The World at the Edge of Space (Perseus Gate Book 2) Read online

  THE WORLD AT THE EDGE OF SPACE

  PERSEUS GATE – EPISODE 2

  By M. D. Cooper

  Copyright © 2017 M. D. Cooper

  Cover Art by Andrew Dobell

  Editing by Tee Ayer

  All rights reserved.

  FOREWORD

  I’m having a blast writing these Perseus Gate books, and I sincerely hope they are fun reads for you. I feel like I’m channeling my love of Farscape into them, and that’s a great thing.

  In this episode, the crew must begin their journey across Orion Space to the Inner Stars, and then to New Canaan, deep within the Transcend. They’re looking at twenty years of travel—if they can get a dark layer map, and supplies.

  It’s going to be a wild ride getting back home, one that will send the crew of Sabrina down some rabbit holes on the far side of space.

  M. D. Cooper

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SABRINA’S CREW

  AWAKEN

  OBSERVING NAGA

  RIGHT HAND TWIST

  INSPECTION

  AN AFTERNOON STROLL

  UPGRADE

  CONFESSIONS

  A MAN NAMED MISHA

  RETYNA GIRL

  DEPARTING

  BREAKOUT

  LATE ARRIVAL

  KABOOM

  BLAST OFF

  SHIP TO BENNIA

  MEET UP

  MARSALLA

  OUTSYSTEM

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SABRINA’S CREW

  Cargo – Ship’s Captain

  Cheeky – Pilot

  Erin – AI embedded in Nance

  Finaeus – Passenger

  Jessica – First Mate

  Hank – AI embedded in Cargo

  Iris – AI embedded in Jessica

  Nance – Bio/Engineer

  Piya – AI embedded in Cheeky

  Sabrina – Ship’s AI

  Trevor – Supercargo and muscle

  NOTE: When Sabrina is italicized, it refers to the ship, but if Sabrina is not italicized, it refers to the AI. Yes, this would be much simpler if the ship and AI did not share the same name, but you try telling that to Sabrina!

  Just so you stay on her good side, never call the ship “the Sabrina”; it really gets on her last synthetic neuron.

  AWAKEN

  STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sabrina, Outside Naga’s Heliopause

  REGION: Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy

  Consciousness returned to Cheeky in slow, unsteady increments.

  At first it felt as though she was surrounded by a nimbus glow and fear set instantly.

  I’m dead. Fuck, I’m dead!

  There was no answer to her cry. The glow didn’t change, and Cheeky tried to reach Piya.

 

  Piya didn’t respond, but Cheeky felt her Link re-initialize and her neural enhancements come online. She was alive, surely neural enhancements didn’t persist into the afterlife.

  An ear-splitting screech assaulted Cheeky and she screamed.

  “Cheeky, can you hear me?” a voice said as the screech began to fade.

  Cheeky realized she still had a mouth and it seemed to work, though it was dry, and her tongue felt stiff.

  “Y-yes…”

  “Good! That means your new ears are working. I can see that your eyes are open, but you probably can’t see yet. Give it another couple of minutes as your visual implants calibrate.”

  “Is that you, Jessica?”

  “Yup!” Jessica replied brightly. “We’ve been taking shifts with you, waiting for you to awake. Looks like I won the lotto.”

  “Are we…is Sabrina OK? I remember seeing a huge fight—right before…”

  “Yes,” Jessica confirmed. “We made it. We all made it—sorta.”

  “Where’s Piya, then?” Cheeky asked. “And what do you mean about ‘sorta’?”

  “Piya wrote herself into static storage, so she’s safe. You took a lot of radiation damage out there, and we had to restore parts of your organic brain before we could pull her out. Your vision centers were the worst. The medbay’s autodoc replaced all of that with artificial matrices for now.”

  Cheeky took a deep breath. She remembered passing over the mining ring, seeing the searingly-bright accretion disks of the orbiting black holes, the baleful light of the Grey Wolf Star. The heat. So much heat.

  “And the ‘sorta’?” she asked after a moment’s contemplation.

  “Well, we jumped through the gate! Yay! Go us, and all that. Finaeus and Nance got a mirror made in time—by some truly serendipitous work on Nance’s part from what I can tell—but something went wrong. We’re a ways from home.”

  Cheeky chuckled, the movement welcome, but painful at the same time. “If we’re on Sabrina, then I’m home.”

  Sabrina said.

  “Sabs!” Cheeky cried out. “Are you OK? Did you get hurt?”

 

  “Glad to see you’re still rolling with the metaphors,” Cheeky said with a smile—feeling her cheeks stretch strangely. “I have artificial skin, don’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Jessica replied and Cheeky could hear the smile in her voice. “Looks good on you too.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Cheeky replied. “I like my natural stuff. Don’t think you’re going to make me all plastic like you.”

  “It’d be fun!” Jessica laughed. “We could be twins!”

  “Wait, stop changing the subject. What happened after we jumped? Are we coming into New Canaan now?”

  “I didn’t change the subject, you did,” Jessica admonished.

  Sabrina added.

  “Sooo…”

  “Well, I assume you know of the Perseus Arm…”

  “Of what? The Milky Way Galaxy?!”

  “Yes,” Jessica said, and Cheeky could hear the grin in her voice.”

  “Jessica! You better be kidding!”

  OBSERVING NAGA

  STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Sabrina, Outside Naga’s Heliopause

  REGION: Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy

  “Seriously?” Cheeky asked from the pilot’s console on the bridge. “Who names their system ‘Naga’ anyway. Just sound like some awful place full of complainers and whiners or something.”

  Jessica shrugged. “Maybe it is—or maybe it means something like ‘delicious fish’ to the locals.”

  “Doubtful,” Cargo said. “Place looks light on the…well… everything. I don’t think there’s anything delightful about it.”

  Jessica had to agree. From what their passive scans of the system had picked up, there was one—marginally—terraformed world, a few dozen space stations, and a couple of habs on the moons around one of the jovian worlds.

  Radio traffic and energy output substantiated an estimate of less than one million inhabitants.

  “They should still have supplies, and we can scoop deuterium and helium-3 off their star, or one of the jovian planets,” Finaeus said.

  “Plus, there’s nothing else around for at least ten light years. I don’t fancy dumping into the dark layer without any maps,” Cheeky added with a glance back at Finaeus. “The jump to get here was terrifying enough as it was.”

  Jessica noted a softness in Cheeky’s expression as she glan
ced at the ancient terraformer. As the pilot turned back to her console, her eyes caught Jessica’s.

  Cheeky asked privately, her mental tone a touch defensive.

  Jessica replied.

  Cheeky began to say, but Jessica interrupted her.

  She drew a circle in the air around herself and winked.

  Cheeky gave a soft chuckle and then winced as she turned back to her console.

 

  Jessica’s mind flashed back to that fight in the deep black at the edge of the Kapteyn’s Star System. She had been part of a fighter squadron flying in the older ARC-5 models—though they had been new at the time. The enemy had been a trio of Sirian scout ships sent to probe the Victoria colony for weaknesses

  One of the enemy ships had detonated their reactors rather than be captured, and Jessica’s fighter had been close. Too close. It had taken days for the S&R crews to find her, and when they did she had been in rough shape.

  She looked down at her hand, rubbing her purple-hued fingers together. That was when she had received her first artificial skin—something necessary to replace her long-gone natural skin, and to seal her weakened body off from infection.

 

  Cheeky replied.

 

  Cheeky passed a mental smile over the Link.

  Jessica chuckled.

  Cheeky said, apparently aghast at the suggestion.

 

  Cheeky replied.

 

  “Sabrina,” Cargo asked, his voice breaking into Jessica and Cheeky’s private conversation. “Any luck on faking an ident?”

  Sabrina replied on the general shipnet.

  Iris said.

  “Was it a replacement?” Cargo asked.

  Iris replied.

  “Seventy years,” Jessica whistled. “Then we really are close to the edge.”

  Sabrina said, a strangely-wistful tone in her mental voice.

  “What’s got you so dreamy, Sabs?” Cheeky asked.

  Sabrina asked.

  “No,” Cargo responded.

  “Not especially,” Jessica added.

  “Been there, done that,” Finaeus chuckled. “It can be fun, but really, it’s just rocks and stars and balls of gas. They all start to look the same after a while.”

  “That can’t be how you feel about it,” Cheeky said. “I bet you’ve seen some amazing things out there. Like…what’s the weirdest animal you ever encountered?”

  Finaeus put a hand to his chin. “Hmmmm…there aren’t as many extra-terrestrial lifeforms that one would consider to be ‘animals’ as you’d think. We made most of the animals that you find out there—even the really weird stuff like the flying pigs on Sardonis in the Aldebaran system. Most of the crazy stuff you’ll find out there are just adaptations of things from Earth, or Earth’s far past—stuff that we adjusted to be suited to the planets after terraforming was done.”

  “Yeah, but there are alien lifeforms on some worlds. Things that were there before the FGT showed up and started terraforming,” Cargo said.

  “Yeah, we did encounter worlds that already had life. Mostly the worst things that we hit were plants that were a bit more mobile than we would have preferred—or right-handed biology. That stuff is a real pain in the ass to deal with.”

  “Right handed biology?” Cheeky asked.

  Finaeus chuckled. “Where’s Nance when you need her? She’d know about this stuff. On Earth, life evolved using what are called left-handed amino acids. We know now that it was a quirk of the supernova that caused the Sol System to form that made them so. However, on many other worlds, right-handed amino acids were prevalent, and life formed from those.”

  “What’s the big deal about that?” Cargo asked, appearing genuinely curious.

  “Right-handed biology might as well be silicon-based as far as humans are concerned. If you encountered a right-handed plant and tried to eat it, it wouldn’t be able to interact with your body. It would be about as nutritious as sand—and don’t even get me started on the places where life evolved using amino acids and sugars. Those places are nuts.”

  “Nuts, how?” Cheeky asked.

  “Well, one of them had trees with leaves that appeared to be crystalline; sharp too, could cut you wide open. Then there was this one low-g world—a super-Earth, so the thing was huge—where the surface of the planet was covered in kilometers of this weird foamy stuff. It wasn’t a fungus or anything analogous to Terran life.

  “Actually, that’s where the weirdest animal was from too!”

  “Oh yeah?” Cargo asked. “What was it?”

  “Well, it was kinda disgusting. It was basically a giant tick-looking thing that had a huge airbag on its back. It would float along, above the foamy surface of the world, and when it found some place that had its version of food, it would plop down, dig in and absorb it all. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t almost a kilometer across, and constantly thought our ships looked like great snacks.”

  Cheeky gave a convulsive shiver, and Jessica found herself in agreement with the sentiment. A kilometer-sized tick trying to eat a ship was the stuff of nightmares.

  “Seriously?” Cargo laughed. “That thing sounds hilarious, not dangerous. What could it do to a ship anyway? You could just shoot your way out.”

  “Yeah,” Finaeus nodded in agreement. “But then who’s gonna clean the ship.”

  Sabrina said in a wavering tone.

  “Sera told you guys about those, did she?” Finaeus asked. “For someone running The Hand, she’s not so good about keeping secrets.”

  Iris announced.

  “Then w
hat’s our new name?” Cargo asked.

  Iris warned.

 

  Iris replied.

  “What about crew?” Cargo asked. “Do we need to take on new personas?”

  Iris said.

  “It’s not a lot, but it’s some worlds, customs, and stuff that we can use if anyone enquires about where we’re all from,” Finaeus said.

  “You’re going to have to stay on the ship, though,” Jessica said to Finaeus. “You’re a well-known figure.”

  “Jessica, seriously, you tracked me half-way across the Inner Stars before catching up with me. I know how to blend in.”

  “Just this once,” Cargo said with a note of finality in his voice. “We need to limit variables as much as possible this time out.”

  “Fine, Just be sure to pick up some good food,” Finaeus said. “We’re out of beef and lettuce. A good burger would go a long way when dealing with being cooped up in here.”

  “I’ll add it to the grocery list,” Cargo said while casting the older man a dour look.

  “See that you do,” Finaeus replied and walked off the bridge.

  “Gee, he really wanted to get off the ship,” Jessica noted.

  “Can you blame him?” Cheeky asked. “We might not get to another station for weeks or months. Our little jaunt on Gisha Station wasn’t exactly relaxing, I’ll have you know.”

  “Well, at least you got off the ship,” Jessica said with warm smile.

  “Yeah, and then off the station, and almost into a black hole,” Cheeky replied, her tony chilly.