Gone With the Rings
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The Forlorn Hope crossed the sparse glittering ice fields at the E ring’s border when Mimas appeared over the radar’s green grid. Cleaning her P-90 with a rag she uncovered inside the duck’s nest, Fate warned Miles. The pilot was busy taking a shower in the narrow module directly heated by the thermonuclear core.
As the Alliance man found out once in the cockpit, the first mapped moon of Saturn wasn’t the only one to intrigue the detection systems. Within the satellite’s AO has gathered a huge fleet of scattered ships. Among them, war cruisers, ice haulers and private cargo ships as well as a multitude of heavy fighters, bombers and rock-fishing vessels from different worlds beyond Jupiter dotted the skies. All displayed the eleven digit registrations and colors of the Rings’ new rebel fleet.
Months before, some inner moons of Saturn and Uranus decided to secede from the Martian Technocracy. A domino effect had finally toppled all the realms around the Deep Rings before reaching Titan, which had seen the dawn of hostilities. Since then, volunteers from the Outer Worlds and renegades from Kuiper had begun to establish the genesis of an army. The small militia had given way to an equally disorganized and inexperienced form, unfortunately equipped with the latest military equipment stolen from the Techno-base on Hyperion.
Because of the Freedom league’s presence, the self-proclaimed capital of the Separatists, had become at least as inaccessible as Titan.
“Shut down your reactor, Forlorn Hope,” an officer cut through Elvis Presley. “And prepare for an inspection before entering the F.L.S. Manassas’ control zone.”
An enraged quack from the angry duck—sleeping on the cockpit communications equipment—acted as an answer.
“Please repeat, Forlorn Hope,” the officer asked. Meanwhile, the ship left her cruise mode and the chairs moved up against the windshield at the top. “I only heard something like a roaster through static and unbearable blues music.”
“Negative, F.L.S. Manassas,” Miles interjected. He looked daggers at the duck trying to turn up the volume before the pilot ejected the radio-cassette. “We’re an Alliance spacecraft with righteous musical tastes! You’re required to let us land on Mimas where our O.W. head offices are located.”
“Do you think this is going to work?” Fate whispered, catching the escaping tape. She nervously read the handwritten tracklist around the reels.
“It will,” Miles replied. An alarm sounded on the dashboard. The Forlorn was no longer being targeted by the Separatists cruiser’s weapons systems. “See?” Nevertheless, two Kestrel fighters came to visit the converted mining ship. “You babysittin’ us?” Miles asked before one of the pilots invited herself on the open channel.
“Don’t deviate from your predefined course, Forlorn Hope,” she replied through her mask. “Hands at ten and two. Or we’ll send you over the edge.”
“Can’t. Gotta stick them to the very long stick between my legs.”
“You gotta be a real pilot to say that, sir.”
The duck quacked loudly before springing on the pilot’s laps.
Miles put the cassette back. “For once, I’m with you, Napoléon,” he gnashed, smashing a flip.
The ship unfolded its flaps. In the copilot seat, Fate could only witness Miles’ ego taking control of the old mining vessel. The latter violently straightened her beak, while continuing her horizontal trajectory in the sidereal void.
“Forlorn Hope! What the fuck?” the Separatist pilot panicked through a long bip. “You’re going off course!” Immediately, a new target lock caused a flurry of alarms.
“Miles! What are you doing?” Fate panicked.
“I’m countin’,” Miles sighed, as his entire lungs emptied with another burst right when Suspicious Minds kicked in.
The thruster strike coupled with the calculated engagement of a new reactor cycle propelled the nef over the enemy fighter. The maneuver was as dangerous as extraordinary.
“It’s a Baltimore-VII…” Miles coughed.
“What?” the Japanese woman shouted to cover the music and even louder alarms. The latters stopped at the same time of the thrusters.
“The Forlorn Hope flies with a modified Baltimore-VII. Just like the one in Andrew’s workshop but better,” Miles explained while asking the computer to run a diagnostic of the defective nuclear core. “Every Ringern knows how to fiddle with a B-VIII… but this one, they’d die in flames trying to tame it.”
“You are a psychotic man!”
Upside down with the duck still on his legs, the Alliance man laughed. The cockpit windows scraped against the Kestrel’s canopy. Six feet of space separated the two ships. On the other side of the armored glass, the Freedom League pilot looked at the Forlorn crew with a disillusioned expression.
“Enjoyin’ the view?” asked Miles, waving his right hand. The left one anchored to the stick, he maintained an impossible course at several hundred kilometers per hour.
As an answer, the outplayed Separatist pilot jammed all the communications, and dived away.
Fate scolded Miles as she glanced through the windshield glass to see one of the Kestrels flying below their mining ship: “Your provocation was as reckless as unnecessary. We could have been nuked!”
Miles configured the autopilot to follow the right trajectory sent by the F.L.S. Manassas. “A rusty barge with an Alliance registration’s bound to have a cocky jock at the controls. Only the Techno-Marine gives birth to soldiers with a broom up their colon.”
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“The Forlorn got us out of Enceladus. But I doubt your evasive skills against a gray-painted Techno-Cruiser and a swarm of Kestrels…”
Miles gave her back the cassette. “That’s because you don’t believe in the power of Blues music…”
She rolled her eyes as she activated the slowing flaps under Miles’ command.
For a moon was in sight.
Miles, Fate and the dazed bird looked up from the screens and controls to gaze at the strange world taking shape in the sidereal void. As the rebel starfighters stalled to return to their fleet, the Forlorn Hope began her descent, gradually caught by the satellite’s gravitational pull.
“What is wrong with your home world? The surface is… moving.” With her finger, she pointed to the swarming mass that waved as they approached.
“Ain’t the surface.”
“What is it then? I read ‘Saturn I’ on the map.”
“Classic ‘borg mistake. Blindly followin’ electronic impulses and blinkin’ interfaces.”
“I am not a cyborg.” Fate pouted before running a scan from the ship’s old analyzer. The report flashed on a monochrome monitor. “(C2H4)n. Polyethylene. Could it be… plastic?”
“Welcome to the heart of Plasticland!”
“This is—this is unbelievable…” Fate stammered.
The ship encountered more and more of these frozen plastic bundles, partly bleached by the radiation and the extreme cold of the void. A minute later, after the sparse conglomerates gave way to denser fields of detritus, the Forlorn Hope crossed the 30-foot-wide shield to face the moon of Mimas and its nearly perfect round shape.
“It will take thousands of years to clean up…” Fate whispered. “Even with polymer-eating tardigrades.”
Guided by the AI of the civilian control tower, the Alliance ship traversed the thin atmosphere. Recently fully terraformed, Saturn I showed a few clouds still black from the chemicals used to create nitrogen and oxygen, overlooking a desertic surface studded with small dark lakes which once were impact craters. The crew then flew over the Herschel Ocean surrounded on both sides by dangerous corrosive swamps, called “the Bayou” by the locals. Beyond the quagmire, oil fields and derricks stretched across the entire planetoid.
“This world is a really grim place,” Fate noticed.
“You’ve been to Uranus, right? Automated chrome mines and tholin refineries are supposed to be even worse. Are there any moons that haven’t been massacred?”
“I would rather worry about the poor souls living on them…”
“They’re the fuckers muddin’ them…” Miles went on as appeared the walled burg of Nouvelle Patrie on the other side of the black sea. Plastic waste and oil slicks washed against the surrounding buttresses.
“Do you think they have a choice?”
“We all have.”
The Forlorn negotiated a bend over a hillside and finally entered the spaceport. Unlike most towns within the Outer Worlds, the capital of the Rings could enjoy a highly carcinogenic yet breathable atmosphere. It had the appearance of any industrial port city once found on Earth; but, entirely surrounded by high concrete walls to protect its inhabitants from the acid tornadoes that sometimes rose from the oil fields.
Miles vertically docked the Forlorn in the Alliance’s underground hangar. Chatting with the AI in charge of the private spaceport, he received confirmation his friend Ayrelle’s ship had landed in the countryside two weeks earlier to conduct business with a camp of naphtha roughnecks. He messaged her, as Fate gathered her meager belongings in her gym bag— namely a towel also stolen from Old Dodge and several pairs of boxers loaned by her conditional friend.
“One of my pal Ayrelle’s ready to welcome you,” Miles said when he got the answer from her nef called The Gandahar. “She’s been goin’ back and forth between Jupiter and Saturn for quite a while now. She won’t be worried by the Technos or the League… regardin’ her business.”
“What is her business?” Fate asked, hiding her last remaining P-90 ammo in a secret pocket of her faux-leather jacket.
“You ain’t passing through Customs, you know…” he said as he jumped into the passageway. He pointed at her gun and bullets. “The Alliance always has a backdoor just in case a weirdo carries a banned rocket launcher. Or somethin’ more hazardous, even.” He then walked towards the fridge and pulled out a freshly baked potato pie. “For you…”
Fate thanked him while stuffing the cold TT in her bag.
“Ayrelle’s a smuggler/entertainer,” he resumed.
“Entertainer?”
“Runs a fly-in cabaret. Nothin’ too shady but a classic opium den paired with a prostitution ring. She’s an old carnie…” Miles scratched the back of his head. “...and an ex-Belter Soviet Special Forces operative.”
“Excellent.” Fate reacted.
“—and not really a friend. Nasty story. Her husband almost strangled me once—but she owes me a couple of credits in the thousands.”
“Even better…”
“Is there anythin’ else you need?”
“Miles, other than an indecent supply of jerky sticks and cassettes from has-been crooners, you do not own much.”
“Don’t drag the King into this...” he said, pointing to the cassette he offered her. “Forgot Napoléon, though. You want him?”
The angry duck stormed his neck from the passageway, also biting one of his ears. Miles yelled, wrestling the poultry bird who finally fluttered towards the bacon drawer.
“Thanks for everything.” Fate reached out to take his bloody hand.
“Free of charge,” he coughed.
She jumped on the hold floor. Raising her dark eyes, she inquired: “Will you tell me what happened to you? Why the scars and all?”
Miles noticed her change of attitude and saw pity glimmering in her red eyes. “The samurai told you.”
“Yes, he did. Not in details.Who did that to you?”
“Some French guys…” Miles casually answered. Fate lowered her eyes while the Alliance man reached for a jerky stick tucked in his right sock. “We never talked about that but… what are your plans once far from Mr. Turban?”
She sighted. “He will catch me one day, you know. I learned from Goro that there is always someone to catch you. Life is just a short sighted survival game.”
“The funny plans, I meant.”
“I see—then, I do not know. I live in the moment,” Fate answered while stepping out of the opening airlock. The damp atmosphere of Mimas invaded the ship. “You have been truly kind to me. I ought to repay you.” She paused on top of the ladder. “Will we meet again for a slice of pie one day?”
“Probably not.”
Fate smiled. “Farewell, Slim Jim. Take care of yourself—or at least, pretend to…”