Vox Fortuna

Meridian System, Hyades Star Cluster

Meridian could’ve been a case study in everything wrong with the galactic frontier. Mapping surveys put it as one of the farthest inhabited systems in the Federation from earth; though calling it ‘inhabited’ was a stretch. Four planets revolve around Meridian, a fairly typical orange dwarf star. It wasn’t as large nor burned as hot as the Sun, but K-type stars like Meridian were of particular interest to the Office for Extrasolar Colonization, or OEC: K-types are incredibly stable, allowing ample time for life to develop on planets within their habitable zone.

Meridian III and Meridian IV were both life-bearing. Meridian III’s relatively closer proximity to the star meant it was hot year-round- summertime could be a deadly affair for an unprepared human. Above ground vegetation was limited to only the hardiest plantlife, and water could only be found underground or at the planet’s poles. A few decades of terraforming could’ve seen it flourish if given the chance.

A heavy industrial mining conglomerate called Vanderwick-Kriegwald-Stalgard Industries, or VKS, stamped out that possibility when they purchased the property rights for the planet. They deployed a machine fleet controlled by a replicant mind to strip Meridian III of all viable resources. Corporate owners forbade human colonization as the world was slated for ‘total extraction’: in a few hundred years the planet would be gone.They were turning it into metal bars, fuel canisters, condensed gems and transitory biomass. It was an ungodly amount of wealth, and all it cost was one measly little world.

Meridian IV was thankfully spared such a fate, though its prospects weren’t much better. It was an ocean world with a single, massive continent and several island chains. The ecology was as variable and diverse as earth’s Cretaceous period. Megafauna was abundant; from the plodding, walking fortresses of the Phalanx tortoises to the Drakes: massive, reptilian apex predators with a surprising resemblance to mythological depictions of dragons. VKS had a pending purchase order for this planet as well, intending to sublease it to various research groups and entertainment companies.

If the OEC had its way this never would have happened. Their department had been pushing for habitable worlds to be excluded from global private ownership for centuries now. They pointed to the overpopulation of Earth, Mars,Thedes and Tiāntáng as proof that humanity needed to settle new worlds. If another galactic conflict like the Unification War kicked off, concentrating all of mankind’s resources on a handful of planets could mean apocalyptic results if people started dropping rocks.

Unfortunately for the OEC, VKS wasn’t an earth based company. It was Thedian. Therefore it was not beholden to Union governance, and the Federation wasn’t about to pass legislation regarding colonization policy or ecological preservation that pissed off the Thedes Empire, a security council member.

Artemis Corrigan wasn’t some Coreworld hippie or Union hardliner, but she still recognized the soundness in their arguments. It also didn’t surprise her that the institution’s warnings went unabated. The Federation General Assembly wasn’t exactly famed for its decisive action. They would debate the issue, of course. There would be studies, surveys, and hearings. If things got really serious they may even open a commission. A commission to make ‘serious inquiry’ into their claims, whose findings would be treated with all the weight of a single hydrogen particle.

It was the same song and dance they did with everything before going back to business as usual. That was why she’d always avoided government work. Better to work for herself and make her own decisions, flying free.

Artemis guided the Vox Fortuna through the final stages of waygate transference. If someone were watching her ship out of a window, they wouldn’t see much: the waygate’s interior ring was spinning at a measurable fraction of lightspeed while the exterior ring rotated in the opposite direction far slower. In the center of the structure was empty space. There was no colorful portal like in the cartoons grade school teachers showed their classes to explain interstellar travel. There was, perhaps, a barely perceptible distortion of spacetime inside the ring, like the small black dots you got in your eyes when you stared at the sun too long. That distortion was the only visual indicator of the wormhole opened inside the waygate, connecting this gate to an identical one somewhere else in the galaxy. This one was only a single system away, in Beta Yucatan.

When a ship equipped for faster than light travel approached a waygate and keyed its activation code, the gate would funnel a considerable amount of power into forming a two way wormhole connecting the pair of waygates together. By traveling through the waygates, transit time across lightyears was cut down exponentially: a journey that would’ve taken centuries using traditional thrusters could instead be undertaken in months, weeks or even days.

Vox Fortuna crawled through that break in spacetime, its aged hull creaking beneath the stress of FTL travel. Fortuna was a venerable old girl. In a just galaxy, she should’ve been retired and living out her days on the tropical beaches of Elysium. Even a scrapyard would’ve been more appropriate, though it pained Artemis to think about.

Fortuna had a narrow fuselage and four wings mounted near its rear in an ‘X’ formation. Each wing ended in an engine nearly a quarter the length and width of the main body. These engines were Waldetoft/Johannsson 99s, nicknamed ‘Screamers’ by the engineers that worked on them. They were top of the line thirty years ago, able to accelerate a ship of the Fortuna’s mass to a considerable percentage of the speed of light. Compared to the stuff coming off the line today, though, they were children’s toys. Modern engines could hit a ninety-nine point an-absurd-number-of-nines percentile of lightspeed. It was like comparing a Ford Model T to a fighter jet.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The engines- and the fusion reactor that powered them- were the best parts of the ship. Everything else was even older. The laser comms were unreliable, seemingly burning out a conduit every other day. Mold had to be cleaned out of the life support system last week. Whenever someone flushed a toilet the lights in the maintenance corridor would flicker for Saint knows what reason. If the whole ship exploded and shunted the crew out into space Artemis would only be mildly shocked- and annoyed that it had waited until they were nearly at the job site to do so.

She flicked a switch on the portion of her dashboard labeled ‘INTERCOM’ in brightly colored tap. The original label had been worn down to nothing over the years and this was her solution until they made it back to port to get the panel refurbished. “Captain Corrigan to crew, we’ve officially arrived in the Meridian system. Making our way to rendezvous with our employer’s vessel now. Should still be two to three weeks until mission is a go but I want the exoframes ready to launch pronto. No telling what’ll happen out here in the ass end of space.”

The Fortuna was a frigate, the smallest category of ship capable of independent long-haul space travel. And even for a frigate it was lightly crewed at the moment with only thirty-eight souls aboard. Thirty eight of the craziest, most desperate hired guns in the galaxy.

Artemis would kill for a real crew, if only she could afford it.

Flicking the same switch down to turn off the intercom, she shifted to private comms and phoned Lieutenant Landaris. “Rem, get up to the bridge. I’ll need your help locating our friends- their transponders are dark.”

After a few moments of static a voice came through: “You got it, cap. Be there in a jiff.” Rem Landaris replied, chipper as always. She spoke from the back of her throat, modulating her voice with a sprinkling of vocal fry that was either obnoxious or endearing, depending on if she was on Artemis’s good side or not.

The elevator to the bridge declared Rem’s arrival with a loud ding. Artemis was the only other person there, the other three station chairs left absent. The crew had suffered losses in the last few months that they were still trying to make up for.

Rem bounced up to the captain’s chair without a care in the world, leaning up against the back and getting directly into Artemis’s bubble before she had a chance to protest.

Rem was exceedingly young given her occupation, still a few years shy of thirty, but she was still two heads taller than her captain. She was thin and wiry, lacking even an ounce of unwanted body fat or visible muscles. Artemis wasn’t sure if that was intentionally deceptive or just an aesthetic choice: Rem Landaris was strong enough to toss a thousand pound steel girder over her shoulder and could carry it around with ease. She had more cybernetics than half the ship’s computers, and most of her meat and bones were grown in a lab.

‘I bet if I cut her up and sold her for parts I could buy a whole new damned ship,’ Artemis mused.

“So you’re having trouble finding our boss?” Rem asked, getting up off the back of the chair long enough to put up her hair with a thick headband. Her hair was a medium-length stark white. One would’ve assumed it was dyed, given her age, but Artemis had never seen it any other color. More modification, she assumed. Probably the same mods that let her grow sideburns thicker than most of the men on the crew.

Artemis shook her head. She’d never understand kids.

“They aren’t transmitting their location, even on encrypted channels. I have their last known position from when they sent us the contract but that was over a month ago. They could have drifted half a million miles since then.” She pulled the information from her neurodeck and tossed it into the main screen so Rem could pick through it. The other woman finally slipped away from Artemis’s chair and went to take the co-pilot’s seat, pulling a plug from the ship console and attaching it to the port at the base of her neck.

That was fairly typical tech, especially for people like the two of them. Being able to directly interface their brains with other computers allowed for incredible processing speed. Rem was picking through the data at the speed of cognition, her eyes glazing over as she stared straight ahead. For all Landaris’s faults, Artemis could never deny her expertise.

“I’ve got it,” Rem announced with a toothy grin. She tapped the coordinates into the flight computer and allowed the ship to begin turning towards the heliosphere, pointing their nose away from the star and out into the Oort cloud surrounding the star system. “They were transmitting a low-power laser in the waygate’s direction to guide us. Guess our sensors are so borked they missed it on our way in. Buuut I caught sight of it through a backscatter on some space dust and traced its location to a thousand AU from Meridian. Then I had to adjust for the roughly eleven day lightspeed lag at that distance and their likely drift trajectory, anddd…presto. There’s your ship.”

Artemis smiled, trying not to look too impressed. No point in stroking the specialist’s already gargantuan ego.

“Let’s let ‘em know we’re here. Deploying WARBLE.” Artemis clicked a few buttons and there was a lurch as the ship launched a comms beacon out behind them. It would take half an hour to connect to the waygate network but afterward it would allow the Fortuna instant communication with any other WARBLE-enabled ship or station in the system. She knew the beacon’s name was some stupid acronym the OEC had cooked up in the early days of human expansion, but she’d let it slip from her mind years and years ago. Wasn’t worth the brain matter it occupied. All she knew was it used miniaturized versions of waygate tech to connect with other beacons in the system, allowing FTL communication in a limited capacity. Still couldn’t do pangalactic video calls.

After ensuring encryption protocols were in place, Artemis fired out a transmission in the direction of their patron’s ship. That broadcast declared their Federation ship registration I.D code, the two hundred and seventy two digit passphrase listed in their contract and a request to dock.

A return message came back in moments: “This is the SUN Gilgamesh to Vox Fortuna. Message received. I.D confirmed. Sending you a rendezvous point and an ETA. Vice Admiral Song is eager to meet with you.”