Farthest Reach Page 5

  Vorz was one of the most accomplished navigators I’d ever worked with. He’d probably forgotten more about stellar cartography than I’d ever known. The odds of me seeing something in those flight plans that he had missed was next to zero, but I looked anyway. After about fifteen minutes of studying them, all I could do was shrug and dismiss the display. Still, the fact that it was bugging the big guy kept tapping at my brain and making me wonder what it was that had set off his caution alarms. It wasn’t until three days later that I found out.

  I was sitting in the ship’s common area with our engineer, when Vorz practically burst into the room. “It was from the legend of my ancestor, Parn Starstalker!” he said, his broad smile showing his finely sharpened canines.

  Spin and I looked at him, then at each other, and then back to him.

  “Maybe try that again, First Mate Furry?” Spin said, pushing back a lock of hair from the unshaved side of her head. Her hair was currently the color of a ripe plum, but that could change on a moment’s notice.

  Vorz looked at the young woman who kept everything on the Phoenix in working order and said, “My apologies, young Spin. I have had a bit of knowledge just out of reach for many days now and I finally managed to get a claw into it.”

  “He was vexed,” I said over the rim of my coffee cup, but they both ignored me.

  Vorz slid into a seat opposite me at the table. “I was reviewing my sept’s legends and it came to me. My grandsire twice revered, Parn Starstalker, recorded these coordinates and run times in his legend. He actually visited Sinjin-3 in his lifetime, though his legend records the planet as ‘Ounapahr.’”

  “No kidding,” I said, genuinely interested. “And what did Grandpappy Starstalker have to say about the place?”

  “To stay away, Brace. His legend records that the winds took a number of his crew. He warns against setting foot there. He says the planet just wants to be left alone.”

  Spin and I took a moment to process that and then looked at each other again. She had yet to see her second decade but had eyes that spoke to a much older level of maturity. Still, I could tell she was biting back some kind of sarcastic comment.

  “And how does that work?” I asked. “A planet asking to be left alone, I mean.”

  “The details on Ounapahr are lacking,” Vorz said, “but my grandsire was quite specific in his warnings. My instincts are telling me we should heed them.”

  I nodded. “Okay, I get that, and all due respect to Grandsire Parn, but we don’t really have a choice here, Vorz. We’re committed to this job whether we like it or not. I mean, we’re less than twelve hours from arrival and thousands of credits in. Again, nothing against Parn, but I think we’re going to have to risk upsetting the planet.”

  Vorz wrinkled his wide nose in irritation but nodded. “I understand, Brace. I just felt you should know. If I’d recognized the course configurations sooner, perhaps we could have reconsidered.”

  “Maybe,” Spin said. “But come on. What are we talking about here since your ancestor was on that planet? Two centuries? Three? I doubt whatever he ran into is still there.”

  “Don’t be too quick to assume that,” I said. “Vorz and I know from experience that some things are built to last. Regardless, we need the job or we’re going to end up living on the ship in some orbit or another because we’re too broke for anything else. The plan’s the same: land, load, leave. No exploring, no poking around, nothing like that. We probably won’t be dirtside for more than a couple of hours.”

  “Of course, my friend,” Vorz said, “but out of respect for my ancestors, I will be extra vigilant. Just in case.”

  Spin laughed and said, “Yeah, just in case, because Brace’s plans never go sideways.”

  I shot her my best “watch it, kid” glare and went back to my coffee.

  ***

  We made landfall on Sinjin-3 just under thirteen hours later. From orbit, it actually reminded me a lot of holos I’d seen of ancient Earth back before global urbanization, orbital elevators, and satellite clutter. Oceans of deep blue surrounded small, isolated continents on the dayside, and the nightside was untouched blackness. It had a breathable atmosphere, plenty of habitable terrain, and what looked to be a stable, life-sustaining climate. A single moon moved in a stable orbit a few hundred thousand kilometers out. I found myself wondering why no one had bothered to colonize the place.

  We did a couple of orbital passes to scan for signals before I set the ship down on the dayside. The landing coordinates were in a narrow patch of a clearing that was only about twice the size of the Phoenix. The signals from the cargo beacons that we’d detected were less than a klick away, but the vegetation was too dense to land any closer. I could tell this was making Vorz nervous, which wasn’t like him at all, but I let it drift until we were gearing up for the ride to the cargo site.

  “How you doing, big guy?” I asked when we had a moment while everyone else was out of earshot. “Ready for this?”

  “Of course, my friend,” he said, grinning. “I feel this day will bring much respect to our legends.”

  Vorz always had a strong sense of enthusiasm in his voice, which was there, but his grin faltered slightly as he glanced toward the open loading ramp.

  “You sure? You’ve seemed a little off since you remembered Parn’s legend.”

  He grunted. “You know me well, Brace Cordova. I will admit, Parn’s tales trouble me. He had a love of exploration and discovery. This place sent him fleeing. That has captured my attention.”

  I shrugged. “Spin’s right, though. It was a long time ago.”

  “It was,” he said, hefting his large scattergun. “I still think extra caution is warranted.”

  I nodded in agreement. I’d already told everyone to arm up and make sure they were as prepared for anything as they could be. We were all armed and had short-term survival packs strapped to our backs. Like Vorz, I’d decided to be extra careful and had both my force rifle and a heavy pistol. Even Spin, who was staying with the ship and making sure the cargo pods were prepped for loading, carried a small but powerful slug thrower in a thigh holster. Young as she was, I was confident that anything that came at that girl would end up regretting it.

  As part of our loadout, we’d acquired a large-wheeled vehicle capable of carrying the four of us as well as a respectable amount of cargo. I would have preferred something with gravity compensators that could fly rather than roll, but apparently, Bliss’s influence with the Deadrock Station quartermaster didn’t extend quite that far.

  I took the driver’s seat and waited for Vorz, Bliss, and Cutter to find their seats and strap in. Once that was done, I secured the canopy while Spin disconnected the charging lines from the roller.

  “You’re all set, guys,” she said. “Bring me back something nice.”

  “Will do,” I said. “We’ll probably be ninety minutes or so roundtrip. Keep your comms open and finish prepping the bays. Let’s get this done and get gone.”

  She gave me a “gee, do ya think?” smirk and a thumbs-up. Vaccing teenagers.

  I hit the accelerator and we shot out of the main hold fast enough that we jumped a little coming off the ramp and jostled everyone. This earned me a couple of annoyed looks from my crew, but I only shrugged an apology. The heads-up display flickered a little as the roller’s sensors synched with the nav system and plotted us a route through the forest. It ended up being a winding one but looked like it wouldn’t take as long as I’d thought. That was good because I could feel Vorz’s tense unease from the seat beside me.

  I left the big guy to his thoughts and focused on driving. The forest floor was rough, but there were wide enough gaps between the largest clusters of trees for the roller to maneuver. Anything we didn’t have to go around we crushed beneath the machine’s nearly indestructible tires. Before long, we broke into a small clearing and saw the crates and containers we’d come for.

  They were stacked neatly, many of them already strapped onto loading pall
ets. Thin, curling grasses had grown up around the pallets, but otherwise, they looked intact and sealed. A collection of individual containers sat a short distance away as though waiting their turn to be loaded up. I slid out of the roller and let my eyes play over the clearing. I must have had a look on my face because I felt Bliss come up next to me and say, “What is it?”

  “He sees it,” Vorz said softly. I swear he could hear a whisper in a windstorm.

  “Sees what?” Bliss asked, looking back and forth between us.

  “Remember the story that Var told me? The one about her team getting hit with some kind of storm? She described it as a hurricane that appeared without any warning.”

  Bliss nodded.

  I gestured around the clearing. “Do any of these trees or plants look like they’ve been through a hurricane recently? Or ever, really?”

  Bliss spent a few seconds looking around. “No, I guess they don’t. So the client lied. I’m simply shocked.”

  “We live in a deceit-filled galaxy, my love,” I said, matching her sarcasm. Though I kept it to myself, I was suddenly wondering if whatever Var had lied about might show up to eat us or something.

  “All right, listen up,” I said, raising my voice to be heard. “Vorz, set the roller’s sensors into sentry mode, full spectrum. Then you and Cutter get to work loading those loose containers onto whatever shipping pallets you can find. Bliss and I will get these full pallets onto the roller. Turns out our client may not have been completely honest about what ran the first team off planet, so everybody stay alert. We’ll probably need two trips to get all of this. Let’s get started so we can get back to Deadrock and the giant pile of credits that’s waiting for us.”

  I heard a round of “Aye, that,” from everyone but Bliss, who just pinched my butt and told me to stop being bossy. I grinned back at her and we got to work. The work went reasonably quickly except for a minor, easily fixed malfunction in the roller’s loading mechanism. The weather was mild and the trees cast enough shade over the clearing that it was almost chilly. That was fine, since pushing cargo pallets around was the kind of work that could work up a sweat even with manual hover loaders to help the job along. The roller’s cargo bed was about three-quarters full when I heard the sensors start chiming from inside the cabin.

  I dropped off the back of the loader and climbed into the driver’s seat. I called up the display and was studying it when Bliss joined me. “Please tell me you’ve picked up signs of a high-end resort nearby,” she said.

  I smiled. “No, sorry. Just a low-level energy build on a three-three mark zero heading from here. A little under three clicks out.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  I shrugged. “Like some kind of weak electrical disturbance. Like a pocket ESD storm or something like that. Weird, really.”

  “ESD storm? I’ve never seen one of those.”

  “Unless you’ve spent time in high ionization atmospheres, then there’s no reason you should have. I’ve never heard of one in a habitable climate before.”

  Vorz and Cutter had stopped working and were watching me. Even though I’m sure Vorz had probably heard my exchange with Bliss, Cutter said, “What is it, Brace?”

  “Probably nothing,” I said. “Probably.”

  “Uh, Brace,” Bliss said, “it’s moving.”

  I looked back at the display. She was right. The contacts were moving in a straight line for our position.

  “Well, vacc,” I said. “All right, guys, let’s get what’s on the roller strapped down and leave the rest. This thing’s not reading as much of a threat, but I’d rather play it safe. I guess we’ll have to stay the night and come back for the rest tomorrow.”

  “This pallet is ready to load, Brace,” Vorz said, dropping his hand onto a stack of containers. “Do you want to try and get it aboard?”

  I checked the readouts. “Yeah, the disturbance isn’t moving that fast. Just hurry it up.” Then, to Bliss, “Come on, let’s get this stuff secured before we’re dodging static bursts.”

  We barely had the chance to get the nearest pallets strapped down before the roller’s sensors started chiming again, this time with a distinct sense of urgency. I dropped down and climbed into the cabin again. My eyes grew wide as I realized what had happened. The disturbance had accelerated at an impressive rate and was now only seconds away.

  I cursed and got out of the roller, shouting, “Incoming! Fall back to the vehicle! Move it!”

  Cutter and Vorz stopped pulling on the hover loaders and started running for the roller. The winds, though, were right behind them. I felt them as a prickling on my skin before I actually saw them. They came over the tops of the trees like a miniature lightning storm, constant arcs of static discharge dancing through a swirling cloud of minuscule debris. I hoped that they might just blow by overhead since they were brushing the tops of the tall trees, but that hope faded as fast as one of the static discharges when I saw the storm dip low over the trees and curve onto an intersecting course with Vorz and Cutter.

  “Brace…” Bliss said, her voice mirroring the icy fear that was suddenly spreading through my chest.

  “I see it,” I said. Then, grabbing my force rifle from the roller’s cabin, I shouted, “Hurry! It’s tracking you!” to Vorz and Cutter. It was no use, though. Cutter wasn’t built for sprinting and Vorz wasn’t about to leave him behind. As I watched, Vorz bent to grab Cutter under the arms to help him along even as the winds of Sinjin-3 swept over them.

  It was like watching a holoimage de-pixelate. My friends seemed to freeze in place and blur out of focus for a moment before they broke apart in the wind like they were just statutes made of some fine particulate. The whole process took exactly as long as it took me to draw in the breath I screamed with.

  I’ll admit it, I lost my mind for few seconds. I don’t even remember putting the rifle to my shoulder and blindly firing into the oncoming storm. The next thing I recalled was the force rifle’s emitter warning me that it was about to overheat and Bliss shouting at me to get in the roller. The storm rushed toward me in a haze of blurring gray particles and brilliant white electrical arcs.

  I backpedaled toward the roller, risking another burst from the force rifle as I went. The gravity generated bursts of energy punched into and through the storm like a sudden burst of air into a fog bank, doing no real damage that I could see. I managed to slam the canopy door on my side just as the winds swept over the vehicle.

  White lines of electricity danced over the windscreen like living fingers probing for a flaw in the Transtel that would let them in. The cockpit was filled with a harsh, spattering whisper as the dirt and debris that the winds had collected whipped against the exterior. I only noticed these things in a general sense, though, as I was focused on punching in the ignition codes that would get us out of there. The engine hummed into life just as Bliss let out a short, startled yelp of surprise.

  I looked up and saw her staring with wide eyes at the wind screen. The winds were there with their arcing fingers and debris whispers, but it was what I saw among those things that had caused Bliss to cry out and me to freeze in place when I saw them.

  There were faces in the winds. They were twisted and warped, but faces all the same, composed of the shifting debris and the arcs of the static discharges. They morphed and shifted, one visage to another, some human, some not. I stared in disbelief as I saw Vorz’s face, still frozen in the expression I’d seen not even a minute earlier, wash across the wind screen and then break apart.

  I remember saying, “What the vacc?” before Bliss snapped me out of my disbelief.

  “Why aren’t we moving, Brace?” she snapped. “We should really be moving!”

  She was right, of course, and I slid the throttle forward. The roller shot backward and away, leaving fans of dirt in its wake to be swept up by the winds as they surged after us.

  The roller bounced wildly and I whipped it into a reverse spin that brought the cockpit around and pointed us in t
he right direction even as white arcs of electricity seem to claw at the windscreen again. I pushed the throttle again and we shot forward, the nav system already retracing our route back to the ship. I could see the winds sweeping over the cargo bay as I goosed as much speed as I could out of the roller.

  We crossed the clearing, going way faster than was necessarily safe. Since neither of us had taken the time to strap in, we bounced around so violently that I was actually afraid one of us was going to crack our skull on the cockpit ceiling, but I didn’t bother voicing my concern. The winds were right behind us and almost filled the rear monitor. The tree line was coming fast ahead of us.

  The problem, I realized, was that the path through the forest was curved in many places. There was no way I was going to be able to maintain speed once I got into the woods without jackknifing the roller or crashing us into a tree or something. The other problem, I realized, was that I really didn’t have much of a choice.

  “Try to buckle up,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level. “This is going to get really bumpy.”

  She replied. I’m sure it was something witty and sarcastic, but I didn’t understand a word of it.

  We hit the tree line with the winds hot on our stern and the path in front of us suddenly filled with obstacles that could stop us dead if we weren’t careful. I cranked the controls hard to the right and felt the roller threaten to spill over as we swerved that to avoid a cluster of large trees. Bliss cursed, but when I looked over at her, I saw an adrenaline-fueled smile on her face. I knew I probably had the same.

  I checked the rear monitor and saw that the winds had broken up and were swerving in and among the trees. They were farther back but still coming at us, just in sections rather than one giant mass. We’d gained ten meters or so on them since entering the forest. Still, I kept the speed up as best I could, weaving among the trees and rolling over whatever was too small to dodge.