DusktoDust_Final3 Read online

  DUSK TO DUST

  By Adrian Felder

  Text copyright © 2015 Adrian W Felder

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Art by RLSather

  SelfPubBookCovers.com/RLSather

  1: Into Dusk

  David Carpenter was in a cell.

  Or at least it felt like a cell. He had been imprisoned by its walls for over a week and the worst part about it was time. Time ticked by at a snail’s pace. In relation to the galaxy, he was moving faster than the speed of light, but relative to his own standards, this was the slowest he had moved in months.

  David was, in fact, not a prisoner but a passenger. His cabin on the starship Gold Rush, an ore hauler, was slightly larger than his body. There was no personal bathroom. The head was located halfway to the other end of the ship, and he shared it with two dozen other passengers and crew members. Food was served three times a day from vending machines. It was so bland that David craved hospital chow after just six days.

  Aesthetically, the Rush didn’t disappoint either. The exterior was about as rusty as the remnants of the Eiffel Tower. At one time it probably had elegant lines defining its shape, but now decades of space junk battering its hull had taken a toll. And the inside hadn’t seen a cleaning crew in years. The corridors and ladder wells were full of garbage, dust, and rat droppings.

  And all of this was all standard. No one cared about starship passengers in this day and age. The United Nations did little to regulate space travel. The real money for starship captains was in freight, not passengers. Thus, the decrepit state found on the Rush tended to be the norm.

  Gold Rush kept Earth Standard Time onboard, and according to the clock on the wall it was almost six in the morning. David lay on his bunk. He’d been awake for almost half an hour but had no real motivation to get up. This was the last day. The last day he would be cooped up on this filthy trash can of a ship. The past six days had felt like a month. He was no stranger to space travel, but he preferred to be in the pilot’s seat. He liked to have control. And if he didn’t have control he liked to have faith in the person who did have control.

  David had met Captain Hurst briefly, and that was all the time he needed to conclude that the man was a complete imbecile. He gave the ship a fifty percent chance of reaching Prospect in one piece with that man at the helm. The other fifty percent of outcomes ranged from Hurst navigating the Rush into a black hole to the disgruntled crew revolting and flushing the man out the airlock. Here’s to the possibilities, David mused.

  There was a slight knock on the door and a second later it opened. “I can’t believe your lazy ass is still in bed.”

  “Good morning to you too, Alana,” David said in reply.

  In walked Alana Ramirez drenched in sweat. She stood six feet tall with braided dark brown hair. In her gym clothes David couldn’t help noticing her long, tanned legs. If he didn’t know her any better he might consider her attractive.

  “Nothing like thirty minutes of wind sprints to start your day,” she said as she wiped her face off with a towel.

  “I take it that was you thundering down the corridor.” Alana had been out of the military two years now, but unlike David, she couldn’t adjust to the leisurely life of a civilian. “You know you could sleep in like us normal mortals. I use the term sleep in very lightly.”

  “You know I can’t stand this damn cabin,” she said as she stripped off her soiled shirt.

  “You’re in the wrong line of work to be claustrophobic.”

  “You know what I mean. If I’m gonna travel space it’s gonna be in my own ship.” She began doing stretches against the bulkhead.

  “My own ship,” David corrected. “And you read the contract. The employer is providing the ship for this run. I don’t like it any more than you, but it made no sense to take Katana to Prospect just to leave her there.” He paused. “Any chance you stopped by the bridge for an update on our arrival?”

  “Nope,” Alana said as she hopped up onto the top bunk. “Guess you’re gonna have to get up and find out yourself.” She threw her used towel at him.

  David recoiled in disgust. “Ok, I’ll get up but you better take a shower before we hit port. I’m not sure customs will let you in otherwise.”

  Alana laughed. “I’ll think about it.”

  David went to the miniaturized wardrobe that the two of them shared and started getting dressed. Alana didn’t bat an eye as he changed his skivvies. This was their relationship. She was more of a sister to him than anything else, but that still didn’t describe their relationship accurately. They’d been in more tight situations together than he cared to count. He would gladly take a bullet for her, and her for him.

  When David had met Alana she had been Corporal Ramirez. Even after five hundred years, the United States Marine Corps did not easily allow women into the ranks of the infantry. Alana had been one of the few to make the cut. In the service David had seen Corporal Ramirez take down grunts twice her size in the blink of an eye. Out of the service he had seen her accomplish more impressive feats. She was one of the best warriors he knew. They had served in multiple combat zones together, done dozens of orbital drops. He had been her squad leader at first, and then her platoon sergeant.

  When David got out, he wasn't able to shake now Sergeant Ramirez. When he had gone to earn his pilot’s license she had been right there with him. There was nothing romantic about it. She was used to the military lifestyle, far more than he was. She stayed with her platoon sergeant because she needed that order in her life. When he bought his ship, the Katana, she became his copilot and gunner. Now, two years later, she was still his backup. While theirs’ may not be the noblest of trades, the two of them were an unstoppable team.

  David put on the only outfit he had, blue jeans, a black t-shirt, a tattered leather jacket, and his old combat boots. Lastly, he stuck his pistol with skeleton holster into the small of his back. That was the best part about getting off of Earth. Nearly everyone carried a weapon once you left the orbital grid and entered the greater vastness of space. He no longer had to travel naked.

  He shot a farewell grunt in Alana’s direction and stepped out of the cabin. In the corridor he turned aft. Gold Rush was a long and slender ore hauler. The cargo hold ran the length of the ship. The bridge and crew and passenger quarters sat atop it. The whole ship was about a kilometer long, leaving plenty of room for shipping containers in the cargo hold but making navigating the ship a work out.

  Few people passed David as he made his way down the central corridor to the bridge. The Rush was running a skeleton crew and there were not many passengers other than himself and Alana. Prospect wasn’t the destination it used to be. Many of he ores were drying up and the Chinese planet of Baoshi was drawing most of the workers now, and, unlike Prospect, Baoshi actually attracted tourists. David had been to Prospect plenty of times before and understood why few people wanted to go there. If it hadn’t been for the planet’s resources he was sure the United Nations Exploration Council would have passed it over a century before. But currency was a powerful motivator, and as long as people paid for the ores and minerals harvested on the rock that was Prospect, human beings would continue to expose themselves to death defying conditions to provide them.

  The bridge of Gold Rush was far different from the starship bridges David was accustomed to. He was comfortable in those of military star cruisers and interdictors, bridges nestled deep within the ship with screens showing outside camera feeds. Instead, he now stood on a bridge like that of naval vessels of old, where the only thing that separated you from the outside world, which in this case was the vacuum of space, was a thin sheet of tempered glass. The whole concept put David on edge.

 
; The bridge was empty except for the first mate, an Australian man named Carl something- David couldn’t remember the man’s last name and didn’t really care. Theoretically these ships could be piloted by one person, but he’d rarely seen that done. This captain was either really lazy or liked pushing the limits of his men.

  “What’s up?,” Carl asked as David approached. “You know you aren’t supposed to be here.” He voice showed indifference. The bridge was off limits to passengers, but security on the Gold Rush was about as common as virtue in a whore house.

  “Just wanted to check our ETA.”

  Carl checked the helm console. “About five minutes. I was just about to make the announcement.”

  “Well then I’ll get out of your hair.” He turned for the door but Carl stopped him.

  “You’re welcome to stay. It’s quite a show dropping out of hyperspace.”

  David accepted the invitation and made himself comfortable in one of the crewman’s chairs. Carl picked up the intercom handset. “Attention, ladies and gentlemen. This is the first mate. We are coming up on our drop point for Prospect. Please make your way to the closest restraining chair and prepare for deceleration. That is all.” He replaced the handset.

  Hyperspace was a funny thing. Discovered back in the twenty-second century, ships now used controlled Klyston detonations to propel themselves forward at speeds of over forty times the speed of light. With no friction to slow it, a ship in hyperspace kept cruising until some other force acted upon it. If the hyperspace route was plotted correctly this was the force of the ship’s inertial dampeners. If it was plotted incorrectly it was a planet, an asteroid, or any other piece of random junk floating in space. Either way, the problem with this rapid deceleration was that the human body wasn’t built for these forces. That’s where the retraining chairs came in.

  David reached up and grabbed his chair’s body netting, lifted it over his head, and strapped it in under his feet. Carl did the same thing in the helmsman’s chair. The netting was uncomfortable but a necessary evil for space travel. At least it left their arms free.

  “So what’s waiting for you at Prospect,” Carl inquired.

  David took a second to decide how to answer this delicate question. “Would you believe me if I said I was on vacation?” he said trying to change the subject.

  Carl gave him a sideways glance. “Right… I know there were resorts planetside back in the day, but from what I hear they went down the toilet.”

  “Yeah. It’s hard to see what people saw in the place to begin with.”

  “My parents took me on a holiday there back when I was a kid, but the place was already drying up. The skies were always gray. It wasn’t much to look at.” David had no experience with the tourism industry on Prospect so he kept his mouth shut. A few awkward seconds passed by. “So what are you really getting into there,” Carl finally said. He wasn’t letting up.

  David hesitated. “My partner and I are looking for work,” he said and then added without thinking, “Got a lead on a job.”

  “Oh yeah, with who.”

  David could have answered with anything. He could have lied. He could have made up some fictional company. But for some reason the truth came out. “Windcorp.” When the words escaped his mouth he already knew he had said too much.

  Carl looked intrigued, if not a little uneasy. “Windcorp, huh.” He paused. “They actually offered me a job a while back. They were gonna give me my own ship. Good money too. I turned them down.” He paused. “You must need work pretty badly to take a job with them.” Windham Corporation, or Windcorp, had its hands in just about everything on Prospect, from legitimate mining and shipping to less legitimate mining and shipping, as well as other things.

  I should have lied, thought David, it would have been safer. “I wouldn’t say desperate. They made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse.”

  Carl looked at him skeptically. “What business are you in?”

  He hesitated a second before answering. “Shipping.”

  For the next couple minutes David managed to steer the conversation away from himself and his travels. Good thing Carl enjoyed talking about nothing in particular. He was in the middle of filling David in on the latest from Australian Football when the hyperspace alarm went off.

  “Alright, here we go.” He placed one hand on the inertial dampener controls and used the other to pick up the intercom.

  “Attention, all hands. Thirty seconds to real space drop. Repeat. Thirty seconds to real space drop. Ensure you are secured in your restraining chairs. Stand by for countdown.” They waited as the seconds ticked by. “Real space drop in five… four… three… two… one… DROP!”

  Carl’s hands flew deftly over the helm controls. He activated the dampeners and the Gold Rush began to slow. David felt his body strain against the netting. Inside it felt as if all his organs were crushing against his ribcage. He had been through this process countless times and it never got any less uncomfortable. But better this than spending years of his life traveling through the void of space at sublight speeds.

  It took about thirty seconds for the Rush to decelerate from forty times the speed of light to just a few thousand kilometers per hour. Outside the bridge’s viewport the black and gray swirl of hyperspace gave way to streaking stars which gave way to the vacant star scape of real space. David had seen the transition hundreds of times, but the majesty of the view never ceased to amaze him.

  Carl maneuvered the Gold Rush about. As he did, their destination came into view, an orange and gray spec among the stars.

  Prospect.

  A hundred and sixty years ago the planet had held so much promise for the future of human space exploration. Astronomers had found it in their galactic telescopes. It was the answer to mankind’s problems- the Tango solar system. A single planet about the same size and orbital pattern as Earth, orbiting a star very similar to the sun. And from the looks of it there was water and an oxygen atmosphere. With overpopulation on Earth becoming a major concern, the United Nations Exploration Council dispatched the star cruiser UNV Brasilia to investigate

  Back in those days hyperspace was not possible so it took the Brasilia seventeen years to complete the voyage. In 2173, the first humans set foot on the planet. It was almost everything mankind could hope for. The planet had an atmosphere richer with oxygen than Earth’s. There was water and plant life but few animals. The planet was much younger in the course of evolution than Earth. And best of all, geological scans revealed it was rich with ores and minerals. There was plenty of iron and silver, along with many heavy ores never seen before. And they were all found relatively close to the planet’s surface, easy to mine, and in unprecedented amounts. It was the new frontier, a colonist’s wet dream, except for its fatal flaw.

  Prospect was unique. Its rotation matched its orbit around the star perfectly. Because of this, the same face of Prospect faced Tango at all times. This created very interesting environmental conditions. From his perspective, Prospect appeared to David as half tan and half gray. Both sides, the light and the dark sides, looked desolate and mountainous through the viewports, but each was equally different. The dark side, facing away from the sun, consisted of frozen lakes and rivers and snowcapped peaks. The temperatures were frigid enough to terrify even the best of Earth’s Antarctic explorers. The light side was the complete opposite. It was covered with mountains and canyons and saw temperatures that would instantly boil water, if water were ever there.

  In between the light and the dark side ran a greenish brown line. This was the Dusk Zone, the only habitable place on Prospect. Running around the circumference of the planet, through the poles, the Dusk Zone was the median between the two extremes, staying in a constant twilight. Back in the twenty second century the zone had been lush and green, but after decades of human colonization it had become polluted. Now, nearly two thirds of Prospect’s forests had been destroyed, replaced by mining and refining facilities, as well as
other, less talked about industries. The Dusk Zone was the center of all human colonization on Prospect, and in David’s experience was possibly the most diverse, downtrodden, and scum ridden place in the galaxy.

  “Crazy, isn’t she.” David looked up. Carl was out of his seat and moving about the helm, checking sensors and preparing for the Rush to make port.

  “Yeah,” David said as he unhooked himself from the restraint netting. He cracked a grin. “It’s good to be back.”

  2: The Skylift

  “Welcome to United Nations Exploration Command’s Skylift Station. Please keep your belongings with you at all times. Any unattended baggage will be confiscated and incinerated. All arriving passengers and crew please report to customs before you proceed planetside.”

  David laughed at the sound of the clearly synthesized female voice. UNEC went to such lengths to try to keep Prospect a respectable colony. But in reality they didn’t care what was brought onto Prospect- they just wanted to vet the products leaving the planet.

  Alana and David were making their way through Skylift Station. The station was a big change from the seedy atmosphere of the Rush. The facilities were kept immaculate by minimum- wage UNEC employees. The floors gleamed. The viewports glistened. David almost felt like he was back one of the grid stations above Earth.

  Skylift Station was Prospect’s only orbital station. It was tethered to the planet by the Skylift, a combination of turbolifts running up through the atmosphere from the Dusk Zone. The Skylift and Skylift Station were both under the jurisdiction of UNEC. All cargo going to and from Prospect went through the Skylift. The reasoning was simple. UNEC only needed to regulate the one port of entry on Prospect to prevent contraband from being shipped off planet, instead of having to worry about all of the many industrial complexes on the surface. UNEC kept a garrison of Peacekeepers in orbit around the planet to intercept any smugglers who tried to bypass the station. Many tried to. Few prevailed. The best interceptor pilots in the Peacekeepers were sent to Prospect.