The Long Forever

Murdo grunts. ‘Well, how about that?’

‘Never said goodbye or nothing,’ Sky says, grinning.

‘Rude, I call it,’ I croak, playing along, while relief sucks the bones out of my legs and sets them shaking.

Murdo flicks the display back to the Barzahk system. The red dot that’s the cruiser streaks away from us.

‘Not hanging about, are they?’

‘Good!’ I say. ‘What do you suppose happened?’

‘Might be something to do with this. I’m picking up a broadcast on the emergency comm channel.’

He taps at his panel and speaker-hiss fills the flight-deck. Amongst the buzz and crackle, I make out a new voice. Whoever he is, he sounds seriously tense.

‘Mayday, mayday, mayday . . . heavy two zero zero nine out of . . . chhhrrr . . . inbound Thessalus six . . . chhhrrr . . . being pursued . . . unidentified raider . . . I say again, we are being pursued . . . chhhrrr . . . interstellar coordinates are . . .’

‘Thought so. Distress call,’ Murdo says, and kills the signal. ‘Whoever those raiders are, if we bump into them the drinks are on us. They’ve saved us.’

‘Too right,’ Sky mutters.

‘Wonder what will happen to the freighter?’ I say.

‘That call will have taken days or weeks to crawl its way here at light speed,’ Murdo says, intent on his controls again as he starts our descent to Barzahk’s surface. ‘Whatever played out, it’s all over by now.’

‘So why’d the cruiser clear off ?’ I ask, confused.

‘There might be survivors who need picking up. And they’ll be looking to chase the raider down. The Combine is all about creds. They won’t take kindly to losing one of their heavies, or its cargo.’

‘Not our problem,’ Sky says. ‘Is it?’

‘Guess not,’ I say, as we start our bumpy descent.

We get our break at an outdoor bazaar full of blue-lipped stallholders shouting their wares through clouds of misting breath. A bundled-up Barzahk merchant woman beckons for Murdo to join her in the shadowy back of her tented stall. A wood stove glows there. We go to follow him, but her assistant – as wide as I am tall – blocks our path.

Sky’s teeth chatter. ‘Who’d want to live here?’

‘Not me, that’s for sure,’ I say.

By the time Murdo reappears we’re nearly frozen solid. As we stumble through the snow back to the landing field, Murdo tells us he has good and bad news. Sky being Sky wants to hear the bad first. Murdo tells us the woman isn’t a buyer. Not because the darkblende could be Syndicate, more because she just hasn’t got the funds we’d be looking for.

‘The good news is she hates the Syndicate. Her only son had taken over her business. Syndicate guys came calling and the fool talked back to them. They gutted him. Made her watch.’

‘Lovely,’ Sky says, shivering. ‘How’s that good?’

‘It means she hates them enough to want to spite them. Gave me a lead. Somebody who still does a bit of business behind their back. And he’s . . . not far away.’

We both notice his hesitation.

‘But?’ Sky says sharply.

Murdo pulls a wry face. ‘But he operates out of the Ark. It’s a rough old joint. And I’m a wanted man there.’

‘Wanted?’ I say.

‘For killing a man. It was self-defence. He cheated me. But it’s worth the risk anyway. Happened when I was your age, so I don’t suppose anyone will know me now.’

‘You don’t suppose ?’ I say.

‘He’s old now and ugly,’ Sky says, winking at me.

‘Hey, less of the ugly,’ Murdo says. As Barzahk’s bitter wind slices through us, there’s a spring in Murdo’s step. My guess is he’s already spending his share in his head.

Our take-off and climb back to orbit are uneventful. By the time Murdo’s set our new course I’m almost warm again. Sky’s still bundled up though, and wracked by coughs.

‘Why don’t you go lie down?’ I say. She’s sick enough already and could do without catching a chill.

But all I get is glared at and told to mind my own business.

I ask Murdo if this Ark place is our best chance to sell the darkblende, or our last chance? He shrugs, says it’s either that or we’ll have to risk approaching the Syndicate. He says not to worry, that he’s got a good feeling.

Sky snorts so hard she starts coughing.

Later, curled up together in the sleep bay we share, Sky sighs so loudly that she wakes me up.

‘Something wrong?’ I ask.

She wriggles around to face me. ‘If we do manage to flog the darkblende, will you still help me find Tarn?’

‘Course. Gave you my word, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, well. Words are easy, and creds are tempting.’

Now it’s my turn to sigh, and I make a bit of a meal of it. In the gloom we’ve made by rigging up a curtain, Sky’s breath is warm on my face.

‘Okay, okay. But what if this Ark guy turns his nose up at the darkblende like the rest? Selling it back to the Syndicate seems crazy. They’d kill us.’

‘Murdo’s sure it won’t come to that.’

‘He’s not sure, he’s just greedy. Creds are all he cares about.’

Hah. Murdo says Sky only cares about her sister, Tarn, but she doesn’t need to hear that. Instead I share a thought that’s crawled around the back of my mind for a while. ‘Maybe the stuff ’s more trouble than it’s worth. Maybe we’d be better off ditching it before it gets us killed.’

Sky coughs again, but not as painfully as before.

‘How would we get to Enshi Four without any creds?’

‘We sell the freighter instead. A go-fast smuggler ship like this must be worth a good few creds. With our split of the proceeds, we can do as we like.’

I feel rather than see Sky shaking her head.

‘Nah. No way will Murdo or the others go for that. Even if they did, what if this is a Syndicate freighter? Who would dare buy it off us? Nobody, that’s who.’

Oh yeah. Same problem. Wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

She pulls me closer. ‘Guess we’ll just have to hope Murdo manages to sell the darkblende on this Ark.’

‘You don’t believe in hope.’

‘I don’t believe in dying either. It still happens.’

We’re out of dee-emm and back in regular space. Our instruments tell us the Ark is coming up fast, but even with my sharp nublood seeing, it’s still only a small sun-licked dot compared to the giant world it orbits. Murdo’s working on giving our freighter a false identity.

‘How about the Nagasaki Maru ?’ he asks.

‘Whatever,’ Sky snaps. ‘Set it before they ping us.’

This Ark space station is no half-forgotten backwater like Shanglo and Barzahk. We can’t just fly in and set down unannounced. First we have to identify ourselves and satisfy their security forces we’re not blacklisted.

Murdo gives his screen one last tap. ‘Okay! We’re now the free-trader Nagasaki Maru out of New Kyoto.’

‘Nagasaki Maru !’ I like the way it stretches my mouth.

The freighter’s hacked comm lets us choose to show up on scans as any one of a dozen legit transports. Murdo says when we’re inside the Ark’s hangar we’ll tuck ourselves away and nobody will be arsed to check.

Now our comm lights up red as we’re hit with an identity request from the Ark. And it stays red for longer than I can hold my breath, which can’t be good.

‘You sure you did it right?’ Sky asks Murdo.

The light flicks green. A deep robot voice pours itself into the flight deck. ‘Nagasaki Maru, this is the Ark. Final approach authorised. Proceed to deck zero, bay eleven.’

Murdo rocks back in his seat, grins and makes a fist.

There’s nothing to do now but sit tight and watch the Ark grow slowly larger ahead of us. It’ll be over an hour before we make our final approach. Cam, Anuk and some other kids are crammed into the back of the flight deck again. The rest are asleep in the crew compartment. Their lack of interest in approaching a new world, or worry at what might happen if things go wrong, blows my mind.

‘What’s this Ark then?’ I ask Murdo.

‘You’ll see for yourself as we get closer,’ he says, leaning back into his seat, ‘but the thing is big enough to be an asteroid. Half of it was already a wreck when it showed up here, but that still leaves plenty of room. They say you can live your whole life there and not walk every deck.’

I sit up straighter. ‘It showed up here?’

‘Who wrecked it?’ Sky says.

But Murdo won’t be rushed. He tells us how, forty standard-years ago, an outbound mining support ship was the first to spot the incoming spaceship. After hailing it and getting no answer, they see the damage and figure she’s a derelict, either abandoned or its crew dead. ‘They get all excited, figuring they can claim salvage and have her for scrap. But just as they’re about to do a hard docking and cut their way inside, the derelict fires up some kind of drive system and parks itself in orbit here.’

He jabs a finger at the planet we’re approaching.

‘So it wasn’t abandoned?’ Cam says.

‘That’s where it gets freaky.’ Murdo grins. ‘It still won’t answer the comm. The miners get cold feet and call in ComSec to deal with it. They turn up eventually, give the thing a going-over and get even more excited.

‘Techs are flown out from the Core worlds to check it out. Historians too. Turns out this thing is an ancient spaceship from the Long Ago on Earth. They reckon it set out over five thousand standard-years ago, in the middle of the Troubles, carrying a whole load of refugees. The drive tech back then was crude, early dee-eem, crawlers compared to what we’ve got now. And they didn’t have cryonics. I guess that’s why they built it so massive – because generations of settlers would have to live and die on board before they got here.’

Sky shudders. ‘Like being in the camps all your life.’

‘They must’ve been desperate, for sure. The historians knew a few Ark ships were fired off, but this was the first ever to turn up again. Only while it’s been crawling through the big cold empty of space, completely forgotten, we’ve survived the Troubles, improved our drive tech and spread out into the galaxy, leaving it behind. And then one day it finally catches up with us when it arrives here.’

I can’t help gasping. ‘But why here, so far from Earth?’

Murdo shrugs. ‘The ComSec scientists think something happened during all the fighting that threw it off course and into deep space. Its AI was set up to scan any star system it passed for a human-habitable world, so it kept on going and going until it sniffed out this place.’

‘Fighting?’ I say, twitching. ‘What fighting?’

‘You’ll see in a bit. The settlers only made it four generations into the trip, then wiped themselves out.’

‘It wasn’t some accident?’

Murdo lets out a grim little laugh. ‘Nah. They found barricades and other obvious signs of combat. The bodies were ferried down to that planet and buried. Big ceremony. So you could say they made it to their new world.’

‘Not what they’d hoped for though,’ Anuk says.

‘No. Anyhow, the Combine guys slapped a preservation order on it, so the mining guys got frag all and were mad as hell. There was talk of hauling it back to Earth using a wormhole jump-tug, but talk’s cheap and jump-tugs aren’t. In the end, they patched her up and fitted the place out as an orbital trading platform. She’s been here ever since.’

The Ark looms ahead of us now. It’s a weird-looking cylinder, all lumps and bumps with masts sticking out supporting arrays of flat panels. The damage is visible, great rips in the hull down at the bottom end. Mostly it just looks ancient.

Murdo slows us to final approach speed. I’m wondering how we’ll find our berth when a drone vessel whips out to meet us. It spins around and projects a big glowing sign behind it.

Nagasaki Maru, Deck 0, Bay 11.

‘Fancy,’ Sky says.

Murdo follows it in. Hangar deck zero is the lowest of several lit-up slots cut into the Ark’s hull. Immediately below it is torn metal and dark gaping holes. Murdo tells us these lower wrecked decks are called the ghost levels.

‘Does anybody go down there?’

‘Not since the ComSec techs left. It’s open to space.’

As we close in on the Ark I realise just how immense the derelict is. It soon fills our forward-view panels.

‘Huge, huh?’ Murdo mutters.

For someone who hasn’t flown a star freighter for years, he does a great job of sliding us inside hangar deck zero without hitting anything. The drone leads us past dozens of docked spaceships, many busy being loaded or unloaded. We arrive at our assigned berth, a gap between two larger freighters. A large circle on the deck flashes our adopted name. There’s just enough room for Murdo to nudge in forward before spinning round to face out again, which seems standard. As he sets up our landing hover, the drone ship kills its follow-me sign and nips off.

‘Nothing to it,’ Murdo says, as he powers down his controls. But the sweat running down his face and the slump back into his pilot seat give the lie to this.

‘Won’t they expect us to unload our cargo?’ Sky asks.

Murdo stirs himself. ‘Nope. See, that’s why Nagasaki Maru ’s such good cover. Free-traders often don’t carry booked cargo. If we’re asked, we say we’ve swung by on spec, to see if we can trade what we’re carrying.’

‘We don’t tell them it’s darkblende though,’ I say.

Sky rolls her eyes at me. ‘Well . . . duh!’

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