The Echo

The Echo

The compressors were shot. The twin metal rods had burned out and hung loosely from their sockets. The engine whined terribly, refusing to enter superlight speed. Two laser blasts hammered The Echo, rocking the ship, knocking Bridget Rubori, the ship’s mechanic, back against the metal wall as she searched desperately for a replacement. She looked frantically at the damaged engine. The repairs were nearly complete, if the damned Imperials didn’t get another shot on the engine and of course, if there were spare compressors to be found. She considered for a moment bypassing the compressors, unsure if she wanted to take the risk. The compressors were vital to the stability of The Echo and without them, the ship could explode brilliantly when hitting superlight. At which point she and the entire crew would be naught but atoms floating in the darkness of space.

“Bridget! Get that engine going!” Captain Flynn’s voice hollered frantically from the intercom to the engine room.

She cursed. Searching through the shelves of spare parts, she noticed grimly that she had plenty of spares, except for the part she needed. Picking out a wrench and a spanner, she went to work on the bypass, carefully rewiring the fusion controller, trying to defuse the excess energy from the ion drive down another, less volatile path. Sweating, she wiped her red hair from her forehead as she worked, hoping to the grace of whatever deity might be out there that this bypass would not kill the entire crew. Frantically, she rewired the box, shut it, and then hooked the neutron capacitor directly to the ion drive and crossed her fingers. Two more laser blasts rocked the ship. The lights went out for a second and then came back on.

“Bridget! The engines now!” Flynn shouted on the comm. “Our shields are down dammit!”

“I worked around the compressors captain,” Bridget replied in the comm. “Try now, but I don’t recommend going past point five past superlight!”

On the bridge, Captain Tomas Flynn looked at the scopes on the pilot’s display. The Imperial warship was behind them, firing from all of its turbo laser batteries as the pilot, Sam Pherson, kept the ship flying, his hands white knuckled on the controls. Blasts of green lasers flickered past the view port, disappearing into the depths of space.

“You heard her Sam, superlight now!” Flynn commanded.

“Without the compressors?” Sam complained.

“Now Sam!” Flynn barked.

“People, hold on to something,” Sam said through the intercom, “this will be rocky . . . if we don’t all explode.”

Sam reached out and pulled a lever. The ship began to shake violently. Flynn lost his grip and flew backwards, sprawling on the floor. The scopes turned to static and the stars shook. Hairline cracks began forming on the viewport. Some of the circuits shorted and sparked.

In the engine room, the ion drivers were rattling terribly. Sparks of electricity snapped out from the brilliantly white fusion reaction core. Bridget stared at it helplessly, adjusting a power coupling, hoping to contain the massive energy surging unchecked through the engine. The coupling was coming out of it’s socket and once it blew completely, the ship would be gone

“Come on, hold together,” she prayed. She held on to the coupling, tightening it. The coupling was shaking violently. She tightened it further, opened it, rerouted the wires and then suddenly, the shaking stopped. The engine’s whining and rattling turned into a loud and smooth hum. Breathing a sigh of relief, Bridget put on a pair of protective earmuffs and began to work, fixing the stress fractures.

On the bridge, Flynn breathed a sigh of relief as the stars turned to starlines and the pursuing warship disappeared behind them.

“A few more seconds of that and we’d be sucked into the vaccuum,” Sam said, looking at the fractured glass. “Good thing none of those cracks went all the way through.”

“We’re not entirely out of it yet,” Flynn replied. “Without the compressors, the engine is still unstable, I’d give it fifty light years before it blows and we don’t want to be on the ship when that happens. Anything nearby that can service this ship?”

Sam called up the navigational display, “Randar is in twenty light years, a backwater planet, low imperial presense. It’ll take us a few hours to get there.”

“The goods are well hidden,” Flynn replied, “and our legal papers are up to date, shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What of the imperials, sir?” a deep voice said. Flynn turned around. First Mate Grontik Trellg came on the bridge.

“We should be fine,” Flynn said. “The jammers kept them from pulling our flight plans, and even if they did break through, they won’t know we’re going off course. Sam, reroute navigation to Randar.”

“Yes sir,” Sam replied.

“Congratulations people,” Flynn said on the intercom, “we’ve just made yet another clean get away.”

A Canteen on Onjak

Anella Starfall sat in the canteen, coolly watching the patrons, waiting for her contact. She sipped slowly on a fine Reliosian wine. Anella sat back in the uncomfortable leather booth. She was tall, the toes of her boots touched the empty booth on the far end. She was also incredibly attractive, with wavy black hair falling over her shoulders, dark blue crystalline eyes and thin, cruel eyebrows gracing her eyes. She wore a black sleeveless shirt, and pants held up by a belt where two blaster pistols, several energy cells, and a dagger were held. Her finely manicured fingers tapped impatiently on the round plastisteel table as she waited.

The canteen was lit dimly by small bulbs in the center of each table. The patrons spoke in a quiet murmur. Androids wheeled around carrying drinks to the customers sitting at the tables, while a bartender stood before a system of pipes and tubes, mixing drinks for the regular drunks. The establishment was particularly seedy. Nearly everyone in the room was illegitimate, smugglers, pirates, criminals, and the like. Anella eyed them all. Most were armed with blasters, keeping a wary eye on the door, concerned for an unlikely, yet not unexpected, raid by imperial troopers, which would be unfavorable to everyone. Anella analyzed them. No one noticed, or cared, about her presence.

The entire planet was a backwater world in a system far beyond the grip of the Empire or the influence of the Confederacy. Onjak was its name, a green and blue haven for crooks or for people simply staying out of sight.

The door came open and a Grellian entered. The lizard like man looked at Anella and then approached her, nodding in greeting. Anella silently flipped off her blaster’s safety and sat up straight as the alien took a seat opposite of her.

“Good afternoon, Domor,” she said. “Any word on the android?”

“The droid was . . . gone when I arrived,” the Grellian replied. “I am sorry. But I do know who took it. A Cavalier class freighter escaped Astarnia just a few hours ago, under the noses of the smug imperials. The Echo I believe it is called, are you familiar with the ship?”

“Captain Flynn and his crew of pirates,” Anella snarled. “I know him. There’s a price on his head if I recall.”

“There is and it is about to be bigger,” Domor replied. “He made off with the android. I do not know if he is aware of the droid’s secrets, but he is aware of its value.”

“I am glad you came to me with this information,” Anella said. “Flynn and I go back years.”

“Friends?”

Anella barked a short laugh. “Enemies. The hatred is mutual.”

“I wonder why you never tracked him down,” Domor said.

Anella shrugged. “The bounty wasn’t high enough and I had other jobs. And I have a question for you.”

“Please ask.”

“Why did you fail to retrieve the android before Flynn stole it?” She squeezed the trigger of her blaster. The gun fired loudly and the Grellian fell over, his head hitting the table. The crowd stopped and looked at her. Then slowly, they went back to their business. She looked him over. He was dead.

“I really hate failure,” she told the deceased. Getting up, she tossed credits to the bartender and left the canteen.

The ISC Justice

Admiral Jack Parintos stood at the bay windows, staring lividly into the blackness of space where The Echo had recently been. Just a few more seconds and they’d’ve been in the tractor beam or simply blown into atoms, even at the cost of the loss of the android. Parintos was tall, wearing a spotless blue uniform, decorated with numerous metals he had earned during the course of the war. His hair was greying and wrinkles of both stress and age formed on his brow. He stood at a parade rest stance staring out the bay windows.

His ship was the Imperial Star Cruiser Justice, the Imperial fleet’s warhammer. The massive bulbous ship was the largest of the capital ships, bristling with modern weaponry, enough to terrify most planets into submission. It was one of ten Star Cruisers. The ships were large and powerful, but expensive to build and maintain. Justice alone took ten thousand crewers, including support for food, housekeeping and medical attention. Justice was a military city.

Below Parintos, crewers worked at displays, all uniformed in the blue. The crew of the Justice were the brightest and the smartest the Imperial Navy had, each one trained rigorously and disciplined harshly. Parintos turned to an ensign.

“Ensign Jenkins!” he barked, “calculate all the possible routes a Cavalier class freighter can take at superlight in five hours!”

“Yes sir!” the ensign said, turning to his console, typing in commands. A few moments later, he looked at the admiral, “sir, I have the map.”

The admiral looked at the display. “Contact the helmsman, tell him to set a wormhole coordinate for this location,” he said pointing.

The ensign complied.

“Prepare for portalization,” the admiral barked.

Outside, three enormous arms unfolded from the ship, the edge of each one broken off into three-pronged forks which began to spin. Three rays of particles shot out before them. Before them, in the space hundreds of miles away, an enormous vortex ripped into spacetime and through it, the admiral could see stars from another region of the galaxy.

“Wormhole opened to the correct coordinants sir,” the ensign said.

“Very well, helmsman, forward, full speed,” the Admiral barked.

The cruiser’s engines roared to life and the enormous ship passed through the wormhole. For being a grand advancement in astrophysics, the admiral noted, the passage was rather dull. It wasn’t any more interesting than a million mile drive through deep space. They came out of the wormhole a few moments later. Abruptly behind them, the hole shut.

“Grav control,” the Admiral said. “Fire up the gravity wells, we’ll catch them.”

Authors note: Not really a story, just some ideas being thrown together. I guess this comes from watching Firefly.

Flynn is a Han Solo/Malcolm Reynolds type pirate captain. Anella Starfall is a bounty hunter/assassin, a female Boba Fett perhaps. Parintos is an Admiral Piett type figure.

Bridget, Sam and Grontik are three of Captain Flynn's ten man crew.

This is in a time where faster than light is delivered through two technologies, an engine called an ion drive which can propel the ship past the speed of light somehow, working around the interstellar speedlimit, and a wormhole generator which can create and control a temporary stable wormhole. The idea would be that the ion drives are relatively cheap and the most common form of transport and the wormhole generator would be extremely expensive and only used by the super rich and the militaries.

This is also a time of chaos where two factions, the Empire and the Confederacy are fighting for control of the galaxy, while rogues like Flynn take no sides and try to gain a profit in illegal activities such as smuggling and piracy. Neither the Empire nor the Confederacy can be classified as good/evil, they both are gray and have committed crimes.

Flynn's ship, the Echo, is a modified frieghter. it's name comes from my car, which is a Chevy cavalier, 565 PE (Papa Echo). Cavalier class, model 565 P. E in the phonetic alphabet is Echo.