The Monolith-class colony transport was more than 700 meters long, and had a cross section of 77 meters by 42. The ship was double hulled, with a sealed, airtight inner hull protected by an outer skin consisting of a highly flexible laminate of foamed titanium-aluminum alloy and boron fiber reinforced metaceramic. The interstices between inner and outer hulls were filled with a low density elastomer foam designed to absorb any residual shock from impact on the outer hull, and prevent spall from compromising the inner. Far from being indestructible, the hull of the ship was nevertheless proof against damage from impacts that would have destroyed or crippled it without those layers of flexible, passive defense.
Dirk was cocooned in his Baccardax PA-2M exo, listening to the subliminal hiss of its life support system as he drifted along the ship's exterior, the relative silence of being on extravehicular activities broken only by the occasional burst of chatter from the Jester, or Rollie and Hicks on the suits' comm channel. His exosuit's LIDAR showed him a range of information on the helmet's heads up display, regarding the very large hole in the outer hull at the location of the ship's main cargo bay. He saw that, at its widest point, the hole was 5.73 meters, and the edges were bent outward, meaning that the explosion which had created it had been internal. It was his last stop along the section of the ship's hull that he was responsible for inspecting; Rollie, Hicks, and he were doing a preliminary exterior survey, before moving into the ship itself. His survey had turned up several curious bits of data, not the least of which was the fact that the sockets for the emergency escape vehicles were all empty, and the ventral bay for the shuttlecraft was open to space, and empty as well. He used the EVA pack to maneuver away from the ship's hull, making it easier for him to get a good comm signal.
Time to check with the others
"Rollie, what's your status, find anything out of the ordinary?" He inquired over the suit channel.
"I'm just about finished my sweep, but aside from some minor damage caused by micrometeorites, it doesn't seem too bad. I should be headed up your way in two or three minutes." Replied Rollie, succinctly.
"Good enough. Hicks, got anything on your end?" He asked her.
"Nothing unusual, but the FTL drive module is still intact, so we've got that going for us. I tested the forward airlock, but it looks like even the backups have failed. If we want to get in, then we'll need one of the CATs to make a door." She reported back.
Dirk had considered loading up one of the CAT-Hyundai salvage mechs on Mule-1 for the trip over from the Jester, but had decided against it in favor of a more rapid departure. Fueling, prepping, and loading one of the CATs took several hours, and he had wanted to get things moving along, so he had gotten one of the tug drivers to bring his small survey crew out on the Mule. The other three members of his team consisted of Sung Kwon, their tug driver, Monika Bujdoso and Yong-Bai Xu, both of whom were first rate salvage operations techs.
Monika and Yong-Bai were currently examining the hole in the Monolith's main cargo bay, looking for any structural safety issues that might present a danger to working in that area. The ship had lost all power, having been abandoned for what was probably several years, as a result, gravity and life support had failed a long time ago. The loss of gravity was problematic, but if the ship's inner hull was entirely without air, if too many of the essential crew sections were open to space, or at air pressure too low to sustain long term operations, then the value of their discovery would be far lower than had originally been hoped. The Jester had very large air reserves for just such problems, but they were nowhere near the size needed to get a Monolith aired up, except perhaps in the most critical areas. The transport should have its own reserves, however, the condition of the ship made it unlikely that those could be counted on to be available. The large hole in the hull had opened the largest single space in the ship to hard vacuum.
He could see Bujdoso and Xu packing up the survey equipment they had been using, and a quick glance at his exo's HUD showed that Hicks and Rollie were headed his way. He already had the information directly through his cranial interface, but he occasionally felt the need to do things himself, just to keep the skills sharp. He was using the CI to continually monitor his life support and power levels, however, and he had direct neural access to the EVA pack patched into his exo as well, giving him the ability to maneuver with far greater ease than with only the manual controls. Hicks' suit was completely fly-by-wire, using a pair of cranial interfaces - one behind each ear, and could literally move herself around just by thinking about it.
"Bujdoso, did you and Xu get a good look at the damage to the hull? Can we head inside now?" He asked, impatiently, wanting nothing more than to get to it.
"Internally, the ship is OK, but the cargo hold isn't going to be aired up anytime soon. The explosion that made the hole doesn't appear to have hit any of the major structural supports, or load bearing framework, although it goes without saying that there's a lot of debris floating around in there." Bujdoso reported back, her last statement a subtle warning.
"OK, let's switch things up a bit. Bujdoso, you and Rollie, get to work forward; Xu, you, Hicks, and I will work our way aft. Remember, this is just survey work; if you get jammed up, don't force your way in, just mark it off, and double back. On the other hand, if you see something interesting, tag it, and we'll check it out later. Ready?" He waited until he had four thumbs up, "Alright, let's do this."
He and the others drifted silently towards the looming bulk of the colony ship, which had appeared small from afar, with only the starry black of space to which to compare it, but as they landed on the portside outer hull, their immediate frame of reference made them realize just exactly how large the ship truly was. Rollie was the only one who didn't bother to orient himself feet to the hull, Dirk and the rest had done so automatically, to give the comforting impression that they were standing on the edge of a hole in the floor, Rollie simply hung there directly over the hole, positioned at an angle that allowed him to see into its Stygian depths.
Dirk could hear the grin on his face over their shared comm frequency.
"Oh, this is gonna be fun. Beware the curse of the flying dutchman, spacers. Bwa-ha-ha-ha!" He joked, in a hokey impression of some cheap thespian of the early 20th century, as he drifted slowly into the unknown.
The small upward tilt, and slight shaking of Bujdoso's helmet told Dirk that Monika was probably rolling her eyes, in a time-honored expression of exasperation mixed with disbelief. He thought that Xu might have snorted, either in disgust, or amusement he couldn't tell, but Hicks was vocal with her opinion.
"That's not funny, you little runt! Cut it out!" She said, angrily, her voice subtly edged in fear.
"Cut the chatter, both of you, I need you focused on the job at hand." Dirk chided them, before he stepped off the edge of the hole and initiated a short burst of thrust from his EVA pack, dropping into the darkness.
The cargo bay was of fairly conventional layout, with a main floor for palletized freight, and secure cargo modules stacked, and clamped in place, along the walls to port and starboard. The fore and aft bulkheads were left clear, for storing the equipment to move the cargo around, and was also where the doors to the areas of the ship fore and aft of their point of entry. Dirk, Xu, and Hicks drifted toward the aft doorway, their suits' external lights casting hard edged shadows across the bay, the absence of air leaving the beams of light undiffused.
"DJ, we're in," called out Rollie from the forward doorway, "I'll see if we can't get this done quick, and then we can help you guys out."
"Right." Dirk replied, curtly.
Xu went to work on the door, prying open the panel for the manual release, and pulled the handle inside, disconnecting the door's primary motor and safety locks. Once he was done, it took little effort to get the door open using a spacer's pry bar, often called a 'hooligan bar'. Dirk was given to understand that the term was derived from the name Halligan, presumably the inventor's, and he was always glad to carry one on EVA.
The corridor beyond was a mess, there was debris floating everywhere, making it virtually impossible to use his exo's LIDAR array to make his way along. With a disgusted sigh, he activated his suit's external cameras, and the corridor became visible in full color high resolution inside his helmet.
"Hicks, Xu, there should be a stairwell just up ahead, let's see if we can't get into it. Maybe we can get to Broadway, and take a straight shot all the way to the engineering sections, then make our way forward." He said, with more optimism than he really felt.
Hicks was in the lead, and headed up the short hallway to the main stairwell, only to find that the horizontal pressure doors between the decks had been closed. Xu went to work, but they were stopped yet again, and again at every level. The ship was completely without air, and that meant the doors had been sealed before the air bled out, otherwise why bother. Dirk was trying to figure out what could have gone so catastrophically wrongful, as they made their way up the stairwell. He still couldn't understand why anyone would be crazy enough to want to colonize a planet this far out. He was using the time he had to wait, while Hicks and Xu opened the last door, to do some speculating.
Maybe their preliminary survey turned up something really valuable. Something so valuable that the cost of a colony ship was made practical. If that was the case, Dirk, they should have come back for it, shouldn't they? Maybe Cam was right, and the information got lost in the - His train of thought was violently derailed by Hicks' scream of terror in his ears.
"SHIT!" Exclaimed Xu, at pretty much the exact same time.
Dirk, without conscious thought, grabbed his 11mm pistol from the holster on his chest, and used his cranial interface to activate the exo's HUD targeting system, before he saw what had elicited such a reaction from his two companions.
It was a body. A very dead body, wearing what appeared to be a uniform and light body armor, common to corporate security personnel. Dirk pulled Hicks and Xu out of the way, and holstering his pistol, took a closer look at their grisly discovery. He grabbed the armor the figure was wearing and saw that a knife was sticking out of the right side, just at the armor's weak point.
Nicely done. He thought, admiringly. I doubt I could have done better.
He used both hands to turn the body around as it floated in zero-G, and he was able to see what had probably caused the reaction from Hicks. The face looked like it had been savaged by an animal. The vacuum of space had preserved the body, and he could see that there had been little blood loss around the damage, meaning that it had probably happened after death. He looked over the rest of the body, and saw a Velcro name tag on the armor vest and pulled it off to read it.
Dirk spent a long time looking at it before doing anything else. A flood of memories washed over him, from his first year in the Alliance Marine Corps, and the man who had mentored him through the initial, perilous months of his first tour of duty on Draconis.
The name on the tag was T. Bullard.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Monday, April 13, 2015
Here Be Monsters - Chapter 24
Rebecca Hicks had been shocked when, for no apparent reason, Dirk had simply bolted out of the Crypt, and left her to do the prep of the vacsuits and EVA gear by herself. He hadn't said a word, but she had gotten the impression from his facial expression that something had been very wrong, She had just decided to tap into the ship's internal communications, when Rollie had come back through the hatch and yelled, "Hicks! Damage control stations, now!" Startled by his barking voice, she had assumed at first that it was another of their sophomoric jokes, and turned to say something offensive, but had stopped cold when she saw the look on his face. She had dropped everything in her hands and sprinted to her assigned damage control station in Engineering.
The engineering section had a realtime feed directly from the bridge, and Hicks was able to watch in horror, as they came within a few millimeters of the Jester being hulled. The chief engineer, Brostowski, had shown her where the last missile would've hit them, had it not been intercepted. She had quickly walked to the head, and promptly vomited after realizing that the engineering bay in which she was standing would have been completely destroyed. Hicks was beginning to suspect that she had been more than slightly foolish to take this job, but she had been thinking with her wallet instead of her brains, and the idea of a big salvage bonus had tipped the scales. Now, she just hoped that she got out alive.
Once the immediate crisis had passed, there was work to do, and she headed back to the Crypt to finish preparing the EVA gear for when they located the ship they'd come to find.
Dirk didn't show up until two days later, when the Captain announced that they had - finally - positively identified the colony ship drifting along in the space between the Omega locus, which it turned out, had been along their own vector, and was being heavily guarded by remote AADS units. The one that had fired on them had been closest to their flight path, and if they had altered course in the opposite direction, they would likely have been fired upon by as many as five of them. The ship was almost directly between the locus and the planet, and appeared to be dead in space; emissions were limited to a slightly elevated rad count from the main drive, but at a level that suggested the ship had been dormant for some time.
"So what do you think happened, Sinclair? A whole colony ship, lost in space, and no one comes looking? That doesn't seem weird to you?" She asked Dirk, as he was prepping his exo for the work ahead.
"Yeah, I admit, it's more than passing strange, but companies the size of ARA Corp can trip over their own dong just like we can. Resodyne bought them out, and they're even bigger, so the scale of any potential screwup increases as well. This is just an example of a bureaucratic fuck-up of epic proportions. Try not to obsess about it. I sure as hell don't." He replied, without taking his eyes off of what he was doing.
"OK, I get that it doesn't worry you, but seriously, what do you think happened?" Hicks repeated, insistently.
He set down the diagnostic testing equipment and turned to face her before speaking, and the look on his face was hard.
"Let me be clear: The fact that a colony ship slipped through the cracks is immensely worrying to me. Those colonists must have had families who would eventually have wondered why they never heard from them. More than that, is the location of this system; we are at least a dozen light years beyond the edge of the Known Sphere, and there's got to be better systems closer to the core. Believe me when I say: I'm worried. And I'm worried because I have no clue what happened, but I won't let that distract me from what needs to be done. Now, if you plan to hang around, then make yourself useful, I got work to do." He answered, with an edge of hostility to his voice.
His answer gave her mind something new to consider that she'd not thought of before: Families. They would have come looking for answers eventually, and no company, even one as large as Resodyne, wanted the kind of public exposure that inability to answer those questions brought. She decided that further information on the ARA Corp/Resodyne merger might hold answers, so she picked up her personal tablet and left the Crypt. She went up to the crew lounge, and used its wireless network to access the ship's internal server, looking for any information on Resodyne's acquisition of ARA Corp.
There wasn't much. The ship's computer had one digipedia entry which contained little more than the contents of a corporate brochure. The lack of information was galling, but not entirely unexpected, and she tried to take Dirk's advice, and not get obsessed. She was just starting to think some impure thoughts vis-à-vis Mr Sinclair, when Alex happened to walk into the room. She saw Hicks sitting alone, walked over to the couch, and dropped right next to her. Alex was looking at her with a knowing grin; she made herself comfortable, propping her feet on the edge of the coffee table, and let out a long breath.
"Chased you out of the Crypt already, did he?" She asked, still smiling. "Try not to take it personally; he likes to work on his exo alone. Says it's a Zen thing. He's the same way with the ship's weapon systems."
Hicks knew the type, and she was the same way in most respects, but at least she could carry on a conversation while working.
"Zen, huh? No offense, but I don't know what you see in that guy. How did the two of you hook up, anyways?" She asked, without really expecting an answer.
Alex looked at her with obvious incredulity, then laughed so hard that tears were running down her cheeks before she got herself under control. Hicks didn't get the joke, and was about to get up and leave, when Alex grabbed her arm and pulled her back down.
"Whew! Sorry, you just caught me off guard, there. I wasn't laughing at you, exactly, but the first thing you said was - word for word - what Cam asked me when we had our recent blowup. Actually, I tried to jump him his first day aboard, but he wouldn't be caught. I was 17 at the time, and DJ's got some really strict ideas. I had to wait almost six months, and I wasn't 18 a day when I finally nailed him down." Alex said, without modesty.
"So, love at first sight, or just six months of celibacy catching up with you?" She inquired with a theatrical wink and a nudge.
"Oh, it was pure lust at first, and I mean Lust, but I realized that I'd made an emotional commitment after it was too late, so I just decided to roll with it." Alex shrugged.
Best of luck with that. Hicks thought to herself.
"So what's your take on this job we're doing? I tried asking DJ, and ended up with more questions, not less." She asked Alex, with a mild note of frustration.
"In all honesty, I find the idea of a colony ship just getting lost, without anyone saying a word, to be more than slightly nuts. The really bizarre thing, though, is the fact that it seems to have been drifting in space for several years now. Years. You'd think someone would have come and take a look. If it turns out to be loaded, then we're going to make a fortune, but even empty, there will be enough to make the crew very happy. Hell, the bounty on that thing's FTL drive from DTI alone, would take care of our fuel costs for the next year." Voicing an opinion that Hicks hadn't contemplated.
Hicks was considering what she'd just heard, and she couldn't find any fault with the young woman's logic regarding the probable windfall regarding DTI's standing bounty on its FTL drive technology. It was the seeming indifference on Resodyne's part to the loss of an asset whose value had to be in nine figures, easy. Likely more; a lot more. There was something strange going on that she simply couldn't verbalize, but it was there; hanging on the periphery of her thoughts, like a sort of mental hangnail.
"I hate to sound like I'm not thrilled with the idea of a fat payday, but I just can't shake the feeling that this whole enterprise is gonna go sideways in particularly gruesome fashion." She said, ominously.
"Oh, come on! You need to relax, girl." Alex popped up off the couch and smiled down at her. "It just so happens, I have a copy of the key to the liquor cabinet, so why don't I fix us both a couple of stiff drinks, and we can talk about all of the fun stuff we'll spend a ton of money on, when we make it back to civilization."
Hicks found that the offer met with her approval, and she grinned appreciatively.
"Now you're talking."
The engineering section had a realtime feed directly from the bridge, and Hicks was able to watch in horror, as they came within a few millimeters of the Jester being hulled. The chief engineer, Brostowski, had shown her where the last missile would've hit them, had it not been intercepted. She had quickly walked to the head, and promptly vomited after realizing that the engineering bay in which she was standing would have been completely destroyed. Hicks was beginning to suspect that she had been more than slightly foolish to take this job, but she had been thinking with her wallet instead of her brains, and the idea of a big salvage bonus had tipped the scales. Now, she just hoped that she got out alive.
Once the immediate crisis had passed, there was work to do, and she headed back to the Crypt to finish preparing the EVA gear for when they located the ship they'd come to find.
Dirk didn't show up until two days later, when the Captain announced that they had - finally - positively identified the colony ship drifting along in the space between the Omega locus, which it turned out, had been along their own vector, and was being heavily guarded by remote AADS units. The one that had fired on them had been closest to their flight path, and if they had altered course in the opposite direction, they would likely have been fired upon by as many as five of them. The ship was almost directly between the locus and the planet, and appeared to be dead in space; emissions were limited to a slightly elevated rad count from the main drive, but at a level that suggested the ship had been dormant for some time.
"So what do you think happened, Sinclair? A whole colony ship, lost in space, and no one comes looking? That doesn't seem weird to you?" She asked Dirk, as he was prepping his exo for the work ahead.
"Yeah, I admit, it's more than passing strange, but companies the size of ARA Corp can trip over their own dong just like we can. Resodyne bought them out, and they're even bigger, so the scale of any potential screwup increases as well. This is just an example of a bureaucratic fuck-up of epic proportions. Try not to obsess about it. I sure as hell don't." He replied, without taking his eyes off of what he was doing.
"OK, I get that it doesn't worry you, but seriously, what do you think happened?" Hicks repeated, insistently.
He set down the diagnostic testing equipment and turned to face her before speaking, and the look on his face was hard.
"Let me be clear: The fact that a colony ship slipped through the cracks is immensely worrying to me. Those colonists must have had families who would eventually have wondered why they never heard from them. More than that, is the location of this system; we are at least a dozen light years beyond the edge of the Known Sphere, and there's got to be better systems closer to the core. Believe me when I say: I'm worried. And I'm worried because I have no clue what happened, but I won't let that distract me from what needs to be done. Now, if you plan to hang around, then make yourself useful, I got work to do." He answered, with an edge of hostility to his voice.
His answer gave her mind something new to consider that she'd not thought of before: Families. They would have come looking for answers eventually, and no company, even one as large as Resodyne, wanted the kind of public exposure that inability to answer those questions brought. She decided that further information on the ARA Corp/Resodyne merger might hold answers, so she picked up her personal tablet and left the Crypt. She went up to the crew lounge, and used its wireless network to access the ship's internal server, looking for any information on Resodyne's acquisition of ARA Corp.
There wasn't much. The ship's computer had one digipedia entry which contained little more than the contents of a corporate brochure. The lack of information was galling, but not entirely unexpected, and she tried to take Dirk's advice, and not get obsessed. She was just starting to think some impure thoughts vis-à-vis Mr Sinclair, when Alex happened to walk into the room. She saw Hicks sitting alone, walked over to the couch, and dropped right next to her. Alex was looking at her with a knowing grin; she made herself comfortable, propping her feet on the edge of the coffee table, and let out a long breath.
"Chased you out of the Crypt already, did he?" She asked, still smiling. "Try not to take it personally; he likes to work on his exo alone. Says it's a Zen thing. He's the same way with the ship's weapon systems."
Hicks knew the type, and she was the same way in most respects, but at least she could carry on a conversation while working.
"Zen, huh? No offense, but I don't know what you see in that guy. How did the two of you hook up, anyways?" She asked, without really expecting an answer.
Alex looked at her with obvious incredulity, then laughed so hard that tears were running down her cheeks before she got herself under control. Hicks didn't get the joke, and was about to get up and leave, when Alex grabbed her arm and pulled her back down.
"Whew! Sorry, you just caught me off guard, there. I wasn't laughing at you, exactly, but the first thing you said was - word for word - what Cam asked me when we had our recent blowup. Actually, I tried to jump him his first day aboard, but he wouldn't be caught. I was 17 at the time, and DJ's got some really strict ideas. I had to wait almost six months, and I wasn't 18 a day when I finally nailed him down." Alex said, without modesty.
"So, love at first sight, or just six months of celibacy catching up with you?" She inquired with a theatrical wink and a nudge.
"Oh, it was pure lust at first, and I mean Lust, but I realized that I'd made an emotional commitment after it was too late, so I just decided to roll with it." Alex shrugged.
Best of luck with that. Hicks thought to herself.
"So what's your take on this job we're doing? I tried asking DJ, and ended up with more questions, not less." She asked Alex, with a mild note of frustration.
"In all honesty, I find the idea of a colony ship just getting lost, without anyone saying a word, to be more than slightly nuts. The really bizarre thing, though, is the fact that it seems to have been drifting in space for several years now. Years. You'd think someone would have come and take a look. If it turns out to be loaded, then we're going to make a fortune, but even empty, there will be enough to make the crew very happy. Hell, the bounty on that thing's FTL drive from DTI alone, would take care of our fuel costs for the next year." Voicing an opinion that Hicks hadn't contemplated.
Hicks was considering what she'd just heard, and she couldn't find any fault with the young woman's logic regarding the probable windfall regarding DTI's standing bounty on its FTL drive technology. It was the seeming indifference on Resodyne's part to the loss of an asset whose value had to be in nine figures, easy. Likely more; a lot more. There was something strange going on that she simply couldn't verbalize, but it was there; hanging on the periphery of her thoughts, like a sort of mental hangnail.
"I hate to sound like I'm not thrilled with the idea of a fat payday, but I just can't shake the feeling that this whole enterprise is gonna go sideways in particularly gruesome fashion." She said, ominously.
"Oh, come on! You need to relax, girl." Alex popped up off the couch and smiled down at her. "It just so happens, I have a copy of the key to the liquor cabinet, so why don't I fix us both a couple of stiff drinks, and we can talk about all of the fun stuff we'll spend a ton of money on, when we make it back to civilization."
Hicks found that the offer met with her approval, and she grinned appreciatively.
"Now you're talking."
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Here Be Monsters - Chapter 23
Cameron sat in his bridge command chair and watched the main screen in front of him as the countdown timer ran down to zero. They had been in FTL transit for ten weeks, two days, eleven hours, and 47 minutes. His crew's nerves had frayed nearly to the breaking point, and now everyone on board was anxious with anticipation; hoping that sometime in the next couple of hours, their Captain had pulled a big, fat rabbit out of his hat.
The trip out had actually gone better than he had feared, the only real problem had been Dirk and Alex; as always when two people lived and worked with one another, there had been an argument. Cameron didn't know how it had started, but it had ended with Dirk losing his temper and calling Alex a dirty word, which was probably how he had gotten a split lip. Nobody had seen her hit him, it had happened out of the view of the ship's security cameras, and Dirk, for all of his anger, had managed to keep a level head, and refused to accuse Alex of having done it. Alex had admitted to it the next day, and had explained the circumstances, knowing full well that she was risking her career. Cameron had already guessed most of what had happened, but hearing that he'd been right had annoyed him, and he'd given them a dressing down that had left both wondering if they would have a last paycheck, much less a career when they got back to Alliance territory. He had finished by putting them on separate shifts, then giving each of them increased work loads. The combination had kept the two of them apart for almost two weeks straight, and by the time Cameron let them have their original shifts back, they were more than ready to kiss and make up. They'd set a new ship record for official noise complaints in a single shift, which was some kind of indicator, at any rate.
The rest of the trip out after Vulcanfall had been boring to the point of insanity. If it hadn't been for Dirk and Rollie's penchant for springing practical jokes on their unsuspecting crewmates, then the tension might very well have done some damage. They had even managed to get him with a prank that involved causing his communication badge to make random flatulence noises whenever he walked within two meters of another member of the crew. It wasn't exactly high class humor, but it kept people laughing, and with little to do except routine maintenance, a little comic relief went a long way. He could sense the excitement of the bridge crew as the countdown reached double digits, and everyone called out the last ten seconds.
The transition from FTL drive to sublight was always something he had to sit down for. It wasn't something that he could explain to anyone who had never experienced it, but the closest accurate description would be to say that, it was like your brain was riding a roller coaster, while the rest of you was standing still. It was like a split second of the worst vertigo ever, then it was gone, leaving you with a feeling of having been stretched out like a rubber band, and then let go. Most of the time when asked, he just said that it felt 'weird'.
People all reacted differently to FTL transition stress. Some, like Rollie, could be doing needlepoint and not miss a stitch. Others simply couldn't take the strain at all, but the only way to find out was to go through it, and hope that it didn't cause much of a reaction. Cameron had read somewhere that approximately 15 percent of the population was incapable of making an FTL transition without being sedated first, but the percentage of people who seemed to be completely unaffected was less than one percent.
His crew were shaking out the cobwebs, and there was a steady stream of data coming up on the screens around his command chair. Alex was scanning for any activity of any kind on the standard commercial communication channels, and as many military frequencies as she could think of. Dirk was using his access to the passive optical sensors on the main guns to try and identify potential planets in the system, while keeping the radar and LIDAR arrays sweeping the area around the ship for any objects that might pose a threat. Erwin Koch had come up from Engineering to assist with monitoring the long-range sensors.
"Hah! I got one!" Exclaimed Dirk, triumphantly, two hours later. "Unless I miss my guess, there's a Jovian planet at 277.3 by 87.391 and a distance of approximately 39.2 AU."
"Bao-Jian, can you confirm that?" Asked Cameron, in a rush.
Bao-Jian loaded Dirk's position data into the navigation system that controlled the high resolution cameras and electronic telescopes, and waited while they shifted position and focused on the new search location. The air on the bridge was thick with anticipation, while the Jester's pilot very carefully focused on his work.
"Confirmed, Captain! There is a large gas giant almost exactly where he said. Best guess at this point puts it at about 25 percent larger than Jupiter, and best of all - it has rings." Bao-Jian told him, excitedly.
There were cheers on the bridge, because discovery of rings made the job of figuring out where the plane of the elliptic was, much simpler. Rings tended to line up with the equator, and the equator tended to align with the plane of the system, as a result, finding the planet where the ship for which they were looking was likely to be, just got a whole lot easier.
The ship had been drifting along under minimal thrust, but generally in the direction of the local star. With their latest discovery, Cameron ordered Bao-Jian to put the Jester on a higher acceleration vector for a point about 1.2 AU from the primary. He figured that if there was a colony transport ship in the system, then it only made sense for it to be in one place, and that was near a planet capable of supporting life.
Hours passed, watches changed, as the Jester went deeper into this system; a system without even the dignity of a proper name. As their proximity to the inner system increased so did their information about its geography, and they cataloged several moons orbiting the gas giant, now tentatively named 'Blacksad', due to a curved band of dark cloud making the planet look like a cartoonish sad face. It was less than imaginative, but it was easier to say than EL51376-B3, which was the official designation according to the UniSys Stellar Cartography Group.
Three days after they had made their FTL transition into the system, they found what they were looking for. An infinitely small blue-green speck that was picked up by one of the long-range telescopes, and Cameron ordered the Jester's course altered to make a least-time approach with the planet, consistent with the need to conserve fuel for the trip out. Once the course was laid in and set, all anyone had to do was sit back and relax for a couple of days, since the planet was passing around the sun away from them, and they would have to swing around it to avoid unnecessary risk of radiation exposure.
Cameron was beginning to think that this whole trip might have been for nothing as they came up on the turn over point, when they would flip the ship 180 degrees, and begin decelerating so that they were at rest relative to the planet when they got these, but tried to remain optimistic about what they would find when they got there.
He had sent Rollie, Dirk and Hicks to check over all of the ship's EVA gear, so that when it was needed, it would be ready to go. As a result, Dirk wasn't at his station on the bridge, when the Jester's threat warning radar picked up a radar anomaly more or less directly in their path. The ship's navigation radar had missed it because, whatever it was, it had been designed to be hidden. Cameron knew what the warning tone was, but with nothing coming up on the primary navigation radar, he was slower to realize what that meant than he should have been.
The only reason the defensive system's radar had picked it up before the navigational radar, which had an extremely long range, was that it was *deliberately* stealthy. The defensive system's radar was controlled by software designed to look for anomalous patches of space that were totally devoid of all EM signature. Dirk's cautionary habit of leaving the threat warning radar to passively search the space around the ship was standard operating procedure for the Alliance Navy, and had struck Cameron as good policy for traveling through systems with an uncertain level of insystem law enforcement.
Cameron was jolted out of his seat when Dirk's voice came over his com badge at a God-awfully loud volume.
"Captain! Bring the ship around, 90 degrees in any direction, perpendicular to our present course, and at our highest possible acceleration! Now!" Dirk demanded, his voice warbling as if he was running and talking at the same time.
"What the hell, Sinclair? What's going on? I've got an alert on the threa -" He was cut off as Dirk suddenly came through the bridge hatch, and sprinted to the ship's weapons control station. "Dirk! Talk to me! What's going on?" He repeated.
Dirk didn't reply right away, but Cameron could see him begin bringing the Jester's point defense systems, lasers and autocannons both, on line, while simultaneously activating the short-range millimeter wave radar.
"Captain, you need to alter course, now; there's no time to explain, please just do it." He said in a voice laden with fear, without turning to look at him.
Cameron had never seen Dirk like this, and it worried him enough to give the orders. He watched the navigational display at his seat, and was horrified to see that the navigation radar was now tracking three small objects that had separated from the larger one, from which they were now rapidly moving on a reciprocal course. The three new objects were accelerating, and shifted to intercept the Jester with increased velocity.
Cameron was not reassured when he heard Dirk say "Oh, fuck!" in a voice bordering on panic.
"Come on, talk to me, Dirk! What's out there?" He asked, confused by his gunner's obvious anxiety.
"Captain, three missiles locked on to us from an AADS; it was lurking in our path, waiting for us to get close enough to enter its firing envelope, and once we did, it launched those missiles. I had the Jester's tactical system programmed to alert me if it detected something, but I never suspected anything like this." He explained, his voice strained.
Cameron could see that the missiles were closing faster, and for the first time in a while, he was worried that he had made a colossal mistake. He had brought his ship and its 47 crew members out to the ass-end of nowhere, and there was a good chance he had just killed them all. The missiles were still accelerating, and closing the distance with increasing speed every second.
"Captain, we need to change direction away from those missiles, and start randomly shifting course. That will give me a little more time to refine the defensive system's targeting solutions, and give us a much better chance of taking them out before they get within detonation range." Dirk told him, without taking his eyes off his work.
"Bao, do it." He ordered the pilot, quickly consulting his command terminal, and continued. "Maintain our current acceleration, but bring us another 35 degrees off our present course away from those missiles."
Bao-Jian wasted no time setting the course corrections after muttering, "Yes sir."
"Captain, I have the best possible data for taking out those missiles, but we are going to have to turn broadside to make the best use of the Jester's weaponry; meaning we're going to be completely exposed if anything gets through, but we'll never outrun them, so..." Dirk trailed off, not needing to finish the thought that was on everyone's mind.
Cameron knew that what Dirk was proposing was a massive gamble, but he didn't hesitate for more than a few seconds before turning to Bao-Jian, and said: "Bao, on my mark, cut our accel and bring us port broadside onto those bogies. In 3. 2. 1. MARK!"
The Jester's main insystem drive had been throwing out a dense plume of white hot monatomic plasma, and it suddenly went out, as Bao-Jian cut the ship's acceleration completely, and pushed the Jester's maneuvering thrusters to their limits to bring them around in as little time as possible. Everyone else was watching the main bridge display, which showed the incoming projectiles' cones of probable trajectory shrink rapidly as they got closer. Dirk's firing solutions were preprogrammed to activate when the ship's weapons came to bear on their assigned targets.
The Jester, in addition to its two 76mm railguns, mounted three pairs of 6-barrel, 30mm rotary cannon in turrets, one ventral, two dorsal, with a combined rate of fire of approximately 24,000 rounds a minute. The ship also had six, 35 megawatt antimissile lasers, as well as decoy flares and chaff dispensers.
Dirk fired them all.
The vibration from the autocannons could be felt throughout the ship, along with the intermittent thumping of the chaff and flare dispensers disgorging their own payloads. The lasers were silent save for the whine of their servos coming through the hull, only audible to crew members in close proximity to them. The railguns were totally silent, their contribution to the effort was limited to only a dozen rounds, but those rounds were canisters of tungsten cubes with a programmable fuse and those twelve rounds added 36,000 projectiles to the enormous cloud of destruction on an intercept course with their targets.
The trip out had actually gone better than he had feared, the only real problem had been Dirk and Alex; as always when two people lived and worked with one another, there had been an argument. Cameron didn't know how it had started, but it had ended with Dirk losing his temper and calling Alex a dirty word, which was probably how he had gotten a split lip. Nobody had seen her hit him, it had happened out of the view of the ship's security cameras, and Dirk, for all of his anger, had managed to keep a level head, and refused to accuse Alex of having done it. Alex had admitted to it the next day, and had explained the circumstances, knowing full well that she was risking her career. Cameron had already guessed most of what had happened, but hearing that he'd been right had annoyed him, and he'd given them a dressing down that had left both wondering if they would have a last paycheck, much less a career when they got back to Alliance territory. He had finished by putting them on separate shifts, then giving each of them increased work loads. The combination had kept the two of them apart for almost two weeks straight, and by the time Cameron let them have their original shifts back, they were more than ready to kiss and make up. They'd set a new ship record for official noise complaints in a single shift, which was some kind of indicator, at any rate.
The rest of the trip out after Vulcanfall had been boring to the point of insanity. If it hadn't been for Dirk and Rollie's penchant for springing practical jokes on their unsuspecting crewmates, then the tension might very well have done some damage. They had even managed to get him with a prank that involved causing his communication badge to make random flatulence noises whenever he walked within two meters of another member of the crew. It wasn't exactly high class humor, but it kept people laughing, and with little to do except routine maintenance, a little comic relief went a long way. He could sense the excitement of the bridge crew as the countdown reached double digits, and everyone called out the last ten seconds.
The transition from FTL drive to sublight was always something he had to sit down for. It wasn't something that he could explain to anyone who had never experienced it, but the closest accurate description would be to say that, it was like your brain was riding a roller coaster, while the rest of you was standing still. It was like a split second of the worst vertigo ever, then it was gone, leaving you with a feeling of having been stretched out like a rubber band, and then let go. Most of the time when asked, he just said that it felt 'weird'.
People all reacted differently to FTL transition stress. Some, like Rollie, could be doing needlepoint and not miss a stitch. Others simply couldn't take the strain at all, but the only way to find out was to go through it, and hope that it didn't cause much of a reaction. Cameron had read somewhere that approximately 15 percent of the population was incapable of making an FTL transition without being sedated first, but the percentage of people who seemed to be completely unaffected was less than one percent.
His crew were shaking out the cobwebs, and there was a steady stream of data coming up on the screens around his command chair. Alex was scanning for any activity of any kind on the standard commercial communication channels, and as many military frequencies as she could think of. Dirk was using his access to the passive optical sensors on the main guns to try and identify potential planets in the system, while keeping the radar and LIDAR arrays sweeping the area around the ship for any objects that might pose a threat. Erwin Koch had come up from Engineering to assist with monitoring the long-range sensors.
"Hah! I got one!" Exclaimed Dirk, triumphantly, two hours later. "Unless I miss my guess, there's a Jovian planet at 277.3 by 87.391 and a distance of approximately 39.2 AU."
"Bao-Jian, can you confirm that?" Asked Cameron, in a rush.
Bao-Jian loaded Dirk's position data into the navigation system that controlled the high resolution cameras and electronic telescopes, and waited while they shifted position and focused on the new search location. The air on the bridge was thick with anticipation, while the Jester's pilot very carefully focused on his work.
"Confirmed, Captain! There is a large gas giant almost exactly where he said. Best guess at this point puts it at about 25 percent larger than Jupiter, and best of all - it has rings." Bao-Jian told him, excitedly.
There were cheers on the bridge, because discovery of rings made the job of figuring out where the plane of the elliptic was, much simpler. Rings tended to line up with the equator, and the equator tended to align with the plane of the system, as a result, finding the planet where the ship for which they were looking was likely to be, just got a whole lot easier.
The ship had been drifting along under minimal thrust, but generally in the direction of the local star. With their latest discovery, Cameron ordered Bao-Jian to put the Jester on a higher acceleration vector for a point about 1.2 AU from the primary. He figured that if there was a colony transport ship in the system, then it only made sense for it to be in one place, and that was near a planet capable of supporting life.
Hours passed, watches changed, as the Jester went deeper into this system; a system without even the dignity of a proper name. As their proximity to the inner system increased so did their information about its geography, and they cataloged several moons orbiting the gas giant, now tentatively named 'Blacksad', due to a curved band of dark cloud making the planet look like a cartoonish sad face. It was less than imaginative, but it was easier to say than EL51376-B3, which was the official designation according to the UniSys Stellar Cartography Group.
Three days after they had made their FTL transition into the system, they found what they were looking for. An infinitely small blue-green speck that was picked up by one of the long-range telescopes, and Cameron ordered the Jester's course altered to make a least-time approach with the planet, consistent with the need to conserve fuel for the trip out. Once the course was laid in and set, all anyone had to do was sit back and relax for a couple of days, since the planet was passing around the sun away from them, and they would have to swing around it to avoid unnecessary risk of radiation exposure.
Cameron was beginning to think that this whole trip might have been for nothing as they came up on the turn over point, when they would flip the ship 180 degrees, and begin decelerating so that they were at rest relative to the planet when they got these, but tried to remain optimistic about what they would find when they got there.
He had sent Rollie, Dirk and Hicks to check over all of the ship's EVA gear, so that when it was needed, it would be ready to go. As a result, Dirk wasn't at his station on the bridge, when the Jester's threat warning radar picked up a radar anomaly more or less directly in their path. The ship's navigation radar had missed it because, whatever it was, it had been designed to be hidden. Cameron knew what the warning tone was, but with nothing coming up on the primary navigation radar, he was slower to realize what that meant than he should have been.
The only reason the defensive system's radar had picked it up before the navigational radar, which had an extremely long range, was that it was *deliberately* stealthy. The defensive system's radar was controlled by software designed to look for anomalous patches of space that were totally devoid of all EM signature. Dirk's cautionary habit of leaving the threat warning radar to passively search the space around the ship was standard operating procedure for the Alliance Navy, and had struck Cameron as good policy for traveling through systems with an uncertain level of insystem law enforcement.
Cameron was jolted out of his seat when Dirk's voice came over his com badge at a God-awfully loud volume.
"Captain! Bring the ship around, 90 degrees in any direction, perpendicular to our present course, and at our highest possible acceleration! Now!" Dirk demanded, his voice warbling as if he was running and talking at the same time.
"What the hell, Sinclair? What's going on? I've got an alert on the threa -" He was cut off as Dirk suddenly came through the bridge hatch, and sprinted to the ship's weapons control station. "Dirk! Talk to me! What's going on?" He repeated.
Dirk didn't reply right away, but Cameron could see him begin bringing the Jester's point defense systems, lasers and autocannons both, on line, while simultaneously activating the short-range millimeter wave radar.
"Captain, you need to alter course, now; there's no time to explain, please just do it." He said in a voice laden with fear, without turning to look at him.
Cameron had never seen Dirk like this, and it worried him enough to give the orders. He watched the navigational display at his seat, and was horrified to see that the navigation radar was now tracking three small objects that had separated from the larger one, from which they were now rapidly moving on a reciprocal course. The three new objects were accelerating, and shifted to intercept the Jester with increased velocity.
Cameron was not reassured when he heard Dirk say "Oh, fuck!" in a voice bordering on panic.
"Come on, talk to me, Dirk! What's out there?" He asked, confused by his gunner's obvious anxiety.
"Captain, three missiles locked on to us from an AADS; it was lurking in our path, waiting for us to get close enough to enter its firing envelope, and once we did, it launched those missiles. I had the Jester's tactical system programmed to alert me if it detected something, but I never suspected anything like this." He explained, his voice strained.
Cameron could see that the missiles were closing faster, and for the first time in a while, he was worried that he had made a colossal mistake. He had brought his ship and its 47 crew members out to the ass-end of nowhere, and there was a good chance he had just killed them all. The missiles were still accelerating, and closing the distance with increasing speed every second.
"Captain, we need to change direction away from those missiles, and start randomly shifting course. That will give me a little more time to refine the defensive system's targeting solutions, and give us a much better chance of taking them out before they get within detonation range." Dirk told him, without taking his eyes off his work.
"Bao, do it." He ordered the pilot, quickly consulting his command terminal, and continued. "Maintain our current acceleration, but bring us another 35 degrees off our present course away from those missiles."
Bao-Jian wasted no time setting the course corrections after muttering, "Yes sir."
"Captain, I have the best possible data for taking out those missiles, but we are going to have to turn broadside to make the best use of the Jester's weaponry; meaning we're going to be completely exposed if anything gets through, but we'll never outrun them, so..." Dirk trailed off, not needing to finish the thought that was on everyone's mind.
Cameron knew that what Dirk was proposing was a massive gamble, but he didn't hesitate for more than a few seconds before turning to Bao-Jian, and said: "Bao, on my mark, cut our accel and bring us port broadside onto those bogies. In 3. 2. 1. MARK!"
The Jester's main insystem drive had been throwing out a dense plume of white hot monatomic plasma, and it suddenly went out, as Bao-Jian cut the ship's acceleration completely, and pushed the Jester's maneuvering thrusters to their limits to bring them around in as little time as possible. Everyone else was watching the main bridge display, which showed the incoming projectiles' cones of probable trajectory shrink rapidly as they got closer. Dirk's firing solutions were preprogrammed to activate when the ship's weapons came to bear on their assigned targets.
The Jester, in addition to its two 76mm railguns, mounted three pairs of 6-barrel, 30mm rotary cannon in turrets, one ventral, two dorsal, with a combined rate of fire of approximately 24,000 rounds a minute. The ship also had six, 35 megawatt antimissile lasers, as well as decoy flares and chaff dispensers.
Dirk fired them all.
The vibration from the autocannons could be felt throughout the ship, along with the intermittent thumping of the chaff and flare dispensers disgorging their own payloads. The lasers were silent save for the whine of their servos coming through the hull, only audible to crew members in close proximity to them. The railguns were totally silent, their contribution to the effort was limited to only a dozen rounds, but those rounds were canisters of tungsten cubes with a programmable fuse and those twelve rounds added 36,000 projectiles to the enormous cloud of destruction on an intercept course with their targets.
The first missile died when it moved to avoid a stream of incoming 30mm AP rounds, and wound up being immolated by a pair of infrared beams of coherent light. The second was all but obliterated when a lucky 76mm canister load detonated in front of it, with a compound velocity of horrific proportions, and most of the 3000 tungsten cubes hit nose-on tearing it apart lengthwise. The last missile almost got to within detonation range, when all of the autocannons locked on to it simultaneously, and ripped it to shreds, some of which still had enough momentum to pock the ship's hull plating.
It was over as quickly as it began.
Cameron sat back in his chair with a loud release of breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and heard Dirk yell "Ooh-Rah!", which seemed to jolt a second cheer from the crew.
It was over as quickly as it began.
Cameron sat back in his chair with a loud release of breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding, and heard Dirk yell "Ooh-Rah!", which seemed to jolt a second cheer from the crew.
"OK people, let's take a survey of any hull damage caused by that last one, and get the repair remotes on any work needs doing. Dirk, well done. Now, tell me what just happened." Cameron demanded, once the noise had died down.
"Without a good look at what fired at us, I can only speculate, but my guess is that it was an automated area denial system, or AADS. What the fuck it's doing in this system, I have no idea. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to take one of the Mules, and go have a look. Chances are that its only programmed to fire on something like the size of this ship." Dirk said, confidently.
"No, way. I have no intention of finding out otherwise the hard way. Do me the courtesy of finding out if there's more of those out there, and get us around them. If we come up short on what we came for originally, then we'll revisit this conversation, but for now: No." Cameron told him, with obvious finality.
He sat back in his chair and watched the main viewer, which was linked to the optical feed on one of the ship's repair drones, and tried to project an aura of calm. This job was just getting started, and had provided more than enough excitement already. If this kept up, and they survived, he would write it all up and sell it as a screenplay. The fantasy was a pleasant distraction from the thought that lurked in the shadows, waiting for him to pay attention to it: Why would any colony need anything like an AADS?
He couldn't think of an answer that made sense.
"Without a good look at what fired at us, I can only speculate, but my guess is that it was an automated area denial system, or AADS. What the fuck it's doing in this system, I have no idea. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to take one of the Mules, and go have a look. Chances are that its only programmed to fire on something like the size of this ship." Dirk said, confidently.
"No, way. I have no intention of finding out otherwise the hard way. Do me the courtesy of finding out if there's more of those out there, and get us around them. If we come up short on what we came for originally, then we'll revisit this conversation, but for now: No." Cameron told him, with obvious finality.
He sat back in his chair and watched the main viewer, which was linked to the optical feed on one of the ship's repair drones, and tried to project an aura of calm. This job was just getting started, and had provided more than enough excitement already. If this kept up, and they survived, he would write it all up and sell it as a screenplay. The fantasy was a pleasant distraction from the thought that lurked in the shadows, waiting for him to pay attention to it: Why would any colony need anything like an AADS?
He couldn't think of an answer that made sense.
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