A Scout's tale

[Blue Ghost]

Aston felt his gut muscles instinctively tense up and his shoulder blade regions ache as he watched the jump travel time steadily tick down. Before him was the compressed full edge on view of the Milky Way galaxy, stretching from window edge to window edge, separated only by a silvery translucent swirling tunnel reflecting the shimmer of blue from the active lanthanum grid radiating the strange energy matrix from the ship’s hull that allowed travel among the stars.

Aston hooked his fingers together, left over right, rubbing his left knuckles with his right thumb as he scrunched his lips. He stared out at the jumpspace image, then glanced at the clock on his dash once more. Edleman’s nebulousness had earned the crew a marked tension that eased up after they entered jump, but had spiked again.

All were silent. In the last hour few words had been exchanged, with Aston briefly wondering if any of the few one word responses or simple questions spoken in the last hour would be their last. Aston felt something was going to happen. What, he didn’t know. But the image of the column of while light striking out at unprecedented distances, and vaporizing, not merely damaging, but disintegrating an entire ship, stuck in his mind.

The inner fright generated by the thought of having his existence snuffed in an instant by a power that no one understood would have to wait. The fear, the innate terror without anything in and of itself being terrorizing, was a kind of pure emotion that was beyond primal, if there was such a thing.

“Five minutes to exit.” Aston announced.

“Okay.” Was Edleman’s muted response.

Aston watched the seamless full screen image; the middle strut being replaced by process imaging which allowed a pilot to see the entire vista before him. There were minutes left, then seconds, then, “We’ve exited jump, captain.”

But Edleman didn’t respond. Instead he called up the fast-scout’s powerful sensor-scanner suite mounted in the nose of the ship. What he was actually doing Aston couldn’t see. He didn’t want to raise neither ire nor suspicion by tapping into the navigator’s console with his own. Still, a word or two from Edleman would be nice. Something like “stay on course…” or whatever, but the man was silent.

Aston resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder to try and beg a cue from the team leader. Instead he ran some checks on what was nearby. Not much. But doing so did give him an excuse to grab a feed from whatever Edleman was looking at for the sake of navigation.

A quick sweep revealed several bodies other than the lone tan planet, each varied in size but none were nearby. Further each contact was somewhere between the size of a golf ball to a mansion, each one a conglomerate of ice and rock, frozen out here for all time suspended in absolute nothingness, but none of them was the size of a worldlette—moon in non-romanticized astronomer jargon.

Further in was the system’s single star, a sizeable yet still dim glowing ball that registered as the strongest radiation source. Several more minutes, and several more returns hit the dish and other antenna in the nose. More rock, more ice. Nothing emitting heat.

And during all this time still nothing from Edleman. Aston finally risked a look back at the captain to let him know that he was still sitting in the pilot’s seat awaiting whatever it was he was supposed to do. But Edleman’s attention was riveted to his navigator’s station, the dim glow, even in normal light conditions, was reflecting off his alabaster jump suit with scout logos stitched on the left breast and shoulders. It was as if Aston wasn’t even there, or so the pilot assumed.

Aston turned back to face forward, perplexed why Edleman hadn’t even given a cursory “Yes, what is it lieutenant?”, but kept his focus like a wizard peering into a kettle with a blue boiling froth to read portents. Aston wasn’t sure whether to be anxious, angry or frightened, or whether he was just over reacting and over thinking it. Yet the image of a column of light taking out an advanced attack craft was still etched in his mind.

“Bring her up fifty-percent and maintain course.” Edleman’s breakage of the quietude jolted Aston’s consciousness.

Nevertheless, Aston slowly throttled up the engines, and the deep yet strangely high-tone engine noise raised in pitched. Aston stared at the ship’s relative speed to the planet. Before there were no values as the returns from the world hadn’t reached the ship, but soon there was a steady zero, and then moments later those numbers shot up. More moments yet, and the meter showed a full four-gee acceleration at half throttle.

The world gradually grew in size with each few minutes that passed. Aston kept shifting his sight between the planet, his instruments, and the readout on his screen as he felt his back pressed into the seat’s thick foam cushion. The accelerometer blurred past twenty, thirty, then forty, and finally fifty meters per second and some change. The relative-thrust vector shot skyward. After ten minutes the relative velocity was in excess of thirty-five thousand meters per second. The Pukharra vibrated with power shaking every bit of loose fitting plastic on board the ship.

“Cut thrust.” Edleman’s voice was edged.

Aston pulled back on the throttle, and the engines resumed their usual quiet low background hum, but unlike atmospheric travel there was no drag, and the planet continued to swell as the Pukharra continued to race toward it.

The threat warning indicator sounded throughout the bridge. “Something’s locked onto us.” Aston quickly stated the obvious, and then worked the tactical panel to get a vector. He was astounded as to just how fast his ship was moving, but his jaw practically dropped when he saw another contact closing on them from port-stern.

“Standby to reverse thrust.”

Aston wanted to question the order but dared not to. Still, he had a nervous appetite for knowledge that needed to be quenched, “Aye, sir. Should I prepare for re-entry?”

But Edleman didn’t reply, and Aston immediately kicked himself for opening his mouth.

“Engineer, I may need you in the turret.” Edleman’s words again caught Aston off guard as he reminded himself that he wasn’t the only crewman on board but didn’t know that the Vargr was also a qualified gunner. Aston couldn’t help but think that the flight needed one more crewman for either the guns or the ship’s engines.

“Rotate.”

Aston worked the yoke in a neutral position to flip the ship and the roll it “upright” so it had the same orientation as before, only with the vessel’s stern heading the direction of travel.

“I’m in the turret, captain.” Vash’s voice came over the intercom.

Aston saw the double barrel laser turret come to life on his dash along with an unnecessary window showing the gunner’s view. Information overload was an ancient old phenomenon, and it seemed that some engineering traditions carried over, even for thousands of years. Aston considered shutting off the feed, but decided against it. He didn’t know why, but it might be something he would need to access for whatever reason.

“Retro-burn. Full power.”

Aston slowly throttled up the engines, and felt his body sink back into the reinforced foam rubber cushioning of his pilot’s chair. The Pukharra violently shuddered with her thrusters putting the structural integrity of the vessel under sheer agony. Aston had flown many scouts, many fast ships, even flew a couple of Rampart interceptors, but none of them had responded like this Pukharra.

“Bring us back, nose first. Stand by for re-entry.”

Again, Aston obeyed without question. He was tempted to reply with a statement that would confirm the order, but he didn’t want to add stress to a developing situation. Aston took a moment to glance at the fire control and his own navigational feed. The contact was still closing.

Aston was burning to ask Edleman why he didn’t want the ship to go in under powered flight, and instead risk a maneuver that was as old as spaceflight itself. But a combination of his own professionalism and intimidation from the whole situation kept his lips zipped up.

Aston brought the ship back to its natural orientation, then nosed her up for her injection angle. That’s when the first column of bright white light suddenly appeared off to port, lighting up the whole interior of the bridge like one long continuous flash of lightening.

The Pukharra’s perpetual fall now drew here into the planet’s atmosphere. A red glow around the ship’s perimeter grew in size and intensity—her nose once a dull orange and strengthening yellow, was now white hot with temperatures that would incinerate most materials.

Aston felt himself getting crushed into his pilot’s chair, like a giant invisible hand were grinding him downward towards the ship’s bridge deck. He let the autopilot take over, gripped the arm rests and watched the relative speed skyrocket as the ship’s distance-to world now read as “RELATIVE ALTITUDE”.

 

[Blue Ghost]

The uncounted millions of molecules striking the hull in excess of mach thirty-five smoothed the ride. The rumble of the Pukharra’s engines died for the moment, only to be given new life in the atmosphere of some far off world.

The bright yellow orange plasma dimmed and eventually died as the fast-scout slowed to mere hypersonic speed. Still way too fast for any effective atmospheric maneuvering, or so Aston assumed. He had no idea what was happening nor what was going on. Some unidentified contact was closing from astern, and the last thing he had counted on was an old fashioned de-orbit for a free fall re-entry. Combined with the plasma leaving a trail of superheated and hyper charged atmospheric molecules, it was like putting a big bull’s eye target over the ship.

Another column of white light pulsated mere feet from the windscreen, again lighting up the interior with a blindingly brilliant white luminescence. Aston squinted to regain some semblance of vision, shook his head, grabbed the control yoke and turned off the auto pilot in time to see several more contacts closing with the fast-scout from head on.




Inside Banshee 225 Commander Ebersole dialed through his load out until the MT89 appeared in his head. The MT89 transformed the Banshee from a standard long range anti-shipping brat into an old fashioned “torpedo-bomber”. The MT89 wasn’t the big huge firework of the tactical nuke carried on long anti-shipping patrols, notably against hard targets like a Zho, but was faster travelling at relativistic speeds and more refined confining its damage to a relatively smaller area—unlike tac-nukes, the torp could focus its energy on a single spot rather than trying to vaporize everything in a magnificent irradiated fireball. And given the battle space, unleashing a tac-nuke, even with “big sky” theory in the works, was a hazardous roll of the dice.

Ebersole noted the IISS grunt ploughing through the air, slowing, but regaining some of her lost speed through re-entry, and cranking up her velocity with a six-gee accel.

Ebersole’s four-ship formation was flanked by two other four-ship flights, and as suspected the bogey had taken the bait and gone for the Pukharra, or whatever it was called. Compared to the sleek dart like configuration that was the Banshee, the fast-scout looked like a guppy with wings—truly a fish out of water.

“Contact, bearing triple-oh, z-plus one-fiver.” Brands was more sedate, his tone cool, dripping with cold vengeance.

“Triple-oh, z-plus one—five.” Ebersole repeated, and switched on his payload’s electronic brains for guidance rather than relying on the Banshee’s own sensor-scan suite.

Whatever it was, it was bright, white, and nothing more. It could move like nothing Ebersole nor anyone else had ever seen, and could turn on a dime as well as vaporize with a single shot. Chasing the fast-scout gave it something to do, but it wouldn’t be long before it realized it had been had.

“Coming up on him.” Lieutenant Mathew Walters, a Soli by blood but pure Imperial when it came to flying for the navy, was all business as he let his flight go high-low as if intercepting another flight of fighters. Given how this thing moved, it was a prudent decision.

“Vectoring zero-one-three.” Was lieutenant Jaque Delacroix. His parent were political dissidents from the Swordys who didn’t hold with the “independence at any cost” dogma and doctrine that pervaded most aspects of the hyper-ego patriarchal society. He never felt the pride of lineage of some ancient maritime marauder from a world two years distant from where they were, and so signed up for the IN.

More white columns of vaporizing radiation lanced out at the fast-scout all the while the numbers showing its distant from Saber flight, it’s altitude, and speed whizzed by at blinding speed.

Both Banshee and torpedo’s computer agreed that there was enough data for a solution, and beeped to let everyone on board know it.

“Weapon’s free.” Ebersole flatly stated, and before he ended the annunciation of the “e” in “free”, he had flipped back the trigger guard and squeezed.

The torpedo was a combination of high tech marvel with the old fashioned kick of a bullet, leaving a visible trail of faint white light as it shot away at half the speed of light. To Ebersole it was nearly instantaneous as the torpedo found its mark and flashed a brilliant strobe of white upon detonation.

“It’s still flying.” Brand reported. “But it’s slowing.”

Several more torpedoes turned the passive blue nitrogen skies with high altitude winds into a mosaic of white stripes against a pale blue with white flashes.



Aston’s eyes were as wide as they would go as he saw a four ship formation close with his ship and wrap the formation from top to bottom, left to right, around the fast scout and imperceptible speeds. The turbulence of four Banshee attack craft jostled the fast scout as she cut through the swirls of atmosphere.

“Bring us around! Vash, Engage that target!”

Aston stood the fast stound on its wing and pulled back on the yoke. The ship groaned and cried in protest as her internal artificial gravity tried to compensate for the added load on her superstructure.

Aston righted the ship again, and heard the twin snap of the ship’s single double barrel laser turret slice into the blue at a target that was beyond visual range. Aston didn’t think of it right then and there, but four Imperial attack craft, and possibly eight other for a total of twelve according to the latest contact readout, probably would not need the relatively weak addition of fire power from a high intensity ship’s laser.

Nevertheless, Vash was in the turret and letting the weapon voraciously consume the powerplant’s output for all its worth with a continued sustained machinegun like volley of pulsed light focused on a single spot.

Aston could see the contact. A white ball of light, or at least it appeared. The white had to be some kind of energy field, because it was opaque in nature, but was fading. Was Vash having an effect? Aston didn’t know, but it didn’t seem likely.

Aston stayed on the contact, just within effective range, his left hand carefully nursing the throttle to keep pace with whatever it was. On the image feed on his dash he could see high-energy detonations flash on its surface, eating away at what Aston was now convinced was a shield of some kind. He had heard of black globes carried by big navy ships. But what was this? A white globe? Probably not, but he didn’t know what else to call it.

The thing lashed out in defiance. Off to his right he saw the outline of a Banshee glow white with the contact’s all purpose kill-all white beam connect with it, only to leave nothing but a fading pale white ghostly outline.

The contact’s hill, underneath the energy shield, was oval like, flat, seemed to have a blunted point at its foreward section, and four huge exhausts aft that seem to not only give it thrust but also provide energy for its defense field.

The sky became a tangle of white streaks and long curved arcs miles in diameter as the contact was no longer trying to run, but was now in a full blown furball with the Emperor’s finest.



Ebersole’s flight had used their torpedoes. Going back to re-arm was suicide considering what this thing was capable of.

The thing lashed out again, taking down one of Ebersole’s, this time the number four craft, hull number two-two-nine flown by Jake Paxton and his three crew—transformed into disassociated white glowing particles and now gone in a wink of an eye.

Ebersole triggered several micro-missiles, each designed to punch a whole in something as potent as a Zhodani or Vargr built interceptor. He doubted whether they would have any effect on this thing, but he was out of options, and the boys who gamed out this scenario weeks ago had underestimated the toughness of this thing.

It lashed out again, and this time it was Lieutenant Kyle Allen and his crew who were sent into oblivion. Ebersole fired off the rest of his micro-missiles, each darting away creating a swarm of miniature hyper-velocity smoke trails seemingly like the tentacles of an angry sea-creature, or the twisted threads of a cable reaching for some unknown thing that could only be seen with electronics.

He saw the missiles impact in a series of explosions, each one capable of rendering a fighter incapacitated or effectively dead by slicing into its hull. But still it flew. The rest of the flight did likewise, taking pot shots where they could, and all that resulted was the loss of two more Banshees sent to the high-energy netherworld.


Aston took the initiative and throttled up the engines to close with the contact, which was now bleeding a trail of white plasma. On his screen he could see two of the ship’s exhausts struggling to maintain a continued output. They were sputtering, flickering, as if something had taxed the strange alien engineering beyond its limits.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aston rammed the throttles full forward, and felt the fast-scout thunder forward through blue and over a thin white layer of transparent clouds. What had been a white ball of light was now clearly a ship with some kind of design just like every other civilization that reached for the stars. It was no longer a mysterious alien glowing white-mass that could reach out and deliver instant death with the touch of its single weapon that seemed to have no limits to it. It had lost whatever god-like quality it had had, and had been brought down to Imperial fighting standards.

Aston noted that Edleman was silent, but didn’t bother to ask if what he was doing was okay or not. If Edleman objected, Aston was sure he would hear about it.

Vash stopped firing for the moment, but once the ship was visible to the naked eye, hull imperfections seen through a fading white-energy shield, flickering exhausts struggle to stay alit and all, Vash opened up with the last of the dedicated energy reserves.

The twin pulsed lasers connected with the weakened opaque shield sending energy feedback and shockwaves over it’s cocoon like shape to touch the manta formed hull underneath. This seemed to tax the ship even more, and now all four of her ports were flickering, as if fighting to maintain her shield at all costs.

And as Aston had guessed, the thing was not returning fire. Not only that, but it was spiraling down. Off to his right and left Aston could see the remaining attack craft flanking him in a loose formation, unleashing whatever ordinance they had left, including one Banshee which had a gun pod slung under its hull, unleashing a stream of hyper-velocity canon shells, and stitching a series of holes along the alien’s upper hull.

The rest of the Banshees fired off AA ordinance, then followed up with a torrent of crimson red laser fire, again pulsing from their nose guns much like the lasers in Vash’s turret.

At that point the alien simply couldn’t take it any more. Her ports died, as did her shield, and she plummeted from the air, tumbling out of control.

Aston could hear shouts of “Take it down!” and “Burn him!” yelled and screamed by the remaining pilots who had let their pilot’s reserve go to be replaced by a warriors’ vengeance hell bent on destroying that which had cost them so many lives.

One flash of white light, like an explosion, flashed from underneath the aliens hull plates. Then a series of white flashes, as if the ship were being torn asunder by some incredible energy that was like an explosion, yet radically different.

Then the craft erupted in a white ball of light, as if it had somehow regained its former glory, but then was suddenly betrayed as it glowed white, accenting its outline like so many of its victims, only to fade from time and space leaving only its phantom image before disappearing entirely from this existence.

That’s when Aston noted that he was breathing hard. What for he couldn’t say, but he could feel his pulse racing and the sweat on his face and over his body covering his skin in a slick ultra-thin layer of moisture.

“Thanks for the assist, guys. We’re RTB.”

Aston heard the flight commander’s voice, then heard Edleman give him an order to follow them. Some unknown amount of time passed for Aston before the image of a large sky borne carrier appeared as a dot in front of him. It grew in size to reveal a flat top with a predominantly triangular form with the pointing end at the front or bow of the ship, and many landing pads dotting her flight deck.

The Banshee’s took to the deck, while Aston and Edleman were directed to hook up after both carrier and flight had recovered in orbit.

It wasn’t until the fast-scout had docked with the carrier that Aston sat back in his pilot’s chair and felt his muscles relax.

He would read the after action report some time later. The contact, bogey or bandit, at that time had not been identified. No one even knew what the beings (if any) who flew her looked like. What was known was that she was a hostile intruder. A misunderstanding? Doubtful. More like the crew of the ship, or perhaps the ship itself, knew it had superior capability, and wanted to throw its weight around for whatever reason.

Not every alien was misunderstood. Not every creature was a friend in waiting. Not every mystery in space was just some benign phenomena needing to be studied. Sometimes the unknown was unfriendly. Not always, but sometimes.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Aston and the Argonauts

The air toiled with the park’s trees next to Richard Aston’s high school. Wispy clouds moved at seemingly lazy speeds in the late afternoon sun, while top fringe leaves high atop the tallest branches ruffled in the light wind. An occasional air raft whizzed by adding its whir to the soft symphony of birds staking out territory and enjoying the breeze. The flapping of the Imperial flag was the final gentle ambient that lured an awaiting eighteen year old Richard Aston into a late afternoon slumber. From a scientific point of view he had had a heavy lunch, and his digestive track demanded life giving blood to break down the delicious nutrients to build and fuel his body. The cumulative effect was to put consciousness in a secondary priority slot, as if food and sleep were far more important than looking at cheerleaders being driven home.

Graduation was only several weeks away, and the recruiter had made a special trip from the city a half hour north to the relatively clean suburbs of one of the major hubs on the North American west coast. There were several candidates ahead of Aston, and each interview took anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. And, as luck would have it, Aston was at the bottom of the list. It seemed to be his bane for all things; being called for his driver’s license, waiting to see a doctor, an afterschool job interview, whatever it was, he was last.

Janitorial staff, a few cleaning bots, and the front office personnel other than the handful of other candidates were the only company left. Aston sat down on the grass outside the school’s front entrance, and leaned against the flagpole. He espied the odd cleaning bot scooping up discorded homework papers and food wrappers, then a lark or some other local bird, landed, peck at a wrapper with its beak, considered Aston with its peripheral vision, then took back to the air for whatever reason.

Sitting on the grass with his back up against the flag, Aston looked down to see the occasional ant crawling onto his shoe as he continued to fight the urge to nap. But the muted voices coming from the window were like another disharmonious symphony among a silent cacophony of ambient sounds. Sleep? No. A five minute nap? That was reasonable….



Aston stood on the decks of a trireme donned in a peasant’s short sleeve tunic knitted of wool that ended at mid thigh to cover a loin cloth, while on his feet were wrapped open air sandals that braced his ankles. He stood amid ships holding onto the central mast to see two massive cliffs opposing one another like faces of giants, otherwise known as The Clashing Rocks.

“Castor, bring me that dove.” Aston ordered, his lips parted to bare his teeth in worry as he tried to make out the nose, chin, eyebrows and other features that seemed to be both natural and god-like on the two cliff faces looking at one another.

Castor, one of a pair, hefted himself from his oar station, and moved aft to take a cage offered to him by his brother Pollux. Within was a single white dove, occasionally cooing, it flapped its wings in excitement as Castor grabbed the top of the primitive wood and iron cage, then moved forward, considering for a moment whether the animal new its fate or not.

Aston heard Castor’s feet slapping the deck as he came forward to the mast amidships, and turned to grab the cage. “Orpheus!” Aston called, “Bring your lyre and come forward.”

Orpheus was in his prime. Mid thirties he was a master of both javelin and song. He had etched his way into many a king’s heart as well as their people throughout the Agean and beyond.

The slow gentle beat of the drummer kept the rowers rhythm, and the gentle lapping of calm water against the vessels sleek wooden hull was one of few sounds in an eerily quiet straight.

“Jason, listen.” Castor warned.

Aston turned to Castor with a furled brow. Jason? He then looked back at the cliffs and focused his attention on any sound beyond the drums and the oars dipping into the sea water and pulling the trireme forward. “I hear nothing.”

“Not even an animal. No bird, no fish jumping from the water.” Orpheus noted as he stepped forward with his instrument and stood next to Aston. “Jason, the gods are precocious. It is their way of toying with our lives to fight their battles.”

Aston brought his hand to his chin to consider the moment, and was surprised to feel the smooth facial hair he had grown since he was a child rearing goats and working the olive presses. Goats? Olive press? He recalled that olive oil was a valuable commodity in the Agean, and stroked his bearded chin as he recalled the times as a boy when he would hang off the lever to press olives. Again, he was amazed at the softness of his own facial hair, like the gentle pelt of a wild animal. It didn’t feel like the rough bristle of a face shaven that morning.

Aston tried to shake his head, what for he did not know, “Orpheus, we must then appease them. Go forward and play a song for Zeus and all who make their home on Olympus. But know this, you play for all our lives.”

“As you say, Jason.” Orpheus moved forward to the prow just behind the bowsprit, cradled his instrument, and strummed the first gentle chords of a song.

Aston turned back to Castor, “Castor, my father’s goblet, and my wine skin. Hurry.”

“But Jason, the dove…”

“Do as I say. Quick now, while Zeus, Hera and the rest listen to Orpheus.”

Aston and his crew listened to Orpheus’s gentle song about maidens in the field tending flocks of sheep and goats, and how they must guard their flocks and the treasure of their families, lest they be swayed by honeyed words of heroes from afar. Orpheus’s voice was soothing, yet its echo among the two cliff faces did not ease the brow of Jason’s crew, as many looked up, expecting something—what, they did not know.

Aston’s shoulders also tensed as he too eyed the rim of the cliffs. An army of archers? Cyclops or titans with boulders? Perhaps Zeus himself would darken the skies and strike from afar.

Again Castor returned with a golden chalice in one hand, and a wine skin in the other. Aston took the goblet, “Pour me some.”

Castor did as commanded, until the cup was nearly full. “Enough.” Aston ordered, then pulled the cup away to hold it aloft as he stared up at the sky. “For you, Zeus. Conqueror of all gods.” Aston moved to the edge of the deck, and carefully poured the wine into the ocean, as if pouring it from his cup and into that of another’s.

Castor moved up next to Aston, “Jason, will not that anger Zeus.” Then in a hushed whisper, “The seas are Poseidon’s domain!”

Aston ignore him, and instead brought up the cage in his other hand, eyed the white feathered bird within, then carefully opened the cage to grab the dove. Castor took the cage and Aston held the dove in both hands, the shadow of the southern cliff half shrouded the Argo as she continued to ply the waters under the power of Jason’s heroic crew.

Aston then threw the bird forward. It instinctively flapped its wings and took to the air, ascending into the sun’s image and vanishing in the glare.

There was a rumble. Aston turned his head aft to the drummer, Argus. “Battle speed!”

 

[Blue Ghost]

Argus’s tempo picked up to a steady beat, and the Argonauts sank their oars into the water, and pulled for their lives. The placid waters of the straight then vibrated. As if some great force were shaking the very earth and translating that to the sea.

“Row men! Row for your lives! Orpheus, keep singing!”

There was a yawn, as if a giant made of granite had opened its mouth, and the grating of stone grinding against stone as a low hollow echoe filled the straight. All knew was a death knell that sent fear through every man that had sword to take to the sea with Aston in his quest, but each continued to row in unison regardless of the danger.

The Argo was more than three quarters of the way through. Aston had done his best to appease the gods, but to what end? Orpheus was right, they were precocious and perhaps just uncaring, callous, if not just plain sadistic to toy with men’s lives and those of their families and loved ones.

“Don’t stop!” Aston urged.

“Jason! Look! Another ship, she swims in our wake!”

Aston looked to see what Castor was talking about, and sure enough another vessel. He could see her cresting the cliff face astern of the Argo. With sail unfurled, was trying to make a run for it by following in the Argo’s wake.

“She’ll never make it.” Aston swore bitterly under his breath. He grabbed a torch from one of the iron sconces shrouding the mast, and was about to wave her off in a vain effort to signal her to turn about.

“Jason, you’ll anger the gods!” Castor quietly berated. “You’ve given them wine and song to spare us, but you cannot deny them this prize! They’ll wreak vengeance on us if you warn them off!”

Aston looked him squarely in the eye, “Man an oar, or be silent!” Aston held the torch to the ship’s hearth, ran astern, and tried to wave off the vessel.

A large portly man with a ring of silver hair dressed only in a loin cloth, climbed up the base to the deck where Aston stood. “The waters seem calm enough, Jason. Maybe the gods favor us after all.” Polyandes’ tone was cautious, hopeful, and still edged with fright.

Aston looked at him with a furled brow. Again, Jason? He looked around at the towering cliffs, and grabbed his shirt to feel the material, as if he were about to snap out of a stupor, then stared at Polyandes standing next to him looking out at the straight.

Aston eyed the other vessel, still trying to wave it off. It was possibly Greek in origin, though the colors adorning the rim of her hull might speak of Persian or Egyptian origins. Either way her sail dangled in the still air, and her rowers pulled like madmen, trying to speed the single deck vessel at battle speed through the straights to make use of the Argo’s offering to the gods.

The rumble only increased in volume, as if giant undersea mountains were grinding against one another in some kind of contest of strength. Loose boulders and pockets of scree loosened and slid down the slope of the cliffs. It was only the beginning, but the Argo was passing the ends of the cliffs to open seas beyond.

The very ground seemed to rumble with anger, as if the Titans of old were stirring under the Earth. The first boulder merely fell from a precarious perch. The second, third, fourth and then a whole avalanche followed as the cliffs themselves swayed and oscillated back and forth, shedding earth and stone in a deadly avalanche. Large stones and boulders sent up huge plumes of white frothed sea water until the first one struck just behind the Argo as her aft passed the plane of the clashing rocks. But the vessel behind the Argo—Aston looked. More boulders and stones. One struck the deck of the pursuing ship, splintering its decks. More rocks and boulders, this time cracking its keel as more wood was smashed by stone shaken by the gods. The carnage was unbearable as sailors from a far off unknown land put their arms and hands up in a vain effort to protect them from several hundred tons of cliff rock raining down on them and their ship.

The clashing rocks then closed behind the Argo as she exited the straight, and all sight and sound of the stricken vessel and its crew were muted by open sea splashing against the Argo's hull accompanied by the sound of gulls cawing and flying above.

Aston bitterly turned forward, “Orpheus! We’re through.” The musician ceased, uncradled his lyre, looked aft to see the Clashing Rocks forming a single cliff facing both the Argo and late afternoon sun.


“Henderson!” Aston was jolted awake, his eyes suddenly wide and filled with the visage of grass, trees, brick school building, and a scattering of houses and apartments in the distance, again all accented by birds chirping and wind rustling the leaves. But Henderson? Richard’s last name wasn’t Henderson. Nor was it Orpheus.

He inhaled and sighed as Ted Henderson got up from his spot on the grass, grabbed his book bag, and went in to talk to the recruiter. Again, it wasn’t Aston’s turn. A few more minutes. He was given a reprieve.

 

[Blue Ghost]

The storm tossed the trireme. Large waves swamped her shallow water line as half the crew scooped up Poseidon’s brine with buckets and tossed it back to the wrathful god’s domain.

The skies darkened with greying clouds, and a looming baritone voice called out to the Argo’s master, “Jaaaay-sonnn. Why have you angered me thus? Jaaaay-sonnnn! We spared you because you delighted us with song, wine and dove, but then …”

The first sprinkle of a coming storm hit Aston’s face and the backs of his rowers, as Aston looked around to try and see where the all encompassing voice was coming from. It seemed to have no origin, and yet was everywhere like the storm filled air.

“Jaaaay-sonnn! You tried to save another ship from our hungry clutches! You tried to deny us sacrifice! You shall pay!”

The wind howled and tore the fabric of the sail as the decks were sopped with more sea water. Aston stood there, angry and helpless against a wrath filled god of the sea.

“I gave Zeus a libation of my families best vintage!” Aston shouted against the storm, “You, ruler of the sea! Zeus is your king! If you stir with anger, then confront him! Or are you a coward that you must toy with those he has chosen?!”

But Poseidon did not reply with word, only to send two waves that dwarfed the trireme. Polides and Castor both held onto the Argo’s large pole like tiller, and adeptly steered the Argo like a water bird to surf the first wave, but the trireme could only spear the second, her sunken ram thrusting like a spear into the wall of water helped speed the Argo through, keeping the flooding to a minimum.

Aston grabbed the mast and it’s bracing with both hands, and closed his eyes as he felt both his body and ship barrel through the frothed wave.

“Poseidon!” Aston shouted, “I curse you! Zeus is your king, and you shall pay for trying to smite us!”

An arc of lightening stretched across the clouds, lighting sea and distant island with a continued strobe of pale blue-white light. A break in the clouds let in a stream of golden sun that seemed to push back the billowing edges of the stormy roof. The seas abated, and in the midst of this newly formed patch of sun formed a rainbow. The dark gray clouds continued to atrophy into collections of gray and white. Behind them Aston could see an ethereal giant whose image was that of a man in his forties, waving a large hand over sky and sea that seemed to calm the wind. Aston, dripping wet from head to sandal, watched the ghostly giant continue to calm the wind, and then its transparent form faded.

An intense golden shaft of light bathed the Argo and its crew. Castor and Polides shielded their eyes as best as they could, all the while the rest of the crew kept rowing and bailing water from the Trireme’s hull. Aston continued to stand amidships, still clutching the mast, but this time only with his left hand.

He dared to look into the sky, and the rainbow which only seemed to be a phantom of nature, glittered with a golden and silver shimmer. A woman dressed much like the Olympians, wrapped in a fine white gold trimmed cloth that equally shimmered with the light piercing the rainbow, glided down the translucent ribbon of heavenly colors towards Aston and the Argo. A massive blinding explosion of light that seemed to last forever erupted on the deck mere feet in front of Aston. The rowers forward of the mast stopped to hold up their arms and hands to shield their eyes, and Polides himself stopped drumming for as long as the light would last.

But Aston merely stood there, mesmerized by the brilliant light. It faded to reveal the wooden deck and the same unearthly beautiful woman hovering mere inches above the Argo’s wooden planking. Her features were perfect and unblemished; perfect symmetry with eyes, nose and cheeks in the just the right proportions that would rival Aphrodite herself.

Her voice gently echoed across the sea as she spoke, “Jason. You, who would dare challenge the lord of the seas, Hera has heard you, and we on Olympus have witnessed your bravery.” Her lips tilted up in a smile as she finished her first sentence. “I have come as a messenger.”

“You?” Aston asked, still negotiating the pitch and roll of the Argo’s deck as she continued to ride relatively calmer waves. “Why not Hermes?”

“I am Iris. Hermes does Zeus’s bidding, I Hera’s. Zeus has bid I and Aeolus to calm the seas, and undo what Poseidon wrought to send you and your crew to the underworld. It is not your time, Jason. Hera has deemed it so.”

Arcs of lightening reached out in the distance to neighboring clouds, and the distant rumble of thunder rolled over the sea as well as the Argo and her crew.

“I make no apologies for him, Iris, Hera’s messenger. We have been from home for some moons now, and are unsure of where we are, or if we are nearing Colchis and the fleece.”

Iris returned to her more appealing form, “Rest assured, Jason. Your goal draws near. You have done well to challenge Poseidon, Jason. But Hera’s warns you that not all gods will heed the will of Zeus, and even if I or others come to your aid, the struggle between us and those who oppose Zeus’s will may be your end, and that of the Argo. You show courage, Jason. You amuse Zeus, and entertain Hera. But you have earned Poseidon’s wrath.”

“Jason.” Another booming voice, male, and just as ominous, but further up in the sky, “It is I, Aeolus. I have left you the easterly trade wind. It will take you to Colchis. Heed the words of Iris.”

Aston watched the ghostly image of Aeolus’s face appear in the sky as he spoke, then vanish once finished.

Castor once more left his oar and stood next to Aston, “Jason, the gods try to kill us and the reward us. We are but a game to them! Trust her not!”

Iris’s eyes went jet black, and her aura turned from gold to an unearthly black as she pointed her left finger at Castor with a booming voice that reached across the seas, “Mortal! Tempt me not!” Lightening and thunder flashed and cracked as she spoke.

“He knows not what he says, Iris. He is but a man, and I command him.” Aston asserted, unfazed by her demonstration, all the while Castor hunkered down and hid behind Aston’s ankles.

The skies cleared once more, and Iris’s former glory returned as she gazed upon Jason once more with sympathy, but also a commanding gravitas.

“We watch you, Jason.” Iris complimented. “Take care.”

The pool of light returned, seemingly a sun glowing on the deck of the Argo, blinding all in a golden white light that flared and lit crew, ship, waves and islands beyond before winking out, and leaving only Aston standing there, still holding the mast, but now mostly dry, with a dripping wet Castor laying at his feet.

“Jason! Jason!” Aston heard Pollux’s voice and looked over his shoulder. “The casks are full of sweet water and wine. And fresh bounty fills our larders! Truly the gods favor you, and we your crew!”

Aston couldn’t help but reservedly grin lacking any words to respond.

“Smith. Smith!” Aston looked to the prow…


Aston rubbed his eyes and lazily sighed as he saw Robert Smith, one of the seniors involved in the engineering club, push himself off the concrete step and walk into the school’s front offices. Another air raft whizzed by, and Aston noted two more people still in front of him. It was well after three PM, approaching four o’clock. But Aston was patient, even if there were no more cheerleaders to admired from afar. They all seemed to go for the wealthier guys with the fancy rides anyway. The cute ones were always taken, or so Aston mused as he leaned back against the pole’s base one more time.

He thought that the one aspect of good luck was that the days were getting longer as summer approached, otherwise evening and night time might be coming on as he waited to talk to the recruiter. Aston wondered what life would be like off world. He had heard about exotic places dominated by a plethora of alien beings. Places wondrous and dangerous all at once. Aston sighed once more and again leaned against the pole to close his eyes…




There it was. Hanging from a tree limb it glittered like the very metal it was named after. Revenge and prosperity for his people and family name all for the sake of an animal sacrificed by and for the gods themselves. Well, this was one prize the denizens of Mount Olympus would not reclaim.

Aston grinned greedily, then wiped the expression from his face and gritted his teeth as he approached the fleece, one hand on the hilt of his xiphos , the other holding the neck line of his black leather cuirass with brass fittings and studded leather straps dangling off his shoulders and around his waist.

Each step brought him closer to glory and his goal. It’s brilliance, its promise, drew him closer, but warily, as if curse and blessing were fighting for control of his body and being. To take it meant to avenge his father and people, but it would cost Colchis its own prosperity.

The first hiss caught his attention but didn’t register. Something here? Hissing at him? Then the second hiss made him stop altogether. From his left he could see the shadowy form of a scaly creature emerging from a cave.

Aston’s eyes went wide with shock and horror at the sight of several heads growing out of a single long muscular scaly slender stock. Each head a serpent with horns and a forked tongue that would dart out and sample the air, its temperature, and its contents.

Aston drew his sword and stood in a crouched battle-ready position, waiting for the hydra to make its move …

 

[Blue Ghost]

“Taylor!” Steve Taylor was a track star and physics genius, tall, lanky, somewhat brash, Aston wondered why the IISS recruiter would even consider him. He seemed more interested in hanging with the cute girls and popular crowd than academics. But Aston didn’t give it anymore thought. He lost track of how many more there were ahead of him, and let his head recline once more….



Aston felt one, then two, then three hydra heads snap and impact their snouts against his black circular shield with Athena’s image stenciled on its face. The force sent him sprawling backwards, giving the hydra the initiative and chance to advance and try to finish Aston.

Aston rolled off to the side, sprung to his feet and slashed with his sword, the xigthos blade hummed as it cut the air, found its mark, and sliced into the neck of one of the closest heads, spewing black venomous blood.

The bulk of the creature turned to face Aston, several more strikes, only Aston batted the first few away with a massive swing of Athena’s shield, and met the rest of the attack with a massive war cry and fore-swing with his sword…



“Aston!”

“Huh? What?” Aston quickly got up, grabbed his book bag, and scrambled up the steps an into the musky air of the school offices. Sitting at a folding table was a man in standard professional garb; blazer, tie, slacks, but also with the Imperial sunburst patch stitched on the left faux breast pocket on his blazer jacket.

“Richard Aston?” The man was fairly non-descript, maybe six foot, full hair, dark, maybe with a strand or two of gray, but otherwise nothing really notable about his person.

“Yeah.” Aston anxiously replied.

“To be honest, you’re kind of an average student, perhaps below average. But, unlike the passel of liars before you, you have no Sol-sec ties whatsoever. Kind of a rarity on this dump of a planet, but welcome all the same. You ship out on the eighth of next month, berth forty-six at the local starport fifteen minutes north of here.”

“But,” Aston stammered, “that’s before graduation.”

The man looked up at him sheepishly, “Yeah? You want to go or what?”

“Oh yeah!” Aston hastily replied.

“Alright then. Be there. Bring one piece of luggage with two days’ worth of clothing. Keep personal items to a minimum. One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Welcome aboard, recruit.”

 

[Blue Ghost]

EPILOGUE

The day before graduation, duffle bag over his shoulder, Aston made his way down the local starport, a private facility with offices and landing facilities licensed by the IISS. Dotting the tarmac were vessels from a thousand worlds and beyond. Beings Aston had only heard of walked, rode or glided through the massive causeway

He found the gate, and sat down. A few seats over a boy watched a hand held holovid, and Aston read the caption; "Jason Prelude, composed by Bernard Herrmann, conducted by Bruce Broughton and the London Symphony."

Aston heard the call for boarding. He got up, grabbed his bag, and entered the gate as the music was coming to an end.


The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Jovian Blade

Captain Richard Aston sat in the pilot’s seat of the Florian class scout watching the sleek image of a type-T patrol cruiser with the Jolly Roger stenciled on its stabilizers, emerge from a cloud of billowing orange red-trimmed fireballs courtesy a missile barrage from a task force of SDBs.

A forlorn ghostly silence gripped Aston as he watched the type-T through his vaccsuit helmet and ship’s windscreen as the pirate streamed plasma from her hull, drives and engineering spaces. The occasional blip or electronic beep from the sensors and software tracking her, seemed to anoint the visage with a clinician’s perspective to the exercise—the hunt and vanquishing of a high-space marauder.

The type-T and her crew had no options, no hope, no avenue of escape as she hung suspended in infinite black, illuminated by sun and fading firestorm explosions which now all but vanished—a ghostly glow remaining in their stead.

She had been identified as the scourge of the Spinward main, formerly the IMS Sulazhe, now dubbed “The Joker” for no apparent reason other than a pirate captain’s whim. Her registry traced to a salvage title all the way from Gushemege, where she was decommissioned after suffering severe damage from a lifetime of anti-pirate sweeps. A cruel irony that now a barrage of missiles and laser fire had rendered her all but a worthless hulk from brethren local navy.

Her battle scarred hull riddled with pock marks and black streaks radiating from impact, and burned by explosions and lasers, she slowly rotated like a wounded creature. Her sleek form now marred might have created a forlorn visage for the veteran spacer, but Aston felt no emotional attachment to her. Unlike active duty, vets and civilian fanboy personnel alike, who harbored deep attachments to pieces of equipment, for Aston she was just another absconded patrol cruiser that had fallen into the wrong hands. If she had had a legacy prior to her new captain raising the jolly roger, then it had been lost.

Another trinary flash and blaze of sparks flared from her goose neck hull section, just aft of her pilotage. The lead Dragon-class had let loose with her topside triple beam turret, and etched three scorching black slashes. Aston glanced at both the close feed on his dash and her actual form before him outside the window as he cautiously maintained formation with the flotilla.

Kyle Branigan, the young twenty-something navigator who had been assigned to Aston at the last minute, seemed more like a wide eyed teen than a well trained crewman as he fed verbal data and confirmation verbiage to Aston’s ears over the ship’s channel. Aston ignored it for the most part. The fight was over as far as he was concerned, and was glad that the pirate patrol cruiser had selected his Florian as a target of choice.

Aston didn’t know much about Kyle. Mid twenties, dark hair, not very muscular, maybe an inch under average height, he wasn’t physically impressive, just average in just about every physical trait. In spite of his constant ramble about range, relative velocity, and damage assessment, he wasn’t talkative, or at least not during the massive burning of the engines to get them to the intercept point. But he knew navigation.

Not much was needed for this op, but leaving course corrections and plotting strictly to software sometimes lead to wild paths that the program had figured through some bug or other quirk in its code. A simple hop to a local moon might suddenly take on new dimensions of some wild path because of poor data or an invalid input. Ergo another set of biological living eyes with a mind that new navigation to prevent wild course plotting was a requirement for most operations.

It was Kyle’s first combat, or so Aston thought, and the “kid” seemed awfully silent but excited when he spoke. Why, Aston didn’t know, but figured Kyle was too intimidated to open his mouth in an op like this one. Was Aston any different? He recalled his first space combat ages ago in Aslan space, and being too nervous and too dumb and ignorant to hazard an opinion or comment during the heat of battle. Fear kept the intellectual bone in check, and where space combat was a fairly clinical exercise lacking the big booms and explosions characteristic of a conventional battlefield, there was a kind of deathly etherealness that enveloped both battle and the black vacuum in which it took place.

Even now Aston was also silent, not saying a single word other than the occasional one-word command or response to Kyle to adjust the scanner or to bring up some small piece of data.

“Should I open up?” Leave it to Vash to break a deadly profound silence with an all business attitude as his voice came over the ship’s channel to Aston’s headset.

“Negative.” Aston replied to Vash who was strapped into the ball and socket turret just forward of the engineering section. “She’s crippled already.”

“Well… why’s the commodore scratching her neck like that?”

It was a good question, and Aston let out an extended “Ehh” before giving a reply; “The fleet captain is just sending them message. No reason for us to add our voice to it.”

“Understood. But tearing her another new one couldn’t hurt—at least not now.”

“Copy that, gunner. But let’s hold fire until we’re given the word.” Aston’s tone was professional and reassuring to his friend all at once—almost light hearted. Vash’s blood lust was part of who he was, and the battle had brought it to the fore. Unlike other Vargr though, Vash knew to defer to human judgment, and trusted Aston.

For Vash, Aston’s human perspective saw the space battle for what it was, an exercise detached from the physical presence of normal combat—impersonal ship-to-ship engagement was dry and clinical in small operations like this one. Again, loud explosions and equally noisy laser weapons were the thing of holovid fancy. Still, Aston knew there was a kind of anticipation of a kill that wasn’t just unique to Vargr, but to most living thing descended from predators.

Aston zoomed the dash camera onto the skull and crossbones where the Emperor’s standard once was. The image was like a poetic gesture foretelling a fate of this vessel, or perhaps another. Aston didn’t know why the thought came to him, but it did, and he could almost picture the open joules of the skull laughing at him, his ship, Vash, and the rest of the task force. Strange, but his imagination sometimes took notes at moments like this for a future novel.

The engineering section continued to vent bright purple, blue and pink plasma from several tears in her hull plates covering her engineering space and maneuver drive. Slowly tumbling as she was she had long since ceased firing. Yet she was still powered, and her aft thrusters, though still aglow, flickered and sputtered thrust in defiance in spite of the all of the fire she took from the sector navy’s task force. Hence the commodore’s reminder via the triple beam turret.

But even now her drives sputtered one last time, and seemed to shut down as the last light from her main drives slowly dimmed and finally died out.

“I think that’s all she wrote.” Aston quoted an ancient expression of which he had no clue of its origins, but it seemed fitting here. This ship was now dead. Before it was clawing onto life, clinging like an intensive care patient with a hundred tubes running into its body. But now she was finally dead.

An outlaw crew that knew its next home would be on some penal planet, and depending on what they did in the next few moments, probably for the rest of their lives.

Aston looked at her one more time, listening to the chatter between the other captains over the tactical channel, along with a challenge for the pirate type-T to stand down. The eerie calm continued. No more missile impacts, no more laser burns, no more exchange of shots, of which Aston’s Florian had been fortunately been spared. The type-T continued to hang there like a thing floating in the midst of nothingness, unsure of what it would do next.

There was a spike in her output and Aston braced himself as he gripped the throttle and attitudinal thrusters harder anticipating a final exchange of fire before the flotilla gave her a final volley and would destroy her utterly.

But the tactical chatter erupted with “She’s making a run for it!” as the type-T glowed faint blue, then stretched and flashed away to some unknown destination before anyone in the fleet could get another shot off. Damaged as she was Aston could hear both fleet captain and various law enforcement state that she was as good as dead.

 

[Blue Ghost]

“Pursue and overtake.” Aston and his crew heard the order. Not soon after the ship was fed an automatic course from the flag. Kyle took over and did his thing as his fingers danced over his console. Aston let go of the throttle and control yoke so the autopilot could do its thing. The nose jets briefly flared and the system’s sun swung into view from the left, and rose to the nine o’clock position until the nose jets on the opposite side fired and the ship corrected its rotational motions.

The ship to ship communications quickly issued orders followed by clipped responses, followed by a sporadic disappearance of each ship in the fleet, each orienting itself into a certain direction, and then stretching away into jumpspace.

“Jump course set, captain… but…”

Aston hit the pressurizing routine as he glanced through his helmet at Kyle’s vaccsuited figure. “But what?”

“The fuel consumption’s wrong, captain. It’s like we’re not going anywhere!”

Aston double checked Kyle’s figures and noted that the final destination had them exiting jump within the system. “Check your system destination and distance estimation. We’re not going far.”

“Oh.” Kyle’s muted reply spoke volumes for his skill. Everyone made mistakes. Aston watched the life support gauges return to normal and glow green instead of the verboten red signifying no or too little internal atmosphere.

Aston tore off the headset and baseball cap with the IISS logo on the brim, and threw them onto the dash before running his fingers through his hair and re-pressurizing the main spaces. He double checked the life support gauge before calling to Vash; “You can breathe again, Vash.”, then hit the intercom button again; “Vash, everyone else, you can breathe again.” Aston knocked on the dash to make sure he could hear himself making noise. Noise meant air was in the ship. No matter what the gauges said Aston believed in making sure. Trust but verify.

“Initiate jump sequence, captain?” It was Bree Hoffmeister, Vash’s first mate in the cramped SRO engineering section aft of the living area. She was the silent half of the brain that ran engineering, while Vash as the active vocal hemisphere. Truth be told Vash had been reassigned as the ship’s gunner, but was still senior to the young female engineering prodigy. That, and he was a better shot than anyone else, which is why he got turret duty in addition to being the chief engineer.

“Go ahead.” Then to Kyle, “We’re not leaving the system, but we’re still in hot pursuit. When we exit jump we’ll need to plot a course back to base as well as some evasives. Understood?”

“Understood, captain.” Kyle replied, his voice somewhat questioning.

“Just Richard. We’re not the navy.”

“Yes… ah, … sir.”

Aston ignored him as he got up from the pilot’s seat and undid the fasteners around his vaccsuit’s midsection. Once he heard the suit unlatch he stepped back into the common area and went through the complicated process of lifting off the top half before stepping out of the trouser portion.

By all rights Aston should have stayed up in the cockpit (or bridge, whatever the scout service liked to call it these days), but whether his attitude was too grim to be bothered by the mundane aspect of watching the ship transition into hyperspace with him sitting there with his arms folded, or his lack of enthusiasm for a combat mission that, to him at least, was effectively over, he didn’t know. Maybe he was coming down with a local bug. Either way his mood and thoughts were elsewhere.

Aston reached up for the latches on his helmet, and undid the safety with a control inside the helmet manipulated by his chin before taking it off entirely, and angrily sighing.

Either way he didn’t feel like sitting next to Kyle as he heard the ship’s FTL drives whine up, and then let loose with a massive transitional thrust into alternate space. Outside the tiny airlock window he glimpsed the translucent pale shimmering gray tunnel with the compressed image of the Milky Way outside the thinly veiled gray jump barrier. He stood there in his pants and shirt and with bare feet just in time to see Vash clamber down the ball and socket gunner’s chair and amble in his specially Vargr tailored vacc suit into the common area.

Vash removed his helmet to reveal his characteristic grey snout, with a wet nose, large ears and all things related to wolfs and dogs. “We might have stopped him if I had gotten a shot off.”

Aston quietly sighed, “Possibly.”

“We could have taken him down.” Vash’s tone was edged. “He wouldn’t’ve gotten away.”

Aston could see where this was going. “Vash, it wasn’t my call. You understand that, right?”

Vash was silent as he began to take off his suit. “They have a week in jump to fix whatever we did to them. What happens when we exit and we have to square off with them?”

Aston exploded, “It wasn’t my call! You got that?!”

Vash stared back at him, mouth agape, and shocked for a Vargr.

“If the fleet captain wanted us to finish ‘em off, he would’ve called us! You got that?!” Aston was on fire, just in time for both Bree and Kyle to step in and witness the two friends square off against one another.

As for Vash, his ears folded back some, but strangely enough some of the hairs on his back were partially raised. A mixed message, but Vash understood that Aston was top dog, but Aston knew that Vash had it within him to challenge his own authority to satiate some primal instinct. But Aston knew that, and really didn’t need to put Vash in his place.

Aston stared at Vash for several heartbeats, then threw down the remnants of his vacc suit onto the deck, and stormed off to his cabin.

Aston threw himself into his chair, and kicked his feet up on his desk, then rested his head in his left massaging fingers. The image of the Milky Way and jump field was normally a soothing visage, but right now it was lost on him. The combat hadn’t effected him, but the outcome had.

“Landing on new worlds. Cataloging new plants and animals. Discovering new caves and canyons. Walking on worlds made of mountainous ice…” he lazily cited the criteria of what he had hoped to be doing when he signed on for the scouts over a couple of decades ago—right after high school.

Bitter? Aston couldn’t say he was. More like heavily disappointed that it had come to this—tracking and engaging a surplus type-T. If he was angry, then it wasn’t at the sector chief for selecting him and the other scout captain simply because they were available, but at the motley band that had formed into a pirate crew, and had decided that marauding the space lanes was a good way of making a living.

Aston had wanted to be a scientist and had hoped that the scouts would help provide a makeup of sorts for his scientific deficit and curiosity. They had, but the price he paid was to get thrown together with naval types in securing the borders and vanquishing the occasional pirate ship.

Odds were the pirate had misjumped. Odds were she was out in the middle of no where between systems with no fuel left and maybe a few days left of food and water, at which point, pirates being pirates, would prey off one another to see would die last in the empty clutches of deep black interstellar space when the air ran out. Odds were. But, sometimes even the darkest of hearts could beat the odds. Or so many a holovid adventure serial told young boys and girls. Still, that was fiction, but the possibility remained, and it was the reason Aston had been given his orders. And maybe that was a real reason for his irritability.

Still, a single scout ship, and a Florian no less, was no match for a wounded type-T, and hardly the ship of choice for a blanket scan of something as huge as a jovian world. Nevertheless the twin engine ship barreled its way through a translucent tunnel to meet with something or nothing.

The type-T was sleek, fast, heavily armed, and a high performance vessel that could reach beyond orbit within minutes. But she was no destroyer, and could only take so much damage. There was nothing worse than a wounded animal, and in the airless reaches of the Imperium a heavily damaged outlaw surplus military vessel was the interstellar equivalent.

And that angered Aston.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Maybe it was because Vash was right. There was nothing Aston could do to change what had happened a few days back when they had the pirate on the ropes. Absolutely nothing. Vash had been silent for the most part during jump, occasionally offering a game of cards and giving that ever so woeful glance that canines and wolves were famous for back on Earth, all the while Kyle and Bree kept their distance when the two were in the same room. The galley had become awfully silent when Aston was in the vicinity.

Towards the end of the hop things seemed to loosen up, and the interpersonal friction Aston had generated seemed to dissipate. But tension built up again in that last twenty-four hour stretch before exiting jump space. What would they find? What would happen? The truth was no one knew, but the other truth was there was little chance, quite literally astronomically low odds anything would happen.

“Vash.” Aston finally broke his silence, “Suit up and get in the turret.”

“Expecting trouble?” Vash’s tone brightened but was also deadly serious about the probability of having to fight a violently damaged foe.

Aston subtly shook his head, “I’m pretty sure that ship’s long gone, but I don’t want to be caught off guard.”

“You got it.” Vash couldn’t help but let his tail twitch back and forth as he delved into the ship’s locker to suit up.

Aston grabbed his own vaccsuit before heading forward to see Kyle already suited up and sitting in the copilot’s seat reaching for an overhead switch.

“Captain, we’re five minutes to exit. I’ve got the turret powering up for Vash.”

“Good job.” Aston replied, not wanting to repeat his admonition of not being a military unit. In this case, they actually were a paramilitary unit, though unwillingly—all part of the service.

Aston strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, latched his helmet onto his suit, and saw the data feed on his helmet’s faceplate HUD come to life.

“Exiting now.” Kyle anxiously announced, and Aston had to admit that even though they would probably find nothing, he too was on edge.

The shimmering tunnel and Milky Way both faded to pure star studded black dominated by a massive earth toned sphere of a gas giant nearly swallowing the view outside the scout ship. Swirls of brown, red, yellow, white and blue were distant pools of mist still hundreds of miles away in spite of the all encompassing view. Aston had to admit, no matter how many times he saw one of these things, their sheer size and colorfulness still awed him.

He then checked all the screens on the dash as well as the threat warning indicators, waiting for the unexpected to show up on some monitor, but, as he guessed, there was nothing.

“We got to scan all that, sir?” Kyle’s phrase was more of a statement than a question, and Aston understood the point all too well.

Still, Aston hesitated before replying, “Well, the sooner you start, the less we’ll have to scan later on.”

A few moments passed before Kyle said anything again, “Captain, I’m just getting static. Lots of magnetism, lots of electrical storms. Huge in fact. I’ve never seen anything like that!”

Aston ignored the incredulity in Kyle’s tone. “Anything metal with a pirate flag?”

“Oh, sorry, sir.”

Again, Aston let it go. The kid was probably a navy washout before joining the local sector patrol to satiate his lust for space. The Imperial Navy wouldn’t just take anyone, but at the same time that meant that the scouts sometimes got the “hand me downs” when it came to personnel to bolster naval forces.

“Ah,” Kyle continued, “yeahhh…. Not showing anything mechanical, or nothing that fits a starship drive signature.”

“No?’ Aston was all business. “Well, we’ll make a few more sweeps, then make a run for some fuel before RTBing.”

“Ar Tee what, sir?”

“Return to base.” Aston explained before deciding to pressurize the ship. Moments later he heard the familiar hush of air molecules being forced back into the ship’s living spaces.

“You’re pressurizing the ship, sir?”

“Nothing gets by you, Kyle.” Aston meant it as a light hearted jest, but regretted it the moment he said it figuring young Kyle might take it as a personal jab. It was, but meant to be more fun than sting. No, he decided, he would not ask for Kyle to be assigned to him. A nice enough kid, but still a kid, and more of a high school graduate than a college washout. Either way, Aston didn’t think him scout material. You didn’t have to be a genius (though it helped), but you also needed some common sense.

But Kyle continued to look at Aston and the ship’s dash. Aston took off his helmet, saw Kyle still looking at him through his vacc suit helmet. “Look, we’re not going to find anything here and now. If we come up on her—a one in a million chance—then we’ll go back to battle stations. Until then, we’re going back to normal operations.” Aston hesitated still seeing puzzlement on Kyle’s face, “But, you can stay suited up if you like.” Aston added sheepishly, then; “Just make sure to recharge your life support when we’re back in port.”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

Again, not the navy, but again, Aston didn’t care at this point.

Scout ship’s had navigational scanners, just like other commercial and private vessels. They weren’t a survey ship, much less a mainline combat unit. To Aston it meant the fleet captain didn’t think the chances of a bandit trying to escape via a micro-jump were slim and none. And on this occasion he was right.

And maybe that was another reason for Aston’s temper flare-up a week back before entering jump. He had already forgotten the Fleet Captain’s name. Halave or something? Some good Vilani name that didn’t speak of a proud alien naval tradition, but someone who came from an old, slow, conservative society who really should have been packing meat or running a store instead of commanding an anti-piracy task force.

It wasn’t the name, but the attitude of the man that the name bespoke of. Aston prided himself on not having any kind of bigoted feelings, unlike so many Terrans who touted themselves as “Solomani”, or even worse the highly martial and near berserker like Swordys, who were both cohesive and scattered in their thinking all at once. Aston didn’t hate nor otherwise dislike Vilani people, but Vash was right. Plugging that pirate a few more times would have saved him and everyone else the effort of a wild goose chase.

“Truth be told I don’t want to be in this thing.” Reffering to his vaccsuit after several moments of silence with Kyle, as he continued to check the ship’s sensor suite.

“Is that regulation, captain?”

“If there’s no one around, it is.” Aston replied, seeing what Kyle was all about. Not an intelligent young man, but quick, and testing. The kind that liked to rise through the ranks by finding fault with others. Not really sociopath material, but opportunistic and mercenary in a social sort of way.

Aston chagrinned. Maybe he was reading too much into the man, but that was his first impression. Aston put his thoughts back to the scan, and pulled an old navigator’s trick of trying to extend the range of the otherwise civvie scanner suite. Tapping power into a directional scan and fooling the software that it was an emergency situation boosted the output and definition of the scan.

As expected, nothing again. Aston heard Kyle rattle off a few more figures, but ignored him. All the same he tossed a question as if it was a response; “Did you get those evasives laid in?”

“Oh, uh, sorry, sir.”

Aston didn’t say anything, but took active navigational control and put the ship on a skim route, letting the engines continued to accelerate well beyond hyper sonic before cutting them. It would still be a few days before they entered the upper ionosphere.

During that time Aston and Vash seemed to get along like before, and Aston couldn’t help but notice that Vash wagged his tail when he entered. Probably because Aston admitted to Vash that the Vargr was right, and didn’t need to explain about human hierarchy to Vash as he knew it all too well. Vargr, like their wolf counterparts, knew when to be impetuous, even if it did lead to mistakes more often than not.

Days later the huge multicolored sphere was now a massive atmosphere colored arc that reached across the view from the cockpit that was nearly flat due to its size. Aston kept the throttles at low thrust, giving the ship just enough nudge to keep from completely being slowed by the molecules striking the hull and slowing her.

Once the scout ship had settled below transonic Aston let the scoops partially open. Outside the Florian’s windscreen was a deep indigo that shared a common soft white atmospheric horizon with the multicolored ammonia and sulphurous clouds below.

Again, beautiful, and again rarely anyone but those who travelled the stars got to see such sites. This is what Aston had signed up for, and it almost seemed to make up for the battle a week back.

Almost.

The threat warning indicator beeped to life accompanied by a flashing red warning light on the dash. Someone tracking them? Here?

Aston grabbed the yoke and slammed it left while pulling back hard. Aston could hear the crew swearing as pots, pans and anything that wasn’t tied down in the galley, including the crew, went sprawling as the scout ship carved a super-speed horizontal arc across the jovian sky.

 

[Blue Ghost]

A crimson laser cut across the scout ship’s prow, missing the windscreen by mere meters. Aston felt his body jerk forward as the ship’s gravity kicked in. He reached for the ship’s intercom; “Vash! Get on the turret!”

Aston eased off on the turn seeing the ship’s stress/strain indicator peak into the red as he leveled the scout ship relative to the planet’s horizon and swept the area with scanning beams. There it was. Aston linked it to fire control, but didn’t check the class. It was either the type-T or it wasn’t.

On the plus side one beam lanced out at the ship. On the other hand it didn’t mean a whole lot other than the attacker was either new at piracy, down on his luck, both, or was grasping at straws. Another bright crimson beam, frayed by the atmosphere, flashed and cut an arc above the ship.

Aston pushed the yoke forward and crashed it left one more time. The scout ship wasn’t a fighter by any means, but at these speeds treating it like one was a must. Aston pulled back on the yoke and the scout ship arced upwards while Aston turned the yoke to the right putting the ship into a twirl as it ascended once more.

Aston shoved the throttles all the way forward to help the scout ship fight the jovian’s pull. Kyle lumbered in wearing his vacc suit, and clumsily climbed into the copilot’s seat.

That’s when the sharp electrical snap of the scout ship’s twin lasers erupted, several pulses flashing like a high tech machinegun to some target that only Vash and Aston could see via electronic eyes.

Aston put the scout ship into a level ascent, but kept the throttles full wide open. Vash cut loose with the ship’s twin laser again. Within a few moments the familiar shape of a gull winged shape four-hundred ton vessel sporting the Jolly Roger on its tail fins appeared against the near black upper ionosphere.

“That’s him.” Vash growled over the intercom.

“He’s ascending, captain!” Kyle nearly shouted.

“I got him.” Vash growled, then let loose with another stream of lethal energized subatomic particles that slashed at the pirate as it made another attempt to escape after a failed attack.

Vash was right, they had had a week in jump to fix whatever they could, and fixed it they had, or what was within their capability. Good help was hard to find, and only the worst or the most uncaring and most ruthless turned to piracy. The social mix didn’t blend with work ethics, and the even now, as the pirate made another attempt to get away, she was paying for it in spades.

Aston curled the scout ship behind her bulk, feeling the heat of her sputtering aft drives buffeting the Florian’s nose and cockpit. Just beyond the infrequent flashing and struggling glow Aston could the pirate’s one remaining turret traversing towards them. One barrel of her triple beam turret was glowing, the others a void ashen black, even through the occasional high speed faint white cloud that flashed across both ships as they continued to ascend at high mach.

Aston saw Vash work the pirate’s drive section with a voraciousness that could only come from a Vargr gunner, tearing and slashing at the pirates already scarred hull with hot metal burning beams.

Again, the pirate glowed blue.

“Not again.” Aston was bitter, and doubly bitter that he hadn’t followed his inner Vargr by listening to Vash a week back and hitting the scum bag one more time.

But just as the pirate was about to jump, she fired. A searing red beam lanced the scout ship, barely missing the starboard nacelle and cutting across her spine and into her engineering section.

Explosive decompression was only an instant, and was stopped cold by the Florian’s inner seal system of expandible foam that immediately hardened when a breach took place. Given their traverseing through atmosphere, even at these high altitutdes, Aston was surprised it worked. But even as the emergency system took hold to repair the wounded bird, the ship began to lose power.

The scout ship’s speed decreased until she reached the apex of an ascending arc, only to begin to nose down. But as she did so Aston and Kyle could see the pirate vessel literally fall apart. A combination of Vash’s fire, damage from the engagement a week back, and her own misuse was too much to bear, and the ship was rendered asunder. Wings, goose neck bridge section, chunks of her main frame, and even her drives, simply disassociated from one another until the once venerable type-T cum pirate simply fell apart—scattered amongst the jovian winds.

“I’ve got no power.” Vash was all business. No snarling, no growls, no edge to his tone, just astonishment. “Bree, what’s happening with the power?”

But there was no response from her.

“Bree. Bree? What’s going on back there?”

Aston didn’t dare leave the controls, “Kyle, get aft with Vash and find out what’s happening with Bree. Get us some power!”

Kyle got up and left the bridge with Aston trying to nurse the ship’s fading electronics. Kyle tried every dial, every switch, every touch sensitive control, but to no avail. He switched over to battery power to keep the avionics running as the scout ship’s internal lights dimmed. No big loss as there was plenty of sunlight streaming through the cockpit and cabin windows, but solving the lighting problem didn’t restore power.

If nothing else, they weren’t under fire anymore.

“Richard, it’s bad back here.” It was Vash.

“What’s happened with Bree.” Aston flatly stated, bracing himself for the worst.

“She’s still breathing, but she’s got a nasty cut on her head. I’m guessing the self sealer knocked against the ship’s bulkhead.” Vash then shifted attention; “Kyle, pull her into the common area, and get back to the cockpit. I’ll deal with this. Richard?”

“I’m still listening.” Aston replied.

“She had us dialed into combat mode. It looks like when they hit us with their last shot that there was power jumping … some short circuits.”

Just what Aston didn’t want to hear. “Tell me you’re joking. Vash, the engines have cut out. I’ve got us on battery power right now, but we can’t fly, and right now we’re gliding downwards. Soon we’ll be in free fall, and there’s no where to land.”

Vash was silent. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Do you want Kyle back there?”

“Not unless he’s a rated engineer. If he can get Bree back on her feet, then that’s the best thing he can do.”

Aston knew that Kyle was neither a medic nor engineer. He was strictly cockpit material. “Uh, negative on both. Kyle, see if you can give some smelling salts to Bree, then get back up here.”

“Yes sir!”

Aston leaned back in the chair and gathered his wits before going back to working on restoring power. He double, triple, quadrupled, quintuple checked every system.

“Power plant restored.” Came Vash.

Aston relaxed, he’d thank Vash later, and merely delighted in the stronger glow of the dash and switches before grabbing the familiar throttle control and pushing it forward. But nothing happened. Ship’s power restored and the engines weren’t responding.

“Vash.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s happened with the engines?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’ve got lights, navigational controls, computers, sensors, scanners and everything else, but no engine power.”

“What? How can that be?”

Aston half shook his head, “You’re the engineer, man. You tell me.”

“I hate to remind you, but I’m not a man.”

Aston hesitated to utter a dog joke, “Either way, we’re still up the creek until you get the engines fired up again.”

“Everything’s green back here.” Vash replied.

Aston went through a sixth check, but nothing. Power, and they were riding the air on the ship’s aerodynamics alone. “Kyle, get back up here.”

Outside the scout ship speared downwards through layers of feather white stratospheric clouds. Inside, Aston pulled back on the throttle, and went through the engine restart sequence. In the old days of jet engines ignition with an oxidizer was needed to get an engine going. But this was the era of starship engines, where hot subatomic nuclei melded with gravity-negating technology to push starships of various sizes and configurations through the inky black of space.

And no jet engine this, but a marvel of high energy engineering, a practical extension of the physic’s study that went by the same name.

Something was not connected, or had burned out. But if Vash had restored power to the primary circuitry that should have been shorted by the laser blast, then it had to be something else. It had to be a connection issue. But if it was, then that meant the laser had cut into the couplings in the wing roots.

Aston checked the ship’s damage control, but nothing was showing up on the systems’ display. Everything was green. So how come the ship’s engines were dead?

Aston checked the external pressure. From negative pressure to fractional atmosphere and increasing. Aston sighed worriedly, and went through the checklist again.

 

[Blue Ghost]

The sky was now blue. It had lost its deep dark cosmic luster, and now looked like any conventional sky of any world, save for the huge mountainous dark colored cloud formations stained red, yellow, blue and black. A veritable rainbow stained the clouds that reached into a hazy infinity. Canyons of clouds that were the size of entire worlds loomed low underneath the scout ship as it continued its nose dive.

Aston pitched the nose downward, trying to generate lift over the body, and then pulled back ever so gradually. The scout ship leveled out momentarily, buying precious moments, but the engines still wouldn’t light.

“Vash, I’m thinking there’s a connection issue somewhere. I got attitude control, but nothing more. We can see and scan, but we can’t run.”

“I know, don’t you think I know that?” Vash replied.

Kyle entered the cockpit.

“Where’s Bree? How is she?” Aston quickly asked.

“She’s on the sofa in the common area with an ice pack over her head. I think the patch blast hit her pretty hard.

Aston ignored Kyle’s assessment. Vash was in engineering, which was good enough for him. A wolf who knew circuits and power he trusted, not someone who was a new assignment. For that matter he wasn’t sure he trusted Kyle’s skill, or rather he trusted his lack of it.

“Help me go through restart procedure. Punch up that check list, and sound me off.” Aston’s tone was commanding but calm. A crisis engineer.

Kyle began with set one, and then went through preflight. Aston repeated the step and executed it, all the way to thrust. But nothing.

“Okay, let’s try again.”

Again Kyle read off each step meticulously, and each time Aston verbally repeated the step before executing it. Then something dawned on him, this planet’s pull was three times or more greater than a standard world, which meant terminal velocity, in theory, could be greater. A constant acceleration downwards that was on the order of twenty-seven meters per second every second might overcome the thickness of molecules keeping most vessels aloft.

“Again.” Aston repeated, his frustration becoming palpable. “Vash!”

“I’m working on it! But everything’s green! I can’t find anything!”

Aston angrily scrunched his lips and sighed through his nose. He looked at the relative altimeter and distance to world readout. Then correlated that with the external pressure gauge.

“One more time, from the top. Set one.”

“Set one, captain.” And Kyle went through the restart procedure again. And again speed and pressure built up, but no engines. And the clouds that loomed low in the distance were steadily creeping up.

“Captain, we’re above one atmosphere now. Pressure is rising.”

Aston didn’t reply. “Set one.”

“Set one, captain.” And after several minutes the same result.

Aston couldn’t take it anymore and got up from the controls after setting the autopilot, and stormed aft. In the SRO chamber stood Vash with several panels opened with wired guts and circuits dangling about. The ship shuddered as it speared through turbulence.

“What in the world?” Aston exclaimed, “What’re you doing?!”

“I’m trying to get us some power!” Vash shot back, “I got everything back up and running…”

“.. but the engines!” Aston began.

Vash vented his anger and frustration, “I know! For the thousandth time, I know!”

“We’ll why don’t we have any thrust?!”

Vash shook his head as he clipped his hand held scanner to one set of wires and then another, shaking his head each time.

“Why are you checking the control circuits?” Aston modulated his tone, not wanting another explosive episode.

“That pirate sliced into the aft computer banks. The computer responded by rewiring operation critical controls through the forward unaffected banks, including power, but it’s dormant for some reason, and I can’t figure out why!”

“How about bashing on it again?”

“Is that more Terran humor? I’m surprised you’re not joking about my keen sense of smell.” Vash hadn’t lost his levity, which was a good sign. To Aston it meant he was closing in on the problem.

Aston stood there like an idiot, trying to tap his own limited engineering training about system analysis.

The galley and main area lights blacked out. “Oh no, what now?”

“No, that’s good.” Vash explained, “The computer’s trying to revive control banks through unpowered circuits by sending a feed.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m using this!” Vash held up a pocket radio with a couple of wires attached to a switch that lead to the ship’s computer.

“What the heck?!”

“Don’t laugh! I’ve done it before.”

“What the heck kind of engineering is this?!”

“I said don’t laugh!”

“I’m not laughing, I’m yelling! You’re hinging our lives on a ten-credit teenager’s plaything?”

“I’m the engineer, you’re the pilot. Shut up and let me do my job! I’m tricking the AI by sending pulses through native circuits so it keeps reviving unit after unit! Now shut up and get back to the controls! This dang thing is my baby. I’ll give her the juice, you make her fly! Now get out!”

Aston was shocked and cautiously stepped back, before heading back to the cockpit. He took several steps and saw Breanna coming around with her eyes half open. “How you doing?”

She shook her head, “I’ll be okay.”

Aston stared at her. She didn’t appear to be playing the wounded flower, as so many females had in the past. Still, “The sooner you’re up and running, the sooner Vash has a second set of hands the sooner our chances of not dying increase.”

“Not dying?”

“Engines are out, and we’re diving into the planet’s atmosphere.”

“Planet’s atmosphere? But we’re orbiting a gas giant.”

“No, not orbiting, diving into, and you need to take something for the headache and get aft ASAP.” Aston let it go at that and went back forward into the cockpit.

“Captain, I think I have an idea.” Kyle was nervous, borderline scared if not in fact frightened out of his wits but trying to control his emotions.

“I’m open to it whatever it is.” Aston was all business.

“I’ve noticed the ship’s computer is trying to feel out what’s up and running and what isn’t.”

“That’s Vash trying to trick out the AI.”

“Well, what if we tease it some to get it to look at the controls.”

“Yeah, okay, big deal, that doesn’t get us engine power.”

“Unless it figured we needed engine pow….”

“Do it! Shut up and do it!” Aston put the scout ship set back at position one, then put it into position final and shoved the throttles into zone five.

By now the ship’s forward momentum had stopped, and now the ship was falling flat straight down with the pressure gauge climbing steadily. The multicolored clouds were now rising like canyon walls on either side of the Florian. Masses of billows so numerous they looked like microminiature balls from thousands of miles distant, and again stretched into murky cloud banks that curved and snaked away as far as the eye could see.

Below massive electrical discharges as lightening the thickness of entire starships that stretched for hundreds of miles arced between said massive formations. The flashed through the windows filling the starship with brief moments of strobing blue-white lightening illumination.

“It’s working, captain.” Kyle said.

Aston watched the ship crawl through its routine, checking and rechecking circuits, and comparing operational parameters with what was required.

“Pressure’s rising, captain.”

Again, Aston didn’t reply, but watched the ship do it’s thing. How he wished he could yell at it like he at Vash or Vash at him, and give it that extra emotional kick that living creatures needed every so often to get things done. But all he could do was sit, be patient, and wait, and hope that the jovian atmosphere didn’t crush the finest Florian League engineers had to offer before the ship’s computer decided it was time to recheck the engines and breathe life into them.

But the canyon walls continued to rise, and lightening continued to flash, and the clouds grew darker and blacker.

“Decrease interior pressure. Don’t depressurize, just let out enough air to keep us at norm.” Aston ordered, and Kyle followed suit.

“It’s not working, sir. I was wrong. I’m sorry.” Kyle stated as he carried out Aston’s orders. “We’re not going to make it.” Sadness crept into Kyle’s voice.

Aston could hear and feel the pressure build up on the hull.

Then, like divine intervention, the engines thundered to life. Lateral relative velocity steadily climbed and Aston and Kyle both hauled back on the control stick sending the scout ship soaring skyward, riding twin plumes of blue white triple diamond flames.

Aston couldn’t help but laugh, and Kyle followed suit seeing that he had been given permission to do so by his superior.

Aston and Kyle sat at the controls until they had reached lower orbit. One of the local moons was covered in ammonia and water snow, that would do for a fuel supply. It was only then, once settled on a world that was below freezing, standing there with a shovel in his hand staring up at the black star studded background with the gas giant looming in the distance, that Aston let himself relax.

Pirates vanquished. Tanks full. Ship out of danger. And a black skyline with a blazing single sun and the Milky Way sprawled out across the heavens. What pirates had survived the initial catastrophe, if any, were dead by now if they hadn’t froze to death when the type T fell apart.

But even though it was mere hours ago, it seemed like it was a month ago. Why that was, Aston didn’t know. But he stared up at the stars, and was thankful to be alive.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

A Very Grave Quarrel

Mobile ABM and HEW batteries, balance struts splayed out on the tarmacadam’s reinforced surface, belched hyper-velocity missiles and energy into the skies above Efate as a combination of Zhodani HE rounds and orbital lasers battered and tore at the tarmac of the starport complex. Chunks of rubble and clouds of dust spewed and rose from impacts and burning destruction etched from the heavens.

Captain Richard Aston ran across the tarmac towards the The Small Ray, a defanged type-S that had seen better days, but was up to specifications in spite of the torrent of destruction raining down around the port and city beyond.

Dust and smoke billowed and enshrouded the city into a dull brown and dull white cloudy haze that rose from the spires and skyscrapers like an unformed ghost, while in sections flames raged and ravaged property of all sorts.

Several low yield shells stitched a line across the gate terminal between Aston and his hastily assembled platoon, consisting of mostly raw recruits thrown into uniform and given a weapon, with a couple of early twenty-somethings to act as mentors. The entire structure collapsed, and the shockwave knocked Aston and his troop backwards sprawling across the tarmacadan.

Soon after black capsules landed in the wake of smoke and debris. Doors flopped downwards and hit the starport surface with a metal clang that could be heard amongst the tumult of shells, lasers, missiles and now small arms fire. Small arms fire that included Zhodani laser assault rifles—a familiar and much hated sound all at once.

Daniels went down, Scudder, Houghton, McClellan, and Sanders were hit, ablative plates reacted to some laser strikes with explosive vaporization and smoky particles protecting their wearers, while others crumpled in anguish.

Aston painfully crawled to the huge mound of rubble separating him from his type-S, and unslung the ACR that some sergeant had thrown his way when the alert sounded. He reached for the sheath attached to the belt also given to him during the alert, felt the hilt of the long eighteen inch steel blade, pulled it out, and snapped it into the holder underneath the ACR’s barrel.

That’s when he noticed that his platoon of young men had followed in a crawl, and were now doing as he had done, affixing bayonets. Aston didn’t have time to think it over, but noticed the young lieutenant looking to him for direction. Why, Aston didn’t know, and concentrated on the matter at hand—getting to the scout ship.

Lieutenant Matthew Briar, looked at Aston with an odd frightening and tumultuous mix of emotions; hope, fear, admiration, terror, and bewilderment. The whole experience was a holovid production come to life, only it wasn’t on the screen and stakes were real. He could die. His whole unit could die. This scout, this Captain Richard Aston, could also die in the mayhem all around him.

Aston looked at Briar briefly, then risked climbing the rubble, up chunks of fractured and broken concrete with melted and snapped rebar sticking out from them, and peered over the top. Again, the troop followed suit without him asking or ordering it.

Aston reached for a flash bang, and looked for the largest collection of black armored clam-shell helmeted individuals. They were only mere meters from Aston’s Type-S. Vash couldn’t possibly hit them with the turret, they were that close.

The troop, bayonets gleaming the patchwork sunlight, watched Aston toss a flash bang. The grenade detonated with fury blinding every Zhodani trooper within a certain radius. Aston went over the top and the rest of the troop followed suit shouting and firing….

 

[Blue Ghost]

The war had been over for what seemed like decades, and the painful truth was that it had been. His body didn’t respond like it used to. The snap reflexes he once enjoyed as a youth had left him long ago. His reedy hair was a thin silver, the skin over his jowls and body drooped low with gravity, and even his joints tended to creak and hurt on occasion. And his vision, though not blurry, certainly was not as sharp as in his hay-day.

But the most damaging part of getting old was just the general atrophy in mind and body, and how his youthful exuberance from his boyhood on Earth had been eclipsed by time and the erosion of wear.

Yes, the war was over, but so was the Imperium, or so it seemed. Long since the behemoth seemingly everlasting empire that was the Third Imperium, was now forever fractured both politically and geographically, with many a lord claiming the throne, all the while another threat loomed in the distance.

But he still had a life to live, or so he believed. He wasn’t sure how to reconcile the thought of needing and desiring to live longer verse what his own personal biology was telling him. Was he trying to convince himself that even though on a subconscious physiological level he knew his time was drawing to a close, and in his own way out wit his biological clock? It felt like a sale’s pitch to his inner psyche—a cry, a thirst, a demand for more life, and for more life to come. What was the old saying? The spirit was willing, but the body…

Days long gone. Peter the amazing post-doctorate surgeon who had become a ship’s medic for the thrill of adventuring in the Marches and the extents. Amy, the beautiful science specialist whose fields of expertise ranged from paleontology to high energy physics and more, various ship’s captains, and his long time friend, Vash. All gone. Fading memories of an era long gone.

Explosions on Efate…or was it Regina? The roar of an Aslan crowd. Sailing on a water world and facing the gaping maw of a hungry beast. A disagreeable Newt, a raving psionic lunatic who had nearly destroyed a ship, and a Geonee who knew only racing as a way of life.

If the war hadn’t gotten them, then something else had. Usually a family obligation, but ultimately time came for them all. It came for everyone.

He sat there on the park bench with eyes half closed, feeling the cold air trying to penetrate his scarf and sweater. He must have looked like a pathetic figure bent forward with both elderly hands resting on the top nob of an inexpensive wooden cane.

“One last duty to perform.” He told himself. He inhaled, and characteristically sighed. Now a knight, he didn’t feel much different from the rest of humanity. Just older, and more tired. But not so tired that he couldn’t address a grievous wrong.

He looked down at the cracked concrete sidewalk with the occasional pale brown leaf fluttering by. He remembered Captain Patterson, and his admonition to him stay close to camp and be careful. Of course it rained and he had been pushed and dragged by a debris flow that by all rights should have killed him. But he had beaten the odds.

The crystal cave with the Aslan youth who wanted to prove his manhood by confronting one of the most dangerous crystalline animals that Aston had ever encountered, and later on his baptism of fire by being dragged into the arena to fight on behalf of a maintenance male who had forsaken traditional Aslan ways for a freer existence. Of course it meant that he had no honor, but he seemed to be okay with it. Too bad he had to have the human fight for him.

Days long gone. Days when he could run up seven flights of stairs and not feel winded in the least, and still have energy, were over. But he was alive. He was here. He had something to do. A purpose. A goal. A reason for living.

And there, across the street, flanked by guards, men and droids both, in a caravan of stretched armored luxury grav vehicles. Epaulets, gold braid and other adornments trimming a bright vermillion uniform with black plants also striped with gold piping stuffed into brilliant polished black boots. A very shiny and well trimmed full beard and moustache that was no doubt conditioned just like his hair. Sharp chiseled features, a good looking and well groomed man, but not very muscular. The side arm and ceremonial saber dangling at his left hip told all.

He closed his eyes briefly. All he needed was a few more winks of sleep. Naps seemed to be the order of the day. Just a few minutes of shut eye in the once summer now cooled autumn air. That’s all he needed right now.

 

[Blue Ghost]

A young man whose heart had been smitten by the Duke’s niece, now lay in a hospital with enough tubes and wires keeping his body alive to make an engineering medic jealous. He was not of station. A commoner in a local store that catered to the local wealthy clientele, he spent his nights stocking the store, and his days manning it. The Duke’s niece, actually a very pretty young woman, had taken to him, and of course he to her. That was their crime.

So it was that it had been forbidden by the Duke for the two to cavort with one another in such open displays of affection. But, like all young impassioned youth whose hearts are entwined, they found ample opportunities.

Noble justice was brutal for those who had little regard for life. The only thing that had saved the young store clerk was the fact that he was human, and a local. Somehow being maimed and mortally wounded was supposed to send a message to other locals not to aspire to status above their station. “Know your place” was the catch phrase many a noble tossed and casually leveled with an heir of arrogance that only added to the fire of the masses, or those local nobility often referred to as rabble.

That’s when the first few killings became clear. It was the Duke, trying to get rid of the rival without killing him outright and bringing the finger of suspicion upon himself. Local law and custom actually protected him, but Imperial law was another matter, and so he had to find cause and place blame on others, citing he had been provoked to outrage. He even went so far as to leave the murder weapon and biological evidence in the form of the victim’s blood in the store. A shoddy work at a frame up. There was absolutely no way for any of the victim’s blood to get into the store, and there was no way the young store clerk could have fired the weapon as lab tests had shown. Only a man who wanted to put others at a disadvantage could do such a thing, and the young Duke’s psychological profile fit that mold to a Tee.

He kept an eye on the gated compound across the avenue from the estate park. Cold was more bitter and had more sting now than ever it did when he was still a pilot in the service. And, strangely enough, as if the world were turned on its head, even though it felt colder, it didn’t feel as uncomfortable as it had at one time.

Night was coming on, and the small palace’s windows gradually glowed to life as twilight turned evening sky to a starry night. Guards and bots were patrolling. Sentry cameras roamed the skies several dozen feet above the local houses. And the young Duke, as expected, forsook his personal guard to stroll through the park at night, confident that he could catch another innocent bystander, and level his full legal rights as a noble upon yet another victim, or so was the noble’s strategy.

The elderly man pressed hard on the cane and forced his creaking body from its resting place on a wrought iron bench, and bent over, one hand on his back, the other supporting the upper weight of his body by way of the cane, he moved.

He took gasps of breath at first, but soon like an antiquated locomotive his body was responding. Camera’s snapped his picture. Sentries and other security looked his way and nodded, scanned him, and chagrinned, and then moved on. But, as old as he was, as near decrepit as he had become, he could still follow the young duke.

Still on the well treaded concrete path, but on the far side of the hill, that’s when he spoke.

“Stop.” His own voice was gravelly and worn, it had only a hint of the golden tones of his middle age. “Stop.”

The duke paused and half turned to look back at an elderly man, “Do you give me an order, old man?”

“I said, stop.” His elderly amble closed distance with the Duke to three meters, then stopped. Raising a boney accusing finger and hand, the tissues, fat and muscle long gone, he pointed at the duke. “I challenge you.”

The duke muted a laugh, “Be off. Find some aged gentlewoman upon which to foist your attentions.”

“No.” His voice defiantly cracked with age. “No, lord duke, you are not worthy of the title. You tried to murder a loved one. And I accuse you of unjust killing.”

The duke drew his saber, “Bold words. It’s been a long time since I’ve killed someone older than myself.”

“I would wager that age makes little to your habit of ending lives.”

“An insult. Do you wish to die slowly as well.” The duke threw away his sheath.

It wasn’t the arena, it wasn’t Efate, he wasn’t on some starship in either a turret or at the helm. He knew himself to be out of his league, but he had nothing else. All that experience, all that training, all those scars, and ultimately it was his own body that would be his failing. And yet there was nothing else in his life but to rectify something he should have done a long time ago.

He straightened himself as best as he could, his ancient body protesting that the various lubricants and well kept tissues were no longer as they were. But no matter. It was do or die, and his body knew the outcome before hand, all the same braced for its fate as well as prepared itself at the command of the mind that guided it.

Holding his cane up like a weapon he twisted his face in anger. The Duke confidently strode forward and slashed at the cane with his saber. The force of the blow twisted his body into an unstable stance, but his foot caught himself. He raised his cane again, but a backslash notched it deeply and sent him tumbling to the concrete and leaf covered grass.

The blade speared down into his shoulder, though the duke was aiming for the center of his chest. The agony of razor sharp steel slicing into nerves running throughout his body, and letting what blood he had left spill from cut veins nearly paralyzed him. But he had been through worse, and it allowed him to reach for the weapon of last resort; his MK1119 machine pistol.

The weapon that had saved him so many times in the past was too late now. Nevertheless, shrouded in the dark it was essentially invisible in the dim shadows. He pulled the trigger and a flame from 20 rounds emptied in less than a second ended the duke’s life.

Alarms sounded, light poured onto the scene, drones, sentries, guards came rushing with high tech long arms and sidearms drawn, and surrounded the writhing elderly man. His color draining with every drop of blood trickling from his wound.

“There he is. Too late for his lordship, but we can finish off his killer.” A young ambitious lieutenant said with an heir of disregard. Dressed in ceremonial red much like the Duke that he was assigned to protect, gold trim, he was ready to accept the responsibility for the Duke’s death, but also prepared to rise in rank as he was a distant relation. It would not mean an advancement, but it would put him closer to the dukedom.

Another set of lights poured onto the scene, and the thunder of a starship engine, several in fact, roared onto the scene. Sentry bots and surveillance drones dropped like poisoned sparrows, thumping onto the ground with a crinkly impact as they crushed dead leaves.

“Hands up. Don’t move.” The voice boomed over the loud speaker, and another set of armed individuals with the royal purple sunburst appeared on the scene, and squared off with the duke’s huscarles.

“There he is!” A team of medics and familiar faces surrounded him. They removed the saber from his near lifeless form, his eyes rolling to the back of his head, his breaths shallow, his heart beat barely registered. They attached devices to him and injected him with chemicals. But the body couldn’t withstand it, and his heart stopped.

“He’s dead.”

“So be it, my lord. A fit price to pay for a murder.”

No one replied, save one man. A middle aged senior administrator who had come to see the mission fulfilled. “No. No it isn’t.”

“What’re you talking about? “

“And nor will you be advancing closer to the sector’s chair.”

The lieutenant furled his brow as much as his young twenty-something forehead would allow, “What are you talking about?” Then noticing the purple color of the sunburst, “What? That’s a fake uniform! What are you trying to pull? What’s your game? I’ll have you rung up on charges, and then executed.”

The administrator looked up at him with arms cross in humble doubt. “Is that a threat, lieutenant?”

“Of course it is.”

“Well, I’ve come across some, how does one put it, uninformed individuals in my time, but to accuse a Scout enforcement group of fraud, and then threaten violence, I think that’s a new one for the books.”

 

[Blue Ghost]

“What are you talking about?! He killed our duke! I’ve had enough!”

“I’m sure you have. A man lies dead on the ground. Dead from gun shot wounds. Trauma. Loss of blood. But it’s not murder.”

“Are you daft? He, shot, him!” The lieutenant emphasized.

“We got him back. He’s alive.” The chief medic looked up at the administrator before getting to his feet and leaving his team to care of the patient. “I’ve initialed the time of death.”

“Is he okay?” the administrator looked worried.

“Oh sure. He’s … on the mend, but …”

“But what?” The administrator was tense.

“At his age? I don’t know, sir. I mean whoever authorized this … I don’t know.”

“It was his own idea.” The administrator’s tone seemed to relieve his own stress and worry, but his reservations were all too clear.

“What, he’s alive? Little good it’ll do him when the magistrate is through with him.” The lieutenant was adamant, the cold air steaming from his mouth as the three hovering scout ships continued to cast strong shafts of light on the scene.

“I think not. Our man, our revived man, is a knight.”

“Him?!” the lieutenant exclaimed, “…of the nobility?”

The administrator leveled a cool gaze, “Your duke was killed in honorable combat. He met the challenge, and even struck the first blow. That’s why his transponder didn’t sound an alarm, because he wasn’t murdered.”

Another set of starship engines thundered onto the scene, and another set of individuals poured from the cargo ramp before it could touch the ground.

Vash was the first to his side, followed by Peter and Amy, “Get out of here!” Growled Vash as he physically pushed the medics aside. “You sure this meta-genic thingy is going to work?”

Amy shook her head, “It’s what that Ancient said…. Besides, they made you people, didn’t they?”

“Another dig at my race? That’s his department.” Vash grimly joked at the old man’s near lifeless form.

Amy stabbed him in several strategic places, tubes connected to a biological technology that mankind had only begun to tap in recent years.

“Honorable combat?! You’re mad! He’s a killer!”

“No, he’s a knight of the realm. Recently made one, and perhaps not quite the station of your departed duke, but your lord accepted the challenge, drew first, struck first, delivered a mortal blow, and died for it! Sergeant!”

“Yes sir!”

“Arrest the lot of them. Take them into custody.”

IISS special security personnel stepped forward weapons leveled. The air was tense, a standoff was imminent, but whether cowardice, the hope to fight another day, or sheer over confidence that he could win a court battle over took the young lieutenant, none could say, and yet he was the first to throw down his weapon.

The elderly man cried and writhed in agony as his body convulsed and thrashed on the grav powered gurney still hanging in the single spot where it slid under his once lifeless form. More calls of pain filled the air, but then the miraculous happened. Boney hands, fingers and limbs regained new form. The skin so depleted of blood, tissue and muscle suddenly reformed and became full again. New life revived into a man a century or more old. And his companions sympathized and hoped that the treatment they had gone through would revitalize their friend.

Then the writhing stopped, followed by a man who was dressed in clothes that barely fit his form, and certainly didn’t speak about his apparent age. Mid thirties? Mid forties? In his prime nevertheless. Sword wound all but gone, interior damage mended, mind and body restored.

“How you feeling?” Vash offered.

Aston looked up, “Where did you come from?” Then bewildered, he looked at his hands and body, then at Peter and Amy. “What….wha…ohmygod, am I dead?”

“Hardly, sir Aston.” The administrator replied, “And thanks again for your help. Do you want to stay and thank your niece?”

Aston shook his head. “No. She’d never believe, and I’ve got …” he looked at Vash, Amy and Peter. “I’ve got things to do. I’m not on the Scout service payroll anymore.” Aston grinned, “But thanks all the same. I’ve got some travelling to do.”

The fourth scout ship’s engines closed once Aston and his crew were on board, then thundered to life before soaring back into the stars.

The End.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'll see if I can post something in the next few weeks. Thanks.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Heaven and Hell

Aston, Vash, Peter, Amy and Ray looked at a fat bald middle aged man with a ring of hair around his crown where a thick shock of dark tangles used to be in his prime. His shirt off, leaned up against the interior wall in the common area as the Florian class scout, Nebula Dawn, silently glided in the sundrenched black of interplanetary space, one side being heated by radiation, the other cooled by a lack of it, all the while the ship’s environmental and hull engineering mitigated the two.

Prince Pahlavi, they called him. He didn’t look much like a prince. Worn, three days growth of beard, few muscles, a pot belly, he was hardly the stuff of story book legends. But his picture and profile of him in his prime told a different story. At one time he had shown a lot of promise. At one time he was to be showcased as the son of a monarch of a kingdom long since gone. But someone thought they could control his thoughts with a combination of psioncs, anti-psychotic drugs, the most brutal forms of psychiatry, and just downright intimidation and brutality.

A lot of parties had a lot invested in him, but, as the saying goes, “too many chefs…” The Imperium wanted him as a lazy king that would be sympathetic to the Imperium, and thereby gaining docking rights for the Imperial navy and merchants, as well as the huge mineral and other raw material’s wealth of an interstellar state that was on the wane and in turmoil. The Aslan, Solomani and a host of small independent states all wanted pretty much the same thing; a head of state sympathetic to them, and either beholden to them or, at the very least, swayable and otherwise amenable to their requests.

Pahlavi had fought his hardest to overcome the Zho-psi talents employed, and the vicious guards from both Terran and Aslan space that had orbited his existence wherever he went. One party even employed a minor princess of some other house to try and win him over for the sake of producing a prodigy that would forever bring him into their political grasp. They let the princess have access to all the psychiatric tools at her disposal to sway him to her, and even to entice his dreams of creating media.

But the truth is he had fallen in love with another woman decades before. Though gone he still pined for her on a certain level, and where she was gone and the Prince knew that forever more, this other woman, this princess, disgusted him to the core. She made him sick. Everything wrong with the opposite sex, she embodied. From her stocky and hippy body form, to her willingness to try and turn his heart and mind from that which he had chosen long before he had been brutalized by the likes of modern neural science.

And that’s where Peter and Amy had come in. Amy had some latent psi power, and Peter was the emperor’s own surgeon at one time, who had asked to be excused of his duties to join his friend on the frontier in the Marches. Flashbang grenades, a few well placed tranq rounds from a Kaylon make snub, the best used by the emperor’s own, some charges to blast the cell door open, and they had found him all wired up and with a dozen tubes inserted into veins, nostrils, mouth, the base of his skull where it met his spinal column, and a few other places.

This was a man who, according to his dossier, had confronted gangs, saved a few women, had been trained by the Imperial secret police in a variety of martial arts, and had been hidden away as a commoner with a fabricated background. He was that important.

But like all important things, everyone wanted him for their own purposes. The prince coughed, his belly fat jiggled over the crest of his jeans. He rubbed his face and accepted a cup of water from Amy.

Aston looked at him. Unsure of what to think. Could anyone survive such an ordeal? He hadn’t been physically beaten, but brutalized beyond measure. Yet here he was, able to answer questions about his experience, but otherwise just too exhausted to say much.

Someone thought he had been kidnapped by an occult. Some tried to deprogram him of his fandom of old holovids. Others thought he was hiding some deep criminal secret, and staged visual theatre to get the prince to regurgitate whatever he was hiding. Still, others thought he had been abused. Well, not until he went through this ordeal, but perhaps his kidnapping was the fact that he had realized what was going on, and rebelled.

“Amy, Peter, Vash, take care of him. I’ll jump us out as soon as we reach distance.” Aston’s jaw hardened as he saw the dilapidated would be monarch continue to rest like a misused zoo animal. Aston was convinced that medicine of the mind had to be done through neural network analysis. Anything else was sheer sadistic torture. If he had the time he would have taken the man to Tarsus for a leave of absence. As it stood now a well populated area like Regina, a place with lots of navy, lots of army, marines and yes, even Scouts and law enforcement would be most appropriate. Most appropriate indeed.

The one-hundred ton arrowhead glowed an ethereal light blue, then vanished to a point of black among a sea of stars.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I went and edited the Aslan story for the thread. I'll about getting to the next story tomorrow.