Cartesian Coordinates Read online

  Cartesian Coordinates

  By Kara Hale

  Table of Contents

  Part I 3

  Part II 10

  Part III 19

  Part I

  The flash of an exploding tanker lit up the Eagle’s interior. Sappho stared mouth open in shock as the fireball licked along our hull, even with our leeward engines on full thrust. We had barely escaped the chaos of an interstellar firefight when They caught up to us, seeming to appear out of nowhere, attacking our right flank. Commander Samson began dishing out orders left and right while I tried to keep the ship stable in the aftershock as she listed to and fro. Our balance initializes were shot all to hell from the brief strafing we’d received, and trying to compensate for it was turning a by-the-book banking maneuver into a nightmare. The deck was slowly but surely tilting to the left. The Commander looked at me with urgency.

  “Peterson, get this boat upright.”

  “Working on it, sir. Our thrusters are at ninety-percent, but our stabilizers are out of commission. I’m trying my best to get her stable, but it’d be a hell of a lot easier if Cosmos could fix them as fast as possible.”

  He paged the engine room and Johnny’s harried face appeared on the screen. “Johnny, I need those initializers fixed ASAP and bring up all the missiles we’ve got.” Before receiving a reply, he transferred to the fighter bay. “Rommal get your pilots ready, we need to deploy immediately to keep these bastards off our tails. I need your people ready to go yesterday.”

  “On it, sir.” Rommal’s face disappeared as the Commander shut off the intercom screen.

  “That work for you, Peterson?” He asked, his cool-headedness at odds with the gravity of our situation.

  I nodded. “Perfectly, sir.” With that, the Commander moved over to our mortar station to give them orders in laying down a base of fire for our retreat.

  “Okay, Lee, I need you aiming for their lead ship. Powers, take the right flank. Owen, left. Auric, how’s our shield holding?” The tilt was starting to become more pronounced. The Commander threw a questioning look my way as he grabbed hold of a nearby console, steadying himself and doing nothing to boost my confidence. My coffee cup slid to the floor, splashing freshly brewed Darjen blend into the cracks. The knowledge that all the electrical consoles were wired with water precautions did little to console me about the fact that I had just lost my caffeine ration for the day. Sappho’s strained, nearly panicked look distracted me from my readouts, her knuckles visibly whitening as her grip grew tighter on the railing from the stress.

  “Sappho, grab a chair and strap yourself in before you fall down,” I whispered to her. She looked at me with an expression of non-understanding, the psychic shock of so many deaths overwhelming her. I couldn’t let up on the controls, lest the ship roll even more. I looked frantically around in hopes of finding someone free.

  “Shields are at fifty-percent, Commander. Not our best, but she’ll hold.” Auric’s brogue was suddenly audible to my left, his normally jovial demeanor dropping away at the sight of trouble. He continued towards Sappho, lightly grasping her arm and propelling her to the nearest seat. ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed to him as Lee reported a hit.

  Just then, the stabilizers cut on and my job got twenty-times easier. “We’ve got balance, sir.” I couldn’t help the smile on my face as the Eagle straightened herself out. Our fighters began giving chase as I turned us around, the jolt of missile launches bouncing my seat. The illumination of downed Prowlers sparked in my peripheral vision as the main scene of the battle shifted to our right. Our mortar crew were worth their stripes.

  “Sir, I’m picking up a transmission from Rommal,” Dumay’s intent face didn’t give anything away. I tensed up. So did the Commander. Hell, we all did. If we didn’t get them soon, our shield wouldn’t hold up.

  “He says we have an all kill. Repeat, we have an all kill.”

  The Commander broke into a smile, Auric let out a small cheer with the rest of command.

  “Come on back Rommal.” The Commander let the feel of triumph linger a moment longer before breaking it with a quiet question about the damage we’d taken.

  “Deck E took a pretty hard hit, but there are no breaches. The engines are slowly climbing back up and I should have the shield at max within the hour. All in all, sir, I think we came out all right,” Auric replied, practically beaming.

  The Commander was silent a moment. “You did good. Peterson, take us moonside, we’re going to need to hook up with Command.”

  “Aye, aye sir.” I leveled us toward Turin, the planet’s third moon and resident transmitter station. It had been closer than I liked, but we came out relatively unscathed, and at least that was something.

  ***

  I had joined up with the Brigadiers on a dare.

  Cosmos, better known as Johnny Quistos, had drunkenly wagered that I would never set foot in a draft office. I, being just as drunk, had not only taken the dare but threw it back at him. Somehow, within a year and a half’s time, we’d both earned our stripes and bars to become full-fledged Lieutenants, although he threw his towel in with the Techies and I with the Pilots.

  For our first assignment, we were both stationed on a ship called the Brigadier Eagle (although I got there first by about a month which Cosmos still steadfastly denied) and began our sightseeing tour of the galaxy. We never expected to be caught up in a war, let alone a civil war, but after working four-hour shifts and lounging it up on the Eagle for half a year, war was what we got. By the end of our first tour of duty, we had went from Section Zed to Delta, always on the front lines, me dodging tracers and trying to keep my ship flying and Cosmos trying to keep her running as coils fried and paneling buckled off. Then, praise the gods, Colonel Everett pulled our Brigadier off the front lines and put us on patrol duty with the rest of our division.

  We had been on the rim for three months straight with barely any supplies coming down the Transient Pipeline when we had paused our patrol of Sector Nine to head for the Fraccus, our ship already running far too low on fuel for my liking. The fuel tanker always reminded me of the bloated whale I’d seen when I was seven as it rolled along its orbit of Rio Prime, but this time it was a glorious sight.

  When we reached the Fraccus we were sent a message from the planet below. It seemed that the Renegade Faction on Rio Prime was tired of our fight in their space and they demanded we vacate the area immediately, having only brought death and destruction to their quadrant since our supposedly peaceful mission.

  The Commander had replied in a brief message describing the dangers they faced if we left and the even more severe dangers they faced if they pissed us off.

  I’ve always said the man needed a bit more tact.

  But, thankfully, they decided it really wouldn’t pay to get us angry and we had pleasantly continued refueling our ship.

  That was when the fighting had started.

  ***

  After the fireworks, I relinquished my shift to Private Mellet. He was a replacement from Brigadier Falcon. He was a bit twitchy on the controls and he couldn’t tell a Blackbird from a Nightingale, but he was a damn good pilot so I didn’t have any reservations leaving him at the helm of my baby. I only had a few hours of downtime until morning, but I was too restless for my own good. I took my leave to walk about the deck, avoiding sleep if at all possible. My mindless wonderings brought me to the engine room, and I welcomed the chance to visit Johnny. Entering, I soon regretted my decision as sparks flashed above my head and the cracking sound of plastasine made me wince.

  “Got your hands full there, Cosmos?” I yelled over the blast of a pipe leak. He was trekking back and forth from the engine core to the stabilizers, trying to keep everything in check. I couldn
’t possibly imagine how he regulated everything, but my boat kept flying so I figured he knew what he was doing.

  “What’re you doing here? And yes, my hands are full, you got us shot up and now I’m having to do clean up like usual,” he replied, waving his data transcriber at me in apparent retribution for damaging his engine.

  “It’s not like I called the Harriers to come out of nowhere and shoot us full of holes.” I got as close to his work area as the mess allowed, stray wires and chipped tile declaring his space. I could see the other Techies racing above my head on the lattice work metal catwalks, straightening out the systems and keeping everything in a semblance of order. Taking the opportunity, I leaned against the only free wall space, a support column, to watch him work.

  “Why are you here anyway? Shouldn’t you be sleeping, or picking a fight, or flying us into a black hole as your record would have it?” Cosmos asked as he continued scurrying back and forth from one broken pipe to another. I stopped trying to follow his path, the movements making me dizzy.

  “Mellet’s got the stick. And I would never get us anywhere near a black hole. A sun, maybe, but black holes give me the heebie-jeebies,” I said, shuddering. “They’re like gigantic mouths for the universe, trying to swallow you whole.”

  Cosmos just continued working, only giving me a hard glare that told me exactly what he thought of both my piloting skills and my estimation of black holes.

  “Okay, I relinquish that you wouldn’t fly us near a black hole on purpose. But I wouldn’t put it out of the picture with that-that jeep jockey flying this ship if we ended up in one. Now, take your jeebie-heebies and let me work in peace. Or do you want us to blow up?” he said, finally stopping in order to gesture effectively at the helm and ‘that jeep jockey’.

  “Fine, message received. But watch where you’re going, Miko’s liable to leave a coil tray in your way since you turned her down last night, rather rudely might I add. Not that she told me about it or anything.” He just continued shooing me out with his transcriber, so I just shrugged to myself. Hopefully he’d heard me, otherwise someone was landing flat on their face.

  I continued on my way, passing the Tech Rack and hearing the giggles of Miko and her cohorts. I had tried to warn him. Moving on, I let my mind wander and my feet take me where they may, not that there were many places to go, but a little surprise could never hurt.

  Somehow, I ended up in the washroom. Surprisingly, I wasn’t alone.

  “Hey there Cam,” Dumay greeted me with a cheerful smile as she sorted through her washables. The piles weren’t very high, a soldier wasn’t given much in the way of space for personal gear on these long missions, but they were neatly ordered for cleaning nonetheless. “What brings you here so late?” she asked, tossing a navy shirt into her darks pile.

  “Just taking a stroll before I hit the sack, you know how it is,” I replied, boosting myself up to take a seat on the sorting table next to her, being careful to avoid her carefully organized piles.

  “Yeah. I just do my laundry for decomp. It’s very-“

  “Zen?”

  “Stable, is what I was going to say. But I suppose zen works too, if you’re ancient.” The slight barb didn’t sting. Dumay wasn’t much younger then me and I was far from thirty.

  “I’ve been reading up on my history. You know what they say about idle hands,” I said, wiggling my fingers and giving her a wink, causing her to let out a giggle like sunshine glass. It was nice to hear laughter again.

  A comfortable silence blanketed us, the rhythmic sound of the washing machine the only substantial noise. I was starting to feel sleep pulling down my eyelids. I had to keep moving. “Dumay, I’ve got to head off. But if you ever need help with that laundry, don’t be shy,” I gave her my biggest smile and the one she threw back at me was more mischievous then I expected.

  “You moving on to find Sappho?”

  I just laughed and kept going.

  By the time I finally reached my bunk, it was nearing fourth shift. With only one shift to go, I figured a short amount of sleep should be okay. I hit the bunk with heavy eyes, but apparently I had reached that point of being too tired and had hit my second wind. Patski’s snores were louder then usual and Moony was whimpering in his sleep again. It didn’t help that my bunk was standard military issue with the requisite impossible to get comfortable tag. I started to lump it into a more sleep inducing pile when Major Horace’s voice broke the repetitive twitter of Patski’s nose.

  “You’re rolling around up there enough to make me think Sappho was paying you a midnight visit, Lieutenant. Anything I should know about?”

  “No sir, just your regular after job jitters.”

  “Alright. But you’d better knock it off or it won’t just be the shakes you’ll be dealing with.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  Leave it up to the Major to bitch at me for trying to make this hellhole more livable. He’d been riding my ass since I first got out of flight school and he never missed a chance to either delegate me to a second-class job or pull some higher rank bullshit and get me stuck on mess duty for a week.

  I had to let it go each time of course because he was my ranking officer, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t give my metaphorical left nut to see him taken down a notch. Sadly, he was one of Division’s pet favorites, so that was unlikely at best.

  I stopped moving and resorted to staring at the metallic gray bulkhead. It was the same bulkhead I saw everywhere. A line of rivets going down every few feet, ridges of nuts and bolts marking the seemliness of the Eagle’s hull. There was a dent in the lower left corner where Sappho had accidentally kicked a little too hard while still wearing her boots, but otherwise it was the same as anywhere else. I could have been in the engine room for all the difference it’d make.

  Uniformity was a recurrence in the military. It was something I’d always known, but I’d never realized how hard it was to accept the non-shifting drabness of it all until I’d been stuck with it for what felt like ages. A person could only take so much sameness until the longing for variation became enough to drive one mad.

  I fiddled idly with my dog tags, each grove and chip memorized. I’d worn them for three very long years and they never failed to surprise me in their weight. The metal was cool against my palm, that wasn’t a surprise; they always were when my mood could only be termed melancholic. Times in the middle of the night when all my mind had to think about were the years of combat and all the battles I’d seen, with no one but the faces of dead friends as my only company.

  ***

  Darien’s laughter was rich and full of life. His hazel eyes gleamed with mischief as he continued with his fowl prank.

  “Luminar, this is Dogral. Have you achieved your objective, over?” He swiped the telecom from my hand before I could reply, the yellow plastic cracking in his grip.

  “Luminar here. Objective has been obtained, time you pull out Dogral, over.” I looked at him in annoyance.

  “Ten-four, over.” He dropped the com back in my open palm as he began heading for the jeep.

  “You do know our objective was to capture the gunner’s nest, not set up a perimeter of chicken wire and flammable gas while covering the gun in hornet thorns. Ranney’s going to be pissed when he tries to navigate out of that,” I said, lifting myself in to the passenger side as he started up the engine,

  “We immobilized him, didn’t we?” he asked with a smile that was infectious.

  “Well, yes-“

  “Then that’s all that matters. If it just so happens that we accomplished the mission in an unconventional yet unique way, then so be it,” he said, cutting off my weary reply as we rounded a sharp bend in the road.

  “Okay, but if anyone’s getting busted back down to Private, it sure as hell isn’t going to be me, Darien.”

  “No one’s getting demoted, stop being paranoid. We just need to adjust our heading to twelve degrees starboard and we’ll be at Turin before you can sneeze.” He glanc
ed at me with mirth, still keeping his attention divided between the road and our conversation.

  “What the fuck are you-“

  The clanging of the close-circuit alarm bell struck me like a freighter as Patski shook me awake. “Pete, wake up. We’ve got a major problem with the engines. The Commander wants you up front ASAP.” He was panicked, with clothes hastily shoved over nighttime attire. The rest of my bunkmates were hustling to get presentable, rushing out the port at a hop, still putting on their shoes.

  “Okay, okay.” I shoved off his urgent shakes and pushed him back down the ladder. I grabbed my uniform and slid down myself, feeling the tilt of a shitty pilot swaying my ship to and fro. “Dammit, Mellet isn’t trained well enough for this type of shit.” I jammed on my pants and slipped on my shoes without regards to socks. I wasn’t going to let him crash my boat.

  Upon reaching command, the panic was even more pronounced. Dumay’s console was spitting out yellow-white sparks and the Commander was yelling explicatives that were vulgar enough to make even the most hardened combat veteran blush. I tapped Mellet on the shoulder to relieve him of his position. He turned around and looked at me with complete adoration, not wanting to be the one to fuck up, and practically jumped out of the seat in order to let me handle the responsibility. Like I said, he was a good kid but still wet behind the ears.

  “Peterson, thank the gods,” the Commander said, breathing a sight of relief. He leaned over me to point at the display’s blue-lit outline of the Eagle. The engines and initializers were both in the red while Deck E was completely black. “Seems those bastards left a time bomb in our hull. It went off a few minutes ago. Auric says it must have sent out an EMP field along with its explosion causing the binary systems to shut down.”

  “You mean I’m going to have to fly this baby manually, sir?” My worried glance at him greeted me with a grim nod. I looked back to the console, my hands tightening on the control sticks. “How long til Johnny gets things up and running?”

  There was a very long pause. I glanced back to him again. His look chilled me to the bone.