Severed Signals: Vincent Chen, #1

By Steve Rzasa

The enemy of my enemy…
 
Vincent Chen keeps star systems in close communication with each other as he tends to the comms ferry satellites that connect the Realm of Five.

When he responds to small colony's apparent malfunction, though, he stumbles onto an enslaved people.

The problem is, the enslaved used to be the oppressors.

They're all former agents of Kesek, the secret police that spent the last century suppressing religion by arresting, torturing, and killing believers—including Vincent's uncle. But it also includes the children and families of those agents.

Vincent is drawn deeper into the plot against them, until he's forced to choose the right side…

Whether he can forgive, however, is the most dangerous question.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Rzasa
• Release date: Oct 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386944768

Steve Rzasa

Steve Rzasa is the author of a dozen novels of science-fiction and fantasy, as well as numerous pieces of short fiction. His space opera "Broken Sight" won the ACFW Award for Speculative Fiction in 2012, and "The Word Reclaimed" was nominated for the same award. Steve received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University, and worked for eight years at newspapers in Maine and Wyoming. He’s been a librarian since 2008, and received his Library Support Staff Certification from the American Library Association in 2014—one of only 100 graduates nationwide and four in Wyoming. He is the technical services librarian in Buffalo, Wyoming, where he lives with his wife and two boys. Steve’s a fan of all things science-fiction and superhero, and is also a student of history.

Book preview

Chapter One

10 AUGUST 2613

Sylvanak Star System

NO ANSWER.

That’s what I get when I prompt the main comms ferry for Sylvanak. Should send me a diagnostic summary of the past six months’ operations, complete with glitches, component breakdowns, and tampering.

Twelve seconds go by. Six seconds for my signal sent by RMS Marconi to reach the ferry, and six for a response. Nothing,

Twenty-four seconds. Forty-eight. After a minute, I log the discrepancies. I hate those.

Even worse, the scanners can’t find the comms ferry. Without it, the settlement in the star system has no way to send and receive communications across the light-years. Essentially, they’re stuck talking to themselves, and limited to perusing only the data they have available on their local networks.

To be fair, it’s the star system’s fault. I may as well be using a stick to swish aside long grasses on the banks of the Xi Jiang River in search of a single frog. There’s so much detritus clogging the nearby light-seconds I bet the navigation computer’s chewing its figurative nails plotting a safe course.

I’m grateful. No matter how much MarkTel pays a guy like me, it isn’t worth the risk of plastering my starship across a cometary debris field.

Captain Vincent Chen. That’s what my Reach profile says. MarkTel classifies me as an Interstellar Communications Ferry Deployment & Maintenance Specialist. Captain sounds much fuller of bravado than ICFDMS. As far as my family’s concerned, that title might as well be "Wàng'ēnfùyì Ungrateful Child Who Never Visits Tiaozhan." 

I use the ship’s cluster of ion engines to pick my way through the sphere of shattered ice and rock. The central computer entry for Sylvanak tells me the first survey teams didn’t pay much attention to the system when they made the nine-light-year hop through the sundoor. The star’s a main sequence K, cooler than most that support human habitable worlds. Difference between me and them is money: they saw rocks chock full of rare metals. So, they passed word to prospectors and colonists looking for a star system easy to settle, if one had the wherewithal to extract basic supplies.

Unfortunately, like most interstellar equivalents of the old Gold Rush, it was a bust.

Colonists stayed, though, even as the prospectors lit out for more prosperous possibilities. Someone spotted an Earth-type planet hiding beyond the cloud.

It’s an icy world, yet fit enough for hearty souls wanting to start new lives away from the busy space lanes of the Realm of Five. Even recluses need to stay in touch with someone, however, especially when said recluses have signed a royal charter for their settlement.

Studying Sylvanak’s planet doesn’t make the next hour more bearable. Nothing resembling the missing comms ferry appears. I twist about in my seat and expand the sensor radius out to their max range. Watching things at two light-minutes distance—almost 18 million kilometers away—means the results are delays, echoes of where things used to be a while ago, but since I’ve got no indication the ferry was bashed to pieces, it must have wandered off.

The sensors pick up residual ion tracks. Okay, that’s good. Ferries have smaller ion engines. These tracks, though, are faint. Probably weeks old, far too dispersed to get a good read. I superimpose them over the ferry’s pre-programmed course, a green arc floating on the inside of the bridge displays.

Nav rewards me with purple lines crisscrossing like webs, stretching beyond my peripheral vision. This isn’t a freighter’s command box. Marconi has a state-of-the art sphere that’s essentially a giant screen surrounding an access port and my captain’s chair. Sensors convert real-time data and extrapolated courses into those lines, splashing them over gorgeous photo-realistic imagery from the ship’s optical scopes.

The picture’s a tangled mess. Zhēn shì luànqībāzāo. There are dozens of possible trajectories the ferry could have followed if it indeed took a hike. I keep coming back to the ion traces. They’re off, somehow. It occurs to me the ferry would have had to boost at a far greater rate than it’s capable of.

Could be someone took it.

There’s no shortage of valuable goods inside. It’s a Raszewski sphere, the good old interstellar engine that makes leaping trillions of kilometers between star systems possible in the blink of an eye. Pirates have been known to go after them, even though they’re tamper proof. If you try to reconfigure one to run a ship, you’re out of luck. We’re talking premium-grade self-destruct package.

That doesn’t count the half-million worth of custom communications equipment aboard.

I need to send a signal to the locals. I spin up the Sylvanak colony at Alban Harbor. "This is RMS Marconi, MarkTel communications tender, to Alban Harbor Comms. I’m tracking the loss of Comms Ferry Nine Nine Zero. Can you confirm? Please send relevant sensor data."

I’m still 100 million kilometers from the planet, so it’ll be nearly six minutes before they get the message. An immediate response is unlikely, so I figure I’ve got about 15 minutes before I hear back from the colonists.

Scans don’t improve the umpteenth time I try them, so as soon as the ions push Marconi past the cometary cloud, I light the main engines. Anti-matter mains flare at the base of the ship’s hologram, a model the length of my arm floating above my shoulder. She’s awkward looking, what with four comms ferries docked along the forward spar, but the slender cooling vanes perched just forward of the main drives add a semblance of grace.

Marconi will keep up the acceleration pace of 25 gravities for an hour, then after a 10-hour break, she’ll do it again. Don’t want to put too much strain on the drive nozzles. Couple in the deceleration needed when I get near Alban harbor, I should get there in about a day.

Plenty of time to puzzle this out.

I reach for the Bible tucked into the seat cushion. Reassuring physical presence does wonders for staving off unease. The spiritual version carries more weight.

As soon as my fingers find the battered cover, my memories transport me to that dark basement eleven years ago. Uncle Ethan. Flashes from scrambler stun weapons. My mother wailing. Father cursing—and he never, ever cursed.

Sweat beads on my eyebrows. Our neighbors said we were lucky, that the secret police took only my uncle. They could have interned the entire family. Could have dumped us all on a forgotten moon, for having possession of a printed Bible.

We wouldn’t be the first of Kesek’s victims. Or the last.

The answer from Alban Harbor lifts me from my memories. It’s equal parts irritating and reassuring. "Marconi, this is Alban Comms. The voice has a twang of an accent. Glad to make your acquaintance. We were worried MarkTel would never get wind of the ferry’s loss, and given our current lack of operational transports, we’d be up the proverbial creek. We’ll have our comms techs send the last telemetry data we received from the comms ferry. It should get to you within the next half hour. Hope that’ll provide some answers. Goodness knows we don’t have any! Alban Comms out."

Okay. They know the comms ferry’s gone, but they don’t know to where. I unstrap from the command chair. No sense worrying further until I see the data.

Meantime, I’m hungry.

THERE’S NOT A LOT OF space for human habitation aboard ship. My cabin is tucked behind the bridge. There’s a greenhouse aft of that, stuffed full of greenery.

Confining as they are, it’s nice to have constant exposure to living things. I’d never have survived being locked inside this rather large can for months at a time. Plus, I’ll never go short of fresh eats before the next station port-of-call.

But meals are lonely affairs. The Declaration-Class comes equipped with a crew of 24 low-intelligence repair and maintenance bots, and one human being. It’s the standard arrangement for dozens of the speedy, compact comms ferry tenders, and yet, MarkTel still installs a table with two chairs.

I don’t get many hitchhikers, so the bureaucratic addition of a seat that always remains empty seems an oversight of the Extended Deep Space Travel Protocols. It reminds me, whenever I set down my tray, how I’ve retreated from civilization so I won’t have to feel pain anymore.

A pair of lumpen bots, each one resembling a chrome beetle the size of my shoe, roll up to the table. One’s adorned with blue lights, the other with red. They beep communications at me. My wrist comm translates: Upload complete. Data from Alban Harbor available.

Good timing. My salad’s gone, as