The Coalition: Name adopted by the first four planets to break with the Union of Democratic Planets at the beginning of the galactic civil war.

Now numbering fifty separate worlds, they have recently begun referring to themselves as the Coalition Empire.

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Encyclopedic History of the Union, 22nd ed.

 

 

          Jeena awoke with her fist buried in the pillow, sobbing and clutching at her stomach, fighting off the pain and nausea that accompanied her back to the waking world. The nightmare images of the prison faded, but she could still smell the men, still hear the echoes of her screams.

          With great effort she opened her swollen and bleary eyes to a room eerily illuminated by flashing red lights, pulsating in rhythm to the modulated shriek of an alarm. It took a moment for her senses to register the sound as the ship’s main system alarm.

          She was suddenly alert and leapt from the bunk, only to reel and fall to the floor. Something was terribly wrong.

          The walls of her sleeping quarters were shuddering, and there was an odor of smoke in the air. Grabbing the bulkhead for support, she forced herself up. The metal wall was hot to the touch.

          Staggering, fighting to maintain her balance, she moved toward the cockpit door. She reached it as she caught sight of her bloody flight suit on the floor. There was no time. She hit the door panel and it opened with a hiss. Naked, she stumbled into the cockpit.

          A deafening roar like the inside of a blast furnace struck her, enveloping her in a ragged blanket of noise that made her cringe and cover her ears. The source of the noise was readily apparent. Through the cockpit window she saw angry, red-hot flames engulfing the hull of the ship. The smell of smoldering insulation was thick in the room, and white-gray smoke rose in twisting columns from the com.

          Re-entry!

          With a sudden, sick fear, Jeena realized her ship was burning up in an uncontrolled re-entry. The “how” of that terrible realization would have to wait for now. She had to get control of the ship.

          Lunging toward the com, she swayed, falling again as the ship careened madly. She grabbed the back of the chair, pulling herself up. A reinforcement cable suddenly tore loose from its mooring and whipped through the cabin, the jagged tip slashing her left thigh and leaving a six-inch, bleeding gash. Screaming, she fell into the com chair.

          Ignoring the wound for now, she scanned the instrument panel, quickly assessing the situation: Drive and main engines were offline; hydraulics were bleeding; external hull temperature was twelve hundred degrees and rising; angle of declination—fifty degrees.

          Too steep!

          There was a sound like the firing of a gun from beneath her, followed by a loud hiss of escaping air. A violent shudder ran through the hull. The ship was coming apart.

          The air brakes had automatically engaged on entering the atmosphere but were doing little to slow the ship. She needed power to pull herself out. She slammed her fist on the main engine switch, but the indicator remained dark. She hit it again, then tried the auxiliary override. Nothing. The engines were dead. The ship groaned, and the fire before her was now a searing wall of white heat.

          She quickly went over her options.

          If I can’t start the engines, at least I have to dump the Drive.

          The Drive was enormous and not built to withstand an atmosphere, but was intended only for interstellar flight.

          She gripped the double-level crossbar above her head in both hands and pulled it down. The separation alarm sounded as a green warning light swept the cockpit. There was a jarring sensation and a deep grinding from behind her, followed immediately by a second alarm: separation failure.

          Dammit!

          The heat of re-entry must have fused the couplings. She could not disengage the Drive. She would have to bring the huge transport down in one piece.

          Gripping the flight stick between her legs, she pulled back hard, sweating profusely as the cabin temperature climbed. Her right thumb toggled power to the tram’s forward thrusters, and she felt some relief as the indicator light came on, but the stick was still buried forward, and she was unable to pull it back. Grunting in effort, her sight blurred by her own sweat, she strained against it, fighting both the planet’s gravitational pull and the inertia of the ship.

          She cursed the lack of response from the flight stick.

          Rigel’s rings, it’s like trying to fly a burning brick!

          This wasn’t a sleek front-line fighter; it was a beat-up cargo vessel with its Drive still attached. Theoretically, it might be possible to land the giant ship in one piece, but she’d never done it or ever heard of it being done.

          The forces against her were enormous. If the thrusters could not decrease the angle of descent, the ship would disintegrate, falling to the planet below in a fiery rain of burning debris.

          The vibrations were at a crescendo now, the shaking so violent she could barely read the instruments. Smoke was filling the cabin. Declination still read fifty degrees; hull temperature was now over two thousand degrees. The situation was deteriorating. She was losing the ship.

          No, not now! Goddammit, not now! All those months of torture; all that pain. I won’t die now. Not like this. Not after so much.

          In a rage she threw her body against the stick, the sinews of her arms screaming in protest.

          “Help me!” she cried out to the ship. “Help me, you BITCH!”

          As if in answer, the ship suddenly shuddered and yawed, nearly wrenching the controls from her hands. Teeth gritting, knuckles white, she held on, fighting for control. Her eyes frantically sought out the declination gauge—forty-nine degrees.

          She was gaining. Against the almost unimaginable dual forces of wind shear and gravitational pull, she was gaining. But the external temperature was now three thousand degrees. There was a popping sound in front of her, and a small crack appeared in the center of the windshield.

          “C’mon, baby,” she pleaded.

          Amid the surrounding noise, she could just make out the synthetic voice of the flight computer.

          “Fifty-two seconds of thrust remaining,” it announced calmly.

          “Damn you, Vicki!” She cursed back to the empty cabin.

          She had less than a minute in which to pull the ship out. Bracing herself, heaving against the stick, she watched the numbers slowly recede as the seconds ticked agonizingly by.

          At forty-five degrees she could feel the vibrations lessen, but she was weakening, her muscles beginning to spasm. Her arms felt on fire, burning from the buildup of lactic acid as she pushed them beyond her limits.

          “C’mon, c’mon,” she grunted, but the stick felt as though it were moving through thick cement.

          The air inside the cabin was searing, and she was laboring to breathe. The small crack in the windshield enlarged, snaking in a twisted curve through the reinforced glass. Sweat poured from her. Declination was now thirty-five degrees.

          Jeena closed her eyes and focused her energy, willing her tortured arms to maintain contraction. They finally reached their limit, and the muscle fibers began to tear, then to shred as her strength finally gave out. With a scream, her eyes flew open.

          The wall of fire before her had thinned, the flames losing energy. Suddenly they fluttered and went out. With their loss, the horrible roaring in her ears died as well. Jeena checked the declination gauge: twenty-eight degrees. She was in a stable glide pattern. She released the thruster toggle and painfully pried her fingers away from the stick. Four seconds of thrust remained.

          Slowly, her left arm throbbing, she reached out and canceled the red alert. The cabin was now silent, broken only by the barely audible sound of rushing wind as they soared through the sky.

          Her body ached terribly, and her left bicep was already turning an angry shade of purple. There was the salty taste of blood in her mouth—she must have bitten through her tongue. She glanced at the gash in her right inner thigh. The wound was gaping but was now only bleeding slightly.

          Jeena sank back into the seat, trembling from exertion and the adrenaline still coursing through her body. She took a few steadying breaths as she watched the wispy, whirling patterns of clouds dance before her and allowed one question to occupy her mind.

          Where the hell am I?

          She had been on a pre-plotted course to Earth when she left Mizar 3. She had chosen a flight pattern well away from all known Coalition military outposts and recent battle sites. The flight plan had been calculated and rechecked by the ship’s navigation computer. She should still be in hyperspace. So, where was she?

          She puzzled over the question as the ship’s computer droned on, giving her technical information on her glide path and the ship’s status, but she had stopped listening. The sky before her had caught her attention, and she realized that she could not recall the last time she had seen blue skies and white clouds.

          When was that? Earth? Yes, it must have been on Earth. The military preferred low-gravity, moon-like worlds for their bases, and Jeena had spent most of her life in the Star Corps. But her last visit to Earth had been almost ten years ago. Can it have really been so long ago?

          Looking out at the sky, she felt a sudden pang of regret and a deep feeling of loss for the life she had missed. It was a life she had chosen, she knew, but in reality, there had been little true choice. You play the hand you’re dealt the best you can, she had said often. Abandoned as an infant, she had cut her own way in this world. She had done the best she could. Still…

          Jeena stiffened, loathing the feelings of self-pity that had crept up on her. The months in the prison must have softened her. She was a soldier, a decorated officer in an elite SAG unit. She had crawled and fought her way up the chain of command, and if not for her capture, she might have made major by now. What more did she want?

          Before she could explore that question, the clouds thinned, then abruptly disappeared, replaced by an impossibly bright, blazing blue sky. Below her and expanding out to the horizon lay a panoramic view of a new and alien world.

          With land now in view, Jeena activated A.L.—approach and landing. Using a combination of sophisticated radar and laser scanning, it would evaluate the condition of the surface below and recommend a site with the highest probability of surviving an emergency landing.

          “OK, Al, what have you got for me?” she whispered.

          Static crackled from the com, and a topographical grid map appeared on the heads-up display, floating like a phantom in the space between her and the cockpit windshield. The entire map was lit in a dull red—probability of survival less than ten percent.

          “Keep looking,” she said, switching to a wider view.

          The display expanded its area, but all was still red. Jeena glanced at the altimeter.

          “C’mon, I’ve got to put her down soon. Give me something I can live with.”

          A moment later a small patch of yellow appeared in the left lower corner of the grid—chance of survival greater than fifty percent.

          “Nothing in blue or green today, huh?”

          The screen remained unchanged. Glancing again at the altimeter, she set a course for the small area of yellow ahead. Course set, she strapped herself into her seat, suddenly aware of her nakedness as the stiff restraints bit into her skin.

          She was soaring above a wide savanna and descending rapidly. She watched as the ship aligned itself with the area Al had chosen as giving the best chance of surviving an emergency ditch—best being a relative term, she reminded herself.

          The plane was coming up fast, the ground now racing past her. Airspeed was still over five hundred knots, but four seconds of full forward thrust would slow that down significantly. Jeena quickly went over her mental checklist for emergency landings—everything seemed ready. Breathing deeply, her hands gripping the stick, she put the big ship down.

          The rear Drive section hit the ground first, almost tearing the controls from her grasp. The great ship shook and shuddered as it thundered over the broken and uneven terrain. Jeena hit the forward thrusters and slammed against the restraining straps. Four… three… two… one. That was it. The thrusters were gone.

          Now it was up to Newton.

          She released the stick and gripped the restraints as the land rushed by. The momentum of the ship was enormous; she was still moving at over two hundred knots. She watched the grid map as the yellow patch disappeared, beyond which all was ominously red. Still, the ship raced on.

          There was a terrible jolt and the sound of shearing metal as the tram’s forward landing gear tore away. With a violent lurch, the nose pitched forward, plowing into the ground. Dirt and vegetation blasted into the air as the belly of the ship gouged a rut in the earth.

          The windshield shattered; the pieces held in place only by the layer of Plastek running through it. Bolts from the rear of the ship tore loose and shot forward, crashing into the control panel. Sparks flew, and the smell of smoldering insulation filled the cabin.

          Then all was silent.

          Jeena slowly lifted her head. The cockpit windshield was dark, layered under a blanket of dirt. Tiny sparks popped and fizzed from the com. She sat quietly for a moment, listening to the sputtering of the control panel. A drop of blood fell from her nose and splattered on her thigh. The edges of the restraints had cut into her flesh, and there was a sharp pain under her left breast that made breathing difficult.

          But she was alive.

          Wincing, she carefully disengaged herself from the restraints. Another drop of blood formed on her nose, and she wiped it away absently, leaving a bloody smear across her cheek. She took a trembling breath and sank back into the chair.

          “Thanks, Al,” she said hoarsely.

          She allowed herself a few minutes to quell her nerves before punching up the ship’s main computer.

          “Vicki,” she said aloud, “where am I?”

          All interstellar ship’s central computers were known collectively as ‘Vicki,’ a tradition dating back to the first flights some four hundred years earlier. Few remembered that the designation originally stood for V.I.C.I., or Voice Integrated Com Interface, but the tradition was handed down through each generation of pilots, reinforced by the feminine voices given to them, the military psyches having shown that it was more soothing to the human ear than its masculine counterpart.

          A sweetly feminine, slightly lilting voice answered.

          “The ship is presently on the surface of Ararat, the second planet of the Arcturus system.”

          Jeena frowned. Arcturus? We shouldn’t even be in the same quadrant as that system.

          “Did you change the flight plan?”

          “Negative.”

          “Why was the Drive taken off-line?”

          “A collision with a large gravitational object was deemed imminent.”

          A reference to the planet Jeena assumed. That was a no-answer. The planet shouldn’t have been there because they shouldn’t have been here.

          “Our flight plan didn’t take us through Arcturus.”

          “That is correct,” came the reply.

          “Dammit, just give me a schematic of the hyperspace flight,” Jeena snapped.

          A holographic image appeared on the heads-up display, representing the flight plan Jeena had laid out before making the jump from Mizar 3. A faint line began there and followed a slightly irregularly curved path toward her destination: Earth. This was a Hawking line and should not intersect any stellar object. Jeena studied the line closely. The Arcturus system wasn’t even close.

          It made no sense. Her hyperspace flight took her nowhere near Arcturus, yet here she was. She gnawed on her lower lip.

          “Was there a course deviation during flight?”

          “Negative.”

          “Any sign of Drive malfunction?”

          “Negative.”

          “What about a gravitational anomaly along our flight path?”

          “Negative.”

          “Well, did the goddamn planet just jump in our way?” she asked angrily.

          The machine maintained a dignified silence.

          Jeena sat back in disgust. Her body throbbed, and her head was pounding. And she was hungry. She realized she hadn’t eaten since she first lay down on the bunk after taking the ship out of orbit, almost two days ago.

          Well, I might be lost, but at least I won’t starve.

          Whoever the pilot of this cargo ship was, he was also obviously a smuggler. She remembered her shock at finding all the contraband goods in the cargo hold.

          Probably had a good deal of his money invested in that hold, she thought. That’ll teach him not to keep his ship hot on a prison tarmac.

          Although losing his ship might have been the best thing for him. If the Coalition discovered he was smuggling, he would have spent the next several years in a pain cell.

          Whoever he was, he was either very brave or very stupid, she thought. Didn’t he know all interstellar flights were logged? How did he figure on covering up all the extra Drive use?

          Jeena sat up.

          Wait a minute; how would he cover them up?

          The CCOMS would document any trips to unapproved sectors. An answer slowly came to her, along with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

          “Vicki, has the Central Coordinate System of this ship been tampered with?” she asked.

          “Affirmative. The CCOMS of this ship does not correspond to the local observable star pattern.”

          A shudder went through her. So that’s how he did it! Navigation through hyperspace was guided by the CCOMS, or Central Coordinate Mapping System.

          Using Polaris as the origin, all known stellar bodies were plotted in four vectors: three for spatial position and the fourth for gravitational density. Orbital and linear motions were also recorded.

          In hyperspace, since you were in effect skirting the normal dimensions of space, no directional readings were possible. It was only through such a system as CCOMS that interstellar flight had been made practical.

          It was also why every flight had to be plotted and calculated in advance, for once you were in hyperspace, you could never be exactly sure of where you were at any given moment. The entire concept of ‘where’—at least regarding three-dimensional space—lost all meaning entirely, and even gravitational fields could only be detected when you were almost right on top of them.

          Without a system like CCOMS, any hyperspace ship had a better-than-average chance of ending up passing through some immovable galactic object—usually with spectacular, if generally fatal, results.

          The pilot of this ship, this smuggler, must have realigned the CCOMS prior to each of his smuggling runs in such a way that they would be recorded as ordinary supply trips in the log. Jeena was impressed.

          What balls!

          Even assuming he had a portable unit programmed with the actual CCOMS, it was a combination of guts and insanity she could admire.

          “Vicki, is there a copy of the original CCOMS in the ship’s memory?”

          “Affirmative.”

          “Re-up the original coordinate system and overlay my flight plan.”

          There it was. Plotted against the true CCOMS, her flight path took her right through the Arcturus system. She took a closer look. The line passed directly through the system’s sun. Jeena sank back into the chair. Good thing this planet was in the way.