Hyperspace
Gregory sank down in the captains chair once more, and activated the repulsors. They turned on with a gentle hum, just strong enough to counteract the asteroids gravity. He turned his head to the left to see Jetlo and Kental take their places, he noticed that his mug was already full of coffee. The galley was getting better. Or prophetic. He started the system up, and noticed a great increase in the speed. He flicked on the intercom, and brought up Computers.
Kravern, what the hell did you do to the system?
The scientist chuckled. Merely modified it a bit. The original programmers put in far too much extraneous information. Piracy protection, the like.
Not content with just pirating freighters, are you?
Greg, you know I dont have morals that low.
Well, its running nicely. Good work, Doctor. He turned the intercom off. It was always good practice to compliment a crew member, especially after one screws up bad enough to almost get the entire ship blown up.
Kental, how did the freighter boarding go?
The man turned his seat around. Well, captain. The merchants didnt have any heart for battle, so we got their cargo loaded up nice and fast. Then Kravern hacked their systems, so they cant lift off for another four days. We thought you might like that.
Very nice. Avoiding pursuit was always near the top of Gregorys priority list. What did you take on board?
Kental smiled. Youll like this. They had a shipment of 255 point-six-ought caliber machine guns. The new model, the kind thats standard on the E.U. army. Detachable silencer, two hundred round magazine size, the works.
Jetlo piped up. Kental, you spend too much time on guns. We need to find you some chicks.
This is coming from a man who calls the ship his baby, the weapons officer said.
Jetlo scowled. Thats different.
Right, I dont cry whenever my guns get scraped.
Gregory butted in. Thosell fetch a high price on the market. A mercenary group would pay well for those weapons.
Kental traded a smirk with Jetlo, and went on. My thoughts exactly, captain. There were also 148 pistols, some nice guns there. Berlin manufacture. Gregory nodded, and Kental went on. We found about fifteen sniper rifles, the Kerfatch variety. All the latest features, a fully computerized interface... I cant say enough about these guns.
Gregory grinned. Sounds good to me.
Especially for someone who gets his kicks out of killing random people.
Shut up, Jetlo. We also scored six ship-held blaster cannons, roughly the same size as the ones we have on the Angler.
Finally, some loot for me.
The captain sighed. We can fit two more on, at maximum. The rest well sell.
We found plenty of ammo for the guns, and about twenty missiles. Optical targeting. Theyre too big for our system, but we can still sell them.
Anything else?
Kental paused for a bit, studying Gregory, and went on. Then theres the mother load. Fifty suits of FarTech battle armor.
Gregory let out a low whistle; Jetlo didnt even bother to speak. The FarTech line was the most advanced in existence, with bullet-stopping capabilities unsurpassed in the field and low-level radiation shielding. It was suitable for combat in both a vacuum and in zero-g, and enabled the user to see in almost every spectrum. One at a time, of course. People would pay nearly one million euros for one suit. At the minimum. And that was for the military types, cheap as they were. The private sector could afford to pay and did pay nearly twice as much.
The suits were supposed to be an exclusive for the E.U. Army, but the design had gradually leaked to the public, and nearly every billionaire fat cat decided that his personal bodyguards had to have a set of the armor.
Thats it, captain.
Very nice, Kental. Do we have any good buyers at Polaris Station?
Kental took a moment to check the computer. Theres the Iron League merc group, and several low-level fences. The Iron League would pay the best prices, though, and could buy any of our stuff.
Good. Whats the name of their contact?
Wayne Marshall, native of Australia. Hell give a fair price, but expect a trap. Especially if the E.U. knows were coming.
How could they?
You can never tell in this line of work, captain.
Gregory grimaced, but let the conversation drop. Pilot, are we ready for takeoff?
Jetlo spun his seat to face the controls. Affirmative. Setting a course to Polaris Station.
The Anglers massive engines throbbed to life. The Angler eased itself up, and shot forward into space on a direct line with Polaris. The asteroid field vanished into nothingness.
Pilot, begin the hyperspace sequence.
Affirmative.
The hyperspace engine. A legend, even a myth for nearly fifty years of Gregorys life, it had become a reality twenty-seven years ago when Turan Yessek reached his mind out to the cosmos. Out of nearly 500 billion humans alive, only Yessek knew how hyperspace operated. He had fought against the term hyperspace for the entire time, all the while saying that such a thing was impossible, that his drive worked on different principles. But he refused to reveal them, and so the term hyperspace stuck. Not that Yessek was complaining much, as he was the richest man in the galaxy after the first year of his invention.
Gregory silently thanked the man for his only true freedom as the stars disappeared.
Jetlo spoke. Radiation shielding at absolute maximum, blocking most visible light.
Do we have a course?
Yes sir.
Gun it.
The view port brightened, and light came in at the crew members. It started dull and far-off, but grew. It turned pure white, and came in over the ship, and Gregory had to shield his eyes from the flare. The Angler lurched, and shot forward into the light. Gregory heard the steady roar of the engines, furiously accelerating. The white glow faded gradually, until all that was left was a milky coating where space should have been. It churned from the shock of the Anglers engines. The mists seemed to part for the Angler, gradually giving way to it.
The crew turned to gaze full on at the view port. Their eyes darted back and forth, watching each bump in the clouds as though danger lurked somewhere beneath the clouds. And perhaps it did. Science had never been able to figure out exactly what the mists were, or why they were.
And then the faces formed.
Out from the mist, a mans head came, larger than most mens bodies, at the least. It had no color, but Gregory recognized a hint of the distinctive eyes of an Oriental man, the face of a African, and the various traits of a thousand other regions. Its mouth contorted in something that was part scream and part smile, but no sound reached the ship. Its forehead was ruptured, burst by the passage of a bullet. Gregory dimly recalled it to be the face of the destroyers captain. Behind it, other faces formed, from all over the Earth, and many from the various moons of the solar system. Their faces all twisted in the same wordless scream that the captain wore, but were warped and burned. Their features ran together in an unclean smear and their skin peeled, flaked, and dripped down from flesh and bone.
Each face looked exactly as it had in death, that much establishment was sure of. Gregory shuddered as he wondered exactly how the captain had earned a gun to his face.
You never get used to it, do you?
Gregory stared blankly as the men opened their mouths for one last, futile scream, and disappeared into the mists. No. Not ever, pilot.
I always wondered what caused them, why the dead come to visit us in hyperspace of all places. All the stories, all the legends tell of ghosts near cemeteries, and old mansions. When I was growing up, wanting to be a pilot, I never thought Id find the myths up here.
Gregory couldnt find the words to answer. All of his crew, nearly one hundred and fifty strong, had been in hyperspace more times than he could count, but still had trouble facing the shadows of those both long and shortly dead.
Kental spoke. Its funny how you never see a man with a look of peace on his face. In my childhood, we told of ghosts who would rise from their graves to take revenge on those who had wronged them in life, reaching out from beyond the grave to pull men in with them. No ghost ever died in his bed, they were all killed.
Gregory placed his chin on a hand, resting it.
Myths. Ghost stories. The textbooks spoke of them, the Greek, the Roman, and even a bit of Norse. They said that hundreds of years ago, people had believed in the myths, even worshipped the gods mentioned within with all their hearts, but the Union had ended that long ago, in about 2050 C.E. The myths had caused too much death, too much violence as those who disagreed with interpretation fought to the death over them. The myths had been abolished, and placed in the textbooks to teach the dangers of fanaticism.
Gregory still had a relic of that era, a piece of old metal money that was ages obsolete. It had been a quarter of a dollar, whatever that was. One side was worn away by time, and the other bore a faded symbol of a forgotten man and a few words. Along the top ran the word Liberty, and the near bottom it bore the phrase In God We Trust. Gregory had never known which god it referred to, or even which set of myths, but he did know that his father had prized it greatly, as a family heirloom of sorts. Gregory had never bothered to ask the man what it meant, and he suspected that his father had never even known.
There had been an old man in the city Gregory grew up in, nearly 160 years of age, who had ranted about the lost glories of America. But it was expected, all old men talked about the good old days, and how much better the past had seemed to their naive eyes than the present seemed to their hardened hearts. He had died when Gregory was still a child, but had pressured him to never lose the coin. He still kept it, though whether for respect of his fathers sentiments or so that the old man might still have some effect on the world he did not know.
The mists had been still for some time. They always were in deep space, away from the stars, probably because no one ever died out that far from life. The crew welcomed the respite.
Dr. Mandrosus hunched beside one of the sickbays beds. The man in it was dying. The radiation was killing him, it seemed. He had received too large of a dose, probably from a small shield failure. He wouldnt last long, but at least he would feel no pain as he went. Mandrosus had already given him large amounts of painkillers, and the brain damage he had received would make up for the rest. Mandrosus briefly considered euthanasia, but he wasnt qualified to make that decision on his own. Nature would have to do it for him.
And it was doing a marvelous job. He had no outward signs of illness or injury, but Mandrosus could tell he bore a large tumor in his brain and in his chest, and it was spreading rapidly. The cancer had been spurred on by insane levels of radiation, and within the hour it would overtake the man.
Mandrosus meant to be there when it did. Modern medicine had cured nearly all of mans ailments. Bacteria, viruses, and even cancer were of no consequence to the well-equipped doctor. The trouble was, Mandrosus was not a well-equipped as he would hope. He could treat most of the common afflictions on space-faring ships, but this type of cancer was beyond him. He would have to have taken the man to a hospital on a planet, but he wouldnt last that long.
Mandrosus had never before lost a patient to a curable condition. This would be the first that he knew he could be able to, even should be able to, but didnt. The man lay there. His skin was slightly tanned, and his hair was a normal shade of brown. His eyelids were closed in sleep and respect, but he shook as if in a nightmare. Mandrosus pulled up a chair, and sat, and stared. The minutes ticked off in the distance as a clock count off the time of the mans life.
Im sorry. There will be no home for you, after all.
His breathing slowed, and he stopped shaking. The heartbeat resounded faintly in a monitor, weak but still going ever so slightly. If only he could hold on long enough to reach port... The heartbeat stopped. Mandrosus raised his eyes from the corpse, and whispered into space.
Into your hands I commend this spirit.
His eyes darted back down to the body, and his mouth hung open in astonishment. The mans skin glowed a faint blue, and then it seemed to ripple. A form sloughed off of the body, the dead man in every detail but color. His eyes were open, staring blankly into whatever the dead see after the life departs. The mouth opened, and Mandrosus could barely read the words on its lips as the form passed through the ships walls to be the first to die out here in the far reaches of space.
Thank you.
The faces reappeared on the main view port, shocking Gregory out of his reverie. They came by the hundreds this time, some victims of murder, some of accidents, some of the plague. The ship was nearing Polaris station. More and more faces seemed to leap from the mists out at the ship, screaming from salvation. The crew tried to ignore them, and failed, some even crying at the sight of it. Jetlo brought the ship out of hyperspace, and into the Polaris system.
(This message has been edited by Celchu (edited 03-09-2003).)
