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AGAINST THE TIDE Chapter One: No Good Deed

“The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is.”

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Thom’s day had hit a high point. After nearly a month of monotony in hyperspace he had finally reached the raggedy edge. Excitement, danger and adventure had come over for tea, and Thom had welcomed them in with open arms.

Of course, his ship had almost exploded, but to stretch the metaphor a little further, Thom was the astronaut equivalent of a lonely cat-person and he was glad for the company.

The image bobbed and blurred crazily as the fumbling maxed out the microphone gain for a moment. But after some clumsy rearrangement, the log camera was mounted neatly on the helm dashboard, looking directly at the captain’s chair in the middle of the bridge. Bounding over quickly, Thom threw himself into the chair and lounged casually in the crimson glow of the emergency lighting and the low monotonous thrum of alarms.

Satisfied he was correctly framed in the picture, the human spoke in a calm tone unbefitting the obviously dire situation.

“Personal log, Captain Thom Crichton. Mission date, twelve-one-gamma.” He paused to mimic the charming smile of a dashing fictional ship commander whose adventures he watched out of sheer boredom while traversing the endless reaches of space. “We are one Sol standard month and twelve days into the important mission the Sol Space Guild has entrusted to us. It is absolutely imperative we get these supplies from Earth to the frontier colonies. Those people out there are relying on me, relying on the SSG Starcast Ronin to complete her mission. For integrity. For justice…!”

The alarms dimmed ever so slightly as a soft, synthetic voice chimed into Thom’s one-sided conversation. “That mission brief is technically inaccurate. While you are paying off the lease on the Starcast Ronin_, the Sol Space Guild still owns this ship. You, and by extension I, are technically in their employ. On top of that, this transport run to the frontier colonies is not an uncommon task. We are among at least a dozen ships making the same run. In fact, the other ships have probably reached the frontier by now.”_

Thom didn’t react to the announcement of the on-board artificial intelligence. A nerve jumped in his jaw, but he managed to hold on to his expression, just for the sake of the camera. Taking a breath, he continued to say:

“Unfortunately, we’ve hit a snag. The FTL drive has encountered a problem and we’ve been forced to fold back into realspace. But with the catastrophic overload building and only moments left to fix the problem, however will we avert this crisis…?”

“Thom, I averted the crisis five minutes ago by shutting down the FTL drive. You merely requested the alarms be left on to give your personal log more… how did you put it? Ah, yes. Dramatic effect.”

His whole expression faltered this time and finally Thom just sighed explosively into his hands.

“Oh, my god, Al. Are you specifically programmed to bum me out?”

The AI, more colloquially known as A14/November – or ‘Al’ for short – didn’t have an expression and spoke in a monotone, but his next statement was one you might associate with a smug smile. “No, Thom. That’s just how I roll.”

“Great. Four months of sublight travel to the next spaceport with nobody to talk to but a smartass.”

“Actually, it might be worse than that. I’ve scanned long range frequencies, searching for anyone able to render assistance, and isolated a nearby distress signal. It’s patchy, but its definitely there.” Al spun up a holoboard in front of the captain’s chair. The glowing display showed their relative position in the galaxy and a second dot representing another ship approximately an hour’s travel away.

The map zoomed in rapidly and before Thom knew it he was looking at a glowing blue neutron star. The tiny ball of blue fusion sat at the centre of a pulsar, the gaseous bodies trapped in orbit bleeding ionised trails that left thin membranes of flourescent interference streaking through space.

And trapped in the midst of it was a ship. A long yacht type vessel, sleek alien lines that went against the spartan sensibilities of human design. The Sol Space Guild tended to make utilitarian ships, nothing too fancy looking but certainly functional, efficient and optimised for crew and cargo capacity.

Long, sleek, aerodynamic lines, a shiny finish to the hull with ostentatious running lights and gravimetrically attached pulse engine nacelles that tilted in their sponsons. This ship seemed more suited for form than function, the kind of thing a flashy alien celebrity might roll about the galaxy in.

Thom wasn’t totally versed in aliens, ironic for an astronaut, but from his vague grasp on the civilisations that humanity shared the Milky Way with he recognised the Sovereignty design. What on earth a Sovereignty ship was doing on this side of the galaxy though, that was a question Thom couldn’t even fathom an answer to.

“Don’t see that every day,” he commented, getting an affirmative hum from Al.

“Indeed. It seems the pulsar is putting out electromagnetic interference. It’s wreaking havoc with their systems, disabling their engines and no doubt frying their FTL drive. Additionally, their distress signal is severely limited in range. We’re no doubt the only one to have picked up on it.”

“How long have they been out there?”

“Assuming they touched the edge of the pulsar’s interference and fell gradually inside, I can calculate based on orbital decay… I estimate two days. At the rate of decay they have a few more days before they fall close enough to the neutron star to burn up.”

Scratching his head, Thom weighed his options. The Starcast Ronin had problems of her own, and he’d prefer to get his ship into dry-dock as soon as possible. FTL drive malfunction was no joke, but the alien ship would have burned up with all hands lost by the time he got back to civilisation and flagged help.

That limited his options to only one suitable course of action.

“Thom, I know what you’re thinking,” Al said, detecting the facial tics indicating Thom was about to open his mouth to give an order. “Need I remind you we have our own problems, as well as a haul of cargo the SSG is holding us responsible for.”

Thom smirked. “Just set the course, Al. Who knows? The aliens in distress might be able to help us out with our FTL drive.”

There was a hum as the pulse engines fired, and a slight shift in gravity as they altered course. “I assume you have a plan then.”

“You know me.”

“That is why I worry…”

*****{{~~~}}*****

Thom poked his head out of the Starcast Ronin’s airlock and looked down, for a given value of ‘down.’ The infinite sprawl of space gave him a moment of vertigo before his flattened his back against the interior bulkhead and gave the stranded yacht a look.

The eldritch blue light of the neutron star glinted on the silvered hull, forcing his faceplate optics to dim slightly. The augmented reality display blinked to life and projected a series of calculations and flight paths for him to follow. His reaction-control-system fuel gauge pinged a comforting green among the rest of the display that tracked is retinas.

“Thom, I am concerned that you have not thought this through.”

He chuckled. “Like my pop always said. When you come to a steep hill…” Squatting slightly, Thom pushed off hard. “Just hit the diff.”

Leaping forward, Thom ran from the airlock and loped into the depths of space. There was a mild tingling in his extremities as he passed out of empty deep-space and into the pulsar’s field of interference. His heads-up display fuzzed and wavered, but the shielding held the worst of the magnetic disturbances at bay.

The thruster nacelles on the clavicles of his jacket puffed vaporous gas, correcting him onto the green path lined up on his augmented reality display, and he rocketed through space at the stranded ship.

Behind him, holding beyond the pulsar, the Starcast Ronin shrank rapidly into the darkness of space. It hurt Thom to leave her behind, but he couldn’t help throw a look of admiration back at the ship.

His home, for all intents and purposes, was a former military vessel. Sleek with the silhouette of a racer ship, while at the same time highly modular as the quick and nimble Aphelion Class prowlers of the navy ought to be. The Ronin had been mostly repurposed for hauling cargo, sporting a cargo spine suspended between the main ship at the front, and the FTL engines module at the very rear.

The Ronin was certainly something beautiful to behold; not a piece of highly refined art but more like a high-performance sports car, or a recently cleaned and loaded assault rifle.

His clavicle nacelles puffed erratically, and he completed a roll before looking at the yacht. It grew as the Ronin shrank. The lines on his HUD guiding him on course flicked back to green and a small readout calculated his heading and speed were just short of optimal. In all, not bad for an irresponsible blind leap through space.

Al chimed in on the patchy coms using a direct tachyon link which was only minimally affected by the bombardment of foreign energy particles buzzing about the pulsar.

“As much as I admire your fearless reliance on random probability, I prefer to deal in certainties.”

The statement was punctuated by the nanowire launcher in the airlock deploying a magnetic grapple. The wire shot through space above Thom’s head and latched on to the hull of the yacht a second later.

“You’re no fun,” Thom said, clipping himself to the high-tensile guideline specifically deployed to increase survivability of space-walks like these.

Riding the nanowire down the rest of the way, Thom flipped over casually and clung to the yacht’s hull by his magnetic soles. From afar the ship was certainly advanced, up close it was a wonder of craftmanship, seemingly forged out of a single sheet of alloy. There were no seams, no distinct external markings. Just a stark-white, almost ostentatious gleam to the entire unblemished craft.

Getting inside proved to be easy. As high tech and hyper-futuristic as the yacht looked, it had its utilitarian safety features. Thom managed to find the old fashioned manual controls after running his hands across the airlock in search. With a twist of the emergency cranks and handles, he cycled the chamber and climbed aboard. Working the same handles inside he closed the exterior door behind him, equalised and before he knew it he was standing in a polished corridor running along the port side of the ship.

Gravity felt normal. The décor was a bit rich for Thom’s taste, and compared to the cramped but functional chambers he was used to aboard the Starcast Ronin, this ship seemed to have a lot of wasted space. Halls were wide and high, and it seemed much of the hull served as one-way windows. Mirrored on the outside, but transparent on the inside.

He looked at his sleeve, a holo-board lighting up across his forearm and he tapped in the commands to do an air-check.

“Human compatible atmosphere.” He tapped another command, lowering his arm as his helmet retracted.

The hermetically sealed headgear broke apart and slid up around the back of his head to gather about a hardened hat, the face plate pulling upwards to form the sun-visor of high-tech baseball cap. Has he unzipped his jacket, Thom looked about and sniffed a few times with curiosity.

“And it smells like a girl’s room in here,” he added.

“I imagine that makes a nice change from sweat and testosterone. Your first stop should be engineering in the aft quarters. Turn three-quarters right then start walking.”

Thom did so and got moving, starting in a walk, then breaking into a jog when he realised how far the corridor went on for. This yacht was certainly larger than the Ronin, especially if you didn’t count the cargo spine. And it was significantly more regal than the serviceable prowler.

The Caushae of the Sovereignty worked on a somewhat royal leadership hierarchy, and as such they culturally had a flair for the expensive and regal. It showed not only in their ship design, but also in the way they decorated. Were it not for the windows revealing space outside, he might have been in a palace of some sort, or at the very least a guest in a noble house. There was art littering some of the walls, marble busts of typical Caushae nobility that Thom did not recognise.

At the same time, Thom figured a ship this size would need a crew of at least a hundred to keep her flying. And yet he was wandering the deadly quiet, unsettlingly abandoned halls of a civilian pleasure vessel.

“It’s very quiet in here.”

“I concur. It is unlikely the crew ran afoul with pirates, judging by the lack of battle damage. Their sort are however prominent in these parts,” Al stated before adding plainly, “This might very well be bait in a trap.”

Thom scoffed. “It would have been nice to know this information before I came aboard! I could have brought a gun.”

“Thom, you do not own a gun.”

The astronaut sighed. “Al. You’re killing me, man.”

The engine room was no less flashy than the rest of the ship. Usually a place reserved for rust, moisture and grease, this engine room was spotless. But it was also dead still, which usually didn’t bode well.

The FTL drive had fallen flat and the engine capacitors were no longer humming with any sort of energy. Basic power seemed to be on, but aside from that the yacht was dead in the water.

The only activity came from a trio of humanoids conversing cryptically just inside the engine room’s entrance.

They’d heard Thom enter and turned in shock. The youngest in their number was the only boy among them, an anthropomorphic rabbit with light grey fur and tired bags under his eyes. The lapin looked like he’d been trying to fix the ship and was losing quite a bit of sleep over it. His frame was draped in baggy overalls, stripped down to the waist with the sleeves wrapped like a belt around his waist. A baggy black hoodie was worn over the top and his heavy grav-boots clunked noisily as he jumped to his feet.

Flanking the lapin were two women, one slightly older than the engineer and the other recognisable alien, a Lycan, somewhere in Thom’s own age range. What little of the anthro canine’s fur Thom could see under the form fitting bodysuit moulded to the athletic curves of her body was a light tan colour. Lighter off-white fur covered her face, with darker coloured whisker-stripes standing out on her cheeks. Her dark hair was gathered up in a bun with a few stray bangs framing her face.

The other young woman was an avian of sort that Thom didn’t recognise. A set of wings sprouted from her shoulder blades and folded neatly on her back, she wore a similar body suit to the Lycan, showing off the bountiful feminine curves of a young woman who didn’t get hung up on her daily carb and calorie count. She was noticeably a little chubby, the taught fit of her suit seemingly drawing attention to the fact, but at the same time the attractive lines of her body held Thom’s attention for longer than a few seconds.

Light blue fur dominated much of what Thom could see and the griffin had a stubby black eagle-like beak front and centre on her face. Her eyes were somewhat larger than the Lycan’s, significantly more surprised and innocent compared to the military tempered glare of her canine comrade.

Speaking of, matching the Lycan’s surly expression was her stand-offish posture. She squared up to Thom and wasted no time in drawing a blaster from her sleek thigh and aiming the weapon at him, snarling out something in a language Thom didn’t speak.

Thom was by no stretch of the imagination a walking xenoanthropology field manual. But aside from being able to identify the Lycan woman, he didn’t know much about the three aliens, least of all their spoken lanugage. It wasn’t that unusual a handicap though, he couldn’t name the race of the avian and the lapin looking aliens the same way he couldn’t name every native animal on his homeworld. The ‘verse was a big place, and full of many unusual creatures in various shapes and sizes.

Curiously, none of them were Caushae, like he was expecting, prompting Thom to assume Al’s assessment of the situation was correct.

Putting up his hands, the human realised he’d just been hoodwinked. “Great.”

Linked in to the microphones and microdot cameras on Thom’s person, Al got a reasonably accurate feel for the situation. His unconcerned tone whispered into his earpiece, “Thom, remain calm and do not do anything stupid.”

To the artificial intelligence’s dismay, the microdot pointed at Thom’s face picked up his devil-may-care smirk.

“Oh, why do I even bother?”

As he ignored her, the Lycan pressed closer, barking her unintelligible instructions louder this time. But as she came within arm’s reach, Thom finally reacted.

Snatching her gun with one hand, the other catching her wrist, Thom twisted the weapon from her grip and wrapped her arm behind her back. At the same time, he kicked her in the back of the knees, swiped her legs out from under her, and when the Lycan hit the deck he put a swift kick in her ribs just to be sure. Her suit seemed to have an armoured lining that softened the blow, but she was pinned never the less.

Thom skilfully balanced the gun in two hands and pointed it at the other aliens, square in the stunned griffin’s face. She had a blaster of her own but didn’t seem aware of it as Thom aimed the captured weapon at her.

In the corner of his eye he saw the lapin move forward and Thom quickly switched his aim to the boy.

“Run-up, get done-up, kid.” Switching back to the griffin, Thom added, “Now, which one of you fuzzy-wuzzies speaks Sol Common?”

The griffin and lapin glanced at each other as if trying to confer, but Thom realised too late neither of them understood what he was saying. The Lycan floored at his feet however spoke ‘violence’ rather fluently, and with a pretty good rhetoric to boot.

Rolling onto her back she kicked Thom in the legs, catching him by surprise before wrapping her athletic legs about his waist and holding him tightly in place between her thighs. At the same time she grabbed him by the arm and forced him on top of her, directing the blaster’s muzzle away as she twisted it from his grip.

Thom pitched forward and fell face first into the soft furry valley that was the Lycan’s cleavage, before surfacing a moment later to catch his breath. By that time the Lycan twirled the gun in her hand, pressed the muzzle to his ribs and pulled the trigger.

A violent flash of blue light filled his vision for a terrifying moment of realisation… and Thom stiffened as disruptive electric shocks messed with his neurons. A second later he dropped into the dark of unconsciousness, a painful self-loathing forming his last sliver of eloquent thought…

*****{{~~~}}*****

Thom inhaled sharply as a wake-up alarm pierced his ears and roused him from a deep and profound desire to just lay there and die. Groaning through the throbbing pain of a neuro-stunner hangover, he pressed his palms to the deck and lifted his cheek out of the puddle of drool pooling under his face. His joints felt stiff and his muscles ached, but the pain was almost a good thing. It was confirmation that he was still alive.

That and Al’s voice forced him up to his knees.

“Thom, are you alright?”

“I hate neuro-stunners,” Thom croaked, then cleared his throat. “What time is it? Am I late for school?”

“Very late. You’ve been out a couple of hours. The Lycan and her associates used the time to force their way on board the Ronin.”

“What!?”

Cursing, Thom leapt to his feet and stumbled towards the engineering compartment entrance. Colliding with the doorframe, he pushed himself around the post then caught himself on a run in the corridor just outside.

“Why didn’t you stop them?” he demanded as beat feet back towards the airlock as fast as he could.

“I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right. I should definitely not have tried to prevent them from hacking into the airlock and instead opened the doors and welcomed them in.” With Al’s synthesised tone of voice it was always hard to tell when he was being sarcastic. However, this was not one of those times.

Hermetically sealing his outfit and cycling out of the airlock, Thom leapt across space much the same way he’d done on the way over. His RCS puffed to adjust his course before he caught the nanowire about a quarter way up, relaxing the thruster sets as his hypergolic fuel ran low.

As he was climbing hand-over-hand up along the guideline, he asked, “What are those fuzzy assholes up to? Are they after the cargo?”

“It would seem they are particularly interested in our FTL drive. Perhaps they are interested in using it to replace their own. The lapin alien seems to be an engineer and is working on disconnecting the FTL module from the rest of the Ronin.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

Flipping over, Thom severed the nanowire connecting the ships and landed lightly, cycling the Ronin’s airlock and pressing back into his ship. He flipped up his faceplate and withdrew his helmet, making sure to keep his wits about him as he snuck about like an intruder on his own damn vessel. The last of the interlocking plates retracted into his ball-cap as he made his way to the entrance of the cargo spine.

“I’ve locked them out of the operating system, but they can still detach the compartment using the manual override. They haven’t figured that part out yet, but I suggest you hurry never the less.”

Thom opened the spine column’s hatch and was about to climb inside when he stopped. On the cargo spine side he opened a maintenance hatch and locked open the hatch. Satisfied with part of a plan, Thom then dove into the narrow tube that ran the length of the cargo spine. Swallowing the moment of vertigo as he passed out of the gravity field, Thom weightlessly threw himself forward, sliding effortlessly through the tunnel connecting the forward and aft sections of the Starcast Ronin.

As he cleared the hundred metres in just a few seconds, Al asked, “Thom, do you have a plan for facing the armed threat?” A brief silence later, Al added, “Let me guess. You haven’t thought of that yet.”

“I’m working on it,” he assured as he climbed out into the engineering module of the ship, also known as the Starcast Ronin-C.

The main chamber was overlooked by a control centre elevated to the high rear of the module. Flanking either side, attached to the nacelles of the main pulse engines were the powerful propulsion conduits, with the cylindrical FTL drive suspended in a gravity field between. The chamber was humming with energy as it normally did, and nothing seemed out of place as Thom took his first few steps into the room.

He froze on the spot when he felt the cold bulk of a neuro-stunner barrel press to his temple.

“God, I’m starting to hate that.”

Appearing out of the shadows behind the armed Lycan came the familiar griffin and the lapin engineer. Keeping Thom at gunpoint, the Lycan directed the engineer towards the cargo spine airlock, while at the same time the griffin girl stepped around Thom to watch him curiously.

“Look if you guys want my FTL drive, I can guarantee you it won’t work well with that alien piece of shit you guys are driving,” Thom commented, then paused when he noticed the griffin watching the way his lips moved with peculiar interest. “The hell are you looking at, featherbrain?”

Her beak moved as if she was trying to mimic his crude dialect of Sol Common. It was a little unsettling, and feeling like a test subject on a slab – something he’d no doubt become shortly – Thom watched the engineer make his way to the cargo spine and try to pry open the manual control access panel. The Lycan at the same time prodded Thom in the same direction and pointed at the hatch.

“Al, my pedigree chum, it seems to me they’d like some help detaching the Ronin-C. maybe we should lend a hand by releasing the Ronin-A,” Thom muttered.

“But you locked open the hatch on that side of the cargo spine. A detach would cause explosive decompression…”

“Kind of over-analysing the plan here, bud,” he said while the Lycan drove the barrel of her stunner into his neck a little more.

Al didn’t question any further. There was just a clang, followed by an ear-popping drop in pressure. Wind rushed all about them in a gale that knocked the griffin off her feet and threw the Lycan to the deck, her gun falling from her hand and sliding across the metal floor.

It was like getting hit in the chest by a bus in a school-zone. The air in the module evacuated directly through the cargo spine and out into space as the Ronin-A was thrust clear. The forward module’s door sealed instantly, but where Thom had locked the mechanism, the cargo spine doors remained open to the sucking darkness of space outside.

Thom managed to keep his feet, crouching low and digging his fingers into the deck. At the same time, he stirred up the remains of his RCS fuel and fired the thrusters on his clavicles.

Full burn; the muscles in his legs screamed in protest as he pressed himself forward with the support of the thrusters. One step at a time he managed to fight his way through the assault of air rushing out through the breach. The reactionary forces were no doubt de-orbiting them, so Thom had to make this quick.

Picking up momentum he charged forward, RCS on full blast and his legs burning like he’d sprinted a solid mile. Making a run he got to the steps and dragged himself up to the control room. At the top tread he slapped an emergency console and sealed the cargo spine. The barrage of air whistling about the Ronin-C halted abruptly and the switch nearly decked Thom. His RCS tank threw a crimson empty warning to his HUD as he scrambled for balance and caught himself on the main control console.

Life support hissed to backfill the compartment with fresh air and the dizziness of low oxygen slowly passed.

Thom didn’t waste a second to catch his breath however. Working his way across the various glowing controls on the upper deck, Thom started disabling everything. With several presses and swipes, he locked down all operating system and manual override access. Power came next as he encrypted the power supply controls and locked them to his own biometric signature before dialling back every drop of juice.

He didn’t stop until he heard that familiar whine of charging capacitors. Another weapon aimed at his head.

Hands up by his sides, Thom looked over his shoulder to spot the young griffin. She had her weapon gripped in both hands, but by her stance and shaking grip she obviously wasn’t used to being in a standoff like this.

“S-s-stop,” she stammered in a rough approximation of Sol Common. It clearly wasn’t her first language, and the word came out of her beak with a bit of difficulty.

Thom had no doubt that Lycan would pull the trigger on him without thinking twice, but the griffin didn’t seem to have it in her. So, he took advantage of that, slamming his hand down on the console he worked on. A final act of defiance in the face of being hijacked by a pair of hot alien chicks and their boy-toy engineer.

The comforting hum of activity that filled the engineering module moments ago whimpered and died out, and silence took hold. It was startling enough for the avian to lower her gun a little and look about in confusion as the engineering module of the Starcast Ronin became an over-priced lemon careening through space.

“Make lemonade with this, ‘ya fuzzy freaks,” Thom commented.

Finally abject terror took her features when the griffon realised Thom had just doomed them. He could tell she was running the calculations in her head, how long it would take for the neutron star’s gravity to suck them into the pulsar like with the yacht.

Thom had to admit, the plan sucked. He was going to threaten the aliens off his ship or they’d all die. A high reward strategy, sure, but it wasn’t without high risks.

The tables pretty much turned now, Thom was about to make a few demands of his own. But as his mouth opened a proximity alarm rang out.

He sighed. “Oh crap, what now?”

Al, his servers safely nestled within the Starcast Ronin-A, linked with the Ronin-C and threw up a holoboard on the main console. It displayed the view of an external camera, revealing a large ship that just folded into the system just a few kilometres away. The size of the craft was so immense it almost didn’t fit in the picture, and its sleek alien design was bristling with a variety of glowing guns.

This was a warbird if Thom ever saw one.

“Caushae design,” Al reported as Thom looked at the avian. “Not bearing any Sovereignty banners that I recognise.”

Thom was watching the avian more intently now. Her hands shook as she looked at the warship looming over them, her gun practically abandoned and pointed at the floor. Her eyes were fixed on the holoboard with obvious fear.

The warship was too big and advanced to be a pirate vessel, that much was obvious. It had to be a military vessel in some official capacity. The avian’s reaction to it seemed unjustified for a minute. Then Thom realised something.

She and her retinue must be fugitives of some sort.

That seemed to bode well for Thom at first and he smirked. “The cavalry has arrived,” he cheered. “You and your friends are in the shit now!”

As he said it though there was another alarm and a report from Al.

“Master alarm! Caushae vessel weapons are tracking our thermal signature. Energy beams off the coils!”

Thom’s eyes widened, reflecting the light of the incoming energy beams moments from blowing them out of space and time. “Well, shit…”