The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (10 page)

Adira stood in the dark recess of the room, stretching her back by arching backwards until her hands and feet were both touching the floor, forming a perfect lowercase n shape. Although upside down, she faced him and gave him a smile and a wink before easing herself upright and turning to face him. She sighed with pleasure as she leaned forward to grasp her ankles. She straightened once more and stepped toward Mach. She pulled a hunting knife from her belt and thrust forward suddenly.
 

Mach twisted away, his mouth open in surprise, wondering where the attack had come from, when she backed away and lifted the knife up between them. A bug stuck on the end, it’s legs wiggling frantically, venom dripping to the floor of the facility.
 

“I didn’t think it was protocol to bring along passengers,” Adira said with a smile.
 

“I thought you were…” Mach said, then just laughed and shook his head.
 

“Kill you?” Adira said. “Oh, darling, if I were to do that, you wouldn’t see it coming. And I wouldn’t miss.”

“That’s… good to know.”

Sanchez grumbled something and joined Babcock. Mach and Adira followed until they were all standing around the scientist. Above the radar, Squid Two hovered, inspecting the readings.
 

“There’s nothing,” Babcock said. “The planet is barren. The only concentration of metals I can find is the facility itself”—he pointed to a red dot on the holographic sphere—“and, of course, the
Intrepid
and its drone.” Both were likewise indicated by two small red dots.
 

“Given the size of
Voyager
, it should be easy to spot, right?” Adira said.
 

“Indeed,” Squid Two replied with its chirping little voice. “It would be the biggest concentration of metal on this awful rock.”
 

“Then it’s safe to say it’s not here,” Sanchez said. “And we’ve wasted all this damned time for nothing when we could have just wiped the data and left.” He slammed a fist onto the console, making the holographic radar blink twice before reforming its shape.
 

Mach’s comlink chirped twice, indicating a message from the
Intrepid
. “Channel open,” he said, speaking into his HUD’s control system. Lassea’s face appeared on the inside of his visor. “What it is, Lass?” he asked.
 

“Sir, Tulula and I have discovered a radio signal.”

“What kind of signal?” Mach routed the conversation through the general comlink channel so the whole crew could communicate.
 

“Here, I’ll play it,” the junior pilot said.
 

A series of bleeps and chirps came through the channel.
 

“That’s an emergency beacon signal,” Babcock said. “I used to listen to hundreds of those during my time back on Minerva. There’s a kind of music to them after a while.” The old scientist smiled fondly. Squid Two’s chirps synchronized with the signal as if singing a melody with it.
 

“What does it communicate?” Adira said.
 

“It’s a binary pulse message,” Tulula said.

“She’s right,” Babcock added. “It’s a shortwave signal with an unencrypted message giving the ship number and Salus Sphere registration code.”

Babcock raised his left arm and gestured with agile fingers across the smart-screen, entering the binary notation from the signal. He sent the numbers to Mach’s smart-screen.
 

“That’s them,” he said. “That’s the registration number of
Voyager
. Ladies, do we have a location?”

“We’ve triangulated it to the northern hemisphere of Noven Alpha,” Tulula said, a slight tremble of excitement in her voice. Since she had joined the crew, she hadn’t had much chance to show off her skills beyond making sure the experimental vestan engine in the
Intrepid
was running optimally.
 

Given the humans and fidesians of the CW were at war with her species and the horans during the Century War, it had taken her a while to grow to trust the crew and feel like she was an important part of the team. Mach was pleased that she along with Lassea had found the signal. It would only help to integrate her with the crew.

“Keep a lock on the signal and program the coordinates into the flight nav,” Mach said.

“Already on it, sir.” Lassea gave him a salute.
 

“Prepare for takeoff. We’ll be with you shortly.”

Mach switched off the comlink and addressed the others. “Time to go. We move now on the double. No stopping for anything, understood? We get back to the
Intrepid
and get off this godforsaken rock right now. I’ll take point. Adira, you take the rear. Let’s move.”

Babcock stood and his little drone hovered over his shoulder. “About the shell,” he enquired.

“You can work on it during the journey to Alpha,” Mach said. “Don’t worry, I have the sample with me.”

Mach had decided to switch off the facility’s power, feeling like the people who had hid here did it for a perfectly good reason and he saw no other reason to do otherwise. He led his team back to the
Intrepid
and boarded just as Tulula fired up the engines and prepped for a quick burst over to Alpha. It would take approximately a day to get there. That would give plenty of time for Babcock to run his experiments.

And plenty of time for Mach to figure out how he was going to tell his crew the truth about the mission. He couldn’t delay it any longer. If
Voyager
were on Alpha, they would need to know. He couldn’t expect them to potentially sacrifice their lives for the safety of the Salus Sphere without knowing what it was they were trying to find—and ultimately destroy.
 

***

When they escaped Noven Beta’s gravity well and headed out to Alpha on cruise control, Mach ordered everyone into the mess hall. It had become the unofficial meeting place for the ship’s crew—probably because it had the coffee and booze.
 

The room smelled rich with the rare beans and another scent: fried eggs. It reminded him that he hadn’t eaten for a while—at least a day and a half ago. The shot of stim he took before landing on Beta had worn off. He sat on his own at the table, knocking back a small cup of coffee followed by a shot of the best Fides single malt.
 

The two liquids complemented each other perfectly, warming his throat and belly and giving him a jolt of motivation. He stood when the others entered the mess. They were all chatting to each other about one thing or another, but grew silent when they came to stand by the table. Mach moved to the head of it and indicated that they all sit.
 

None did.
 

Sanchez cocked an eyebrow in a silent inquiry.
 

Babcock was the first to speak up. “What is this about, Mach?”

“The truth,” Mach said.
 

Adira leaned against the wall beside the door. She almost melted into the shadows, given her black body suit. Her green-tinged skin seemed to grow darker like some deadly chameleon. Tulula was in front of her, standing next to Sanchez, the latter looking increasingly tired.
 

“About what?” Lassea asked as she rounded Sanchez and Tulula and stood by the table with Babcock. “Is it something we’ve done?”

Mach knew that she meant herself. That was the one thing he needed to work on: give the girl the confidence to think she wasn’t always in trouble for something. Of all his crew, she was the one he trusted the most. She was far more capable than she could ever believe. And there was goodness inside of her.
 

Which couldn’t be said for himself, nor Adira or Sanchez.
 

Lassea was like a beacon of virtue compared to the rest of the crew. It was just a shame she didn’t have her twin brother with her to share the role. He would have helped her become stronger-willed a lot faster, but for now, Mach would take that role.

“Firstly,” he said, “I wanted to thank Lassea and Tulula for their superb work in finding the signal. Without you two, we’d still be fighting off bugs on Beta. But that aside, I wanted to explain more about the mission.”

“About time,” Sanchez said.

Mach glared at his friend and replied with, “And in the spirit of sharing, Sanchez, you’re going to tell the truth once I’m done. That’s not an option either. You either tell us what’s going on with you, or I’ll give you an escape pod so you can leave the crew.”

It wasn’t a pleasant experience to have to threaten his friend to speak up, but Mach had to do something, both as the captain of the ship with his responsibility for the crew, and as a friend. It was clear Sanchez was suffering and was too proud to speak up.
 

Sanchez folded his arms across his considerable chest and glowered at Mach across the table. “You first,” he grumbled.
 

“Fine,” Mach said. “So, the mission. As most of you realize, we’re getting paid way more than is usual for an F&R. The reason is because the cargo of
Voyager
is… sensitive.”

“How sensitive exactly?” Adira said from the shadows.
 

“Sensitive enough that if it’s not destroyed, then the entire Salus Sphere is under threat.”

The atmosphere grew thick now. The coffee and scotch sloshed in his guts.
 

Lassea seemed to go pale, but she still leaned forward to learn more. “What is it?” she asked. “What do we need to do?”

Babcock remained silent throughout, scrutinizing Mach through his spectacles as Squid Two hovered silently over his shoulder, the little droid’s tentacle arms remaining still.
 

“It’s a new kind of bomb,” Mach said, just wanting the truth to be out and the weight off his shoulders. “When OreCorp was originally hired by the CW hierarchy to mine for uranium, they found a new element. Over the years they experimented with it, testing its strange capabilities. Until one day they discovered what it actually could do.”

The entire crew was staring at him now. He could feel Adira’s gaze on him even from her shadowed aspect at the rear of the room.
 

Babcock was the first to speak. “Get to the point, Mach, what does this element do?”

“It creates a black hole when the atoms are split.” There, it was out, though he didn’t feel much better for it. Just thinking of that kind of power getting into the wrong hands made his guts burn with nervous acid.
 

Sanchez shook his head with his eyes closed, as though what Mach was saying was impossible, but his old friend would know that Mach wasn’t lying.
 

“This is crazy,” Tulula said. “To create a black hole would require enormous amounts of energy—and mass.”

“Like a planet?” Mach said.
 

“Oh…” Tulula said, catching on.
 

“This is the situation,” Mach continued. “The CWDF had OreCorp develop a super weapon shortly before the Century War ended. At the time, it looked like the horan-led Axis Combine was going to win control of the Salus Sphere and ultimately the galaxy. This black-hole bomb was going to be the last throw of the dice if that happened, but luckily the CWDF won and it didn’t come to pass.”

“So where’s it been all this time?” Lassea asked.
 

“I don’t know, the guys at OreCorp wouldn’t share that with me. Top-secret status. But what we do know is that the CW wanted to get rid of it so it couldn’t fall into the wrong hands. A cell of vestan spies was caught last week infiltrating the CW hierarchy data stores.”

Tulula bristled at this. Mach didn’t blame her. Her kind was a strange lot. On the one hand technically superior to any other race, but also inherently clandestine and untrusting. Despite the recent peace treaty that brought the vestans into the Commonwealth and out of the Axis Combine, there was still a hangover from the cold war days.
 

“I don’t condone that,” Tulula said.
 

“I know,” Mach responded as Sanchez wrapped an arm around her waist, giving her a squeeze of encouragement. “You have no worries while with us. You’re a valued member of the crew regardless of what other vestans do. But anyway, due to that breach, the hierarchy decided they could no longer keep such a weapon or its research in case it fell into the wrong hands.”

“And not necessarily Axis hands,” Babcock added, showing his general disdain for the CWDF and the ‘idiots’ that run it.
 

“True enough,” Mach said. “Either way, a weapon like that is too dangerous. The ability to destroy an entire planet and use the gravity to create a black hole in a system is way beyond any species’ power. It was loaded onto
Voyager
and sent out here to the Noven system.”

“Because it’s an abandoned one?” Sanchez said, finally adding something to the conversation. “And they wouldn’t miss it if the weapon was… disposed of.”
 

“Yeah, something like that.
Voyager
was sent on a suicide mission to activate the bomb and thus destroy any evidence, but when the ship went missing, naturally, OreCorp wanted to make sure it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. That’s where we come in. Due to the sensitive nature of the weapon technology, they couldn’t send a fleet of destroyers after it; they’d only cause suspicion, especially with the horans still keeping a close eye on movements around the borders.”

Sanchez grabbed a seat and slumped to the table.
 

This was the cue for the rest of the crew to follow. Mach saw a mixed range of emotions on their faces: fear, trepidation, horror, but above all, determination. Adira joined Mach at his end of the table and sat opposite. “We have to do this,” she said quietly.
 

“It’s insane,” Tulula said. “Dangerous, reckless… but I suppose necessary. I just wish you could have told us from the start. My respect for you has diminished because of this.”

Mach appreciated her candor and couldn’t blame her. It was a decision he’d struggled with, but given the situation, he couldn’t risk not having the help of his crew. None of them, including him, had any family or loved ones waiting for them. If it did become a suicide mission, and that was looking likely since the bomb clearly hadn’t gone off as planned the previous week, then this was the best crew to send after it, find it, and detonate it before anyone else found it.