Helium3 Episode 3

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  – Chapter 4 –

  A Lonely Way To Die

  Mervyn paced.

  Aurora glared at him, ‘Sit down, Mervyn. You are making me nervous.’

  ‘They’ll be here soon, and before you know it we’ll be on our way to Zetalona,’ Tarun said, but he looked less than convinced himself.

  ‘You said that an hour ago. And the hour before that,’ Loren complained. She sulked in the corner with crossed arms. Mervyn hated waiting too. He turned and stalked back across the cramped floor of the ancient shuttle Guthrik had lent them.

  ‘I knew that human we could not be trusted,’ Aurora grumbled ‘He has betrayed us, again.’

  Mervyn considered it, ‘But why not just shoot us when he had the chance and save himself a shuttle? It makes no sense.’

  ‘Then the Silvin have betrayed us.’

  ‘At least we’ve got plenty of air reserves,’ Tarun said.

  ‘And virtually no fuel -- a muon’s good that will do us,’ Loren said.

  Mervyn continued pacing, ‘And you’re sure the heat shield’s damaged?’

  ‘I checked it on the remote cameras -- we’d burn up on re-entry,’ Loren shifted uncomfortably on the spartan seat. ‘We have no option but to stay here until either the Silvin freighter turns up or we suffocate.’

  Mervyn turned again.

  Aurora’s chima burned red, ‘For Quarks sake sit down, Mervyn!’ He ignored her and carried on pacing.

  A bleep sounded from the control panel making them all jump.

  Mervyn hurried across to it, ‘A ship.’

  ‘I told you they would turn up, but none of you believed me, did you?’ Tarun said with relief.

  ‘That doesn’t look much like a Silvin freighter to me,’ Loren said peering at the long distance image of the approaching craft.

  ‘A new design?’ Tarun said hopefully.

  ‘Whatever it is we have to send out a distress call,’ Mervyn said. ‘It’s our only hope.’

  The new ship responded immediately to their signal. ‘Warning,’ the onboard computer chimed, ‘missile lock! Warning -- missile lock!’

  Loren sank back onto her seat, ‘Quarks, it’s a warship. And there’s only one warship in these parts.’

  ‘The Naga,’ they all said together.

  Mervyn slumped onto a seat.

  Mervyn waited for the door to open They were in the same shuttle bay where the Naga had hibernated them for the journey to Pershwin, he could see the shattered control tower on the screen. Even their sleds still sat at the far end of the bay. As he watched the Naga arrived with a gaggle of Puncheon. Without warning the shuttle door blew. The force of the blast threw him to the ground. Armoured Puncheon swarmed in to the shuttle with blast riffles at the ready. Mervyn tried to raise his hands, but the raiders pined him to the ground and strapped his hands together. Something hard dug into his ribs: Guthrik’s deep space communicator, he was supposed to contact the Human leader when they completed their mission. He was roughly hauled to his feet and herded out of the shuttle with the rest of the Misfits.

  ‘Why would a shuttle be just sitting there right in our path?’ The Naga was saying to the Puncheon around him, ‘This is more than a coincidence.’ He turned back to the shuttle and saw the Misfits standing at gunpoint. He closed his eyes and opened them again as if he thought he might be dreaming. ‘You lot again! You just keep coming back like a bad comet, don’t you,’ he raged. ‘Throw them out the airlock! And clean up the mess this time.’ He turned back to his puncheon companions. ‘My apologies -- it is a coincidence.’

  A guard grabbed Mervyn and dragged him towards an airlock. He tried to struggle free, but his hands were tight fast behind him and the Puncheon was just too strong. He could do nothing. This was it, the end of everything. He thought of his parents and his sisters. He hoped they would miss him. Then he thought of Rufus De Monsero, would he miss the Misfits? Who would he taunt now?

  ‘I am still the Patriarch’s Niece,’ Aurora screamed. ‘I am still valuable.’ It was worth a try. The guards paused, waiting for the Naga’s reaction. Mervyn held his breath.

  ‘I am worth a fortune,’ Aurora shouted, taking advantage of the guard’s uncertainty. ‘Double if you ransom us all together.’ The Naga showed no sign of having heard and the guards continued dragging their captive to the airlock. All hope evaporated.

  Time slowed to a crawl and Mervyn started thinking of everything he would never do: sail round the Ethrigian system, visit a black hole, have a girlfriend. Say goodbye to his Mum -- tears pricked at his eyes -- watch a sunrise with his sisters.

  Where did they go wrong? Why hadn’t the Silvin showed up? Why had he trusted Guthrik? Failed possibilities competed to overwhelm him. The Puncheon shoved him into an open airlock. He fought back tears of despair. He wasn’t going to beg: he would take this like a man -- die with dignity, if that were possible with the blood evaporating away in his veins.

  He tried to shut out the thought of dying in the vacuum of space. The pain wouldn’t last long, maybe the ship’s engines would vaporise him as he tumbled past. One thing though felt worse than all the rest: he would die alone. He struggled to free his writs so he could hold hands with his friends, but they were firmly bound. The inner door slammed shut and he waited in the dark for death to claim him.

  They were taking their time, dragging it out most likely. Suddenly the door opened again and he was jerked back into the shuttle bay.

  ‘Bring them here,’ the Naga barked.

  ‘He is going to ransom us,’ Aurora whispered and received a cuff round the head for her trouble. ‘Careful, you will damage the goods.’

  ‘My Puncheon commanders need some sport while we wait for reinforcements,’ the Naga growled when they stood before him. ‘So we are going hunting.’

  Mervyn was mystified.

  ‘Your sleds are over there,’ the Naga pointed to the far end of the shuttle. ‘You get a head start while we launch our fighters.’ It took a moment for the full horror of the Naga’s proposal to sink in.

  ‘And what happens when you catch up with us?’ Asked Aurora innocently.

  The Naga pointed two fingers at her like a blaster, ‘Kapow!’

  Aurora blanched, ‘You’re making a big mistake--’

  ‘Your time s starts now.’

  ‘Run!’ Mervyn, shouted and raced for the sleds. Tarun and Loren sprinted past him, then he looked back. Aurora stood in the same spot, unmoving.

  Mervyn doubled back. ‘Aurora, you’ve got to move.’

  ‘I am not playing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am not playing their game. I would rather go out the airlock with dignity than be blasted from behind while running away.’

  ‘But we need you,’ he pleaded. ‘Any chance is better than none, Aurora, who knows what may happen?’

  ‘They will make fools of us, that is what will happen.’

  Mervyn grabbed her by the shoulders and stared straight into those intense emerald eyes, ‘We’re good pilots, Aurora, we might get lucky. We might outrun them. They might get bored and give up -- anything could happen.’

  ‘They have fighters, Mervyn -- light, fast, and enough weapons to destroy us a hundred times over -- it’s just prolonging the inevitable.’

  ‘I still have the communicator Guthrik gave me, Aurora. Perhaps we can get close enough to somewhere to use it -- maybe get a message to Zetalona -- we could save hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives.’

  Suddenly Aurora was gone, ‘Come on, Mervyn, what are you waiting for?’

  Mervyn sighed and ran after her, ‘Girls.’

  As he climbed into the sled Mervyn punched the thrusters to life and felt the comforting presence of his biolink reactivating. He had been isolated in his own mind since Revlon, now he felt the others hovering on the fringes of his consciousness. Not the same as having access to limitless informat
ion, but these were the friends who counted.

  Aurora linked herself to the sleds’ bionet too, ‘How do we do this, Mervyn?’

  ‘We hot launch,’ he replied. ‘Equal amounts of forward and reverse thrust. Then kill the reverse.’

  Without warning, the bay doors began to open. Mervyn snapped the canopy shut and strapped himself in -- this would be a rough ride. The thrusters howled in protest as he increased power and held them in balance; the sled shook as though alive. A slash of black starscape appeared between the bay doors. Freedom? Or a false hope? Anything was possible -- you just had to grab the opportunity and tag along as it passed, wasn’t that what his dad had said.

  ‘We go as soon as that gap is large enough to take a sled,’ Mervyn instructed.

  Aurora got away first, angling her sled to slip through the doors and escape into the darkness beyond. Mervyn was hot on her tail. The G-force squished him into the back of his seat like a rubber ball. He felt sure he could feel the muscles of his face tearing off the bones. As the sled escaped the battleship’s artificial gravity he felt the familiar lurch, like speeding over a humpbacked bridge, as he become weightless. The G-force lost its power over him and everything sprang back to its rightful place. On the viewscreen, at frequencies beyond the visible spectrum, the seemingly featureless space came alive with vibrant colours: vast interstellar gas clouds glowed red and blue, a Brown Dwarf pulsated with a malevolent orange glow, far off to the left a nova glowed with rainbow coloured gas clouds heated by a neutron star buried somewhere at its core -- the remains of a collapsed giant star -- now long forgotten. He sped away at full throttle, recklessly gobbling fuel, to put as much distance as possible between the sled and the battleship.

  ‘Valna must have refuelled the sled before we left Revlon,’ Loren reported, ‘we have a full load on board.’

  Thank goodness for Valna -- at least he remained loyal.

  ‘Ok, so I am a bad judge of character,’ Aurora said. ‘Just don’t rub it in, ok.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  Tarun tactfully interrupted, ‘Where are we heading for then -- even with a full fuel load there isn’t enough to reach even halfway to Ethrigia’

  ‘Ok guys,’ Mervyn said, ‘what advantages do we have over fighters?’

  ‘The sleds are smaller--’ Tarun began.

  ‘Don’t think size, think mass,’ Loren said. ‘We may be smaller, but we have more mass.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’ Aurora asked.

  ‘Did you asleep through all your navigation lessons?’

  ‘No -- not all of them.’

  ‘Having a higher mass means we can get a faster slingshot from the gravity of that Brown Dwarf. We’ll need all the extra speed we can get.’

  ‘What else,’ Mervyn. asked

  ‘We can manoeuvrable better,’ Tarun, suggested.

  ‘There’s two of us in each sled,’ Aurora, suggested, ‘We can take turns to sleep on straight runs. That way we’ll be fresher when we have to decide on curse corrections. And anyway, when we are sleeping we will use less oxygen.’ Aurora was right. Although the sleds were cramped, there was a cubby hole which one person could just squeeze in to if they had a mind to sleep.

  ‘Is that it?’ Mervyn asked. It was. ‘Right, Loren and Tarun, you work out the best route -- maximum speed over maximum distance -- while Aurora and I head for that Brown Dwarf.’

  Silence reigned as they worked. Far ahead the Brown Dwarf sparked and boiled in its vain attempt to spark into life as a star. What must it be like to spend an eternity in failure? Maybe one day it would get lucky and capture an asteroid with enough mass to tip the balance.

  Loren jolted Mervyn out of his musings, ‘Got it! You’ll like this -- all we got to do is send them in the wrong direction.’

  ‘This sounds bad,’ Aurora said. ‘Does this plan have an ending?’

  ‘It’s a good plan.’

  ‘So that’s a no then.’

  Loren ignored her and called up a star map on the viewscreens and marked a route. ‘There’s one opportunity to deceive them,’ she marked a circle on the map. ‘Here. But there’s a cost -- we’ve gotta slow down and let them catch up. The fighters need to be committed to their trajectory before we are. That shouldn’t be too difficult, they have less mass than the sleds so they’ll have to fly closer to the dwarf to get their slingshot.’

  ‘But that puts us within shooting range,’ Tarun said in alarm.

  ‘Ah, yes... it will be tight.’

  ‘How tight?’

  ‘Very tight.’

  Aurora was not convinced, ‘So what if we just pile on the power and head out as far as we can?’

  ‘They will catch us here,’ Loren marked a cross on the map.’

  ‘And if we pull off this trick?’

  Loren marked another cross much further away. Mervyn suspected by the tone of her voice she was hiding a surprise up her sleeve, but he decided not to spoil her fun, he would know soon enough anyway.

  ‘So what is the point, Loren? They are going to get us anyway,’ Aurora exclaimed.

  It was the response Loren wanted, ‘Because, I have worked out a way to get us to here,’ she said smugly and marked a new cross. ‘Which, you might note, is within communications distance of this relay station,’ she drew another circle.

  ‘All right, genius, so tell us how we achieve this magnificent feat,’ Aurora, sneered.

  Loren told her.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Aurora, hissed, ‘even I can’t make a sled do that.’