Some new sci-fi for y’all today! This is the beginning of a piece I tried to write a few years back—something that was going to turn into a classic bug hunt and spooky spaceship story, but good fun nonetheless. My homage to Aliens, as it were. Right now I just have the intro. Let me know if it catches your interest…
During the first few minutes of the burn phase, while the merchantman Chixlu was ramping up to stellar transit speed, Adler Brin could look through an aft-facing window and see Tazab Station receding into the distance. A two-kilometer titanium cross shrank to just a speck, suspended on the long ghostly tendrils of a purple-pink emission nebula. A few more minutes and it was gone entirely. The nebula, for its part, remained unchanged, fat and happy as if it had slurped up the station for an afternoon snack. Adler would not see another outpost of civilization until he arrived at Canberra Orbital, three weeks in the future.
Eventually he pulled away and laid back on the coarse, unyielding cot in what passed for his quarters. He was a little too tall for it, which forced his body into a clumsy S-shape; the ship’s acceleration compressed that S in the other direction, pushing him against the back wall, which wasn’t so bad as long as he was careful to avoid the cables snaking their way along the curve of the metal.
It was still more comfortable than sleeping on deployment on Brizalon, huddled up in a foxhole and letting rocks press into his back all night. But during the war, Adler had at least had brothers and sisters in arms, enduring the same travails alongside him. Here, he was alone.
He had been alone for months, almost the entire time since the Federation went bankrupt and left its loyal soldiers to find their own ways home. So he had gone from station to station, ship to ship, selling off wargear to pay his way. Helmet, carapace armor, frag grenades, spectral scanner—he was returning to civilian life, piece by piece. Shedding his old skin like a snake.
All he had left were his boots, and a laser rifle that now lay next to him on the cot. That weapon was the one thing he would not sell. It stayed always within arm’s reach, even when he slept.
He was starting to feel drowsy. Good. The constant humming and thrumming of the engineering compartment might not keep him up after all. Loose bolts were a greater nuisance, rattling loudly in unseen places, but after a few minutes he could tune those out, too, as he would the scraping of tree branches against a bedroom window. Yes—that was a pleasant image. For a moment he was ten years old again, sitting in a warm bed on a dark, windy night, and he had not yet watched his friends burn alive on the sands of Brizalon.
***
A message over the intercom jolted him awake. It was the creaky rasp of this ship’s captain, a Zaldarian free trader named Quizop. “Adler Brin, report to the bridge.”
What the hell? Adler sat up, blinking, laser rifle already instinctively in his hands. Nobody on his previous flights had summoned him by name. He was supposed to be invisible, left to mind his own business for the duration of the voyage. Given that this was Captain Quizop—who had barely let him aboard at all, then consigned him to a remote nook not far from the main reactor, and laughed in his face when he asked about radiation—he didn’t suppose she had anything positive to say.
He threw off the blanket and planted his feet on the deck below, a wide-spaced hexagonal grating instead of the square grid common on human vessels. The whole floor area of the Chixlu was kitted out with it. A nightmare if you dropped loose change, or a wedding ring. Most of the interior walls were similar, with frequent gaps between thin metal panels—once again hexagon-shaped—revealing a maze of pipes and hanging cables. You could look just about anywhere on this ship and glimpse its innards.
Adler made sure he had all his valuables on him, in the pockets of the ratty green fatigues he now wore full-time, then walked over to a small wash basin, presumably bolted on when this corner of engineering had been converted into a billet. He ran water over his face; stubble scratched his fingers. He looked shabby, his hair was mussed, he probably smelled like shit, but nobody would care—boot camp was a long time ago.
Before he left, he took one final look out the window. A bluish tint over the black of space indicated that they had gone to warp. They would be traveling fast now, somewhere around eighteen light-years a day. But the nebula had hardly budged—it was hundreds of light-years across, not something you could escape easily. Even when they reached Canberra it would remain clearly visible, a livid welt in the sky.
He went on. He thought he remembered the way to the bridge—not that this ship’s design, or his lack of sleep, were helping matters. At one point he encountered a crewmember, a lanky, scaled Tazabian switching out some air filters. They glanced at him as he walked past. He saw himself reflected in their slick, bulbous, pupil-less eyes, showing nothing a human would have recognized as emotion.
Adler did eventually find his way. The bridge was a dark, humid place, where Quizop’s crew labored quietly in their alcoves. Blue and green light from screens shone dimly off the walls. He peeked into the empty weapons station, taking a look at the console, but it was all gibberish to him.
Quizop was in the center of it all. She hung a few meters off the deck, embraced around the torso by a gigantic metal claw, itself suspended on an arm reaching down from tall, murky recesses. She might have been likened to a lizard back home—a very short, very plump lizard. As if a bearded dragon collided head-on with a wall. She had beady black eyes, and tan scales; six limbs, the first pair longer and with claws for gripping, the last four a set of stubby legs. Without the metal arm to move her around, she would have managed little more than a waddle at the height of Adler’s knee.
“Ah. Mr. Brin,” she said. “Is that the appropriate form of address in your culture?”
He stood up straight, but held himself back from saluting. He wasn’t a soldier anymore. “You can call me Adler, captain.”
“Very well. Adler. I’ve wondered about you, Adler—why you’re putzing about on freighters, panhandling your way across the galaxy. I pulled up your service record.” She glanced at his laser rifle, a slight turn of her wide, neckless head. “I’m sure there’s good money for you in the mercenary trade.”
Adler frowned. “I’m sure there is. War never sleeps. But I’ll be happy if I never touch a weapon again—all I want to do is go home.”
“Hm. You must have heard the reports. I don’t know how much home you’ll find.”
He had indeed heard: riots, economic depression, declarations of independence from Mars and Circe and the other colonies. Just a few weeks ago, he’d passed a television and seen grainy footage of tanks on the grounds of the Federation Palace. Still he pushed on, his destination fixed, driven by overriding instinct like a migratory bird.
“That’s for me to deal with, captain. What do you want?”
“There’s a… situation, that’s come up. You may have the skills to resolve it.”
I’m already strongly tempted to continue this one as a serial on my blog. Like, comment, and subscribe for updates, and I just might do it 😉
Until next time!
“Last Flight from Tazab Station”: Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
Note: The cover image for this post is AI-generated. The text was 100% written by a human.
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