The Stranger

By Faris Naimi

It is the 2107th year under the rule of the Imperial Padi Dynasty. The trade ship Gypsy is sent beyond the boundaries of the human empire of Eden, but its pilot, Samir Tahan, learns that this is far more than the average delivery run.

Samir finds himself stuck with the primitive and mysterious people of the Casi Village with nearly no chance of returning home. After learning about a bizarre phenomenon that the villagers call the Choosing, Samir understands that he is the only one who truly understands what the Choosing is. It becomes up to him to put an end to it once and for all.

Laern is the twenty-two-year-old leader of a determined band of pirates. Once he is contracted by Andrew Hoeffman, infamous CEO of the Angelica Corporation, Laern becomes caught in a corporate plot that steers him toward his ambitious dream. But that same plot threatens his life, drags him into the Choosing, and carries him toward his calamitous encounter with the stranger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524528379

Faris Naimi

Faris Naimi was born and raised in northern Virginia. He is the author of several stories that have appeared in publications, such as 365 Tomorrows, Five2One, Ealain, and several others. Naimi wrote The Stranger at the age of eighteen while studying biology at George Mason University.

Book preview

Chapter 1

G YPSY FINALLY STOPPED rocking and reached a point of smooth acceleration. The trade ship was traveling in deep space, far from any of the major star systems of the HEE. The dull black of deep space matched the bored atmosphere of the ship’s coc kpit.

Samir Tahan may have been in the pilot seat, but he had given the ship over to the autopilot days ago. The ship’s subtle shaking was still causing the bobblehead that sat on the ship’s dashboard to rapidly nod up and down.

How much longer until we reach the drop-off site? Morris moaned the words as he stretched out his entire body in the copilot chair.

Autopilot says it’ll be another four days. Samir lifted himself from the chair and walked towards the automatic doors that led into the living area of the ship. The metal doors were decorated with two palm trees on either side of an image of a distant sun: the unmistakable symbol of the Human Empire of Eden. The doors slid to the side as Samir approached.

Eh, when has that thing ever been right? Morris brought up a map of their location on the ship’s computer terminal, which was built into the long control panel. I bet you 20 credits that we won’t make it there in a week. He punctuated his challenge by flicking the bobblehead. The bobblehead belonged to Morris. It wasn’t modeled after any famous person in the HEE, it was simply a man in an orange jump suit, who was giving a thumbs-up to whomever was in front of him. Morris had bought it from some local trader on one of their trade runs to a merchant port. Since then, Morris had something of a personal attachment to the bobble head. He named it Pat, and brought it with him on every trade run that they did since. He would even take the bobblehead with him whenever he left the ship, due to of his constant paranoia that someone would break in and steal his treasured friend.

Morris waited for about ten seconds to hear a reply from Samir, but never got one. What’re you doing back there, partner? He got up and walked into the living area.

He watched Samir, a twenty-seven-year-old Arab man, hopelessly struggle to use the video phone to call his wife before she went to bed. Just like he did every night.

Haven’t you figured out how to work that thing yet? Morris couldn’t keep himself from chuckling as he walked over to help his partner.

Samir tapped on the touchscreen of the monitor over and over again, It’s not my fault! The damn thing’s broken.

Yeah, yeah, partner. It sure is broken alright. Morris finished dialing the video phone and wiggled his fingers at Samir while sarcastically mouthing the word, magic. Morris walked back into the cockpit of the ship.

Samir’s wife, Fatima, answered the phone call immediately after Morris slumped back into the co-pilot chair. Fatima’s image on the screen showed her from the waist up, and her light brown skin appeared darker than normal. Her long, raven colored hair was untied and came down beyond her shoulders.

Hey, honey. How was everything today? Hearing his wife’s voice brought a smile to Samir’s clean shaven face. They both had developed slight accents from growing up in Arab communities on their home planet of Endma, but Fatima’s was thicker than Samir’s.

Samir shrugged in response to her question, It’s as boring as usual. We’ve just been counting stars all day. The moments of silence that followed seemed much longer in his head than they actually were, I miss you. Now it was Fatima’s turn to smile.

I miss you too, she said, They don’t pay you enough to be gone all of the time like this.

Honey, I fly a trade ship. I’m shipping goods from planet to planet, I’m hardly an Imperial bio-engineer. He didn’t want to admit that he agreed with her.

Alright, well are you at least flying somewhere safe? An obvious look of concern spread across her beautiful heart shaped face as she waited for his answer.

Of course, I’m well within local boundaries. We’re just making a few quick drops in some of the central systems. Samir’s hands tightly gripped the sides of the monitor screen and his face twitched. With this answer, the look of concern left as quickly as it came.

Okay, good. I love you. She kissed the palm of her hand and put it up to the screen. Samir did the same to complete their nightly ritual. Then, he ended the transmission. The call went surprisingly smooth. Most faster-than-light calls end with interrupted signals that stop conversations with loud static, especially on rundown ships such as Gypsy.

Samir sat in front of the video phone for a minute until he heard Morris’ voice from the cockpit. Partner, did you really have to lie to her? I mean, I don’t know a whole lot about Neo-Islam, but aren’t you guys not supposed to do that?

Samir knew exactly what he was talking about. Morris was right. Members of the reborn Islamic faith were not allowed to lie, and Samir took his religion very seriously. He couldn’t defend against not telling Fatima the truth, but at the same time, he couldn’t bring himself to worry her. In Samir’s eyes, Fatima’s peace of mind outweighed the stress of committing one sin. It’ll be fine, he reassured, there’s no reason for her to worry over nothing.

"I don’t know about that, partner. This is the closest that we’ve ever gotten to the border planets. Hell, we’ll be right on the border between the Empire and empty space. What if something does happen?"

Moe, nothing will happen! The words came out choppy and angry. Samir was annoyed that Morris thought he was qualified to give Samir advice on his own marriage. Samir had known Morris to have short-lived romances with many men, but never a committed one.

Samir also despised considering the possibility of something bad happening to him while away on a job. He refused to think about what would happen if Fatima didn’t have him to support her. They had just started talking about having kids, and Samir wouldn’t let anything get in the way of that. All he had to do was make this last run. Samir and Morris’ employer, the Orion Corporation, agreed to pay them an unusually large amount of money for this particular delivery. It would be much more than enough to support him and Fatima while he looked for another job. He had no idea why he was getting paid this much just for a single shipment. Even after considering how far out of the way they were going, the payout was still just too much. What the hell are we carrying? Samir thought to himself.

Samir would be lying if he said that he wasn’t tempted to go into the cargo hold and see what was in the shipping crates for himself. But there was a code of confidentiality in the shipping business, and peeking into unmarked shipping crates just wouldn’t be worth risking his paycheck.

His mind wandered back to his pay. He might make enough off of this last job to move out of the Vex System. It was far too dangerous there for Samir and Fatima. The entire system carried a reputation as a gangland. Though they lived on Endma, the safest planet in the Vex System, there were still gangs everywhere. It was no place to raise a child. Perhaps he could take them somewhere closer to the capitol. Maybe the Atlantic, or even the Eden System itself.

Samir made his way back to the pilot seat. He knew that he had gotten unreasonably mad at Morris just a moment ago. As he turned toward his right to apologize, he saw that Morris was already fast asleep. He got over it pretty quickly. Just in that moment, Samir realized that he hadn’t told Morris that this would be his last run. He was so caught up in what might happen with him and Fatima, it hadn’t crossed his mind to tell his running partner of 10 years about his plans. He contemplated whether or not he should wake up Morris, but he decided to wait until he woke up on his own to tell him.

Samir reclined the pilot seat and stared at the ceiling of the cockpit. Gray. The same gray ceiling that he had been looking at for the past ten years. Run after run after run, he was stuck in the same ship with the same shade of gray to look at for days.

But these days were numbered. After this run was done, there would be no more gray. Instead, Samir would have the beautiful shades of orange, red, and yellow of some beautiful planet’s sunrise to look at. The same beautiful planet where he would raise his children and start his real life with Fatima.

Samir had always found his job shipping goods for the Orion Corporation to be boring, but he found it even more tedious now that he was so close to being done with it. With the money that he would make on this run, plus all the money that he and Fatima had been saving over the years, they just might be able to settle down on a nice planet in a nice star system and open a shop and sell Fatima’s original art. She had always painted and sculpted masterpieces that carried a traditional Arabian tone with them. Thinking about Fatima and how they would build the rest of their lives together brought Samir peace as he drifted to sleep.

Chapter 2

S AMIR WOKE UP to a loud crash as the ship shook violently. He recognized the unmistakable sound of an explosion. Half asleep, he grabbed at the controls. He switched the view on the monitors to show the sensor footage of different angles outside of the ship. That was when he saw it. At first, it was just one: a jackknife style ship, unmarked and black. A pirate ship. It fired a barrage of short, bright red beams. It only took the beams a few seconds to cross the empty vacuum of space and reach G ypsy .

The ship shook again. This time, hard enough to wake up Morris.

What’s happening! Morris was yelling over the ship’s blaring alarm which indicated that it had sustained heavy external damage.

Pirates! It took a moment for Samir to take the ship’s control from the autopilot. He prayed that no other blaster strikes would hit them as he did so.

Morris grabbed a hold of the controls in the copilot’s section of the cockpit. What’s the plan?

I’m the one that’s supposed to have a plan? Samir kept the thought in his head, saying it would only panic Morris more. Finally, he responded, Pull the ship up!

Morris complied and Gypsy tilted its flight direction upward and looped behind the pursuing pirate ship. Two other jackknife ships were approaching from behind Gypsy. They were only a few minutes away from being close enough to open fire on the merchant ship.

Samir engaged the ship’s weapons but he knew that it would take about a minute for them to be warmed up and ready to use.

Can you make them warm up any faster? Morris sounded like he was just about ready to abandon ship, not that it would do him any good. The only escape pod on the ship wouldn’t be able to outrun any of those jackknife styled pirate ships. The jackknife style design allowed them to move swiftly, but they weren’t capable of sustaining very much damage. All Samir would have to do is directly strike each ship once, with a blaster shot, and that would be enough to take them out of commission.

It’s a merchant ship, we’re not exactly prepared for combat situations and these weapons aren’t exactly military grade. Samir was definitely right about the ship’s weapons. The guns installed on Gypsy were the same tier of cheap hardware that were utilized on some clunky gang ships in the Vex System. Samir steered the ship downwards and they managed to duck under the jackknife ship that was ahead of them. We can’t outrun them. Once they all regroup, they’ll just run us down, he said.

Samir could see Morris looking at their location on the map on the cockpit monitor. From the looks of it, they were just on the border of the Empire’s domain. It only took Samir a second to make his decision. It had been about a day since he had last engaged Gypsy’s warp drive. That should be enough time for it to have recharged. He set the warp drive’s dimensions and established a general flight path.

The warp drive worked by bending the space around the immediate proximity of the ship, as well as, the projected flight path. With this, the ship could travel entire light years in mere moments.

Samir turned the ship away from the boundaries of the Empire and engaged the ship’s warp drive. Immediately after the warp drive was engaged, the empty blackness of space was bent and replaced by a wide spectrum of colors. The cascading aurora of colors filled the ship’s windshield and windows.

The pirates redirected their ships to chase down Gypsy into unexplored space. Eventually, Gypsy’s warp drive began overheating, so Samir had to disengage it. The approaching pirates did the same. The colors that had filled the view of the windshield had blurred and faded into the empty black of deep space. Samir would have to wait for hours before he could use Gypsy’s warp drive again, assuming that he could elude the pursuing pirate ships to stay alive for that long.

Samir tried to find the pursuing jackknife ships through his windshield, but spotting a jackknife ship in empty space was no simple task. Gypsy had no military grade sensors, and the mediocre sensors that the ship did possess were incapable of automatically spotting such small ships. This left the task to the vision of the pilots.

Samir switched the view on the cockpit’s monitor to show the sensors that surrounded their ship again. The pirate ships were painted the same dark black of the deep space in which they were flying. Samir immediately recognized that he wouldn’t be able to spot them by searching for a color, shape, or outline of a ship. He would have to search for the approaching blackness, blocking out the shine of the stars. He would have to spot a void in the endless void of deep space.

Dammit, this is impossible. Samir’s thoughts were as unsteady as his hands. They shook as they gripped the controls. From time to time, he jerked the ship in sudden, random movements to avoid being shot down:

Up.

Diagonal.

Left.

The ship remained at full throttle the whole time. At first, it was working. The red beams of the pirates’ blasters missed Gypsy. Eventually, they managed to lock onto the ship, and stopped missing their target.

Damn. Damn. Damn. A military grade targeting system. Samir deduced that they must have one installed on each of their ships after seeing how well the blaster beams gradually increased in precision over time. In that moment, Samir thought that it was funny how he was taught by the Orion Corporation to recognize the idiosyncrasies and unique qualities of a military grade targeting system, yet he was never taught a way to combat them. He recalled being taught all about how pirates would ambush trade ships to haul merchandise out of the cargo hold. Sometimes, the pirates would take the pilots for ransom, but Samir figured that if these pirates were settled so far away from the central HEE planets, they probably didn’t want to be located. They would simply kill him and Morris.

In a panic, Samir fabricated an entire plan within a few seconds. The plan was not, by any means, well-thought-out. It was simply put together in his subconscious while he attempted to dodge the red beams that were assaulting his ship, but he figured that his fate was sealed the moment that the pirates targeted him. He cut off the ship’s engines. Using the settings on the cockpit’s computer terminal, he turned off all of the ship’s functions except for the life support. After he did so, only one more blaster shot rocked the ship before the pirates ceased fire. A hard voice came on the ship’s communications channel.

Stay in your damned seats and don’t try anything! You get out of the cockpit, you get your damned head blown off! Samir had the impression that he and Morris would have their damned heads blown off either way. But he complied.

To Samir’s surprise, Morris didn’t comment on this surrender. But Samir didn’t even bother to ask Morris how he felt, or turn his head to look at him. Samir’s head was filled with thoughts of Fatima. Would he ever see her again? Would they never get the chance to open their own store together? Would he never get the chance to give her children? He couldn’t keep himself from crying as he thought of his life with her ending here, in deep space, killed by godless pirates, over some merchandise that some corporate tycoon sent to some outskirt planet and wouldn’t bother missing.

Only a few tears rolled down his cheek before he managed to stop himself. He couldn’t allow Morris to catch him like this. He looked over and saw that Morris’ face was simply frozen in an expression of utter horror and disbelief. Samir understood. Both men knew the danger of delivering to the outskirt planets, but neither one of them actually expected something like this to happen. Samir was so caught up in his emotions that he almost forgot that he was in the middle of executing a plan.

Morris. Samir was whispering, although there was no real reason to whisper, "I have a plan. I think that we can let one of the ships dock with us. Only one ship can dock with us at a time, and there can only be a crew of two people, max, per jackknife style ship. Once they’re on board, we can sneak past them and take their ship! It’ll be a hell of a lot easier using one of those jackknife types to escape. They’re faster and more discreet. If we shut down Gypsy’s life support before we leave, we can kill the pirates on board before they have the chance to radio back to their crew. We’ll be able to get away before they know what we did and we’ll be home free!"

Samir waited for a reply from Morris. He practically begged for one. His desperate, brown eyes pleaded for some form of acknowledgement. But Morris just sat there with a grim expression on