Deep Breaths
STARDRIFT – Episode 1: Dead Reckoning (Scene 7)
Vizier had not prepared any arrival protocols and the Unit Breaker had defaulted to idling mode and was drifting, the forward view black with distant stars.
The voice on the radio was calm but insistent. “Gate Control to Unit Breaker, clear the approach vector.”
Vizier reached across and flicked on his microphone while his other hand was activating manual flight controls. “Just a moment Gate Control. We had a bit of a crisis on board.”
“Had you been turned around Unit Breaker?”
An aft thruster did not fire up and Vizier alternated between flicking the ignition switch and adjusting the fuel valve control. He was only half listening to the radio. “Repeat that Prion Gate?”
“Unit Breaker, Fest Stop gate control. Have you been turned around?”
The thruster fired up but it gave Vizier no joy as he brought the Unit Breaker around and looked back at Fest Stop gate and the god-awful asteroid it sat on.
Vizier shifted in the pilot seat, his breath taken out of him. A trip through underspace should have had him a system away. Yet he was back here.
The coordinates were in the memory buffer, fed by the transponder. Vizier pulled them up again and checked them. “Gate Control, we had a technical issue when we crossed. I’m loading codes again.”
He reactivated the codes, from a transponder he could not trust. But that was all he had for a jump.
“Gate Control this is Unit Breaker. Codes entered. Unit Breaker request clearance for jump.”
Behind Vizier there was a noise in the ship. Some kind of wailing. The girl wasn’t in the cargo hold anymore. She must have found the strength to climb up the ladder and was now coming down the corridor.
“Unit Breaker this is Gate Control. Your codes are not clearing.”
Right, they were locked out of Prion Gate, first stop on the way to Nustral. Then maybe they should not be going there.
“Gate Control, list and confirm active channel links.”
Gate Control named three links other than Prion. Bach Gate and two others he could not hear. The girl wailed in the corridor behind him. A scream that created an echo that wrapped a cold wind around his neck.
“Gate Control, transfer codes to Bach Gate and activate.”
He should get her into a cabin but first they had to get away. If Jel Darm became aware they were here he would have something to say about getting his ship back. And Vizier really didn’t want to listen to that. They had to get moving.
“Unit Break, this is Gate Control. Your codes are not locking in for Bach Gate.”
“What about the other links. Run them all.”
“Unit Breaker, better come in to port and check out that transponder of yours.”
Of course he should do that. Go back into Fest Stop port where Jel Darm and Cira Warten and her large goon would be waiting. He should have checked the transponder before they left. He knew there was something fishy with it but now he was sure.
“Unit Breaker, Gate Control here. Transferring this call to Fest Stop Port—”
The radio was drowned out when the girl reached the bridge. She was rambling on loudly and with a clear panic in her voice.
Vizier looked over his shoulder, tried to catch her eye and indicate for her to sit down and be quiet. She had put on Jel’s shirt but still looked awful, smeared with dried stasis fluid. The no hair thing made her look even more haunted.
She didn’t get the message and stumbled forward until she pushed against Vizier’s shoulder. She took hold of his arm, tugging at it. “Where am I?”
She spoke galactic common but her accent was so thick it took a moment for Vizier before he parsed out the meaning. He took her by the arm and guided her to the seat behind him. “You’re on the Unit Breaker. This is a cargo ship.”
She shook her head, and Vizier’s arm violently. “No. The Dilradasi. I’m on the Dilradasi.”
Vizier grabbed her by the shoulders and eased her back in the cockpit to the second chair. “Sorry my dear, not right now. Right now you are on this shit bucket stuck with me.”
She sat down but would not let go of his arm. She looked up at him, her mouth contorted and she wailed again in anguish.
He guided her arms so that her hands could grip onto the arm rests and managed to strap her into the seat. “I can understand that you are upset but I have bigger problems to worry about at the moment. Just sit here for a bit and breathe deeply if you can.”
She closed her mouth, nodded sharply but her eyes stayed fixated on Vizier. “The hand on the ground steady the mind at flight,” she said.
“Right, you’re stuck here and so am I,” he mumbled as he took the pilot seat again.
“Unit Breaker this is Fest Stop Port. Your ship has been marked for possible transport and shipping violations. Proceed immediately to Dock seven.”
Vizier had to think but the girl was breathing so loudly behind him. Snorting through her nose as if she was trying to fill a hangar with oxygen.
“Port, Unit Breaker here. I have trouble with aft thrusters. We’ll be coming in slow.”
The Port Master carried on with reading possible violations and confiscations and the issuing of travel restrictions and more.
Vizier wasn’t listening. He wouldn’t be coming in at all. Not that he feared the Port Master. It was who else could be there.
No, he had to make another plan.
Then, in the background behind the voice of the Port Master another screamed. Jel Darm’s whiny voice. “…must get my ship back here…screw your head off…!”
Jel Darm sounded like a ball of livid plasma, and depending on Cira’s investment…
A small hand gripped Vizier’s shoulder tightly. “What is wrong?” the girl asked right in his ear. “Why are the people shouting?”
Her breathing seemed too fast. She was going to get herself right into a panic again. Vizier had to remain calm, not make it any worse. This was what you did with a first class passenger who found out the Curet roses in their cabin could not be changed for Kaline lilies because they were three systems away from Kalin.
“Don’t worry. We won’t be going anywhere near those angry people. And you at least did nothing wrong my dear.”
She stopped breathing for a spell and Vizier glanced over his shoulder only to see her, white in the face and vomiting over the back of the pilot seat. “Nothing wrong until now, my dear.”
Vizier muted port control and kept speaking, keeping his voice down to a calm drone. That might settle her enough for the moment.
“There are no ships on the asteroid that can get to us. There were only three other ships docked. One was not flying, taken apart for maintenance. The other two are slower, older, and bigger than this little Unit Breaker. And each only had a tail gun, not for attack but for defence.”
The girl whimpered and then started breathing slowly again, counting her breaths.
“They could possibly use the port guns to target us, but only if we tried to enter the port, which I do not intend to do.”
While he was parsing out his options Vizier had been steering the ship to the dark side of the asteroid, just rock, the solid half. No guns, no port, no gate.
He could land there but that would be pointless.
What he needed was to get them away from Fest Stop, get some time to rip that transponder apart and see what’s wrong and…
“What happened to the Dilradasi? Where are the elders?”
“I’m not sure but I think they may be in the hold.”
The radio kept buzzing. Port control must be dying to talk to him.
The talking that was a bigger problem was the thin breathless stream coming from right behind him.
“The Nedrilsten. Where’s the Nedrilsten? I must speak to Kasadi Dyma, any Dyma.”
“Soon. We can go wake up any of the other six if you really want, but not right now.”
If he could knock her out then he would not have to worry about calming her down. Then he could concentrate on his immediate problem.
The radio stopped buzzing. Something had changed. Vizier ran through the channels. Mostly crackle and then a ship calling. Vizier immediately recognised that bored efficient drone of a liner helmsman.
“Fest Stop Gate, Odesia Terrace. Control codes for Bach Gate submitted. Waiting for lock confirmation.”
Odesia Terrace. That had to be a passenger liner. Not one of the really big ones. They clustered around the pretty planets and the cultural centres. This was something smaller, but still way bigger than the Unit Breaker.
Not much out here for tourists. “They could have been doing a flyover of Arogym,” said Vizier with a grin. “Get a history lesson on the war.”
“Arogym,” whispered the girl.
Oh, no. He should not have said that. She’s going to go into full blown panic attack now.
She didn’t. She started mumbling under her breath. Soft enough that he could not hear the words, but it stopped her loud breathing and somehow calmed her down.
“You know,” said Vizier, now mostly speaking to himself. “If we can tuck in closely under the Odesia Terrace we can pass the gate with her. Captain won’t like it a bit.”
Did he know the captain?
Vizier took the Unit Breaker on a wide arc, staying on the blind side of the asteroid and below the passenger liner. It had to slow down to pass through the gate otherwise he would have had no chance.
The radio chimed up. The Port Master would be wanting to know why he hadn’t made an approach. Or Jel Darm would have got hold of the microphone to promise more violent revenge.
“Unit Breaker, Vizier Streak?”
It was a restrained female voice. Cira Warten.
“Vizier, you should dock the ship. We have unfinished business.”
A shiver made Vizier’s knees knock against the console and he clenched his jaw. He’d rather fly right into the Odesia Terrace’s main turbine exhaust.
The girl behind him sighed and spoke in a normal voice for the first time. “She seems nice.”
“After two hundred years you would know nothing about that.”
“Two hundred years?”
The passenger liner loomed large above them. There were not many viewports down her, but there were some. But people would not be looking back, the interesting thing was the shimmering meniscus of the gate in front.
“Ship’s very big.”
“Yes it is,” said Vizier. “But not so big that our passing along with it would not be picked up by sensors. By gate control, the ship, or both.”
Still Vizier rolled them over and brought the Unit Breaker close enough that if he had extended the landing struts they would have touched.
Ahead of them the nose of the space liner pushed through the gate meniscus. Becoming a ghost dissolving in a haze.
Vizier frantically worked the controls. He could hear the aft thruster whine as he changed their alignment with the liner to an acute angle. Momentum would have to do a lot of work.
The moment before they would pass through with the ship Vizier detached the container holds, letting them drift with their momentum along with the liner and knocked the sublight drive up to the max.
The Unit Breaker rattled nearly as bad as before, the Grill Drive whining at an ear-splitting pitch.
The girl gasped for a breath as the acceleration pushed her back in her seat.
The little cargo ship shot across the meniscus of the gate, skipping along the surface and then past the outer pylons and away from the asteroid.
Vizier ran a check over the controls to make sure nothing was coming apart. Then he turned round in his seat and looked at the girl. “I don’t know where we are going now,” he said. “But neither do they, and that gives us some time to catch a breath.”
© 2025 Gerhi Janse van Vuuren