Rogue

Chapter 1: Run They spin. Gyrate. Faster than a sniper bullet. They skid and scoot. Across the flattened disc of the star-system. Along the tightly knit fabric of space and the invisibly non-fungible threads of time. Forces of unimaginable magnitude. The fundamental driving forces of the cosmos. Out in the open. Out to play. We know the what, perhaps the when. We have no frigging idea the why. Other than gesticulations and clever fabrications, we have no scintilla of an idea. Why the heck these giant balls of rock and gas spin, or move…on their effing own! Who was the mastermind that set the whole universal chessboard? And who was the referee that rolled the dice, set all the pieces in motion? How the heck do they know to effing move! These seemingly lifeless giant sacks of shi…. ========================================================================== Code Arctic! Code Arctic! Hull breach! Deck Hera, Sublevel Beta! Threat Level…Bloody Red! An automaton monotone read us our rights over the comm system. Apparently, we had the right to die in silence unless we did something about the situation we so rudely found ourselves in. Nicely done Michi. Hella programming there. I snapped out of the ever-delightful Dr. Crotch’s French Science session, and fell out of the holographically suspended nap cubicle. My brain cells were scrambled for a second as the Q-waves from the canoe-shaped cubicle snapped, untethering from my neural wave chain-link. For some reason his weird insight into how much we didn’t really know about anything drove me to sleep faster than any drug. Guess I’d been spending too much time with Derya. Her take on sleeping pills was simple. We didn’t need them as long as we had so many horrible songs. The comm system was going haywire. Alarms were blaring and blinking in crimson twinkles. I slipped into my spandex under-suit before stepping into the hermetic chamber. A glass seal rolled down, locking me inside as I spread my arms wide, ready to receive the holy grail of modern human advancement. “Exo-suit 4.0, go for Klein,” I spoke calmly into the chamber and parts started moving, clicking, clanking and beeping. Two minutes later, a robotic arm placed a helmet over my head and turned it, the sheeny round radiation guard clicking into place. The screen on the chamber pulled up and released me into the wild of the ship in distress. I was running. Panting. Now sprinting as best I could in the spectacularly heavy suit. Deck Hera was one level below-unarguably the most vital of the three decks. By some weird syzygy of cosmic elements, the hull breach happened on the deck with the Engine room. If that was compromised, everything would stop. No life support, no thrust, no movement. Nothing. Just broken dreams and unbroken records. And death drawing in closer with every labored breath as we floated aimlessly in the chilly cosmic boneyard as yet another space junk. Yet another antique trophy on the open shelf of Mistress Universe. “Holy grail! What the hell Klein!” Derya shrilled in a yelp as she squeezed her svelte body between my giant frame and the thick and bulky metal wall in the hallway to Engineering. I found my footing a couple of yards away, holding my own against smashing into the wall. My armor clanked with a small thud against the metal as I finally came to rest. Thanks Newton. “Didn’t see you there. Sorry.” I whispered softly through my helmet, out of breath. My voice would come out as muffled mumbling on the outside. “No shoe! And Klein…what did I say about apologies?” Derya’s hard glare tore through the glass to the heart of my soul. Oh right. She abhorred apologies. Rare breed of a creature she was. “Oh, I’m s…not sorry. Now can we take care of this cosmic mess before you find my head a new anatomical location on my body?” She scowled. She was a weirdly attractive woman, Derya. She only smiled upon encounter with great scientific espial. As it were on our epic odyssey across the cold stretch of Sol’s system, new discoveries were rare to come by. Space was mostly empty, and dare I say it, boring to the sodding bone. Still, our ship, Rogue 1-Derya’s choice of name-found ways to keep us on our toes. Nothing much this time. Just a gory hole gaping in the hull, a live test to our response time. We had learned not to lose these tests since the first time our crew was sliced into half around Ceres in a sporadic attack by the cowardly but deadly Space Command. They were a bunch of highly trained cowboys flagging the banner for the Universal Union of Worlds, a kind of joint governing body for space. Derya and I met on Craven II, a space prison a hundred and seven levels high, and about five flanks wide. It was the largest mega-structure beyond the Moon’s orbit. It was meant for the bottom 1% of the world’s worst criminals. Everyone who attended this hidden boarding institution was believed to have committed the most of heinous crimes against humanity. Everyone you met there was capable of killing you with a toothpick, a paper towel or mouthful of water. And it might sound unoriginal, but unlike Derya, I wasn’t supposed to be there. Really. Craven II was supposed to be a black site. And it was. That is until the day we broke out- 8 some solar months back. “Oh s**t! That’s not good.” Derya’s familiar curse cleared my vision to what our Automaton model had coded Arctic. Arctics were usually threats that rendered the affected area temporarily uninhabitable. It was a serious threat level, just one bar shy of Sahara, which meant death wrapped in a dry bundle of cataclysm. A Code Sahara would only give us a few minutes, if not seconds, to jump ship. Now we had to handle this Arctic before it festered into a Sahara. “Derya, you need a suit. Go back to Engineering and get one!” I vociferated over the noise of clattering metals and escaping atmosphere. “Screw that. We need to plug that hole right now!” “You won’t be plugging anything if we walk into a contaminated module. The radiation will have you in seconds, that’s if you don’t freeze instantly.” I said and saw the embers of coal glowing behind the emerald fury of her eyes. She hated a lot of things, and all people. The one reason she had of tolerating any of us on the ship was because the ship needed all of us to operate. And the one thing she hated more than anything was taking orders. “If I didn’t need you to help fix the breach, Klein, I’d toss you out of the hole myself.” She hissed. “This conversation is pointless.” Swiftly, I grabbed her by waist and carried her-easily- to the end of the hallway and tossed her on the other side before locking the hallway shutters and smashing the console with a fistful of instant regret. Well, that was probably a bad idea in case I needed a rescue. But it wasn’t nearly as grave as the mistake I made grabbing Derya. I was literally a dead man walking, living dead on borrowed time. If I survived fixing the breach, she would thank me for not dying before she got started on me. The one thing that stood out on her file on Craven II was that all the men who ever laid hands on her lost them-gruesomely. She had a long trail of severed limbs in her wake before she came to the prison, and she continued her brilliant record with blockheads who thought they could have their way with her on the accursed station. I turned into the last hallway compartment and sealed the doors behind me. If the atmosphere was contaminated, this would be the place to look. I raised my head and darted my eyes around. I couldn’t see the hole through the spewing gas and sparks flying. A fist squeezed tight in the small of my stomach at the thought of any of those sparks igniting. Guess the Nitrogen we never used had come in handy, holding the pure oxygen in circulation on the ship on a leash. “Hayloom, scan for contamination.” I spoke into my wrist Kleon, a miniature version of our ship-wide Automaton Assistant. A snare of blue lights popped out of the device and straddled over the ceiling, creeping into the floor and crawling into the plumes of gas. Data streamed through my Kleon as the scanner scoured through the zone. Contamination detected. Gamma. Ultraviolet. Contamination status: localized. Atmosphere unbreathable. South-side hull structure, unstable. Hayloom announced. I sighed as I stepped forward into the unknown reaches of the gas-clouded compartment. This was probably a bad idea. This day was turning out to have a handful of them. I wasn’t really a mechanic. Derya was better suited for this. Nothing seemed to be out of her skill set. By trade, I was a farmer. Grew up on a farmland in the beating heart of Africa. My name wasn’t really Klein. It was Kileni, a fearsome surname-at least according to the United Allies Security Council. My dad was persecuted for claims of destabilizing peace in the region, hanged for his troubles. When I used my knowledge of botany to come up with some juicy cocktails that left the eyeballs of some guilty politicians popping while their tongues stuck out a few feet, I was shipped off to Craven II. For many a night in my dimly lit, insalubrious bunker, I would chuckle to myself in retrospect. These guys were afraid of a frigging farmer! Derya had decided Kileni was too unimpressive. Now Klein, that was a name worthy of a crewman of Rogue 1-not that I knew anything about Klein and his inside-out bottle. Honestly, I really didn’t care what they called me. We were all strangers, misfits brought together by a convoluted knot of fate. We were all rogues whose names were tainted by the goo of humanity’s follies. They made us into what we’ve become. And then when they didn’t like what they saw, they sought to obliterate us into oblivion. Guess it was better to just be rogue, embrace the skin they made for us. Holy fudge! I screeched to a halt when I cleared the plumes of gas. There it was, the breach. And no, it wasn’t a hole. It was a…it looked like a giant toe, almost the breadth of my shoulders and just about the height of my hairline. And it was sticking through the hull like something I’d rather not say inside another thing I’d definitely rather not say.