On Galaxy's Edge: Ascendance (28 page)

He walked down the boarding ramp, and made his way to the front of the ship. It was quite a strange looking ship, he considered as he walked around it. It was obviously designed for carrying bulk, and not for speed, and it also looked incredibly old. Nero didn’t have a huge amount of experience with different types of ship, but he estimated that it must be at least half a century old. The scorch marks from repeated reentry attested to that, as well as the design.

Round the front of the ship, underneath where the bridge was, were the maintenance hatches that Trix had been in earlier. One of them was still open, and he secured it before turning to head back in. But then something caught his attention, out of the corner of his eye. He turned, wary, and passing behind another ship, not far away, was a dark figure. A figure wearing grey armour. It quickly disappeared behind the other ship, but it was unmistakable.

He turned and ran back to the rear of the ship, watching for another flash of grey. He didn’t think he’d been spotted, but couldn’t afford to take any risks. He ran up the boarding ramp, through the hold, and entered the bridge, seeing Trix sitting in her captain’s chair.

“They all good, Nero?” she asked, without looking up.

“What? Oh, yeah, fine.” She turned to face him, and saw the distracted look in his eyes. Guessing what was up, she turned to look out of the window, at the CSG ship still berthed across the port. She couldn’t see anything amiss, however.

Nero walked over to the window as well, and spotted his small shuttle some way across the spaceport. From this distance, he couldn’t see much detail, but unless he was imagining it, he was sure the canopy was open. And he hadn’t left it open when he had left.

“You are a mystery, Nero,” Trix said, watching him. “No, don’t worry,” she said, when he turned to look at her. “We’re all entitled to out secrets. I’ve got plenty of my own, too, and I’m not gonna tell them to you. But maybe they’re not as interesting as yours, eh?”

Nero gave her a half-hearted smile, and returned his attention to the gleaming black Aegis shuttle, looming predator-like over the other ships that surrounded it.

****

The Aegis agent looked up, and saw the freighter take off from its landing pad. It was a slow, chundering old thing, almost looking like it would fall out of the sky, but his interest was aroused. Could their target be on that ship? It was unlikely, perhaps, but a possibility.

He returned his attention to the small, single-seater shuttle in front of him. This was the shuttle that had left Dimora, he was sure of that, but there was no sign of his target. He had asked around, and no one had been very forthcoming, despite the techniques he had used. Perhaps nobody had come into contact with the target, but the agent didn’t believe that.

Someone would have met the target, and someone would talk. It was simply a matter of time. And it was also just a matter of time before he caught up with the target. No one had ever gotten away from him before, and he wasn’t going to allow this to be the first time.

Turning away from the small shuttle, he headed back to his own ship. There was a prisoner in there ready to be questioned, though it almost seemed a shame to question this one, he reflected. She was very attractive, even in the overalls she insisted on wearing.

Well, those will soon come off, he thought as he stepped onto the platform, and ascended into the belly of the ship. He walked through the dark passages, coming to a room with a sealed door. He opened it, and stepped inside, the door closing silently behind him. A whimper came from the far side of the room, and the Aegis agent smiled behind the helmet.

****

The g-forces thrust him back into his seat, the skin on his face pulling backwards for a moment into a horrific grimace before the inertial compensators kicked in. He shook his head, in an attempt to clear the strange sensation, and stood up once things had levelled off.

Nero walked over to the front of the bridge, and looked out of the window as the last hint of blue from the planet’s atmosphere faded into the blackness of outer space. Privately, he was relieved to have left the planet behind. It would be difficult now, he hoped, for Aegis to track him down. It was shame to have to leave behind his shuttle, though.

He turned around to see the other three members of the crew walk onto the bridge. Trix had told Nero their names before they had taken off. Apparently, they were called Ando, Kess and Adira, and all were human, though otherwise, they were completely different. Ando was the only guy, a similar height to Nero, and reasonably handsome, whilst Kess was of a medium height, with long blond hair. Adira, meanwhile, had skin of a colour that suggested she was from a planet a long way from Aellyn, and Dimora. He’d never seen skin like it before, sort of copper-coloured, and her facial features were proportioned slightly different to the others.

On seeing Nero, Kess walked over and offered her hand, which Nero took. “So you're the new guy,” she said, by way of greeting. She was dressed in similar overalls to the spaceport workers, and looked like she never wore any other type of garment. “What’s your story then?”

Nero considered what to say. “A long and boring one,” he replied with a shrug, not really wanting to get into that already. Perhaps it would come later.

Kess looked down at Nero’s augmentations, quirking an eyebrow. “Doesn’t look like it’s so boring,” she said. “But suit yourself. Nice to have you onboard, anyway.”

Nero inclined his head. Ando, and then Adira, both greeted Nero, and then Trix stood up from the console, having set the ship to fly on autopilot.

“So where are we off to this time, Trix? Anywhere fun?” Ando asked.

Trix gave him a disparaging look. “Fun, Ando? You know we don’t allow fun on this ship. Case in point, I want you to go and cook dinner tonight.”

Ando rolled his eyes, and gave Nero a pained glance. “But I cooked the day before we arrived,” he protested. “I’m sure it’s Adira’s turn. I can’t even remember the last time she cooked.”

“Hey, I cook plenty,” Adira said. “You guys just don’t seem to like whatever I make.”

“That’s true,” Ando muttered, grinning at her. “I don’t know where you got your cooking skills from, but I assume some assassination school.”

“We all know Adira can’t cook to save her life, and besides, she’s a good medic,” Trix said, hands on her hips. “That lets her off cooking duty a little bit. And Ando,” she turned to give him serious look. This only elicited a grin from him. “It’s your turn, because I say it’s your turn. So get to it.”

“Yes cap’n. At once cap’n,” he said, giving her a mocking salute. He turned around and headed off the bridge, down to wherever the kitchen was. Trix turned to the rest of them. “So we’re actually heading to Mureika. Maybe a couple of days away from here. In the meantime, Kess, I want you to show Nero around. And go and find that damn Reese.”

“Come on then,” Kess said to Nero. “Best not to disobey the boss when she’s in her captaining mood.” Nero glanced at Trix and saw the amused expression on her face, and then turned to follow Kess down the ramp, squeezing into the narrow corridor, and followed her through one of the hatchways into the ship’s recreation room.

Ando was already at the kitchen on the far side of the room, pulling out some food supplies from storage. He grinned when they approached. “So you’re here to help, are you? Fine, Nero if you could--”

“We’d love to, Ando, but I’ve got orders. I’m giving our friend here a tour.” She turned to Nero. “So this is the kitchen, you might have guessed. We generally leave it to Ando, though. If you ever feel a bit hungry, just give Ando a yell, yeah?”

“So long as you don’t mind what it is you end up eating,” Ando replied.

Kess led Nero back out of the room, and showed him the other rooms on the ship. One was a med unit, complete with rudimentary surgery tools, and another was an exercise room. Otherwise, the only other rooms were the bedrooms, and the cargo hold. It wasn’t really that large a ship, Nero thought, considering its duties. When the short tour was over, they went back into the rec room, and settled down to dinner with the others. Nero finally began to feel a bit more relaxed. More so than he’d felt in a long time. For that, he was grateful.

Meanwhile, the freighter continued on its journey into the depths of space, the AI computer piloting the ship to a small planet many lightyears away, to deliver a shipment of med supplies. The brown water-and-desert planet, and the black shuttle berthed in the spaceport, were left far behind, and began to retreat from Nero’s thoughts.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SPACE IS DARK

Four months later

The explosion rocked the ship, and Nero jumped up out of his bed, instantly alert. He looked around, and it was a moment before he realized the constant thrum and vibrations from the engines had disappeared. The ship was completely and utterly silent. Until he heard running feet in the corridor outside, and Reese’s voice swearing and cursing.

Nero pulled on some trousers and stepped out into the narrow corridor, stepping back when Trix ran past him, heading down into the cargo hold. Nero followed, and saw the others all gathered there already, and all dressed in nightwear. Reese was in the process of pulling a maintenance hatch off of the wall, from which a stream of smoke was pouring.

“Engine finally failed?” Nero asked, turning to Ando next to him.

“Looks like,” he replied. “I guess it’s hardly a surprise.” That got him a glare from Trix, who was standing next to the hatch as Reese climbed through.

“This is fixable,” she said, returning her attention to Reese as he disappeared. They heard some banging as he moved through the skin of the ship, followed by some further cursing from the man.

“Well, if it’s not, it’s not like we’ll have that long to fret about it, is it?” Ando asked, in a light-hearted tone. Trix ignored him, and they nervously settled down to wait for Reese to reappear. It didn't take him long.

With black stains on his clothes, Reese re-emerged from the hatch, blood dripping from a cut on his arm. “I think we’re fucked,” he said, as soon as he was out. He dabbed at the cut on his arm with his jacket’s sleeve.

“Fucked?” Trix asked, wanting a more informative diagnosis.

“Yeah. One of the gridded ion thruster arrays has malfunctioned, as I’ve been saying it might, and the power surge has knocked all the others out as well. The engines won’t restart while that array is still in there, so that has to come out, and then the other arrays may have been permanently damaged by that surge.” He let out a breath of air, and tried to collect himself.

“So. It has come to this,” Trix said, considering the options.

Reese gave her a disparaging look. “That is about the most generic statement I’ve ever heard. You could be talking about dinner being late, or an attack by pirates, or a slightly annoying game of chance! We all know the ship is falling apart, so of course it ‘came to this’.”

“Can you fix it, Reese?” Trix asked, ignoring his comment.

“I don’t fucking know, Trix. It’s a big thing to go wrong. We may need all new parts for it. Parts which we don’t have.”

“I’m aware of that, Reese. Just try, okay? I’ve never met anyone who could fix things as well as you can. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

“You’re sure, are you?” he asked, as he bent down to pick up some tools from a toolbox. He then ducked back down, and climbed back in through the small maintenance hatch.

“Hopeful,” Trix said to herself once he'd disappeared. Nero glanced at her, an enquiring look on his face. “It wasn’t an empty compliment,” Trix explained. “He really is brilliant at this. I just hope he’s wrong. That we don’t need new parts.”

They were silent for a time, waiting for Reese to reappear. In the time that Nero had been on the ship, things had run pretty smoothly more often than not. Admittedly, sometimes the engines would have a fit of some sort, but they had always fixed themselves. Now, though... if Reese couldn’t get them working again, then Nero’s few months on the ship would come to an abrupt and rather unexpected end.

Reese stayed in the maintenance hatch for maybe half an hour. It was a little difficult to keep track of time, when they were all just sat around waiting to find out if their lives were going to shortly end. All they heard was the occasional bang and swear word emanating from the hatchway, until at last, they heard a faint rumble begin to sound.

Then, quite abruptly, the ship gave a violent shake, and shortly settled back down to a familiar background tremor, the engines running normally. Nero let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, as did everyone else, and then Reese backed out of the hatchway, a relieved expression on his sweaty and grimy face.

“See,” Trix said, once he was out. “I told you you’d manage.”

“And you weren’t at all worried this whole time, then?” Reese asked.

“Of course not. You know I never lose my cool, Reese.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. Anyway, I think I’ve managed to bypass the array that decided to have a fit.”

“So everything's working?” Trix asked.

“Should be. The power will be reduced a bit, but not noticeably. We were lucky, Trix. Very lucky.”

She turned to head back up to the bridge. “I know, Reese.”

****

“Does this beast have a name?” Nero asked, as Trix piloted the ship once again. She pushed the lever forward to accelerate the ship up to speed, and the stars visible through the window began to blur slightly.

“Huh?” she asked, absently, about to engage the spacetime distorters.

“The ship. Does it have a name?” He’d been on board something like three months now, and it had never occurred to him before. But he felt like it should have one, a flying home like this.

“What, you mean like ‘Piece of Shit’? Or ‘Crappy Retarded Airborne Pisspot’?” She engaged the distorters, and the ship began to shake slightly as the fabric of the spacetime continuum was bent, and then the ship was thrust into the blackness of the space-between-space, where nothing else was visible. Not even the stars.

“Yeah,” Nero replied, “but maybe nicer.”

Trix turned around from the controls, now that they were safely up to speed, and gave him a strange glance, as if to say that ships didn’t generally have names. “What did you have in mind?” she asked.

“Fafnir,” Nero said, the name coming to mind from some old legends he had read as a child. It seemed suitable, for some reason he couldn’t quite place. “It has a certain ring to it.”

“Fafnir?” Trix asked, trying the name over. “You know, I quite like that. Makes the ship sound more important than it really is, at any rate.”

Nero turned as Reese walked onto the bridge, breaking off their conversation. “Everything working?” he asked, having changed out of his grimy clothes.

“As good as normal,” Trix said.

“That bad?” Reese asked, moving to sit down in the copilot’s chair. He brought up a diagnostics screen on the holodisplay in front of him, satisfying himself that things were working. “So when should we reach Sygti?”

“Maybe half an hour,” Trix replied. “Now that things are working.”

Her guess didn’t prove far off, and about thirty five minutes later, the newly-christened Fafnir disengaged its spacetime distorters, and re-entered regular space. Leaping out of the blackness in front of them came a large, grey planet, with two big moons orbiting very close it. Nero looked on with interest, having never seen such large moons before.

Trix slowed the ship down, and they approached the planet on its dark side, the solar system’s sun hidden behind the bulk of the planet. With growing curiosity, Nero noted how populated the planet was. There were more dense areas of artificial lighting than he’d ever seen before on a planet, and flying far above it were numerous ships.

“You know which city we’re heading to?” Nero asked Trix, as they rapidly approached the outer layers of the planet’s atmosphere. He walked closer to the panoramic window, and studied the planet below them.

“The big one,” Trix replied. Nero gave her a disparaging glance. “I’ve got coordinates,” she said. “Apparently our buyer is on the edge of a large city. Didn’t specify which, though. I guess we’ll just have to see where our coordinates lead.”

She brought the ship down, descending rapidly through the planet’s atmosphere, and making sure they didn’t go too near any of the other ships. They didn’t want a crash, not when they’d just got the ship working again.

Ando and Kess entered the bridge at the same moment, holding on to the overhead rails whilst the ship was shaking, the air resistance causing some not-insignificant turbulence.

“You two been...?” Nero asked, letting the pause drag out. Both looked a mite dishevelled. They glanced at each other, horror on Kess’s face, and an intrigued expression on Ando’s.

“No!” Kess said. “And don’t go giving him ideas. I went back to bed, if you must know,” she explained.

“Sure you did,” Nero replied, ingratiating understanding in his voice.

“Oh, alone, Nero!” Nero exchanged a sly glance with Ando, and then turned back to the window. They were just above one of the cities now, and were rapidly nearing it. He glanced down to the map of their destination’s coordinates, and saw that they were nearly on top of it. Leaning forward to look down, out of the window, he saw an endless sea of buildings, none more distinctive than the other.

“So... how are we going to find our buyer?” he asked.

“I’m hoping that will become self-evident after we land,” Trix replied, concentrating on bringing in the ship to land. There was a small spaceport not far away from their destination, and Trix skilfully spun the ship around, and brought it down to land on the tiny landing pad. They had maybe a couple of metres clearance between the ship and the walls of the spaceport.

“Nice job,” Reese said as Trix cut the engines. She smiled, and stood up from her captain’s chair.

After they’d opened up the boarding ramp, they had a good view of the city’s skyline above the low walls of the spaceport. Mostly, the city consisted of relatively low buildings not more than a few stories high, with just the occasional tall building thrusting upwards into the sky. It was most unlike the city back on Dimora, Nero thought as he looked at the view. Though like Dimora, the buildings were mainly glass and metal.

A person walking up to the ship got Nero’s attention, and he looked down to see a middle-aged woman pushing an empty hover-board. She looked harmless enough, he thought, and following Trix and the others, he walked down the ramp to meet her.

“Hena?” Trix asked, stepping forward to greet the woman.

The woman inclined her head. “And you must be Trix?” she asked, and it was Trix’s turn to nod. “If you don’t mind, we’d better load this stuff up quickly. I don’t want to draw too much undue attention,” she said.

“Certainly,” Trix agreed, turning to head up the boarding ramp with Hena. “Are you expecting trouble?” Nero looked around them, wary of being watched.

“Not specifically. But this whole planet is under direct CSG control, and this is something they would frown upon.”

“I see,” Trix said, eyebrows drawn down into a frown. Nero wondered what that meant exactly. After all, all planets in the galaxy were theoretically under CSG control.

“What does ‘direct control’ mean?” he asked, stepping up closer to Hena. She turned to look at Nero, and as ever when he first met someone, her eyes flicked briefly to his arms.

“That we’d better be very careful indeed. They have an outpost on this planet, in this city. They use it as a base to reach this whole quadrant of the galaxy, so there is constant CSG activity. I regularly see patrols out in the city, monitoring things.”

Nero looked away, out of the rear of the ship, wondering what sort of base it was. What sections of the CSG were based here? He unconsciously clenched his fists, metal fingers pressing hard against metal palm. He looked back to see Trix and the others already loading up the crates onto Hena’s hover-board, and a couple of their own boards as well.

He went over to help, and in short order all of the crates were loaded onto the hover-boards, and they began to push them down the ramp. Nero led the way, acting as an imposing presence to any watching who might have thought about trying to make off with the crates. They had discovered in the last few months that nine times out of ten, would-be thieves simply watched Nero pass, deciding he looked like too much trouble to bother with.

With Hena next to him, they walked out of the small spaceport, and emerged onto a narrow street that was remarkably busy at this time of night. The storefronts that lined this particular street all had bright flashing signs advertising their wares, and every store seemed to have lighting of a different colour. The effect was to lend the street a strangely festive air, and they walked through the hustle and bustle of the city’s nightlife.

At the end of the high street, Hena took them down an even smaller street, with buildings towering a few stories above them on both sides, and led them up to a recessed set of steps. Pulling the hover-boards behind them, the group of outsiders climbed the steps between the buildings, and came up to what amounted to a second level in the city.

Stood on the roofs of the buildings they had just been walking past, they were actually on another street, complete with another layer of buildings sat on top of the lower ones. Though only a single story, these buildings nevertheless had a multitude of shops projecting harsh lighting onto this street, and had a similarly large clientele milling around.

Before Nero could have a good look around - there was a shop that attracted his attention, selling the strangest-looking food he’d ever seen - Hena had turned down a back alley, and quickly stopped outside a building with a glowing green cross above the door.

She hastily opened the door, and ushered the crew of the Fafnir into the dim waiting room. There was a single alien sat in a seat, holding a bandage on its arm, and with a miserable look on its face. It looked up with curiosity with they walked into the room.

“Again?” Hena asked, seeing the alien sat there. It nodded, and returned its attention to the opposite wall. “I don’t know what the cause is, but he’s a regular,” Hena said quietly to Trix.

She then walked to the back of the room, and slid the door open to reveal what turned out to be a surgery. There was a white capsule in the centre of the room, long enough to fit the tallest of aliens in, and currently open to reveal the bed, and an array of surgical implements at the side of the room.

“If you just dump the medications here,” Hena said, pointing generally to the floor, “that would be great.”