Brothers in Exile Read online

  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

  TO WAKE A LOST GIRL FROM THE ICE, TWO BROTHERS MUST FACE AN EMPIRE.

  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 was very wrong. Perhaps it was the silence that greeted Isaac and his brother Aaron as they exited jumpspace near the fifth planet. The deep-blue ice giant shone pale in the crystalline light of its sun, while all their commscans picked up nothing but empty static. For a planet that was supposed to have a mid-sized orbital colony of more than a thousand people, that was highly unusual.

  “Alnilam Station,” he said, transmitting across all the major radio 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,” he said. “How’s our orbital trajectory?”

  “It’s coming, it’s coming,” said Aaron, his eyes practically fused to his display 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, it lay almost six light-years from the nearest established Outworld settlement. 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 a trade route among the local stars. Few starfarers ever came out this way, though. For all Isaac knew, they were the first people to visit this colony in years.

  “There,” said Aaron. “Got it.” The main cockpit holoscreen lit up between them, showing an image of the planet with their current trajectory in green. Around the sphere representing the planet itself, a red ellipse traced a separate orbit.

  “What’s that?” Isaac asked.

  “The station. Since they aren’t responding to our hails, I figured we ought to calculate our own approach vector.”

  Isaac frowned. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. We don’t know what else is down there. For all we know, our approach could put us on a collision course with local traffic.”

  “What traffic? We’re picking up nothing but radio silence across all bands—for all we know, the station is dead.”

  Dead. The suggestion sent chills down the back of Isaac’s neck. He sighed and shook his head.

  “If the station were dead, wouldn’t the colonists have set up some sort of distress beacon?”

  “What’s the point in setting up a distress beacon if you’re more than two parsecs from the nearest help?”

  What if they are dead? Isaac wondered. What if that’s why they haven’t hailed us?

  “Something is definitely wrong,” he said softly. “Maybe we should just cut our losses and leave.”

  “What? You mean turn around and go back to Nova Minitak?”

  “That, or move on to Esperanzia. This isn’t right. We’ve been transmitting on every major frequency, with no response. Something about this system is very wrong, and I don’t want to get involved.”

  “Involved in what?” asked Aaron, his face incredulous. “If something is wrong, maybe they need our help. How can we turn around and leave them if they need us?”

  We can’t help them if they’re already dead.

  Isaac drew in a sharp breath. “It’s been a long, long time since anyone contacted these people. For all we know, there might have been a plague, or a famine. If we board the station, there’s no telling what we might find inside.”

  “But there’s no harm in checking it out if we don’t. Come on—we’ve come this far. There’s no sense turning around without at least finding out what happened.”

  Maybe, Isaac thought silently. It was a six-week journey to the nearest port, and he hated wasting all that time and fuel for nothing. Besides, maybe they could find out something that would be useful to pass on, something that would help the next starfarer who thought about coming here. Since they were already here, it was the least they could do.

  “All right,” he said. “What’s the most efficient trajectory to put us into a parallel orbit?”

  “Just a sec—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 make it four.”

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

  Aaron groaned and rolled his eyes, but he made no protest. He knew better than to press Isaac over spending their scarce resources, especially this deep into the Outworlds. 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 station below them could probably attest.

  * * * * *

  The pale white sun was setting over the horizon as the Medea made its final approach. Wispy white tendrils raced above the wind-carved lower 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. Isaac was sure now that he and his brother were the only ones there to witness it. They’d hailed the station constantly throughout their approach, without any response. There was little doubt in his mind that the station was derelict.

  “We’re coming up on the station,” he announced, one hand on the flight stick and the other resting on the instrument panel in front of him. “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 that I can see.”

  “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, his hand on his chin. Something that we aren’t seeing. There was no way the station could have missed them—unless everyone was somehow dead. Even if the station’s long-range transmitters were down, the Medea was close enough now that a simple shortwave could reach them. He checked the receiver again, just to be sure. Nothing but silence.

  The blue-green horizon turned a deep shade of turquoise as the sun set behind the giant planetary disk. The clouds below turned from blue to violet and finally to black as the night finally swallowed them. With the planet occluding the system sun, the other stars swiftly began to brighten. Millions of tiny pinpricks of light shone overhead—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 settlements of men? Isaac shivered. There were times when the vastness of space made him feel very 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 station, reflecting the starlight. 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 long antennae on either end. Isaac gripped the flight stick a little tighter and rechecked the nav-computer to make sure they were still on course. Down below, a flash of pale blue lightning lit up a tiny patch of the planet’s atmosphere for an instant. Whatever tempest swirled in the clouds below, it preferred to brood in the shadows.

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

  “Can you try to contact them as I make the final approach? Be sure to try the shortwave, too. If anyone’s still alive in there, chances are better they’ll have something rigged up on those bands.”

  Aaron shrugged, but he went ahead and did it anyway. Isaac kept an eye on the main screen as he made the final maneuvers to put them in a parallel orbit just five hundred meters away.

  “So this is Alnilam Station,” he mused as he peered out the forward window. 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 transmission?”

  “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—”

  “They can’t be. If they were, they would have fixed the leak.”

  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? All I know is that it’s possible. You can’t refute that.”

  I guess I can’t, Isaac thought. Instead of admitting it, though, he kept silent, peering at the ghostly derelict as if lost in thought.

  “We should dock and go in there,” said Aaron. “Peek inside, take a look around. Even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can at least find out what happened to them.”

  “Are you crazy?” said Isaac, his heart beating a little faster at his brother’s suggestion. “We have no idea what’s in there. For all we know, the place is infected with some sort of disease.”

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

  “It’s still a dumb 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,” said Aaron, raising both of his hands. “We don’t know hardly anything. All we know is that no one has answered our transmissions and that there’s a small reactor leak at the hub. Everything else looks fine.”

  It does not look fine, Isaac thought to himself. His palms felt clammy, and 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 find some fuel and supplies to make this trip worthwhile. It’s more than a parsec to the nearest settlement, and we’ve already burned through so much of our supplies that we’ll have to sell half our cargo just to replenish them.”

  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. “Whatever happened here, it’s not our problem.”

  “But it is our problem,” said Aaron. “We’re involved just by being here. And since we’re already here, we might as well find out what happened to these people so we can get their story out. They deserve that much.”

  He’s right about that, Isaac realized. They certainly do.

  “Okay, I’ll bring us up to one of the rimside docking nodes so we can go in. But I want you to stick with me, Aaron. Understand? No running off—we do this together.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Together. Got it.”

  I hope you do, Isaac thought as he stared out the forward window at the derelict station. Down below in the planet’s atmosphere, lightning flashed silently, illuminating the tempest for a single instant before returning the world to darkness.

  * * * * *

  “Are you sure you want to go in with EVA suits?” Aaron asked as he slipped his legs into the thickly insulated pants. “These things are built for zero gee—inside that station, they’re going to be heavy.”

  “Just put it on,” said Isaac as he pulled his suit up to his waist and secured the heavy utility belt. With the grayish-brown protective outer layer through the padded insulation and flexichain, the suit weighed more than half as much as either of them. Aaron was right—the suits were built for use in a microgravity environment, and would no doubt prove unwieldy on board the station. 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-like clothing, enhanced with durasteel fibers and self-sealing repair gel.

  They finished putting on the suits 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 on the suit’s outer layer closed over the zippers. It was an older model, so the helmet w
ould have to be secured separately—no fancy retractable gear. The gloves came first, though. Tight enough to squeeze a little but so thick that they made his hands feel more like paws. Lifting his arms put pressure on his chest, simply from the extra weight he had to carry. The inner layers were supposed to wick away body moisture, but 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 down the dome-like helmet from the upper hook on the vestibule. The microsuction 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 lit up softly with 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 through the heavy durasteel door into the starship’s only airlock. Even so, he could hear the clang of the metal grating against his boots through the fibers of his suit. 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.

  He stopped and stared at the opposite door. The rhythmic hiss of the airflow mingled with the silent pounding of his heart as he wondered what lay on the other side. The sweat pooling against the back of his neck felt strangely cold. He wished his brother would hurry up.