Line of Sight
by D. Tyler Pierson
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
After confirming one another’s identities and exchanging pleasantries, Howard said over the radio, “I had a hell of a time sneaking out of Koul-Tu. Local constables can’t really do much about the heavily armed loyalists combing the streets, even if they cared enough to want to. Those militia lunatics were cracking down. They murdered our friend within the rebellion.”
“Where are you now?” Abigail asked.
“I managed to steal a rover and drive it out a ways. I’ve got a suit and a week’s-worth of air and provisions. Sorry I didn’t answer before; I didn’t want to risk anyone tracing my signals until I was out of the city.”
“Don’t worry about it, just as long as you’re alive,” Abigail dismissed. As long as you’re alive, I’m alive, too. “I’m acquiring your position now; we can be down in a few hours.”
“I’d appreciate a lift. It’s getting lonely down here.”
Abigail cut the transmission and turned back to Thrax, who asked, “What happens if that warship realizes the ship landing in the middle of nowhere is coming to get Howard?”
Abigail shrugged. “What if? The hard part was sneaking in. Charisma can outrun or out-stealth anything Makeen’s got, guaranteed. Now suit up.”
The vac-suits — of which the locker held three — were simple enough, especially when compared to the clunky, inefficient spacesuits of the past, but they still took over ten minutes to put on. The cramped spaces of the Charisma made the process that much more awkward. Abigail wasn’t looking forward to performing this dance again in reverse, this time with Howard aboard. She’d been checking to ensure Thrax’s helmet was properly fastened when she noticed something peculiar on the window-screens.
Where the view had once been dominated by Makeen’s pockmarked form, they were now speckled with chunks of rock and dust clouds resembling ash. She found it difficult to breathe as the realization hit her.
A good portion of Makeen had been obliterated.
A cloud of planetary matter spewed from the world’s remains like an open wound; a slowly expanding gunmetal smear against the backdrop of space. The bits of Makeen that weren’t vaporized looked like some leviathan had taken a bite out of it, leaving a fat, cracked crescent moon shape behind. For the first time since her training days, Abigail felt entirely out of her element; a front-row witness to something that defied any explanation she could conjure. The disorientation of that uncharacteristic helplessness nearly drowned out her utter terror of the scale of it all.
“Holy hell!” was all Thrax could manage when he finally noticed the devastation himself.
Abigail’s mind screamed for her to refocus, but her body refused. It took Thrax saying, “I take it that’s not a bug?” to finally snap her out of her panic.
“Yeah, Thrax,” she replied sarcastically. “A camera bug perfectly simulates a planetoid blowing up.”
“Well,” Thrax said in a harried voice, then gestured with both hands as if the footage was question enough. How do you explain this?
Still wearing her suit, Abigail pushed past Thrax and into the pilot’s seat, willing any measure of clarity to return to her. She scanned for transmissions of any kind, foolishly hoping that anyone, namely Howard, survived whatever had just happened to Makeen.
Charisma soon picked something up, and Abigail threw the broadcast onto the forward window-screen. They were greeted by the hardened expression and military outfit of the militia warship’s captain. Despite her outward bravado, she seemed just as out of her depth as Abigail was.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” the woman in the transmission said in a shaky voice. “Any other ships in the area, please respond.”
Against her better judgement, Abigail put on a brave face and patched herself in. Any problems the two of them would’ve had with each other had just vanished with half of Makeen, anyway.
“This is Charisma. What’s going on?”
“Thank the gods,” the captain said after a fraction of a second’s light-delay.
“What just happened?”
“Targeting package barely saw it. Nobody on Makeen is responding—”
“Saw what?”
“I... I don’t know. It... it wasn’t big, whatever it was. Five meters at most. But I’ve never heard of an impact like this from something so small.”
“One hell of a meteorite... what was it made of?”
“No idea. I don’t even think it was a meteorite. We’re not a science ship and our sensors had the... object for less than a second, but it was travelling at almost the speed of light. I’m broadcasting the data now—”
Abigail abruptly cut the transmission and opened the militia captain’s data package, relieved she no longer needed to appear calm.
Outside, Makeen’s ruins seemed to take on a malevolent character; a monument to the fragility of... everything.
A quick, unconscious streak of gallows humor found Abigail. At least we don’t need to squeeze Howard in here now, she reflected as she pored through the contents of the warship’s broadcast.
“The trajectory data from that thing doesn’t intersect with anything on the star charts; it goes almost perpendicular to the galactic plane,” she said. “In fact, there’s nothing along that path until... Leo T? No, that can’t be. There are plenty of stars too dim to be seen... right?”
She felt Thrax tug on the back of her seat and pull himself up to float behind her. He suddenly seemed a massive presence. Abigail would have been frightened of him in normal circumstances, but her feeble need to get a handle on — to understand — this took priority.
“Either way, no humans out in those parts,” she mused, the implications washing through her in the form of a chill. There were probably simpler explanations, like the rock or object or whatever it was being gravitationally ejected from its home system, but the slim possibility that there was design behind that projectile nagged at her. It certainly explained the object containing enough mass to destroy a planetoid — the damn thing had hit with the force of a large moon, not a small asteroid.
The sheer improbability of it all was staggering. How long must it have flown? Another galaxy?
Abigail could feel her sense of self shrinking in real time, almost as if the flight deck itself had grown in size, ready to consume her.
What made Makeen important enough to destroy? she wondered, acknowledging that the thought was little more than a defensive, knee-jerk effort to apply purpose to the scene outside.
Thrax wasn’t crippled by the same existentialism. “We could have grabbed Howard before—”
“Seriously?” Abigail asked, her voice hollow.
“You had days to find him. We could’ve been watching this in the rearview. You know Rho won’t accept this.”
She felt her body tense at that.
“Shame,” Thrax said. “I was beginning to tolerate you.”
His hand left the back of her seat, and she imagined him reaching for his hip. She probably had seconds before he placed his gun against the back of her head and...
Abigail reached for the rightmost part of her console and typed a blindingly quick command to open every hatch throughout the length of the ship, save for the one in the rear that led to engineering. Before Thrax could react, Abigail ignited Charisma’s drive and sent the ship careening into the night. The sudden acceleration pushed her into her seat and sent Thrax tumbling through the hatch and past multiple decks in his descent. She heard him slam into the bottom of the shaft nearly thirty feet below.
Already, she could feel G after G — far more than the safety threshold — piling on. Too weak to turn and peer down the hatch, Abigail held up her suit’s forearm, using the reflective glass of the wrist-mounted touchpad to get a look at Thrax. Her arm was now extraordinarily heavy, and her insides tried to surge toward the leather of her chair.
Thrax was pinned down but had managed to unholster his pistol.
With a gasp, Abigail reached for the controls to close the hatches, but before she could, a hail of bullets flew up to the flight deck, slowed by the crushing gravity but no less dangerous. She instinctively curled into a fetal position as they chewed up her pilot’s chair and tore through the leather where her head had been moments before. One of the bullets took out the hatch controls.
There was a pause; no doubt Thrax reloading.
Abigail decided not to let him fire again.
Consciousness fading, she unscrewed her helmet, considering angles and trajectories all the while. Feeling like she was pushing a boulder, she pulled the helmet free and rolled it arduously up the back of her seat until gravity flung it down Charisma’s length. The sound of its impact at the end of its path rang the whole ship as if a bomb had gone off. Judging from the G-force, that probably wasn’t far from the truth.
She waited for Thrax’s reprisal for several long minutes. None came. Cautiously, she eased the engines and queried Charisma for any hull breaches, finding none. Before long, the contents of the ship were back in freefall, and Abigail fought to recompose herself.
She looked down the length of the ship, no longer “down” as much as it was “over there.” She saw what was left of Thrax floating still and limp, the space around his head a halo of pulverized metal, broken glass, and blood globules.
There was no explaining that away to Rho.
* * *
Aboard an independent refitting station, Abigail stared out the window at the Charisma, which was ensnared by docking clamps and crawling with repair drones. Enormous, interstellar-capable engines were being grafted to her rear and thick, impact-resistant armor to her nose. The vessel would need both if she was to survive a near-lightspeed journey to a distant solar system; preferably one far from the rebellion Rho seemed so intent on exploiting.
The external modifications, in addition to a cryo-pod, had burned through Abigail’s savings. Fortunately, it turned out there had been a standing bounty on Thrax posted by some rival gang. That money would keep her from going broke wherever she went next. Relying upon blood money to stay afloat didn’t exactly sit right with her, but that it had been earned in self-defense helped put her mind at ease.
Abigail never thought she’d burn enough bridges to ever need to flee this system, but she felt surprisingly at peace with the notion of starting anew. Toosaum and the rest of the colonies — well, one less now — had been good to her, but she figured this was a good excuse to finally see the rest of the cosmos.
Her sense of mastery over spaceflight had been shaken by the freak destruction of Makeen and, for the first time in a lifetime, she felt small. Infinitely so. She saw a universe teeming with mystery where once it had been a place of cynicism.
One week was all the techs needed to finish Charisma’s modifications. Then she’d be off. Perhaps she’d one day meet the ones who had fired the bullet at Makeen.
Copyright © 2021 by D. Tyler Pierson
