Previously: John Andrews, a former Navy pilot turn civilian transport-for-hire, has stumbled across a murder while concluding a routine job on the distant colony world of Min. On his MobiGlas personal device is an encrypted file which holds a terrible secret, one that John must protect from the murderers who now hunt him...
- - - - - - - -
The plasma pistol behind John whined as it charged, the muzzle of the weapon only inches from the back of John's head. "Well, then, who the hell are you?" A gruff voice behind him asked, though the tone said pretty clearly that he didn't give a damn who he was aiming a pistol at.
"My name is Frank Turner," John lied quickly. It'd be best if the thugs didn't match his name to one that owned a starship. "I work here, I was just checking the place out. I stumbled across the body, and I don't know what the hell is going on." John tried to sound as innocent and frightened as a dove. If he could bluff well enough, he might get them to get their guard down.
"Well, Frank, you picked a hell of a day to do your job." The thug said. The gun he held remained fixed on John's head. The lie wasn't convincing anyone, and John was running out of time.
"Jesus, you're not going to kill me, are you?" John shouted, sounding as panicked as he could. There was a pause by the thug, and John quickly turned his head to get a glimpse of his attacker before whipping it back. The man with the gun did not seem to notice, or care, but that was a mistake by him.
First and foremost, John got a picture of the room around him again, where everything was. There was cover not too far away from him, and the large cargo bay door that John had entered through was now wide open. Second, and perhaps most important, John learned that it wasn't just him and the gunman. There was another, maintaining a form of security a few paces behind the one adjacent to John, and he was looking nervous. It was obvious that they were running out of time until something happened, and that meant that they were going to act hasty.
"It's nothing personal." The thug behind John said suddenly, snapping him back to reality. "You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time." The gun whined as it began to charge up to fire, and John tensed his legs as he braced himself to jump.
"I couldn't agree more." John growled. As hard as he could, he pushed off the ground, leaping back into the body of the man with the gun. The two collided, bowling the gunman over with John on top. They fell to the ground with a crash, and the second pirate leveled his weapon, a submachine gun, at the chaos.
John quickly rolled off of the first thug and got to his feet, whipping out his LH-86 as the second one opened fire frantically, the green plasma bolts crackling though the air and lighting the room in an eerie emerald glow.
"Fuck, get him!" The first thug shouted as he started to get back to his feet. John kept running until he got behind some crates that looked solid enough, and flattened his back against it. More plasma streaked in John's general direction, impacting with walls and anything in-between with a hiss. John waited for a break in the frantic shooting, now joined by the first thug's more careful pistol shots marked by blue bolts, before turning around the corner of his cover. Lining up on one of the thugs, John pulled the trigger, and his pistol bucked in his hands as it roared. The flash of light illuminated both pirates, and John instantly knew that he had missed, but the shouts of "holy fuck, he's armed!" meant that he had thrown the hostiles off their game.
John turned back around the corner and back into cover, looking around. He couldn't stay in one position the whole time, he'd get easily flanked and killed. Instead, he would have to keep moving in order to keep the enemy guessing. As soon as he saw a new position to run to, John sprinted away. A few errant shots were fired in his general direction, but none were anywhere near hitting him. Once behind cover, John peeked around his cover to catch a glimpse of his assailants. He wanted this next shot to take one of them down. The light from the opened bay door dimly illuminated the warehouse, and suddenly John made out the form of someone moving carefully in the shadows. Rounding the corner, John lined up and took the shot. The pistol barked twice, and there was a terrible shout as the bullets hit their mark.
"You son of a bitch!" The survivor roared, a voice that John didn't recognize. He had killed one, but the one still alive was the one with the SMG. A heartbeat later, a barrage of green plasma arced toward John's makeshift cover, hissing as it burned a black mark into whatever it hit.
"Shit." John hissed as the endless fusillade continued. The weapon his opponent was using was a heat-based weapon rather than an ammunition-based one, meaning he could fire for a good long while before his gun would overheat and stop firing as it purged itself. The pirate would know that, meaning he'd make a break for cover as the gun began overheating so he would be safe while it cooled down.
Crouching down, John quickly moved away from the cover he was, taking care to make as little noise as possible. As he moved, he could hear the thug talking, radioing in for help. John only had a few moments to either avoid his assailant or incapacitate him, or he'd be flooded by so many attackers he wouldn't be able to survive. Once he reached the next piece of cover, John peeked over the edge. Again, the darkness made it extremely difficult to see anything, and the second attacker wasn't making the same mistake that his friend had. Wherever he was, he was hiding deep in the shadows, somewhere John couldn't see.
John quickly took a glance back at the opened door that led back out onto the back alleys of Min. He was tantalizingly close, maybe a good ten meters away, but the final pirate could be anywhere in the warehouse, likely watching the exit to see John sprint past and into the sights of an SMG.
"Okay, now what?" John asked himself as he forced his breathing to slow. His head felt like it was floating away thanks to a strong dose of adrenaline coursing through his veins, and John had to shake his head to dispel some of it so he could think clearly. Instinct wouldn't help him here, after all.
He looked down at his LH-86 and quickly slid out the magazine with a press of the release, the bulky thing falling into his hand. In the dim light, John could make out several rounds still left in the mag, perhaps only four. It would have to be enough, as he couldn't afford to swap needlessly. Sliding it back into his pistol as quietly as he could, John crouched down as low as he could and peeked out the corner of his cover. The exit was still in front of him, but there was no cover in between him and freedom, making any attempt to "run for daylight" would end with John's burnt corpse being left for the next shift of workers to discover.
John turned around and stared intently into the dark, trying to make out what was there. Against the far wall was the front doors, still locked as John had found them. An idea began to form in the back of John's mind, and he took a deep breath before moving forward.
Slowly moving forward, one foot carefully after the next, John listened for any sound other than his heart thumping in his chest. For a while, all was quiet, and John was beginning to wonder if he wasn't walking into a trap when suddenly he heard movement from outside the warehouse. Footsteps, and plenty of them.
Reinforcements had arrived.
- - - - - - - -
There was a muted bang from outside the building as a weapon was discharged, and the front door of the warehouse rattled as it took a direct hit. "Fuck!" John hissed as he quickly dove behind cover a moment before the door slid open with a groan. Wincing as sunlight poured into the previously dark warehouse like a flood, John could make out the outlines of three more assailants, all of them armed, and all of them blocking John's escape route.
"What the hell's going on here?" One of the newcomers shouted into the warehouse.
"Some asshole, watch it!" The thug deeper in the building, and uncomfortably close behind John, yelled back. "He's armed, and he got Ki!" The two parties went quiet, and John knew that they were combing for him again, trying to make him move. They wanted to have him try to run in the direction opposite of the way that he had heard the voices, but John wasn't going to play their game. Gripping his 86 tight, he turned in the direction the way he had heard the pirate in the back of the warehouse and began to make his way that way.
Moving as quickly, and as quietly, as he could, John began to pace through the warehouse, ducking in-between piles of crates. The smell of the body of poor Trey, decomposing in peace, grew stronger, and John suddenly knew where he was in the building. With that, he knew where everyone else was, or at least where they had been.
John kept moving, when suddenly he heard the sound of a step just a decibel too loud only a few feet to his left. Quickly, he whipped around and raised the pistol. He could barely make out the panicked face of the thug before him before squeezing the trigger. The LH-86 bucked in his hands, and it roared a deafening blast as a heartbeat later the pirate was hit, blown backwards by the impact and collapsing on the ground.
"Fuck!" A pirate somewhere behind John shouted, before opening fire frantically with his weapon, a loud ballistic assault rifle. John didn't move for a second, his eyes transfixed on the man he had killed, before putting a lifetime of memories behind him and pressing on. The time for subtlety had passed, and suddenly the warehouse was alive with weapons fire. Rounds passed dangerously close over John's head, snapping as the supersonic bullets whipped past John's ears.
John raised his crouch as he sprinted forward, heading for the rear entrance. He couldn't stop, or they would find him and kill him. As he sprinted, more and more bullets were aimed his ways, tracers passing eerily around him as he raced for the exit. Pushing his body just a bit more, John finally passed the threshold and stood outside for the first time in what felt like ages. The sun was beginning to set on Min, and it took a second for John to get his bearings again. He couldn't stay here: He needed to get to the Wanderer, and he needed to get off this dustball before the Tiger's Claw's goons got him.
A snap-crack of a bullet passing close to John's head motivated him to start running again, and John took off, leaving the alarmed shouts of his pursuers behind him as he sprinted through the backalleys of the colony world. The sand crunched under his feet as he kept going, scratching every time John would take a hard turn around a corner in order to lose his attackers. John could feel his lungs burning, but he couldn't stop for a second. He pushed his body further, harder and harder, even as his muscles screamed at him to stop and take a breather.
John ran for what felt like a quarter of an hour, and when he finally stopped to double over, coughing as his exhausted lungs frantically regained air from the dead sprint away from the warehouse, John was back in the more urban section of Min. Catching his breath, John looked up to see people staring at him nervously, and for a second John didn't understand why. Then he remembered that he still was holding his 86 in a dead man's grip, and abashedly he holstered the pistol. John glanced back the way he came, but there was nothing there. They were still out there, but they were either still catching up, or they had decided that trying to run John down wasn't the right tactic to use.
John took one last deep breath, then began to walk as quickly as he could down the busy streets of the colony, glancing constantly back as he kept moving toward the spaceport only a few blocks away.
- - - - - - - -
John had hurried through the paperwork that held him back from just gunning his engines and leaving Min behind as quick as he could. As soon as he finished dotting his i's and dotting his t's, he practically sprinted through the spaceport's ragged halls until he reached Hangar 5A. The doors couldn't open fast enough for him as he squeezed through between the metal gate. Before him was the Wanderer, unmolested by no one other than Port Authority, who had unloaded the heavy cargo container that she had arrived with. The port access opened with a hiss as the Aurora detected her owner approaching, the ladder unfurling expectantly. John scrambled up it like a monkey, and as soon as he clambered inside, he shut the opening behind him. Quickly, John stripped out of his sweat-marked clothes and into his space-suit before sliding into the command chair.
John began to start up the Wanderer, the systems spooling up agonizingly slowly. His eyes flicked between the console and the door that led into the hangar from the spaceport halls. The pirates couldn't be far behind. "Come on, come on!" John hissed as his heart pounded in his chest. Finally, the whine of the boot-up process died down to a dull rumble, and the HUD flashed the RSI logo before displaying the interface. Turning on VTOL, John keyed in the traffic control channel. "This is John Andrews of the Aurora Wanderer, requesting permission to head out."
"Copy that, Wanderer." The traffic controller replied, his voice clearly stressed. "There is an incident currently progressing, we just received word: No ships are leaving Min until after the investigation is complete."
"Dammit." John hissed under his breath, hoping that his swear didn't get broadcasted. "Copy that, I will-" Out of the corner of his eye, the door into the hangar slid open, and men with guns rushed in, taking aim at the Aurora. "-shit!" John shouted as he slammed down on the display that activated the shields. The shield generator hummed to life just as blue plasma splashed against energy fields, dissipating harmlessly instead of burning a fatal hole in the Aurora's hull. Quickly, John spooled up the VTOL systems, the broad rotors spinning to life with a high-pitched whine, while at the same time the main engines engaged with a roar.
The sudden sound of kinetic rounds smacking off the hull like a steel rain came only a few seconds later, and that was all the encouragement John needed to kiss goodbye to Min. The Aurora hovering barely a few inches off the deck, John kicked the afterburner. The Wanderer shot forward like a bullet, the plasma trail filling the small hangar with an overpowering blue light and a blistering heat as the Aurora rocketed away, out of the hangar and toward the skies.
"Aurora Wanderer, what the hell are you doing?" The traffic control operator practically screamed at John over the comms.
"I am being shot at, and I am not going to die for some goddamned halt order!" John shouted back before cutting the comms channel. He didn't have time to explain to anyone what the hell was going on, especially since he knew that the pirates had friends somewhere above. It would be only a matter of time before they vectored in on the Wanderer, its nose scraping the outermost atmosphere of the dustball planet beneath her.
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As soon as the Aurora broke through Min's atmosphere and into the first vestiges of space, John cycled through his contact list. When he had arrived, John had tagged three ships that had been loitering suspiciously over the northern hemisphere of the planet as just a precaution in case they were pirates or raiders. Now that he had pissed off one of the most brutal gangs in the galaxy, it made more than a little sense to check if they were now hostile.
While the ship's computers and sensors tried to tea quite the contacts, John turned his attention to the space around him. John had tried his best to explain why he had to break lockdown, but he doubted if anyone believed him. Given that there were at least half-a-dozen ships orbiting Min with bounty hunter tags, John would make a very opportunistic target. Somewhere, past the bounty hunters and the pirates, was the jump-point out of the system and back toward New Pittsburgh and the rest of the UEE. He would need to fly for his life if he stood a chance of slipping the net.
John hit the comms button to transmit to the horde of hunters watching the Wanderer streak for the stars. He needed to convince them of his plight, or at least keep them from getting involved. He was about to speak when the sensors finally finished updating, revealing the positions of the two small Mustang fighters and the larger Freelancer. John scanned through them, before realizing suddenly that the second Mustang contact was two hundred meters behind him.
The Wanderer shook, hard, as plasma bolts impacted into her rear shields. Behind the Aurora, the small, dagger-like Mustang tailed closely, readying another shot. John grit his teeth, and rolled the Aurora into a tight spin, spinning wildly as John opened up the throttle. The Mustang fired again, but its shots passed harmless by, the Mustang pilot's aim shaken by John's simple move. John allowed himself a smile as he realized he was up against an amateur, and braced himself for what he'd do next.
The Mustang driver fired another burst, this one splashing against the Aurora's shields. The pilot of the fighter kept right on John's tail as the two ships began to weave inbetween the massive cargo ships sitting docile. John pulled hard on the stick, willing the Wanderer into a hair-pin turn around the lip of a massive stack of cargo containers magnetically locked to their transports. The edge of Min II's gravitational influence was approaching, but the second Mustang and the Freelancer were approaching rapidly, the sensors giving an alarming tone to warn that they had come within 5 kilometers. John had to even out his attackers, and soon, as the bounty hunters had begun to swivel their ships around and slowly pour on speed in preparation for pursuit.
As John pulled one more turn around a cargo ship, more plasma bolts from the first Mustang arced barely overhead, the rounds impacting into the cargo containers, burning cruel holes into the steel boxes. Enough was enough, and John braced himself for what he did next: Kill the throttle.
The Wanderer slowed to a halt like it had hit a wall, the jarring transition rattling the ship and nearly slamming John's head into the console. The Mustang, tailing too close behind, had no chance to stop itself. The small ship practically disintegrated upon impact with the larger, heavier, and better armored Aurora, the thin metal that comprised the fighter's hull splintering into fragments as the Mustang crumpled upon impact. There was a satisfying shove that shunted the Wanderer as the small power generator aboard the Mustang went critical and exploded. Alarms blared inside the cockpit, but the Aurora was fine, to John's relief. The gamble had paid off, but he wasn't out of the woods just so yet.
The display that listed the tagged ships removed seamlessly the first Mustang, but the other Mustang and the Freelancer were approaching rapidly. To make matters worse, several of the bounty hunters were moving with the Wanderer and her pursuers, looking for an opportunity to make a quick buck. Two assailants was bad enough, but an entire system of guns being pointed at John made him very very nervous indeed. The navigational display showed that the jump point out of the system was only a few kilometers away, but there was no way that John would get there before the pirates and bounty hunters would. He would need to open the gap, clear his tail, and get out before they caught up with him again.
Gritting his teeth, John braced himself for a high-G turn. The Aurora shuddered as the ship strained to keep up as it turned on a dime, going a full 180 as John led her back towards Min and the many cargo ships sitting idly in orbit. John kicked the throttle back to full as the fog at the edge of his vision cleared, and the Wanderer shot ahead like a bullet, the roar of the engines only slightly muffled through the hull. Before him, the bounty hunters scattered out of the way of the Aurora barreling towards them, surprised at the sudden maneuver. While the hunters kept a passive lock on John, none of them had armed their weapons just so yet. That didn't meant that it couldn't change in a heartbeat, but their temporary neutrality was still good news. The pirates, caught off-guard by John's sudden reversal, began to circle around as they tried to circle behind their prey.
John gripped the stick tight as the Wanderer approached the sitting cargo ships: There was no room for a mistake in this kind of fight. A single slip of the controls, and he'd smash full-on into the stacks of containers. If John was to be honest with himself, he almost felt as if this was where he belonged. Any Navy pilot, if they were honest, or drunk, enough would admit that there is a form of addiction to adrenaline. Being in a life-or-death situation, where the only thing keeping you alive is your skill alone, gives a high better than any drug. John had missed it; he had never felt more alive than when he was in a dogfight.
The pirates were closing fast behind John as the Wanderer flew past the first cargo ship. John hit right rudder, and the Aurora began to drift closer to some of the ships waiting in line to be unloaded. On the sensors display, the three-dimensional display showed that the two pirates were closing from behind and above. John pushed the stick forward, and the Wanderer dipped down before John aggressively kicked her to the right, sliding underneath the cargo ships. Bolts of plasma flicked by past the massive ships above the Aurora, and the small vessel shuddered as more than a few rounds smashed into the cargo ships themselves. John pushed the throttle back, decelerating rapidly as debris from a stricken vessel began to stream into his flight path. "Holy shit!" He shouted. He hadn't anticipated that his attackers would be mad enough to start fragging anything in their path to get to him.
John kicked the Wanderer left, back out from under his cover and into the open again. He wasn't about to risk some poor cargo captain's life so he could save his own. Bracing himself, John pulled hard on the stick, and the Aurora's nose shot upwards, climbing rapidly in a tight turn. Halfway through the loop, John stopped pulling and gave the engines full blast, shooting back for the jump-point. The pirates were still turning to reacquire their target when John shot past the ring of bounty hunters. John winced as he blew past them, expecting a hail of plasma rounds... but none came. Instead, they seemed far more interested in the ships chasing John. He watched his sensors display intently as the two tagged pirate ships began to flicker to represent a barrage of plasma rounds. The Mustang practically disintegrated as soon as its shields failed, fragmenting into pieces as a single shot punched through the thin armor and hit something volatile. The Freelancer, however, remained vigilant, and the distance tracker showed it burning as fast as it could away, widening the gap between it and its pursuers as fast as its powerful engines would allow it.
With all eyes off of John, he selected the bounty hunters and tapped the comms button. "Thanks for the assist, guys." He said, taking a deep breath as the adrenaline began to slowly dissipate in his veins. "You really saved my ass."
"Not a problem, Aurora." One of them replied. "Where are you heading off to now?" He sounded vaguely suspicious, which made sense. After all, they had no idea why the hell three ships had suddenly jumped one. As far as they knew, John was just as much of a target as the pirates.
"I'm heading for Earth." John replied. He wasn't lying, and he knew that mentioning the capital of the Empire would at least abate some suspicions. Still, they'd likely shadow him for a while, but that was no big concern for him. They'd back off once he got to Terra, the last real stop before the Sol system. No pirate would be mad enough to fly a marked ship straight for Earth.
"Understood, Aurora." The bounty hunter replied. "Happy trails."
"Same to you, guys. Good hunting." John said with a smile. "Wanderer, out." Closing the comms channel, John slowed down to a cruise. A few moments later, reality stretched itself into oblivion, and the Wanderer returned to the familiar whirling blue tunnel of jump-space.
- - - - - - - -
The next several dozen hours were long and tense. Every time he entered a system, he would pour over the sensors display, agonizing over every contact, and scanning aggressively every dark corner in case of a ship running silent. John knew he was a wanted man; whatever the hell had been on Trey's MobiGlas was extremely precious to the Tiger's Claw gang, and that meant they were more than willing to throw people at John to get it.
Thankfully, the trip to Earth was more or less uneventful; no one had tried to intercept John, and it didn't seem like any ships were trailing him besides the expected bounty hunter. As soon as John passed through the Terra system, however, that tail peeled off and the Wanderer continued on unmolested. As soon as reality reasserted itself at the end of the last jump, the Sol system filled the sky. There, a bright light in the distance, lay Sol, and orbiting millions of miles away from it was Earth.
As John approached the ancestral home of the human race, he found himself wondering when was the last time he had gone to Earth. He never had really been given a reason to head to the Sol system terribly often; he preferred work on the frontier, where trade routes weren't so established and prices were far more lucrative. He couldn't even claim that he had a personal reason to visit, as John had been born aboard his parents' cargo vessel sometime during a jump to Terra. The last time John could remember visiting Earth was during his Navy career, and it had only been a short shore-leave. He remembered Earth being a beautiful place, but there was a shady underside to it that permeated just about everything.
Beijing had one of the largest starports on Earth, but it was also considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. The "shady underside" that John had sensed in Berlin was practically the name of the game in the ancient city. If John could have avoided it, he wouldn't have visited the city at all, but he didn't really have any options left to him. There was someone he needed to see there.
- - - - - - - -
Despite how infamous John had become in the Min system, none of the port authorities on Earth seemed to be aware of him at all. He went through the same docking procedure that every other pilot in the Empire went through, albeit somewhat accelerated thanks to his citizenship status, and landed safely enough in one of the hundreds of hangars in the Beijing starport. It was night by the time John finally finished all the paperwork and stepped outside, the moon barely visible through all the smoke of the busy city. It was a smoggy town, and neon lights that marked one store or another filtered through the air in a mesmerizing display. Everyone on the street seemed tense, ready for just about anything. John could practically feel the exhaustion of the tired old town, the weight of millions of people living on streets that spanned back for centuries. He couldn't help but feel a little sad to see the sorry state of the ancient capital.
As John walked slowly, and very cautiously, out of the commercial district of Beijing and into the more residential area, the landscape barely changed. The only thing that seemed to be missing was the abundance of neon signs, leaving only the streetlights to illuminate a cloudy city. John checked his MobiGlas, cycling through his contacts, before selecting one Kyle Webber. Webber had been a technician in the Navy, and had served alongside John during their tour. John couldn't claim that they were close friends in any form of the word, but he didn't know a man better at cracking encrypted files than Webber. John could only hope that the man would forgive John's unexpected arrival.
Webber lived in an apartment, an old one that stretched a few stories into the sky. According to the MobiGlas display, he lived in Room 108, right on the first floor. After a few minutes of navigating the aged apartment complex, John found himself finally standing in front of the door to the room, the numbers "108" emblazoned on the steel automatic door in black paint. John rapped his knuckles on the door before pausing for a response. He'd be off to a rather inauspicious start if Webber wasn't in, or worse, had moved.
"Who is it?" Someone shouted from inside. John sighed in relief, recognizing the light German accent of the technician.
"It's John Andrews." He said in reply. "We were in the Navy together." There was a pause as Webber tried to remember the name.
"Ah, yes, Andrews." Webber replied. "Please, come in." There was a beep as the door unlocked, and with a woosh it opened to reveal the room itself. It was spartan, the walls painted a dull white and the floor bare steel. There was barely any furniture in the main area, just a few chairs and a table to make up a form of living room. There was a small hallway that lead likely to the bedroom and bathroom, and John could see cooking equipment up against the wall. There was a window facing the street, but Webber had closed the shutters.
"Hello, Webber." John said, walking in. The two shook hands cordially enough as the steel door closed behind John.
"Hello, Andrews." Webber replied, leading John over to a seat. "It is nice to see you. What are you doing in Beijing?" John took a seat and paused to collect his thoughts before talking.
"I actually came here to speak to you, Webber." He started, drumming his fingers against his MobiGlas. "I need a file cracked."
"Oh?" Webber replied, leaning forward in interest. "What kind of file?" John grimaced.
"I don't know." He admitted, frowning. "It was uploaded onto my Glas automatically." From there, John told Webber the whole story: The body on Min, the pirates, and the message from beyond the grave. When he was finished, Webber leaned back in his seat.
"It sounds like you have gotten in over your head, Andrews." Webber remarked. "A whole pirate gang has painted a bullseye on your chest."
"It's not like I wanted to get involved." John replied. "Look, whatever is on this file is important. We should crack it open, then contact the authorities, let them handle this." Webber nodded before pointing at John's MobiGlas.
"May I?" He asked. John nodded, and unstrapped the device from his wrist. Carefully, he handed the MobiGlas to Webber, who immediately pressed a small button on the side. A panel flipped open, revealing a small interface. "I am going to link my Glas to yours, and I will crack it from mine. That way, we won't run into any fail-safes that might lock us out." Webber remarked as he began to tinker with his own MobiGlas still on his arm.
"How long do you think it'll take to break through?" John asked, crossing his legs. "It's not like I have all the time in the world. They'll figure out where I went eventually."
"It depends on how difficult the encryption is." Webber replied, pointedly. "I doubt that it will be horrifically difficult; it was meant to be entrusted to someone who could break it with a bit of effort and deliver it to the Advocacy or local authorities, assuming that your story is correct." John shrugged, and resigned himself to the wait.
The hours passed slowly, but just as the clock on the wall marked 12:15 in the morning, Webber gave a triumphant smile. "I've got it." John, who had been slipping in and out of consciousness as he sat on the chair, quickly roused himself and hurried to Webber's side.
"What?" John asked, excitedly. "What did you find?" Webber tapped an option on his MobiGlas' display, and suddenly John's hummed to life. It felt like the lights in the room dimmed to let the image being projected shine brighter: The visage of Trey Galet, once again displayed. John examined the image, surprised. "That looks like the same message I saw on Min." He said to Webber, staring intently at the projection.
"The video file seems to have already played some. Perhaps it was meant to be displayed and saved on the viewer's MobiGlas." Webber remarked. "I can get it to play." John nodded, and Webber hit a holographic button on his own device. The projection of Trey suddenly reanimated as the video file played.
"Whatever you do, don't let Mercer get a hold of it!" The image of the pirate shouted, as he had before on the dustball colony of Min. Again, John watched as pain wracked the man's body. It wasn't pleasant before, and it wasn't now. "We found something, some kind of starship graveyard around a small moon at the edge of Imperial space." Trey continued, not cut-off as he had been before in the warehouse. "Every ship in orbit was ancient, hundreds of years old. All had the same markings, same fleet I guess. All of them had a single massive hole in their hulls. Burned through by some massive energy weapon on that moon."
"That'd take a hell of a lot of power to do that kind of damage." Webber noted as Trey took a breath. "And a lot of shielding to keep an energy charge of that level from frying systems." The pirate continued recounting.
"Every time we sent a ship to investigate, it was..." Trey struggled to describe what he had seen. "Disintegrated. Some point defense system across the entire moon just vaporized whatever got too close." John shot a glance over at Webber, but the technician could only shrug.
"I've never heard of anything like this." Webber admitted. "Whatever this place is, it is really advanced. Maybe even alien." John felt a chill run down his spine. If the Tiger's Claw could get their hands on something as powerful as what Trey was describing, they'd be unstoppable.
"Mercer went hunting through some of the wrecks, and found out that the security systems could be shut down with an access code." Trey stared straight forward, his eyes burning. "Mercer is planning to use what is on that moon to raid entire systems. Millions will die, and I just couldn't let that happen. I stole the map that he found, a map that would lead him to where he could find the codes, and hid it in my personal hangar on Terra, Hangar Six-Five." He coughed, painfully, as the plasma burn began to immolate his internal organs. John was no doctor, but he knew that the pirate would be dead within the hour. These were his final moments, shared with a man that he would never meet, and trusting him to save millions from a bloodthirsty brigand. John could feel the weight of the galaxy begin to lie upon his shoulders as the video approached its end.
"Go to Terra. Get the map from the hangar, it's in the fish-tank. Get it to someone who can stop Mercer." Trey ordered, beginning to slump against the containers that he lay against. "Please; it is on you now." With that, the video froze, then closed. The room seemed to brighten softly with the video gone, but John felt no better in the light.
"Jesus." He muttered under his breath. "What have I got myself into?"
"Something bigger than yourself, Andrews." Webber replied, crossing his arms. "You heard the man. You have got to find that map and give it to someone. I have some contacts in the Advocacy, perhaps they can help us." John nodded slowly.
"Okay, you get on getting that file ready for transfer so we can hand it off to them when we contact them." John said, grimacing. "I've gotta step out for a second, get some air." He felt a touch out of sorts, his mind trying to process what he had stumbled into. He was a transport pilot, not some kind of hero of the stars. This was far outside his area of expertise, even when he was a Navy pilot. To be just thrown into the mix of things was a jarring transition from the easy-going pilot-for-hire he had been only a few days ago.
He was beginning to regret ever taking that contract to Min.
- - - - - - - -
John took a deep breath in the murky Beijing air as he stood outside the apartment building. There was a slightly metallic tint to the air, pollution blown from the manufacturing facilities that blanketed the landscape. For the uninitiated, this would be rather jarring, but John had breathed in similar air on New Pittsburgh. It was something you got used to after long enough time. In a way, it was appropriate: He had to steel himself for what would come, and it was if the air itself was feeding him the iron he would need to stand his ground.
John was about to turn around and head for inside again when he heard a muffled blast from inside the building. It took a second for his mind to process it, but when it did, John felt adrenaline flood through his body. "Oh, no." He began to say. "Oh, no, no, no!" He shouted as he sprinted back inside the building, fumbling for his pistol before remembering that he had to leave it back aboard the Wanderer. A heartbeat later he was standing in front of the door, which slid to accommodate him. "Oh, fuck!" John shouted as he rushed inside.
There, on the floor, lay the body of Webber, a plasma wound in his chest still smoldering. The MobiGlas on his arm sparked as it lay spilled open, abandoned wires that connected it to another device lying on the ground where they had been left.
The pirates had the message.
- - - - - - - - -
Next: With the message stolen by the pirates, John must race to Terra to recover the map before they do. But the Tiger's Claw won't be the only force trying to stop the pilot. A desperate chase begins, next on Farflung Wanderer.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Monday, May 4, 2015
Farflung Wanderer, Episode One: Into the Frontier
The universe opened up before the wide canopy of the Aurora ES as the disorientating flurry of lights that was jump-space tore a hole in space back into reality. The small starship shuddered violently as it made the transition, and her pilot quickly put his hands back on the controls to stabilize the craft.
When the rocking finally stopped, the man inside the thick flight-suit let out a terse breath and leaned back in his seat as he gathered his senses and looked through the many displays before him. The jump had gone off without a hitch, and he had arrived safely in the system where New Pittsburgh was nestled. There, the cargo stored in the back of the Aurora was destined to be sold, and there the pilot could get a paycheck.
The flight to New Pittsburgh was uneventful, but as the Aurora approached the outermost limits of the planet's gravity, that peace was broken by the announcing beep of an incoming transmission. "Aurora ES, please identify yourself to Port Authority." The pilot hit the comms button and leaned into the microphone built into the panel.
"This is John Andrews, of the Wanderer." The pilot replied, a grin spreading across his face as he spoke. "Here to deliver cargo and get paid." Whoever was running Traffic Control wasn't so easily amused, however.
"Understood, Aurora." The man on the other end said flatly. "Your tags check out, you are cleared to land at hangar nine-seven. Welcome to New Pittsburgh." The line went dead, and John turned his attention back to the growing planet before him as he pushed the throttle forward a hair, the Wanderer rushing forward eagerly.
- - - - - - - -
The rattling of orbit entry shook the Aurora softly, but John held her steady on her course down toward the surface. The clouds met him at high altitude, thin and sparse in the arid environment of the mining world. As soon as the Wanderer cleared them, John got his first glimpse of the sprawling industry below.
Smog rose from factory after factory as heavy machinery worked hour after hour to process ore and raw materials into products to be sold throughout the Empire. In the distance, past the kilometers-high towers and smokestacks, cracks and scars in the earth stretched deep into the crust of New Pittsburgh as ore was pulled from the ground with brute force that shattered planets. It wasn't much in the way of a looker, John thought as he slowed the Wanderer's descent, but it certainly got the job done.
As the Aurora hurried to meet the smokestacks, John slowly leveled the starship out until she was flying almost level, diving slowly as the Wanderer's onboard navigational computer pointed toward Hangar 97. Rounding a large office building, John finally got visual on the tall star-port that was the hub of most off-world traffic. Hangar 97 lay before him, the Wanderer's HUD putting a small marker above the giant metal doors that led into the bay.
Slowing, John kicked in the Aurora's VTOL function, and felt the ship's auxiliary helicopter-like blades mounted inside of the outer frame of the Wanderer spool to life, their whir barely audible above the hum of the starship's systems and the roar of passing atmospheric vehicles. John waited until they were fully online before nosing the ship slightly forward, letting the craft approach the entrance, which slid open before him as sensors detected his arrival.
Carefully, the Wanderer maneuvered inside the tight space of the hangar while the HUD's altitude indicator changed into a measure of the distance between the floor plating and the landing gear that had automatically deployed from underneath the Aurora, moving and locking into position with a loud mechanical whine. One meter at a time, John let the Wanderer settle before finally the distance hit zero. The ship jolted as she made contact with the floor before resting against the hangar deck, and John began to turn the craft off.
As soon as the main engines powered down and the ship's computer began to shut down, John got out of his seat, sliding between it and the canopy window, and paced back to the cramped living quarters of the Wanderer. Hitting a release on his suit, the EVA suit disengaged around John and he began to remove it piece by piece before replacing high-tech protection with a olive green tee-shirt stamped with the word "NAVY" in gold and a pair of black utility pants. John himself was tall, just over six feet, with dark brown hair and chestnut eyes to match. Sliding his MobiGlas onto his wrist, John patted his hand against the inner hull of the Wanderer before putting it against the door lock. The mechanism hissed as the ship depressurized and the door slid open, a gust of fresh air blowing through the Aurora like a storm.
Climbing down the deployed ladder, John took some tentative steps on the deck before putting his hands in his pockets and grinned broadly. It was good to be planet-side once again.
- - - - - - - -
Managing paperwork was the least fun part of being a private pilot, though it wasn't like that had been too much better back in the Navy. Port Authority had clamped down on cargo since smuggling operations had gone up in the last couple of years, and one could never be too sure about what was inside every crate of cargo. The digital documents that John scrawled through on his MobiGlas holographic display was consent papers, asking for Port Authority to search through the goods that John had transported to New Pittsburgh in exchange for it being delivered to its destination. Disagreeing with this was an easy way to catch the attention of the Advocacy, and that was trouble John had no attention of attracting.
Sighing as he sat down on the less-than-comfortable bench in a break room on the same level as Hangar 97, John flipped through the last few pages of data before finally seeing that glorious "accept button", which he pressed with as much energy as a bored pilot could manage. There was a pause as the paperwork was filed through the net before the screen changed to a checkmark, text floating above it confirming that the request had gone through. John grimaced when he saw the estimated waiting time for the cargo to be unloaded and processed: Five hours.
John leaned back in the bench as he thought through his options. Five whole hours was a lot of time to have, and it would do him no good to waste it, especially since that this delivery job was a one-off. He wasn't going to get employment, or least easily, from the same corporation that he had just finished this task for. He would have to go job hunting over the Spectrum that digitally connected all devices.
Scrolling through page after page of "Wanted" ads was a bore, John thought, but at least he didn't skip them because he was under-qualified. Having Citizenship was a hell of a boon, and it basically allowed him to get just about any transport job he wanted. The question that was on John's mind was two-fold. First, the job had to be legal. The quickest way to become the enemy of a lot of people was to traipse on the wrong side of the law, and John didn't have the contacts nor the experience to survive in the cut-throat world of crime. Second, and most importantly, was the destination. John was not keen on having to make multiple jumps to get from point A to point B, and the more systems one visited, the higher the chance of getting jumped.
As he was about to turn the fifteenth page he was on, John's eye caught on a small advertisement that he had almost missed. It was an unassuming contract, simple and straight-forward: Deliver some light supplies to the frontier colony at Min. It wouldn't take too long to get the job done, maybe half a week of flight round trip at least. John minimized the screen and opened up a new one, this time a holographic display of the known galaxy. John's eyes followed the route he'd have to take from New Pittsburgh to Min, looking for something that could spell trouble. Seeing nothing of any real alarm, John reopened the job application and scrolled down to the accept page, which he quickly hit. There was a pause as it went through the Spectrum, but a minute later the screen flashed back to that familiar green checkmark.
John grinned and got up from his bench, heading for the exit of the break room. He had to negotiate more paperwork by Port Authority to pick up the goods, but as soon as he was done, he'd be ready to take off and head out for Min.
- - - - - - - -
The hours went quickly now that John had a purpose. As the brutal desert sun began to sink against the horizon, John finally returned to Hangar 97, his Aurora waiting for him patiently. A small cargo container hung underneath her, loaded with the supplies for the colony. John smiled as he took in the sight of his starship: John never got tired of seeing his craft.
Walking up to the side of the Wanderer, John waited for the starship's exterior sensors to detect him. There was a pause as his bio-signature was confirmed, and a heartbeat later the ladder deployed and the side door opened with a hiss. John clambered onto and up the ladder before ducking his head inside the Aurora.
Putting his hand on the door panel, the entrance sealed shut behind him, and with a whisper of air, pressurized the starship. John fumbled with his clothing, sliding out of his day clothes and into his bulky white EVA suit. The RSI-licensed suit had come with the Aurora, and John hadn't had the heart, or the money, to upgrade. As soon as he was dressed, John slid on his helmet over his head until it met with the neck of his suit. A click announced that it had sealed, and as the internal suit systems booted up, John made his way up to the cockpit of the Aurora, squeezing between hull and seat before finally taking the chair.
Once he was well and sorted, John buckled himself in and started the Wanderer's systems, feeling the powerful computers that managed the starship hum to life in her innermost workings. The HUD and smart-panels flashed to life, displaying the simple but iconic logo for "RSI" as the last of the start process concluded. As options scrolled across their displays, John tapped his way through the engine start protocols he had memorized ages ago.
The Aurora whined as the power generator in the center of the ship began to spool up to operational capacity. In the tail of the ship, the powerful thrusters that propelled the Wanderer through the black glowed to life, roaring as they engaged. All over the starship's hull, small micro-thrusters that maneuvered the craft through space as rudders and flaps would for a plane in atmosphere test-fired, hissing as they let out small jets of blue plasma.
Back in the cockpit, John grasped his left hand on the throttle while his other hand tapped through the smart-panels to activate the VTOL mode. John gave them a look to confirm they were working, as the safety flaps that hid them opened to reveal the helicopter blades. A few button presses more, and he connected a comm channel to Traffic Control. "This is John Andrews of the Wanderer, parked at Hanger Nine-Seven. Requesting clearance to launch, over."
"Aurora designate 'Wanderer', you are clear for departure." A different voice than the one that greeted him when John had entered the system responded. "Happy trails."
"Have a good one, Control." John said, smiling to hear a friendlier voice. Putting his hand on the joystick, John gave her a little throttle. The Wanderer shuddered softly as she slowly left the deck of the hangar. Pushing the stick slowly forward, the Aurora worked its way out as the hangar entrance slid open before her, revealing the night sky lit by pinpricks of lights stemming from a hundred fires.
As soon as she was clear, John turned off VTOL and opened the throttle. The Aurora responded like a dream, shooting forward like a missile as it screamed toward the skies. The spires of the factories, lit only by safety lights that flashed barely visibly against the red-lit smog that drifted away from them, streaked past as John let the Wanderer roar skyward. Gravity's best attempts to pull her back to the earth were futile, the ship imperceptibly shuddering as it conquered the force of nature. The sound of the winds whirling past the cockpit began to fade until there was nothing but silence.
It took some time for the Wanderer to finally clear the gravity field of New Pittsburgh proper, and even longer for her to navigate to the jump-point at the edge of the system. As the Aurora approached the edge of the wormhole, John activated the jump-drive with a single press of a button on the displays. He typed in his destination, some intermediary planet that was of no real concern to him, before returning his attention to piloting. John slowed the Aurora down as she approached the jump-point, and suddenly the universe stretched out into infinity before being supplanted by a bright blue tunnel into oblivion. The Wanderer shuddered as the wormhole bounced her about, strange energies pulling and pushing on the hull of the starship.
John checked the estimated time of arrival to the next system, which the panel displayed as about an hour. Tapping on the display, John brought up the navigation systems and began to plot in the course into the ship's auto-pilot. Once the route was plugged in, John tapped the "execute course" button on the display, before pushing the panels out of the way and unbuckling himself from his seat. It'd take twenty two and a quarter hours until the Wanderer reached the Min system, and spending that time in the cockpit would only drain John's energy and dull his senses, and neither of those were conductive to survival.
Standing up, John worked his way around the seat and to the small living compartment in the center of the ship. A small cot faced a porthole revealing the disorientating lights of the wormhole. Tapping a button on a small console adjacent to the window, the glass blackened until it was just a sheet, as did the window on the other side. The internal lights dimmed until the only light that brightened the cabin was the pinprick of light from the wall-panel and the faint blue lights of jump-space from the cockpit.
Sighing, John slowly got on the cot and nestled himself in. As he stared up at the darkened ceiling of the Wanderer, his mind drifted to what awaited him on Min and the route ahead, what dangerous he could encounter. He fell asleep soon enough, his ship continuing on as if he had never gone to bed.
- - - - - - - -
The twenty-two and a quarter hours passed quickly for two thirds of it, as John slept peacefully while the Wanderer continued on its path. By the time John woke up, there were only eight hours left. Those passed agonizingly slowly, as John read novels on his MobiGlas and looked over the ship's systems again and again. The latter was habit he had picked up back in the Navy, a form of ritualistic paranoia whenever a space-faring vessel left its port of call. A pilot was supposed to know all that ailed his craft before he went out, sure, but once you were out in the black all that mattered is a pilot's ability to monitor his ship.
The maxim, at least as John had been taught it, was to check systems every two hours if you were in a fighter, and every hour if you were in anything bigger than that. Because he had been unconscious for the past fourteen, he ran fourteen systems checks in under two hours, making sure that nothing had gone wrong. A good pilot checked not for the obvious problems, which were also more rare, but the more common and pernicious ones that tended to fly under the radar. Stress fractures on the hull from exposure to gravitational fields and the wear-and-tear from jump-space was a major one to watch for. Another was any sign that power was being lost excessively as energy flowed from power generator to ship systems. A major drain could cost a pilot their life, but a minor drain was to be expected as systems burned energy just by being on. It took skill and experience to be able to tell the difference. The tests went off without a hitch, however, and over the remaining hours John lived a very monotonous life until finally the end of the final jump approached.
The Wanderer shuddered violently as the jump-drive aboard played with the powerful energies surrounding her. John, who had buckled himself in when he had started this last jump, gripped the seat as he braced for the shock of returning to real-space.
It felt like the hand of God snatched the Aurora and gave it one good hard rattle. The ship shook like a rag-doll as the swirling blue jump-space stretched out like it was being pulled until the blue faded into black and the pinpricks of stars appeared. As the Wanderer settled, aided by the micro-thrusters self-stabilizing the vessel, John loosened his grip on the stick and gave a sigh of relief. He quickly looked over the navigation display, which read to him that the ship had arrived safe and sound in the Min system.
"Alright, then." John muttered under his breath as he tapped the nav screen and selected the small world of Min II. A second later, the HUD changed, an arrow appearing pointing in the direction of the dustball of a planet. John slowly panned the Wanderer over, lightly adjusting the stick. A thousand years ago, space travel was a complicated mix of mathematics and physics. Today, with computers a thousand thousand times more powerful than those assisting those ancient space programs resting lightly on one's arm, it was as simple as pointing the starship the way you wanted to go and hit the gas. The engines on starships, even the smallest space-worthy ones, were capable of blowing through a gravitational field fairly easily, to put it simply. There was a more complicated science behind space-flight, especially around gravitational fields, but the layman could rely on his ship's computer systems to get him through without too much hassle.
It took a fair amount of time for the Wanderer to actually hit the gravitational field of Min II. This was a frontier world, and that meant you encountered frontier people, so John studied every contact that the Aurora's sensors had picked up. Unsurprisingly, there were some wanted smugglers, a bounty hunter or twelve, and plenty of cargo ships. However, nothing had been tagged as a pirate, though John knew better than to assume that there truly were no brigands. A few thousand credits, and suddenly your ship's ID has been swapped for an entirely new one, an easy way around UEE ID tagging.
A few ships, prowling around the northern hemisphere of the planet, had no tags at all, which put John on edge, but they seemed to be preoccupied. Three of them, John thought as he saved their contacts on his HUD; two Mustangs and a Freelancer. While John didn't stop monitoring the contacts when he started entering the main bulk of traffic heading for the planet's surface, he did relax a little. There were enough bounty hunters here, all of which had clean UEE tags, and a few with Citizenship, that would make trying to attack anyone in this area a quick way to be spaced.
Once the planet filled his cockpit, John tapped the comms panel and tried to raise traffic control. Unlike New Pittsburgh, which had extensive infrastructure in orbit around the planet, there was only a single unloading station for the bigger Hull-class vessels to dock at, as well as what had to be some form of militia outpost protecting it. Whoever was running things would be planetside, which didn't mean too much other than it'd take a few moments longer for his ship to be scanned. "Min Traffic Control, this is Aurora Wanderer, requesting permission to land, over." John said clearly. There was a chance that comms could be disrupted by the planet's atmosphere, even though the desert world before him likely had a thinner one, and being misheard was a quick way to get in trouble.
The pause between John's call and the response was longer than John liked, so he slowed the engines down so he wouldn't hit atmosphere before he got clearance. Finally, the comms panel beeped to announce an incoming transmission. "Wanderer, this is Traffic Control. ID is checked, please proceed to Hangar Five A." The woman running operations had a colonist's drawl, the kind of voice you hear from someone who has left the city behind long enough to forget what's proper to sound like. John had always been partial for that kind of voice, as it had always represented to him a form of free spirit that you didn't find on the mega-cities of Terra or Earth. "Welcome to Min, Aurora."
"Thanks, Control." John replied, smiling pleasantly enough. "Have a good one, out." John slowly edged the engines forward, and streaked toward the world before him.
- - - - - - - -
An hour later, John stood on the surface of Min, staring up at the blazing sun. The world was like New Pittsburgh was back when it was just being colonized. Sand was everywhere, crags and cliffs rising in the distance like the maw of the world. This particular world had rock spires that stretched toward the skies, formed by ancient oceans that had long since evaporated. It was a hell of a world, but people believed they could make their fortune here, and John was the last person who would disagree. There was opportunity to be found out here, at the edge of civilized space.
John had never been to Min before. It just hadn't been a place his career had taken him to. There was a mystery to this world, an air of danger and adventure that enthralled John. No matter how mundane his job could be, John never let himself be anything else but amazed to walk on some alien world. It was no surprise that as soon as the unloading process had begun, John began to poke around.
The colony was as bare-bones as they came. The star-port barely poked above the tops of the buildings surrounding it, the materials and traffic necessary to mandate a taller structure not yet present. The structures that made up the colony were pre-fabs, naturally, and while they were still relatively new, the sand had etched itself into each and every wall. The entire place looked like it had been recently dug-up, in fact. All that was missing was some ancient ruin or pyramid to seal the deal.
John smiled at the people on the streets as he passed them, though he could feel their stares bore in on the Navy shirt he wore. Out this far, one could run into all sorts of people, and not all of them were as big of fans of the UEE's military as those closer to Sol. However, John was ready for any eventuality.
Unlike New Pittsburgh, which banned personal weapons on the surface, Min had no such qualms over packing heat. As such, John carried his personal firearm strapped to his hip, attached by a magnetic grip between the weapon and micro-magnets stitched into his clothes. Technically, John could holster the pistol anywhere, but where it was served him fine: It made sure John could reach it at the quick, and it made sure that anyone who wanted to pick a fight knew that he had a reply.
The pistol itself was an LH-86, a pistol from Gemini. While there was much to be said for plasma-based weaponry, a combustion-based handgun like the '86 had a lot more punch, and couldn't be deflected or absorbed by shields like energy weapons could. However, it was also loud and had a hell of a kick. In John's eyes, though, the sound did a good job of intimidating any assaulters into backing off, and the kick was manageable. You only really needed to put one into someone to put them down. Add to that a thirteen-round magazine, of which John was carrying two, one of which was already loaded into the pistol, and you had a hell of a weapon.
John ran his fingers over the weapon, to make sure it was at the ready, as he continued walking further and further out from the star-port.
- - - - - - - -
There wasn't much in the way of a "plan" in John's mind. He was merely just going to go as far as he could, and once he hit the edge of the colony, he'd turn back around. It'd give him a taste of what Min had to offer, and John always appreciated a chance to stretch his legs. As the minutes passed, the buildings became more and more industrial in nature until John was walking through a sea of warehouses, and beyond them lay the desert of Min. "End of the line." John muttered to himself, the back of his mind wondering why he hadn't brought along a water bottle.
John was about to turn back around when a very strange, and very powerful, smell filled the air. It was instantly familiar to him, and an adrenaline kick made him shudder as he instinctively went for his '86. There, in the air, was the unmistakably acrid smell of burning ozone, and the horrid scent of melted flesh.
John turned to face the nearest warehouse, where the odor seemed to be stemming from. It didn't occur to John that he might be walking into something. The only thought in his mine was that someone had been shot, and he had to get to the bottom of this. His mind was racing, running through his recent memory. He hadn't heard a shot, meaning that whoever had been shot had been lying there for some time, before John had gotten in earshot. Given how relatively quiet it had been in the area, that the act could have been committed any time ago, although the fact that the smell came from inside a warehouse did mean that the blast might have been muffled.
Crawling up to the big metal door, John peered through a small hole where the door had been punctured somehow. It wasn't much larger than a keyhole, and it was dark inside the warehouse. There didn't seem to be anything moving, from what John's limited vision could tell, but there could be almost anything waiting inside. Going through the front door did not strike John as a smart idea, so he began to slink around the side, looking for another entrance.
That entrance presented itself in the form of a heavy door, left partially unclosed. In the back of John's mind, he wondered if whoever had fired a shot had gone out this way. Going prone, John peered through the slit just large enough to accommodate his body. Like the peephole, there wasn't anything to really see... Aside from an odd shape lying against the far wall. John aimed his pistol at it, and quickly rolled under the gate.
Once he was through, John got back to his feet and slid behind cover, in case the unknown figure decided that it was, understandably, not very keen on unexpected visitors. But after a few minutes of absolute silence, John realized that he was the only living thing in this warehouse. The smell was stronger now, almost overpowering. It was hard for John to avoid gagging on it, but he swallowed his disgust down and got out from his cover.
Slowly, John. approached the form slumped against the wall, It was sitting there, absolutely motionless. As he got closer, he could begin to make out more and more of its form, but the detail was still gone. He stopped in his tracks, and tapped a small button on the side of his MobiGlas. A beam of light instantly flicked on, and suddenly John could see everything..
Lying there, abandoned, was what was once a man. He had been tall, well over six feet tall, and in his thirties of forties. There were tattoos on his face which John recognized instantly as marking allegiance to some pirate gang. The man had worn to his death rather meager clothes, ripped and torn in some kind of struggle, though they had been shoddily made to begin with, faint red and greens on both shirt and pants. The man's left arm lay useless on the floor, and his right lay clutched over a horrific wound, cradling it where he had when he died in some desperate attempt to stave off death.
John moved closer to the body, and noticed that on its right arm was a MobiGlas. A small white light was flashing on the device faintly. Tentatively, he reached out to touch it, but before he got halfway the air in front of him exploded in light. Instinctively, John jumped back as he tried to catch his bearings. A voice filled the air, halting and pained, and suddenly John understood what this was. Projected holographically by the MobiGlas was the dead man, staring out at the pilot.
"If you are seeing this, then my Glas didn't recognize you as one of my... 'friends'." The holographic man spoke, his face a twisted mix of physical pain and the reaving of betrayal. John slowly moved back to where he was, staring into the eyes of the hologram intently.
"What is this, then?" John muttered under his breath. He'd heard of this sort of 'last will and testament' thing, but he'd never been unfortunate enough to encounter it.
"My name is Trey Galet, and I am-" The hologram of Trey paused as he took a ragged breath. "-was a member of the Tiger's Claw, the best damn gang in the galaxy." John thought that the tattoos had looked vaguely familiar, but now that he had a name to put to them, he had put the two together. The Tiger's Claw was a gang that John had only heard about, but they were supposed to be extremely brutal raiders of frontier colonies. "Our leader is a man named Mercer, and he's been good to us." There was a long pause as Trey winced as the pain temporarily overwhelmed him. "But something changed."
"Changed?" John repeated under his breath. "The hell does that mean?"
"While you're watching this, my MobiGlas has been automatically downloading an encrypted file to your device." Trey said through gritted teeth. Immediately, John checked his Glas, and sure enough, a new data packet had been downloaded unto his device.
"Shit." He hissed. This development was all sorts of bad. "You just had to drag someone else into this, you pirate asshole, didn't you?" John muttered, his hand tightening around his LH-86.
"Get the packet to someone who can decrypt it. Whatever you do, don't let Mercer get a hold of it!" Trey began to shudder as the plasma did butcher's work. "We found-" With that, the video suddenly cut out, and the MobiGlas on the body of Trey flicked off like someone had yanked a power cord.
"What happened?" John asked out loud, surprised. Suddenly, a dreadful possibility came to surface in John's mind: Trey had said that the video was only playing because it didn't recognize John. That implied that if someone else were to walk in, someone that it did recognize were to stand in front of it...
Behind John's head, the sound of a plasma pistol charging whined.
- - - - - - - -
Next: John must escape from a pirate dragnet as he carries a mysterious file that holds secrets beyond his darkest fears. An adventure begins, next on Farflung Wanderer...
When the rocking finally stopped, the man inside the thick flight-suit let out a terse breath and leaned back in his seat as he gathered his senses and looked through the many displays before him. The jump had gone off without a hitch, and he had arrived safely in the system where New Pittsburgh was nestled. There, the cargo stored in the back of the Aurora was destined to be sold, and there the pilot could get a paycheck.
The flight to New Pittsburgh was uneventful, but as the Aurora approached the outermost limits of the planet's gravity, that peace was broken by the announcing beep of an incoming transmission. "Aurora ES, please identify yourself to Port Authority." The pilot hit the comms button and leaned into the microphone built into the panel.
"This is John Andrews, of the Wanderer." The pilot replied, a grin spreading across his face as he spoke. "Here to deliver cargo and get paid." Whoever was running Traffic Control wasn't so easily amused, however.
"Understood, Aurora." The man on the other end said flatly. "Your tags check out, you are cleared to land at hangar nine-seven. Welcome to New Pittsburgh." The line went dead, and John turned his attention back to the growing planet before him as he pushed the throttle forward a hair, the Wanderer rushing forward eagerly.
- - - - - - - -
The rattling of orbit entry shook the Aurora softly, but John held her steady on her course down toward the surface. The clouds met him at high altitude, thin and sparse in the arid environment of the mining world. As soon as the Wanderer cleared them, John got his first glimpse of the sprawling industry below.
Smog rose from factory after factory as heavy machinery worked hour after hour to process ore and raw materials into products to be sold throughout the Empire. In the distance, past the kilometers-high towers and smokestacks, cracks and scars in the earth stretched deep into the crust of New Pittsburgh as ore was pulled from the ground with brute force that shattered planets. It wasn't much in the way of a looker, John thought as he slowed the Wanderer's descent, but it certainly got the job done.
As the Aurora hurried to meet the smokestacks, John slowly leveled the starship out until she was flying almost level, diving slowly as the Wanderer's onboard navigational computer pointed toward Hangar 97. Rounding a large office building, John finally got visual on the tall star-port that was the hub of most off-world traffic. Hangar 97 lay before him, the Wanderer's HUD putting a small marker above the giant metal doors that led into the bay.
Slowing, John kicked in the Aurora's VTOL function, and felt the ship's auxiliary helicopter-like blades mounted inside of the outer frame of the Wanderer spool to life, their whir barely audible above the hum of the starship's systems and the roar of passing atmospheric vehicles. John waited until they were fully online before nosing the ship slightly forward, letting the craft approach the entrance, which slid open before him as sensors detected his arrival.
Carefully, the Wanderer maneuvered inside the tight space of the hangar while the HUD's altitude indicator changed into a measure of the distance between the floor plating and the landing gear that had automatically deployed from underneath the Aurora, moving and locking into position with a loud mechanical whine. One meter at a time, John let the Wanderer settle before finally the distance hit zero. The ship jolted as she made contact with the floor before resting against the hangar deck, and John began to turn the craft off.
As soon as the main engines powered down and the ship's computer began to shut down, John got out of his seat, sliding between it and the canopy window, and paced back to the cramped living quarters of the Wanderer. Hitting a release on his suit, the EVA suit disengaged around John and he began to remove it piece by piece before replacing high-tech protection with a olive green tee-shirt stamped with the word "NAVY" in gold and a pair of black utility pants. John himself was tall, just over six feet, with dark brown hair and chestnut eyes to match. Sliding his MobiGlas onto his wrist, John patted his hand against the inner hull of the Wanderer before putting it against the door lock. The mechanism hissed as the ship depressurized and the door slid open, a gust of fresh air blowing through the Aurora like a storm.
Climbing down the deployed ladder, John took some tentative steps on the deck before putting his hands in his pockets and grinned broadly. It was good to be planet-side once again.
- - - - - - - -
Managing paperwork was the least fun part of being a private pilot, though it wasn't like that had been too much better back in the Navy. Port Authority had clamped down on cargo since smuggling operations had gone up in the last couple of years, and one could never be too sure about what was inside every crate of cargo. The digital documents that John scrawled through on his MobiGlas holographic display was consent papers, asking for Port Authority to search through the goods that John had transported to New Pittsburgh in exchange for it being delivered to its destination. Disagreeing with this was an easy way to catch the attention of the Advocacy, and that was trouble John had no attention of attracting.
Sighing as he sat down on the less-than-comfortable bench in a break room on the same level as Hangar 97, John flipped through the last few pages of data before finally seeing that glorious "accept button", which he pressed with as much energy as a bored pilot could manage. There was a pause as the paperwork was filed through the net before the screen changed to a checkmark, text floating above it confirming that the request had gone through. John grimaced when he saw the estimated waiting time for the cargo to be unloaded and processed: Five hours.
John leaned back in the bench as he thought through his options. Five whole hours was a lot of time to have, and it would do him no good to waste it, especially since that this delivery job was a one-off. He wasn't going to get employment, or least easily, from the same corporation that he had just finished this task for. He would have to go job hunting over the Spectrum that digitally connected all devices.
Scrolling through page after page of "Wanted" ads was a bore, John thought, but at least he didn't skip them because he was under-qualified. Having Citizenship was a hell of a boon, and it basically allowed him to get just about any transport job he wanted. The question that was on John's mind was two-fold. First, the job had to be legal. The quickest way to become the enemy of a lot of people was to traipse on the wrong side of the law, and John didn't have the contacts nor the experience to survive in the cut-throat world of crime. Second, and most importantly, was the destination. John was not keen on having to make multiple jumps to get from point A to point B, and the more systems one visited, the higher the chance of getting jumped.
As he was about to turn the fifteenth page he was on, John's eye caught on a small advertisement that he had almost missed. It was an unassuming contract, simple and straight-forward: Deliver some light supplies to the frontier colony at Min. It wouldn't take too long to get the job done, maybe half a week of flight round trip at least. John minimized the screen and opened up a new one, this time a holographic display of the known galaxy. John's eyes followed the route he'd have to take from New Pittsburgh to Min, looking for something that could spell trouble. Seeing nothing of any real alarm, John reopened the job application and scrolled down to the accept page, which he quickly hit. There was a pause as it went through the Spectrum, but a minute later the screen flashed back to that familiar green checkmark.
John grinned and got up from his bench, heading for the exit of the break room. He had to negotiate more paperwork by Port Authority to pick up the goods, but as soon as he was done, he'd be ready to take off and head out for Min.
- - - - - - - -
The hours went quickly now that John had a purpose. As the brutal desert sun began to sink against the horizon, John finally returned to Hangar 97, his Aurora waiting for him patiently. A small cargo container hung underneath her, loaded with the supplies for the colony. John smiled as he took in the sight of his starship: John never got tired of seeing his craft.
Walking up to the side of the Wanderer, John waited for the starship's exterior sensors to detect him. There was a pause as his bio-signature was confirmed, and a heartbeat later the ladder deployed and the side door opened with a hiss. John clambered onto and up the ladder before ducking his head inside the Aurora.
Putting his hand on the door panel, the entrance sealed shut behind him, and with a whisper of air, pressurized the starship. John fumbled with his clothing, sliding out of his day clothes and into his bulky white EVA suit. The RSI-licensed suit had come with the Aurora, and John hadn't had the heart, or the money, to upgrade. As soon as he was dressed, John slid on his helmet over his head until it met with the neck of his suit. A click announced that it had sealed, and as the internal suit systems booted up, John made his way up to the cockpit of the Aurora, squeezing between hull and seat before finally taking the chair.
Once he was well and sorted, John buckled himself in and started the Wanderer's systems, feeling the powerful computers that managed the starship hum to life in her innermost workings. The HUD and smart-panels flashed to life, displaying the simple but iconic logo for "RSI" as the last of the start process concluded. As options scrolled across their displays, John tapped his way through the engine start protocols he had memorized ages ago.
The Aurora whined as the power generator in the center of the ship began to spool up to operational capacity. In the tail of the ship, the powerful thrusters that propelled the Wanderer through the black glowed to life, roaring as they engaged. All over the starship's hull, small micro-thrusters that maneuvered the craft through space as rudders and flaps would for a plane in atmosphere test-fired, hissing as they let out small jets of blue plasma.
Back in the cockpit, John grasped his left hand on the throttle while his other hand tapped through the smart-panels to activate the VTOL mode. John gave them a look to confirm they were working, as the safety flaps that hid them opened to reveal the helicopter blades. A few button presses more, and he connected a comm channel to Traffic Control. "This is John Andrews of the Wanderer, parked at Hanger Nine-Seven. Requesting clearance to launch, over."
"Aurora designate 'Wanderer', you are clear for departure." A different voice than the one that greeted him when John had entered the system responded. "Happy trails."
"Have a good one, Control." John said, smiling to hear a friendlier voice. Putting his hand on the joystick, John gave her a little throttle. The Wanderer shuddered softly as she slowly left the deck of the hangar. Pushing the stick slowly forward, the Aurora worked its way out as the hangar entrance slid open before her, revealing the night sky lit by pinpricks of lights stemming from a hundred fires.
As soon as she was clear, John turned off VTOL and opened the throttle. The Aurora responded like a dream, shooting forward like a missile as it screamed toward the skies. The spires of the factories, lit only by safety lights that flashed barely visibly against the red-lit smog that drifted away from them, streaked past as John let the Wanderer roar skyward. Gravity's best attempts to pull her back to the earth were futile, the ship imperceptibly shuddering as it conquered the force of nature. The sound of the winds whirling past the cockpit began to fade until there was nothing but silence.
It took some time for the Wanderer to finally clear the gravity field of New Pittsburgh proper, and even longer for her to navigate to the jump-point at the edge of the system. As the Aurora approached the edge of the wormhole, John activated the jump-drive with a single press of a button on the displays. He typed in his destination, some intermediary planet that was of no real concern to him, before returning his attention to piloting. John slowed the Aurora down as she approached the jump-point, and suddenly the universe stretched out into infinity before being supplanted by a bright blue tunnel into oblivion. The Wanderer shuddered as the wormhole bounced her about, strange energies pulling and pushing on the hull of the starship.
John checked the estimated time of arrival to the next system, which the panel displayed as about an hour. Tapping on the display, John brought up the navigation systems and began to plot in the course into the ship's auto-pilot. Once the route was plugged in, John tapped the "execute course" button on the display, before pushing the panels out of the way and unbuckling himself from his seat. It'd take twenty two and a quarter hours until the Wanderer reached the Min system, and spending that time in the cockpit would only drain John's energy and dull his senses, and neither of those were conductive to survival.
Standing up, John worked his way around the seat and to the small living compartment in the center of the ship. A small cot faced a porthole revealing the disorientating lights of the wormhole. Tapping a button on a small console adjacent to the window, the glass blackened until it was just a sheet, as did the window on the other side. The internal lights dimmed until the only light that brightened the cabin was the pinprick of light from the wall-panel and the faint blue lights of jump-space from the cockpit.
Sighing, John slowly got on the cot and nestled himself in. As he stared up at the darkened ceiling of the Wanderer, his mind drifted to what awaited him on Min and the route ahead, what dangerous he could encounter. He fell asleep soon enough, his ship continuing on as if he had never gone to bed.
- - - - - - - -
The twenty-two and a quarter hours passed quickly for two thirds of it, as John slept peacefully while the Wanderer continued on its path. By the time John woke up, there were only eight hours left. Those passed agonizingly slowly, as John read novels on his MobiGlas and looked over the ship's systems again and again. The latter was habit he had picked up back in the Navy, a form of ritualistic paranoia whenever a space-faring vessel left its port of call. A pilot was supposed to know all that ailed his craft before he went out, sure, but once you were out in the black all that mattered is a pilot's ability to monitor his ship.
The maxim, at least as John had been taught it, was to check systems every two hours if you were in a fighter, and every hour if you were in anything bigger than that. Because he had been unconscious for the past fourteen, he ran fourteen systems checks in under two hours, making sure that nothing had gone wrong. A good pilot checked not for the obvious problems, which were also more rare, but the more common and pernicious ones that tended to fly under the radar. Stress fractures on the hull from exposure to gravitational fields and the wear-and-tear from jump-space was a major one to watch for. Another was any sign that power was being lost excessively as energy flowed from power generator to ship systems. A major drain could cost a pilot their life, but a minor drain was to be expected as systems burned energy just by being on. It took skill and experience to be able to tell the difference. The tests went off without a hitch, however, and over the remaining hours John lived a very monotonous life until finally the end of the final jump approached.
The Wanderer shuddered violently as the jump-drive aboard played with the powerful energies surrounding her. John, who had buckled himself in when he had started this last jump, gripped the seat as he braced for the shock of returning to real-space.
It felt like the hand of God snatched the Aurora and gave it one good hard rattle. The ship shook like a rag-doll as the swirling blue jump-space stretched out like it was being pulled until the blue faded into black and the pinpricks of stars appeared. As the Wanderer settled, aided by the micro-thrusters self-stabilizing the vessel, John loosened his grip on the stick and gave a sigh of relief. He quickly looked over the navigation display, which read to him that the ship had arrived safe and sound in the Min system.
"Alright, then." John muttered under his breath as he tapped the nav screen and selected the small world of Min II. A second later, the HUD changed, an arrow appearing pointing in the direction of the dustball of a planet. John slowly panned the Wanderer over, lightly adjusting the stick. A thousand years ago, space travel was a complicated mix of mathematics and physics. Today, with computers a thousand thousand times more powerful than those assisting those ancient space programs resting lightly on one's arm, it was as simple as pointing the starship the way you wanted to go and hit the gas. The engines on starships, even the smallest space-worthy ones, were capable of blowing through a gravitational field fairly easily, to put it simply. There was a more complicated science behind space-flight, especially around gravitational fields, but the layman could rely on his ship's computer systems to get him through without too much hassle.
It took a fair amount of time for the Wanderer to actually hit the gravitational field of Min II. This was a frontier world, and that meant you encountered frontier people, so John studied every contact that the Aurora's sensors had picked up. Unsurprisingly, there were some wanted smugglers, a bounty hunter or twelve, and plenty of cargo ships. However, nothing had been tagged as a pirate, though John knew better than to assume that there truly were no brigands. A few thousand credits, and suddenly your ship's ID has been swapped for an entirely new one, an easy way around UEE ID tagging.
A few ships, prowling around the northern hemisphere of the planet, had no tags at all, which put John on edge, but they seemed to be preoccupied. Three of them, John thought as he saved their contacts on his HUD; two Mustangs and a Freelancer. While John didn't stop monitoring the contacts when he started entering the main bulk of traffic heading for the planet's surface, he did relax a little. There were enough bounty hunters here, all of which had clean UEE tags, and a few with Citizenship, that would make trying to attack anyone in this area a quick way to be spaced.
Once the planet filled his cockpit, John tapped the comms panel and tried to raise traffic control. Unlike New Pittsburgh, which had extensive infrastructure in orbit around the planet, there was only a single unloading station for the bigger Hull-class vessels to dock at, as well as what had to be some form of militia outpost protecting it. Whoever was running things would be planetside, which didn't mean too much other than it'd take a few moments longer for his ship to be scanned. "Min Traffic Control, this is Aurora Wanderer, requesting permission to land, over." John said clearly. There was a chance that comms could be disrupted by the planet's atmosphere, even though the desert world before him likely had a thinner one, and being misheard was a quick way to get in trouble.
The pause between John's call and the response was longer than John liked, so he slowed the engines down so he wouldn't hit atmosphere before he got clearance. Finally, the comms panel beeped to announce an incoming transmission. "Wanderer, this is Traffic Control. ID is checked, please proceed to Hangar Five A." The woman running operations had a colonist's drawl, the kind of voice you hear from someone who has left the city behind long enough to forget what's proper to sound like. John had always been partial for that kind of voice, as it had always represented to him a form of free spirit that you didn't find on the mega-cities of Terra or Earth. "Welcome to Min, Aurora."
"Thanks, Control." John replied, smiling pleasantly enough. "Have a good one, out." John slowly edged the engines forward, and streaked toward the world before him.
- - - - - - - -
An hour later, John stood on the surface of Min, staring up at the blazing sun. The world was like New Pittsburgh was back when it was just being colonized. Sand was everywhere, crags and cliffs rising in the distance like the maw of the world. This particular world had rock spires that stretched toward the skies, formed by ancient oceans that had long since evaporated. It was a hell of a world, but people believed they could make their fortune here, and John was the last person who would disagree. There was opportunity to be found out here, at the edge of civilized space.
John had never been to Min before. It just hadn't been a place his career had taken him to. There was a mystery to this world, an air of danger and adventure that enthralled John. No matter how mundane his job could be, John never let himself be anything else but amazed to walk on some alien world. It was no surprise that as soon as the unloading process had begun, John began to poke around.
The colony was as bare-bones as they came. The star-port barely poked above the tops of the buildings surrounding it, the materials and traffic necessary to mandate a taller structure not yet present. The structures that made up the colony were pre-fabs, naturally, and while they were still relatively new, the sand had etched itself into each and every wall. The entire place looked like it had been recently dug-up, in fact. All that was missing was some ancient ruin or pyramid to seal the deal.
John smiled at the people on the streets as he passed them, though he could feel their stares bore in on the Navy shirt he wore. Out this far, one could run into all sorts of people, and not all of them were as big of fans of the UEE's military as those closer to Sol. However, John was ready for any eventuality.
Unlike New Pittsburgh, which banned personal weapons on the surface, Min had no such qualms over packing heat. As such, John carried his personal firearm strapped to his hip, attached by a magnetic grip between the weapon and micro-magnets stitched into his clothes. Technically, John could holster the pistol anywhere, but where it was served him fine: It made sure John could reach it at the quick, and it made sure that anyone who wanted to pick a fight knew that he had a reply.
The pistol itself was an LH-86, a pistol from Gemini. While there was much to be said for plasma-based weaponry, a combustion-based handgun like the '86 had a lot more punch, and couldn't be deflected or absorbed by shields like energy weapons could. However, it was also loud and had a hell of a kick. In John's eyes, though, the sound did a good job of intimidating any assaulters into backing off, and the kick was manageable. You only really needed to put one into someone to put them down. Add to that a thirteen-round magazine, of which John was carrying two, one of which was already loaded into the pistol, and you had a hell of a weapon.
John ran his fingers over the weapon, to make sure it was at the ready, as he continued walking further and further out from the star-port.
- - - - - - - -
There wasn't much in the way of a "plan" in John's mind. He was merely just going to go as far as he could, and once he hit the edge of the colony, he'd turn back around. It'd give him a taste of what Min had to offer, and John always appreciated a chance to stretch his legs. As the minutes passed, the buildings became more and more industrial in nature until John was walking through a sea of warehouses, and beyond them lay the desert of Min. "End of the line." John muttered to himself, the back of his mind wondering why he hadn't brought along a water bottle.
John was about to turn back around when a very strange, and very powerful, smell filled the air. It was instantly familiar to him, and an adrenaline kick made him shudder as he instinctively went for his '86. There, in the air, was the unmistakably acrid smell of burning ozone, and the horrid scent of melted flesh.
John turned to face the nearest warehouse, where the odor seemed to be stemming from. It didn't occur to John that he might be walking into something. The only thought in his mine was that someone had been shot, and he had to get to the bottom of this. His mind was racing, running through his recent memory. He hadn't heard a shot, meaning that whoever had been shot had been lying there for some time, before John had gotten in earshot. Given how relatively quiet it had been in the area, that the act could have been committed any time ago, although the fact that the smell came from inside a warehouse did mean that the blast might have been muffled.
Crawling up to the big metal door, John peered through a small hole where the door had been punctured somehow. It wasn't much larger than a keyhole, and it was dark inside the warehouse. There didn't seem to be anything moving, from what John's limited vision could tell, but there could be almost anything waiting inside. Going through the front door did not strike John as a smart idea, so he began to slink around the side, looking for another entrance.
That entrance presented itself in the form of a heavy door, left partially unclosed. In the back of John's mind, he wondered if whoever had fired a shot had gone out this way. Going prone, John peered through the slit just large enough to accommodate his body. Like the peephole, there wasn't anything to really see... Aside from an odd shape lying against the far wall. John aimed his pistol at it, and quickly rolled under the gate.
Once he was through, John got back to his feet and slid behind cover, in case the unknown figure decided that it was, understandably, not very keen on unexpected visitors. But after a few minutes of absolute silence, John realized that he was the only living thing in this warehouse. The smell was stronger now, almost overpowering. It was hard for John to avoid gagging on it, but he swallowed his disgust down and got out from his cover.
Slowly, John. approached the form slumped against the wall, It was sitting there, absolutely motionless. As he got closer, he could begin to make out more and more of its form, but the detail was still gone. He stopped in his tracks, and tapped a small button on the side of his MobiGlas. A beam of light instantly flicked on, and suddenly John could see everything..
Lying there, abandoned, was what was once a man. He had been tall, well over six feet tall, and in his thirties of forties. There were tattoos on his face which John recognized instantly as marking allegiance to some pirate gang. The man had worn to his death rather meager clothes, ripped and torn in some kind of struggle, though they had been shoddily made to begin with, faint red and greens on both shirt and pants. The man's left arm lay useless on the floor, and his right lay clutched over a horrific wound, cradling it where he had when he died in some desperate attempt to stave off death.
John moved closer to the body, and noticed that on its right arm was a MobiGlas. A small white light was flashing on the device faintly. Tentatively, he reached out to touch it, but before he got halfway the air in front of him exploded in light. Instinctively, John jumped back as he tried to catch his bearings. A voice filled the air, halting and pained, and suddenly John understood what this was. Projected holographically by the MobiGlas was the dead man, staring out at the pilot.
"If you are seeing this, then my Glas didn't recognize you as one of my... 'friends'." The holographic man spoke, his face a twisted mix of physical pain and the reaving of betrayal. John slowly moved back to where he was, staring into the eyes of the hologram intently.
"What is this, then?" John muttered under his breath. He'd heard of this sort of 'last will and testament' thing, but he'd never been unfortunate enough to encounter it.
"My name is Trey Galet, and I am-" The hologram of Trey paused as he took a ragged breath. "-was a member of the Tiger's Claw, the best damn gang in the galaxy." John thought that the tattoos had looked vaguely familiar, but now that he had a name to put to them, he had put the two together. The Tiger's Claw was a gang that John had only heard about, but they were supposed to be extremely brutal raiders of frontier colonies. "Our leader is a man named Mercer, and he's been good to us." There was a long pause as Trey winced as the pain temporarily overwhelmed him. "But something changed."
"Changed?" John repeated under his breath. "The hell does that mean?"
"While you're watching this, my MobiGlas has been automatically downloading an encrypted file to your device." Trey said through gritted teeth. Immediately, John checked his Glas, and sure enough, a new data packet had been downloaded unto his device.
"Shit." He hissed. This development was all sorts of bad. "You just had to drag someone else into this, you pirate asshole, didn't you?" John muttered, his hand tightening around his LH-86.
"Get the packet to someone who can decrypt it. Whatever you do, don't let Mercer get a hold of it!" Trey began to shudder as the plasma did butcher's work. "We found-" With that, the video suddenly cut out, and the MobiGlas on the body of Trey flicked off like someone had yanked a power cord.
"What happened?" John asked out loud, surprised. Suddenly, a dreadful possibility came to surface in John's mind: Trey had said that the video was only playing because it didn't recognize John. That implied that if someone else were to walk in, someone that it did recognize were to stand in front of it...
Behind John's head, the sound of a plasma pistol charging whined.
- - - - - - - -
Next: John must escape from a pirate dragnet as he carries a mysterious file that holds secrets beyond his darkest fears. An adventure begins, next on Farflung Wanderer...
Monday, March 30, 2015
Welcome Back!
It's been a while. How have you been?
I admit, the reason why there hasn't been a lot of writing on this site is no one's fault other than my own. However, I intend to change, and in a big way.
Starting in May, I am beginning my first major monthly episodic story, set in the universe of Star Citizen. I hope to join you out in the 'verse in just a few days!
Daniel O'Dette
I admit, the reason why there hasn't been a lot of writing on this site is no one's fault other than my own. However, I intend to change, and in a big way.
Starting in May, I am beginning my first major monthly episodic story, set in the universe of Star Citizen. I hope to join you out in the 'verse in just a few days!
Daniel O'Dette
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Waiting for the Sun
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this months ago, and I eventually submitted it to a local writing publication. It was extremely well reviewed, and I decided that if I was to post something today, it might as well be the first thing I've ever finished.
t was not as such a long night, so much as one that didn't seem to end. Both of them sat in the same room, waiting for dawn to break. The sun, however, defied them both, leaving the poorly-lit room in the quasi-darkness it existed in. It had to come eventually, they both thought. It had to, but it didn't.
t was not as such a long night, so much as one that didn't seem to end. Both of them sat in the same room, waiting for dawn to break. The sun, however, defied them both, leaving the poorly-lit room in the quasi-darkness it existed in. It had to come eventually, they both thought. It had to, but it didn't.
The room was small, but cozy in its own sense. It certainly felt lived in, with clutter in all the corners of the room. It was also very warm, the heater below the window blasting hot air into the room with the subdued rattle of machinery. He listened to it, counting the rattles and trying to find some pattern in the chaos. He grimaced; there wasn't. She kept watching the window, waiting for the sun.
It was too quiet, he thought. He could hear her breathing softly next to him, so barely audible over the heater, but that was all. No words were being shared. There was just the soft sounds of the body and the rattle of machines. It hadn't been like this before, hours ago, but that didn't matter much anymore. Things had changed.
The sky outside turned a crimson shade slowly, heralding the arrival of something new. Neither knew what it was, but they both knew that the instant that it came, the old way would die. It was terrifying to strike out that way, but there was not a thing he or anyone else could do.
As the sun began to creep over the horizon, he gave her one last embrace as everything they had known vanished with the long night.
Welcome Aboard
My name is Daniel O'Dette, and like I said on the description to the site, I am a writer.
I've been writing for years, actually, as long as I can remember. Very few things I have finished, and I doubt that'll change with the existence of this blog, but one can only hope.
My writing style is typically realistic, though if I'm particularly bored I will range into the campy feel that one would get from an 80s action movie or a 40s television serial (don't worry, I try not to lapse into too many cliches when I do this). On average, my stories revolve around larger conflicts and being a "cog in the machine", be it a war or some other large scale event.
Inspirations for my writing range from George R. R. Martin to Tom Clancy, the latter being someone I read all throughout my late childhood and teenage years. I've started reading Martin recently, and I've been hoping to draw influence from his use of details and wheels-within-wheels.
You'll understand that I won't use this blog to share personal information; this is devoted to writing and writing-related activities, such as game mechanics for a theoretical video game (I don't know square one for game-design, but that doesn't mean I can't come up with ideas for a game I would like to play. Perhaps I could forward the ideas to someone in the industry someday).
That's about all I have to say. If you're new here, find a post and start reading. The majority of the stories are chapters in a larger novel, if you will, so it's best to start at the beginning (I will always make them in the following style: "Story Name-Chapter Number-Chapter Name". Logically, if this is a stand alone, it will be just "Story Name").
Enjoy your stay, and welcome aboard!
I've been writing for years, actually, as long as I can remember. Very few things I have finished, and I doubt that'll change with the existence of this blog, but one can only hope.
My writing style is typically realistic, though if I'm particularly bored I will range into the campy feel that one would get from an 80s action movie or a 40s television serial (don't worry, I try not to lapse into too many cliches when I do this). On average, my stories revolve around larger conflicts and being a "cog in the machine", be it a war or some other large scale event.
Inspirations for my writing range from George R. R. Martin to Tom Clancy, the latter being someone I read all throughout my late childhood and teenage years. I've started reading Martin recently, and I've been hoping to draw influence from his use of details and wheels-within-wheels.
You'll understand that I won't use this blog to share personal information; this is devoted to writing and writing-related activities, such as game mechanics for a theoretical video game (I don't know square one for game-design, but that doesn't mean I can't come up with ideas for a game I would like to play. Perhaps I could forward the ideas to someone in the industry someday).
That's about all I have to say. If you're new here, find a post and start reading. The majority of the stories are chapters in a larger novel, if you will, so it's best to start at the beginning (I will always make them in the following style: "Story Name-Chapter Number-Chapter Name". Logically, if this is a stand alone, it will be just "Story Name").
Enjoy your stay, and welcome aboard!
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