Chapter Two
From about fifty thousand kilometers out, the ship could barely be seen. It was just a dark patch between the dark places between stars. No lights emerged from it to show its location, no light fell on it to illuminate it.
From a mere thousand kilometers away, which was really close in astronomical terms, the ship was no clearer or easier to distinguish. Although basic sensors from half a solar system away could locate it, the eye simply didn’t have enough detail to distinguish the ship from the background.
From five hundred meters away (which is so close in proximity that it’s the equivalent of rubbing your nose on someone else’s whilst standing in an open field) the ship could finally be distinguished. A dull gray, with a few less dull gray highlights. A slight speckling of light on one edge where a local primary shone slightly less feebly than the other background stars.
But without points of reference, it was impossible to distinguish size. A projection of metalwork on one side could have been an antenna or a gantry or a docking station. As things turned out, this ship happened to be just over two hundred and fifty meters long along the long axis. A tadpole as ships went. Consisting of mostly engines, this looked for all the world like a courier ship, one of millions that flew the galaxy conveying messages from one planet to another. Although the PD Rods made faster than light travel possible, sending information without having to physically carry it was still an elusive goal.
This was the Immonen, a ship whose sole purpose was to travel.
But appearances can be deceptive. For the Immonen was not a courier. It was, as it turns out, what is known as a ‘blind jumper’. Back in the early days of interstellar travel, there were no maps. Like the sailing ships of a long forgotten era that sailed the seas before them, the new travelers had to find their own way and create their own maps. But unlike the sailors of yore, the star travelers did not have the luxury of easy to use navigation points such as stars, the sun and the magnetic poles.
Well, they still had the stars, but they were next to useless when even a short jump would make all but the nearest stars indistinguishable from each other.
And here is where the blind jumpers came into the picture. As star travel became possible, everyone realized that they would need to know where they were going and where other people had gone before. And more importantly, where the good rest stops were.
So everyone pooled his or her knowledge. All exploratory ships, upon their return (assuming that they did) would download all their astronomical information to the distributed repositories. Over time, the galactic map was built up and travel became so easy that it was commonplace.
But there was always the insatiable demand for new territories. To see what was there. To go places where nobody had been before. So there were always a few people willing to make blind jumps into the unknown. Most used older or second hand ships massaged back to just legal operating conditions by eager hands. Nobody had used a new ship for blind jumping in the last five thousand years.
And blind jumpers needed to have at least a little something wrong with their personalities. Blind jumps could end up in any number of astronomical hazards. A short jump could almost guarantee that the navigator would be able to avoid any visible obstacles. But it’s a long way from one place to another. An exceptionally long way. And getting anywhere involved making lots of very long way jumps. So long in fact that you could aim for a spot that looked empty from where you started only to find that it was now home to an inconvenient black hole when you arrived.
This was the type of ship that was the Immonen. And the past tense was a perfect tense to use, for the Immonen is a derelict.
“Got something on the screen Captain” said Ken.
“What is it?” asked Captain West.
“Inert, range fifty thou, moving at thirty. Too fast for an asteroid, too slow for a ship.”
“Well, that’s interesting. It’s right on the edge of our scanning range. What do you say Ox, want to go in for a closer look?”
“You don’t pay me to think Captain,” replied Oxley, the Second on Kilkka. “It’s your ship but if Ken mentioned it, it’s probably worth a look.”
West quietly mulled over this new object. They had been about to make their next jump when Ken announced the new contact. It was close enough that they wouldn’t lose much by going in to have a look. They were in a hurry, but a contact in deep space was normally worth looking at. It might be something, or it might be nothing. “Let’s go in and have a look.”
“Yes Captain” replied Ken. He plotted in the new heading to the nav computer and aligned for the small jump. A jump of fifty thou was barely a blink and consumed a lot of energy, but to make the same trip on thrusters (and throwing out remass all the way) would be quite a waste of resources. And out here, there weren’t many convenient gas stations advertising “Reaction Mass available here!”
Half an instant later, with most of the laws of physics thoroughly broken, the Kilkka appeared a scant five thousand kilometers from the object.
“Full scan, please” said Oxley.
“I know the drill” shot back Ken. “I’ve been navigating longer than you’ve been piloting.”
“Just like to help” smirked Oxley. “You can never be too careful with these close encounters. And I’ve had more than my share of things jumping out at me from the dark, thank you very much.”
“Cut it out you two” injected the Captain. “What do we have?”
“Let’s see” mulled Ken as the computer started feeding him the information as it was gathered. “No emissions of energy, radio or thermal, flat trajectory with no spin, no replies on standard hails, medium mass and hollow. It’s a ship.”
“Derelict?”
“Ooh, salvage rights” chimed Oxley.
“Looks like she’s dead in the water. Constant velocity and trajectory, no reaction to any scans. If there’s anyone aboard, then they are extremely uncomfortable.”
“Dead is more like it,” said the Captain. “Okay, first things first. Do a complete wide-band scan and see if there is anyone nearby. I don’t want to fall into some first-rate pirates’ trap nor do I want some trigger-happy novice wanting to claim that we’re stepping on his mark. Ox, inform the boarders that they may have some action soon, and get some fingers on our triggers. If a shootout evolves, I want violence to be our first resort, not out last.”
The news of this new ship spread quickly throughout the ship. The Kilkka had a standing crew of just ten, but carried a group of thirty boarders on this trip. A boarder was somewhere between a commando, a private and a wingman. The skills required were many and varied but most tended to just bring gusto and a good aim. No ship has ever been happy to be on the receiving end of boarders. Because when they are there to help, they aren’t called boarders, they are called the rescue team.
With every sensor, antenna and dish on the Kilkka deployed, local space was awash with pulsing waves of energy. Probing far and wide, everything that was nearby was seen, assessed and categorized. But there were no nasty surprises. They were currently in a region of space that was far from any systems, inhabited or otherwise. There was, literally, nothing to hide behind. Even a cloaked ship running at full stealth conditions with minimal emissions would have been spotted.
“Okay,” announced Ken. “We are about as free and clear of contacts as we’re likely to be. If there is anyone out here watching us, then they have far better technology than we do and we’re outclassed anyway.”
“That makes me feel a whole lot better,” muttered Oxley.
“I just like to hedge my bets,” replied Ken. “I’d say that there was definitely nobody out here except us, but you never know when some new and fancy alien species is going to come along and change your perception of what is and isn’t possible.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Knock it off you two,” said Captain West for the thousandth time. “Let’s see if this is going to be worth our time. Take us in.”
The Kilkka moved in closer. Carefully matching velocities, the two ships seemed to be standing absolutely still, despite the non-obvious fact they were both traveling faster than any bullet ever had.
“We’re in position,” said Ken. “Final scans of the ship show no external damage, dead zero emissions from the interior. Internal temp holding at just above ambient.”
“Atmosphere?”
“Possible, but not likely. It depends on what happened and how long it’s been out here. Hang on, sensors found the nameplate. She’s the Immonen.”
The computers clicked over as the database of known ships was searched. With no immediate results, it clicked over to the registry of lost ships. After a few moments, the results came back.
“Wow, she’s an oldie,” exclaimed Ken.
“Whatcha got?”
“The Immonen – built by the Egorov Starship Consortium, Explorer Class. Used by the Ikushko Mail and Data corporation as a general courier for a standard ship’s lifetime, then sold on to an independent blind jumper. Used on and off by different blinders for a dozen cycles or so with no major finds. Decommissioned eighty eight years ago.”
“And then?” asked West.
“And then nothing. She wasn’t re-registered with any major shipping company or planetary government. Comparing the scans to the last known specs she seems to have had an engine upgrade but no major modifications. No visible weapons systems added, no battle damage. She’s a non-ship.”
“What do you think?” asked Oxley. “She a contraband runner?”
“Possibly,” replied West. “She was decommissioned so someone went to the effort of getting her worthy to fly again. That same someone then went and upgraded the engines, so she could travel further and faster but has no offensive capacity. It really does seem like she would have been used as a runner.”
“Could be a different ship but with faked identifiers. That’s happened more than once.”
“Again, possible, but not enough information to know for sure.”
“Still want to go in?”
“Hell yes. Send in the boarders.”
Down in the grunt space, five boarders had finished suiting up. These suits were slightly different to the simple type that Deva used. These were military surplus suits, consisting of a basic EVA suit underneath, a military grade maneuvering pack on the back and full body armour all around. Most of the boarders customized their suits with additional holsters, extra lights and little personal touches so that they could tell each other apart visually as well as through their HUD’s.
“Good to go?” asked Saer.
“Good to go!” came back four replies. Saer was the Lieutenant in charge of this complement of boarders. He’d picked four of his most experienced team members to accompany him on this trip. Normally, a team of ten would be used to navigate a new and unknown ship in order to be able to relay comms through each other if there was a lot of interference on the unknown ship.
The reason for taking a team of five instead of the usual ten was that on the previous shift it had been Oligana’s birthday, so a celebration had been in order. Since it was mid-trip and their main task had already been performed, sobriety had been deemed unnecessary. So by saying he was taking the four most experienced team members, what he really meant was that he was taking the four least hung over.
The prep bay was large enough to accommodate all thirty boarders at once, so having only five of them in there meant that the space seemed cavernous in the normally claustrophobic ship’s crew areas.
“Leave the guns behind,” said Captain West over the comms. “I don’t want any holes in my new ship.”
“Yes boss,” replied Saer as he firmly pushed his sidearm into its holster. Taking note of his lead, the other four made sure they had their weapons. Boarders may have been homicidal, psychotic and borderline insane but they would never leave their own ship unarmed. That fell into the category of “suicidal”, which was what separated boarders from blind jumpers.
As the large doors with the big “Outer Door” warnings opened, five dark shapes moved out into the hard vacuum of space. The gap between their own ship and the Immonen was small, and easily traversed. Having reached the Immonen, Saer and his men set about looking for a hatch.
“This bird has zero energy” called Saer across the comm back to the bridge of the Kilkka. “You want us to cut or force?”
“See if you can find the emergency access point,” said West. “As I said, no holes in my new ship, please.”
“It should be about eighty meters aft of your current position,” said Ken. “I’ve added it as Point One on your HUD.”
“I see it,” said Saer. “Move up.”
Looking like some barnacles scuttling along the side of the ship, the five Boarders moved towards the indicated position. The emergency access point turned out to be a rectangular hatch, slightly taller than a man with a manual override to open the door from the outside.
“There is some vacuum ablation of the material, but it looks solid. There might still be some atmosphere in there, assuming that there aren’t any holes anywhere else.”
“Copy that Saer. You want me to squirt you the info on the hatch mechanics?”
“Nah, this baby is pretty standard. Hell, this design was old when my grandpa was young.”
Working quickly, one of the boarders used an impulse tool to turn the gears holding the hatch closed. As it swung open, a faint trace of particles could be seen to float out the opening and to drift away into space.
“Looks intact,” reported Saer. “Hull integrity seems good. We have a bit of dust flying out the door.”
“Sweet,” exclaimed West, turning to Ken. “This boat may actually be worth something.”
“I don’t know. Even if we tow it, I doubt that we’ll be able to cover the costs from the money from the salvage. She’s a pretty old ship, not to mention that she shouldn’t even be out here.”
“Maybe there’ll be something interesting inside. Someone was using her for something and maybe it’s still aboard. Or we might even be able to sell her to a museum.”
“If a curator is dumb enough to buy this hunk of junk then the rest of the museum won’t be worth visiting,” said Oxley.
“You never know,” replied Ken. “Be optimistic.”
Back at the Immonen, Saer sent his team in. Knox had point, looking around inside the ship, followed by Magdala and Ubba. Lincon stayed at the hatch to make sure that their return trip wouldn’t be obstructed and to relay comms if there was any interference from the hull.
The interior of the ship was absolute black. There wasn’t even the faint light of the stars to look at. Everyone had their HUD’s displaying an overlay to supplement what little visual information the suit’s lights exposed. Wherever the lights didn’t shine, only the artificial overlay showed where the corners and edges were. The visual returned a flat black.
Another door blocked their way into the ship’s interior proper. The outer hull on most ships was fairly thick as standard to help block the worst of stellar radiation, and that had been the norm for a long, long time. This door was also opened easily, and this time there was a slightly larger flurry of particles, dust and small debris flying out the door.
“Definitely still has good hull integrity,” said Saer. “How’s the reception?”
“Good,” called Ken. “Visual is clear, audio is good and telemetry is stable. Looks like this one is going to be a cakewalk.”
“Damn, he jinxed us,” muttered Lincon.
The boarders made their way into the Immonen. A ship’s layout was a fairly standard across almost all types, since there were certain practicalities that needed to be followed. The logical first place to look was in the crew areas, and this was were they headed.
“First mummy,” said Knox.
“Male or female?”
“Not sure. Most of the flesh flaked off long ago, mostly bones in a ships tunic.”
“See if you can get any ID off the tunic,” said Ken.
“Checking.” Knox moved in close to the corpse. The atmosphere would have slowly dried out the deceased body after they died. Decomposition would have been minimal, with the scrubbers keeping the air clean and free of bacteria. It would take several years for a corpse to reach the mummified stage normally found when derelict ships were found. “No markings, no badge work – not even a name.”
“Definitely something illegal,” said Oxley. “What are the odds that the first person we find just happened to be having a laundry day?”
“Okay, finished computing trajectory,” said Ken. “Assuming zero deviation from last stop, there are three systems that she could have originated from. Assuming standard transit deviations, the number jumps up to around twenty, depending on where it came from and who they were trying to avoid. And if we assume evasive maneuvers, then it blows out to about three hundred possible previous last stops. Looks like she was in a normal travel lane and then just kept right on going.”
“Suggestions?” asked West.
“Nobody is coming now, she’s not due to reach anyplace where she’s likely to be spotted for another thousand years. Even if we left right now, we know where she is and where she’s going to be if we want to come back at a later stage.”
“I concur,” said Oxley. “We may as well take a look around and see if whatever they were carrying is still here and if it’s likely to be worth anything. If it is, we can take it and leave the ship and if it isn’t we can ask around and see if anyone is interested in her and pick her up later.”
“Saer, proceed with your sweep. Let me know if you need additional boarders.”
“Copy, Captain.”
Saer assigned his team different areas of the ship to explore independently. In this type of ship there was normally very little cargo space, so searching that only took a few minutes. The crew areas were larger, but still quite small and easily explored. The maintenance areas comprised the largest volume of the ship and took longer to scour through.
“Hey Ken!” called Saer. “How many crew are there meant to be aboard this thing?”
“Checking. Standard crew when she was active was sixteen, but a skeleton crew of five could fly her for short trips, assuming nothing broke down or needed fixing. Hell, you could set the auto and send her on her own if you didn’t care if she arrived at her destination or not.”
“Well, other than that first one, there doesn’t seem to be anyone else aboard. Or at least not anymore.”
“If everyone else left,” said Oxley, “Wouldn’t they have taken their friend with them?”
“Not if he wasn’t their friend,” replied West.
“Found some more!” called Magdala. “Looks like there’s around nine or ten in one of the access points by the top engine.”
“You can’t be bothered counting properly?” asked Saer.
“Looks like someone opened a window,” replied Magdala. “The room is sealed off from the rest of the ship, but the external door is ajar. It was messy and violent in there until long after the poor fools died.”
“Send someone over there and see if any of them have any ID on them,” instructed West.
“Lincon, go around the outside and see if you can seal the outer door. Can you get a fix from Mag’s position?’
“Got it Saer,” replied Lincon. “Moving now.”
“Mags, see if you can open the inside door from where you are. Ubba, get up there and help her.”
Quickly and efficiently, the team closed in on the room from different directions. It took Lincon a moment to locate the external door since it was only very slightly open, but once in position he could see into the room. The bodies were in similar condition to the first one, but had continued to bounce and bump each other after they dried out and had fallen apart rather badly.
Rather than spend time trying to close the un-powered door, Lincon simply filled the gap with expanding hull foam. Good for quickly sealing holes in the hull; it would be easy to remove at a later time. From the inside, Magdala opened the inner door.
“Oyo, it’s a mess in here,” she said. “It’s going to be pretty hard to sort everyone out.”
“We’re not here to identify the remains,” said West. “Nobody was meant to be on this ship, which means that they probably didn’t want to be found. Ken, have a search on the database and see if we get any missing persons listed for around the time the Immonen was decommissioned.”
“Sure, but I doubt that we’ll be carrying enough information to cover that kind of a search. We’d need a planetary database for a search like that. And we don’t know how long it was between the Immonen being decommissioned and going out on its final flight.”
“Humor me,” he replied dryly. “Any luck Mags?”
“I’m going through pockets and seeing if anyone happened to be carrying anything useful, but it’s not looking good so far. Someone should start looking through the crew compartments and see if there is anything useful in there.”
“Good point,” said Saer. “That room is too small for an effective search with more than one person. Mags, you going to be right on your own?”
“Oh, yeah – no worries boss. Desecrating the dead was just what I signed up for.”
While Magdala went about searching the grisly room for any signs of who the crew had been, the other four boarders set about searching again through the crew rooms that had been occupied, this time more thoroughly. Most of the rooms had few personal effects in them.
Even so, there was always something that people carried that would identify them. Being able to prove you were who you said you were was half the battle in a society were cosmetic surgery was as easy as changing clothes. And nobody would want to be trying to get past the usually over-zealous customs on a planet or station without any form of ID at all, not even some fake ID.
Normally it would have been a lot easier to simply access the ships logs and get the information from there, such as the last logged flight plan. But with the entire ship powered down, getting any meaningful data from the computer would be a weeklong event, and that was time that they didn’t have to spare.
“I found something!” said Ubba.
“What do you have?” asked Saer.
“Looks like one of the crew was just a passenger,” replied Ubba. “There’s a carry bag with some personal effects, some receipts from a shop called ‘Elements’, a personal A/V player and discs and a whole bunch of data discs. Shit!”
“What is it?” asked Ken, picking up on the alarm in Ubba’s voice.
“Got a Judges seal.”
Silence fell over the comms. Although there wasn’t really one cohesive government to rule all the known planets, most people suspected that there was some organization that held everything together in the background. Although there was no evidence to make this obvious, the Judges stood out like a hand full of broken fingers.
The Judges were, as the name suggests, enforcers of the law. The curios thing about them was that they had power and authority in any district, on any planet and on any station. One would have assumed that they would be barred in at least a couple of systems by governors who didn’t want them messing around in their backyard. But everyone obeyed their orders. Everyone.
Generally, the Judges didn’t interfere at the lowest levels where individuals were concerned or in petty crime. Nor did they get involved at the top, with planetary governments or intergalactic business conglomerates. Their normal fare was the notorious criminals, the drug lords and the illegal transporters. Thus the black market was kept in check and the vast majority of people lived in a fairly comfortable middle class.
And across all the planets, across all the systems, even on the most remote stations and settlements, one unwritten law was paramount and was known over and above all others. Nobody, absolutely nobody impersonated a Judge.
“We’re out of here,” said Captain West. “Everyone, get back aboard. Ken – wipe the logs, we were never here. Oxley, make a copy of the trajectory and velocity of the ship and store it in a data chip. Stash it in our off-line data safe.”
“Yessir,” came the chorus back from everyone. It took about two minutes for the boarders to move from the Immonen back to the Kilkka, and about ten seconds after that for them to get under way.
“How come we left in such a hurry?” asked Oligana as she helped Saer out of his suit.
“Dead Judge aboard, or there was a Judge aboard and he left his seal behind, in which case he was probably dead or some nutcase killed a Judge and kept the seal as a trophy. Either way, I don’t want to have someone asking me why we were there.”
“So tell me this then,” whispered Oligana fiercely. “Why the hell did the Captain keep a copy of the ship’s path if he doesn’t want anyone to know we were here?”
“Because,” replied Saer, “If the time ever comes that some Judge is raking him over the coals or he finally gets caught for some of his shadier deals then he can use the location of a deceased Judge as leverage to try and get a reduced sentence.”
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 14 | 16 | 17