The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (2 page)

The hammering on the hull seemed to follow her, as though whatever was out there was tracking her movements. She banished the thought as ridiculous and got suited up in a blue-gray OreCorp-issue battle-armor suit. Yelan did the same.
 

The auto-fit, graphene-strengthened titanium suits were leftovers from the Century War. The dull gray surfaces showed scratches and dents that had been hastily repaired. Though they looked ugly, they would do the job. The materials could deflect a high-caliber caseless round all day every day.
 

That wasn’t to say the body within the suit wouldn’t be bruised to hell and back, but at least the rounds wouldn’t puncture the life-preserving shell. A team of six first responders joined the two senior officers in the armory and suited up.

Each person grabbed an auto-rifle from the weapons rack, loaded up a fresh mag, and waited for Sereva’s instructions. She stood in front of them, Yelan by her side. She was about to yell her orders, that they were to sweep the ship and find out what the hell was turning the place into a drum set, when the sounds suddenly stopped.
 

Any words she was about to speak paused on her lips. She scanned the roof as though she could magically see through to the outside.
 

“They’ve stopped,” one of the ensigns said with a relieved sigh.
 

“You’re the observant one of the team, then?” Sereva replied, rolling her eyes. Before the ensign had time to retort, the captain commanded them to follow her to the airlock. “We need to check this out,” she growled. “I ain’t a sitting duck.”

It took a few minutes to go through the airlock.
 

Sereva, Yelan, and their team of first responders stepped out onto the dark planet’s surface. Speaking through their internal communications, Sereva ordered them to fan out in pairs. “Shoot to kill,” she said. “We’re not here on a preservation order. I don’t care how rare or valuable these things are, whatever they might be. They die… or we do. Understood?” All she wanted to do right now was secure the area and then activate the cargo; it was clear to her now that they wouldn’t be leaving the planet. That didn’t matter now; dealing with the cargo was the only priority.
 

“Ooh-rah,” the squad said as they followed her orders, fanning out in pairs. Yelan stayed with her. The two of them, side by side, their rifles raised, stepped one foot over the other, making their way toward the bow of the ship.
 

Yelan stood on the outside and covered the dense, dark forest, while Sereva kept her weapon pointed forward. Occasionally she looked up, expecting something to jump down at them from the black sky.
 

They made a complete circuit around the faded-blue hull of the ship, meeting up with the other team.
 

“Nothing,” the observant ensign said.
 

“Yet,” another said.
 

“Okay, enough,” Sereva snapped. “Head back to the airlock and get an engineer out here to fix the cameras. I want four of you to trace our trajectory back through the woods and recover the radio dish. And remember, you see anything move, make sure it doesn’t move anymore. We’re not taking any chances.”

The team split, two heading into the ship, the other four stalking through the carnage of the ship’s entry route. Snapped trees formed a long V shape around a long crater in the planet’s muddy, clay soil.

The captain and her navigation officer followed the other two back to the airlock. She activated her internal communication unit within her suit and ordered the cargo crew to prepare the hold for transport of the object. Static filled her ears, jamming her channel. She winced at the volume and switched it off.
 

The first responders and Yelan went inside, but Sereva felt something behind her. She stopped and cocked her head, listening via the helmet’s external mic.
 

She felt a low rumble of vibrations up through her feet and legs.
 

“What is it?” Yelan said. He was standing in the airlock’s outer chamber and had turned to face her.
 

She gripped her rifle and continued to listen. She looked up at him to tell him what she had felt when she saw his face, his eyes bulging, his mouth opening wide.
 

She didn’t have time to hear him.
 

Two bone-colored protrusions thrust out beneath her arms, lifting her clear of the floor by at least a meter. She couldn’t move, the grip on her ribs too strong. She stared down at the alien protrusions, confused at what she was seeing. Her legs dangled. Yelan screamed and raised his rifle.
 

Sereva tried to turn her head around, but she was stuck in place.
 

The navigation officer fired a full burst over Sereva’s shoulder, burning through the mag in less than two seconds, but the grip around her body did not let up, the rifle’s rounds seemingly having no effect on the creature holding her from behind.

A dark shape appeared at the top of the ship. It jumped down in front of her, blocking her view of her lover and best officer. Before she could understand what was happening, she heard Yelan’s screams cut off as four of the creature’s six legs punctured his suit.

Then she was moving as she screamed, dragged backwards through the forest by some great creature. They were all around her suddenly. Huge dark shapes clambering through the dense trees with many limbs, but their forms so alien she couldn’t understand what was happening.
 

The pain hit her, the protrusions squeezing tighter against her ribs. All the while, she wondered what the hell could puncture a graphene-weave battle suit.

Over her comm channel, she heard the screams of the rest of her crew through the static. She finally came to a stop in a clearing. Her body convulsed with the shock of the pain. From out of the dense trees another one of the things stepped, in full clear, hideous view. It was then she realized what she was looking at and screamed until it punctured through her mask… OreCorp was wrong; so very wrong.

Chapter Two

The murderer ran through the busy metropolitan area of Fides Prime’s capital city.
 

Carson Mach had trouble keeping her in view, even with the adrenal boost from a stim shot fresh in his muscles. Shocked onlookers spread apart, leaving a narrow pathway through the sea of humanity for Mach to sprint after his agile prey.
 

She was heading for the transtube station a few hundred meters up ahead. The cylindrical building’s outer glass shell was lit to a burning orange by the heavy morning sun. A bullet-carriage on the maglev track was preparing to depart.

If the murderous human known only as ‘Ripper’ got on the carriage before Mach could get to her, he could kiss a much-needed payday goodbye—which, as ever, he needed in order to clear numerous misdemeanor fines—or face a decade of solitary on the prison planet Summanus.
 

These days the fines he received included an extra Carson Mach tax, imposed by his former friend and officer, Morgan, who was now a head honcho in the Commonwealth government.
 

“She’s getting away,” a gravelly voice said in Mach’s comlink.
 

“No shit, Sanchez,” Mach replied between heavy breaths. “You wanna help me out here? You’re supposed to be the great hunter, after all.”
 

“Just keep running, old man.”

Ripper knocked over a group of people and stumbled, her muscular arms flailing for balance. Mach gritted his teeth and pushed himself harder, pumping his legs across the smooth sidewalk surface. He vaulted over a couple of elderly vestans who were struggling to get to their feet.
 

“I can’t reach her in time,” Mach said.
 

Ripper was no more than fifty meters away from the carriage. She held up a small laser pistol and aimed it at the guard who stood within a booth by the side of the transtube entrance.
 

The guard, a young man, dived out of the side for cover.
 

A cackle came from the murderer.

If anyone was worth a bounty of three million eros, it was Ripper. Her kill count had exceeded a hundred souls in the last few months alone. And those were the ones that could be accounted for.

“Might be time for a plan B,” Mach said to Sanchez as he checked his smart-screen, the holographic personal computer on his left forearm, to see if he could spot Sanchez’s location, but as expected, he was nowhere to be seen, having gone into stealth mode.

Mach would have preferred if he and Sanchez had both given chase, but the old hunter suggested in his usual blunt way that he knew what the hell he was doing and Mach ought to just trust him for once.
 

The doors to the transtube closed shut—the guard must have activated a remote security protocol. Ripper smashed her shoulder into it at full tilt and just bounced off. She reached into a black leather pack attached to her back and pulled out a small puck-like device. She placed it on the glass doors and dived behind the security booth, making the guard sprint away into a crowd of people.

Mach could already hear the high-pitched whine of the tactical explosive device as he closed in. He was no more than fifty meters away now and was in the direct path of the blast zone.
 

“Everyone get to cover!” he yelled, using his exosuit’s external speakers to warn the dozens of people who had stuck around to watch the conflict. The people scattered, heading into commercial buildings or squatting behind large steel planters.
 

He had no such cover to reach in time. He closed his eyes, pulled his arms into his chest, and fell into a tight combat roll. His exosuit whirred as the impact-activated nanoweave stiffened around him.
 

A thunderous shockwave crashed into him, rolling him backward, but his suit’s servos kicked in, stalling the momentum. Mach lifted his head. The transtube doors were shattered into a million pieces. The security booth lay in a heap of splintered plastic. Not good. Not good at all.

Ripper clambered out from beneath the pile of material and headed toward the jagged opening. Mach stood, drew out his SamCore Stinger, and aimed, but the blast had screwed with his targeting array. His aiming reticule danced about, making it difficult for him to get the shot.
 

While Mach tried to steady his aim, he watched in horror as the door to the carriage opened and she stepped her right leg inside. He fired, and missed. She turned and smiled at him with her sharp cruel features and eyes hidden behind mirrored lenses.
 

His hands shook violently, his muscles protesting against the assisting servos of the suit. She turned her back and made to step inside, taking away Mach’s bounty and his last chance to prevent a long term in solitary.

Before she could step inside completely, however, her left knee blew out, sending a spray of bone, cartilage, and blood into the carriage. The other passengers screamed and headed down the narrow walkway to the next section. Ripper crashed to her front, gripping her leg.
 

She leaned up, drew her laser pistol, and aimed it at Mach, a pained grimace stretched across her face.

With his targeting messed up, he didn’t take a chance, but dived to his right, using the destroyed security booth for cover.
 

Her shot went wide.
 

A quiet
whump
whispered across the sheet instead of the expected sound of a laser bolt.
 

Ripper slumped to her back, twitched once, and started to bleed out from a wound in her head. Her body lay still.
 

When Mach’s heart rate lowered and he managed to override the exosuit’s damaged controls, he activated his comlink. “Sanchez, tell me that was you?”
 

Mach stood and spun round to see if he could spot his old friend in the crowd of people who had started to fill up the street again now that the danger was over. Mach couldn’t see Ernesto Sanchez, though that didn’t mean he wasn’t there, somewhere.
 

Sanchez was as good a hunter as he’d ever seen—or not, as the case may be.
 

“Yeah, Bleach,” Sanchez said, using Mach’s nickname, on account of his ability to go in and clean up other people’s messes. “I thought you’d need a helping hand there.”

“I could have completed the job,” Mach grumbled, walking over to Ripper’s inert body and checking her for signs of life—of which there were none. “But thanks, it was a good shot. Where the hell are you, anyway?” Sanchez’s ID blip flashed on Mach’s holographic smart-screen.
 

“Found myself a nice vantage point,” Sanchez said.
 

“Holy crap, man, you’re over two klicks away. How did you make that shot?”

The old hunter rattled off a ton of metrics, including velocity, angles, wind speed, direction, atmospheric pressure, and a bunch of other factors Mach had never heard of.
 

“Well,” Mach said, “I’m glad you figured it all out in time. I thought I had lost you back there in the chase.”

“Nah, I’m getting too old to go chasing around the streets like we were kids.”

“Tell me about it,” Mach said. “Well, how ’bout you get your hide over here and help me with the body. We need to hand it in to get the bounty.”

“Sure, give me ten standard minutes.”

A group of travellers had gathered around Mach and Ripper’s body. He assured them with a flash of his smart-screen that he was on official CW—Commonwealth—business. His fake ID convinced the rabble, and they eventually dispersed, already bored of the situation. Mach dragged the murderer’s body out of the carriage so the transport AI could close the doors and get the transtube system running again.
 

While Mach waited for Sanchez, he sent a biometric scan of Ripper’s body to the Bounty Office for verification. Within a couple of seconds they had paid half his bounty and sent the address where he had to take the body for verification. Then they’d pay him his final half.