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    In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: Zedekiah Wight
    In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: Zedekiah Wight
    In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: Zedekiah Wight
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: Zedekiah Wight

    By J.M. Wight and Joe Vasicek

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    About this ebook

    Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil!

    When Captain Victor Andrecek and his crew of down-and-out smugglers respond to a deep space distress call, what they find shocks them to their very core. The victim is dead, his EVA suit nailed to a cross and launched on the head of a repurposed missile, with the words of an ancient scripture burned on a plaque at his feet. And he is not the only one.

    The madman behind the murders is a privateer known as Zedekiah Wight, and the reward on his head is more than enough to tempt Andrecek and his struggling crew. With it, they can finally get back on their feet again—not to mention, rid the galaxy of a very dangerous man.

    But Andrecek can't help but wonder: what was Zedekiah's reason for crucifying those men? With the showdown rapidly approaching, the answer might make the difference between being in the right, or being dead.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoe Vasicek
    Release dateJan 10, 2022
    ISBN9798201890438
    In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: Zedekiah Wight
    Author

    J.M. Wight

    J.M. Wight is a pen name of Joe Vasicek, who writes science fiction and fantasy. As the faithful son of Utah pioneers, J.M. Wight blends science fiction with distinctly Mormon themes. Whether it's interplanetary colonization in the Millennium or the technological singularity rolling forth from the New Jerusalem, this is LDS science fiction like you've never read it before.

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      Book preview

      In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight - J.M. Wight

      In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight

      J.M. Wight

      Foreword by Joe Vasicek 

      Copyright © 2022 Joseph Vasicek.

      All rights reserved.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual persons, organizations, or events is purely coincidental.

      Sign up here for J.M. Wight’s email list.

      Foreword by Joe Vasicek

      It feels a little strange, and perhaps a bit pretentious, to be writing the foreword to my own book. After all, J.M. Wight is one of my pen names, albeit one that I haven’t done much with in recent years. But with the publication of this story, I hope that will change in a major way. 

      I originally started the pen name J.M. Wight for my religious fiction, to differentiate those stories from the rest of my fiction where the existence and nature of God is more open-ended. In mainstream science fiction, you can explore questions of religion but you can never definitely say that there is a God. As soon as you do that, it ceases to be mainstream and becomes religious fiction.  

      But I think it goes deeper than that. These days, a mainstream audience isn’t going to be familiar with the prophecies of Isaiah, or most of the stories in the Bible. So even if God isn’t a character or a major driver of the plot, a story that even just references scripture on a more than superficial level is going to speak to a relatively limited audience. 

      Or perhaps not. Perhaps you aren’t particularly religious or well-versed in the scriptures, but are curious enough to read a story that is. In that case, I think you’re going to enjoy this one, since the religious elements are fairly subtle, and the reader is left to make their own decision about who Zedekiah Wight really is, and what he really stands for. 

      I could say more, but I think this is enough of an introduction, and you’re probably eager to get on with the story already. So I’ll end by saying that whatever your faith or religious inclinations, I’m glad that you’re giving J.M. Wight a try. Enjoy! 

      In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight

      We’re picking up a distress signal, sir, Suleiman Ibn Nasser, the Trident’s first mate, said as he peered at his third monitor. It appears to be coming from an EVA suit about ten thousand klicks from our current position. 

      Captain Victor Andrecek frowned. On the dimly-lit bridge of the Trident, Suleiman sat directly in front and to the right of him. Eliso, his second mate and only female member of the three-man crew, sat on Suleiman’s left. Andrecek’s command chair was elevated just enough to give him a clear view through the forward window that wrapped nearly 180 degrees around the room. But the bridge’s main holoscreen display was much more useful, since it showed a three-dimensional map of the sector. Currently, it showed that the Trident was the only object of any significant mass for 50,000 klicks in any direction. That was what made Suleiman’s discovery so confusing. 

      Are you sure of that? Andrecek added as he cycled through the wider system starmap on the armrest screen of his command chair. I don’t see any official traffic heading into or out of our local sector.  

      Not that that counted for much, since only about half of the Ramallah system’s traffic was officially registered. The inner system in particular was crawling with pirates and smugglers and everything in-between. Andrecek and his crew fell squarely in the smuggler camp, but that didn’t make it any safer for them out here. 

      I’m sure of it, sir. What’s more, it appears to be heading on a sun-ward trajectory at several hundred meters per second.

      Sun-ward? Why the devil would anyone this far in the inner system be heading sun-ward?

      Suleiman glanced over his shoulder at the captain and shook his head. I don’t know, sir, but we’re certainly picking up a signal, and it’s certainly coming from an EVA suit on a collision course with the sun. 

      Andrecek’s frown deepened. A distress signal from an EVA suit was always a serious matter, and an urgent one, too, since the victim typically had only hours to get help before they expired. It was an unwritten rule among starfarers that anyone encountering such a call for help should drop everything to answer it. But though the Trident, a 5,000 ton modified cargo hauler with limited FTL capabilities, was cleared with the local port authority at Ramallah Station to travel through this sector, her business was anything but official. Andrecek had no desire to get his ship and his crew caught up in trouble that didn’t concern them—especially if that trouble was bait for a pirate ambush. 

      The scanners show that we’re the only ship of any consequence within 50,000 klicks, he thought out loud. If that’s true, where did this spacewalker come from? He couldn’t have gotten far on his own.

      Suleiman shrugged. I don’t know, sir. I only know what the instruments tell me.

      Captain Andrecek stroked his square, clean-shaven chin as he pondered the situation. Pirates typically didn’t have sophisticated equipment like cloaking shields, and even if they did, they would still show up on the Trident’s scanners as an anomaly. Probably. He’d paid a lot of good money to make sure that his ship had top-of-the-line detection systems, otherwise he never would have come to this pirate-infested backwater in the first place. So the chances of it being an ambush were fairly slim. But where had this spacewalker come from, especially to be heading sun-ward at such a high velocity? 

      Is it possible that they came out here on some sort of a skiff? Eliso asked. I know our scanners are good, but if someone came out on a short-range craft, it might blend into the background noise—especially if it’s derelict.

      Then run a detailed infrared scan, and put the results on-screen, Andrecek ordered. I want to know the position and trajectory of every object larger than our fishbone skiff within twenty klicks of our position.

      You want to find our friend’s lost ship? Suleiman asked.

      No, Andrecek answered. I want to make sure we aren’t ambushed by someone whose cloaking systems are more advanced than our scanners.

      Suleiman and Eliso both turned to give him a look of concern and fear. Uh, sir, Eliso asked, should I power up our point defenses?

      That’s a very good idea.

      The infrared scanner results came in about a minute later. To Andrecek’s surprise, they showed no large objects matching the distress signal’s trajectory.

      Are you sure those results are correct? he asked Suleiman.

      Yes, sir, he answered. It looks like our friend was the victim of a very bad spacewalk, and his ship jumped out and left him stranded.

      How does that explain his sun-ward trajectory?

      Suleiman shrugged. I do not know, sir. Perhaps there was some sort of battle in this sector?

      But if that’s the case, how would they jump out? Eliso

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