Chapter 1 Recap: “The Resh” have taken over Earth. Jay wants to get off the planet, but needs money. He maneuvers his way into a party the Resh elite are throwing…

They called the currency tokens, but they weren’t very private about where they keep their money. Jay kept that sweet thought in mind as he crossed the party room, weaving through stationary people. He reached the far side of the room, thankful that the Resh speaker was still keeping everyone’s attention. He spotted stairs that led up to a high balcony overlooking the party. Jay started up, and saw that the balcony was empty, and grew confused. He had expected the balcony to be packed with guards and guests, but there was no one in sight. Moving fast, he took his opportunity. He crossed the balcony over to the far door, which was labeled with ‘Private’, and upon twisting the handle, he found that it was unlocked. This is not supposed to be unlocked. Cautiously, he cracked the door open. The room was empty, but the lights were on. He was on edge now, preparing for anything. 

It was a rather small office, with a large mahogany desk and chair in the very center. The room was decorated with an oriental rug, bright red wallpaper and curtains that ran from the ceiling to the floor. Photos of royal-looking Resh were hung in golden frames, and tapestries depicting huge battles adorned the walls. Jay entered the room and unsheathed his knife. As soon as he fully entered the room, the door clicked and an inhuman voice spoke from behind him. 

“This is where you end, Jay Orion. You have nowhere left to go.” Jay turned to see the tallest Resh he had ever seen. The Resh were very strange creatures to look at. They had very sharp chins, and this particular one looked as if his was chiseled out of stone. His lizard-like eyes peered down at him, and his slick hair was swept back in a glorious style.

“You have caused us enough trouble already, we will not let you steal from us again. We know your intentions, your plan, and everything about you. Your life is in our control, and we have had enough of you.”

His cool voice cut through Jay like a knife. He tried to form a plan about how to get out of this, but he was too frightened to think. His hope was depleting.

“How did you know I was here?” Jay stuttered, his hopes of surviving vanishing.

“Jay, you underestimate us. We have eyes everywhere. We captured you on camera going past the front of our building, heading towards the alley. We alerted the guards of your presence, but they failed to stop you. Once we saw you eliminate them from their body cameras, we knew that you were inside the building already. So we got everyone off of the balcony and left you a straight path to the door. All we had to do was wait, and you fell perfectly into our trap. All of our guards are outside this door.” He motioned towards the door he was standing in front of. “And they are ready to kill you the moment you step out. Even if you manage to kill me, you will have nowhere left to run. It’s over, Jay.” 

At that moment, Jay remembered the pistol from earlier. He reached for his belt, pulling out the pistol. The Resh had no time to respond before Jay shot him right between the eyes. Blood spilled from his face, staining the carpet in a silvery pool. 

But Jay had no time to relax. The guards on the outside were ramming the door, and various curses in the Resh language could be heard. He moved the Resh’s body to one side and dragged the nearby desk against the door, buying him some time. He opened the front drawer of the desk and found a stack of unorganized scriptplates. Scriptplates were metal sheets with a glass strip across the width. They slid down to reveal messages on the metal that changed when you pressed a button on the bottom. He grabbed the whole pile and shoved them into his inner coat pocket. 

The guards on the outside were starting to make a dent in the door, and Jay had a limited time to escape. Quickly, he turned around and rushed over to the window. He ripped the curtains on either side from their rod and tied them together, creating a rope about eighteen feet long. He moved the heavy desk chair to the window with great effort, dragging it across the carpet. Prying open the window, he tied one end of the curtains to the chair and lowered the other out of the building to the patio. Pulling on the curtain to test its hold, he lowered himself out of the window to the patio floor. He sprinted across the patio to the wooden door. He unlatched it quickly and ran as fast as he could down the alley. He passed the guards’ bodies and the piles of garbage, cesspools and wet clothing. He got to the end of the alley and turned away from the Resh’s building. He spotted his ship, which he had parked in an empty yard, surrounded by an overgrown chain link fence. 

It wasn’t the best looking ship; its grotesque paint had been chipped away from many years of use. The boxy shape had once been desirable, but current ships were sleek and white, while his more resembled a two pronged fork. A gray, thin figure was leaning against a fence. It was Mo. 

“Where have you been?” Mo said. “I have been waiting here for thirty minutes! It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out job, just grab the scripts and go.”

“I guess I didn’t account for the fact that it was a trap.” Jay had never seen any cameras outside of the building, and never recorded any plan of infiltrating the party. “They knew we were coming, and they lured me in.” 

Mo was surprised by this, but he seemed more glad than angry. It was hard to tell emotions with him, but over time Jay learned to notice them. Mo was a droid. A very old, cranky, and pessimistic droid. His model name was MO-2, but Jay knew Mo hated it when he called him that. Mo quickly opened the side door of the ship with a creak and motioned for Jay to get inside. The automatic doors had been broken for as long as he could remember, and Mo refused to fix them. They had to be pried open with a makeshift handle welded onto the side. 

Jay stepped into his ship, closely followed by Mo. He ascended the ladder into the cockpit while Mo went to the back of the ship and turned on the engine. Most newer ships’ engines could be turned on from the control panel in the cockpit, but Jay’s ship was meant for cargo shipping, therefore having a louder, more powerful engine for heavier loads. It wasn’t stealthy, but it was the only thing he could afford. 

The thrusters of his C-15 LR fired up with a roar. He pulled back on the yolk and they started to ascend, twenty, fifty, one hundred feet into the air. The grassy lawn below him was being blown and parted from the sheer force of the engine keeping this two-hundred ton ship aloft. Once he had cleared the tops of the buildings, the ship lurched forward. It gradually gained momentum, whizzing over the rooftops of the compact public housing complex. The Resh’s building was at the border of the Slums, also known as the Gray District. On the other side of the border was the Liberty District, a far richer, fancier, and snobbier section of the city. 

Jay was heading into the heart of the Slums. The concrete jungle that was the Slums was originally an industrial district, but ever since the Earth left the Sun’s orbit, all of the factories were either rendered unusable or they weren’t needed anymore. Then they were transformed into houses by a small group of squatters, which then grew larger and larger until the city was forced to recognize the Slums as a District. So they named it the Gray District after the fact that there was little to no color here at all.

Jay lived in a derelict warehouse that had been converted into his living space and hangar. There was no rent, and as long as he kept the curtains shut at night, no one knew he was there. All of his savings and belongings he had kept since he was a child were there, and he even rebuilt Mo there. 

Mo had originally been sold as a work droid, only programmed to do what it was told. A humanoid bundle of wires, as agile as he was bulky, his chrome bones were barely visible beneath his copper muscles, which were wrapped in a faded trench coat. Jay had found him in the scrapyard while looking for ship parts and was able to haggle him down to a very low price. Jay took him back to the warehouse and reprogrammed him over a couple of months. The result was a droid that acted more like an arrogant brother than a friend. 

They were well into the Slums now, far away from the Resh’s building. Jay could finally breathe easy, knowing that he wasn’t in danger of being followed by the Resh. Still, his heist had hastened his need to get off Earth, before the entirety of the remaining government pursued him. 

At that moment, he saw something: billowing smoke, its dark grayish hue camouflaged against the black sky. At the source of the smoke, a flickering light reflected off of hundreds of glass panes nearby, creating a reddish glow. Jay picked up the cockpit radio.

“Mo, get up here, now!”

Mo scrambled up the ladder to the adjacent seat. “What is it?”

Jay motioned to the approaching smoke. Mo sat in the seat, stunned at what he was seeing.

“That can’t be…” Mo trailed off.

“Yes.” Jay knew it too. As their ship approached, the source of the smoke was clear. The warehouse, their home, was ablaze.

Behind the police tape, Jay and Mo stood in silence, overlooking what used to be their home. Shards of broken glass and black wood lay strewn in a debris field a foot thick. Remnants of what used to be pillars formed an outline of the once-massive building. Bigger objects poked out of the rubble; metal doors were bent out of shape, tables and cabinets were on their side, and concrete stairwells rose high above the ground, one of the only remaining structures.

“This is a restricted area. You shouldn’t be here.” A city police officer had walked up behind them, startling Jay. The city had started giving the police force silent speeders, modified to mask the engine sound so that the officers could capture unattentive criminals.

“We used to live here,” Mo calmly explained. “We were hoping to locate some items of value to us.”

“I see,” said the officer, looking skeptically at the duo. He was clad in a black vest and black pants, with a white belt holstering a blaster and radio. “Show me proof of residency that is in line with the current city standards and you may continue your search.”

Jay started to panic. Since the warehouse wasn’t technically registered by the city as a residential area, they had no proof of residency, therefore no legal admittance onto the property. And if the city found out that they were living there illegally, it would just add on to the trouble they were already in. But Mo was a quick thinker, and handed him multiple sheets of paper that he had just printed. Jay never thought that Mo’s built-in printer would ever be necessary, but he had been proven wrong.

“Here,” said Mo. “All of the documentation that we have been given for our residency of this building.”

The officer gave the papers a quick glance and, feeling satisfied, turned and walked back to his speeder. As soon as he was out of earshot, Jay turned to Mo.

“How did you do that?” asked Jay, genuinely astonished.

“I searched for a picture of residency papers in my database, replaced the address and area code with this building and changed the names. Then all I had to do was to hand him the papers and pretend they were official. The city will eventually find out that the papers are forged, but it should buy us some time to salvage what we can and leave.” Mo had always been quick on his feet, but never with creating false documents in a matter of seconds. Jay had expressed concern in the past that eventually the city would come and ask for their papers, but he and Mo had remained so well hidden that not even their neighbors noticed them.

“All we need to find is the token safe. Once we locate it, then we can leave.” 

Mo seemed agitated. Something was making him want to leave as quickly as possible, but Jay was not planning to linger either. The interaction with the officer made Jay assume that the Resh had gotten through to the government already and that they were on the lookout for them. The sooner they found the safe, the better. 

Mo was already searching, knee deep in the charred wood. Using a magnet on his hand, he was able to locate the safe easily. “I found it! Go start the ship. I am right behind you.” 

Alone, Mo examined the safe. It was slightly dented, but suffered no other major damage. He turned the handle to reveal a gleaming pile of tokens inside, Jay’s life savings. Mo pocketed the tokens in his trenchcoat. He searched around his feet, locating a piece of twisted metal, and began to beat the door of the safe until it was badly mangled, chipping the paint and shattering the bolt. Then he tucked the safe under his shoulder and walked back to the ship. 

Stay tuned for Chapter 3…