Dark Omega

CHAPTER 53 - ROLL CALL

Haides had never been to space before, let alone set foot on a starship. Some Akakians did go into space: navy servicemen, merchant crews, orbital workers, and the like. But ordinary people had little reason to leave the homeworld. Akakians were not by nature, an adventurous breed. Few citizens had any desire to venture into the greater galaxy just for the fun of it.

The closest to space Haides had ever been was flying the family hopper. It had a contra-grav unit that could theoretically let it escape the planet entirely, but the turborotors didn't deliver much thrust once you got above ten thousand meters. Plus, the cabin wasn't pressurized, which made it unpleasant as soon as you hit four or five klicks. Higher up, you'd pass out from a lack of oxygen, then freeze to death when the environmental system couldn't cope with the extremely low temperature outside the hull.

If you wanted to go into space, a hopper wouldn't do. You needed a lander or a shuttle. Landers were optimized for surface-to-orbit transfers but could go a bit further in a pinch. Shuttles were bigger and had greater endurance, and could carry you into high orbit, even onto a moon or L-point habitat. You could, in theory, take a shuttle and go visit a planet in the same solar system.

Both kinds of craft defied gravity using the same contra-grav coils as the hopper, but were sealed and pressurized, and had multipurpose engines that could provide full thrust at all altitudes, up to and including actual space flight. And they had shielding, which was kind of essential if you wanted to cut back on cosmic radiation and land again without burning upon reentry. What these small vessels lacked, which set them apart from real starships, were translight drives. Without the ability to generate an event horizon, they were limited to whatever sublight speed they could accelerate to, which, particularly in the lander's case, was extremely limited.

The craft Haides was in looked a lot like a lander. Not much more than an elongated box with engines on it. It had a pair of stubby wings and rudimentary streamlining. Contra-grav provided most of the lift, so the wings and aerodynamic shape were there mainly to give it a little extra stability—boxes didn't maneuver very well. The inside of the vehicle was just as bland: a cabin with room for about eighty people, with the entrance at the rear, the cockpit at the front, and a cargo hold under the passengers' feet.

After a stomach-churning ascent at full burn, the landing craft settled down as it left the atmosphere. After a while, the main engines cut off. There was no sense of weightlessness—the gravitics seamlessly compensated for the loss of acceleration and Akakios's diminishing gravitational pull.

Another ten minutes and Haides could feel thrusters firing, and the lander began to slowly rotate. If Haides craned his neck, he was able to look out through one of the viewports. They were nearing their destination, a space leviathan idling in low orbit. The pilot was merging vectors with the larger vessel, edging closer and closer to the metal monstrosity.

Haides was no expert when it came to starships, but could see this was no combat vessel, but a merchantman. Warships were almost universally shaped like snub-nosed daggers, covered with point-defense blisters, armored gun ports, massive ordnance turrets, and crenelated spinal shields. This ship looked nothing like that. It had an elongated box-like body, not too different from the lander, only magnitudes larger. Moreover, there wasn't a single weapon aperture in view. That didn't mean the ship had none—it was large enough to carry many concealed guns—but it definitely wasn't built for combat.

The colossal merchantman measured a kilometer and a half, maybe a little more—size was damn hard to judge without points of reference—front to aft. That meant it was only a little shorter than a Coalition battleship, but it's fat, boxy hull meant internal volume was eight or ten times that of even the largest warships. As starships went, it was pretty large, but nowhere near the big macro-haulers of the Syndicate.