Homecoming, Part 1
03 Jan 2017Tisiphone Moreau
Too long.That’s how long I’d been out in deep space.
Twelve thousand light years of wandering, laying low while the price on my head cooled off back home. Twelve thousand light years of trying to stay busy, stay sane. Twelve thousand light years of stellar surveys and planetary scans, of ice cores and soil samples. Twelve thousand light years of bleak, barren rocks and hanging on to the thin hope of discovering one of the rare gems out there that someday people might call home.
Twelve thousand light years to think about how many people died at Aeternitas because of me. Twelve thousand times to remind myself that they chose that life; that they knew the risks.
Memory is short. Twelve thousand light years is enough for a trivial bounty to get pushed so far down the board that no one even remembers it was there. As long as the Crimson Posse – if any of them were still around – had not called vendetta on me, twelve thousand light years was far enough to make it safe to come back.
'Safe' being a relative thing.
--------------------------------------------------
Rogue Planet JERICHO
31/12/3302 14:22:17 GMT
There are potentially billions of rogue planets like Jericho in the galaxy; lonely little worlds drifting in the vast expanses between stars, untethered and undetected. Without a nearby sun to nav-lock with, you can’t reach a rogue planet unless you already know where it is. One of our number found it by pure, dumb luck – a hyperspace accident; freak collision with a massive object that wasn’t supposed to be there. Stars are constantly in motion – the witchspace corridors between them are in perpetual flux. Had they made that fateful jump just two hours earlier or later and Jericho would have perhaps gone undetected for another millennium.
A breathable atmosphere, if a little sulfuric for long-term living. Near-Earth gravity – a touch heavier, but it’s good for muscle tone. Abundant water ice trapped in the ring which surrounds it. Jericho was a one-in-a-billion find. For good reason, its location has been the most closely guarded secret of the Crimson Mercenary Dragoons for centuries.
The Keelback Redemption shuddered as I guided her down through a thick layer of turbulence and water vapour that blankets Jericho’s surface. Overheating and overuse had left the port-aft ventral thruster a little twitchy but it was easy enough to compensate for on the descent. We broke clear of the clouds, greeted with the dark, wind-scoured landscape and the faint beacons of the High Redoubt’s landing pads ahead.
Redemption swept in close against the cliff face below High Redoubt, yawing about and coming in over Pad 4. The rumble of her engines climbed in pitch as the side nacelles angled downwards, washing the pad with exhaust and holding her aloft while I aligned with the landing grid.
There was a momentary panic; a jolt as the wind coupled with the twitchy left thruster and threatened to tip us over into the cascade of magma falling from the Redoubt’s center into a ravine below. Effluvium from the massive geothermal pumps that power and heat the Redoubt, the glowing red column is perhaps the planet’s most distinguishing feature – and its deadliest.
I let out an audible breath as the ship settled her weight onto the landing struts.
Too long.
That’s how long it’s been since I’ve made the dicey approach to High Redoubt.
--------------------------------------------------
Jericho is a dark world. The nearest star is a half-dozen light years away and what little light makes it that far is refracted and diffused through the ice belt and omnipresent cirrus clouds. Everything on the planet is perpetually monotone; flattened and laid bare under cold starlight. To compensate, the Redoubt is awash in spotlights and search beams. To stand on the landing pad is like standing under the light of a massive, blue sun.
Bathed in that actinic light, I looked up at Redemption and winced. Micrometeorite collisions had stripped the paint away from every fore-facing plane. Grease from some leaky valve had left a dark trail along her port side – and no doubt was a factor to the wobbly thruster I’d felt when coming in. Three of the external lamps had cracked and one was totally dark. A white paint job that had seemed a lark at the time was now showing the wear all the more starkly. The cargo hatch had started to stick when closing and the onboard chef machine had developed a bad habit of over-salting every meal.
Compiling a mental list of the items I’d need to have fixed, I turned away from the ship and walked with Kristal to the massive loading door set in the cliff’s face. I pulled my head free of my helmet, eyes and nostrils stung by the acrid air. Cold wind spiraled down into the ravine and pulled at my hair and short, ochre cloak.
Home for the holidays, I thought bitterly, watching the door lock lights flicker from red to green.
A sharp hiss as the outer seal cracked open, exhaling warm, damp air over us while we stood waiting on the pad. Three tonnes of tungsten alloy rolled aside into a recess in the rough stone wall. Buzzing sodium lamps blinked to life in sequence down the long, circular corridor that would take us into High Redoubt’s heart. It had been two years since I last walked down this hall and absolutely nothing had changed.
Our unpowered magboots rang against the steel grill flooring of the corridor as we walked deeper into the hangar level. Cables and hoses of all sizes and variegated colors snaked beneath the floor, sometimes shifting and stiffening as fluids moved through them, making the lower third of the circular tunnel resemble a restless nest of vipers.
Kristal’s voice pulled me from my thoughtless wanderings of the cables between my feet.
“Any idea why he wants us back here? Why now?”
I blinked and looked up. Shook my head.
“He didn’t say. I think the Aeternitas bounty got him spooked – and that makes me spooked.”
“Did you see the other ships out on the pads?” she asked, tipping a thumb over her shoulder towards the hangar door behind us.
“Yeah,” I said, huffing. “Raskard’s here, I didn’t recognize the others. The troops are being marshalled.”
Grim silence settled down on us, marking time with clanging boot heels until we reached the cargo lift at the corridor’s end. A massive platform, big enough for hundreds of tonnes of cargo plus the exo-loaders and trucks needed to move them to a waiting ship, it currently sat empty. Inset on one side of the shaft was a much smaller personnel lift – we headed towards this and I brushed my fingertips over the control screen to get it moving.
The top of the lift shaft opened out onto the lowest level of the Redoubt itself. Built as a cavernous warehouse, the chamber stretched off into darkness at its furthest corners. The original builders had given High Redoubt an industrial-Gothic character, all ornamented arches and towering buttresses, crafted to reflect the Dragoons’ curious antecedents.
Another lift in the central column carried us up to the command level - a wide, dome-ceilinged room at the Redoubt’s crown; banks of monitors and screens crawling up every wall and the center dominated by a holographic display currently set to show a model of High Redoubt itself, overlaid with status details of all kinds. A few unfamiliar figures in Dragoons livery were seated at various stations around the command room – many more stations sat empty and unused, no one around to fill them and no need for it besides. The company had seen better days; times were lean.
Tiler himself was in his chair at the foot of the hologram in the room’s center, working one of the consoles and gazing up at the infographics floating around the map of the structure. I noticed an icon representing Redemption sitting on pad 4, surrounded by a few panes holding details on the ship and one for her pilot – me.
“Ranger Moreau, back from the black!” Tiler crowed, looking at us through the hologram and fixing me with a wide grin.
“You heard about that, huh?” I asked, moving closer to read my abbreviated dossier floating between us.
“Updates come fast, even out here,” Tiler said in reply, gesturing loosely at the display. “Another trip like that and you’ll make Elite.”
“Great! I’ll go get another hit put out on me and get right on that.” Eyes rolling, I cast a glance over at Kristal who glowered back at me and shook her head. Over the last hundred or so jumps back, we’d fallen into a habit of not using many words.
“It wouldn’t be the worst idea,” Tiler said, hands held up in appeasement. “Having a few more Elites around here would give us some much needed legitimacy.”
That caught my attention.
“Us?” I repeated, shifting my helmet to cradle under my other arm. “What exactly is going on around here, Tiler? Why call a Moot?”
Tiler rolled his chair back from the tactical display and turned towards a flat panel on one of the walls, beckoning us over as he moved towards it.
“Because we can’t keep hiding on this rock. We’ve licked our wounds, it’s been long enough.” His chair stopped and he looked from us to the large panel overhead. On it, glowing traces connected a web of dots in various colors - an economic map of the inhabited systems.
Tiler gestured up at the map, encompassing the Federation-Alliance border with the sweep of his hand.
“Happy New Year, ladies. The Dragoons are going back to work.”