Betty', corroborated the guesswork Sam had let guide him here.

  Sometimes, being a Captain around these parts called for damn-fool heroics, Sam thought. Other times it called for tucking your tail and running to keep you and yours safe... and every once in a while, you just had lick your finger and stick it in the air, to see which way the wind was blowing.

  On the holo, a multi-day projection of a pressure wave of solar wind washed across the Thorn, causing a ripple through its upper atmosphere. And when that happened...

  On the screen, several of the blue objects clustered in close to the Thorn rippled outwards, further from the reaching, mountainous spikes.

  One or two of them even cleared a white circle faintly inscribed around the Thorn. When they did, they changed in color, from blue to green.

  Halfway around the circle of twelve work stations surrounding the central holo tank, Salix made that chopping sound of his, and folded his feet up on the desk in front of him. His hands blurred in front of him.

  Gliding back toward the seated, bipedal plant, Whish laughed, a burbling, whistling sound: "Would it kill you to use a translator? Or ask Daisy to watch your hands and do it for you? Why do you look at me and think 'the Manta's got nothing better to do than be my mouthpiece!"

  Salix's hands blurred again, his pale, bark-like skin and shrouded, dark eyes fixed on the flying Manta. The last few gestures looked surprisingly like his twig-like fingers, deceptively strong for their size, were throttling something.

  Whish pumped his long, kite-shaped body, flying a few feet back from Salix. "Okay, okay, fine!" He turned to face Sam.

  "Ever the optimist, our friend Sal wants to remind everyone that the solar wind storm won't last very long. We need to bring the Betty in close and be ready to act fast."

  Something heavy crashed through the airlock. Sam didn't bother to look as Newark rolled down the stairs, like a deformed marble around a Roulette wheel. Another black exoskeleton, appearing to Sam like a dense mass of hard, bent vines - just like tumbleweeds from good ol' planet earth, bouncing around some wild west desert town- suddenly bounced right through the holo.

  The two forms crashed into each other, exoskeletons creaking, two nipping beaks and dozens of muscular pink and black tentacles whipped out from the two spun-silk balls that lay around the soft bodies of the creatures at the center of their protective exoskeletons. The air filled with high-pitched grunt-laughs from both Newark and Posk.

  "Knock it off!" Gruber yelled from Engineering. "I'm running that holo down here too, and I just about had a heart attack when Posk jumped through it! Jesus! Somebody hose them down!"

  Newark acquiesced, turning to roll onto one of the large, multi-species-suitable workstation acceleration couches surrounding the holo. Posk, however, wrapped several strong tentacles around his playmate's exoskeleton and flipped himself up and over, right through the holo once again.

  Sam tried not to laugh as Posk's every tentacle stuck out and shook like a drunk with the shakes, just as he passed through the holo. The Tumbler equivalent of sticking out its tongue.

  Whish laughed, and Salix thumped the arms of his chair to show his approval.

  Sam bit his lip as Gruber swore some more.

  "Alright," Sam said after a minute. Everyone quieted down and listened. "Salix is right. How much speed do we bleed off, and how close to that Thorn will we have to get? Daisy?"

  "Analysis of the Ery and Mantel projections is complete," Daisy's deep, calm voice washed over the bridge. "There are sufficient data points consistent between the two forecasts to project a six hour recovery window for the hulk shown here."

  The image in the holo field exploded, focusing in on one of the two green dots. It grew to almost six feet across, a grainy image made up of squares of higher and lower resolution. The hulk was small, only a fragment of a spaceship.

  "Shit," Whish swore. Sam studied the image: dark marks showed across most of the hulk.

  "Okay," Sam murmured. "Yes, it's been picked at before, but we've had worse salvage bring us a pretty return. Daisy, Ben, put your heads together. Let me know if we can pull the whole thing free before it sinks back--"

  His words stopped. He jumped out of his chair, practically leaping over his workstation. He ran up to the holo and stuck his fingers up and into the hulk, pulling at it.

  The image exploded in size even larger. Sam's prodding focused on another silver gleam behind the first one.

  "Uh-oh, uh-oh," whispered Posk from the other side of the bridge. Sam ignored him and tugged until the gleam blossomed.

  A double-click sounded in the air, signifying someone had opened a private channel and only Sam could hear the voice. "Sam," Gruber whispered. "We've got a sure thing here! Slim pickings maybe, but a sure thing! Don't..."

  Sam knew his engineer was right, it was a risk. More than a risk! Still, he stared at the massive, intricate, silver and white craft, down past the first hulk. He twiddled his fingers in the air, pulling up time and distance charts.

  "Captain," it was Doug's voice. The Skanen sounded respectful but concerned. Sam didn't answer.

  It was still too close to the Thorn to have any real chance to reach before the winds shifted again, pushing it deeper into the Thorn's gravity, and crossing into the shatterzone.

  Still...

  Sam felt his muscles bunch in his back and shoulders. How many captains had stood here just like this? he wondered. How many ignored the odds, and plunged ahead, wanting the treasure, or the prestige, or just desperate enough to risk it all to keep his crew fed and warm and breathing?

  "Captain." It was Doug again. Not amplified, but there in the room with them.

  Sam turned to his best friend. The two antenna on top of its chitinous, lobster-like head quivered, betraying nerves of its own that his six black eyes could not. A mother-of-pearl shimmer worked across the metallic purples and blues of its two arms and its six legs.

  Doug's mandibles rustled, and its whole head nodded. He didn't have to say a word. He understood.

  Sam's fingers ran along the massive, intact shape of the spaceship, tracing it's white and silver arches, spires and wings. "Not today," he whispered.

  Then, with a sigh, he made a throwing gesture through the ship, and the image shrank back down. He grabbed at the broken hulk, and the image stabilized around it.

  He looked around. The unspoken tension around the bridge was gone. Whish was floating over Salix, one prong of his two-pronged tail tapped at the plant's shoulder, until Salix reached for it and the Manta yanked it away.

  He heard Gruber muttering something rude again, and Newark and Posk resumed cawing at each other.

  He turned and gave Doug a wistful grin. Then he let that go, too.

  "Okay, crew, what am I paying you for? Let's figure it out, and go get what we can get!"

  19

  "Nothing!" Sam slammed his right arm against the wall. The wall obliged him with a fist-sized dent. The impact was still echoing when the elevator doors opened onto the bridge.

  Doug and Whish were silent as he stormed to his seat. He sat hard, staring angrily at the closeup of the miserly space hulk floating in the holo.

  He watched the sled slide quickly across the cable back to the hulk, its expansive cargo hold opening to the vacuum, the useless load tumbling away with the gases.

  And below it, barely v
isible, the powerful search lights of his crew continued to scour the hulk.

  Four runs.

  They'd each taken a turn mothering the small sled that rode the cable from the harpoon embedded in the hulk's side back to The Betty, while the others kept searching for more promising scrap. Four loads of the most promising of the junk they'd found.

  All four times they arrived at the open belly of the cargo hold, the more sensitive sensors mounted on the ship declared the scrap they'd painstakingly hauled across the wire was worthless.

  He looked at the time counter hovering beside his chair. Forty one hours had passed. Below that another time counted down: at best they could keep the hulk from sinking back into the Thorn’s gravity well for four more hours before they red-lined on fuel and wouldn't be able to make it back to... anywhere.

  Sam Travis’s skin itched. He couldn't remember the last time he and his crew had spent two whole days sitting still. Bad things happened and bad people caught up with you when you stayed in one place too long.

  And nothing good had come of sitting still yet, either.

  "All right kids, start scanning a new section of the ship, each of you. Get creative, sniff all over, but stay in visual range of each other at all times. It’s been a shitload of days since our last accident. Let’s keep it that way. Meantime, I’m going to see if Ery can tell us anything more about this ship."

  Now he was throwing good money after bad— bartering more data he could hold on to for...who was he kidding. It wasn't just a rainy day, there was hail coming down on their heads right now. And locusts and frogs.

  Behind him, Whish's two-pronged tail tapped through the same data First Officer Doug and Engineer Ben had already sifted. Travis appreciated the effort.

  Many digits makes light work…and maybe saves everyone's ass.

  He slumped back into his chair, letting the air burst from his lungs in an exasperated sigh.

  How was he going to keep the Betty flying without a haul, even an anemic one, to trade for the necessities?

  Seven years was a good run, he thought.

  Then he got angry and smashed his skin and bone fist against the chair arm. It hurt and it pissed him off, which was the point. A fitting punishment for the thought.

  Giving up wasn’t an option. He had people depending on him.

  There was always a way, if you could hold on long enough. That’s what life was, he schooled himself.

  “Ben, there’s got to be something we missed. If not the metal, then-“

  “There’s nothing left over there but the metal, Cap,” Ben interrupted. “And the last of the juiciest outer alloy layers were nibbled off decades ago.”

  Sam stared at the massive holo. “Can we carve pieces off to sell? I know there’s plenty of mines in-system but not a lot of refined metals like-“

  Alarms shrieked around the bridge. Sam jerked upright, feeling fine strands of restraint fiber cross his chest and thighs. He waved up an emergency diagram of the ship. No dangers visible there, he called up a long range view behind The Betty. Had someone snuck up on them?

  Nothing there either.

  Why were alarms going off on his ship?

  “Somebody talk to me!”

  "Shock wave incoming," Daisy called out, voice amplified but as calm as ever.

  Gruber’s voice lacked calm, but had plenty of amplification. “Shit, boss! Huge levels of energy are coming up from the…Thorn…“

  Sam froze for only a moment, taking in what that could mean. Then he eyed the timer in the holo tank-now displaying a rapidly expanding white sphere of light down deep in the Thorn’s shatter zone.

  “"Daisy! Get all the way in front of that hulk before that shock wave gets here. Broadcast on all channels: All hands! You’ve got… eight minutes to get to the cable line and haul ass to the betty. Arrival incoming. I repeat… Arrival! Yes you heard right, now move it! Spend all thrust and get your asses back here ASAFP!”

  Then came the waiting. Long minutes of waiting.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah, Ben?”

  “You ever think you’d get to see one’a these?”

  Sam laughed.

  “Right now I’m just busy hoping all of us survive it.”

  “I hear you,” Ben whispered. Sam heard the awe in his engineer’s voice.

  He would have shared it, if he wasn’t too busy monitoring the vitals in all his crew’s suits.

  “Hurry it up, you assholes!” he whispered, as he watched his crew blaze back to the sled and red-line its engine back toward The Betty, in the last seconds before the shockwave hit.

  Time was up before the sled made it all the way back.

  Travis's vision narrowed to a slit of white. Brilliant white, seeping in through the window, searing into his brain.

  The skin of the Betty groaned, and her Captain struggled to hold onto consciousness.

  He slid his hands up into his chair's arm-mounted holo and gestured to black out the windows. The glare was barely cut in half.

  He stared into the Holo, trusting his eyes to the computer recreation instead of the raw view outside.

  Just past the edge of the hulk, down deep in the grip of the Thorn, he saw the ball of expanding white energy rising to meet them.

  His ship began to shake and roar around him. Travis held on with his flesh and blood hand as well as the replacement one.

  He was savaged by twin hammers of gravity and acceleration, despite the ship's efforts to counter the fantastic forces-lest everyone on board coat the walls with a paint made of their smashed cells.

  He watched the crushed, looted wreck blot out the white wave on the holo. He watched light stab through cracks in the hull of the space junk, blurring out of focus as the shock wave tore it apart and sent the pieces streaking toward his ship.

  Then he froze in his chair, head half turned away from the holo in instinctual terror, and half caught by what he saw between the shards of the hulk.

  The Eternal, the white ship of legend. No longer trapped down deep, no longer out of reach.

  The fabled treasure of so many hunters now hurtled up, ejected from the shatterzone by the same shockwave that was about to hammer the Betty.

  Two miracles today, Travis thought.

  The white light was a sight few ever saw first-hand.. He certainly never thought he'd have front row seats to an arrival, let alone live to see one .

  The world roared around him, and Sam’s eyeballs almost shook out of his head as first pieces of the hulk smashed into the Betty.

  The world was about to be changed again, and with it, the fortunes of Travis and his crew.

  That is, if the miracle didn’t kill them all first.

  THE ARRIVAL

  20

  Lou woke to thunder and lightning.

  Red and green lights strobed in the darkened Command and Control module, and half a dozen audible alarms battered her ears. Every part of her hurt...and tingled strangely.

  She shook her head, despite the pain it caused, and scanned the room.

  Lou smelled burnt ozone, saw orange licks of flame. Adrenaline spiked and she pushed herself awkwardly up, slamming her head against the ceiling before clutching to the handrail next to the emergency station there. She clawed the chemical extinguisher free from its straps and in then, one-handed, sprayed out the electrical fire in the junction box closest to her head.

  With the fire out, she wiped her eyes and tried to remember what the hell had happened.

  The rock storm.

  The light show.

  She breathed in and out slowly, fighting panic that tried to lock itself around her mind.

  The haze from the chem extinguisher was already fading. Command and Control's air scrubbers were working, at least.

  Two of the alarms died, confirming to her there were no more fires in C&C.

  Her head was full of sawdust. She must have blacked out for a moment, after... did they really go FTL?

  Her eyes narrowed, tracking disconnected mem
ories. She'd had a dream about Dwyer. What had he said? Something about lights. The light show? Beacham's force field?

  She eyeballed the room. First Officer Villanueva floated at his station. So did Nav Officer Okoro. Both were unconscious. She swam across to Rose at 'the sticks', felt her strong pulse and gave her a shake.

  "Dad," she slurred out, and her eyes opened. She saw Lou and did a double take.

  "Chief?" the Navigator began to say, then stopped herself. Her eyes clouded with memories rushing back as she looked up at Lou. "Commander." Lou nodded to herself and moved on, once Rose had turned her attentions to her workstation.

  Arnel Villanueva was already opening his eyes before Lou reached him. "All sections, report!" His voice came from the ceiling as she floated to his side, gently touching his shoulders.

  "Emergency condition throughout the ship! All sections, report status. All sections, report in by any means."

  Silence and static filled the bridge for long seconds.

  Villanueva shook his head at her. "No response, Commander. Systems aren't logging receipt of signal by any section, but those rocks played hell with us, it's just as likely a signal problem as..."

  He swallowed, and Lou could tell by his face his memories were clicking together. She nodded. "Stay on it, First."

  He sketched a military salute at Lou, and she carried on.

  "Good to go, Commander," Taggart called out hoarsely, before she even got close. He hadn't even turned around before answering her, but somehow knew she was there. As she floated by, slapping him on the shoulder, she saw his eyes were bugged out, veins and tendons in his strong neck bulging. Taggart looking shaken was a first, that she could recall, but after this day she couldn't blame him.

  Beacham's red skin was flushed even darker with blood, and he was gibbering. "What do the alarms mean! We're dead aren't we? Why does 'dead' mean I spend the rest of eternity with YOU people? Where's my poker game with Einstein and Hawking!"

  “We’re not dead!” Rose shouted at Beacham. “Commander, Power reserves are critical. On the good news side, I've been able to trip a wireless relay down the spine of the ship. Eighty percent of HHL-6 is reporting depressurization alerts."