Backyard Starship: Origins Read online

  BACKYARD STARSHIP: ORIGINS

  2 SHORT STORIES FROM THE BACKYARD STARSHIP SERIES

  J.N. CHANEY

  TERRY MAGGERT

  Copyrighted Material

  Backyard Starship: Origins Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

  Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

  1st Edition

  CONTENTS

  Don’t Miss Out

  The Witch of Drocourt

  Peacemaker: Orbital

  Join the Conversation

  Connect with J.N. Chaney

  Connect with Terry Maggert

  About the Authors

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  THE WITCH OF DROCOURT

  6 SEPTEMBER 1918

  This was not the plan. This was never the plan.

  Halvix turned his head and spat. The blood landed on a ceramic deck festooned with bandages and three empty ReLive injector bags, their limp shapes a testament to how severe his wounds were. His ship had taken two rounds from the demon chasing him, each detonation shattering inner hull plates and riddling him with shrapnel from the aimed shots.

  The Peacemaker hunting him was good.

  Better than good. Nearly machine-like in her pursuit across four systems, two shipyards, and this backwater world where Halvix knew he would die.

  Unless he could get to the surface. It wasn’t a big planet, but it was big enough for him to dodge the badge until he healed. If he healed.

  He threw a glance at the reason he was running. It sat next to him, small and unassuming in the cradle, a bar of metal that massed less than Halvix’s own hand. The weight mattered little. The markings on the bar were critical. It was platinum, which was nice, he guessed, but the markings—in a language known only to scholars—well, that was the reason for his excursion. He regretted shooting the two Acolytes of Vinicul, but they were in the way and loud and inconvenient.

  And it wasn’t like the Temple at Viniculis needed all six relics to do whatever they did in the gloomy interior. Hell, he’d left five bars behind. If anything, Halvix was being generous. The Temple could go on.

  But Halvix might not.

  Another missile detonated close enough to rattle Halvix’s teeth—the ones he had left, anyway—and Halvix saw the power controls spike as his engine began to collapse. He had everything but time.

  So he made a play. “Open comm to Peacemaker vessel.”

  His AI, Six, answered instantly. “Channel open.”

  “Peacemaker Valint. As pleasant as this is, I’d like to end this pursuit. Will you consider my surrender?”

  The answer was immediate, and it didn’t bode well. Valint’s rich, lilting laugh came over the channel, then the screen flared to life, and she was there—tall, beautiful, and confident. She gave him a wintry smile, the kind only female humanoids could perfect, that told him there would be no surrender. Her hair was so black that it verged on blue, and it hung long over one shoulder. From beneath the curtain of hair peeked the badge of a Second Veteran. She was more than experienced. She was lethal.

  “I will consider removing the Bell Four of Vinicul from the wreckage of that shitpot you call a ship, you vermin. I’ll let it cool, pluck it from the ashes, and then spit on your bones. You murdered two—”

  “Wholly unintentional, I can assure you. I’m a thief, not a—”

  “You killed the last two fully Blessed Teachers. You didn’t kill two priests. You killed a faith,” Valint said in an icy growl.

  “I—oh.” Halvix felt his throat go tight. It had certainly not been a part of his plan. In a way, it made his choice that much easier. He feathered the control, readied his escape, and set the drive to go FTL, all while keeping eye contact with Valint, who seethed through the screen. He had a pod with supplies and power, and he had his wits. He could call in a ride—for the right price, of course—once the Peacemaker caught up to his ship, somewhere in between this system and the next galaxy. Either way, he didn’t care.

  It was time to go.

  With a wave, he cut the comms, grabbed the relic—Bell Four, he corrected himself, worth every bit of two million bonds—then limped into the escape pod where he collapsed with a groan. The bugout bullet, as he called it, was coated in fifty thousand bonds’ worth of neutralizer, making it the stealthiest thing within light-years. The chime sounded. He had pressure, so he sent the final command to his little ship, a stalwart class seven that had seen him through five decades of life as a thief.

  “Drive status go. Farewell, Meteor.”

  The shudder told him his pod was away, and the spiking whine that followed confirmed the Meteor had gone pluslight within the gravity well of a non-tech planet. That was a serious crime, but then, as Halvix clutched his loot while the pod fell howling through clouds, it was hardly the most pressing issue of the day.

  “Exterior report?” Halvix asked.

  “Stable but getting hot. You’re coming in over the nightside. And—”

  His AI, Six, had the voice of a young teacher, her vowels carefully rounded. When she hesitated, Halvix took notice. “And what?” he asked.

  “You appear to be joining a party.”

  “A party? Care to explain?”

  The pod was heating up now, and Halvix felt his skin prickle with sweat.

  “Maybe that’s the wrong word. Did we do any survey work on the current geopolitical status of this world?”

  Halvix felt a spike of alarm. “Did I do any research? You’re my AI. You’re the one who’s supposed to know. Not me. What in the Dark’s name are we heading into, Six?”

  For the second time in as many minutes, Six hesitated, and Halvix felt his guts go to water. “It would appear, for lack of a better term, that you’re dropping into the shit.”

  “Dropping into the what?”

  Six flashed a short video on the screen, and Halvix stopped speaking. Instead, he stared.

  The image was high-res, low light, and the closest thing Halvix could imagine to . . . hell. It was hell.

  Humanoids were blown apart in every direction. Animals, people, machines, and the land itself were torn and twisted in a horror show of mangled guts and fetid pools. Massive guns thundered, the air bright with explosions as millions of soldiers fought across a scar that ran as far as Halvix could see. As he watched, a rolling barrage of shells landed with a hideous effect, sending blood and viscera skyward when an entire squad of humans was vaporized. One soldier’s boots—upright and neatly positioned—remained, inexplicably, right where a shell landed.

  Halvix swallowed. This was primitive but deadly. He wasn’t landing on some pastoral grassland filled with idiotic shepherds and fools. “I’m—oh, shit—”

  “Yes. You’re landing in a war. And, based on our trajectory, we’ll be on the losing side.”

  “I am good and lost. I’ve never been so lost in my life,” Corporal Mark Tudor muttered, his feet squelching in mud that was calf-deep and rising. A small stream burbled mere yards away, but it didn’t matter. The war, Mark knew, was mud. It was mud and screams and blood, usually all at the same time, and he was now an Iowa farm boy who was utterly, hopelessly lost.

  It was hours until dawn, too. He could hunker down, or he could try to get the messages through. His satchel bulged with after-action reports, letters, and two critical communiques from an Australian Colonel who swore he’d see Mark dead if the messages didn’t get through. That had been some time ago, closer to Drocourt proper, just after an abysmal lunch of bread and cold coffee, chased with a stale French cigarette. Mark didn’t smoke, but he had to smoke to mask the odor of death. The line between Drocourt and Quéant ran nearly ten miles, all of it now a charnel house with the added wreckage of two mechanized Army elements.

  And dead men. So many dead men. And horses, their legs rigid in death, hooves pointing like accusatory fingers. Death came in all forms and for all species there in the aftermath of August and early September.

  “You’ve sent me to my grave, sir,” Mark said to the now-distant colonel who had bullied him into carrying even more messages with him on his journey. He squatted, peering into the murk, then wiping his eyes as if doing so would allow him to see in the dark. The sun had gone down hours earlier, and Mark had set out—first on a bicycle and then on foot when a German split the bike’s handlebars in two with a Mauser round in the last light of day. Now, here he huddled, thumbing his pistol and wondering where in the hell the town was. Maps were useless. The landscape was more lunar than earthly, pitted with shell holes big enough to hide a barn in.

  The only thing thicker than the evening fog was the pall of death, broken periodically by the cries of men calling to their
mothers or their wives or their children. No matter what language they were speaking, Mark knew what they were saying. No one died asking for honor. Everyone just wanted to go home, and—

  He froze.

  The sound was a mutter. A whisper. Mark strained to hear, leaning into the darkness with a feeling of desperation.

  “Etienne? Is that you?” the voice called out, weak but insistent.

  The speaker was male, young, and possibly American. Mark went rigid, then brought his salvaged pistol up and pointed in the direction of the voice. There were generally no pistols to be had, but Mark had taken his 1911 from a dying officer who had pressed it into his hand on a road choked with wounded. Mark had immediately cleaned the weapon, checked its load, and put it in his belt, remembering his father’s words from when they’d hunted for the stewpot.

  Take care of your weapon, and it will take care of you, son.

  “I will, Pop. I will, and devil take the dirt,” Mark felt himself whisper, clutching the 1911 like a rosary. Then he heard the voice again.

  “I’m comin’ down for breakfast, Ma. Be right down. All I have to do is tuck in my shirt,” said the boy, his words drifting toward Mark like a prayer. “Sure thing, Ma. Smells good, yes, it does. I’ll pump the can full at the well, Ma. I milked Claire before sunup. Cream’s in the icebox. Coming right . . . comin’ right down, Ma.”

  With deliberate slowness, Mark reached into his bag and found the stub of a candle he had taken from a church west of Cambrai. After striking a match, Mark cupped his hand and lit the candle.

  Mark saw the speaker behind the huddled ruins of a stone barn that had been shattered by a falling shell. The man—boy, really—lay on the ground, slumped against a section of wall of round river stones older than the United States. Now, the barn was scattered wreckage, like the boy, asking for his mother, thousands of miles from home. He was Canadian, judging by his uniform, and he wore the hint of a mustache on his pale, sweating upper lip. Mark walked slowly over to him, and the boy looked up, his eyes a startling, clear blue in the weak glimmer of the candle.

  “Ma? That you?” Blood pooled next to the boy, a dark, cloying puddle in the ragged dirt. Mark saw the boy’s wound and recoiled. Ribs and viscera showed through the wide tear in his uniform. He did not have long. “A drink, Ma? Sure am thirsty.”

  The boy couldn’t see Mark or anything else in this world. Not anymore.

  But he could drink. Mark held his canteen to the soldier’s lips and dribbled a thin stream of water into his mouth in hopes of bringing him some small measure of relief. The boy’s throat bobbed once, then he fell still and his head lolled to the side with a finality that made Mark want to scream.

  “He’s even younger than me. Damn you filthy—”

  Mark stopped suddenly as he saw a painfully pure light streak across the sky, followed by the report of a shell unlike anything Mark had heard in his forty-seven days of combat. The rolling boom went on forever, filling his senses.

  Did that shell . . . slow down?

  Mark pointed the 1911 toward the fading glow of—an impact? Was it an airplane coming to rest after a daring night flight? He’d heard of such missions but thought them little more than the fever dreams of French reporters who were drunk on fear and desperate to push back the Kaiser’s hordes with stories, if need be. The French 75s were far from victorious. The light was still shining, diffusing into the sky in blues and greens, but dying away even as he stared.

  I must know. I must see.

  As an afterthought, he blew out the candle and flicked the molten wax away. There was enough light coming through a battered copse of trees that he began moving, drawn to it.

  Looking at the light now, a dim, fading ripple in the low clouds, Mark felt suddenly calm. There, under the flickering skies of war-torn France, he allowed the fear to drain from his body and resigned himself to dying. He was exhausted. He was sick with it, existing in a place where the waking world was no different than Hell itself, though he’d heard Hell was, at least, warm and dry.

  “I must see,” he said, unsure whom he was speaking to.

  The remains of light were closer now, and Mark’s nose filled with the smell of fire. That, he knew. War was fire. It was always fire, and this war had seen more flame than all other wars combined. So Mark continued walking forward, holding the 1911 like a talisman, his feet encased in mud. He stepped on, over, and around more broken buildings, and men, and even the impossible beauty of an undamaged teacup, sitting upright on the buckboard of a shattered wagon, the horses and driver long gone save for a long smear of crimson.

  Then he heard the first scream, and this time, he knew the language.

  It was German.

  Halvix didn’t exit the pod; he survived it, rolling out onto the mud with a long, low groan.

  “Of all the things the gods made, gravity is the worst. I am accursed,” he mumbled. Taking stock, he sat up, blood streaming from his nose and other wounds in a steady drumbeat that proclaimed the end of his life.

  If he did nothing.

  “Gotcha,” he said as his fingers closed on the last ReLive bag in his shoulder pouch. Without hesitation, he buried the needle in his neck and squeezed, hissing in agony as the stopgap meds flooded his system in an attempt to close the new holes in his body.

  The meds made his head swim. Then, things began to clear. His ocular implants gave him limited vision, but even so, it was dark—except for the distant flashes of primitive artillery somewhere to the east.

  Then he really noticed the smell.

  Death. Or more accurately, war. Halvix hated war. It was a good way to get killed, and he was thief, not soldier. He pulled at the drinking tube and swallowed mineral-heavy fluid that gave him the strength to lever himself up. Swaying a bit, he stood, surveying the area around him.

  “This is . . . unpleasant,” he said to himself. He saw human bodies, or parts of them, and there were many. Some wore the remnants of uniforms, and some wore gray field dress. A pair of dead beasts lay reeking in a pile of vegetation stacked like a cone, two times the height of a person. “I wonder who’s losing?”

  As he walked a short distance and surveyed the damage, it appeared as though everyone was losing. Then, Halvix felt the Bell in his pouch and decided that, of everyone in this shitstorm, he was winning. For the moment. Halvix drew his sidearm, steeled himself, and began circling away from the pod after throwing armfuls of the vegetation over his ride. As to his ride out, the method remained to be seen, but he was alive and free of the badge’s reach as long as he kept his wits.

  The bullet struck Halvix on his chest plate, shattering into hot fragments that scalded his neck and arm and bowling him over despite the refractive pushback of his armor.

  “Got him!” Corporal Heinz Goettner crowed, his Mauser still at the ready. He’d fired at the enemy from a range of forty meters, only seeing the stinking Gaul when something flashed off his kit. “Horst, Karl. To me. I told you Prussians are the best shots. I get his pockets. You get his knife, but only because you cheat at cards, you lying Junker.” He began to move forward, still cautious because of the dark. All three soldiers wore stolen British uniforms, using them as cover to move away from the aftermath of the Somme and every battle that had sprung up in its wake.

  “I don’t cheat. You’re a terrible drunk who can’t count, you manor-born trash,” Karl murmured next to him. The low moon shone off his helmet, his face nothing but hard shadows and darkness. Then his teeth flashed, and Horst slithered up, always silent, always ready to fight. “Take left. I go center. Horst—ahh. Slowly. He might not be dead, or his cowardly mates might be lying in wait. Can’t trust the French.”

  As one, the seasoned veterans advanced, a well-oiled machine with forty months of combat between them. The war that was supposed to end in six weeks had gone on for years, leading them to this moment where they stalked forward, hoping to steal their way to a meal or two or maybe even some tobacco, though heaven only knew what it would cost.