Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) (13 page)

As Ju-lin
turned I noticed that her tears were gone, replaced by a broad smile.

“Come
on,” she said gesturing toward the cockpit. “There should be a couple of jump
seats in the cockpit.”

I
couldn’t help laugh a little at her giddiness.

“What?”
she asked.

“You,” I
said. “You’re so, happy.”

“Oh shut
it,” she gave me a playful shove before passing from the secondary cargo area
to the small but functional galley. Just past the galley were four crew berths.
Unlike the modular sleeping pods from the Carrack, the Scotsman’s sleeping
berths were built into the fuselage of the ship. There were two on each side of
the passage, and all four berths had room for a person to crawl in and lie
down. An accordion-style retractable curtain to offer some degree of privacy.

“No, I
mean it.” I said. “You
really
hate being on the colony don’t you?”

She
didn’t say anything for a moment. As we entered there were two jump seats with
retractable control panels on either side of us. Further forward and up a few
small steps was the pilot’s seat and all of the primary ship systems controls.

“It’s not
quite that,” she answered as we passed into the cockpit. “It’s just that I
don’t feel right when I’m stuck on a world, there is something about the curve
of the ground—”

“It’s
because she has Void Soul.” Loid broke in from behind us with a cheerful tone.
“Take a seat.”

“A what?”
I asked.

“Celestrial
folklore,” Loid answered. “They have a bunch of stories about the Thar’esh, a
kind of a dark force or ghost-demon that haunts and torments people. They say
that the Thar’esh will sometimes come and take a bite out of a child’s soul. It
creates an unfillable gap that they call a Void Soul. The bitten become
discontent with everyday life, and are only happy when they are out in the
black of space where the endless void of the universe can equalize the
emptiness of the void within.”

“I didn’t
know the Skins had stories like that,” Ju-lin said.

“They say
that Void Souls were what drove the Celestrials to expand into space in the
first place,” Loid said as he slid into the pilot’s seat. “That’s the problem
with most Earthborn, we’re so full of their own stories that they don’t listen
to anyone else’s.”

“How do
you know them?” I asked.

“Oh,”
Loid began powering up the engines. “The Celestrials get a bad rap most of the
time. Granted, they come off pretty sticky and humorless, but that’s mostly
because Earthborn don’t take the time to get to know them. That will change
though. Last I heard the Celestrial Imperial Council has been quietly starting
talks with a faction of senators looking to establish an official peace with the
Collective and the Protectorate.”

“The
Prime Minister and the corporatists would never hear of it,” Ju-lin replied.

“Yes,
well,” Loid answered. “The Prime Minister wants to keep people afraid to make
sure he can keep his power consolidated. As long as he keeps the Protectorate
scared that the Celestrials may attack, he can keep the Protectorate Fleet
close at hand. Mark my words, the winds are changing. The Earthborn have been
run by fear for far too long.”

“You
sound like my father,” Ju-lin commented. “He always said that the only reason
the Draugari a
ttacked Centauri was because we kept
pushing into their territory after we’d cleared the Wild Worlds. But then the
Protectorate C
ommand just used the attack as an excuse to double our
deployments and push even further into Draugari territory.”

“We’ll
see” Loid continued. “I’m all for peace, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to
it. If every schmuck with a starship starts hauling goods between the
Protectorate and the Celestrial Empire, my profits are going to go to shit.”

The engines roared to life
as Loid finished the ignition sequence. The cabin lurched backward as we lifted
off the ground, and then surged forward as he began burning the thrusters to
take us up into orbit.

Chapter 15.

I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth and gripped
the turret controls with white knuckles. I hated the waiting. The caravan
slowly crept into view, but still we waited. Our ship was silent, nestled in
the shadow of an asteroid. I glanced out across space, the other ships would be
there, also, hiding, waiting for our prey.

The caravan included seven vessels. Four were fighter
escorts, we would target them first, and destroy them before they have time to
react. The larger combat vessels would come second. Two of them, with markings
from the Collective. Their armor is thick, but weaponry small. But with our
Slires hiding in the shadows, waiting to strike, the fight would be quick. We
will leave the cargo vessels untouched. Kill the crew. Take our prizes. Victory
through honor.

Today the weak will feel the power of the strong, and they
will be punished for stealing from the worlds that do not belong to them.

Once we
were clear of orbit, Loid spent several minutes adjusting our trajectory with
maneuvering thrusters, and then set in a slow thruster burn to send us in the
toward the flux point
to Aurae, the next system
on our journey. Once he was done, the ship settled into soft whispers and
creaks as we seemingly drifted through space. After the thunder of the
Scotsman’s
lifting off and pulling free of the planet’s
gravity,
the silence of space travel was unsettling.

Ju-lin,
true to form, was quick to break the silence. We were discussing interplanetary
navigation when I asked about one of the terms she used: flux points

“What are
fluxes?” Loid echoed without turning around as he made final adjustments to our
course. “Eli, what cave did you crawl out of that you don’t know what flux
points are?”

Little
did Loid know how close his sarcasm came to the truth.

“He was
sheltered,” Ju-lin covered for me as she began to answer my question. “A few
hundred years ago, back when we were confined to the Sol system we discovered
several random gravitational anomalies floating around. Some scientists thought
they were randomly occurring micro-singularities, but a few others had other
theories. They thought that the anomalies weren’t random, and set about to find
a way to open them.”

“Open
them? Isn’t a singularity another word for black hole?” I asked “Wouldn’t that
have just expanded it and devoured everything?”

“That’s
what the first scientists thought,” Ju-lin answered. “They said that if the
micro-singularities were naturally occurring and that manipulating them could
be disastrous. It was before the Earthborn Society was founded. The United
Nations Interstellar Council was in charge of setting policies and standards in
space back then. They forbade anyone from experimenting with the
micro-singularities. But, of course, a small group refused to listen, and went
ahead on their own to build the gravitational flux drive and started hopping
between solar systems.”

“How does
it work?” I asked.

“Think of
space like a large flat sheet. It’s not, but think of it that way. Then you
imagine folding the sheet and stitching together two points. The grav drive
briefly props open the micro-singularity—the things that we call flux
points—wide enough for a ship to enter, and the ship passes through, slipping
through the stitch between two points in space.”

“Where do
they come from?” I asked.

“That’s
still the question,” Ju-lin answered. “When we first discovered them we thought
we were the only humans in the universe, possibly the only intelligent life. We
didn’t know about the Celestrial Empire, or the Domari Collective. The thing
about the flux points is that they are clearly not random occurrences. A flux
drive opens the anomaly, a ship passes through, and then it shrinks back to
size. Those first scientists were right. If the singularities
were
naturally occurring, they would collapse in on themselves or expand infinitely.
But they don’t do either. After the grav drive’s field passes through they just
snap back to how they were. Given that, scientists universally agree that the
flux points were built, or at least created by someone or something else.”

“The same
thing that spread out the human genetics across the worlds?” I asked.

“Some say
so,” Ju-lin answered. “Others disagree, they say the flux points are likely a
few billion years older than the oldest evidence of human habitation on any
known world.”

“But
that’s just one theory,” Loid broke in. “Over in the Collective, the natives of
Hoken believe that they are the footsteps left by the God Iagen, the Great Fat
Druid. After creating the universe, Iagen visited every world by leaping from
star to star, but there were some points that could not hold him when he
landed, so he fell through the universe and landed in another point. The holes
remained.”

“Or yes,
there is that, if you prefer superstition to science,” Ju-lin rolled her eyes.

“You
never know,” Loid answered. “The Domari mastered the grav drive 900 years
before the Earthborn, they may know something we don’t,” Loid answered as he
spun around in his pilot’s chair to face us. “Besides, I’ve seen a lot of
strange things in the ‘verse. When I first heard stories about the Giant Space
Whale I thought they were completely ridiculous.”

“A Giant
Space Whale?” I asked, astonished.

“Oh
you’re just full of fables,” Ju-lin sighed. “The Collective integrated three
pre-industrial species and took them from their mud huts and gave them the
stars. So now we have to suffer the primitives, and listen to stories about
Space Whales. And then over on the other side we have the Celestrials and
their, what was it, the Thar’esh taking bites out of children’s souls? What’s
next? The ancient Earth stories about time traveling doctors, or how about the
Draugari apocalypse calendar?”

“The
Doctor!” Loid grey eyes lit up with a smile. “That’s one of my favorites. I
have all of the old vids saved on my Slate if you want to watch, great stuff.”

“Who?” I
asked.

“Nevermind,”
Loid chuckled to himself.

“Dear
lord,” Ju-lin unstrapped herself and got up. The artificial gravity had engaged
once we left the planet’s atmosphere. She turned to head back toward the
galley. “I’m starved, I don’t suppose you have anything besides protein packets
and recycled bilge water?”

“Actually,
I’m a man of comforts,” Loid responded. “Above the stove you’ll find freeze
dried foods of all colors of the rainbow. Stay away from the Orion peppers
though. They’re hallucinogenic, so I’m saving them for a special occasion.”

“Right,”
she said as she slipped through the passage back into the living quarters.

“Ah,”
Loid said as she was out of earshot. “To be so young and so sure. I used to be
that, but the ‘verse has a way of undoing our certainties.”

“I can’t
say I’m too certain about anything,” I answered.

“Yes, I
can see that,” Loid answered. “That’s a better way to be I think, a skeptic is
rarely surprised. Though you seem to be hovering between skepticism and
ignorance. That’s a bit more hazardous.”

“Does the
Collective really have stories about a space whale?” I asked.

“The
whale? Oh yes, the stories are real, and true enough,” he answered. “I was out
prospecting once with Mith, an old Hoken friend of mine that I used to travel
with, we were scanning an asteroid and found huge beams lodged in the stones.
At first we thought it was a huge wreck of a ship. The scans came back that the
remains were biological. There wasn’t enough to prove what it was, and then we
lost the exact location on our return trip when we tangled into an ion storm
and our computer systems were fried. But I am certain it was a Space Whale’s
rib cage. Sometime I’ll retrace that trip and see if I can find it again. Too
bad the Draugari moved into that region after the bat
tle at Centauri, or I’d be back searching right now. There is a fortune
to be had if a traveler can bring back proof of a Space Whale, but there’s no
profit to be had if your head gets stuck on a
Draugari pike before you
make it home.”

I looked
at him, skeptical.

“Oh,
yeah,” Loid dug around for something. “I almost forgot, I found this in the
wreck, figured you could use it.”

It was an
empty Draugari sheath.

“Thanks,”
I answered as I took it. I turned it over in my hand. It was made of some kind
of leather with ornate designs scrawled throughout. Its smoothness felt like an
old friend as I slid my blade into it.

The
flight through the Eridani system to our first flux point
took almost three hours. When we reached it, I found
that the flux point from Eridani to Aurae was just empty space. Loid explained
that flux points in populated systems are oft
en controlled by local
authorities, stationary outposts, or patrol fleets. But here, off the beaten
path and a few fluxes removed from civilized space, it was nothing but a blip
on a display screen. When we arrived at the location, Loid spun up the grav
drive and we fluxed.

My
stomach whirled as space outside turned into a shifting blurred pattern of
nothingness. Gravity seemed to spin as I lost my bearings, not only on
direction, but on time, and reality itself. After a few agonizing moments, it
was over. When the flux completed, it seemed like not much had changed. We were
still floating in the blackness of space, but instead of a distant yellow star,
there was a bright white one.

“I was
scanning an asteroid belt out here when I caught your Celestrial and Draugari
frie
nds passing through,” Loid said. “It looked
like they were coming from Hyades, luckily the flux point isn’t too far. You
can end up with a long slog between fluxes out here in the Nymphs.”

“The Nymphs?” I asked. “What are they?”

Loid paused again to look at me sidelong before he continued.

“You’re in the Nymphs,” he answered, turning back to the
controls. “It’s a patch of eight systems. Aurae, Hyades, Maia, Celaeno, and,
damn there are a few others, there on the map. Back in ancient times on Earth
there was a pagan religion that believed in all sorts of gods and spirits, the
spirits of nature were called nymphs.

I leaned back and studied the star map. There were dozens of
blue, yellow, and orange spheres representing different stars. Aurae, where we
were flying, was marked with a green dot. I followed a connecting line from
Aurae and saw Eridani, my home system that we had just left. Up and to the
right I saw a long string of connected stars, large, floating green letters
labeled the region the Earthborn Protectorate. I followed another dotted line
further upward and to the left from our position to three closely packed stars
with the label “The Furies.” Beyond the furies was a series of unnamed stars
accented by bright red.

“The Furies,” I repeated. “I’ve heard of those before.”

“I’d bet,” Loid answered as he moved the display to focus in
on the three pale-blue stars. “The Furies are one of the two gateways between
the Earthborn Society and the Celestrial Empire. Both sides have fleets
patrolling and keeping guard over their flux points. The Celestrials like to
keep to their borders secure and do most of their trading with the Protectorate
and Collective through the trading hubs in the Nexus system. They’ve been in
the stars longer than most, don’t trust most outsiders, and like to keep their
borders closed.”

“But you have Celestrial markings on your tailfin,” I
recalled Lee noticing them during our conversation earlier. “That means you can
get in and out?”

“My access is minimal, but I can poke my nose into the
Empire,” Loid said, his voice tinged with self-satisfaction.

“How is that? If they don’t trust outsiders?” I asked.

“
Most
outsiders,” Loid corrected me. “We’ll deal with
that when we get there. In the meantime, I think it’s time to grab some lunch.”

He set
our course for
Hyades
, a 10 hour trip. 
The food stocks that Loid maintained were far better than anything I’d eaten
back at the colony. The colonial rations were all processed protein molded and
flavored to look and smell like other foods. Loid’s food, on the other hand,
was freeze-dried versions of the real thing. I was amazed at the depth of
flavor and texture as I bit into a rehydrated apple. After we ate, Loid showed
us around
Tons-o-Fun
and gave us a primer on the flight, control, and
combat systems.

As he
walked us through the ship, he told us how he came from an overcrowded moon on
the edge of the Protectorate’s border with the Collective. He left his family
and signed onto a fuel hauler bound for the Collective when he was 14.
Eventually, he somehow managed to save enough to purchase
Tons-o-Fun
, a
rundown Scotsman that had been bound for the scrap pile. Over the next ten
years he had flown
Tons-o-Fun
from one end of the known universe to the
other, picking up tricks, technology, and, of course, stories, along the way.

Loid
wasn’t a simple scavenger. He had run with pirates, and he had run from
pirates. I gathered that he did his fair share of smuggling using scan-shielded
compartments for hauling illegal goods, but he also had official (looking)
trade authorizations for dozens of systems.