Planetfall
Battleship Cassius, the dreaded hulk and gilded pride of the armada, hung at high-orbit anchorage above Tycho. Fifty kilometres of obsidian steel from angular stern to pointed bow. Its ablative heat shield and angled thrusters glowed white-hot from an abrupt re-entry pattern executed mere moments ago, but otherwise betrayed nothing of its presence. Far from being a new addition to the fleet, the Cassius was a dying breed. Far too costly and time-consuming to produce, it was practically an antique. When uncloaked, its exterior spoke of a long and storied history. Its underbelly was charred from countless jumps through super-luminal space. Streaks of scars, and scores of deep gouges, shone through in dirty silver, revealing beneath its sizzling crust the foil of corsairs and glancing plasma fire. As monolithic as the Cassius was, the impressive capital-class ship appeared as little more than an unseemly mole against gas giant Tycho’s imposing radiance.
At the helm of the ship, through the tempered glass of the view-port, Commodore Coburn twirled a waxy whisker, his face set in an expression of tense contemplation. He was attired in simple robes of maroon over black clothing, and leather gloves. Save for a gold signet ring of office on one knuckle, he bore no other ornamentation. A double-handed broadsword was sheathed at his side, and a holstered, snub-nosed pistol was slung about his chest. To all appearances, he was perfectly calm and collected. In truth, he was sullen and agitated, and starting to feel as ancient as the ship. His face was pallid and drawn, his deep-set eyes bloodshot from adrenaline, and his cheekbones jutted like the pinions of some bird of prey. Sweat dripped from his brow, and he could smell his own stink. Months of meticulous planning, snatches of information, protracted interrogations, and sheer luck had brought him to this precise moment. He’d lost sleep for months on end. Years had been wasted, never to be retrieved. Every effort had been expended to apprehend a man who more closely resembled a spectre in his slipperiness. Worse, a ghastly miscreation of fathomless evil and infinite vexation, like a demon conjured from myth. Harken Drake. He ground his teeth in frustration, and almost spat as he sounded out the name mentally. No, Commodore Coburn, was not calm and collected. He was on the brink—of what he wasn’t yet sure. A breakthrough, or a breakdown. Irrevocable failure on the one hand; hard-won success on the other. Disgrace and ruination, a live possibility, regardless of the outcome. To those who know him personally, involuntary grooming was his tell. To those who knew him personally, and anyone fortunate to have served beneath him, he was also man of indomitable will. He would pursue the wretch to the ends of this quadrant, and beyond, if he had to. The crew was merely along for the ride, whether they liked it or not.
A figure appeared in his periphery and thrust something into his hands. Barely registering, he grasped at it. He’d only recently let go of the support rails during the jump, his hands numb from the force with which he’d held on. He felt as if his hands may sprout another knuckle in compensation. The figure hastily stooped to retrieve the report, and garbled an apology. All sound had been reduced to a slow vibration, and his scalp and jaw throbbed with dull pain. The commodore stepped back from the view-port, easing into the plush upholstery of his chair. Accepting the proffered document, he waved the figure away and thumbed it open upon his crossed legs.
The darkened face of the tablet lit up, and minute laser beams began to dance and intersect, forming a fuzzy image. A slowly revolving, three-dimensional projection of the Cassius soon materialised. Littered about its form were clusters of diagnostic information. Everything one needed to know about the ship was readily accessible from the display.
His finger drifted toward the affected areas of the ship, highlighted in amber. The commodore heaved a sigh. The ship’s photon sail hadn’t been withdrawn during their mad dash through super-luminal space, and as such had been irreparably damaged. He looked up from the tablet’s morass of technical data and through the view-port, hoping to dismiss what he already knew was irrevocably true. Outside, the taut propulsive material of the square sail had broken free of its metal struts. Its reflective sheeting was sprawled out against the mantle of the ship like some gelatinous deep-sea denizen, and of little use to anyone. The commodore cursed beneath his breath. Without the aid of a photon sail, manoeuvring the craft through the gravitic currents and eddies of space, especially in a dogfight, would force them to rely upon brute engine power and fuel. And fuel—if the ship’s sensory array was to be trusted—was in dangerously short supply. The increased stress would also risk precipitating runaway fuel bleeds, or emergency venting of the engines. In such an event, his life, and the lives of his dutiful crew would be saved, but only for their deaths to be prolonged. He set the tablet to one side and swung about to regard his crew from the elevated platform atop which he was seated. Under the pitiless gaze of Tycho they’d all slowly wither and die, marooned in a distant and inhospitable sector of space. Death itself was of little concern to him; it was what inevitably preceded the screaming and perishing that wore on the commodore’s mind. Colleagues, friends, and loved ones, envenomed by helplessness and hunger, would eventually turn on one another.
The bridge, deep in the bowels of the ship, was a hive of activity. Bodies milled and jostled in their haste and purpose. If a ship can be likened to the human body, the bridge represented the throbbing heart of the machine. Coburn examined one by one the busied expressions of his crew, and found his darker contemplations had been banished. Burly-chested gunners, their overalls soaked with grease and sweat, piloted trolleys overflowing with caches of munitions through the press. Navigators pored over the illuminated sprawl and endless flicker of novel astronautical information, their faces as blank as the glass tablets upon which their hands deftly skittered. The effect was hypnotising; they never once broke concentration, never paused to look down as they made the most minute calibrations. Elsewhere, a gaggle of medics were negotiating the careful transfer of an unconscious engineer from the arms of one of his colleagues to a gurney. The victim’s outfit had been reduced to an ill-fitting, sooty rag that clung to him in places, and his face and upper body were livid with severe burns and ragged folds of loose skin the colour of pus. The medics carefully applied a white, foam-like substance to the affected areas, and began wheeling him off; the engineers, all in various states of undress, followed closely behind. A fire must’ve broken out in the engine room, he surmised.
Coburn felt admiration well up inside of him. For his iron nerve and meritorious dedication to the Confederation, he had earned his place as the ship’s unflinching captain. If not for his carefully assembled and singularly skilled crew, however, he wouldn’t have made it this far. Worse, he’d have turned from the horror of warfare and consoled himself with drink and other stupefying aids. Without his carefully assembled and singularly skilled crew—gunners, medics, engineers, and navigators, all—he’d be nothing, no one, and nowhere. Watching them now, their tireless administrations, it almost seemed insensitive to inform them of the precariousness of their mission. They’d each dedicated so much, and had so far gained very little in return in the course of this frustrating goose-chase. He owed them this much, he thought, and stretched stiffened joints before rising from his chair.
As he rose to his full height, the tumult steadily petered off, and the crew paused to look up and regard him. The throbbing heart of the ship seemed to skip a beat. The silence departed as abruptly as it arrived, with a single clap. Soon others joined in, and a ripple of exuberant cries and frenzied applause began to spread outward from the fore of the pilothouse to the rear of the bridge. Before long, the atmosphere more closely resembled that of a rowdy tavern. Even the commodore couldn’t help but crack a smile, if a little wan and wary. It utterly pained him to sour the mood, to snuff out a moment so replete with joy. Such sensations weren’t commonly associated with life aboard a capital-class ship bound for war and hardship. He basked in the afterglow of their adulation a moment more, before solemnly raising a gloved palm to the animated crowd. The hubbub died away instantly, and with it, that moment forever.
He slowly paced about the grating of the elevated platform with his hands interlocked behind his back, waiting for the first line of his address to propose itself. He paused to daub at the moisture collecting on his brow, before turning to face the smiling faces of the assembled crew. “Firstly, an explanation” he began, but before he could continue, a booming voice cut him off.
“Better be a good one, commodore.”
Commodore Coburn didn’t take kindly to being cut off, in the ordinary course of things, but these were hardly ordinary times. He strained his eyes to locate the source of the taunt, and found himself staring at the surly face of an engineer. He painted a grisly picture. His torso was bare and discoloured with burns, and patches of his navy-blue uniform clung to him in places, having fused with his skin during overload. Coburn addressed him directly when next he spoke.
“Or what…”
The engineer fell quiet.
“As I thought. Save your quips for the enemy, assuming you live long enough.” With that he addressed the others. “To be clear, had we lingered much longer, the safety of our informant would’ve been jeopardised. Had we overstayed our welcome, we may well have lost the Grendel forever. I simply can’t allow that to happen—not again.” He clenched his fists, the leather of his gloves squealing in response, before gazing down at his feet. “Not after Europa, and not for those to come,” he finished, and clutched at something at the end of the gun-metal loop of chain about his neck.
The Europa Incident, the tragic source of Harken Drake’s infamy. A betrayal so malign, a disaster of such scale and severity, that it had ingrained itself on the collective psyche of human civilisation. Billions of space-faring colonists, the seed of countless generations. A nigh-impossible project on paper, it required every available resource, and the complete co-operation on the part of nations and representative institutions. The greatest endeavour of the species, if not its greatest hope, was brought to its knees in seconds, dashed by the machinations of its greatest nemesis, the remnants scattered like ash on solar winds. In tandem with a moratorium on seeding habitable plants, the largest inter-sectoral manhunt had begun. In addition, for those worlds already inhabited, several watchdog organisations under the Europa Resolution were created. All possible deterrents and preventive measures were put in place—anything to prevent a disaster of this magnitude from happening again. On the bridge, that tale didn’t bear repeating, nor did the full enunciation of its name. They didn’t need to be reminded of their purpose. That would’ve been in bad taste. The crew no longer smiled up at the commodore. Instead, their faces fell to the floor, down-turned as if in prayer. They clutched mementos of their own at their sides. Rusted metal fragments of the Rosetta’s hull, the ark that ferried innumerable souls to their untimely doom. The Commodore waited a moment more, out of respect, before continuing.“With the loss of the photon sail, our manoeuvrability is virtually nonexistent, especially in a dogfight.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” commented the figure to his right, his second-in-command.
“What are we to do, commodore?” Again, the injured engineer interjected. His tone betrayed none of the mirth of before—only fear.
“The engines will have to pick up the slack,” Coburn replied. “For now, we’ll simply have to wait. Drake should be rendezvousing with our informant as we speak. When the Grendel appears—”
Sirens blared, cutting Coburn short. Strong and clear at first, the sound pitched suddenly down and became garbled, like a tape unwinding. Then, a dramatic loss of cabin pressure, and the sound of metal whining, grating, and shearing off. On the bridge, every system that could fail was beginning to malfunction. The drone of alarms had been overtaken by screams and the spluttering of choked engines. Lights flickered and strobed to disorientating effect. Crewmen began to float away from their posts. Those that hadn’t fainted paid for their consciousness with asphyxiation, and writhed and retched for breath where they drifted. Reinforced bulkheads, a ship’s last line of defence against the implacable void, snapped like twigs, caving in on themselves. Anyone unluckily enough to have been in the vicinity would’ve felt the uncanny sensation of being extruded alive through a slot the size of a credit stick.
“Engage the reserves at once!” roared the commodore over the clamour, sweating profusely.
There was no close enough nor suitably conscious to follow through, however. To make matters distinctly worse, the ship had begun to invert, toppling backward over itself as it was slowly drawn into the unsolicited gravitic embrace of class-1 gas giant Tycho, an exoplanet whose title and class serves as an almost comical understatement. The gas-shrouded colossus had developed a reputation for regularly diverting city-sized asteroids from their sworn trajectories. Compacting a capital-class ship, even one as robust as the Cassius, was nothing.
A silence as deep as the vacuum of space crept in, and all manner of sensation was snuffed out. The ship seemed to take one final breath as it gradually increased its descent, racing toward the planet’s upper-atmosphere. Once through, the ship’s plunge couldn’t be halted. If the ship didn’t fall apart like layers of pastry upon re-entry, the high-density orb of swirling ammonia would ensure they be broiled alive. Come on, damn you, thought Coburn. If he’d had the privilege of air in his deflating lungs, he’d have hissed those words through gritted teeth and blue lips. Tightening his grip on an overhead support rail, he kicked off hard from the tempered glass of the view-port and glided toward the central console. It would hold—it had to. He was close, now. The denouement of the charade was in sight, a long and frustrating campaign that had left deeper scars than those that marred the ship’s polyceramic overlay. He muttered a brief prayer, and palmed the engine’s emergency countermeasures.
Lockout
Coburn came to suddenly. He found himself sprawled across the hard metal floor of an unknown bridge, on an unknown ship. He felt half-drowned, and announced his newfound wakefulness with a gasp. His chest seared with pain, and each breath drawn was as ragged and urgent as the last. The force of the episode flushed his pallid, spotty features with colour, and dulled his hearing. Once he’d steadied himself, sound returned to him as water might drain from one’s ears. The sound grew more distinct over time, sharpening his drowsy mind—until it became sharp enough to draw blood. He opened, then squeezed shut, his bloodshot eyes. A flash of light bloomed before him, leaving him momentarily blind. It quickly receded, only to return again a split second later. Klaxons screamed with a white-hot glow inside their red-tinted casings, spinning wildly like tiny neutron stars. Saving for the stuttering, crimson glare, the room was otherwise unlit. He promptly shoved his fingers in his ears. Slowly sitting up, he peered down about himself. Coburn seemed to have simply taken a fall, laid out as he’d been on the flat of his back. Gazing about, he found his immediate surrounds were an unintelligible blur. He groped around feebly for his glasses. His hand briefly grazed something solid and cushioned, but sharply withdrew his extended arm when a jolt of pain raced down his spine. He lay there a moment more, in disorientation and pain, his breathing unsteady once more.
“Where am I?” he wheezed out loud, and then gasped. The cold echo of his voice, a few semitones lower, responded. He was alone. He laid one hand across his chest, the other on his clammy forehead, and tried to focus on the predictable thud of his heartbeat and little else. His hands searched for the familiar leather band of his holstered pistol. Gone. He thought he felt the pommel of his broadsword prod into him, but that, too, was absent. Who’s disarmed me? He felt a sudden pang in his gut. Suddenly, he recalled it all with startling clarity. The initial thunderclap and gurgle of dying engines. The thrum and scrape of shearing metal. The petering pressure, and the panic that ensued. The faces of his crew flashes before his eyes—their weightless bodies, bulging eyes, and gasping mouths. Tycho’s vast watercolour atmosphere, and their glacial tumble toward it. They’d been hit by something, or someone. Harken. He drew his lower lip between his teeth and bit down hard. It had to be him.
There was little to confirm his suspicions, but little to invalidate them, either. He tried to not engage the thought further, but a million scenarios played out in his mind, each one grislier and more painful to consider than the last. He’d been captured and stripped of his weapons, and imprisoned here—wherever exactly here was. Judging from his surrounds, he had been separated from the others, or else he’d been the only one taken captive. He was to be made an example of, then. He thought it almost comical—the unassailable Coburn, righteous agent of the Confederacy, skewered for his efforts by the universe’s greatest threat. In Coburn’s mind, Drake had always possessed a flair for the dramatic; as much murderous ideologue as he was a hackneyed pastiche of performative evils. Lesser men would think twice about bringing him to heel once and for all.
His thoughts drifted to the others, to his beloved crew. He could only hope they’d got off lightly—perhaps detained indefinitely. Coburn chuckled aloud at that; unduly optimistic and naive thought. Dark and obtrusive alternatives came to mind, attended by gory and disturbing visuals. In the corridors of the Coburn’s mind, he saw what ultimately awaited them—what awaited anyone who crossed Harken Drake and his delusions: obliteration. No, not detained. It was more likely they’d been tortured for pleasure, or mutilated until their bodies could take no more. The remains would be summarily ejected through the airlock like so much space-waste. He tried to picture the scene, their bodies, or what remained of them, floating aimlessly in the void. As he swept his mind’s eye over their mangled form, he was struck by an alarming realisation. He could grasp the basic composition of the tableaux, but the finer details of the distressing scene eluded him entirely. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t picture their faces, as if the visual record of their personhood had been expunged from memory. He tried a different approach. His forehead creased in concentration as he tried to sound out their names, hoping to prime the thought and conjure up the corresponding face. A few names proposed themselves, but none he immediately recognised. They all seemed unremarkable and ill-fitting; they could’ve belonged to anyone—not his most trusted allies. Their visages evaded him once more, and then all and sundry other particulars that would mark them as his unique friends, colleagues, and shipmates. Then their titles and offices; their regimentals and regalia, too. Their very being danced on the tip of his tongue, mocking him, and then unravelled into nothingness. As the moments passed, his efforts to rein in these illusions made began to make increasingly little sense, until he found himself set adrift from all he once took for granted—from all but the present moment. He shook his head from side to side, and rubbed his eyes. He seemed to have lost glasses.
Calvin Coburn roused himself to a seated position, wincing and cursing from pain, and swept the floor with his hand in a wide arc. Dust and grime. He got down on his hands and knees, and resolved to comb the floor in a half-crawl, half-squirm in a bid to retrieve his spectacles. Eventually, he brushed a hand over them, and collapsed to his belly with a sigh. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose and rose clumsily to his feet, nearly toppling over from the motion. His head felt at odds with the rest of his body, disproportionately large and unwieldy, like a sandbag had been laid squarely across his shoulders.
He soon realised that his vertigo-like symptoms didn’t stem from his exhaustion, but from turbulence from the ship itself. It was careering unguided through space. Hopelessly adrift, it was colliding with debris as it was buffeted by gravitic chutes and envelopes. He had to find the central navigation panel, and fast. He cast his renewed gaze about, attempting to glimpse it through the scarlet slices. Black. Black. Black. Red. There! In the distance, there was a faint glimmer of blinking white lights set into a black metal console. He approached it with his back arched at first, as if walking through a storm, and then in a crouch, lowering his centre of gravity. The blare of klaxons only seemed to intensify. He heaved an overturned chair upright and, grasping the armrests for balance, drove it ahead of him. He sunk into the chair and swung himself about to study the slim, digital screen with its tidy columns of navigational data. Cycling proximity alerts rang out, their high-pitched staccato tones audible even above the din. His eyes glossed over the readout, before he turned his attention back to the controls; there simply wasn’t time to get acquainted with a new ship. He grasped the pitch-correcting levers in readiness, but to his horror, found them stiff and unyielding—likewise the buttons. He turned to the readout once more for a closer look, and he felt the tight knot of his intestines.
Manual control had been overridden, and he’d been forcibly locked out of the navigation system, unable to steer the ship himself. Coburn’s mind raced for answers. It was possible, but highly unlikely, that the ship’s systems had been rendered inert in response to an attempted hijacking. To prevent any intrusion, it might’ve simply followed protocol and automatically shut down all but the most vital systems. If that was the case, a distress signal would be broadcast with its particulars across the sector. Coburn turned back to the readout to review the information it would communicate through the vast reaches of space. He was shocked to discover that the ship was registered as none other than the Cassius. Coburn bolted from his chair, overturning it once more, and hurried over to the nearest view-port. Ironically, the narrow aperture afforded him an all but incomplete view. The defective glass coating was covered in a thin layer of moisture and riddled with scratches, dents, and other imperfections. Coburn wiped away the excess residue with his shirt, pressed his face to the cool, inconsistent surface and fixed the blackness with a panicked eyeball. There, glinting like a streaky marble in the murk, was the gas giant Tycho. On its surface, its most violent storm to date had begun to subside.
The Cassius continued to meander through the abyss. Aboard the ship, Coburn had cycled through a series of increasingly desperate and pointless behaviours. He would begin by pacing with intent, only to veer off without warning and press his face up against the view-port. Finding little, he would return to his seat once more and stare at the display. He’d idly jostle the levers and tap at the unresponsive buttons and toggles. It was agonising. All he could conceivably do was wait for someone to find him. When he attempted to decode the tight columns of data the display churned out no end. His time would’ve been better spent attempting to master some forgotten human tongue, rather than adduce his position from hieroglyphics. Coburn slammed his fists against the flimsy metal casing of the console and cradled his head in his hands, defeated. Unfortunately, even if the ship’s systems hadn’t been surrendered, he would fair no better than a trained monkey at piloting the Cassius. In fact, a space-faring simian would be an altogether more suitable candidate, as Coburn lacked the formal training necessary to manoeuvre the ship at all, let alone without serious incident. The illuminated display flickered off from prolonged disuse.
Several hours passed in the penumbral gloom of the ship’s interior. Coburn had run out of ways to pass the time, and had fallen asleep where he sat. An audible pip caused him to stir with a grunt. Bleary-eyed, he peered up through his interwoven fingers, and found himself bathed in the soft, dirty light of the display. The central console’s display had woken up, seemingly unprompted. A straight, horizontal line in black appeared, set against an off-white background.
Coburn blinked and leaned in, reaching out a hand to the visual.
The line quivered at first, before its simple uniformity darted about, forming serrated edges and jagged peaks, and a voice sounded over the speakers.
“Sleeping on the job, are we, Mr. Coburn?” The voice was thin and peevish, and vaguely familiar.
Coburn, visibly shook, took a second to respond. “W-who am I speaking with?”
He was met with an exasperated sigh, and the voice tutted before continuing. “Your secret admirer,” the voice responded dryly. “Reclusive planet-gazer types make me weak at the knees.”
“I don’t understand. Are you responding to the distress signal? Please, if you can—”
“What? A distress signal? You really did drift off, didn’t you… And quite far from your post, too. It’s Officer Guelaz, you dolt.” The voice trailed off, replaced by the cold quiet of static.
Coburn blinked twice.
“Supervising Officer, Cara Guelaz,” she said. “Your Supervising Officer, Calvin. Would you like to explain how you ended up so far adrift from your post?”
Calvin hadn’t managed to catch that last part. He froze where he sat, stiff save for his slackened jaw, his eyes glazed over as if in a trance. His name—she’d said his name. Incomplete, and without the appropriate honorific. It felt ill-fitting and unremarkable at first, but increasingly familiar as he sounded it out many times in his head. The cogs had finally begun to turn. He remembered.
Calvin Coburn hadn't been addressed as Commodore for a simple reason. He had never achieved the lofty rank it described. And lofty it was, for, more to the point, there was no use for such a title. It was outmoded and archaic, the stuff of childish fantasies—of his fantasies. It held all the trappings of authority, virtue, and heroism. And Calvin Coburn was no hero—far from it. He had no ship to call his own, no dutiful crew slaving beneath him, and no renown or impressive deeds to speak of. He was not, in fact, the mythical, mustachioed mariner or charming man-of-action he took himself to be. In truth, he was a rakish researcher, and the only occupant of the Cassius. The craft bore no resemblance to a ‘capital-class battleship of the Confederation,’ if such a thing even existed. It didn’t. No, the Cassius was a long-neglected and cramped science shuttle of the dingiest order, its hull spotty and discoloured with decades of rust. The rickety craft was stationed at the fringes of an inter-sectoral highway for various ships known as Europa’s Tongue. Mercantile vessels, frigates, ice-haulers, and the occasional flotilla or VIP made use of the cosmic thoroughfare. The ships passed unnervingly close to Tycho, a planet of unpredictable weather patterns.
Calvin’s job was remarkably simple. He was hired to observe the astro-meteorological happenings upon the Tycho’s surface, noteworthy or otherwise, for which he was adequately skilled to do. Those findings would then be tirelessly abbreviated, rendered in natural language, and filed daily in the form of reports. Those reports were then sent directly to the Rosetta Research Program for review and, depending on the nature of those reports, passed on to the relevant authorities. The task, while being simple, contained no small measure of drudgery. It was, however, vital work, for Tycho’s storms had the capacity to endanger ships in transit, travelling unnervingly close to the planet’s surface. During its unusual and extreme outbursts, it would roil violently with brooding clouds of noxious ammonia, propelled by winds that could rend the flesh from one’s bones. Its torus-shaped disk of ice rock would hurl its contents into space. If a ship, or fleet of ships, was caught in its path, they would be severely damaged or worse. So far, Calvin’s reports had been unremarkable, and had made no reference to the planet’s unpredictable spells of moodiness.
Calvin rubbed his dark-ringed eyes, and felt the fog lift a little more. He hadn’t felt this lucid in some time. Several minutes had elapsed—minutes that had felt like an age to Guelaz, who’d been trying to coax some form of a response out of him, or at least the barest recognition of her questions.
“Calvin!” Guelaz cried out in frustration.
“Sorry, sorry…” he mumbled, at odds with his newfound clarity. “What were you saying?” he asked.
“Bloody hell! Did you hit your head or something?”
He scratched his forehead thoughtfully. “It sure feels that way.”
There was the faint skittering of manicured nails on keys, and the pop of successive clicks as she parsed the relevant information. When next she spoke, her tone had turned more serious. “I’ve been thumbing through the reports you’ve filed in the last month or so.”
Calvin straightened in his seat and licked his lips nervously. “Yes?”
“Calvin, you've grown increasingly tardy of late. You've failed to file at least three in the last month, and the reports you have managed to produce are patchy, to say the least.”
“What do you mean? Patchy how?” He began wrapping his fingers against the cold metal of the console, and a thin film of perspiration had begun to coat his furrowed burrow.
“The reports are incomplete. Too condensed, lacking in finesse. And…” She paused.
“And?”
“And there are notes in the margins, too.” She paused again, carefully considering her words. “I’m not sure how to describe them, exactly.”
Calvin was starting to grow impatient. He wanted to know precisely what he was being accused of. “You’ve got the reports right in front of you, don’t you?”
She sighed. “I do… Did you proofread these before submitting them?”
“Always,” he replied, an unmistakable edge to his voice. “What is it, Guelaz?”
“Well, it’s all nonsense, really.”
“Guelaz… Spit it out.” He’d came just short of outright shouting at her.
“Let’s see. There's talk of a vast criminal network that operates under the cover of mercantile ships. Clandestine meetings among what I can only assume are… space pirates.” At that, she couldn’t help but laugh wryly. Calvin simply glowered at the screen. “Seditious plotting against the prevailing order by some eco-conscious terrorist,” she continued, “and the careful orchestration of civilian mass murder that attended it. Is this ringing any bells?”
Calvin had fallen quiet, pale-faced and breathless, his mind racing. “I don’t—” he started.
“Calvin, what on Earth is this all about?” Guelaz interjected.
He was equally bemused as his supervisor, and could only assume he was being taken for a fool. “Is this some kind of crude joke you’re playing on me, Guelaz?”
“I wish, but unfortunately not.”
“I didn’t write any of that,” he insisted. “And even if I did, why is this such an alarming find?”
“A couple reasons, Calvin. Patchy work we can sometimes abide. The separate hemispheres of your life are spilling over into one another, impeding your work—work that if not done, or done incorrectly, could endanger lives. You’re clearly distracted, obsessed with some fantasy world of your own devising, unable to file a simple, clean report on time. Simply admonishing you isn’t going to prevent this from happening again.”
Calvin’s folded hands curled into fists. “I didn’t write that,” he spat.
“The reports plainly exhibit your unique ID, your digital signature, Calvin.”
“This information could’ve been intercepted somehow, doctored in some way. Surely.”
“Calvin, that’s an insulting absurdity. Look, we—”
He looked away from the screen for the first time in what felt like hours, and stared out the view-port fringed with rust and grime, and beyond. Tycho. It appeared as little more than a smooth, faintly purple dot. He stared on. It was anything but. His temples throbbed with heat and pain, his stomach churned, and his face had been flushed of colour. Calvin wiped the sweat from his brow and pinched the bridge of his nose, after casting his glasses aside with the flick of his wrist.
“Calvin? I said we have little choice but to replace you.”
“It’s you, isn’t it…” he said breathlessly, and pointed a shaky finger at the screen. “You did this!”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” she said sternly. “Can’t say I didn’t expect it, though. A pity, all the same.”
“You’re in league with him. How else would you have tracked me down?”
“The shuttle’s en route, Calvin. Stop sitting in the dark, feeling sorry for yourself. Go and gather your belongings—only your belongings. Be a dear and co-operate when the ship arrives. You can expect it in a matter of hours.” The screen flickered once then fizzled to black.
Calvin leapt to his feet as the feed died off, clasping the base of the chair with both hands and hurling it at the screen in a fit of rage. “And you can expect me, Harken Drake!” he roared at the smoking crater of pulverised glass. Outside, Tycho’s watercolour atmosphere bubbled and broiled at a distance, the telltale signs of a nascent storm.
Option Oblivion
Pandemonium prevailed on the capital-class battleship, and its steely-eyed custodian, Commodore Coburn, was doing his best to regain control of the situation. Once the engines had re-engaged and the pressure had shifted in favour of regular breathing, the strobing lights of the bridge illuminated the extent of the damage to its on-board personnel. Cabling hung in smoking, spluttering bundles from the ceiling; the floor was littered with assorted trash, station fixtures, and bodies; and everywhere, groans and screams erupted in a stomach-churning cacophony of agony. Coburn peeled his face off the floor and staggered to his feet—or foot, as he quickly discovered. A piece of plating had come loose during the ordeal, and had hovered in zero-gravity, before descending like a guillotine to the floor, crushing the Commodore’s leg beneath it. He hobbled from person to person, limping and clinking his way across the length of the bridge, using the sharpened tip of his hefty broadsword like a walking stick, attending to whatever was required of him.
He roused many a rattled crewman to their feet, dusting them off and directing them back to their gutted stations. As soon as they’d regained their wits, he began barking orders at them. Many had been hurled across the breadth of the bridge from the initial blast of overdriven engines, causing the entire ship to buck violently. Unfortunately, many had been crushed against its steel-walled interior like insects beneath the heel of one’s boot. Those that survived had been wheeled with all haste to the med-bay, or treated on-site when the wing had reached capacity. Others were less responsive to his cajoling, and lay inert and sprawled out on the floor, having suffocated to death during the sudden loss of pressure. Those poor, pale wretches, he thought. He half-knelt beside them, balancing on the pommel of his sword, and muttered a prayer while drawing their eyes closed with the tips of his fingers. He staggered back, the fragment of the Rosetta clutched tight in his free hand.
A figure appeared at his side, resting a firm hand on his shoulder. “This is no time to stand on ceremony, Commodore,” he said, puncturing the moment.
The Commodore turned to regard his faithful second. “Ah, Guillas. Good to see you’re still with us,” he said, a hint of a smile tugging at his otherwise stern features.
“Aye. You, too.” He reached a hand around the Commodore’s back. “Sir, there’s something you should see.”
“You have to mistaken me for someone else, old friend,” said the Commodore. He balanced on one leg while aiming the unwieldy blade at his second’s throat.
He laughed despite himself. “This is no time for humour, either,” he said, his features suddenly grave.
His second drew him from the mayhem, and toward the remains of the pilothouse. “The enemy, it would appear, is giving us precious little time to recover.” he said, gesturing at a blinking display. The dull green face of the scanner revealed a single, determined point of light, fast closing in on their position. By its estimates, it would be on them in a manner of minutes.
“Harken,” the Commodore snarled, spitting on the ground.
“We’ll have to hope he wants to chat, and not blast us out of the sky.”
The Commodore wheeled about from his display, his eyes ablaze, and began barking out commands once more.
The Grendel docked with a thud, followed by the ear-aching squeal of protesting metal. When in proximity, it drove its knurled, pincer-like legs through the toughened, polyceramic exterior of the Cassius and locked itself firmly in place. A mechanical parasite, the Cassius its reluctant host. Its multi-focal laser purred as it excised a large disk of hull from the ship, prising it open to be freely boarded. The sound coaxed a single tear from the Commodore’s ashen face. They may as well have driven a stake through his heart and called it a day. There was no resistance to speak of, no countermeasures engaged—no fight left in the Commodore’s beloved battleship. They were in.
As the sound eased off, the Commodore drew his snub-nosed pistol. Hugging cover, he formed a loose perimeter around the smoking gouge with a handful of his gunnery staff. The gaps in their ranks were filled by anyone daring enough to aim a weapon. Orderlies, junior navigators, and medics all took up arms against the threat. With its systems still in recovery, the band formed the Cassius’ first and last line of defence, such as it was; forewarned, but ultimately blind as to what would happen next.
With the circular ruin still billowing smoke, a figure materialised and stepped through the hazy veil. The gun-line regarded the form with their raised weapons, peering down their sights. The figure wore a floor-length robe of dark grey leather—now pockmarked with bright red dots—and steel-capped boots. Its face, partially hidden in the shadowy depths of its hood, featured a prominent breathing apparatus that produced a vile sucking noise. Slung about its shoulder was a semi-automatic rifle, and a waistband bulging with grenades. It was impressively armed. Yet, for some reason, it shuffled forward as if afraid. Its one hand covered its face, as if protecting it, and the other inches from his breast. The others seemed taken aback, too. They had an altogether different picture of Harken Drake. They turned their attention briefly to the Commodore, their faces all registering a look of sheer puzzlement, only to find a look of delight on his.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Move in!”
They hesitated, their weapons drooping from the target.
“Get out of the way!” The Commodore jostled them aside and hobbled toward Drake, his pistol’s aim unwavering in his sweaty grip. When we got within three paces of him, he plunged his one hand into his robe. “For Europa!” the Commodore cried, letting the blade fall to the floor, and throwing himself at Drake. As he did so, Drake batted the pistol out of the Commodore’s hand, and followed through with a right hook to his jaw, before being tackled to the floor. Momentarily dazed, Drake tried to wriggle free of his grasp on the floor, but the Commodore shifted his weight until they were belly to belly in a half-mount. Drake’s legs bucked wildly as the Commodore continued to steadily apply pressure. “What are you waiting for?!” he screamed about the din, but no shot rang out. Exploiting the lull in his attention, Drake lashed out with a flurry of blows, driving his bare fists into the Commodore’s face until he couldn’t lift a finger; cracking skin, blackening eyes, and fracturing bone, until his face was peppered with spittle and blood. With Drake depleted, the Commodore seized his neck in both hands and, with the last of his strength, slammed his head repeatedly into the floor, screaming with every blow, until Drake’s feet stopped bucking.
He sat on the body a moment more, his arms resting on his knees, and his blood-red tongue lolling as he drew deep, abdominal breaths. He peered through the narrow slit of his left eye at the lifeless form, at the crimson pools that formed a halo around Drake’s head, and threw his head back in laughter. It was a cruel and triumphant. He tugged at the ventilation system about its face, wrenching it from its fleshy seal, and raised it on high as if it were a trophy. “Now that’s how you do it,” he said, stumbling to his feet. There were no cries of applause, no camaraderie—and, he turned to find, no gun-toting retinue behind him.
He’d swung about to find little but claustrophobic darkness, and his hand grasping at thin air. He peered down at the figure he’d bested, expecting to stare manifest evil in the face. But the figure had been so badly disfigured, even with adequate lighting, there was little face to speak of. The garb was simple—no robes, no bandolier of grenades, no gun. Something squawked in the oil-coloured pool beside the corpse, and Calvin stooped to pick it up. A standard-issue, portable comms unit. He turned it over in his hands in examination. It fell to the floor, and a loud exhalation escaped his lips, followed by a low moan. Inscribed on the device was the name, “Carla Guelaz,” his supervisor. She’d come to extract him herself.