Cheno's Crash Landing

Null-Type Emergence Chapter 1

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Viatella’s taunt rattled about in Cheno’s brain as he clutched the escape pod’s seat restraints. The autopilot spewed warnings of multiple system failures, and Viatella’s body was still slumped forward, jostling from the pod's first contact with the planet’s atmosphere.

The escape pod’s shielding blazed with streaks of violet, its walls clamoring with horrific thunder as the Roya siblings descended towards the surface of Ojame. Cheno screamed to his sister Viatella, who’d fallen unconscious after her head smacked the pod wall during the launch from Bootes IX’s emergency bay. His voice had gone hoarse; he’d been begging V to wake up for several minutes.

Seven years his elder, Via had watched over him through almost a decade of exile; to lose her in a crash landing on some backwoods planet was unacceptable. Cheno’s face burned as hotly as the shielding that still glowed a violent shade of purple. Viatella stirred a little at an ear-piercingly loud alert for planetfall. The older sister smiled.

“Had you going there, huh bro?”

Cheno scowled and sighed with relief, the knot in his stomach releasing as Via winked at him. Impact with planet surface in one minute.

“Not a great time for practical jokes, V. Are you ok though, really?”

Viatella shrugged, “Not sure. My head’s pounding. Are those pirates still on our tail?”

Cheno shook his head. The escape pod’s walls had settled down, at least they’d made it through the worst part of reentry.

“You were right about scrambling the rest of the pods… it’s not like we’ll be able to get back on the Nine anyways.”

An outsized laugh from V caught Cheno by surprise.

“I’m not devastated, we’ve spent enough time in that tin can.”

Impact with planet surface in thirty seconds.

***

She played with the ring she’d worn since the earliest days of her youth. Something uncomfortably warm trickled down her neck. A quiet feeling of dread crept over Viatella, whispers from your ghost, that’s what her dad always called the sensation. Pulling the ring from her finger, she tossed it to a confused looking Cheno.

“Dad gave me this ring when I was four. It’s the only keepsake I have from before. I want you to hold onto it, just in case.”

The pod’s thrusters kicked in, knocking the passengers around as the escape craft reoriented itself for landing.

Impact in 10–

“What’s wrong V?”

8, 7 —

Viatella grimaced. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Cheno.”

4

The Roya siblings grabbed each other’s hands.

3

“I love you.”

Almost in unison.

1

The pod slammed into Ojame’s surface, cratering in the tall pink grass native to the planet’s rolling hills.

***

Cheno came to in a panic, every inch of his body aching all at once. Alarms from autopilot continued to raise holy hell about the crash landing that had already happened. A proximity alert had joined the chorus of bad news, and the look on V’s face told Cheno there was little chance the incoming lifeforms were there to help. Via looked equal parts bad-ass and terrifying as she loaded a block into the slag-cannon. Cheno wasn't sure when she’d grabbed the oversized pistol, but the fact she had it at all only added to Cheno’s fear that their situation was indeed dire.

The pair scrambled out of the escape pod, surveying the crash site. They’d smacked into the side of a hill, close enough to the top that it took little time to reach the crest. Dancing fields of grass stretched out as far as they could see, but smoke and other tell-tale signs of industry rose from their west. A trio of grav-speeders streaked down a hill north of them, less than a kilometer away. The thought that pirates had already found them hit Cheno with competing waves of nausea and terror. Via must’ve read his mind. She grabbed him by the shoulders, staring at him with an expression not unlike the one his father had made right before their exile.

“Cheno it’s important that you do exactly as I say. You are going to run the fastest you've ever run, towards whatever settlement is over there.” She pointed to the smoke.

“Do you still have my ring?”

Cheno nodded.

“That’s our proof that we are who we say we are; and now it is me too, little brother. Never lose it.”

Cheno fought back tears but failed. He sobbed as his sister wrapped him in an embrace.

“Now run, don’t turn back and don’t stop until you’ve reached the town. Go!”

Cheno raced down the hill. Behind him he could barely make out his sister screaming “Hey assholes!” at the speeders. A blast from the handcannon. Another. Two more. Cheno made it to the base of the next hill, winded but still moving. He thought he heard more shots ring out. He neared the top of the hill when a bolt of plasma slammed into his arm, the force of impact throwing him to the ground. Cheno screamed in agony. His arm was napalm as the wound cauterized, a gibbous moon now vanished from his body, a singed hole in its place. The boy blacked out.

In the abyss, Cheno heard a voice calling; he could see Viatella’s face, bloodied and lifeless, floating on the periphery. The ship, now a wreck of mangled debris, hovered above a flesh-textured moon reflected off the surface of a blood red river, and the monstrous void of space consumed it all. The voice yelled again, a stranger’s voice, husky and worried in tone, was this the Maker his father had always rambled on about? A light, unbearable at first, and then softer, pinkish and gently undulating, sounds of a hovercraft… and then a hand, grasping his good arm. Cheno realized he was not dead yet, and the aching wound in his heart told him that in large part, he wished he was.

*** ***

Iroshine helped the kid to his feet, nodding towards the groundskimmer that hovered idle behind them.

“Take cover and hold that arm tight; I’ll be back.”

A plasma round had blown a hole clean through the teen’s arm, but he seemed to handle the shock well enough, or at least he understood to get out of the way. His wound had cauterized unevenly, and though Iro was sure the boy wouldn’t bleed out at this rate, blood was still a bitch to get off the seats. The kid covered ground quick, leaving a thin path in the tall grass as he sprinted towards the skimmer’s refuge.

Oka’s raiding party sped towards the duo across the pastel pink grasslands, a minute out at best. Foxhole configuration, Iro signaled to his drones, which whirred back to the skimmer and retrieved an expandable energy shield and rail cannon; meanwhile, Iro smacked the leg compartment that held his compressed firing platform. Damn thing never opened on the first go. The latch released just as the drones dropped the shield, which pulsed to life, its near translucent membrane glowing with red hardlight. Aiming subprocesses and other automation services threw their splash screens along the shield’s sights. Unfolding itself with ease, the firing mount pinged, ready for placement on the shield. Iro obliged with harried movements, eyes locked on the trio of speeders flying towards them.

Drones in place and kid in cover, Iroshine loaded an ujo-slag block into the railgun and thumbed the safety. He let off a warning shot about a hundred meters from the packs’ lead, the slag blasted through the air at some ungodly fraction of the speed of light, the round shattering on impact into thermite hot fragments of glass-metal. Two of the speeders broke off their approach, their frames swinging horizontal from the blast of their airbrakes. Looks like they weren’t operating shields of their own, good.

Now alone and likely outgunned, the last of the speeders slowed down, hesitating – it was all Iroshine needed. The targeting computer had already marked the speeder’s approach, Iro adjusted for the speed change and let off another round. This one ripped through the speeder’s front gravwell, a second later the rest of the chassis slammed into the ground. Iro didn’t wait to see if a pilot emerged from the wreck, swinging the railcannon’s barrel back to the pair of onlookers. The stragglers quickly turned tail. Just as well, the turret’s heat sinks were near capacity and Iro was short on coolant; two more shots would’ve cooked something internally if the shield’s sensors were to be believed.

Signaling for his drones to breakdown the turret, Iro repacked the firing platform and ran back to his VanRoss, giving the beat-up groundskimmer a hearty whack as he jumped in. The kid poked his head out from the back bench, a messy tangle of black curls and peach fuzz revealing a much younger face than Iro had realized.

“Still alive back there huh?”

The boy nodded.

“Well hang tight, and when we get back to Gren Tallis you can tell me why Oka’s goons were chasing you.”

Iro didn’t bother hiding the annoyance in his voice. He turned back, finalized the route to town and punched the thrust controls, already dreading the endless stream of complaints he was bound to hear from Jubei and Hana. One more mouth to feed was definitely not what the Ghosthopper’s crew needed, as everyone was wont to remind Iroshine whenever he brought strangers around. "Shine’s Strays," was the name the rest of the crew called the random stream of people he let on board. Short memories, Iro supposed, considering how many of them were once in the same boat.

Gren Tallis was one of three ports that blipped the otherwise unremarkable near-earth exoplanet Ojame, itself a member of an easily missed star cluster far from any galactic Fold lines. The Ghosthopper was holed up in Goveni’s repair shop a few kilos from the port proper, her impulse drive and life support systems having been damaged in a recent dust up with a roaming Federation interceptor. Something about missing broadlight credentials, it was always some kind of missing registration or fee or licensing with those people… Iro wondered if any other species were stupid enough to ruin the grand vastness of space with the incessant need to track and control each other’s comings and goings.

Turning to the backseat, Iroshine hollered over the wind “You gotta name kid?”

“Cheno, sir, Roya Cheno. My sister Viatella… she distracted them so I could…” The words caught in his mouth, their reality too harsh for the teen.

“I’m sorry Cheno. She must’ve been brave, and loved you more than anything.”

Fields of delicate lotus-grass slid past the gravwells as the two fell back into silence. A hazy pink sun neared the horizon while its more distant counterpart, a white dwarf whose name escaped Iroshine, peaked at its zenith. The boy’s bloodname bothered Iro, a tantalizing half-remembered gossip story, the kind of junk tossed around in the mess hall on the rare quiet day. Where had he heard the name before? Iro spent the last leg of the drive mulling over his passenger’s words, only half aware of the travel until the ‘Hopper was in view. Goveni waved as the skimmer slowed its approach, a small cloud of microdrones busy at work on a field generator hovered around him; the old man pointed towards the modest shop and house he’d worked out of the last fifty years.

He yelled out to Iro, “We need to talk, this wasn’t just some patch up job, Shine.”

“And it’s gonna cost me, right?”

The old man let out a hearty laugh, stepping onto a short mag-lift. As the platform lowered, he hollered back, “You bet’ch your ass it is!”

Iroshine shook his head, waving dismissively. “Let me get the boy’s arm situated and I’ll be in.”

Turning his attention back to Cheno, Iro looked the kid’s arm over again. The blast had missed his ulna by less than a hair. Something about his passenger left Iroshine unsettled, but then maybe the kid’s weird air was just another symptom of the horrors he’d just been through. The galaxy had thrown more than it’s fair share of death at Iro, but to lose a sibling, the doc figured that wound must cut deeper.

“Alright Cheno, that stem-pack was just enough to tide you over. We’ll have to dress this wound properly now. The stem cells should be blocking most of your pain receptors… this shouldn’t hurt more than a pinch.”

Cheno nodded and held his arm out. The slag had left a mess of wound. Iro cleaned it gently, applied one of his last packs of flesh generating cells to the hole and dressed the arm tightly. He’d need to blast the new skin with several hardening coats over the next week, but the kid had been quite lucky. From experience Iro could say with some authority that the injury would’ve been twice as painful had the young Roya boy lost bone; doubtful that would be of much comfort to him now though.

Oka wouldn’t have risked open hostility with a member of Emiskara’s fleet unless there was a fair bit of coin in play. It was unlikely for them to venture this close to civilization, but given the conversation waiting to be had with the crew, Iro figured it was best to keep the boy outside.

“Keep a watch out for any more speeders. You see anything, get your ass inside and hide, we’ll deal with it.”

Cheno nodded. The kid’s guts surprised Iro; he’d come from money, evidenced by the metropolitan outerwear and his high-end broadlight tech. Another headache for another time there. Unless the boy hated his sister, he was handling her death with the stoicism of a much older soul, and the bit of field surgery he’d just received hadn’t phased him either. Must be in massive shock, poor kid. That their paths had crossed was a matter of luck beyond measure, had Iro’s stop on Ojame not been extended by slow going repairs, the Ghosthopper would’ve been off this rock two days ago.

What the hell was Oka up to? His petty crooks had been tolerated up to now because the group was mostly harmless, small time robberies and the like. Kidnapping was a brazen move for the group, murder was a straight leap into the volcano. The Triad (not the gang, the star system Ojame revolved in) didn’t have the centralized policing force of the Sapiens Federation, nor did it have much interest in developing one; most crime within the system was dealt with at the community level, more serious offenses could be taken to Emiskara for tribunal. If what the boy said was true, Oka’s gang would jump to straight to the top of the bounty board, a fat prize for whichever crew found him. Ullenon might be able to pull enough from the kid’s broadlight optic system to take to Emiskara, after any location data was scrubbed. From the sounds of it, the crew could use the dough.

Before jumping out of the VanRoss, Iro rummaged though his pack. Finding an old nutrient bar (chocolate, nice), he tossed it back to Cheno.

“Eat up and stay awake. If I’m not out in ten I’ll send someone to get you and takeover watch.”

With that, Iro hopped out of the skimmer and walked towards Goveni’s, an aching feeling in his heart that the credit account was about to get a lot slimmer.

****** ******

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