the last voyage of the lathan devers pt1

green.  the florescent light washed through Issac’s vision as his

eyelids fluttered open.  his eyes burned, and he grasped at them with his fingertips.  but they would not reach.  he realized then that his hands were bound, tied together behind the back of the wooden chair in which he found himself sitting.  he set all his effort to focusing his eyes.  it worked, at least a little, and the grey brick of his enclosing walls grew sharper.  grey brick?  Issac remembered falling…then there was something about a scorching hot surface.  his bits of memory were anchors sinking in lava, and he tried, from his perch on a drowning raft, limbs straining against the anchors’ line, to draw them back in.

**

Issac sat up slowly in the pre-dawn grey. Leah laid next to him, asleep still. he thought of brushing the shock of silver hair away from her closed eyes–it was the only hair of such color amidst otherwise jet black curls, and the only strand that constantly, and beautifully, he thought, tumbled off her head to obscure her right eye. he thought better of it, though. she would understand. they had said their goodbyes the night prior, and he did not want to have to repeat them in the morning.  she had wept slightly–never a full out sob, and barely even a matured cry–for the entire two hours it had taken her to fall asleep.  Issac had several times thought she was asleep, and had allowed himself to begin to drift off, when she would bring him back to consciousness with a resurgence of tears often accompanied by an impotent and unanswered plea for him to stay.  ostensibly, the planning was too much: the wedding was less than a month away and even a week of Issac’s absence would overwhelm her.  this was not true, of course; her mother and aunts and sisters were working full time, tirelessly, often invasively, to draw to a fine point every last matrimonial detail and nuptial miscellany.  the real reason, of course, was that mission involved a marginal amount of risk.

Issac wasn’t exactly sure why he had been called upon to participate in this particular trading run.  Lathan Devers had granted Issac a timely favor some months before, and they had agreed then that Issac would repay the trader by augmenting Devers’s crew at his request.  as far as Issac knew, though, this run was no different than any other Devers made with his skeleton crew, except that the mission was to Klin and that they were, in addition to their normal cargo, carrying a shipment of foodstuffs donated by charities on Dulvern.  Issac knew little of Devers’s usual work, but from what little the rougish, middle-aged man had told him, their routes were ventures in basic capitalism.  even in this case, Devers had been paid a fee by the charities to carry the food at what was a very small extra cost to him, a cost that was more than made up for by the surcharge.  it was a business decision, like all those Issac assumed Devers made.  in any case, common trading and bartering seemed to pose little risk outside of the minimal degree to which all space travel and stops on foreign worlds were inherently unpredictable.

attempts to reassure Leah of this fact had fallen woefully short, though.  “we’re bringing food to them,” Issac had said in an effort of comforting.  he himself didn’t know much about the plight of the people on Klin, except that their condition could be called “plight,” or so he had heard, vaguely.  Leah had studied these things, though, and he thought that his high, humanitarian efforts would be commendable in her eyes.  they were, but would have been more so at any other time than the present.  “and Devers is the best pilot in the Dulvernian sector.  everybody knows that.”  this statement brought his affianced little levity, perhaps because it was only partially true. incompletely true, the same way that Issac’s purported mission outline was, unbeknownst to him, incompletely true.

Issac removed her hand from his side, where it had lain when she finally fell asleep and had stayed throughout the night.  he pulled back his covers quietly and got up.

the couples’ efficiency apartment, in which Issac did not officially reside, in accordance to her parents’ wishes and religious beliefs, was small, but it’s clutter provided a treacherous minefield of debris in the low light of the early morning.  Issac stumbled slightly, and his collision with the wooden dresser toppled a picture frame that had been sitting on its top and sent it crashing to the floor.  Issac looked back at Leah worriedly.  she stirred, inhaled deeply through her nose, moaned slightly, and, just as Issac was sure she was about to open her eyes and sit up, she rolled over and unconsciously pulled the covers up around her cheeks.  Issac breathed a sigh of relief and replaced the photograph on the shelf.  he glanced at it.  it was an old-style paper print whose peer was hardly to be found these days.  Leah had a fascination with antiques, particularly a way of using obsolete methods of going about everyday routines that Issac had never quite been able to solve.  why spend a greater amount of time to create an inferior product, he often wondered.  the paper print had a slight appeal, he thought absently as he began the gravshower’s startup sequence, but it showed the subjects with all of their true flaws and before their natural backgrounds, distractions the holoframes eliminated automatically.  well, it makes her happy, he thought as he removed his last article of clothing and stepped in the gravshower, now dully humming in its state of readiness.  he turned the knob to the desired temperature and depressed the green button below the dial.  no matter how many times he used one of these–and their apartment, though small, did have this one luxury–he still got a little rush when the dampeners kicked in and sucked the gravity out of the small, sealed cube.  he knew that the gravity wasn’t “sucked out” the same way that, say, air would be, but that’s how it felt to him, as if the gravity was drawn through a vent into a waiting vacuum, and there stayed until Issac requested its return.  the gravshower released the clear cleaning agent a moment later, which drew itself naturally to his weightless, suspended body, washed over him coolly, and then the portions that his skin did not absorb as moisturizer, evaporated.  Issac closed his eyes and let himself float for another minute.  then, thinking of the time, Issac tapped the button with his toe and felt the cube slowly reinflate with gravity.  the shower set him down lightly on the tile floor, and he waited there until he felt his normal weight.  the dampeners clicked off, and the door slid open automatically with a hiss.  clean and dry, and his full weight, Issac stood and stepped out of the shower and reclothed.

he would eat on the way, he thought, and not risk any more time in the apartment. no need to give Leah any more chance to deal with goodbyes one more time.  he exited the bathroom and grabbed his coat, donning it as he closed the door behind him.  “lock,” he said quietly, and the voice-recognition system complied, securing the door with a faint click.

forty minutes later, Issac was finishing off the last bits of his langari sandwich, an all-plant delicacy he rarely indulged in due to the high price of imported vegetation.  he had balanced his overpriced breakfast by electing to take mass transit instead of airtaxi, his preferred method of transport.  it would be much later that he would realize the fortuitousness of that decision.

the conversation began as Issac watched the telestrator on the magtrain’s upper bulkhead.  watching the strators was perhaps Issac’s favorite pastime, and he had been delighted when they were installed on all of his city’s magtrains three years prior.  today, the regional news was showing clips of a religious leader raving about one of the latest spiritual crises that was supposed to be gripping the galaxy, though only a particular few seemed to notice any of its alleged effects.  “they bring us ruin!” the zealot spat feverishly.  “Wainright’s text proclaims it.  the signs are clear!  has not our hallowed predicted all the crises of the last centuries? did not he foretell of the dark times?  and we have ignored his warnings!”  Issac wondered absently if he was going to rupture a vocal chord during the prolongation of the syllable “-nor-”.  if he allowed himself to think too seriously about what the preacher was saying, he might grow angry, and did not on this particular day feel inclined to delve into that particular thought process.  little time for that now, and even less energy.

“i wonder what he thinks he’s talking about,” a voice next to him on the sparsely populated magtrain asked.  Issac turned his head and sized up his questioner quickly.  she was a woman of late middle age, and possessed an intriguing beauty despite the jagged lines on her weatherworn face. “prophesies, and the like?”  Issac wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.

“myth,” he answered with a dull contempt.

“going to the commercial hanger,” the woman asked incongruously.  “headed to Klin?” again, Issac was unsure whether she was asking or telling.

still, seeing no reason to lie, and not willing to exert the effort such required, Issac answered, “yes.”  it was simple and matter of fact.

“they say,” she said, smilingly, “that if one attempts to survive dayside, one will not succeed.”

“is that so?”  Issac’s question was barely that, and he wished the woman would stop talking to him.  he had no intentions of seeing anything of dayside: his ship was to land in the ring, and from there depart.  as a famous author once predicted: an eternal twilight of an eternal july.  “i suppose the same could be said of nightside, though i plan on seeing precious little of either.”  despite his confidence, the woman continued as if he hadn’t spoken.

“one will not succeed, unless one follows certain precautions.”  she grinned and sat back in her seat with a quiet sense of self-satisfaction.  she waited for the next question.

“which precautions?” Issac asked with irritation.  really, he wanted nothing to do with this old woman, but somehow his interest was piqued though he was hardly willing to show it.  the question was, in a way, then, genuine.

“well,” she thrust off, “to begin with, the sand is a funny thing.  it burns, you know.  long-term sun exposure.  but a foot down, the sand is cool, or cool enough.  you suppose it takes great effort to crawl through foot-deep sand?  well, you’re right.  but Klin’s sand, on the dayside anyway, tends to be coarse, and thus less dense, and it’s an effort that will keep you–keep one, i should say–alive.  can’t have your–”

“yes, i see,” Issac said gruffly.

he stared straight ahead and flexed his jaw muscles in annoyance.  why should he care about the size of dirt grains somewhere he never intended to set foot on, and in no way intended crawling across.  he didn’t notice, but she smiled a deeply affectionate smile as she gazed at him.  the magtrain slowed.  the deceleration was barely noticeable due to the trains internal magnetic holding field, but an experienced rider could still sense it.  a soft, vaguely robotic female voice came over the intercom.  “we are approaching: Wrade’s Station.  next stop: Caulmen limits spaceport.”

the strange woman stood.  “my stop.”

Issac looked up at her with a suddenly quizzical look.  he had assumed that there were no more stops between here and the port, which was still ten minutes away, and that she was going to the same destination.  if she was getting off earlier, at wrade’s station, whatever that was, then how could she have known that he was staying on the train to the end of the line?  she looked at him squarely, and he noticed something that made his stomach shift uncomfortably.  her irises were of the most peculiar aqua blue and shone like tropical shallows in midsummer.

“the war has already begun,” she said cryptically.  she looked at him probingly and opened her mouth to speak again, but the words caught in her throat in a way that seemed to puzzle even her, and she slid out of the opening door behind her, pulling her coat up around her neck.  Issac stood.

“excuse me, how did– excuse me!”  she disappeared into the crowd, and for a moment Issac thought of making after her, but the other passengers were flooding onto the train and the warning sound for the closing door was sounding loudly.  in any case, he certainly did not have the time to chase after some queer old woman for no particular reason.  he sat down with a dissatisfied huff, and decided that she was simply insane.  he directed his thoughts to the coming journey.

Issac stepped out of the train and lit a cigarette.  they didn’t let him smoke on the train any more–Dulvern was cracking down more and more on public smoking.  he thought it might have been against regulation anywhere in the spaceport, but he was in open air, and would not have been intimidated by anyone ordering him to extinguish it.  he smoked with his right hand, his left firmly implanted in his left jacket pocket, shielding his chest from the wind.

Lathan Devers was standing outside of his ship when Issac arrived.  the rain had begun to fall steadily, and Devers had not paid for one of the more-expensive enclosed docks.  the ship was small and rugged, with an angular cockpit giving way sternward to a bulky hull that was only rounded at the endwing thrusters.  the wings were fat stubs, but the fact that the craft had wings at all indicated it’s fairly extensive in-atmosphere usage.  most ships, Issac knew, despite his very limited space travel experience, were in fact wingless, trading the extra fuel consumption needed while leaving the atmosphere for a shape more efficient for space travel.  certainly, the presence or absence of wings were of no particular relevance while traveling through regular-space or time-space, but wings were expensive.  they added massively to the ship’s surface area while adding almost nothing to its internal capacity, for either cargo or personnel.  and with the relatively high expense of heat- and space-resistant material needed for a vessel’s skin–and for cubic feet of dock space, for that matter–well, even an atmospheric like Issac could approximate the math.  in any case, Devers did not look happy.

“you’re late,” was his terse greeting.

“the magtrain was slow,” Issac offered plainly, striding briskly toward the lowered loading ramp, not slowing.  Devers stood in his way, unmoving.  Issac stopped inches before bumping into him.  he looked up to make first eye contact with the ship’s captain.  disaffectedly, Issac asked, “something wrong, captain?”

Devers paused for a moment.  then smiled subtly.  he held of a small docket of stapled loose leaf.  “your papers, sailor.”  he put a spin of intentional irony on the last word.  Issac took a long drag from his cigarette, exhaled in a direction that did not entirely avoid the captain’s face.  he planted the stick in the left corner of his mouth and took the papers with his right hand, never removing the left from his jacket.  though there were a few added pages for intersector travel, the papers were familiar to Issac.  he had been on space journeys, but only to systems within his sector, and never with cargo.  he skimmed the cargo manifest that was required even on personal papers: trinkets, it seemed.  various native gadgets to be traded for perhaps other gadgets of foreign origin, or even raw materials unavailable on Dulvern.

Devers motioned to Issac to step closer to door that stood closed before them.  he indicated a flat, dark panel that affixed to the hull waist-high, and tapped a few keys below the panel.  “put your hand here, please.”

Issac obliged slowly.  the panel swelled slightly with a dull green light, and Issac though he felt it grow warm under his touch.  then the light, and heat, if they were indeed there, faded quickly and Issac stepped back.

“it’s got your palm now, kiddo.  if you need to get in, just put your hand on one of these–“

“yeah, i get it,” Issac said.  he glanced briefly again at the opening pages of his papers, and Devers, after repeating Issac’s motion on the palm-reader, turned to enter the ship.

one field on the first page caught Issac’s eye.

“you named the ship,” he said, his cigarette bouncing in his lips as he spoke, “after yourself?”  he was both mildly incredulous and quietly mocking .

by way of acknowledgement, the captain said, still walking, “thrusters light in fifteen.  you’d better get settled.”  he turned his head slightly.  “the Devers waits for no man.”  there was a trace of a smirk in his tone, if not on his face.

Issac rolled his eyes overdramatically.  he tossed his spent tobacco onto the tarmac, ducked his head against he strengthening rain, and followed the captain of the Lathan Devers, Lathan Devers, inside.

the cockpit–Devers called it “the bridge,” but it was hardly more than a cockpit, and Issac chose to think of it in this way–was by definition cramped and surprisingly dark, given that the upper front quarter of it was transparent.  at least it seemed transparent now; it was actually a viewscreen set, at the moment, to display direct external conditions, though it could be set to show the crew anything that any sensor on the ship could observe.  as his eyes traveled away, Issac saw that the walls of the cockpit, lead at an acute angle to the small control panel of the pilot.  there, he saw a smattering of instruments and displays that meant nothing to an atmospheric like Issac.  he stood at the back of the small room, leaning against the wall, close to the door.  he thought about grabbing his pack of cigarettes from his jacket, but figured they were against regulation on a spacecraft, and decided it was too early in the trip to upset anyone too much, though he cared little, he was sure.

the door behind him opened, and he turned his head to follow it.  a woman bumped his shoulder heavily as she strode into the cockpit.  “sorry,” he muttered, standing more erect.

she looked back at him sharply.  her eyes were dark, like her jet black hair that fell no further than her chin, scooped up slightly in the back.  she wore all black: a loose but, Issac noted, suggestive tanktop, and fitted, slightly flared black slacks.  her black leather boots clanked on the steel floor with every insistent step.

“don’t lean there,” she commanded, dispensing with whatever meager pleasantries might have been had on such a ship.  “that’s the–”

“Gamne,” the pilot called to her loudly, diverting her attention.  she responded with equal abruptness and moved towards him.  a fiercely defensive quality assumed itself in her tone.  Issac was not to find out, apparently, what exactly it was he had a moment before been leaning up against.  he scanned the instrument panel, looking for the words “eject” or “attack” or “self-destruct.”  none were apparent, but the words he did see, “LG4.1″ and “LG4.2,” the latter having a yellow and black striped underline, did not completely reassure him, either.

the captain had placed him on the “bridge” for holding because he had to “do some things” before take off.  according to Devers, all passengers of his ship had to stuff themselves into the tiny cockpit of the vessel on account of the disability of the rest of the ship’s gravimetric pressure.  though Issac’s space voyages had only been of the most casual and controlled type, he knew that every craft had to provide special gravitational adjustments for its passengers during takeoff, landing, and wormhole journeys, lest the voyagers become, in the former cases, nauseous and perhaps ill, or, in the latter case, unconscious or more likely dead.  Issac had deduced little form his brief skimming of the papers Devers had given him, but one bit of information that stood out to him was a note that explained the functioning of the time-space fields, but also of the absence of the gravimetric fields on every part of the ship but the “bridge.”

in any case, Devers entered the bridge not a moment later.  Gamne, as was apparently her name, and the pilot had seemed to smooth over whatever disagreement or miscommunication they had been having, and the black-clad woman had set to her computer displays.  the pilot leaned back in his chair and, surprisingly, with a smile placed a hand on the inner left thigh of the bent Gamne.  even more surprisingly, she simply smiled demurely–a gesture that Issac had thirty seconds ago supposed impossible of her–and carried about her work.  the pilot set back to his work, also noticing Lathan’s entrance onto the bridge.  Gamne continued to tap at seemingly-random controls and shot the pilot an unnoticed and lustful grin as he plotted the ships exit course.

“get a fuckin’ move on,” Devers barked as he plopped down in the captain’s chair, located in the center of the bridge.  Issac wasn’t aware of a particular need for the Lathan Devers to make an overly rapid takeoff, but he had never, in his limited space travel, been in a cockpit–bridge, he corrected himself sardonically–during launch.  “strapped in ninety seconds.”  he glanced back quickly at Issac and waved his hand in a seemingly random direction.  “the straps for the standers are over there.”

Issac opened his mouth to request further specifics, but the captain was already rattling off commands to the fourth member of the crew, the communications officer, if an officer he could indeed be called.  he was a tall, squirrely man of middle age.  his thick, dark hair offset his pale skin, further discolored by formidable brown-tinted glasses that perched on his long, angular nose.  he answered the captain, and his voice sounded even more weasely than Issac had expected.

he knew the cockpit had gravitational dampening, but even that was clearly not sufficient for a comfortable or even safe departure without other restraints.  his eyes scanned the back wall of the cramped brain of the Devers in search of the straps the captain had vaguely referenced.  he saw what looked to be a few loosely-hung cargo nets, though why they would need cargo nets on the bridge he was unsure, but no straps that seemed to be intended for a human.

“uh, captain,” he muttered weakly.  he was not surprised when the captain didn’t respond, instead issuing a curt order to the pilot, followed by an apparently unanswerable question of Gamne after which a brief pause prompted an angry repetition of the question, which in turn prompted a hurried and uncertain answer from the… what was her role exactly? Issac wondered distractedly.

“thirty four–thirty five, thirty five,” she corrected herself quickly.  then, with confidence.  “thirty five.”

the captain cursed quietly under his breath.  there was a moment of quiet, one that passed so quickly that Issac nearly did not detect it, but, because of its raucous context, simultaneously lasted an eternity.  “begin ascent,” the captain said, with a sudden calm.

“sir!” the pilot called, punching three last buttons before snapping his harness into locked position.  Issac, who had been following the action intently, had only a microsecond to realize that he had never found the standers’ straps before the pilot jammed the flight stick into its fully-forward position.  a large yellow light flashed on his control panel, and he smacked it heavily with a closed fist.  Issac gathered that he had overridden some sort of safety system because the pilot’s action was followed immediately by a force of which Issac had never felt an equal.  he felt the muscles of his face being sucked into his chest, his chest into his stomach, his stomach into his legs, those into his feet, and his feet almost seemed to wrap around the surface of the planet only to plow back through the top of his skull.  the next sensation he was aware of was the crush of a steel bulkhead against the back of his head.  he was entirely unsure whether his head had crashed against the hull of the ship or if the wall had fallen cataclysmically upon him.  a second later he realized he was sliding across the floor.  he wondered passingly why the door to the bridge was rushing at him like a charging defensive player in a batell match.  he was able, through some miracle combination of luck and self-preservation instinct, to protect his head from terminal  damage.  his defensive move, however, made vulnerable his midsection, and the i-beam next to the door caught him solidly in the stomach.  Issac’s motion ceased momentarily, and he laid wrapped around the pillar.

“seventy-five thousand,” he heard the pilot shout.  if he could have looked up, Issac would have seen the rest of the crew straining mightily against the backs of their seats, pained, though unworried, expressions on their faces.  “one hundred thousand!” the pilot called again.  the hull of the ship was rattling violnetly, and the engines screamed like a hurricane of fire.  Issac had not moved from his wedged in position on the floor, but felt the beam digging further into his gut as the g-forces increased.  Issac had heard the term before, but now really, really knew what it meant, even failing a rudimentary understanding of the physics.  his agony was the only textbook he needed .  he felt sick and dizzy.  he gritted his teeth and attempted to breathe, though he was unsure if he was succeeding or not.  he grunted and groaned against the acceleration, an adversary more than worthy.  a moment later: “one hundred and fif–” suddenly, the cockpit was still.  “–ty thousand,” the pilot finished in the sudden calm.  the gripping force of speed was gone, the rattling was gone, even the scream of the engines had faded to a dull roar.

“we’re clear.”

“contacts?”  the captain asked.  Issac wondered whether Devers noticed, or even cared, about his unsecured passenger.

“none–” Gamne began before cutting herself off.  “one.  he’s turning.  he’s dipping back into the atmosphere, mister Devers,” she said excitedly.

Devers sat back in his chair and smiled broadly.  he even laughed a little bit, though stress still stained his voice.  “Issac?” he asked, turning around for the first time.  Issac had brought himself up to his knees, but could get no further.

“i’m–” he started, attempting to draw on some absent source of strength.  he puked on the floor.  long, hard wretches.  then he collapsed into a ball on the steel paneling and wept.

[ the last voyage of the lethan devers: part two comes out june 18th!  stay tuned! ]