Itineris

[Vogel]

Haze.

This was not the effect of Jump Drives, as he very well knew.

Orange haze.

This was a familiar sight however.

As was the creature.

Pulsating. Ribbed.

His Minuteman paled in comparison to the size of the beast that had destroyed his home. It sat a small distance displaced, pointed in a parallel direction with his fighter, directly at the orange haze.

It was some kind of mockery. He was in formation with it.

The situation was so unnerving that for once his instincts told him nothing. Just as before, when he had been there. When they had all been there.

Attack? Attack it how? With what?

Run? How would one run from something that seemed to exist at will?

Wait? Wait for what?

It had brought him here. The impression was obvious. It was impossible to ignore.

It sat glowing, the monstrous entity, giving off an ephemeral blue glow. Strange lights like red lightening darted about in the jelly-like interior. It seemed to be stationary.

Waiting.

Waiting for what?

Doyle was frozen in his seat. His mind was unable to comprehend who, better yet what, or most importantly why this was happening. Therefore it almost seemed to shut off in an attempt to evade the questions.

Waiting.

Waiting in front of the haze.

That haze, which must have been

**Home**

A chill shot up his spine.

That was a clearly defined thought. A word, or a feeling, some kind of intuitive understanding. It came from outside his mind, slipping between the mental barriers with ease and gracefully wrapping itself around his conscious mind.

**Home.**

The orange din reflected off his eyes.

**Light Gone**

Billions of people. Billions of people who had been born, lived, and died, many of whom were fighting each other for no discernible reason other than to not be killed first.

Billions gone.

Light Gone

The Sun was gone.

**New**

Doyle felt as if his head was made of air. Concentration was at a premium as these alien ideas filtered through and were slowly deciphered by his primitive mind.

**Care**

He cared about those people. People cared about each other.

Had they cared about each other?

Had they cared with their guns trained on their fellow men? What had stopped them from pulling the triggers?

Other than

**Care.**

It was not that the thoughts came quickly, but that they were so dense, for lack of better terms. Their impact was much more complicated. It was as if the being sending them was making a distinct effort to simplify them, yet could not seem to find the best way.

**Light Gone.**

Doyle looked over at the creature, sitting perfectly still in front of the haze, and then looked back at the atomized remains of his birthright. Everything seemed so unreal.

But

He could hardly move his jaw.

Why?

Why what? the old man replied hoarsely.

The Lieutenant was suddenly aware of the fact that his feet were planted on the ground and he was standing erect. His head still swimming, the transition seemed to come rather easily.

He looked over at the old man.

Bedridden. Old. Hair long and gray. Face drawn, tired. Hands weak, frail.

They were in a dimly lit room with but a single door and window.

The old man groaned ever so quietly as he turned his head to see his visitor.

Doyle knew this man.

The mans eyes betrayed the same.

Its Its! the old mans voice rapidly took on a great sense of surprise and anxiety as his shaking finger rose to point at the intruder.

But the light went from his eyes.

He fell back to the bed.

Gone.

Doyle found his back against the nearest wall. The room was suddenly very small, claustrophobic, stuffy, inescapable, fated.

His heart was racing, yet he was at rest, such was the mental torment he was experiencing.

Where was he? Where was this?

He had to know.

It was his destiny.

He spun around to the window, the only window.

And there, in the evenings fading light, sat a small city. New construction along its fringes was evident. Small airborne vehicles were scurrying about, flying up and in circles, around a flat spire-like object that towered above the rest of the settlement.

It stood up the same way it had launched so long ago.

The ASF-1.

The Liberty.

**New.**






The readout before him indicated that the jump had been successful, and that fuel reserves were down to twenty-five percent.

He could feel the cold sweat worming its way under his flight suit.

It was trying to tell him something.

It was trying to tell him everything.

That beast, that monster, that atrocity, that creature, that being, that

Jump successful.

James Doyles eyes snapped down to his instruments.

The EWS was quiet. The sensors showed scattered unknown contacts in the distance. The missile warning was gone.

He looked over his shoulder.

Earths successor was small enough to blend in with the stars.

His journey was not yet over. This he knew very well.

It had merely begun.

[Vogel]

It had been several days. Miraculously the chronometer in his ship confirmed it this time.

He had eaten, drank, slept, and woke for the past series of hours; what amazed him was how surreal something this simple now felt.

Was he getting used to things here?

It was possible. It was also possible hed lost his mind and didnt know it.

Doyles Minuteman was by no means a star-faring vessel capable of traveling such great distances, even with the help of the trade lanes and jump gates scattered about. This forced him to periodically find a nondescript station and coerce them into letting him land for a moment in order to restock supplies. It wasnt terribly hard; filching food when the person behind the desk wasnt looking was nothing special. What was special was getting away with the fuel.

The device that Jax had concocted seemed to work miracles; it was nothing more than an adaptor of some sort, just as rickety-looking as the box hed installed in the cockpit. When plugged onto the end of a fuel line, it somehow converted the fuel these people used into something his Minuteman was willing to stomach; he didnt quite know how it worked but what mattered was that it did. In any case, he could occasionally get a friendly dockhand to fill his small fighters tank for free. Other times, it took a bit of cunning: while on some border outpost or another hed sat in his fighter, the fuel line still in but finished refueling, and simply waited. These people expected to be paid in a manner that did not involve hard currency or even a data card as far as he knew, so oftentimes nobody came out to check. Then, when the next ship rolled in and the hangars doorways swung up, the thief of a soldier would suddenly kick-start his fighter and rocket out of the station before anyone realized it.

Once or twice some ships were vectored towards his location, but he found that his Jump Drive confused the Hell out of them.

In any case, now that he was plenty aware of his predicament, he began to notice some trends. For instance: once jumping out of the cockpit he was immediately seized with a feeling reminiscent of a migraine combined a sock to the stomach. Having suffered through that, the pain in his head would settle down into a dull throbbing sensation which would slowly get worse as time went by; in the meantime his body would start sweating and having spasms for no apparent reason. The instant he returned his butt to the ejection seat of his fighter, all of these feelings disappeared almost instantly. The result was he slept in his ship.

Secondly, any food or water he bought, or rather stole, tasted positively lousy for at least several minutes after jumping back in his ship. When re-opened later, the food tasted as normal as hed imagined it would. For whatever reason the food was bad until it had sat in his fighter for some time. The same could be said of the fuel hed put in; the ships engine refused to start with the new mixture in the tanks until several minutes had elapsed.

He had no idea what was going on; in the back of his mind he hoped hed run into that research people again, as theyd sounded like the only ones who seemed to have any clue. Not that giant alien beings which destroyed stars were something able to be explained, but he was focusing on the smaller things for the time being.

And so, Lieutenant James Doyle was scratching out a living in a world he did not know, nor belonged to.

His only course of action was to learn more about this place, more about how humanity survived, and what had become of it. Liberty was evidently well established; its origins were obvious, its economic, industrial, and technological power equally so.

What of the ASF-2? Or 3? Or 4? Even 5?

Flying virtually blind, Doyle made his way from gate to gate, across systems, hoping to find some answers.

But there werent many.

He could ill afford to hang around bars that were on these space stations; the feeling of being terminally ill so affected his ability to function that he could hardly speak if enough time went by.

The chorus of voices over the subspace radio channels was of little help as well; many passed his queries off as ridiculous, insane, or worse. Some even tried to goad him into traveling to their location; his soldiers instinct gave him plenty of warning in such cases. And after his stunt on the planet they called Manhattan, he tried to avoid police and military units like the plague for fear of being captured, tortured, studied, probed, and God knew what else.

But all the same, talking to these people felt so strange. There was no adequate word to describe it. These people were the legacy of what he was fighting for, what they had all been fighting for. They were descendants.

Well, not his, in any case. His family had died long before they made it to Pluto to board the Liberty.

But they were descendants nonetheless.

By the time hed reached a place that seemed perpetually shrouded in red haze hed already heard people with multiple dialects and slang terms; many of the terms were irrevocably alien but the accents were there nonetheless. The accents here reeked of British.

And so they were.

A nice fellow with an officious voice had told him that the Earth clone he was looking at was called New London. Logically, the ASF-2, the Bretonia, had landed here at some point, and a whole new space-bound nation had been built around its namesake. He had to give them credit: the progress that had been made in these places was amazing from his point of view.

The official-sounding man belied himself to be a soldier, however, speaking of his own flights and battles when Doyle let slip some of his own tales over the comms. Doyle wished he could have questioned why theyd had casualties to begin with, but the danger was too great to follow the mans wishes and meet in orbit.

Of course, the man did say that the Coalition was gone. He also mentioned something about a doppelganger faction that were called the SCRA, but they sounded like posers to him; at the very least, the Red Star no longer spread death to British and American citizens alike.

But it was odd. The soldier he was speaking to must have been playing along; he sounded too casual when Doyle had mentioned the Battle of Triton.

That was his cue to leave.

See you around, he said through the mic, Maybe youll find me in a century-old obituary.

His Minuteman soared into the light and was shot to another star, untold light years away.

No, he had no clue whether or not this was a century from his time. For all he knew it was a millennium. Either way, what was important was that this was the future, and he had a lot to catch up on.

Although he did hear somebody talk about Back in 815, whatever the Hell that meant

He didnt like this place, Bretonia. The red all around him gave him the eerie notion that his ship was swimming in blood or something.

Lord knows hed seen enough blood to last ten lifetimes.

One of the trade lanes arched towards a small cloud of what looked like gray dust of some sort. Figuring it was a nice contrast to flying through a painting of death, and figuring that it might be a nice place to hide for the time being, James Doyle flew over and cautiously slipped inside the cloud. Strangely enough theyd stuck a jump gate in here.

Only one way to find out what its for, I guess, he muttered to himself.

The arms yawned open, he entered the light, and the red turned to black and blue.

Quite the contrast indeed.

Unidentified craft, this is Freeport One. State your name and function, please.

And a delightfully un-British voice, with a delightfully paranoid tone, Doyle mused.

This is Jimmy Doyle, he replied, glancing down at his fuel gauge, Looking for a place to set down for a bit.

A few seconds of silence went by.

Pilot Doyle, your Identify Friend-Foe transponder is not responding to our sensors, Id advise you get it fixed while youre here. State your affiliation, please.

Affiliation?

He knocked the funny idea of stating his name, rank, and serial number out of his head before replying with a little name hed picked up by the wayside.

Freelancer.

Alright, Freelancer, youre cleared to land at Docking Bay Five. Welcome to Freeport One.

At least he was learning.