Steven Campbell - Suck My Cosmos

“Can you think of something else?” Garm implored.

“You want me to take out a ship that thousands of Navy capital ships couldn’t? And you want me to do it in a matter of hours? Sure. Do you want me to turn it into a puppy or a balloon using my mystical powers?”

“There’s nothing you can do?” I asked.

“I can tell you to turn off the engines or get it headed somewhere other than here,” Delovoa said.

“Okay, we’ll keep you informed,” Garm said, hanging up.

We knew the rough location of the engines from our numerous interrogations. It was just a matter of getting there. We waylaid a few more people along the way and coerced the most economical directions.

It took us seven elevator transfers, but we finally reached what we thought was it.

“Are you ready?” Garm asked me, her hand on the door.

“No.”

“Well then get ready,” she said through gritted teeth.

“No matter how much time I get, I still won’t be ready,” I said.

“Why are you complaining now? We’re about to go in and fight two incredibly difficult opponents. Why don’t you be more supportive? Now your crappy attitude is giving me doubts.”

“Goooo Garm,” I mock-chanted. “You didn’t have any doubts without me? You thought you were just going to walk in and slap those guys around with your girlie fists and it’s only my ‘attitude’ that’s bringing you down?”

Garm took her hand off the door to argue with me better.

“I worked out scenario after scenario we can use to our advantage—if you took the time to read them.”

“I did read them. They all assumed that we were awesome and they were terrible. Which my many injuries can attest, is not the case,” I said.

“Guys,” Delovoa interrupted.

“What?” Garm snapped into her tele.

“I might be able to partially change the course of the dreadnaught. But it won’t be easy.”

Pause.

“Well?” I asked.

“If I can activate all the Portals on one side and keep them open, I calculate it might be enough to move Shelter’s trajectory a few degrees.”

“You have that authority?” Garm asked, surprised.

“No. Only the Governor does. And last I heard he was dead. It would cause a lot of havoc in the Belvaille System and may even damage the Portals, but there’s a definite chance it could work,” Delovoa said.

“Would that be enough for it to miss Belvaille?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Then why does it matter?” Garm said.

“Because a direct hit is guaranteed death. A glancing hit might mean only half of us die. If you can turn off the engines or reverse them, Shelter just might ricochet off the shield.”

“Talk to Maris-To,” Garm said. “He’s probably the main person in charge of the coup. If anyone has the authority of the old Governor, it’s him.”

“No, have Malla talk to him,” I said. “Maris-To won’t talk to Delovoa. Also, ask MTB to put in a good word if he’s around.”

“You sure? If Maris-To instigated the coup and repaired Shelter, he might be pretty upset you guys are over there messing with his dreadnaught,” Delovoa said.

“Right, but he doesn’t want to be the ruler of a demolished space station and demolished dreadnaught,” I said. “The only risk is if this is some weird plan that involves him killing everyone in the System.”

“Not a bad plan,” Delovoa said.

“Just call Malla and start figuring out those Portals,” I said.

We hung up and Garm looked at me.

“You ready now?”

“Damn right,” I said.

She threw open the door and we were not ready for what we saw.

The engine room of Shelter was just one room.

One enormous room.

We both stood there gaping at the…absolute glory of it. It must have been ten miles straight across.

You would think there would be piles of technology and tubes and wires and cables everywhere, but there wasn’t. It was almost completely unobstructed.

There were ten distinct engines that fanned out in subtly different directions.

There was noise, but not as much as you would think. Each one of those engines looked like it should be making people deaf a few solar systems away and here I was staring at ten of them.

When I came out the door and saw the engines, it had thrown off my whole orientation. Was I on the ground or were they on the ground? Was the ground an irrelevant concept in spaceships like this? Did this whole room have some weird gravity that allowed this engineering impossibility to even exist?

Looking at it all made me not only a bit dizzy, but incredibly proud. This hadn’t been constructed by some alien species with billions of slaves. This was made by Colmarians, the most backwards empire that ever was.

Then I remembered that I wasn’t a Colmarian. I was an—

“Ontakians,” Garm whispered, while crouching.

Not sure why she whispered and not sure why she crouched. We were literally miles away. It took me minutes to locate them even with Garm trying to point them out.

I think if I started shouting and fired a flare gun they still wouldn’t have noticed us. Don’t know how Garm spotted them.

They were…over there. I couldn’t really tell where there was.

I took out a compact set of binoculars to watch the Ontakians.

They were wearing work clothes, had tools, and were doing something to something. Definitely mechanical. And they looked like they knew what they were doing. I mean, they were far away, but they weren’t banging with hammers.

Man, these guys were good at everything. I felt like such an underachieving Ontakian by comparison.

I put the binoculars down. During my dinner with the Governor, Maris-To said he hadn’t killed Ray’Ziel. That bothered me because he had no problem admitting to all the other rotten things he had done. But that meant I still didn’t know who killed the City Councilman.

Maris-To also said he had been repairing Shelter before Ray’Ziel was assassinated. I wondered if these guys had been part of that original construction crew. Maybe Ray’Ziel tried to divert his technical people to more legitimate work, or even got wise to what Maris-To was doing. Then the Ontakians took it upon themselves to kill him.

That would have given them insight into Maris-To’s operations, and why I could run into them at his ball, and why they had asked me if I was working for Maris-To when they saw me at the Olmarr Association.

They were all for advancing Maris-To’s plans up to the point of repairing Shelter. Now that they were here and it was fixed, their plans took very different directions.

That was the problem with owning fifty-seven and 9/10 th’s solar systems. You didn’t know all the people working for you.

This was all a guess, but it wasn’t a bad guess.

“So how do we get over there?” I asked Garm, pointing at the Ontakian engineers.

She gave me a mean look and held up a finger for me to be quiet. Like I was louder than a dreadnaught’s engines.

Along the wall were some elevators. Which we took to other elevators and then to other elevators. They were all open caged and very disorienting. This was typical Colmarian Confederation. They made an engine room that laughed in the face of physics, but the elevators to navigate it were rusty deathtraps. I couldn’t even tell which way we were going.

We had travelled for some time and it seemed like we were further from the Ontakians than we started. Then we were far above them, then far to their side.

I was getting nauseous.

“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a while.

Garm shushed me.

After some time Garm had moved us to be not far from the Ontakians.

They were maybe forty feet below us and a hundred or so yards away. But I saw no way down.