Chapter 1: Exile

“Your transfer papers, Corporal Schaffer,” the Admiral chimed as he handed him a file with a condescending smirk. Schaffer took it, opening the document and glancing over its contents with a concerned expression. His concern turned to horror as he realized where exactly it was that the admiral was sending him.

“This isn’t legal, Rawling. You can’t just make me disappear into thin air, people will notice.”

The Admiral straightened his spectacles, his smirk turning into a wide grin.

“I can assure you, Mister Schaffer, you have already disappeared, and nobody has noticed.”

Schaffer rose to his feet and stood before the Admiral’s mahogany desk, the varnished wood shining under the mellow office lighting. He balled his fists, anger overcoming him.

“I could hop over this desk and beat the life out of you before security was even alerted,” he snarled.

“You’d never get out of here alive, Corporal. You’re on a Navy space station, where would you go?”

“This assignment is a death sentence, and you know it, you miserable old bastard. You too yellow to do the job yourself?”

The Admiral rose from his seat behind his desk and leaned forward to look Schaffer in the eye, planting his gloved hands on the table, the white material contrasting with the dark wood. He was clad in an immaculate, white uniform, the standard attire of the UNN Admiralty who oversaw military operations in human-controlled space. The badges and medals that were displayed proudly on his breast identified him as one of the overseers of affairs on the Pinwheel, the most notorious of all the Naval stations in Coalition space. It was a prominent and esteemed position, and Rawling had not attained it without significant nepotism and corruption, at least one instance of which Schaffer had accidentally stumbled upon.

“Listen here, you insubordinate worm,” Rawling sneered. He emphasized the last word as if Schaffer was a stain that he had just discovered on his lapel. “You stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, you made problems for me. As your commanding officer, it is fully within the scope of my duties to reassign personnel who I have deemed ... disruptive to the day to day operations of this station.”

“I have friends, you think they won’t notice that I’m missing?”

“My dear fellow,” Rawling chuckled, “check your papers. You aren’t missing.”

Schaffer scowled at the man, then turned his eyes down to the folder, scanning the text as Rawling waited with a knowing smile. It was all legal, there were no inconsistencies. The admiral outranked him, Schaffer couldn’t refuse his orders. To be charged with insubordination or dereliction of duty in wartime was to risk a lengthy prison sentence or even execution. He could try to challenge the ruling, but it would be a kangaroo court, no doubt presided over by the bastard himself and a jury of his minions. In fact, he might be counting on that, it would add legitimacy to his plot.

“I’ll tell people. I’ll tell everyone,” Scaffer blurted, panicking somewhat as he started to realize just how carefully Rawling had orchestrated his plan. It had all the subtlety of a mob hit.

“You aren’t telling anyone, Corporal Schaffer. You’re actually quite late. In fact, you’ve not been on the station for several days.”

“What are you talking about? You’re insane.” Schaffer scanned the document, noticing the date on it. November the third, today was the fifth. According to the documents that he held in his hands, he had been transferred two days ago. He looked up at the admiral in disbelief. “Even you can’t pull this many strings, Rawling. What about security camera footage? The testimonies of all the people that I’ve interacted with?” He waved his hand in the direction of the door behind him. “Your own damned security personnel who just escorted me in here?”

“All taken care of, I assure you. I am a powerful man, Schaffer. You knew as much when you decided to challenge me. Your peers all had the good sense to take the bribe and shut their mouths, as did a few of your so-called friends.” Schaffer lowered his head at the revelation, staring at the carpeted floor. Who? Who had sold him out? “The rest have been shuffled around, they won’t be in touch with each other, most have been reassigned off-station. The only narrative that could ever be constructed about your whereabouts is my own, and the official records reflect that.”

Schaffer seethed, he was out of ideas, completely outsmarted.

“You won’t-”

“Get away with this?” Rawling interrupted with a chuckle. “I already have. As far as anyone knows, you are long gone. Just another brief acquaintance who was rotated out, one face among thousands.” The Admiral pressed a button on his desk, activating an intercom with a hiss of static. “Guards, please escort Corporal Schaffer to his next assignment.”

Two marines in black UNN combat armor entered the room, making a beeline towards him. He briefly considered struggling, but it would be pointless. If he was beaten to death on the carpet before the eyes of the admiral, he would only be playing into his hands. He wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. The guards grabbed Schaffer firmly by his arms and twisted them behind his back, restraining him with a zip tie secured tightly around his wrists.

“It’s a fairly long trip to Borealis,” Rawling called after him as the guards dragged him through the automatic doors. “I hope you don’t mind being in solitary confinement for a couple of weeks.”

The guards, obviously corrupt themselves, manhandled Scaffer through the cramped engineering tunnels of the station. They were careful to keep him out of view of the general population who lived and worked in the giant torus that ringed the central control hub, rotating on its axis to provide artificial gravity. That was where the space station got its nickname. The Pinwheel.

Schaffer didn’t struggle, it was pointless. As far as anyone knew, he wasn’t even on the station. If the marines were to dispose of him in these tunnels and drop him out of a convenient airlock, he would not be missed. He should be thanking his stars that Rawling had not done precisely that. The man was cruel, but his cruelty ensured that Schaffer had a chance to escape his fate, however small.

He knew where he was being sent, he had recognized the name in the documents that Rawling had handed to him. It was the Polar outpost. It had some official designation, a long string of numbers and letters that would only mean something to the button pushers and screen tappers who worked in logistics, but its reputation preceded it. It was a small, manned base in the northern polar region of Borealis. The planet was inhospitable, with crushing gravity, unpredictable weather and inhabitants who could at best be described as unfriendly.

Some kind of deal had been struck with the alien who ruled the area, its permission had been sought to build a listening post there, so that the UNN might spy on its allies in other territories of the planet. Word had circulated, as it often does, when the station had started to earn a bad reputation for driving its personnel crazy. It was said that even the aliens who lived in the region found the featureless wasteland that was the frozen tundra inhospitable, and had sought to escape it by any means. Those unlucky enough to be stationed there were confined to the tiny outpost. After a string of suicides and attempted desertions, the Admiralty had eventually reduced the staff to a handful, then to zero. The station was entirely automated now and was generally considered to have been abandoned.

Schaffer knew that he wouldn’t be coming back from the Terminal, as it had been so aptly named, as it had been the final destination for many of the poor souls who had been stationed there.

The guards dragged him through the winding service tunnels, ducking under protruding pipes and bundles of exposed electronics. They must be taking him to one of the docking hangars that were spaced out at regular intervals along the torus. Perhaps he could call for help once there, and some crew member loading cargo would notice him and raise the alarm. Somehow he doubted that Rawling would have failed to account for that.

The admiral was certainly vindictive, but Schaffer had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of his job as a Corporal on the Pinwheel station was to take inventory of the cargo that came in and out of one of the hangars where the larger supply ships docked to unload their wares. He had noticed goods going missing, cargo being loaded onto ships that had not been inventoried, and money changing hands outside of official channels. He had investigated, and that investigation had led him to none other than Admiral Rawling. The man had been abusing his position of authority to run a black market under the very noses of the Admiralty, and on the largest military installation outside of Sol system no less. He was audacious, that was for sure, but what Schaffer had initially assumed to be a small smuggling operation had ended up extending to half of the damned station staff. They were all corrupt, taking bribes to keep quiet.

Wanting to be a hero, he had confronted one of the smugglers in the hangar, who had immediately reported him to Rawling. A short while later, he had found himself summoned before the corrupt admiral.

They arrived at their destination, one of the guards shoving him through a small service door and into one of the cavernous hangars, as he had suspected. The ceiling extended hundreds of feet above him, the walls lined with walkways and bridges, large enough to accommodate even frigates should they need refueling or repairs. A low-powered force field contained the air, strong enough to prevent the loss of atmosphere to space, but not so powerful as to impede the passage of ships and shuttles. It was common practice not to venture too close to the edge. A human pushing hard enough might slip through the barrier, such accidents were not unheard of. The same artificial gravity created by the spin of the station was present in the hangars, as they were located on the North and South faces of the torus.

The same guard gave him another rough shove, pushing him forward as they began to march across the bay. It was mostly deserted, what few personnel that Schaffer could see were little more than small specs in the distance. There was one shuttle parked on the deck, sitting idle as two men loaded crates onto it. It was a standard UNN dropship with a stunted nose, a cockpit placed high for visibility and stubby wings for atmospheric flight. The guard pointed at it over Schaffer’s shoulder with a gloved hand, his voice coming through on speakers embedded in his full-faced helmet, crackling with static.

“There’s your shuttle, and out there,” he pointed to open space. Schaffer could just make out a tiny object floating in the distance, too small to make out the details. “That’s the jump carrier that’s gonna take you to Borealis.”

A jump carrier? Did the corruption extend so far? Jump carriers were the largest class of ships operated by the UNN, their very purpose being to use their massive superlight engines to tow smaller vessels into superlight in their wake. Perhaps the captain was not aware of the situation, but some of the ship’s crew certainly were. With luck, he would have an opportunity to escape or to interact with someone who was not in on the conspiracy, but he doubted it. Admiral Rawling did not make such mistakes and his money greased the palms of anyone who might interfere with his plans.

One of the men loading the crates onto the shuttle stopped what he was doing, placing a box down on the loading ramp and wiping his brow as he appraised Schaffer.

“This the guy the boss wants us to clip?”

“Yeah,” the Marine replied, pushing Schaffer forward and keeping a firm grip on his arm. “This is a special job though, don’t bump him off. He needs to get to the Terminal first. If they go looking, that’s where they’ll find him.”

The man loading cargo whistled, eyeing Schaffer up and down. He looked like an engineer, he was wearing yellow overalls that were stained with grease, along with a pair of thick work gloves.

“Don’t know what you did to piss the boss off, buddy, but that’s a tough break.”

Schaffer kept quiet, antagonizing these people would do him no good right now. The guard continued, talking over his shoulder.

“Fence this lot,” he said, gesturing to the boxes with his free hand. “The boss says you get an extra twenty percent of the cut for doing him this favor.”

“I hear that, give him my regards.”

The Marine handed Schaffer off to the shuttle crew, turning to leave with his colleague.

“In you go,” the man on the ramp said, taking him by the upper arm and angling him inside the craft. “You’re riding in the back with the crates, don’t give me and my pilot any trouble and we won’t give you any. I’m here to get you to Borealis, that’s all. It’s not personal.”

Schaffer took a seat on one of the boxes inside the cargo bay. It was packed with crates, most of them probably contained contraband or stolen goods. After the engineer was done loading, the pilot raised the ramp, sealing him in darkness. There was a short delay, then he felt the craft rise off the deck, feeling the thud of the landing gear as it retracted into the belly of the shuttle reverberate through his feet. He tried to steady himself, his hands still tied behind his back, the inertia buffeting him around as the craft accelerated and made course corrections. It didn’t take long for the shuttle to arrive at the jump carrier and begin to slow, angling itself towards what he knew was the landing bay of the larger craft.

Schaffer couldn’t see anything, the portholes were all blocked by crates, but he knew the appearance of the ships from memory.

Jump carriers were massive vessels, their hulls covered in recesses where gunships, fighter craft and shuttles full of Marines would anchor themselves like limpets in order to ride the superlight current that the behemoth generated. Larger ships with more mass could coast up alongside it in formation, ensuring that they were pulled in when the drive came online and tore a hole in space. The vessels had a vaguely bullet-shaped profile, their bulbous hulls broken up by the hangar bays situated on the port and starboard, open to space save for the shimmering force fields that kept in the atmosphere. They were painted in the traditional ocean-grey, as was most of the UNN fleet. Along their undersides were arrays of railguns mounted on flexible arms, torpedo tubes and point defense turrets mounted at intervals along their length. The enormous main engines at the ship’s rear would be idle as it drifted in open space, but when in motion they spouted plumes of blue hydrogen flame.

The shuttle slowed to a crawl, then he felt the impact of the landing gear on the deck, the shock absorbers making the craft bounce briefly before coming to rest. Most ships in the UNN, including shuttles, had artificial gravity generators. It was trivial to generate an AG field on something as small as a dropship, but as the mass of the vessel increased, so too did the power requirements. Large space stations like the Pinwheel just couldn’t feasibly meet those requirements, and so they were given a spin, using centrifugal force as a substitute.

Schaffer waited, his eyes unable to adjust to the pitch blackness. After a couple of minutes, the ramp descended, the glare of the hangar’s harsh lighting blinding him for a moment. The engineer climbed up into the cargo hold and draped a jacket over Schaffer’s shoulders, concealing his tied hands.

“No trouble now, and this will all go smoothly. If you try to make a scene, you’ll regret it. The boss said you had to be alive when you got to Borealis, he didn’t specify in what condition.”

“I won’t make a scene,” Scaffer muttered, following the man off the shuttle.

“You unpack these crates,” the man called back to his pilot as he descended from the cockpit. “I’ll deal with this guy.”

There was nobody else on the deck, a few other shuttles lay idle, powered down and waiting for their crews to return. A few cargo lifters with thick, tank-like treads were stowed near the walls, their long forks colored with yellow warning markings. Schaffer looked out into space, watching the Pinwheel hang in the velvet blackness, the arid planet that it orbited shining below it. It spun lazily, the fat torus ringed with glinting lights and the off-blue glow of force fields. This was probably the last time that he would ever see it. His train of thought was popped like a bubble as the engineer urged him forward.

“Enough sightseeing, come on. Let’s get this done, and we can both be on our way.”

They marched over to the rear of the hangar bay, entering the carrier proper through one of the automatic doors that led them into a cramped hallway. Schaffer had ridden alongside carriers, but he had never actually been inside one before. It was much like a battleship or a cruiser, the low ceilings and narrow passages were claustrophobic, and one had to duck to avoid protruding pipes and machinery. It was like being inside some kind of industrial factory. The air was stale, and it had that metallic, dry tinge to it that was so familiar to Naval personnel.

They proceeded down the corridor, turning corners in a maze of nondescript hallways until they came across a man who was waiting for them, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed. He was wearing blue overalls, standard attire for Naval personnel. He put out an e-cigarette, the only kind permitted on service vessels because of the air filtration systems, and greeted the engineer with a wave of his hand.

“This the guy?”

The engineer nodded, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a wad of blue bills. He handed it to the man, who flipped through the stack, counting the notes. Schaffer recognized it as UN currency, the kind most often used in the colonies. Countries on Earth and Mars tended to retain their ancient currencies, but colony worlds and outposts preferred to deal in UN credits. Paper money was still preferred to digital transactions where shady dealings were concerned.

“I counted it already, Patrick, you know I won’t stiff you.”

“Just making sure,” the stranger replied, his voice gruff and gravelly. “I got a storage compartment for your cargo. Two weeks, one-way trip. There’s a toilet, and I’ll bring him food once a day. Nobody will find him here.”

“Rawling sends his regards.”

The engineer handed him off to Patrick and turned his back, walking away down the hall towards the hangar. Schaffer’s new ward took him roughly by the arm and tugged him forward, typing in a four-digit code on a panel beside a door. It opened with a whoosh of stale air, revealing a small room no larger than a prison cell. There was a sink and a toilet, along with a metal bed frame that had no mattress. This must have been a janitor’s haunt not too long ago, somewhere to rest and freshen up without having to travel the entire length of the ship to return to the living quarters. Schaffer was shoved unceremoniously inside, then the man drew a short, retractable blade. Schaffer tensed, fearing the worst, but the man ran it over the zip tie and cut his hands free of their restrains.

“You’re in the engineering section, nobody comes here besides me. You can shout for help if you like, nobody will hear you. The door is locked from the outside, so you can’t escape. I’ll bring you rations once per day, that’s all you get.” He brandished the knife, popping the blade free of the handle, the sharp metal glinting under the fluorescent lighting. “Don’t try anything stupid, I’m not allowed to kill you but I can sure as hell make you regret it.”

Schaffer didn’t reply, but Patrick seemed satisfied. He turned to leave, then hesitated for a moment, digging through his pockets.

“Catch,” he said, tossing an object to Schaffer. He snatched it out of the air, examining it. It was a clear, plastic bit, of the kind used during superlight jumps. “Don’t bite your tongue off during the jumps, or it’ll be my neck on the line.”

Patrick left, sealing the door behind him. Schaffer was glad for the bit at least, although he had no crash couch and no restraints in this cell. He would have to make do.

The nervous system was unable to handle the strain of inter-dimensional travel. The neurological effects included uncontrollable muscle spasms, blackouts, and temporary insanity. The safest way to traverse the dimensional tears was to be safely strapped down, rendered immobile with a bit preventing you from biting off your own tongue and bleeding out.

He shivered as he realized how cold he was. There was moisture dripping from an exposed pipe that had been sealed with some kind of tape, and there were no heating elements visible. This must be one of the older vessels still in service, it certainly didn’t seem up to spec. That was probably why it was hauling cargo to irrelevant allied worlds rather than serving on the front. What had Rawling said, it took two weeks to get to Borealis? Fuck...

He sat in silence for a long while, scanning the room with his eyes, taking in every detail and imperfection. There was nothing else to do. The least his captors could have done was give him a book to read to alleviate the boredom that would no doubt drive him half crazy, but maybe that was the idea.

He felt a subtle acceleration as the massive vessel began to maneuver, they were underway. There were no windows in his room, it must have been located somewhere towards the middle of the superstructure, but experience had honed his senses to detect the subtle movements of a ship in space. Jump carriers never went far under the power of their chemical rockets, it must be preparing for the first of several superlight jumps. Schaffer held the bit in his hand apprehensively, hoping that he would have time to insert it.

Suddenly the hairs on his arms stood on end, and he felt a strange tugging sensation in his sinuses. This was it, the carrier was preparing to expend the energy that it had accumulated in the superlight drive. When the drive had been charged with enough power from the several nuclear reactors that the carrier housed, it would release it, directing it towards the front of the ship and creating a tear in the fabric of space. Schaffer was no astrophysicist, he didn’t understand the details of inter-dimensional travel and miniaturized black holes. He only knew that the ship would be sucked in, exiting reality and entering an alternate dimension of space where the laws of physics allowed it to exceed the speed of light. At the end of the process, it would be catapulted dozens of light years away, where it would be birthed into our reality again like some giant stellar infant.

He inserted the bit, biting down on it and wondering if it would be better to be seated or lying down, then his senses left him.

Like trying to crawl out of a tar pit, Schaffer slowly regained consciousness. He found himself on the floor beside the bed, his head pounding like a hammer. Had he hit it on something, or was it just a migraine from the jump? He couldn’t tell. He spat out the plastic bit, wiping it on his clothes and stowing it in his pocket, then rose to his feet unsteadily as he braced himself against the metal bed frame for balance. His whole body was wracked by the slowly receding ache of cramping muscles, and he felt like someone had twisted a fork in his brain as if it were a bowl of pasta. He sat heavily on the bed, the rusty springs creaking beneath him, cradling his temples in his hands. This wasn’t his first rodeo, he knew that it would subside in a few minutes.