Legacy

LEGACY by Thomas Heasman-Hunt

COPYRIGHT

First published in the United Kingdom 20th March 2017 by Cynefin Road

Legacy

Copyright© Thomas Heasman-Hunt 2016

All Rights Reserved.

Cover Images

Copyright © Cynefin Road 2016

All Rights Reserved.

The author has exercised his legal and moral rights.

Legacy is a work of fiction and any similarities to persons or events depicted are coincidental (and somewhat unlikely until the EM Drive is functioning or CERN open a portal to a parallel world). The author suffered from hot legs during the publication process but was otherwise unharmed.

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First Electronic Edition

ISBN 978-0-9957637-8-4

For Emma. Obviously.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began writing with no particular plan and the story simply took me where it wanted to go. The characters who grew did so organically, often showing up and demanding attention, though it's no coincidence their nature reflects my own value system. Representation matters, and I hope you come to be as fond of them as I am.

Legacy started life as six serialised short stories, chronicling the interstellar adventures of Emily Ajax and the episodic structure reflects these humble beginnings.

THH.

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF CAPTAIN ROBERT AJAX

"I, Captain Robert Ajax, being of sound mind and body…blah blah…you know how these things go. I hate recording them, but my lawyer tells me I have to do it every year – whatever that means here in deep space – to account for time dilation. So here it is, for what it’s worth, my latest last will and testament. Maybe this’ll be the one that matters. Maybe I’ll switch things up, just for the hell of it this time. I mean, what difference does it make? Everyone I care about already has everything they ever wanted; I made sure of that. What’s the point in being the most famous man in the galaxy if you can’t provide for your nearest and dearest? I’m not one for leaving things behind. What’s the point of having a legacy if you’re not around to see people use it?

"So. Here’s all I have to say, about everything: I’m Captain Ajax. Privateer, adventurer, war hero. I saved the Four Quadrants, as you all know. There’s a statue of me on Lumina that I’m sure you’ve seen. They got my moustache wrong, but I guess it’s not important. There are only a few people who know the whole story about my adventures. Patrick. Dracon, of course. Like me, they’ll take it to their graves, I’m certain of that. I suppose, looking back, my motivations, my reasons, aren’t important. We made a better galaxy. We saved humanity. What more can you ask from a life? Ever since I was stuck on that freighter, crawling through the outer reaches of that miserable system I was born in, I’ve just wanted to make a difference. Well, I did that, and then some. I changed the universe. We all did. Is that my legacy? Is that what I leave behind?

"No. I only leave one thing behind, and that’s her. My heir. My daughter. I was a hero for the whole galaxy, but not for her. I should have been there when she was growing up. I should have done right by her, but I didn’t. I was a crummy dad, and a worse role-model. Thankfully, she’s too smart to make the same mistakes I did. I hope she stays in Osiris where she belongs, with all the comforts the long peace I helped win has brought her. I don’t want her flying across space, risking life and limb in strange gravity wells, always wondering whether she’ll overload her tidal drive and blow her ship to pieces. That’s no life. Gravity: it brings us together, and it rips us apart. That’s an old saying, I think, or maybe I just made it up.

"It’s all for her. It has to be. Everything that’s mine must go to her, to Emily, to make a better life than I made. That must sound ridiculous, given everything I’ve achieved, and I hope she never comes to understand what I mean. I hope she never finds out what my real legacy to her, and the rest of humankind, was. That’s what I really want to give her: peace, and a life without the kinds of horrors I’ve faced. Or better yet, a peace built on a stronger foundation than the one we laid. I think someone else will need to be responsible for that though. My adventuring days are long behind me.

"Ah, listen to all this rambling! This isn’t a will! Interface: delete all previ…wait, no…this should be honest. This, if nothing else, should be the truth. Let it stand. Everything goes to Emily. Everything. This is important.

Interface: save document. Seal with retinal scan.

ONE

I don’t understand why this is so important to you, Emily... Kit spun the good luck charm he carried everywhere with him on the table and the movements sparked holographic flashes on its smooth surface. The charm had originally been a link in a suit of body armour worn by a Meccite warrior-hulk and, to hear Kit tell it, he’d actually ripped it from it in the heat of battle. Emily had been there and knew perfectly well the guns were long-silent by the time the pampered boy had started picking his way through the bodies of the slain for anything which might make an interesting trophy. It was an appropriate ju-ju for him to be fiddling with though – the end of the Meccite Wars had come shortly after, their preferred methods of warfare rendered obsolete by the refinement of the mono-mass railgun. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she could still hear the crackle of elctrostatic and the whistle of exotic matter toroids as they hurtled through the air and sliced through armour which now seemed an antique.

It matters, she explained, because what’s mine is mine.

Kit smiled. He was a handsome, youthful-appearing man with a floppy fringe of sparkling hair, eyes he’d had surgically mismatched and, when he grinned his boyish grin like that, subdermal holo-patterns shimmered across his cheeks. He gestured around the big sitting room. Don’t you have everything you could ever want though? You’re the richest woman in the system.

"In the Quadrant, she corrected. But that isn’t the point. I don’t want my inheritance because of what it is, I want it because of what it represents." She stood up abruptly and stalked across the room to a panoramic window which took up most of one vast wall. Her holographic interface attempted to keep up with her, momentarily surrounding her in a cloud of swirling semi-transparent portholes, but she absent-mindedly dismissed it with a wave and the glowing shapes folded themselves neatly into the device on her wrist. She stood at the glass, looking out at the familiar view of Osiris Prime, the world which had been her home for over two centuries. From this high orbit, the surface of the gas giant was a gently-curving sea of swirling orange clouds. The lights of the mining facilities high in the stratosphere winked at her. Even now, their tethers would be descending to the lower atmospheric layers to claim the bounty of the clouds for the Cartels. Above the mottled ocean currently hung two of the inhabited moons, almost totally black in the darkness of space except for the webs of silver light. Roads, vast refinery complexes, and spaceports. Behind them, stretching into infinity, the star-speckled magnificence of the cosmos.

From here, the Darkstar Nebula was visible as an angry red bruise at the extreme left of the sky, and the galactic disc was a bright band of light slashing the heavens in two. She had visited over five-hundred inhabited systems, seen many times that number of worlds, observed the disc from every vantage in known space, but this was still her favourite view of them all. This was where she had grown up, where her mother’s family had lived for generations; citizen of the galaxy though she might be, this orbital was the closest thing she had to a homeworld.

She put one hand on the glass and watched a blocky ore freighter disengage from the nearest mining platform and heave its megaton bulk into orbit with a blue burst of thrusters.

Emily? Kit was by her side. He’d been her friend for decades now. He was half a century her junior, and not nearly as well-travelled and wise as he thought himself, but she found his company agreeable.

All my life, she said, "I’ve been given everything I could ever want. I was his daughter. Everyone knew me. Growing up, my face was splashed across every network node, my life was dissected by every holo-reporter in the galaxy. I’ve lived in the public eye, so much so I don’t feel like anything really belongs to me – not even myself."

I thought you liked the attention.

She smiled ruefully. "I won’t pretend I haven’t used it to my advantage now and then, but that’s not my point. What I’m trying to say is...well, that I was given everything. I never had to work. She nodded down at Osiris Prime. I never laboured on a mining ship. I never even served on a battlecruiser or so much as waited a table in my life."

Isn’t that a good thing?

"Yes, of course it is. You think I want to be down there refining liquid lithium? But nothing’s mine. It was all his."

Your father’s, Kit said. He had a bad habit of stating the obvious – he wasn’t too bright, but he was charming (and rich) enough to fake it.

Yes. My father’s.

Her father loomed over everything about her. How could he not? He loomed over the entire galaxy. He was a titan. The story of how a humble privateer captain had risen to become one of the Free Planets’ greatest heroes was a long and complicated one. By the time Emily had been born it had already been written so she learned it as history like everyone else, until the charming, understated man who appeared intermittently in her life to shower her with affection and gifts seemed totally divorced from the god-among-men who had changed the course of human history.

The man she read about in the holo-archives was not only a ruthless and gifted ship commander, but also a master diplomat, a skilled warrior, and a peerless leader of men. In his era much of the galaxy had been a lawless place, a patchwork of petty realms ruled over by lords and kings little better than brigands. He had been a ray of light in a dark universe, a cowboy captain in the finest tradition of space exploration. A charmer of women – like her mother – and a two-fisted hero who brawled his way from bars bolted to the surface of cold asteroids, to the courts of emperors. He’d captained one ship at first, The Sunskimmer, a refitted freighter with an overclocked engine and an overgunned prow. And with just that ship, he’d toppled despotic regimes, halted invasion fleets, saved a hundred worlds from destruction or enslavement. The Free Planets had been a spent force when he’d begun it, but by endorsing and aiding his activities, he’d restored order and peace to the galaxy. Or so the history books said.

Captain Ajax, she said. Not my father. Not really. I mean, he was, but I never met that man. Even when he took me with him. By then, it was all in the past, Kit. He was just touring the places he’d saved, the all-conquering hero returning to the scene of his greatest triumphs to be showered in glory again.

Showered is right – remember the blossom on Eris?

Emily smiled at the memory. The Erisians had spent a decade actually chemically altering the climate of their planet so, when she visited with her father, the gooja trees rained delicate blossom petals the whole time they were there – some months. It must’ve taken them a long time to put things right, but it had been awe-inspiringly beautiful. She remembered the streets of their shining capital with its spires piercing the pink sky and the carpet of flowers they had to wade through, and still more floating down from the twisted branches of the great trees, until it seemed like the air was full of dancing fairy wings. At sunset, as the horizon turned vibrant blue, they turned translucent in the light and it was like gliding through an ocean of spectral gossamer. By then, he was just an old man in a uniform which barely fit him, she said sadly.

So what does that have to do with any of this?

She looked at him sharply. He could be very dense sometimes. "The whole galaxy thought they owned my father, Kit, but I’m his only child. And now...now he’s dead. And a thousand worlds are flying black flags in mourning. But he was my father. They can keep their Captain Ajax; I didn’t know him."

"But it’s one moon..."

She slammed her fist against the glass in fury. There was no risk she would damage it – like the rest of the orbital facility, it was covered in enough magnetic shielding to repel a cruiser-mounted antiphoton cannon. It was his moon. His home. When he was done gallivanting through the stars, saving princesses and scouring the Darkstar Raiders out of their nests, that’s where he came back to. Not here, where he left me: there, on a bare moon, half a Quadrant away.

Is it true he won it playing praxian squares with the Crown-Prince of New Odin?

So he always said. Who knows now? New Odin hasn’t been habitable in two generations. The history books say what they say. All I know is, it was his place. And he was my father.

You have to admit though, Kit said diplomatically, the Free Planets have a claim on a lot of the facilities and equipment there. It was either theirs to begin with, or he claimed it while carrying out missions on their behalf.

He was a privateer. A free man. Why do you think he died a captain? If he’d been enlisted in Spacefleet, he’d have been Admiral Ajax two centuries ago.

I know, but...

A free man! Free to claim his own bounty! Free to confiscate the assets of enemy vessels as he saw fit! This is written into the very charter of the Free Planets! It was an argument she’d been having with everyone she knew for weeks now. Kit knew it all as well as she did, but she couldn’t leave this alone. "Captain Ajax, my father, was a privateer with a contract of service to the government of the Free Planets. He revolutionised warfare, he changed the destiny of the Four Quadrants, he amassed a fortune greater than almost anyone else in history. He was a legend and a hero, but they never owned him. He was his own man. And that moon is a monument to his success. It’s where he built his home, where he kept all the mementoes and keepsakes of his adventures. It was his place. And I’m his daughter: his only living heir. All that was his, he bequeathed to me. It’s encoded into his personal archives, Kit, sealed with his own retina scan. The Free Planets want to renege on an agreement as ancient as interstellar travel. He was a privateer."

But you aren’t, Kit told her gently, and are you going to risk a war to fight the very government your father helped to preserve?

Emily stared out at the writhing surface of Osiris Prime, another huge freighter gliding slowly down to the near platform. She was wealthy and powerful, thanks to her father. How many of the Cartels in this system would rally to her if she decided to press her claim against the Free Planets? Some, perhaps. Maybe even most. But when it came to actual fighting, there were only a handful of them she’d want to rely on. Her name carried weight across the stars, but she wasn’t her father, and she’d never led fleets into battle. And, like Kit, they’d say it was only one moon. She had a dozen moons already. What was one more jewel in the fabulous crown of a spoiled princess? But it wasn’t about the moon. It was about her father. Like everything. Even in death, he loomed over her.

She rested her head against the glass and closed her eyes.

***

Roland’s World was a tiny speck of nothing on the edge of the Anubis Expanse, just halfway across the sector from Osiris. It was little more than a bare rock, with almost nothing to recommend it except for a sky constantly streaked by multi-hued dust clouds of the Expanse, great nebulae rising in columns light years high, constantly lit by the slow explosions of stellar birth in their impenetrable cores. Emily’s ship slowed to subluminal speeds, appearing to burst from nowhere close to the surface of the cold red sun into which Roland’s World was slowly spiralling in its aeons-long orbital decay. No one knew who Roland had been now. It was just what the place was called. The only reason anyone had ever heard of this desolate corner of the galaxy was because the stellar density made it an excellent staging point for fleet movements.

A hundred battles had been born in amongst the threaded clouds of star stuff and Roland’s World, a moon-sized body locked in the embrace of an ancient, dying sun was the only substantial planet for a dozen light years. It was therefore orbited by hundreds of installations of various sizes, from dockyards to defence platforms and hab-satellites. It was pure military though: an austere and far-flung outpost of the Free Planets’ vast interstellar navy, the Spacefleet.

The Osirian ship which had brought her here wasn’t much more than a pleasure frigate, dwarfed by the battleships docked in orbit of Roland’s World. Her father had supposedly ushered in an era of peace, but you’d never know it from looking at the huge dreadnoughts and battlecruisers hanging against the backdrop of the gorgeous nebula. Emily stood on the bridge, her arms folded, watching the fleet yards glide past through the ship’s holoscreen. The captain was a humble man who knew his business, and he hadn’t objected to giving her the run of the craft. She’d probably spent more time in deep space than him anyway and travelled on ships far more advanced than this little cutter. The menacing prow of one cruiser loomed to port as they were directed into their dock by the facility’s computers, a mile-wide forest of bristling weaponry jutting out: sufficient firepower to scour an inhabited world down to the bedrock. Maintenance craft swarmed across the hull like worker bees, each of them the size of sub-orbital airtram but dwarfed by perspective. A ship that large must require a crew of thousands. What enemy remained at large in the galaxy capable of standing against it?

The usual checks were waived for Emily as she boarded the spacedock – her name was all the clearance she required – and she strode through the gleaming corridors with her friend Jilly in tow. Kit had been unable to travel with her, which was probably a good thing since he’d have been less than useless in a meeting like this. No, stolid, reliable Jilly was a much better companion. She was the daughter of one of the wealthiest Cartel owners in Osiris, and they were both dressed in the fashion of the Osirian nobility – simple pants and tunic in greys and browns, not dissimilar in principle to the workers’ overalls. Of course, Emily supplemented her plain outfit with a few adornments from her personal collection. An ancient Jovian diamond on her lapel, created by the crushing pressures in the heart of a gas giant; a bracelet hung with charms taken from the cultures of a dozen distant planets including a minute tail feather of the extinct H’shan, preserved for eternity in a miniaturised stasis field, and a Phoenician mind prism which occasionally threw out multi-coloured flashes of light in response to the mood of the wearer. But most valuable of all, if not openly displayed, was a gift from her father: a priceless relic of the Darkstar Wars. It was a simple thing. An antique data chip hanging around her neck on a fine platinum chain, currently tucked discreetly into her collar. It was important though. Vitally important.

They walked into the conference room, a dome-shaped chamber at the top of this section of the facility. The roof was transparent, offering an awe-inspiring view of the nebula. As if on cue, a pulse of light throbbed almost directly above them, sending flashes. An atmospheric electrical storm through clouds which slowly cycled from red to purple to blue as they watched. The only other occupant of the room was a blank-faced clone, a legal clerk, sitting at the head of the long table, who bowed gently when they entered.

Emily looked around, then turned to Jilly angrily. This is outrageous, she said, there’s no one here!

Relax, her friend told her.

He’s keeping me waiting on purpose. Letting me know who’s in control.

Well this is his station, Emily.

So? My father made him the man he is! He at least owes me the dignity of...

The door on the opposite side of the room swished open and the clerk rose to bow to the man who entered. Emily turned smoothly and put on her most diplomatic facial expression. Lord Admiral, she said, trying hard not to clench her teeth.

Lord Admiral Dracon, one of the most decorated officers in Spacefleet, the foremost weapons development expert in the Free Planets, and hero of a hundred battles, cut a rather dashing figure, somewhat at odds with the warm smile he gave her. Emily! My dear! He crossed over to her, stepping around the clerk, putting his hands on her shoulders and looking down at her in a fatherly way. Why so formal?

Sorry...Uncle...it’s been a while. I wasn’t sure...

Nonsense. What’s half a century to people like us? And is this Jilly? I almost didn’t recognise you.

I told her she shouldn’t straighten her hair, Emily said with a rueful glance in her friend’s direction.

Ah, that must be it, Dracon smiled, how are your parents?

Well when I left, sir, Jilly said, keeping her tone even.

Let’s sit, he said, gesturing for them to take their places at the table.

They sat on one side, he on the other, with the clerk between them. Like all clones he was unassuming and androgynous, but he had a mass of circuitry built into the back of his skull and down his spine; additional archive banks for his complex work. That meant he was a specialist in interstellar disputes, a notoriously tricky legal area thanks to the vagaries of relativistic space travel. Contracts could be confusing when neither side can even agree on the definition of ‘now’. Dracon ran his hands down a neatly-trimmed goatee. His hair and beard were both silvery grey, an affectation since, after four-hundred years of life, he could choose to look however he wished. He was wearing his Spacefleet uniform with the golden knots of rank displayed openly on the tunic’s chest and a crimson collar which indicated his specialisation in research. Now, I hope we can solve this amicably, Emily.

So do I, Uncle. I’m sure you’ve reviewed my claim.

I have. He placed his palm against the surface of the conference table and the prepared holo-documents ghosted across the surface, a window automatically spinning its way to each of them, except the clerk who of course would have the entire contents memorised already.

And you still dispute it?

Dracon leant back and steepled his fingers in front of his face. This is a complicated situation.

How so?

Your father was technically a privateer.

Exactly. And, like all private individuals, he is free to distribute his assets as he sees fit. A copy of his will is on record in the Spacefleet archives. He has passed all his worldly goods on to me, his daughter and heir. I don’t even know why we’re having this meeting.

The contents of Troja are not his to, as you say, ‘distribute’, Emily.

Troja was the name of his moon. Her moon, now. Did they not belong to my father, Captain Ajax?

Yes...

And, again, I refer you to the will. She glanced at the clerk. That’s what it says, doesn’t it? Everything that was his is now mine, correct?

The clerk’s eyes flashed as he accessed his electronic archives. The wording of the relevant document is quite clear, he said in a toneless voice.

Exactly. So give me what’s mine, Dracon.

The Lord Admiral pursed his lips. His fingers drummed gently on the tabletop. What’s yours. Yes, indeed. Here is the thing, Miss Ajax, the issue of ‘ownership’ when it comes to the activities of privateers is always complicated. Ordinarily disputes of this kind are easily resolved but in the case of your father, thanks to his service to the Free Planets over the centuries, we are in a quandary.

Which is?

You can’t have that moon.

Emily threw her hands in the air. This is absurd! He left it to me!

It doesn’t belong to him.

His retina scan is on the deeds! She looked at the clerk again. Yes? He silently nodded his assent and she raised her eyebrows and held out a hand to Dracon, daring him to gainsay the simple facts with which he’d been presented.

How well did you know your father, Emily?

She blinked, surprised at the sudden change of subject. What does that mean?

It’s a simple question. How well did you know him?

"He was my father."

But he was over two-hundred when you were born. And how often did you see him?

I travelled the galaxy with him...

For a few decades. He was an intermittent presence in your life though, isn’t that right?

What are you getting at, Dracon?

He leant forward and jabbed his finger against the table to punctuate his point, sending flashes of holo-feedback across its surface each time he made contact. "I fought by his side for hundreds of years. I was his Executive Officer aboard The Sunskimmer, assigned by the Free Planets in defiance of his formal protest at the presence of a military observer on his bridge. We spent most of those early voyages at each other’s throats."

I know the stories, Uncle...

Do you? Do you know what it’s like to have a relationship like that? We were battle brothers, Emily. We saved each other’s lives more times than either of us cared to count. I hauled him from the heart of a collapsing star, only a pressure suit between me and oblivion. He strangled a Yelvian jackal-warrior with his bare hands and performed field surgery on me while we were under heavy fire. You may know the stories, but you weren’t there. How could you have been when you weren’t even born? I knew that man. I loved that man. I know he was your father, but I was his XO. I sat beside him on the bridge, I commanded in his absence. First I won his respect, then the respect of his crew. We were inseparable for almost our entire careers. Together, we won back the stars for civilisation. He’s the reason I’m an admiral.

Emily looked into his eyes. She’d known this man since she was a child and she was all too aware of the bond he’d shared with her father. There was a sadness deep within him she’d never noticed before and she remembered that he too was in mourning. He had also lost a member of his family. But it didn’t change the facts. An admiral, she mused aloud. While he was just a captain till the day he died. Because he was a privateer, with a contract. A contract you now intend to ignore.

Emily...

"His will is clear. What was his