Heart of the Nebula (5 page)

“
You’re in luck,” he said.
“I got you a ship headed for Gaia Nova, the old Imperial capital.
Stars know it’s hard to get one of these days.”

Kyla tensed.
Is he trying to raise the price?
She hugged her chest and walked a little
faster.

The smuggler glanced at her and snickered.
The harsh sound of his laughter was almost, but not quite, drowned
out by the groaning of heavy machinery.

“
No need to be afraid,
darling,” he said. “The police don’t ever come here.”

Just get me to my ship and
go away,
she thought silently to herself.
She kept her eyes on the floor grating and tried to ignore the way
he kept moving closer to her.

Just when she thought he’d snake his arm
around her again, he turned and led her through a narrow
crawlspace. The walls were old and corroding in places, but the
mold was gone. In spite of the loud industrial noises, she took
care to be quiet as she followed on her hands and knees.

They came out in the middle of a platform
with rectangular cargo containers stacked about five or six high.
Each one was fairly small, about two body lengths long and not
quite tall enough to stand in. The corners were rounded and
reinforced, while the hatches had a complicated cross-bar system to
keep them sealed.

The smuggler quickly scanned the containers
and picked out a blue on the bottom of the stack. After glancing
over his shoulder, he leaned forward and swiped a card over the
access panel. The cross-bars disengaged with a loud click, making
Kyla jump.

“
Here,” said the smuggler,
cracking the hatch open. “In you go.”

She hesitated for a moment, not sure whether
it was safe to crawl into the dark, cramped space. The far end was
filled with plastic crates, so that she barely had enough room to
sit against the wall. She couldn’t imagine being cramped the whole
voyage like that.

“
It’s only until you’re on
board,” the smuggler hissed. “See this wire? Pull it tight, and the
hatch will open from the inside.”

“
What if it’s up against a
wall?”

He shrugged. “Then tough luck.”

She took a deep breath and poked her head in
the hatch. There was a little more space inside than she’d thought,
with an old, stained blanket for her to sit on. Other than that, it
looked fairly clean. The blanket was a little damp, but not so much
that she couldn’t get used to it. And as for the smell—

“
Are you in or not?” the
smuggler asked, his voice low and impatient. In the distance, the
sound of the loading crane grew louder.

There’s no going back once
you’re in,
Kyla thought to herself.
You’ll be leaving this place forever.
For the briefest moment, she almost felt a
yearning to turn around and stay. But then, her anger swelled up,
dousing any nostalgic delusions about the place she’d once called
home. She had no future in this place—the Colony was little more to
her than a living hell. Better to leave and never look
back.

She slipped into the open hatchway and eased
herself onto the blanket. There were no lights inside, of course,
but she was used to that. The hatch was something else entirely.
Before the smuggler closed her in, she felt around its smooth inner
surface until she found the wire and knew exactly where it was. It
made her shudder to imagine being sealed in the container with no
way out.

“
There now,” said the
smuggler, a wry grin crossing his face. “Are we
comfortable?”

Kyla tensed—she’d seen that grin before. He
opened the hatch a little wider, one hand fingering his belt as if
in anticipation. The space in the container was just big enough for
two people—probably because he’d planned it that way. Before he
could advance any further, however, voices sounded further down the
hold. He swore and quickly shut the hatch, taking care not to make
too much noise.

Darkness enveloped her—but not the kind of
darkness in the moldy crawlspaces that hid something dangerous and
unknown. This was the comforting darkness of a warm, snug hiding
place. She counted to sixty, but the smuggler didn’t
return—something must have frightened him off, thank the stars.

She eased herself back against the wall of
the container and fingered the release wire with her hand, just to
reassure herself that it was there. With no other way out, that
little strand of threaded metal made all the difference between an
escape pod and a coffin. As to where she was going, she hardly
cared anymore. All that mattered was that she was getting away.

* * * * *

James stepped off the public tram with his
parents and walked toward the ticketing gate. Traffic was light at
the main terminal today, but a few people still hurried about, busy
as usual at the hub of the Colony’s small spaceport.

“
Well, this is it,” he
said, stopping in front of the counter. He dropped his canvas
duffel bag and turned to give his aging mother a hug.

“
I wish you could stay
longer,” she said as they embraced.

“
So do I,” said James. “But
duty calls.”

“
Just come back alive.
That’s all I ask.”

James gave her a sad smile. Every time he
left the station for another mission, she always made the same
request. With his brother dead and his sister taken by the Hameji,
he was the last of the children she had left. It always filled him
with a tinge of guilt for the risks he knew he would soon take.

“
I’ll do my best,” he told
her. It might not have been the most comforting answer, but it was
certainly the most truthful.

His father gave him a parting handshake.
“Take care of yourself, son.”

“
I will.”

“
Be sure to keep your eyes
and ears open.”

“
Of course.”

“
I mean it,” said his
father, looking him in the eye. “Conference or not, this smells of
centralist politics.”

James frowned. “But the patrician—”

“
The patrician is the
servant of the people, nothing more. He doesn’t have any more power
than we give him, and if you ask me, he already has far too
much.”

Yes,
James wanted to say,
but the Corps
isn’t run by popular vote, and if it were...

There were a number of ways he could have
finished that statement, all of them colorful, but instead he kept
his political views to himself.

“
I’ll do my best,” he said,
bending down to pick up his bag. “Don’t worry—I won’t fail
you.”

His father smiled and wrapped an arm around
his tearful mother. James turned and held his wrist console up to
the computer terminal. His ID cleared, and the gate opened to let
him onto the concourse.

“
We love you,” his mother
called out one last time. He stepped through, then turned and
waved.

“
I love you, too,” he
called back. “See you in a few weeks.”

Biting his lip, he turned and headed toward
his terminal, passing over the giant mosaic image of the star
system. Karduna was a golden nub at the very center, coordinate
lines radiating outward. A giant pink and red mass off to the right
marked the Good Hope Nebula, the imposing cloud of gas and dust
that marked the edge of the frontier this side of settled space. On
the other side, a gold nub bigger than the first marked Gaia Nova,
the seat of galactic civilization.

Before the Hameji slagged it, that was.

“
Hey, Lieutenant!” came a
familiar voice from behind him. James turned and saw Ensign Jones
running up to him.

So much for formality.

“
Sterling,” said James. A
grin spread across his face at the sight of his boyish
copilot.

“
It’s good to see you, sir.
Need a hand with those bags?”

“
Sure. Thanks for the
help.”

He gave Sterling the
lighter of the two bags, and they soon fell into step, walking past
the half-empty shops and vendor kiosks toward the boarding area. It
wasn’t uncommon to see soldiers in this part of the station, though
the two of them did turn a few heads. A quick glance at the cluster
of enormous holoscreens overhead showed that the
Freedom Star
was
scheduled to depart in twenty-five minutes.

“
So what do you think of
that girl?” Sterling asked.

“
Girl? What
girl?”

“
You know, the one we’re
supposed to protect.”

“
You mean the patrician’s
daughter?” said James, picking up the pace. He shouldered his way
through a crowd heading in the opposite direction and got a handful
of dirty glances.
Deal with it,
people.

“
Yeah,” said Sterling.
“Isn’t she something?”

James’s cheeks reddened. “Now isn’t the time
to talk about that, Ensign.”

“
Oh? Why not?”

Because she might be somewhere in this crowd
right now.

“
Because it’s too damn
distracting,” he said instead. “We have a mission to perform, and
ogling her halfway across the galaxy is not going to accomplish
that.”

Sterling covered his mouth and suppressed a
laugh. “Sorry, sir—that’s not what I meant.”

“
Of course not.”

Compared to the rest of the station, the
spaceport was extravagantly spacious. The ceilings were high and
vaulted, while the walls and floors were made of high-grade basalt
from the nearby asteroids. Every surface was polished smooth, so
that the place still looked new. The architectural engineers had
done a good job: the veneer of prosperity was convincing enough to
fool just about anyone.

But in truth, the spaceport was little more
than an imitation of what it had once been. The spacious concourse
was more empty than full, with only a handful of people returning
from the terminals. Along the walls, far too many caged and
boarded-up doors marked where shops and restaurants had once
flourished. The Colony, once an attractive, thriving settlement,
was now an isolated outpost in a system that had been utterly
ravaged by the Hameji.

“
Is this your first time
out of the system, Sterling?” James asked. He couldn’t help but
notice the quickness in his copilot’s step.

“
Oh, yes, sir. I’m not much
of a pilot—never have been. I’m more of an engineer.”

James raised an eyebrow. “An engineer?”

“
That’s right. Back when
the mining industry was still profitable, I used to work at the
shipyards repairing broken equipment. When most of the workforce
got laid off, I joined the Corps for the steady
paycheck.”

“
Right,” said James. He
didn’t bother to point out that the payroll office was four
standard months behind.

“
So really,
sir—”

“
Call me James.”

“
Yes, er, James—really, I’m
not much of a pilot.”

“
No, but you’re a fine
copilot and the patrician chose us both for a reason. You’ve got a
unique skill set, and that might just help us get out of a tight
spot. Don’t put yourself down.”

Sterling grinned. “Thank you, sir.”

James checked the displays
and led them to the right, toward their terminal. “So what can you
tell me about the
Freedom
Star
, Ensign?”

Sterling’s eyes lit up, just as James
expected they would. “Gaian Enterprises deep space luxury yacht,
Dolphin class—latest model, too. One hundred and twenty meters stem
to stern, with room for six crew and eight passengers. She’s one of
the few civilian ships left at the Colony with a functioning jump
drive—two, in fact.”

“
Two?” That wasn’t a common
feature on civilian ships.

“
Yeah. The dual drives
don’t add much to the distance rating, but they more than double
our jump rate in deep space.”

“
Which means we don’t have
to rely on the starlanes for transport,” said James. “If we have to
make it back on our own, we can do so quickly without having to
worry about being interdicted.”

“
Right,” said Sterling,
“though that won’t help us much in-system, since the reactors
aren’t significantly boosted.”

Still, at least we won’t
be stranded.
That was the problem with
sublight engines—if the political situation was unfavorable, you
were at the mercy of whoever controlled the local system. When the
Hameji had invaded nearly five years ago, virtually every starship
with a working jump drive had fled, taking hundreds of thousands of
refugees with them. Only a handful still remained at the Colony,
and almost all of those belonged to the Corps now. The
Freedom Star
was one of
the rare exceptions.

“
Are you worried about
something?” Sterling asked.

“
No,” James muttered, “but
it bothers me that the patrician’s putting us under the command of
a civilian.”

“
A civilian?”

“
Captain Allie Jarvis,” he
said, leaning in a little closer to speak under his breath. “She’s
the captain of the
Freedom Star.
Her family has no military background that I could
find, but she’s distantly related to the patrician.”

“
That explains why she
didn’t run with the rest of the refugees.”