Galaxy: I

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GALAXY - I

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by

Peter Foye

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Galaxy - I

Copyright ©2011 by the author

Peter Foye

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet via any other means without permission of the author is illegal. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Published by Peter Foye at Smashwords

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Author's Note

The initial idea for this series was born from some silly chatter between good friends over pots of good real ale in my local pub. By the time I had found my way home the three main characters were living happily in my head and all they needed was an adventure or two. I wrote the first episode as a pilot for a TV show and the following ones just for fun.

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For my good friend

John Vincent

Who gave me the initial idea, encouragement, then further coercing to write this romp through future space and then to read, comment and criticise my humble offering.

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Galaxy - I

And at this point … ‘GALAXY – I’ was born. Its remit was as straight-forward as the operatives that carried its badge… not to right wrongs or even to save damsels in distress; but to … provide a service to the customer of the highest quality, to find that lost cat (or what-ever) and earning as many Dominion Rials as possible along the Milky Way. Thus the scene is set and…

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Table of Contents:

Galaxy - I

Episode 1: The Case of The Devious Droid

Galaxy - I 2

Episode 2: The Case of The Missing Mogg

Galaxy - I 3

Episode 3. The Case of The Silent Sentinel

More About The Author

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Galaxy – I

Prologue :

The year is AD. 3030 and the resourcefulness of human kind, driven by the burgeoning needs of exponentially increasing populations, that were crowded into swarming, seething cities, have scattered like seeds in a solar wind, far, far into the outer reaches of the known universe. Some believe that the most daring and perhaps foolhardy have gone even further into realms of unknown science. During the years of ceaseless expansion and subsequent colonisation of earth-like planets and those that were close enough to support complex carbon based organisms like homosapiens, several diverse alien life forms were discovered and interacted with. Many were primitive with simple social structures while others were sentient and highly developed, both in their nature and technology.

These were the nations that were to prove the most helpful and profitable after agreeing to multiple trade contracts and military alignments. If there was one thing that the humans excelled in it was the Machiavellian methods that were used during the devious politicking that seemingly gave their business partners the best of the deal, while in fact the opposite was always true. Thus inter-system and then inter-galactic commerce became the new unspoken god that ruled all, the believers and agnostics alike and was completely omnipotent over any of the life-forms within the Dominion, as this era has become known.

Among these many worlds, each embroiled in its own struggle for supremacy, either over natural events or simply just to be more successful than its neighbours, there arose the usual conflicts of life that for countless millennia existed alongside the time-line of man …and woman come to that. There were the injustices wrought by one on another, the blood feuds between families and friends, the felonies and frauds perpetrated one on another, the suicides and homicides, the mysteries and the missing, right down to the regular cheating and lying.

And at this point … ‘Galaxy – I’ was born. Its remit was as straight-forward as the operatives that carried its badge… not to right wrongs or even to save damsels in distress; but to … provide a service to the customer of the highest quality, to find that lost cat (or what-ever) and earning as many Dominion Rials (Dr’s) as possible along the Milky Way. Thus the scene is set and…

This story is called…

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Episode 1 – The Case Of The Devious Droid

ACT I :

The starscape is a vast vista of the cosmos, from nebulae to spiral galaxies, gaseous clouds to binary star systems, giant ringed gas giant planets with many orbiting moons. Then there are the less spectacular smaller hard ice covered planets and hot desert type planets with fiercely active volcanoes and then the even smaller and not spectacular at all, the potato-shaped whirling, drifting asteroids and the complete silence of the void…

… to be broken by the hissing sound of a suit pack thruster, as it coughs and stutters in an attempt to maintain pressure. The heavily suited figure is in a continual struggle to maintain directional control, which appears to result in near misses with spinning lumps of jagged rock and rusted pieces of metallic debris of all shapes and size.

…you … you … double-dealing space rat ‘Murff’, I’m gonna chew a chunk out of your worthless, mangy aaa.. ah … Ooof!

The oddly suited figure, trailing spitting tubes of varying lengths and diameters, as if a nest of bad tempered snakes are attempting a simultaneous escape but finding their tails held fast, bounces sharply to alternate sides while trying to arrest a re-active tumbling action. The suit thrusters fire again but bad synchronisation induces a sense mangling oscillating spin.

You wart faced ba-a-a-a… screams the tumbling and twisting spaceman, arms flailing amid the metallic ‘snakes’, still hissing their sporadic protests.

A close-up of the spaceman’s visor shows an agonised man’s face, a face as rugged as any that had been hewed from a particularly hard granite by a drunken sot at the end of the longest bender of his alcoholic career. As the camera eye pulls away the suited figure is now stable, limbs spread wide but travelling backwards at quite a speed.

Wheeee-e-e-e …., he screams in Doppler fashion as the figure gets ever smaller. With a soundless thwack his backward motion is smartly and suddenly arrested by a jumbled mass of metal lumps of varied origins. The larger pieces that had tightly jigsawed together were studded with dials and gauges of bygone ages and now looked like so many unseeing eyes staring blankly back at the twinkling cosmos. The hapless spaceman, one Joe Nine-T, was at the present unaware of the nature of the heavenly body that he had now become a part of. All he knew was that he had slammed into the thing arse first and his back, plastered to it like a dung pat, hurt like hell. The greasy synthesised air that had filled his lungs been ejected from him under the force of the impact and he gagged into the mouthpiece fearing that he would not take another breath. But the rush of rubber smelling air that re-inflated his lungs from the demand valve was truly welcoming like he never thought possible.

Gee shee..it Joe Boy, thought that was about it. Oww my back feels like a mad mule of a Rigellian whore has stamped all over it. If I get my sorry arse off of this thing, whatever it is, I’m gonna yank Murffy’s tail back through that grinning, tusked maw of his then choke him. I’ll give him - ’ …I’ll even throw in this Space Fleet Mk. XIV EVA suit, nearly new, to seal the bargain.’ That ageing ion-drive mULE he was keen to off-load didn’t look bad, good re-skin and repair job, full service log, re-con hydrogen scoops, sixty percent full ion converter banks. Such a ‘good deal’…eh, he said. The crook knew the banks were shot, must have used some hi-tech stuff to fudge the scales and I fell for it. I was bloody lucky to clear the station dock, never mind leaving the sector. I’ll get him … damn right I will. Now to get off of here…

It was a strange thing but dizziness doesn’t really happen in space. Maybe it’s because there is no real up or down, only a directional gravitational field can give you that. In space there’s plenty of gravity but it’s so spread out. At least Joe’s apparent rotation had ceased or so it seemed to him but he was still a space fly stuck fast to this sticky ball of metal junk and he was not happy about it, not a bit.

What a trip this turned out to be. The ship is a bucket of nails, escaped from the knacker’s yard and flogged to the first sap that drifted by on a fresh solar wind. That was yours truly, then the scoops promptly clogged as the filter scrubbers gave up, followed by the energy banks suddenly dropping to their true readings … ‘effin critical!!’ …great, just great.

A space helmet precludes a view of one’s feet, that is if you are human, ‘cause you can’t bend your ridiculously short neck hardly at all, but he knew without looking down, that his grav-boots were held fast. His arms however had some independent movement allowed but experimenting soon showed that he was never going to push off with enough force to break the attraction of this huge lump of magnetised debris. Though Joe was a technician, that was what the ‘T’ signified after his name, he never really rationalised problems or even thought in straight lines. His thought processes were more ‘curved’ in a way that they came and went with some tumbling across one another to find a place to be noticed in the chaotic spaces that Joe considered to be his brain. It was among this maelstrom of ideas that Joe sought for a flash of inspiration but today, as with many days, there was none.

Oiy shitbrain … wake up. Get me out of here, he said with feeling and some slight panic that added to the timbre of his voice, then thinking clearer he recalled …nothing. Save that is, having exactly the same thought as on many previous occasions during his miserable life scavenging the dirty holes of the universe. The middens of mankind and all the other kinds middens were ever to be his domain. And at this particular moment his small, small domain among the worlds of the Dominion amounted to this conglomerate of the detritus and flotsam of the universe.

Ah, I got it, he said, with some deliberation, as if desperately trying to hang onto an idea before it slipped between his synapses and escaped forever. Praying, that’s it, but how’s it done? I’ve heard of it somewhere, I mean I’ve seen the monks of Jedda-Tau do it, whatever ‘it’ was. Sort of chanting and chirping it sounded like.

Screwing up his eyes he made a squeaking warbling noise inside his helmet but all it did was to deafen him and mist up the visor.

"Can’t see how this is gonna work, in fact can’t see a damn thing now. Look if there is a God, er …Gods, Super-being, Overlord, Sir, Your Worship … sorry Madam, please, please cut me some slack here. I know I’ve said some harsh things about Murff an’ that and maybe I haven’t been too …well straight but if you can see it in yourself to be getting me…’

The impact behind him was sudden and shocking with the force of it and the resulting kinematic energy transfer being instantaneous, the reaction catapulted him away from his disintegrating new home. The spinning and tumbling began anew. There was no time to shit, scream, curse or draw breath, just chaotic motion. Was it over in seconds, hours, longer? He couldn’t tell, nor did it matter then but what did matter was that his flailing mass of body parts and tubes and the machinery that was part of his suit, had got snagged on …something. A ‘something’ that looked promising as a possible source of plunder.

The reason that our hapless hero Joe Nine-T was way out here in the first place was that he was stranded, adrift in the endless wastes of the cosmos and far from normal trade routes. Joe would call himself a trader, a purveyor of the exotic and the unattainable. In point of fact he delved in the shady world of pseudo-religious icons, strange and mysterious antiques and all manner of devices that were illegal to remove from certain planets, planetoids, space stations, military bases and museums. And most certainly illegal to traffic to most other systems, whether part of the Dominion or the home planets of other allied trading species. Thus his contacts with authorities and police agencies were usually disastrous and once his cover was blown, which all too frequently did not take long, he was on the run again.

On this occasion his sleek FTL ship, The Valkyrie, he liked to call her ‘Val’, had been ensnared by The Guardians, a particularly vindictive and insidious secretive Dominion agency that operated outside normal government forces. As usual it had been an unfortunate series of events that so nearly cost him body and soul, but only the latter if he had one, he wasn’t sure. The arrangement with Murff-E had been hurriedly brokered to get him off ‘The Wheel’, the space port known more officially as Omega 47 in the Dominion quadrant of the Cygnus Nebulae. For Joe ‘The Wheel’ tripped easier off of his often-furred tongue. On reflection, he thought it was partly his own silly fault that allowed himself to be flimflammed by a geek like Murff and mentally he gave himself a severe kicking.

The box of tricks that hung from the side of his suit had been hooked by a grapple arm that extended from a roughly cylindrical, multi-faceted piece of scarred flotsam. To Joe it was a possible source of energy; a few ergs may still be in the internal workings of the machine or whatever it was. All he had to do was to find some sort of access port, plug on a suitable umbilical and scavenge it.

Where is that A4 plug that’ll do it, he said, feeling better about things already. I’m gonna make like that guy in the vids, that one with the fangs an’ suck out the last erg of… ah here it is.

His over-sized gloved hand that looked like something from another century, one that involved armour and lances, the tech was so old was surprisingly dextrous and he was able to attach the E-drain. The flow indicator winked with super bright neons in a brief display then went blank. The frown was back and furrowing his forehead.

What…? No, don’t do this to me, I need this… but his pleas invoked no discernible response.

Hey, you, wet-brain, get that thing outta my ear, the voice said in an affronted tone. You hear?

You gotta be pulling my chain… Joe responded with some incredulous surprise at the tinny voice in his ear.

"Yeah you, you’re the one with the poking bits. You some sort of space vampire or what?’ the junk continued indignantly.

I didn’t mean nothing… hey what ‘m my saying? I getting space-crazy talking to a piece of space junk as if I’ve harmed it.

Then through one of the scorched black panels the display started to glow then pulse with low energy. Both man and machine were at the very beginning of a symbiotic relationship that would test each of them but for now, neither would understand what was happening and perhaps they never would fully. Then again the ways of the cosmos and all that was in it would forever challenge and mystify all that dwelt within it.

Well ‘Man’, if that is the species you are ‘cos you look dumb enough, are we going to have an understanding or what?

Joe looked as if his reply might be with the biggest wrench that he could lay a hand on but there was none to hand, not out here. Here he was marooned in space, held hostage by some sort of robotic device that thought ‘he’ was in charge. But maybe there could be some salvation in all of this. After all some robots had quite sophisticated circuitry that allowed rational processes, well some … He tried another approach.

Look, my moniker is Joe Nine-T and my business is… he thought for a second, because he had heard that there were machines that had polygraph abilities, … a trader in merchandise artefacts. That was close enough, he thought.

Gotcha …thought so, …a smuggler.

No wait a min…

"A smuggler, and I am …er was … a type ZA!££&* ( unintelligible)… E.M.D.D, that is a Zenith Class Extraneous Materials Disposing Droid and available for…"

Ah, a hi-tech dustbin, what a laugh, I got nabbed by a bin. Don’t let this get around tinhead ‘cos my cred will hit bottom in every alcho-bar and whore pit this side of Orion. Now get them hooks off me so that I can feed on some juice still in these husks, then I can get that rust bucket back yonder to travel a parsec or two.

The Droid gave a kind of tortured squeal that sounded like protesting metal scraping together. More lights flickered and chased in a crazed random motion round its circumference followed by flashes of electrical arcs.

Then it went dark

.Hey, you given up already? Joe enquired, bemused by the sudden silence.

No chance! was the droid’s response.

Look OK, maybe we got off on the wrong foot …er wrong appendage, perhaps if we, that is us together, we could scavenge enough energy in all this junk …ah that’s what I’ll call you … Space Junk. Now how does that sound, a proper name, all regular like, not just a stupid number in a catalogue. What do ya say Space Junk?

The response was another ripple of lights, though this time more excitable