Divine: Chapter 2

"The Universe is big, let's make it smaller, one jump at a time." That was the slogan used by the Orion Rangers that got Marty Jean thinking thirteen years, seven months, four days and five hours ago. He was walking down the street, heading home after a long day working at a storage warehouse that kept everything from small household appliances to entire space worthy ships. If someone bought it, it was brought to the thirteen square mile complex and stored until it was shipped out anywhere in colonized space.

Working there was tough. Bad hours, bad bosses, bad pay, it was all bad in Marty's mind, but it was work and he needed the money to make rent. He had been struggling to pay his exorbitant rent, month after month. That was how it was as a low class citizen stuck on some wild space colony. He couldn't run, he couldn't get on some ship. The corporations owned the planet, a planet of factories and mines, meant to feed the rest of the colonies their little gadgets that made life so easy anywhere else.

Marty stopped in front of the poster that hadn't been there when he had gone to work at the break of dawn nearly eighteen hours ago. On the little rock that was called A-234/BA and had twenty seven hour days, eighteen hours of work was short. A fire had broken out in one of the massive warehouses, spread fast and engulfed the entire building, sending sparks everywhere while small explosions could be heard deep inside. Everyone was sent home since they weren't working anyways. They had all come to watch as little bit of their woes were burned away.

The poster was flashy, printed on real paper, a commodity, someone was going to tear it down any second and sell it since everything was digital now. There was an image of a man sitting in a cockpit filled with all kinds of readings and bright lights. He was in a skintight pilot's uniform with gold bars on his shoulder, denoting some kind of rank. His gray, gloved hand was pointing out at a single star that was much brighter than all of the others and there were the words, "Let's start there."

It was cheesy, but cheesy was effective. He had never heard of the Orion Rangers before, but he knew that he was interested, mostly because anything seemed better than his current life. There was a number to call at the bottom of the poster. Rather than memorize the number, he didn't have his data pad with him, he decided that he was going to be that guy and tore down the poster.

Carrying the poster, rolled up and tucked into his dirty, blue jumpsuit that was made for someone who had fifty pounds on him, Marty quickly went home. Home was a very kind term. It wasn't a home, it was a tenement, a testament to his shitty life. There was a bed, a toilet and a sink. Not really anything else. The kitchen, or rather the mess hall, was communal to everyone who lived in the concrete building that housed over five hundred other workers. They all suffered as much as him, but Marty now had something to greedily hoard.

Coming to the bottom stairs since the building didn't have any sort of fancy, convenient technology such as an ancient elevator, Marty went to one of the pay phones. Out in wild space, even during the twenty fifth century, old technologies that should have died out long ago, stuck around.

Marty swiped his cred card and prayed that it would be accepted. He had no way of checking his account between paychecks and sometimes he found himself without money whenever the company was late paying him or decided that he didn't work hard enough to get as much as he deserved.

The small screen on the metal box flashed green and Marty felt relief. A prompt for a number appeared and Marty quickly tapped in the thirteen digit number onto the keypad. There was a moment as the machine connected to one of the routers, to a satellite above a planet, a slip space transceiver which would then open up a slip space rupture and send the call through to whatever planet this number went to. It took several minutes as the screen told him to patiently wait. Even with slip space technology, when living in wild space, it took a long time to get anywhere.

Marty tapped his feet and looked around. The payphone was in a booth with a folding door which Marty had closed. There were a few other workers who had just gotten off shift. They were smoking just outside, they looked tired and beat down. One was missing part of his ear and the skin on his face looked scarred as if he had been in a fire. They talked quietly and then a beep on the screen got Marty's attention.

A person began to speak. There was no video feed, that cost extra. "The Universe is big, let's make it smaller, one jump at a time." Marty nearly jumped at the quote from the poster. "Orion Rangers Recruiting." It stopped and Marty quickly replied.

"Uhhh, yeah. Uhm." Great way to start. "I've got one of your posters." His finger held onto the wrinkled piece of paper in his hands tightly. He was talking to someone on another planet somewhere, in real time, it felt sort of amazing.

The recruiter on the other end immediately began to throw his spiel. "You interested in joining one of the most elite and daring group of individuals in the Milky Way." He said it as if mankind had spread to other galaxies. "You want to see the Universe?"

Marty was nodding his head as he listened. Already he was excited. "Yes."

There was a chuckle. "Then the Orion Rangers is exactly where you need to be. What's your name, son?"

"Marty... Marty Jean." He said quickly. His fingers were sweaty and he was getting the shakes. He was missing dinner service to talk on the phone and there was no way he was going to be able to get any food until morning.

"Well Marty, according to my receiver here, you're calling from quite far away." Another chuckle. "I admit, I'm a bit surprised to be getting a call from so far out, or that anyone out there knows about us. How'd you hear about the Orion Rangers?"

"I... I have one of your recruitment posters." He looked down at it, outstretching it in his hands, looking at the pilot pointing out at that one star.

"Out there?" The recruiter said. "I can't think of a reason for one of our posters being out there, but then again, you are calling. Why you interested?"

Marty thought. He was interested because life sucked and he wanted something else. He was interested because the corporations owned everything and there was no competition to them. He couldn't get a job anywhere else and by some miracle, he came across this poster which shouldn't have been there. He wanted to leave, he didn't care how or where, he wanted to be gone, away from this rock that wasn't notable enough to have a real name and yet he said something entirely different. "I want to see what's out there. I want to see the Universe."

There was silence on the other end and Marty was afraid that his cheesy reason hadn't worked on the recruited like the poster's quote had on him.

"Well, I'll have to see a good part of it and come over to talk to you in person."

"Does..."  That sounded as if the recruiter was going to come over and visit him, here. "Does that mean your coming here?"

"How else am I suppose to judge if you're worthy material for the Orion Rangers. You're a bit out there, so it will take time before I'll be able to find the time. Where can I find you when I do get the time?" There was the shuffling of papers on the other end.

"Like an address?" He asked because there weren't exactly addresses on A-234/BA. None that Marty knew about. The corporations had their way of knowing where things were, but there was nothing official to use for the laborers, they were just told to go to places and were expected to figure it out from there.

"Yeah, don't you have one?"

"Not exactly." Marty's heart pumped. He didn't want to lose this opportunity, not because of something as stupid as being born on what was essentially a slave world whose masters didn't care enough to name the streets.

"Hmm. That puts a damper on things... You still have that poster.

That he did and he didn't plan on losing it anytime soon. "Yeah."

"Well since we Rangers haven't been there before, you probably have the only one among your peers. When I come, and you'll know when I do, just show that to me and I'll know its you. Just don't miss me when I do get there."

"I won't. I won't." The call ended.

The next several weeks were torture for Marty. He constantly listened to conversations at bars, in the halls and at work for any word about a Ranger or something unusual. There was a worker strike at one of the factories which was put down harshly. Someone had an uncle over there and was trying to figure out if he was still alive or not. There was a bad case of the flu breaking out in the south which had killed a lot of workers and there were rumors that the corporations had released it on purpose. Marty didn't see the logic in that. There was a lot happening, but nothing was about a Ranger.

Marty kept working and kept his ears open. He never let the poster get away from him. There were regular 'inspections' of the tenements and it was impossible to know what would be confiscated. There were times when someone was dragged away, kicking and screaming by security officers for possessing some pain medications for thier backs while their neighbor got away scott-free when they had hallucinogens. There was no way to know.

The poster was folded up carefully to prevent tearing at the folds and he never opened it to preserve it longer, he then had it in an inside pocket of his jacket which he sewed shut so that he couldn't be pick pocketed. There was very little in the way of police. Corporate security didn't stop murder, they only stopped anything that threatened corporate property.

"You see that ship come flying by earlier?" A scruffy man said to a woman as they lifted a crate filled with spare ship parts. "Landed somewhere in town."

"No." The woman huffed and lifted with her knees. Getting hurt out here was a death sentence. The only doctors were those that were trusted the most to treat injuries. There were no official doctors from fancy universities and school, workers were on their own. "Did you see what he looked like?"

"Nah. I just saw the ship."

Marty listened silently from behind a pile of crates that he was supposed to be moving. He kept his head down, looking busy. The floor managers were always wandering around, looking for laziness.

"Went straight over me and went north as I was walking here from Jimmy's."

"Jimmy's? What were doing there this early?"

"Doesn't matter what I was doing there." They were moving away after setting down their crate to grab another one. Marty stayed where he was and strained to listen. His heart was pounding as he decided what his next move should be. He could ditch work in the hope that it was the recruiter who would then whisk him away, or he could wait and try to find the ship. There was a while planet for the recruiter to look for him, there was no guarantee that he would still be around by the time work was done.

"Fine." The woman dropped it.

They didn't say anything else worth noting and Marty knew that he had been standing in one place doing nothing for too long so he quickly began to actually work before he got caught. Those that were caught slacking were taken out back and put in a holding cell for as  long as a week, all of which was deducted from pay. No one was caught not working, it was a death sentence since money was tight for everyone. The slightest upset to the delicate balance that everyone lived by meant that there wouldn't be enough to buy food and then the person would come to work weak and hungry and would lose more money. It wasn't that uncommon to come across bodies, emaciated and work to death.

Marty decided that he needed to get out now. There was a ship that had been different enough from the usual cargo ships and private fliers that the managers used to be talked about. Ships didn't come to this planet for vacation, no one came unless they were on business.

Work wasn't as tightly secured as some would expect. People got paid by the hour. You could check in and check out and you would be paid for how much time you put in. The reason why people did come in at all when work conditions were so bad and life was so precarious was because there was no other alternative. This was a corporate world with no competition, no way of finding any other job. If Marty was wrong and the ship that had been seen wasn't the recruiter, he would lose a large amount of money that he would never be able to get back, it was all or nothing now for him.

Marty slid his identification card past the reader at the entrance to the warehouse he was at. The guard looked at him as he was crazy. It was midday, people would be working now, lunch wasn't a thing.

"It's that important." Marty said with as much guilt as he could to sound convincing.

"If you say so." The guard shrugged and made no move to stop him as he walked out.

The man said that the ship had gone north which was where the port was. It was a quick walk, everything needed to make the place run efficiently was close by since that cut down on fuel costs for the giant fifty meter trucks that transported thousands of tons of goods everyday to the waiting ships that then carried the cargo to massive cargo ships in orbit. Looking up, Marty could see the foggy ships in the sky, they were that big.

Keeping his head low on the mostly empty streets since people were working, Marty walked to the port where there were ships going up and down, landing and taking off, all had corporate logos on their hulls and there he saw the Orion's belt painted across the hull of a small shuttle. It was hope, it was salvation.

Foot traffic was light at the port and people minded their own business, making it easy for Marty to approach the ship where there was a man, older than him by about ten years. He was talking on a communicator.

“Yes, I know it's an entire planet, but I'm already here." He paced back and forth at the base of the ramp to his ship. “Just let me do my job and stop worrying."

Marty slowly approached the man in an expensive looking suit with all kinds of lights and devices attached to it. He held onto the poster in his hand tightly. It seemed like a dream to him, this was what freedom looked like.

The man looked up and saw Marty. He didn't need to see the poster to know. “I'll be back soon." He cut the connection and approached the nervous young man. “You must be Marty." He had a warming smile on his face.

“Ye-yes." Marty managed to spit out.

“You look tired, why don't you sit down and we'll take some. My name is Teth by the way." He motioned to a set of boxes where they sat and talked and soon after, Marty got on the ship and never saw that planet again.

-12 years later-

"I remember when you came up to me." The recruiter, now known to Marty as Teth, spoke across the holo-feed. "You were smaller than I thought, scragglier as well."

Marty sat in the seat of his ship, a Mark IV Tiger scout ship. It was fast, versatile and had the range necessary to explore the galaxy. He was getting ready to to leave for a mission, to explore a set of systems several hundred light years away. He had been commissioned by one of the major manufacturing corporations to look for a new system for them to mine at. He had left orbit an hour ago and was making pre jump checks when Teth contacted him, mostly for friendly banter.

"You try living on one of those factory worlds as a worker for all your life and then you see if you can keep a healthy weight." Marty replied and checked his fuel and the status of the one thing that made this kind of exploration possible, the Cossus Engine. It was the pinnacle of human technology and yet no one understood how it worked. It had been invented thousands of years ago by Horace Cossus. He introduced it and showed that it worked, jumping from Earth to Pluto and back. He never explained how he did it, all the rest of humanity knew was that it worked.

The Cossus Engine was just a box on the outside, but the inside held some of the most closely guarded secrets in the history of mankind. It was punishable by death to even try to tinker with it and doing so would set off the small, but very lethal explosives inside that would incinerate the person and the engine. No one has successfully opened one and Marty intended to never even try.

The engine was nominal, they rarely broke, they were well made. The first Cossus Engine was in a museum on Earth, it still worked.

"I know, I know." Teth replied. "It's just that whenever you, one our best rangers goes out, I'm amazed by how far you've come. From an everyday worker at the bottom of the rung to one of our most requested Rangers. Rem Corp is paying a small fortune just to have you look at some rocks."

Marty thrummed his fingers against his arm rest. "Why did you let Rem hire me? You know how I feel about them, especially after Aegis."

"I know." Teth said apologetically. "I never expected them to just come in and strip the planet, even after you reported life on it, microbial or not."

"They just care about profit. I know this, I used to work for them and now it seems like I still do." This had been a reoccurring theme recently. Rem Corp and its sister company Harken Manufacturing had been expanding aggressively the past several years and due to the increase in demand for raw material, Marty found his contract in their hands time and time again. "Promise me that you won't make me work for them anymore after this."

"Last one, I promise." Teth said. He was good for his word.

"Alright then." The last of the checks were good. He only needed to make the jump now. "I'll see you in a week."

"Good luck, Marty. Don't hit a supernova." It was a joke that also held some truth. Space exploration was dangerous. Rangers were in high demand because they were among the few that would chart unexplored space. Many argued that drones could do the job, but they couldn't. The Cossus Engine didn't work when it was being operated by a robot, it just didn't. The unmanned ship would jump away and never return. People could be sent out and recover the ship and the logs would show that the drone would try to jump back, but the Cossus Engine wouldn't work until there was a person there to operate it. It was a small price to pay for such a remarkable piece of technology.

"I won't" Marty cut the connection. "Computer, you still have the coordinates?"

The built in virtual intelligence replied in its feminine voice. "Yes, captain. I merely await your order and I shall initiate the jump."

"Jump." Marty said and the ship became to vibrate as power was fed into the Cossus Engine.

"Jumping in five, four, three, two..."

The stars around the ship turned into long streaks of blue light before they meshed together into a foggy haze, surrounding Marty in a tunnel of blue fog that went by him at an incredible speed. He traveled light years in seconds, going speeds that were long believed impossible before the Cossus Engine. It broke almost all laws of physics that dictated the normal lives of people. The closer one traveled to the speed of light, the slower time went by. A few seconds at the speed of light should have been so much longer for those outside the ship and yet time went by for Marty just as fast or slow as the rest of the universe. No one understood it and it was just accepted as fact.

The jump took just over an hour, taking him from close to the center of the galaxy to the fringes.

The tunnel slowed and the stars regained their shape and soon space stopped moving and the star, once a tiny speck from the cockpit, was now a raging ball of plasma, filling his heavily tinted view.

"Jump successful, Captain."

"Begin preliminary scans." Marty ordered. The ship fly the ship around the system and scan for planets for something that his employer might want. "Start in the Goldilocks zone."

"Beginning scans."

Marty reclined his seat. The virtual intelligence was capable of doing this itself. He was pretty much just there to make sure the engine worked. He didn't understand why everyone thought he was so good, he was just lucky. He had completed more contracts in less time than anyone else and had not vanished from a jump either. People had been lost, jumping away and never returning. It was a gamble every time a jump was made.

"Wake me when you find something." He closed his eyes and closed the visor of his helmet and set his suit to keep his body at a comfortable seventy-six degrees.

His dreams were troubling. Planet after planet, ones that he would discover, ones that he would be the first human to set eyes upon, would be destroyed by Rem. Each one, stripped of every resource it had and it was all because of him. His dream twisted and he woke up with red eyes.

"Captain, a planet has been found in the Goldilocks zone." Marty rubbed his eyes. He was sweating, but the moisture was wicked away and would be recycled for emergency use if he ever needed it. His suit could also administer preliminary first aid and had a beacon on it for if rescue was sent. "Scans indicate an Earth like environment with a ninety percent chance of life."

"Fuck." Marty just knew that irony would have a cruel sense of humor. "Of course the last system I investigate for those bloodsuckers would have a life holding planet." Though, he didn't have to report it. They didn't have to know about the planet, they were relying on his word. If he told them that there was nothing of worth, they would have to trust him.

"Sir?" The computer asked. "What are your orders?"

"We're heading home." Marty brought up a display. He was going to scrub the computers data and then scan a desolate rock at the edge of the system and give that to Rem. "Plot course for Sol."

The computer silently began to plot the correct jump to get back to Earth. The calculations had to be exact, the slightest miscalculation at this distance would strand him in the middle of space and even a computer couldn't fix that issue. There would be no telling where he would end up if he missed the jump.

"Unknown radiation detected." The computer said as a spark flew up into Marty's face. He jolted back as his screen went blank.

"Computer." He called out, but it was dead. The ship had been hit by something and now it was shutting down.

Marty grabbed the controls. They didn't respond, all of the powered systems were dead. He was beginning to drift towards he nearest object with a large gravitational pull, the planet. He looked at it closely for the first time as it slowly got closer. It was green with blue oceans. If he didn't know any better, he would have guessed that it was Earth. There was the white swirls of clouds and continents with mountain ranges. Normally it would be beautiful, but at the moment, he was on a collision course with it.

There was nothing Marty could do with no control of the ship and the few systems that didn't require power, such as the parachute and emergency burners, meant to slow his descent, needed an atmosphere. He had to wait for the ship to begin to fall out of the planet's sky before he could do anything.

It was a long wait. Even with the planet already so close, the acceleration towards the planet was only gradual and it was nearly a day later when the ships began to buff against the air, turning the hull red.

"Alright Marty." He cracked his knuckles and grabbed the handle that would begin to burn emergency fuel for the burners and the other hand was on the lever for the parachute for the final decent. "You've practiced before, in the simulator." He took deep breaths. "And died four out fo five times." He chuckled. "Let's make this the one out of five your survive."

Fire surrounded him, he couldn't see anything and was using an analog barometer. Even now, when man traveled among the starts, some instruments never went away.

He initiated the burners at about fifteen thousand feet to slow his descent enough to use the parachute. He was pushed against his harness which dug into his shoulder, his suit did a lot to spread out the pressure on his body and mitigate the g-forces he was feeling. He clenched his teeth and watched hsi fuel go down faster than he remembered it should be.  Maybe the simulator was for a different model of craft, he couldn't recall at the moment.

"Okay okay okay." Marty said when the fuel ran out almost two minutes before he expected it to. The barometer began to decrease at a rapid pace again. He needed to deploy to chute now before he was too fast, he was already too fast now, it might rip the chute from the ship, but might would turn into will shortly.

With a grunt, Marty pulled the lever and a small hatch opened up near the near of the ship, near the engines where the parachute was pulled out. One massive chute, surrounded by five smaller ones. They opened up immediately and Marty was violently shaken and heard a sickening groan of the ship and then a wrenching scream of metal as a chunk of his ship was torn away along with the parachute.

The ship began to spin violently, tumbling and throwing Marty all around, disorientating him. He could still see fire, the fuel of his ship had ignited, surround him, turning the ship into a fire ball that barreled across the sky. The barometer was getting low, Marty couldn't prepare for the impact as the ship smashed into trees and then the ground and instant later.

Somehow, he survived. Marty was fully conscious of everything, including his broken ribs which ached with each breath. He winced and undid his harness. He felt a light jab in his side as his suit detected the injury and injected him with a pain medications as well as hardening around the injury sites to better protect them.

The canopy was charred and covered in dirt. Marty hit the emergency switch which blew off the hatch with explosive bolts. It went soaring into the air, arcing and then landing out of sight with a thud. There were voices outside, speaking… in English, maybe this was some colony of some sort and he'd be able to send out a signal.

Marty climbed his way out of his cockpit, making sure to grab his weapons in case the colonists were hostile. He worked against the dulled, but still painful stitch in his side and atop of the ship.

“Who goes there?"

Marty turned towards the sound of the voice, expecting to see some shocked soldier or colonist, instead he stared at animals, upright animals on two legs in leather clothes with swords and bows.

There was a wolf and a some cat at the base of his crashed ship and a pig with a horse that were next to… normal horses.

“Where am I?" Marty said to himself, his helmet keeping his words to himself. He raised his wrist to see if his suit's built in computer could answer some questions for him. His arm lit up, but he was met with a loading bar as his suit rebooted entirely.

“It's magic!" There was a yell and then a whoosh as something went by his head. He thought it was a rock at first until he saw the source of the projectile. The boar was holding a bow up at him.

There was no way Marty was going to let him fire a second one, he wasn't going to die here.

Marty raised his rifle that he had brought out of the ship and fired, sending a beam of highly charged and heated plasma at the boar which hit him in the head. The boar fell forward, dead and smoking.

The next series of events happened so fast. There was more yelling, pain in his arm. He fired again at the source and then when it was all over, his suit injected him with another does of pain killer which made him drowsy. He fell to the ground where he couldn't move. His limbs felt so heavy.

Something took a hold of him and removed the faceplate of his helmet. There was a wolf or something looking at him with concern.

“I- I need your help." Marty pleaded before blackness took him.