Brothers in Exile_Sons of the Starfarers Page 5

  “If you’re sure you’re ready, I want you to go as soon as you can,” his father told him. “There’s nothing for you here. Take the Medea and find a place as far away from this mess as you can.”

  Isaac nodded dutifully. “I’ll do my best.”

  “There’s something else.”

  His father laid a hand on his shoulder and glanced to either side, as if afraid that someone in the corridor might be listening.

  “The Medea isn’t typical for most Outworld starships its size. It was built from the hull of a deep space hauler, so it’s got enough room, systems, and storage space to support up to two people. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t be asking this. I want you to take Aaron with you, son.”

  “What?” said Isaac, giving his father a puzzled look. The request had caught him completely by surprise.

  “You heard me. There’s nothing for either of you here. The best I can give you both is a chance to strike out on your own.”

  “You mean, you want me to drop him off at one of the nearby systems?”

  “No,” said his father, looking him in the eye. “I want you to take him with you, as your partner and copilot. Wherever your wanderings take you, I want you to go together.”

  Isaac frowned, unsure how to respond. There was nothing in the traditions about brothers going out to become star wanderers together. If an entire generation left for the stars, it would throw everything in turmoil back home.

  Our family is already in turmoil, he realized. And we no longer have a home to go back to.

  “Does Aaron know?”

  “Not yet,” said his father, glancing over his shoulder. “I haven’t told anyone else about this but you. If word of this got to your mother, she’d do everything in her power to stop us.”

  “So when are you going to tell him?”

  “Not until you’re ready to go. And since we can’t let your mother find out about that either, we’ll have to prepare everything in secret. I need you to pack your things—yours and Aaron’s—and sneak them on board the Medea. Can you do that?”

  Isaac drew in a sharp breath and bit his lip. “I don’t know. I think so, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Shouldn’t we tell him about it now? Give him a chance to make the decision himself?”

  “We can’t risk that. You know how he is. The boy can’t hold a secret. If we tell him now, your mother will find out about it, and there will be hell to pay.”

  Won’t Mom raise hell about this either way? His father was right, though. If their mother found out about their departure before they left, she might actually be able to stop them. At least this way, they were sure to get away.

  But neither of them would be able to say goodbye to their family.

  “It’ll still be Aaron’s decision whether to stay or to go,” his father reassured him. “If he doesn’t want to join you, we’ll unload his things and let him stay. But if he wants to go out with you, will you take him with you?”

  Isaac nodded slowly. “Yes. I can do that.”

  “Promise me you’ll watch out for him, son. He hasn’t been preparing for this like you have—he isn’t nearly as mature or as ready as you.”

  “If he isn’t ready, why do you want to send him with me?”

  His father sighed. “Because there’s nothing for us here at Alpha Oriana. If you boys are ever going to make something of yourselves, it will be out there, among the stars. I hate to cut you loose like this, but I don’t really have a choice. So will you promise to look out for him? Keep him safe, and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid?”

  Isaac swallowed. He felt as if his father had put a heavy weight on his chest. It made him feel as if he could barely breathe.

  “I know you can do this, Isaac,” his father told him. “You’ve always set a good example for your younger brother and sister. They look up to you. I know this is hard, but I have every confidence that you’ll do fine.”

  “All right,” said Isaac, taking a deep breath. “I’ll do my best.”

  His father smiled. “Thank you, son.”

  A change in the pressure of the shower water brought Isaac back to the present. He’d been in long enough that the water recycler was starting to back up. With a heavy sigh, he switched off the wash cycle and let the vacuum in the drain suck the precious moisture back through the filters and into the Medea’s reservoirs.

  I’ll do my best, Father. I promise.

  * * * * *

  “It’s about time you finished washing up,” Aaron said as Isaac ducked into the cockpit of the Medea. “Everything come out all right?”

  “Yeah,” said Isaac, taking his seat on the left. Control panels and display screens filled the space above and below the window, most of them dormant now since they were out in deep space. On Aaron’s side, the nav-computer showed the starmap with vectors for triangulation. Since they’d already located their position in this sector, the vector lines were green.

  “Where do we stand?” Isaac asked as he brought up the screen for the jump drives. His main screen displayed their jump drive’s energy reserves: eighty-eight percent maximum, enough to jump as far as point-two light-years with reasonable accuracy.

  “Looking good. Coordinates set for a point-two-eight light-year jump, which should put us near a brown dwarf binary—uninhabited, of course.”

  Isaac frowned. “How close is that binary? Are you sure you want to push it?”

  “We want to make good time to the New Pleiades, don’t we? The binary’s not too close—about five thousand standard AU, give or take a hundred.”

  That’s still too close for the mass we’re hauling. Traveling through jumpspace was tricky. The transit time was almost instantaneous, but it was impossible to pinpoint where they’d emerge. In general, jump accuracy decreased exponentially relative to sidereal distance traveled. The only way to mitigate that was to pump more power into the jump drives, but the power requirements increased dramatically with the ship’s mass. That was why most Outworld starfarers flew small one-man starships: anything larger, and the fuel requirements would simply be unsustainable. Even with a ship as small as the Medea, it took hours to build up enough of an energy reserve to make a reasonably accurate jump.

  “We can’t have that binary anywhere within our exit zone,” said Isaac. “Better cut that distance to at least point-two-two.”

  “Oh, come on—the odds of a collision are so astronomically low, there’s no point in even worrying about it.”

  “Yes, but there’s still the danger of solar radiation, as well as the navigational hazards of jumping into a gravity well. We don’t have the proper shielding to graze the—”

  “All right, all right,” said Aaron, rolling his eyes. “I’ll cut the jump distance to point-two-four. Happy now?”

  Isaac sighed and rubbed his forehead. Why was his brother so difficult? It wasn’t like they were at cross-purposes. They both wanted to get to the New Pleiades as soon as they could. Perhaps he was coming down with cabin fever again? Long voyages could be especially difficult, with months going by without any other human contact.

  “Great. Set the coordinates, and I’ll make the jump.”

  It didn’t take Aaron long. “Got it,” he said barely half a minute later. “Ready when you are.”

  Isaac glanced over the new coordinates. Besides star systems and rogue planets, they had to keep a close eye on the density of the interstellar medium. Jumping into a high density region significantly increased the risk of hull breach or equipment failure, especially if done too frequently. Plenty of starfarers died from too much carelessness on that account. Fortunately, the space between Esperanzia and the New Pleiades was mostly clear.

  He nodded. “Right. Initiating jump.”

  The bulkheads behind them began to hum and throb. A queasy sensation grew in Isaac’s stomach, starting off small but soon filling him with nausea. He began to feel dizzy, as if the gravity had been shut off. The stars in the forward window seemed to
flee away from him, even as the bulkheads of the ship began to close in. Isaac closed his eyes, and in that moment something flipped, as if the universe itself had become inverted. The sensation passed, and when he opened his eyes again, the view had returned to normal. A couple of the brighter magnitude stars had shifted a few degrees, but the starfield was otherwise unchanged.

  “Commencing sector scan,” said Aaron. “No large objects in the immediate vicinity. Looks like that dwarf binary is somewhere off our bow. Scanning for transmissions… nothing.”

  Isaac let out a long breath and nodded. His grip on the flight stick loosened as it became clear that there was no need for immediate sublight maneuvers. No debris fields, no gravity wells, no dangerous radiation sources—nothing but the wide, empty vastness of space.

  “Looks like it’s just us, then.”

  “Yeah, looks like. I’ll get started with the triangulation.”

  Isaac raised an eyebrow and glanced sidelong at his brother. “You in much of a hurry? We’ve got at least eight hours until the jump drive’s charged.”

  “Yeah, but…” Aaron’s cheeks reddened.

  “It’s the girl, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted rather sheepishly. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. Who is she, do you think?”

  Isaac shrugged. “Probably the daughter of one of the colony leaders.”

  “Yeah, but what’s her story? Why did they freeze her and no one else? Does she know that everyone else is dead? I don’t know about you, but when I look at her, she doesn’t seem frightened or worried at all. She seems serene, like a goddess.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What do you think it’s going to be like for her when she wakes up?” Aaron asked. “It’s got to be hard, to be sure, but she’s probably expecting that. It takes a lot of guts to seal yourself up in cryo when you don’t know who’s going to wake you. She must really trust us to do the right thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How can you trust your life to someone you’ve never even met? How is that even possible?”

  Maybe she didn’t have a choice, Isaac thought silently. If her only other option was death, maybe it wasn’t a matter of trust so much as survival.

  Aaron sighed and shook his head. “And you wanted to leave her. If we’d done as you said, we would have jumped out and let someone else come and take her.”

  “Hey, I agreed to it in the end.”

  “Yeah, but if I hadn’t pushed you, we wouldn’t have found her. Stars, we never would’ve even docked!”

  Isaac shrugged. “I suppose.”

  They both stared off at the starfield in silence for a few moments. In deep space, the stars shone with a soft, precise brilliance that was unequaled anywhere else. Without any suns or moons to drown out their light, the sight was truly magnificent. It was one of the few things about the long interstellar voyages that Isaac knew he would one day miss.

  “Isaac, can I tell you something?”

  “Sure,” he said, turning to his brother. “What’s up?”

  “All my life, I’ve felt like—like I’ve never really arrived. It’s like I’ve always been under someone else’s shadow, or had someone else making all the decisions for me. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Go on.”

  “Right. Well, this girl—saving her is the first thing I think I’ve ever done on my own. I mean, ever since you and I took off on the Medea, I’ve felt as if I’ve just been tagging along, following you from planet to planet and star to star. But this was me, not you. This is the first time I’ve ever been fully responsible for anything.”

  We’re both responsible for her, Isaac almost answered. Instead, he put a hand on his brother’s arm.

  “You’ve done good, Aaron. And you’re right. If it weren’t for you, we never would have found her.”

  “We haven’t saved her yet, though. She might as well be a frozen corpse until we find some way to thaw her.”

  And even when we do, that might be all she is. Isaac didn’t want to think about what it would do to his brother to find out that they’d gone through all this for nothing.

  “Anyways,” Aaron continued, “I just wanted to say that I’m not going to drop from orbit on this one. I’m not going to let you down, and I’m definitely not going to let her down.”

  “Right. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

  Inwardly, though, Isaac knew he would never his brother carry that sort of burden. After all, if the weight of responsibility had been so heavy on him, how could Aaron possibly carry it?

  A Slaver’s Bargain

  The bluish-white light of Vulcana reflected off of the star’s protoplanetary disk, casting a milky glow that filled the system with ambient light. Almost two million kilometers away, a vortex was visible in the cloud of gas and dust, the super-massive protoplanet Hephesteron. In time, fusion would probably ignite in its core, turning it into a faint brown dwarf for at least a few hundred thousand years. Whether the lonely protoplanet would sustain that reaction and achieve its aspirations to become proper a star was a question Isaac couldn’t answer.

  Hephesteron Station traced a highly elliptical orbit around the protoplanet. The brothers were in luck: the station was nearing aphelion, which meant it was still accessible. Every three or four standard years, the station passed through the protoplanetary disc, effectively cutting it off. The debris cloud was too dense to jump into safely, and few starships had sublight engines powerful enough to facilitate travel through it.

  On the long voyage to the system, Isaac had come across a short novel in the starfarer database which told a tragic tale of two lovers separated during the transit period. The translation was surprisingly good—probably because it had been done by an actual human and not an AI. That, or the translation algorithms for the New Pleiades were much more developed than those for most other Outworld languages. Either way, it was a sign of strong cultural ties between this sector and the Coreward Stars.

  “We copy, Medea,” the operator’s voice cackled over the comm system. “Clear to dock. We are transmitting flight plans now.”

  “What did he say?” Aaron asked.

  “He said they’re transmitting flight plans for the docking procedure. Send them to me as soon as you get them.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Aaron’s going to have a hard time getting around this system, Isaac realized. Probably the whole New Pleiades. According to the Gaian Imperial catalog, the star cluster had been settled predominantly by colonists from Gaia Nova, and the local dialects were much closer related to Gaian than anything in the Orianan language family. Since Aaron had never learned Gaian, even the creole was largely unintelligible to him. That was bound to make for problems. Isaac would have to stay close to him while they were on board.

  “Okay, got ‘em,” said Aaron. “Looks like a pretty standard docking maneuver. Sending them to you now.”

  Isaac’s main display plotted the flight path, complete with multiple vector lines for all nearby ships and objects. He set the autodocking routine and leaned back in his chair as the sublight engines engaged.

  “So this is the New Pleiades,” Aaron mused aloud, staring at the protoplanetary disk out the forward window. With its milky glow and the vortex of the planet forming within, it looked unlike anything else they’d seen together.

  “One of the border stars, yeah.”

  “Do you think they’ll have the equipment to thaw the henna girl?”

  Isaac shrugged. “They might. If not, though, they’ll probably be able to point us in the right direction. Just stay close, and try not to wander off too much.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I can take care of myself, you know.”

  Can you? Isaac wondered silently. Even if he could, Isaac wasn’t about to let him out of his sight.

  * * * * *

  Hephesteron Station was unlike any other colony Isaac had ever seen. Nearly the entire facility ran on artificial gravity, which was almost unheard of in the Outwo
rlds. When Isaac had learned about that fact, he’d expected the interior of the station to be cramped and crowded to cut down on energy costs. Instead, it was the exact opposite.

  An elevator led from the spaceport at the bottom of the station to a large atrium at the center of the topmost level. An expansive glass ceiling gave an unparalleled view of space, with the protoplanet taking center stage. The vista alone was enough to take Isaac’s breath away, but the extravagance of the station’s central square was even more incredible. Every structure, from the walls and floor to the extravagant pillars, was made from polished white-green marble. Wide, spacious avenues branched off in the eight cardinal directions, each one lined with shops and market stalls.

  The people of the station were dressed just as extravagantly. Leather and silk were everywhere. A woman in a shimmering silver dress briefly caught his eye, followed by another wearing a wide belt with blue and gold beads. The place was practically exploding with color, making him feel as if he’d left the Outworlds altogether. In some ways, perhaps that was true.

  “This place is amazing,” said Aaron, giving voice to the sentiment they both shared. The people milled about as if nothing was out of the ordinary, but that was certainly not true for either of them.

  “Can I be helping?”

  Isaac blinked and came back to his senses. A short man in a green frilled shirt waited patiently for their response.

  “Uh, yeah,” said Isaac. “We’re starfarers from the Oriana Cluster, looking to make some trades. Where can we find some people willing to do business?”

  The man chuckled. “Is here, friend. What you wanting?”

  “What did he say?” asked Aaron. “Do you think he knows where we can find—”

  “Shh!” said Isaac, perhaps a bit harsher than he’d intended. Even though the people here spoke their own particular dialect, there was no telling who was within earshot. A bald man with a cybernetic implant running from the base of his neck to the top of his head walked past them while a cluster of dark-skinned women in flowing orange robes headed in the opposite direction. The station was clearly a major hub.