The Lost Voyager: A Space Opera Novel (3 page)

Then he would be a free man again, with no threat of a vacation to Summanus.

“Ah,” he said, breathing in the cool morning air. “It feels good to be free.”

A CW uniformed ambassador sneered at him as she walked past, craning her neck to see the bloodied remains of Ripper’s body. Mach just gave her a wide grin, making her snort and shuffle off.
 

“Yep, a fine day indeed.”

***

Mach entered the mess of his ship, the
Intrepid
, and sat down at the table with the rest of his crew, their expectant eyes all focused on him, an unspoken question hanging heavy in the pregnant air.
 

“Well?” Adira, his on-off lover, assassin, and generally complicated woman, said. “The fact you’re not in lockup tells me you managed to complete the job. Did you get paid?” She sat directly opposite him, her arms folded against her chest, her shoulders and back held straight. Her dark eyes narrowed, an eyebrow arched.
 

A smile stretched across Mach’s face. He threw a heavy silver token onto the titanium table surface. It clanked heavily before coming to rest. The overhead strip lights glared brightly off its surface.

“What is it?” Lassea, the
Intrepid
’s pilot, said, scraping back her chair so she could lean across the table to get a closer view.
 

“A Noven security credential,” an old voice said, answering for Mach. It came from behind him. Mach turned and nodded at the man with a small, multi-armed drone hovering above his right shoulder.
 

“You know of this place, then, Babcock?” Mach said to his old friend.
 

“Yeah, I’ve seen one before.”

Kingsley Babcock and Carson Mach had served together in the Century War, on the side of the Commonwealth fighting against the horan-led Axis Combine. Kingsley’s specialty was cyber warfare, but he had taken the knowledge and used it to create a host of intelligent drones. Mach knew that if it weren’t for the drones, Kingsley would have gone completely mad during his exile to the barren planet of Minerva.
 

After one of Kingsley’s hacking missions went wrong, providing an entry point into the CW’s IT system to their enemy, he couldn’t live down the shame of his actions that led to thousands of deaths. Realizing his curiosity and talents would likely get more people killed in the future, Kingsley exiled himself on Minerva for decades, only coming out of his self-imposed imprisonment when Mach had found him and convinced him to join his crew.
 

Since then, Kingsley had been a highly valuable member of the team, along with his collection of drones. The one that hovered above him now, a shiny metal sphere with eight fully articulating arms wriggling about, was called Squid Two. The original Squid drone had unfortunately met its end during another one of the crew’s adventures.
 

Adira focused on the holographic display on her right forearm. She gestured her lithe fingers across it with elegant movements. Lassea, a young pilot of twenty, leaned closer to her older colleague, and one she looked up to—but then it was more out of fear of her reputation than a respect for her skills, not that they were regarded as anything less than incredible—and deadly.
 

“Huh,” Lassea said, reading the search results from Adira’s smart-screen. “A dead mining operation, two dwarf planets, no signs of life or activity for over ten standard years… what’s that got to do with this shiny trinket?”

“That trinket, my dear girl, Babcock said, “is a security token for the NMO—Noven Mining Organization—main facility. Each token holds a terabyte of security protocols. Each member of the corporation carried one for both visual and computational inspection.”

“Seems medieval,” Adira said. “Why not just use remote biometrics like the rest of the Salus Sphere’s organizations?”

“You have no sense of romance,” Ernesto Sanchez, the hunter, said as he entered the mess hall, striding with those long legs of his. “Each token is made from a pure sample of whatever the facility is designed to mine. They were reminders of all the hardship the workers went through, as well as a status and security symbol.”

His rounded shoulders hunched over a wide, bulky torso. His leather jerkin looked as worn as his weather-beaten face. A threaded necklace of varied animals’ teeth around his neck swayed and clinked with each step. The big man nodded at each of the crew, except the vestan engineer, who stood in the shadows of the kitchen to the rear of the mess.
 

Tulula and Sanchez looked as if they had had an argument, Mach thought, watching the two of them. The female vestan refused to return Sanchez’s nod of greeting. The alien woman hadn’t had much trouble integrating with the crew since Mach picked her up on a previous mission, but over the last few days he had noticed her becoming more withdrawn, spending most of her time in her private berth or here, in the kitchen, cooking up only God knows what.
 

“I think it’s pretty,” Lassea said, holding it by the edges with the tips of her fingers and angling it so a rainbow of colors glimmered beneath the lights. “But what do we have it for?” She looked up at Mach with the same look of innocence she had kept since the very first day she and her brother, now no longer a member of the crew, had met Mach.
 

Mach thought back to that time briefly and smiled as he remembered how green she was, how naïve. But now, after a few months with the Bleach crew, she had toughened up into a highly capable pilot, despite her apparent innocence.
 

“It’s payment of sorts,” Mach said. “A kind of deposit on our services. It represents our next job and the future security of this ship and its crew—as long as we’re successful.”

Babcock and Squid Two stepped closer to Mach’s right. Sanchez was on his left, and even Tulula, with her strange shiny black alien features, leaned forward out of the serving hatch of the mess kitchen. Adira, cool as ever, just rested back in her chair, stifling a yawn.
 

She only ever seemed to come alive when her, or one of the crew’s, life was at risk. One of the many reasons Mach liked her: she was dependable when it mattered, and usually when it didn’t either.
 

“So what are we doing?” Sanchez said.
 

“Well, there’s a mining exploration craft that’s gone missing. OreCorp sent it out to destroy some corporate data and carry out another little job.”

“No communications from the explorer?” Lassea asked.
 

Mach shook his head. “The ship, named
Voyager
, last communicated with OreCorp headquarters a day away from the Noven system. After that there was nothing. Not even a distress beacon.”

“Could have been taken out by pirates,” Adira said. “The Noven system is in deep space outside of the Salus Sphere’s CW protection force.”

“It’s a possibility,” Mach said.

“So,” Sanchez said, “you’ve taken on this job for us to go find out what happened?”

“Exactly like that. I thought you’d enjoy the hunt for the ship,” Mach said.
 

The older hunter shrugged noncommittally. “Depends.”

“On what the payment is,” Tulula, the vestan engineer, said, finally speaking up. The rest of the crew turned to face her, seemingly oblivious to her prior presence.
 

“Two million each,” Mach said. “If we wipe the data and locate the ship.”

Adira made a low whistling noise. She looked up at Mach and fixed him with her glacial stare that he was never able to look away from. “That sounds like danger money,” the assassin said.
 

“Exactly that,” Mach agreed. “It’s a complete gamble, this one. We don’t know what happened to
Voyager
, but OreCorp is insanely rich and wants its toys back. So that’s what we’re going to do. Lassea, plot a course for the Noven system. Tulula, Babcock, Squid Two, I want you in engineering, preparing for a weeklong LightDrive jump.

“What about us?” Sanchez said, pointing to himself then Adira with his thumb.

“Weapons check; both ship-installed and personal. Whatever’s out there, it’s managed to maim an OreCorp exploration craft: that means it’s tough, and we’ll need to be on our toes.”

With a series of shuffling chairs, salutes, and whispered gossip, the crew set about their orders. When Adira and Mach were left alone in the mess, Adira closed the door and pressed herself against him. “How dangerous is it?” she asked, whispering into his ear, her hot breath making his skin tingle.

“Very,” he replied, wrapping his arms around her waist, pulling her closer to him so they were facing each other, their eyes just a few inches apart.
 

“So this might be the only chance we get,” Adira said.
 

“Better make the most of it.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. Now shut the hell up, Captain, and kiss me.”

That was one order Mach didn’t mind following.

He was honest when he spoke about the danger levels. No one truly knew what was out there in deep space beyond the safety zone of the Salus Sphere. Mach didn’t relay OreCorp’s fear to the crew of what might have happened to
Voyager
, but whatever it was, Mach and his friends were going to have to face the same thing—and survive long enough to find the exploration craft.

Chapter Three

Mach checked his smart-screen. It had been six days since they had left Fides Prime. They were just a single day’s L-jump away from hitting the Noven system and he’d still not told the crew their full mission.
 

They thought it was just a routine find-and-rescue job with a bit of data destruction bolted to the side. Easy in, easy out, everyone gets paid and a few months off. It’s not like he enjoyed withholding information from them; he’d rather tell them straight what they were expected to do, but he knew if he did that, there’d be squabbling over what they would do with the cargo once they had secured it from
Voyager
.
 

He stepped across his plush accommodation berth that also doubled as the captain’s operations room. He had smart-screens on three of the four walls, all sending him data and metrics about their journey and
Intrepid
’s operational capacities.
 

Sitting on a stool, he yawned and stretched his arms above his head. A bone clicked in his neck, reminding him of an old injury he had suffered while fighting alongside Sanchez on a barren ice planet.
 

If it wasn’t for his old friend, Mach would have frozen to death and his body would have been a chewy snack to that particular world’s carnivorous flying lizards. Great things they were, with feathered wings and pointed snouts that carried teeth sharp and strong enough to strip flesh and tendon clean off the bone with the barest of efforts.
 

Through each screen he watched the video feeds sending him back images of the crew going about their business. It no longer felt like spying on them since he had told him that all parts of the ship were observable from his operations room. They took that with good grace and no resistance.
 

They trusted him.
 

They were his friends first and crew second.
 

Which made keeping the truth from them that much harder to deal with. He knew it would eat him up inside, but it was for their own good. Once they had found the lost craft and recovered the cargo for OreCorp, they’d all have more money than they’d ever seen before in their lives. They would no longer have to do these kinds of jobs, working freelance as a group of renegades, willing and able to do almost any mission regardless of its legality and danger.

Adira was sitting at her console to the right of the bridge. Her responsibility was to keep weapons operational and ready for use. Mach thought back to an issue he and Adira had recently overcome: her contract to assassinate him. For years he wanted to know who had taken it out, but she refused to tell him.
 

He found out anyway, and truth be told, he wasn’t surprised, but he let it go. The fact Adira hadn’t actually completed the contract—the very first time she had done such a thing in her career—told him that he and Adira’s relationship went beyond captain and crewmember.
 

She was a hybrid human-fidesian, taking the best—and the worst—of each species. Though she looked human apart from her green tinged skin, her physiology was actually closer to fidesian, which was responsible for her deep emerald eyes.
 

Tulula was different. The vestans could grow and manipulate their limbs to suit their environment and job, making them highly prized engineers and spies. This was the prime reason why the lizard race of the horans, the main constituent of the CW’s enemy, the Axis Combine, had fought so hard to bring the vestans into their alliance with the lacterns—a minor race that did little more than weakly probe the southern edge of the Salus Sphere with their drone ships.
 

A ghost sensation of Adira’s warm body against Mach’s remained on his skin as he sat and watched her manipulate the controls. She was calibrating the laser batteries and ion cannon. Mach wondered if she were thinking about their time together the past few days. Was it more than just sex for her?

He told himself it was; otherwise she would have completed her contract long ago. But neither of them had openly spoken about their feelings to each other. He guessed it was due to the nature of their work. Always being the ones to go in and clean up other people’s highly dangerous screw-ups didn’t exactly give the sense of a secure future together.
 

With a sigh, Mach shifted his attention across the bridge. The young former junior pilot from the CW academy, Lassea, sat forward at her navigation console.
 

It wasn’t strictly needed; the
Intrepid
had some of the best AI programming in the known universe—especially since Kingsley Babcock and his drone assistant, Squid Two, had made ‘efficiencies and upgrades.’ What they actually were, Mach didn’t really want to know. Once Babcock got talking about his creations, there was no stopping him.