Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (2 page)

“Treat the injured,
have radiation meds passed out,” Captain McFadden said, remembering
that they didn’t have enough left to go around. “Start with the
higher ranks, oldest first.” She looked to the ensign standing
beside the door. The blond-haired boy looked anxious; he wasn’t
sure what to do with himself. With the ship three times overstaffed,
there was little for him
to
do. “Ensign…”

“O’Reilly, Ma’am,”
he replied.

“Fetch my book from
my quarters,” she said.

“Which one, if I may
ask?”

“Dawn’s Exodus,”
Captain McFadden replied.
I’d
best read faster if I’m going to finish it before I give it to
Shamus,
she thought as she watched the ensign scurry off.

A Beautiful Day

“The emergency hatch
is not made to facilitate open-air flight,” Lewis told Alice
through her communicator.

The wind blowing
through Alice’s brown-red hair, and the view of the fresh green
growth extending all around, made for a good opportunity to use a
Ramiel fighter as though it were a pleasure craft. The small ship’s
emergency hatch was wide open, and she was sitting up. In glider
mode, strong fabric extended out from the sides and gave the craft a
butterfly-like appearance. “I’ve got to throttle way down to fly
at this height, I may as well take in the sights while I’m below
face-stretchy speed.”

“Are you forgetting
why you’re flying so low?”

“I know, I know,”
she replied peevishly. “There could be a framework camp up ahead.
I’ve got the important shielding up, don’t worry.” The rolling
green landscape still smelled like freshly turned earth. The
incredible pounding the planet of Tamber took during the battle of
Rega Gain by countless crashed ships and bombardments had re-awakened
entire continents. Old terraforming efforts and botanical systems
that had been dormant for decades were active once again.

While she trained as a
ranger for two months and served for over four, Alice had watched it
happen. It was beautiful, and it was making the planet a healthier
place, but the overgrowth was hiding things that she was tasked to
find. Most of her missions took place at night, making her job even
harder. She was overjoyed to be sent out on a day mission to
investigate some wreckage that was showing new activity.

Alice spotted a large
armour panel sticking out from the ground and perked up in her seat.
“We’ve got to be close,” she said.

“That matches a
dorsal panel from the Idyllic,” Lewis confirmed. “It looks like
your pleasure flight is coming to an end.”

“Yeah,” she said
with a sigh. Alice leaned forward into the form-fitted cockpit and
the fighter’s top hatch closed. “Wish we could guard this area
from higher up. How many people did that transmission say could be
trapped?”

“They claimed there
could be as many as nine survivors from the crash, all recently
discovered,” Lewis said. “The Carthans guess that they were
trapped much further down in the ship, well underground, and have
only recently made the climb closer to the surface, within scanning
range.”

“Still no word from
the Carthans on their rescue team?”

“They responded to my
query fourteen minutes ago, actually,” Lewis said.

“And?” Alice asked
as she started an intensive scan.

“They said they
wouldn’t be able to approach the wreckage until we cleared it,”
Lewis replied.

“Typical. They get
their butts kicked, then stretch their resources out too thin and use
British Alliance recovery money to contract out all the hard stuff,”
she said.

“I haven’t seen you
stepping back from the positive attention you receive every time you
succeed on a mission,” Lewis teased. “What would you do if there
were not assignments from Carthan Search and Rescue?”

“I’d probably be
searching for remnants of the Order forces, or on the Leviathan
picking crew.” Alice considered those alternatives for a moment.
Looking for Order of Eden combatants in the wilderness when everyone
knew the chances of finding any were next to nil, or guarding salvage
workers as they picked through the wreck of the Leviathan were not
popular assignments. “You’re right, I shouldn’t complain. Turns
out I really like helping people, and at least the Carthans usually
set us up with real leads.” The detailed scan of the valley ahead
completed, and Alice sighed. “There are a couple of scavengers down
there, but no sign of leftover framework troops. Definitely no sign
of a hidden command bunker.”

“My wager is on Remmy
finding it now,” Lewis said. “He was sent after the more
promising signal.”

“Stop rubbing my nose
in it,” Alice snapped. “He gets more missions, is constantly
assigned to assault teams, and has seen way more of this rock than I
have by now, and we entered into the service at the same grade.”

“You’ve seen nearly
four times as much of this world in square kilometres,” Lewis
corrected. “He’s never assigned to a fighter because he only has
basic qualifications for flight.”

“So you’re saying
I’m qualified to be his tour guide if he ever needs a lift and I’m
the nearest pilot,” Alice replied. “That’s it, I’m landing.”

“Your job is to
observe, resolve crime from a distance, and report,” Lewis said.
“The Carthans will send a recovery team to rescue them within
twenty hours.”

“Twenty hours, I hate
that. These people have been trapped in there for months, who knows
what they’ve been eating.”

“Orders,” Lewis
reminded in a singsong tone.

Alice flipped a switch
savagely, closing communications. She could have done the same with a
thought, but it felt good to cut Lewis off with a gesture.

The scavengers didn’t
match with Carthan personnel records, so there was no possibility
that they were with a recovery team. The one she could see was
dragging a heavy box away from the exposed part of the massive
Carthan ship. “Attention, looter. You will be fired upon if you and
your four companions don’t retreat from the area immediately. You
are interfering with Carthan property, and looting this vessel is
classified as an attack,” she recited, not for the first time since
she’d become a ranger.

The figure below ducked
behind the crate he was pulling and fired several shots in her
direction. The energy bolts barely registered on her fighter’s
shield monitor. Alice set the energy level of her secondary guns low
and fired at the crate. After a couple of wide shots, she struck the
side, melting through it in only a few hits. “That was your last
warning, you really don’t want me to come down there,” she
announced, half hoping that the looter and his friends would duck
into the wreck. It had been several days since she’d had a good
chase.

To her disappointment,
the looter stood slowly with his hands held high. His friends were
emerging from the wreck with their hands up as well. A skipper truck
– a boxy vehicle mounted on a cheap antigravity sled - appeared not
far from the wreck as it deactivated its camouflage, and the group
began heading towards it. One of the looters slapped the first one
Alice noticed across the back of the head as they were about to board
the vehicle.

Alice watched the truck
turn and advance over the horizon, logging it into her report for
Haven Shore and the Carthan government. When she was sure they were
gone, she guided her fighter into a slow turn and opened a channel to
Carthan Control.

“Control here, what
can we do for you Ranger Alice Valent?”

Instead of replying,
she sent the details of her discovery to Control as a set of scan
results and a video report of her encounter.

“One moment please,”
said the operator.

Alice turned the
fighter back towards Haven Shore and powered into a climb. “They’re
going to say…” she started whispering to herself.

“Control here, I see
you’ve scouted and cleared the area. We will send a recovery team
within twenty hours. Thank you, Ranger Valent.” Her communications
system notified her that the work increased Haven Shore’s land
claim on Tamber and another hundred twenty thousand units of Galactic
Currency would be delivered to them by the end of the day. She was
entitled to one percent as a bonus, and she’d see that in her
quarters along with the rest of the cash she hadn’t had the chance
to send to the Warlord.

“Yeah,” Alice said
as she closed the channel. “They’ll go in,” she muttered to
herself, “after nineteen hours. It’ll take five hours to cut
through the wreckage, and when the grateful crew emerge, they won’t
even mention that I could have gotten them out nineteen hours sooner.
Meanwhile, those looters will come back, and there’s just the
slightest chance that they’ll disturb the wreck, crushing the
people trapped inside. I liked it better when the Carthans were still
too screwed up to make the rules.”

The fighter’s
altitude cleared five thousand metres. She retracted the cloth wings
and increased thrust with the inertial dampeners off. The crush of
increased g-forces and the counter squeeze of her vacsuit made her
feel like she was exerting herself, doing something other than
playing a game of Verify the Scan. The ship, and her teeth, rattled
hard as a sonic boom announced that she’d passed Mach one as the
ship climbed.

With a satisfied sigh,
she engaged the inertial dampeners and increased her acceleration.
“Something about flying in atmo makes drifting in space seem like a
light snooze.”

“Navnet Control,
here. You are approaching my orbital sector, Ranger Valent,” said a
thickly accented male controller through her priority channel. He was
controlling a navnet sector in Tamber’s orbit from one of those
great big British Alliance carriers. Her requests for a tour had all
been rejected, but she continued to send them every two days.

“Just looking for a
good route to Haven Shore, British Alliance Navnet Control. Help me
beat the traffic?” Alice replied in jest. There was very little
traffic anywhere but around Haven Shore and a couple of other hot
spots on Tamber. Most of the people who survived the siege months
before had fled to the nearby planet of Kambis or left the system.

The controller
chuckled. “I’ve got a nice straight path for you, just keep it to
a responsible speed, please.”

“Aye, thank you,”
Alice said. “Party pooper.”

One Strange Night

Minh-Chu Buu took his
seat at the table and let the atmosphere around him soak in. From the
inside pocket of his bomber jacket, he drew a thin bottle of Zuugo,
an expensive herbal drink, and he poured it into the empty glass on
the table. The empty glass cost three pips at the bar, an extreme
price for the privilege of serving yourself.

“Why’d you buy
that, man?” asked Jack Kipley, a man who had become known as two
things: Lucius Wheeler’s former first officer, and the ship idiot.
It was Minh’s turn to babysit. “Just sneak it out like this,”
he said, demonstrating by pulling a canteen from his grey and green
long coat and taking a swig.

“You’re going to
get caught,” Stephanie said, taking a seat to Minh-Chu’s left.
“You’ll get tossed out and draw attention.”

“Yes, Ma’am,”
Kipley said exaggeratedly.

Minh-Chu had seen small
towns with fewer people than the massive commerce centre around them.
It had been built inside an emergency shelter set against the side of
an impact-pockmarked mountain. Shops, food stands, and bars
surrounded a sea of tables, lounges, and chairs. He could count the
familiar products on offer on one hand; the objects and services on
offer ranged from new to unusual. The most entertaining was something
he picked up as a curiosity – a Groom Worm – that claimed to
…disappear under clothing,
keeping the user clean and fresh for up to one year!

He wouldn’t use it –
the thought of using a parasite in lieu of bathing or vacsuit
grooming seemed like a last resort option – but he enjoyed the
little package presenting a small white worm as a souvenir for his
shelf on the Triton.

The music in their area
of the expansive seating section was a whirling thrash of alien
instruments, the kind of thing that nagged at him, challenging him to
translate it into some kind of tune he could properly comprehend or
enjoy. He wasn’t sure he was hearing the intended music in the
first place, since all sound in the cavernous shelter was processed
through a scrambling field. That was the biggest attraction for the
crews who gathered at the Alt-Mecca Mall: the scrambling field that
rendered all recording devices useless.

It was a dangerous
place, sure, but crews could make plans without worrying about
authorities listening in. The people within couldn’t be scanned
either, making the Alt-Mecca the perfect place for the wanted, or
whoever shouldn’t be found on Planet Vinuto. It was a border planet
in a system sitting roughly between the no-ship’s-land of three
wars. When the Warlord first started visiting ports and collecting
information, Minh-Chu had difficulty grasping the idea that there
were three major interplanetary wars going on at the same time. The
Iron Head sector, named after the Iron Head Nebula that occupied over
one tenth of the space, was the most dangerous area he’d ever seen.
Nevertheless, it had become the home of the Warlord for nearly seven
months.

One of the wars fought
by the Roche Group against Nihilists, an alliance of corporations
protecting several solar systems against a group of idealists who
believed that territory, data, and the property of the deceased
should be completely free. Through experience, Minh-Chu had
determined that the more organized Nihilist cells were opportunists
and thieves who didn’t much care about civilian safety. If he had
to call them by another name, it would be raiders, or worse. The
Roche Group wasn’t perfect, but they were rebuilding their
collective territory and trying to re-establish order, and that was
something their people needed. He was thankful that the Warlord had
no business in that war, and Jacob Valent had quickly grown to hate
Nihilists almost as much as he despised the Order of Eden.