Stellar Objects

Chapter 3: Pursuit

8 months later...

Captain Nitin Nayar sipped his chai tea as his ship lurched. The screen in front of him displayed their prey, a small blast-marked shuttle emerging from behind a half-imploded moon. 

"He's getting away," he said, with bored disinterest.

"He's fast," said the pilot, whose name Nitin never bothered to learn.  The hotshot fly-boy was young, no more than twenty, and had never seen a day at the Front. Nitin hated him for it.  He'd seen real battle and it'd cost him his legs.

Captain Nayar holstered his tea in the cup holder the skinny kid from the engine room had fashioned, and wheeled his uneven chair back to confer with the only person on the cramped command bridge who was excited about their high speed pursuit.

Lt. Shelly Carpace – she made sure Nitin knew her name – had been transferred from Scotland Yard to, as she quotes "keep the peace and uphold the law" in the dark zone between Earth and the Front.

Keep the peace, Captain Nayar nearly laughed to himself. In a time of war.  It was insulting to very notion of peace and contemptuous of everyone on board his ship, the HMS Ghandi.

"Why you want this adami so bad?" Nayar asked. 

"He's dangerous," replied his lieutenant.   Shelly swiped her hand over the five mounted glasspads at her station and ordered, "profile: Crowther, Judson."

Instantly the three-dimensional image of a man's face filled a transparent glass screen on the left. The digigraph showed a young man, about the pilot's age, clean-shaven and eager. There was even a hint of a smile.  In a different time, he could've been a poster boy for the Galactic Navy's recruiting. But now he was a fugitive; guilty of treason for fleeing the Front. 

His charges scrolled up the screen:  theft, desertion, larceny, rupee-laundering, injuring officers upon escape, and treason. That last word pulsed in red.  It was a high crime against the Raj, punishable by death.

Shelly wasn't just chasing a criminal, she was hunting a man to his death.

Everyone dies, Nayar told himself. Some sooner than others.

"I can be dangerous," Nayar said, half-joking to lighten his own mood.

"Yessir!" replied the eager pilot.

"This is not a joke," said Shelly, sternly. "His actions could incite others to do the same, abandon their duties. Then where would we be?  Defeated by the Enemy. Conquered, enslaved.  Like Egyptia. Is that what you want?"

Egyptia was the latest planet to fall.  The Navy's spin machine had been selling the story that Earth was turning the corner, finally poised to win the war.  But then Egyptia fell and the Raj ordered a fresh offensive.  His speech, from New New Delhi, broadcast throughout the galaxy, promised to "redouble our efforts, never cease in our pursuit of freedom and liberty against a brutal Enemy that would take both from each of us...before taking our very lives."

Nayar looked up at Shelly, who stood straight in her pristine police uniform.  "Do you always do your duty, lieutenant?" he asked.

"Not at this speed," she snapped back, saying it loud enough for the pilot to hear.

Nayar glanced at the main screen. The shuttle was slipping away.  In the distance, the captain spotted an asteroid belt that would pulverize the Ghandi, but shield the small shuttle. 

"I'm at full power," the pilot said defensively.

Nayar tapped the small glasspad that wired into the arm of his chair. "Engine room," he commanded.

A fuzzy image speckled the glass; the Engineer bending over, fussing with the pulsing blue fusion reactor.  Nayar caught an unwelcome sight of his backside spilling over the top of his trousers.

"We need as much sakti as you can spare," said Nayar.

The Engineer rose and stood to the ceiling mounted camera, showing his chubby, scaly face.  From the front, he was more lizard than man and as far as Nayar knew, he rarely left the engine room.  He had a name, but refused to use it; insisting on being called by his profession.

"If you'd got me that new transluseter I put in for," the Engineer said with a forked tongue, "then maybe—"

"We can loosen the fusion release," chirped another voice.  Nayar strained at the screen, and spotted its source.

In the corner of the room, chained to a pipe, Nayar caught sight of a boy.  It was the skinny kid who'd installed the cup holder on his chair.  He was a service slave with a funny name like Guck or Glitch.

The Engineer hurled a wrench at the kid.  "Shut it, squirt!" he howled.

Guck ducked and the tool clanged off the metal wall.  The Engineer cursed something in his native tongue and Nitin decided not to ask the computer for an instant translation.

"Captain," interrupted Shelly. "Asteroid belt's ahead. If we don't get more power, we'll loose Crowther in that briar patch."

"I have eyes," Nayar said. "And ears.  Engineer, I heard another idea to push this ol' cart."

"Yes, Captain," the Engineer answered back, before mumbling something under his breath that sounded like 'Jam Lunge."

Grunge, recalled the Captain. That was the slave boy's name.

"Unchain the kid and let him do his thing," ordered Nayar. "And Grunge, if you can fix an engine the way you fix a cup holder, you'll have a long career on this ship."

"I can fix anything," Grunge said, grinning up to the camera as the Engineer fumbled with his claws to unchain him.  "Anything and everything."

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What's Grunge going to do?