Line of Sight
by D. Tyler Pierson
part 1
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Terror streamed through the creatures as they watched the fleet of unthinking, continent-sized automatons fall sunward toward their home planet. They knew the Dreadnaught and a hundred ships like it were all that stood between those monsters and the violent erasure of their history.
The twin mandibles of the Dreadnaught’s main mass accelerator weapon focused their aim as the targeting computers coordinated with those of the rest of the fleet. In less than a nanosecond, the priority list of where the first volley of shots would go was fabricated and distributed amongst the defenders’ fleet. Then, the Dreadnaught’s mass accelerator hurled a five-meter-long, several-ton slug of ultrahard exotic material at a speed so close to that of light that the difference was barely worth acknowledging.
The kinetic energy stored within the slug would be cataclysmic when unleashed.
The projectile crossed the several hundred-thousand mile distance between the Dreadnaught and its target almost no time at all. The black machine that had attracted the slug’s ire — which packed fabulously destructive weapons of its own — detected the incoming threat. With milliseconds to act, the colossal machine split apart and let the projectile fly harmlessly through the space between the two pieces. The beast, having ascertained that the threat had passed, reformed and continued its advance toward the Dreadnaught, its compatriots, and the world they defended.
As the battle for a species’ future unfolded, the slug sailed through the ocean of stars, oblivious to it all. It was a failure; its importance squandered in an instant. The chances of anything slowing down its near-lightspeed journey or intercepting it outright, at least in a timely manner, were infinitesimally small. It could very well watch whole galaxies form and die without ever once happening upon anything larger than an errant hydrogen atom.
In missing its target, the unfeeling slug embarked upon the loneliest journey of all time.
* * *
The Charisma was little more than an oversized missile with a hollowed-out section for human habitation. The engines — the acceleration of which imparted gravity upon the tube-shaped vessel’s interior — could carry the ship across the Solar System in three months. Of particular interest to her captain, Abigail Felder, was Charisma’s ability to land on planets, which gave a serious edge over the competition.
Charisma wasn’t a large ship, but she still boasted a respectably sized cargo bay. Abigail needed to be smart about how she filled it so that her trips turned a profit, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. Her days of losing money on a venture were far behind.
She needed only stock the hold with one specific man to be financially set for the next five trips.
Abigail threaded Charisma through the precise slingshot maneuvers that would deliver her to the remote dwarf planet Makeen’s doorstep. She felt as comfortable plotting complex orbital maneuvers as she did walking with her own two feet and hadn’t felt danger doing so in years.
The cold emptiness held little she couldn’t plan for.
The hatch in the floor slid open, and a man climbed up into the cramped flight deck. He pulled himself smoothly into the gimballed seat next to her despite the gravity of acceleration. The commotion plunged her back into reality. For all her lofty fancies about how the cosmos was her domain, the muscular, balding man named Thrax was a living, breathing reminder that she couldn’t even say as much about her own ship.
Thrax was dressed in a jumpsuit common amongst crews, but his right hip was adorned with a holster occupied by a chrome-colored pistol. He’d been sent to lend his engineering expertise to the job at hand, but it was obvious to Abigail that there was an ulterior motive behind his presence. Perhaps that flamboyance was the point.
“Moment of truth, huh?” he remarked as Makeen’s grayish expanse took up more and more of the flight deck’s window-screens. The arrangement could have passed for a miniature planetarium.
The Charisma cut engines and put on her best impression of space trash for the final approach to Makeen. On a previous job, Abigail had patched the ship’s network into that of the dwarf planet’s modest satellite array. All it took was a quick tightbeam connection to one of them and she could have a view of the local airspace without ever needing to use Charisma’s sensors and revealing her position. She looked through the satellite network’s eyes at a ramshackle warship belonging to Makeen’s local militia. The craft would be crushed in an engagement with any real navy, but she was still a major inconvenience for Charisma.
“Don’t worry, I’m sure your calculations were perfect,” Thrax whispered.
Had it been anyone else, Abigail would have chalked his reassurance up to an annoying instance of nervous rambling, but this was outright patronizing. His presence went beyond the irritation of one looking over her shoulder; she felt he was studying her. “You don’t need to whisper, that ship can’t hear you,” Abigail said.
“I could shout, if you like.”
“Or you can clam up and let me do my job.”
Thrax snorted with what could have been approval and nestled deeper into his seat. Abigail thought back to the day she’d met him and been hired for this job. They’d been in a cozy office on the solar system’s only truly civilized planet, Toosaum. She distinctly remembered thinking the lavender-scented air fresheners, the round walls and furniture, and general spotlessness of the office were far above the station of a scoundrel like its owner, Taris Rho. Last they had met prior, Rho had been running her criminal enterprise from abandoned tunnels deep beneath the planet’s icy surface. Now, she had graduated to infiltrating the government.
Abigail had always needed to stifle a laugh whenever she wondered just how exactly an up-jumped common outlaw planned on approaching civil issues like sanitation, infrastructure, and education. Everyone wanted to rule the world until they actually did.
She remembered Rho spreading her hands and declaring from behind her desk with a mad smile, “We’re officially joining the revolution!” while her two bodyguards — one of which had been Thrax — watched impassively.
Abigail had been surprised to discover Rho’s interest in an interstellar rebellion lightyears away. Participating in it was far beyond the scope of her usual criminal activities. In Abigail’s mind, the woman should have stopped her ascent at getting dirt on Toosaum’s political leaders and buying local police forces.
Instead, Rho had explained, she’d sent one of her men, Nick Howard, to act as liaison with her main contact within the rebellion. The rebel contact had been lying low and using Makeen as a base of operations in this system until a few loyalist-leaning folks within the local militia discovered his true allegiance and decided they were feeling homicidal. Howard had been there when the resulting commotion started, and he’d presumably been made by the militia. He needed an extraction, and Rho had preferred the odds of a veteran spacer like Abigail pulling it off over those of her usual rank-and-file.
“Outsourcing,” Rho had called it.
“Easy money,” Abigail had called it.
She returned her attention to Charisma’s approach.
It took the better part of a day for the dormant ship to drift underneath the sentry’s nose and fall into a comfortable orbit around Makeen. Abigail had been sure to place the world between Charisma and the militia ship to block line of sight. Without the acceleration to keep her pinned to her seat, she felt free, even in the claustrophobic flight deck. Thrax was less graceful, but still able to hold his own in freefall in a way most land lovers couldn’t.
She wondered if the man would kill her if she failed to retrieve Howard. Abigail wasn’t affiliated with Rho’s organization; Rho had taken a risk in letting her this deep into the fold. That and she probably didn’t tolerate failure, even from one of her underlings. Rho’s emphasis on Thrax’s piloting and engineering skills couldn’t have been anything other than a threat; a promise that he could fly Charisma just fine after throwing Abigail out the airlock.
Whatever, she thought. The job is straightforward enough and I’m the best damn spacer in the system.
* * *
Seven hours went by.
“Any luck getting a fix on Howard?” Thrax asked.
“Look, man,” Abigail said, hunched over her terminal, “we all know you’re here to babysit me. There’s no need to feign interest. I’ll be fine without the small talk. Promise.”
Thrax said nothing, and she glanced over to see if he was even paying attention. It was tough to get a handle on what was going through his mind; his statuesque expression betrayed little of his mental state. He could have been in the throes of serenity or on the hair-trigger cusp of violence for all Abigail knew.
He simply glared at her.
“But, if you need to know, the answer is ‘no,’” Abigail continued. “He hasn’t transmitted his location since the initial SOS, which came from the second largest settlement. I need something way more specific if I’m to actually find him.”
“And he hasn’t responded to our hails?”
“‘Our hails,’” she snorted. “No, he hasn’t responded to any of my hails.”
Thrax smiled, as if he were in on some joke.
“He might have ditched his comms altogether,” she continued. “I’ve been sifting through the local bulletins. No violence in the city in the past few days aside from the initial unpleasantness that started this whole mess. But that doesn’t tell me much. For all we know, Howard’s asphyxiated corpse could be facedown in the regolith a hundred miles from the nearest settlement right now. It’s not hard to get away with murder on a world without breathable air.”
“Just keep looking. Clock’s ticking.”
It’s not like there’s much else to do, Abigail thought. The underground settlement in question, Koul-Tu, was home to fewer than eleven thousand people, but if Howard didn’t want to be found — or was otherwise dead — locating him would still be problematic. The prospect of making potentially hundreds of inquiries to find him wasn’t the end of the world, but every minute wasted was one more in which Charisma could be detected by hostiles.
“So, your boss suddenly found herself a patriotic streak?” Abigail asked as she opened contact information for a former business partner on Makeen.
“The rebels are, naturally, underequipped; they need water, food, and other logistical supplies. We don’t have much, but they’ll happily pay us for what we do.”
“Ah. War profiteering. Okay, that’s more her speed.”
“Well, that and our humble solar system can declare independence alongside the rebels. We’d never need to worry about some interstellar regime pissing on us ever again.”
“Yeah, until fifty years after the rebels win and they become exactly what they’re fighting today,” Abigail muttered, suddenly tired. The rebels and the interstellar government they wanted toppled had zero bearing on her or anyone else within a dozen lightyears of here. Most of the people on Toosaum or the surrounding colonies probably couldn’t even name either combatant. Nobody cared, Abigail included.
But then again, Rho was a paying client just like all the others, the constant, petty cycle of revolution and oppression notwithstanding.
“Gotta say, never thought I’d be taking part in an espionage operation,” she said.
Thrax shrugged. “Sounds like a step up from smuggling.”
Yeah, I even have my own handler ready to execute me if things go wrong, Abigail mused, Just like all the spy films.
Two more days passed, during which nobody on or above Makeen noticed Charisma. That gave Abigail some much-needed breathing room.
“I’ve talked to contacts, made calls to the local constabulary, to morgues, combed through security footage. I’ve tried everything,” Abigail said to Thrax, who floated below her gimballed seat and above the hatch in the floor that led to the rest of the ship.
“Not everything,” Thrax said, brandishing his pistol. Abigail couldn’t make up her mind on whether that gesture was meant as a threat or a reassurance that he’d keep them safe. Keeping a finger off the trigger, he pointed the weapon’s barrel at the vac-suits that hung in a compartment to the left of Abigail’s pilot’s seat.
“It’s not safe down there.”
“Like you said, you’ve done everything you could from up here.”
“That doesn’t mean we screw around in Koul-Tu until someone puts bags over our heads and walks us out an airlock.”
“Well, unless you’re up for a field trip, I suggest you start coming up with solutions.” Abigail imagined capping that sentence off with something like: Or else I’ll be flying Charisma home myself.
She sighed and turned back to her controls. A blinking red LED and an incessant beeping stopped her muttered profanities in their tracks.
“Oh.”
“What?” Thrax asked, grabbing the back of her chair and pulling himself closer.
“It’s Howard. He’s hailing us.”
Thrax pursed his lips, his expression satisfied. “Well, that was easy.”
Abigail ignored him and made the connection.
Copyright © 2021 by D. Tyler Pierson
