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  Sons of the Starfarers

  Book I: Brothers in Exile

  by Joe Vasicek

  Copyright © 2014 Joseph Vasicek.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual persons, organizations, or events is purely coincidental.

  Editing by Josh Leavitt.

  Cover design by Kalen O’Donnell.

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Table of Contents

  The Derelict

  Rumors of War

  Promises Unforgotten

  A Slaver’s Bargain

  A Patriot’s Plea

  Contraband of War

  Bonds of Brotherhood

  Author’s Note | Acknowledgments

  Two brothers without a homeworld. A girl frozen in stasis. A galaxy on the verge of war.

  Deep in the Far Outworlds, a derelict space station holds the bones of a long-dead people—and a beautiful young woman locked in cryofreeze. When the star-wandering brothers Isaac and Aaron Deltana find the sleeping girl, they soon realize that they are her only hope for rescue. If they don't take her, then slavers certainly will.

  With no way to revive her, they set a course for the New Pleiades in hopes of finding someone who can help. But a storm is brewing over that region of space. After a series of brutal civil wars, the Gaian Empire has turned its sights outward. A frontier war is on the verge of breaking out, and the brothers are about to be caught in the middle of it.

  They both harbor a secret, though. Somewhere else in the Outworlds is another derelict station—one that they used to call home. That secret will either bind them together or draw them apart in

  SONS OF THE STARFARERS

  BOOK I: BROTHERS IN EXILE

  Book I: Brothers in Exile

  The Derelict

  Something about the Nova Alnilam system didn’t feel right. Perhaps it was the radio silence that greeted Isaac and his brother Aaron as they exited jumpspace near the fifth planet. The ice giant world shone pale in the crystalline light of its sun, but the orbital colony sent no transmission to greet them. On every channel, their commscans picked up nothing but empty static.

  “Alnilam Station,” he said, transmitting across all the standard bands. “This is the Medea, requesting docking permission. Do you copy?”

  Silence. Isaac counted to five and glanced at his younger brother.

  “I don’t think they’re picking us up. Have you got our trajectory yet?”

  “It’s coming, it’s coming,” said Aaron, his eyes practically fused to his screen. “Just give me a second.” He brushed his unkempt hair out of the way and scratched at the patchy stubble on his chin.

  Isaac sat back in his chair and mentally reviewed what they knew about the system. A Class F star on the barely inhabited fringes of the south second quadrant, Nova Alnilam lay almost six light-years from the nearest permanent settlement. That put them on the fringes of the Far Outworlds. The first colonists had arrived about a hundred and twenty years ago, but the records after that were spotty and inconsistent. An obscure astrographical survey in the Gaian Imperial catalog showed that Nova Alnilam was rich in uranium and other radioactives—which, if true, would make it the perfect third leg in the trade route Isaac hoped to set up. Few starfarers ever came out this way, though. For all Isaac knew, they were the first people to visit this colony in decades.

  “Got it,” said Aaron. The main cockpit display showed a starmap of the local sector with their current trajectory in green. Around the sphere representing the planet itself, a red ellipse traced a separate orbit.

  “Is that the station?” Isaac asked.

  “Yeah. Since they aren’t responding, I figure we ought to calculate our own approach vector.”

  Isaac frowned. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. If there’s any local traffic that our scanners haven’t—”

  “What traffic? We’ve picked up nothing but silence ever since we arrived in this system.”

  “All the more reason to be cautious.”

  “Come on,” said Aaron, his voice rising to a plea. “How dangerous can it be? It’s not like we’ve picked up a distress beacon.”

  “Of course we haven’t. The nearest possible help is nearly two parsecs away.”

  “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  Isaac sighed. “Yes, and with good reason. What if the colony is dead? What if they were wiped out by a deadly disease? What if there are volatiles in the vicinity of the station, and our ship blows up the moment we try to dock? Something is definitely wrong here, and I’m not going to risk everything just to find out what it is.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Isaac admitted. “We can wait a while to see if anyone responds, but if they don’t, we should cut our losses and move on.”

  Aaron frowned, incredulous “You mean go back to Nova Minitak?”

  “That, or Esperanzia.”

  “But it took us so long to get out to this place! Besides, what if they aren’t dead? What if there are survivors who need our help?”

  “Unlikely,” Isaac muttered. Still, his brother had a point. As much as he wanted to avoid getting involved in whatever had happened here, if there were any survivors it was their responsibility to help them. After all, the only law in the Outworlds were the promises that they made to each other—promises like mutual assistance.

  “We can’t just leave now,” Aaron argued. “Not after we’ve come so far. We’ve got to find out what happened here.”

  “I still don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Isaac groaned and rubbed his forehead. Because some things can’t be unseen.

  “If anyone on that station is still alive, they would have contacted us by now. And if everyone is dead, there’s no telling what we’ll find there.”

  “Come on! Let’s at least get a little closer. What’s the harm? Maybe we’ll find something.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  As much as he hated to admit it, though, Aaron was right. It was a six-week journey to the nearest port, and if they didn’t come back with anything to pass on, someone else was liable to waste the time and fuel to come out here—and perhaps they wouldn’t prudent enough to bring enough reserves for the return voyage. No, the responsible thing was to gather as much information about this settlement’s demise as they safely and reasonably could. At least that way, the voyage wouldn’t have been a total waste.

  “All right. What’s the most fuel efficient route to a parallel orbit with the station?”

  “Hang on just a sec. Calculating… there! Two passes round the planet with three engine burns and an ETA of six hours. Though if we spend only five percent more of our sublight fuel, we could shorten it to four.”

  “No,” said Isaac, shaking his head. “We need to conserve as much fuel as possible. Time isn’t a critical resource.”

  Aaron groaned and rolled his eyes, but he made no other protest. He knew better than to press Isaac over spending their scarce resources, especially this far out. If they weren’t bound to the same starship, Isaac didn’t know what would become of his brother. The Outworlds were as harsh as they were vast, as the ghostly silent Alnilam Station could attest.

  * * * * *

  The pale white sun was setting over the horizon as the Medea made its final approach. Wispy white tendrils sp
ed above the planet’s upper cloud decks like ethereal ghosts racing each other into the oblivion of night. As Nova Alnilam dropped closer to the horizon, an eerie green light shone on the edge of the upper atmosphere—an alien sunset over a world of toxic ice. By now, Isaac was sure that he and his brother were the only ones to witness it. They’d continually hailed the station during their approach, without any response. There was little doubt in his mind that the station was derelict.

  “We’re coming up,” he announced, one hand on the flight stick. “Have you got a visual yet?”

  “Yeah, still about fifty klicks out. Coming up fast, though.”

  “What can you see?”

  Aaron peered at his screen. “Visually, it looks fine. Both station wheels still rotating, no major hull damage.”

  “Are you sure that they’re rotating?”

  “Yes. No leaks, no fractures. Infrared shows traces of heat around the windows and exhaust ports, consistent with an internally heated structure. If the station is abandoned, it sure doesn’t look it.”

  There’s got to be something else going on here, Isaac thought, frowning. Something that we can’t yet see. If anyone was still alive, there was no way they could have missed them. Even if the station’s long-range transmitters were down, the Medea was close enough now that a simple shortwave was sufficient. He checked the comms again, just to be sure. Silence.

  The blue-green horizon turned a deep shade of turquoise as the sun passed behind it. The clouds below turned from blue and violet to black as the night finally swallowed them. Above, the stars began to brighten. Millions of tiny pinpricks of light—a host of ageless, silent sentinels in the midst of the eternal void. What had they witnessed here, so many lonely light-years from the rest of civilization? Isaac shivered. There were times when he felt small and helpless, indeed.

  On the dark side of the horizon, where the ocean of stars met the blackness of night, a tiny point of light gradually grew brighter than all the others. It was the derelict station. As they came closer, the man-made structure gradually took shape: two narrow wheels running at cross-purposes to each other around a fat central cylinder with antennae on one end. Isaac gripped the flight stick and rechecked the nav-computer to make sure they were still on course. A flash of pale blue lightning indicated that a massive storm was brooding in the shadows far below.

  “We’re coming up on the station,” said Aaron. “One klick and dropping.”

  “Can you try again to contact them? Be sure to use the shortwave, too.”

  “Come on, Isaac. Haven’t we tried enough?”

  “Just once more.”

  Aaron groaned, but went ahead with it anyway. Isaac kept an eye on the main screen as he made the final maneuvers, bringing them into a parallel orbit just five hundred meters away.

  “So this is Alnilam Station,” he mused as he peered at the ghostly sight. The station’s hull was a dark gray, the beacons at the ends of the antennae flashing a deep red. The starlight was too dim to give anything more than the basic shape of the structure. On the inside of the wheels where the windows should have been, there was a blackness as dark as the night on the planet below.

  “I’m picking up something,” said Aaron.

  “Is it a signal?”

  “No, it’s something else. Radiation signatures, concentrated mostly at the hub.”

  Isaac’s heart fell. “That would be one of the station reactors, probably leaking fuel or coolant.” Proof that no one’s alive in there after all.

  “Well, it can’t be that bad, since the wheel engines are still working. And I’m only picking up radiation immediately around the reactors, so it’s not like it’s leaked down to the rim. If anyone’s still alive—”

  “—then they would have fixed the leak. Sorry, Aaron. They’re all dead.”

  Aaron bristled. “How do you know that? For all we know, the engineers are gone and none of the survivors knows what to do about it.”

  “If there are any survivors, why haven’t they hailed us?”

  “How should I know?”

  Isaac shook his head and turned to his secondary display. The reactor leak was a problem, but it wasn’t big enough to have killed everyone outright. It was probably just a system failure that had happened after everyone else was dead. And he had to admit, it was troubling that the life support systems all appeared to still be online. Heat, pressure, air—all of those systems were automated, but they didn’t typically have as many redundancies as the reactor. Perhaps his brother was onto something.

  “We’re just as much in the dark now as we were when we first jumped in,” he mused aloud.

  “We should dock and go inside,” said Aaron. “Take a quick look around. Even if there aren’t any survivors, we can at least find out how they died.”

  “Are you crazy?” said Isaac. “We have no idea what’s in there. For all we know, the place is infected with the plague.”

  “So we wear EVA suits and take a quick, sterilizing spacewalk before we come back. No big deal.”

  “It’s still a bad idea. We’re not going.”

  Aaron scowled and rolled his eyes. “So what? You just want to turn around and leave? Abandon this place without finding out what happened?”

  “That’s right. We know the station is dead, and that’s enough.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Aaron protested. “You said it yourself—we’re just as much in the dark as we were when we arrived. Except for a tiny little reactor leak, everything else looks fine.”

  It does not look fine, Isaac thought to himself. He was already beginning to regret his decision to come to this system at all.

  “Listen,” Aaron continued, “even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can salvage something to make this trip worthwhile. It’s more than a parsec to the nearest settlement, and we’ve already burned through enough supplies that we’ll have to sell half our cargo just to replenish it.”

  That much was true. Even with the credit they’d built up around this sector, they’d be dangerously low on fuel if they turned around now. The Medea was a small ship, and it could take them almost a year to make up their expenses if they cut their losses now. Still, the thought of setting foot on the station made Isaac’s skin crawl.

  “It isn’t safe,” he muttered.

  “So what? We knew that before we came here.”

  “Not like this. Whatever happened to those people, it’s not our problem.”

  “Yes, it is!” said Aaron. “It became our problem the moment we arrived in this system. Since when are you the one to shirk responsibility?”

  Isaac rolled his eyes. “They’re dead, Aaron. What more can we possibly do?”

  “We can find out what happened to them and get their story out. They deserve as much, and the rest of the Outworlds needs to know.”

  Once again, Isaac grudgingly had to admit that his brother had a point.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll bring us up to one of the docking nodes so we can go in. But I want you to stay with me at all times, Aaron. Understand? We do this together—no running off.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Together. Got it.”

  I hope you do, Isaac thought as he stared out at the derelict station. Down below, lightning flashed silently, illuminating the tempest for a single instant before fading back to darkness.

  * * * * *

  “Are you sure you want to go in with EVA suits?” Aaron asked as he slipped into his thickly insulated pants. “These things are going to be heavy.”

  “Just put it on,” said Isaac as he secured the heavy utility belt on his own. With the padded insulation and protective outer layer, the suits weighed nearly half as much as he did. The important thing, though, was that they were perfectly sealed and provided enough oxygen to last a good five hours. Whatever they encountered on the other side of that airlock, it would have to get through nearly four centimeters of armor, enhanced with durasteel fibers and self-sealing repair gel.

  They suited up in silence, Isaac in
the narrow vestibule just outside the airlock, Aaron in the corridor by the bathroom. Whoever had built the Medea hadn’t designed for it to allow more than one person to suit up at once. Considering how the starship was barely large enough for two to live on it comfortably, that was hardly a surprise.

  Isaac fit his arms into the sleeves and secured the clamps on his wrists. He zipped up both sides of the chest flap and fitted the helmet brace around his neck while the magnetic seals closed over the zippers. It was an older model, so the helmet would have to be secured separately—no fancy retractable gear. The gloves came first, though, a tight fit but thick enough that they made his hands feel like paws. He could already feel sweat pooling on his chest and under his armpits.

  It’ll be better once I’m used to it, he told himself as he pulled his helmet down from the vestibule. The micro-suction fabric on his gloves helped him to get a firm grip on it, and the slots around his collar helped him guide it in until it was secure.

  The moment the helmet clamps sealed with a hiss, Isaac felt as if he’d been cut off into his own private universe. The glass faceplate gave a slightly copper color to everything outside, while the indicators in the corner of his vision displayed his vitals. He took a deep breath of the canned oxygen, and the hiss of the airflow filled his ears.

  “Need a little help?” he asked, toggling the external speakers by clicking his right thumb and ring finger twice.

  “I’ve got it,” said Aaron, his voice coming through a bit tinny. The pickup on the microphones wasn’t all that great, probably because the designers hadn’t considered them an important feature. After all, there was no sound in space.

  “Great. I’ll be waiting for you in the airlock.”

  Isaac barely lifted his feet as he shuffled into the Medea’s only airlock. The greenish-yellow LEDs shone down through thick plastiglass, protection from the harsh vacuum. Unlike the rest of the ship, the walls and ceiling were made of the same durasteel plating as the rest of the hull, designed for exposure to the void.