Asteroid Return: An Arek Lancer Novella Read online

  ASTEROID RETURN

  An Arek Lancer Story

  By

  Troy Osgood

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Author’s Note

  Other Books by

  CHAPTER ONE

  “They did what?” I asked, surprised, shocked and angry.

  “They released Commander Arskli.”

  I looked at the vidscreen, at the image of the Turesan Planetary Governor Yoterra, a Thesan. She was upset, almost as much as I was, that was obvious. We both had reason to be.

  “A prisoner exchange,” she went on to say but it really didn’t matter.

  The reason why it had happened didn’t matter. That it happened at all, that mattered.

  Not like I wasn’t paranoid enough already.

  “Thanks for the heads up,” I said and switched off the vidscreen, leaning back in my seat.

  I stared out the Nomad’s Wind view window, watching the stars drift by. We’d stopped in this system long enough to get the download from the Feed. That was the plan until I had gotten Yoterra’s message to contact her.

  Had to get going. We were heading to the Tuyo system for a job. It was the first job we’d had in a week and one we needed badly.

  We being me and my crew.

  The Nomad’s Wind could carry a crew of six but I had retrofitted it to be operated by a crew of one. Currently there was only two. Me, the captain, and a thirteen year old Thesan girl named Kaylia. For a long time there had been only one, me. But I’d picked up Kaylia a couple of months ago.

  She was the reason that the release of Arskli was a problem. A Tiat, high ranking in their military, Arskli was responsible for me meeting Kaylia in the first place. She, Arskli, had kidnapped Kaylia and the kid had escaped, literally running into me on a mining asteroid in Deep Space. I’d been responsible for the Commander’s capture on the Thesan controlled planet of Turesa.

  Tiat were not a forgiving people and they never could be relentless and brutal. As far as Yoterra, Kaylia’s legal guardian, and I knew the Tiat’s bounty on the kid had been removed. The Tiat seemed to no longer be interested in her. But I knew it was just a matter of time before Arksli came looking for revenge on me, and the kid as a bonus, for the loss of reputation she had suffered. Tiat were big on their version of honor and there was no way Arskli would let it go.

  Something to look forward to. One more name on the long list of people out to get me. A list which, despite my best efforts, seemed to be growing. Lately it seemed I couldn’t go anywhere without picking up a new enemy. The latest was a Divutan black market art dealer by the name of Gur. I’d gotten on his bad side by helping some refugees from a dying planet.

  Would have thought doing a good deed would have helped my karma. Nope.

  In the meantime, we’d stay as far away from the Tiat as we could. Which shouldn’t be a problem, I tried to avoid them anyways.

  Tiat and Terrans weren’t allies, never would be. We’d fought against each other in the Third Galactic War and were engaged in a kind of cold war over new territories to this day. That was old news for me though. I hadn’t worried about the status of the war in five years, ever since I had left the Earth Expeditionary Forces Special Operations and became an independent freight hauler. I’d gotten my ship, the Nomad’s Wind, and set off into space.

  Should I tell Kaylia about Arskli? Naw. No need to worry the kid. She had enough to deal with. The main reason the Tiat wanted her was that she was the last of a group of genetically modified Thesans. A kind of super trooper of the species. More feral, claws, speed. The works. Kaylia’s parents had been the ones whose DNA had been messed with. They’d passed it onto the kid.

  An example of the Tiat not forgetting or forgiving. The Thesa Wilders had done some pretty nasty damage to the Tiat and it had taken years, but the Tiat had gotten their revenge. Or most of it. There was still Kaylia, alive and well and a reminder that they hadn’t killed all the Wilders. And that would never happen. Not on my watch.

  So no telling her. Not now anyways.

  “Kid,” I said turning on the ship’s intercom system. “Come on up. It’s hop time.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked out the viewwindow at the stars. Lots of small white dots, pinpricks in the blackness of space. In the distance was a small planet, the only one close enough to be visible by the eye. This system had no sentient species, or habitable planets, and was used mostly for mining. The Kry controlled it.

  We were just stopping by, had only been here for thirty minutes or so. Long enough to get the updates from the Galactic Feed. That’s how I had known that Yoterra was looking for me. We would have been out of the system a while ago but I needed to get ahold of Yoterra.

  Traveling from solar system to solar system is done in a series of hops. You hop into the space between systems, some kind of strange realm that is nicknamed Wildspace, and then hop out again somewhere else. Going from A to C means hopping to B and sometimes E. It takes time. Well in that in-between space, you can’t receive transmissions of any kind. Well you can, but they’re so garbled that there’s no understanding them or cleaning them up. So when a ship enters a system, there’s a rapid influx of downloads from the Feed, the galaxy wide information system. News, letters, videos, books. Takes awhile to go through it all, but what else are you going to do well hopping through wildspace?

  It also means that by the time you get anything, it could be days old.

  I turned as the door to the bridge slid open and Kaylia walked in. About five feet tall, slender, she looked like a humanoid cat. Gray and black striped fur, tufts at her wrists and ankles and long black hair that ran halfway down her back. Short and pointed ears, bright yellow eyes with green slit irises.

  And a long tail that was always moving, swishing back and forth.

  Only thirteen years old, or the equivalent of that anyways, she’d seen a lot in that life. I didn’t know why she had chosen me, but she had and I would do whatever I could to protect the kid.

  She’d grown on me fast.

  When I started out in space as a freight hauler, I never wanted a crew. It was always going to be just me. Going where I wanted, when I wanted. Then I met Kaylia and well it took some getting used to, I was now okay with a crew.

  Just her though. No need for anyone else.

  Smiling, she was always smiling, she sat down at the navigators station in front and down from me. The Wind’s bridge had four stations. The pilot’s on the right, co-pilots on the left and down a couple steps were the navigators and weapons/communications. Lots of screens, buttons, dials and controls. She busied herself with some of the buttons for a minute.

  “Navorders all set,” I asked her, looking at the back of her head.

  She flashed me a thumbs up over her shoulder, one of the first earth expressions I had taught her.

  The kid was mute and primarily communicated through sign language.

  I glanced at my station. Since I had everything rigged for a single crewer, my station had controls and readouts for all the ship’s systems and I looked quick to double check. She’d set up the hop perfectly.

  Normally I’d set all the hops f
rom the system where we left to the destination system and let the navcom make the adjustments as we traveled. No route was ever perfectly set in stone. The galaxy was in constant motion and things changed rapidly, so whenever a hop brought you to a new solar system there was some downtime as the navcomp made adjustments before hopping out. I’d been training Kaylia on how to do that manually, so now whenever we hopped in she would plot the course out.

  She tapped on the console to get my attention.

  Six hours.

  Space travel was not quick.

  I leaned back, put my feet up on the edge of the console and my hands behind my head.

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  With a nod, smile and eyes bright with excitement Kaylia stood up and sat down in the co-pilots station next to mine, the small aisle between us. She adjusted a couple of dials, tapped some buttons and hit the controls. The Wind started moving forward, the distant planet growing a little bit in size. We couldn’t feel the motion inside the bridge, the inertia compensators working, but the stars started to elongate as we gained speed. I could feel the familiar vibrations through the metal decking of my ship. The white pinpricks became lines, more and more of them closer to together until the black was all gone and replaced with a landscape that was best described as fuzzy clouds of white.

  The space between space. Wildspace.

  Not all ships had view windows but I made sure mine did. I found the view of both, space and this wildspace, to be peaceful. It was where I belonged. The view here was unchanging, just the weird cloudy white, so it did get old after awhile but I tried to spend the first couple minutes of most hops just enjoying the view.

  Out of the corner of my eyes I could see Kaylia shift to mimic my position. Feet up, hands behind her head, leaning back. I smiled and watched wildspace drift by.

  *****

  Tuyo System contained six planets, three of them were gas, another a ball of fire and two that were inhabited. None of the planets were capable of sustaining life but they had three colonies on the two planets. Since there was no life native to the system, the first settlers got to pick the planets names. Tuyo Major and Tuyo Minor.

  Very imaginative.

  Major had two mining operations from the Pierd, one in each hemisphere. Minor, our destination, had an operation run by the Huyit Trading Consortium. We’d left a system with mining operations by the Kry to come to one with operations by the Pierd and one of the galaxies many trade consortiums. There was a lot of mining done in the galaxy.

  The Wind wasn’t capable of transporting ore. Too heavy for light freighters like my ship, an Earth made Castellan Model F497. The heavier transports did the bulk of the ore, those also usually belonged to whatever Trading Consortium or planetary government owned the mine. That left guys like me to deliver the cargo needed for the people working and running the mines.

  It wasn’t big money but it kept me and my ship flying. That was all I wanted.

  A little extra would be nice but can’t have everything.

  We’d been traveling in-system for three hours when the first of the planets became visible to the eye. Star hopping brings you in at the far edge of a system and you have to use thrusters to get the rest of the way. They’re slow. At least it appears to be, but when talking the distances between planets, three hours really isn’t that bad.

  Tuyo Major was coming up off to the port side. Our port anyways. With ships in space, directions like up and down or left and right were kind of meaningless.

  It was an ugly planet. Gray, cratered. No lights could be seen from this distance but there were plenty of ships in orbit. Large freighters and even a small space station, a long cylinder with a ring around the middle. It served as a terminal for ships as well as defense. I could see the weapons mounted on the ring.

  My console lit up, telling me that we were being scanned. I hit a button and transmitted the ship’s ID and our purpose for being in Pierd controlled space. It was just a routine check.

  We continued past Major with no problems. Hadn’t expected any, but can never tell. Last I had heard, things were fine between the Pierd and the Huyit Consortium. That wasn’t always the case, but for now it was. Which was good. I hated flying into warzones, I’d been in too many of them back in the soldiering days. The Wind had shields and some weapons but it was still a freighter, not good in a fight.

  I could see some of the ships docked at the space station. Some light freighters like the Wind, lots of different makes and models, lots of different species. There were a couple heavy freighters drifting in orbit with the station. I could see smaller shuttles moving between them and the planet. Major couldn’t handle ships landing in atmo and most heavy freighters weren’t designed for landing and flying through atmosphere. Another benefit that my ship had.

  Shuttles brought cargo and personnel up from the surface to the freighters or the station. The surface was nothing but gray rock, lots of cliffs and mountains. Barren and stormy. Not a fun place.

  And Minor was worse.

  It would be another six hours before we came upon Minor along its orbit on the far side of the system’s sun. We could have hopped in on that side, closer to the planet itself, but that would have required hopping to another two systems. More time and more fuel. In-system travel wasn’t that fast, but sometimes it was needed as it didn’t use up fuel as much as hopping. As we passed the sun, I tilted the ship so the viewwindow was away from the light. We were still light years away, a lot of them, but it was bright.

  Gravity on a spaceship is weird. It’s centered on the ship itself, whatever the manufacturers consider the deck. What is down for one ship would be up for another or sideways for a third. It makes things interesting when approaching space stations and planets.

  As we flew through space I leaned back in my chair, feet up on the console, and drank an ale. What I called an ale anyways. Tradelan works pretty good most of the time. It takes the word in the other language and substitutes the closest word in yours. So what I was drinking was an ale, it also wasn’t. That was just the only word that came close to the translation.

  Because of the translation issue, while Tradelan allowed the varied beings of the galaxy to communicate, it still led to a lot of miscommunication. Which more often than not was answered with blaster fire.

  This particular ale came from a planet called Ture and was pretty good. The closest to true Earth ale that I had found. And this far out in Deep Space it was easier to find.

  My console started beeping and I sat up. The lights on the comms were flashing, indicating there was an incoming message. Not live, a recording. Someone had sent a message out into the Galactic Feed to my address. It was just luck that the Wind was in-system currently, otherwise I might not have gotten it until after the next hop, wherever and whenever that would be.

  The Feed was the galaxy wide, at least the known galaxy, system of connected satellites and relays. It bounced data across the stars. Anything from messages to entertainment, news and pictures. Each system paid a tax to have the Feed satellite’s there, but they were all willing to pay it. No inhabited system went without, even the Tiats. While they had their own system they still used the Feed.

  Glancing at the delivery mark I was surprised. One of the last people I would have expected a random message from. Well we were still on good terms, and did communicate, it wasn’t just for social calls.

  I wondered what my former commander, Colonel Terrence Jessups, wanted.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I was in the Earth Expeditionary Forces for ten years and most of those were spent in Special Operations. All of that time was spent under the command of Colonel Jessups. He was pretty much responsible for me being who I am. When I had joined, at eighteen and just out of high school, I was the stereotypical troubled kid. It had been my mother, my sister and me. We had it rough and I’d fallen in with a bad crowd.

  A bad decision led me to the best one I had ever made.

  I’d been given a choice; jail or t
he military. I chose the military and everyone, including me, was surprised to find I had a knack for soldiering.

  Except the following orders part. That I had never really learned. But my skills made up for that and led me into Special Operations. Jessups took that wild kid and turned him into a soldier. I’d risen quickly up the ranks and had left as a Captain.

  Without Jessups, I wondered where I would have ended up. Nowhere good that was for sure. I glanced around at the Wind. Some would have said that I hadn’t upgraded when I left the 2Es, might have taken a step back, but I was happy and free. On my own.

  Putting on the headset I keyed the transmission and watched Jessups appear on the screen. Gray haired in a close cut military style, brown eyed, more crows’ feet and wrinkles around the face than the last time I had seen him. Jessups was looking weary. He’d been looking that way the last few times but now it was really noticeable. He was run down. Tired. Should have been long retired but the man knew too much and was too good. The 2Es wouldn’t let him leave. Not that he really wanted to. The Forces were his only family.

  “Captain,” the message started and just hearing his voice almost made me jump out of the chair and stand at attention. “I am messaging for two reasons. I cannot go into many details over the Feed as encrypted as it is.” Here he paused. To send me a message meant he couldn’t use the standard military codes. The Wind didn’t have the software to decrypt them. Jessups was trying to figure out what he could tell me. “The first reason is to inform you of the deaths of three members of your old unit.”

  That caught me by surprise. The deaths must have been recent as I did check in with some old war buddies now and then. For three of them to die around the same time and recently, as they must have been or I would have known, was pretty suspicious and I could see why Jessups would want to inform me. I wondered how many others of the old units were getting similar messages.

  I saw that there were data packets attached to the message. Those would be the news items on the deaths.

  “The other reason is we believe connected to the first.” Again Jessups paused, staring at the screen. It caused me to look at him instead of at anything else. “The rock is active.”