by Nick Webb
“You can tell me on the way, Ken. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“On an adventure. Trust me, it’ll be fun.”
* * *
SIYANE
Messier 71
PSR J1952+1846
4,220 Parsecs from Earth
Many people believed humanity’s mere presence in the stars beyond its home planet had rendered space civilized.
Superluminal travel allowed them to hopscotch over the void on their way from one colony to the next. Half the time they didn’t even bother to glance out a ship’s viewport and note it was the stars they journeyed through.
But out here, twelve hundred parsecs from the nearest settled world—which happened to be the most uncivilized world of them all, run by gangsters, murderers and thieves—space revealed its true nature. Vast. Untamed. Dangerous.
In other words, her playground.
Alex noted all this with a brief smile of anticipation as she increased the thrust of the impulse engine and accelerated into the stellar system hiding in a far corner of Messier 71. Not the venue for idle musing.
The race was already on. Word of the contract had spread across the width and breadth of the freelance scout network by now, and she’d be deluding herself if she thought she’d be able to close this deal without competition.
The rules for claiming ‘property’ in unexplored, unowned space were straightforward: plant a beacon at the location detailing the extent of the claim and the name of the claimant. Once the broadcast reached the relevant authorities—a matter of seconds—the claim was certified. Period, full stop. It was the only practical way to handle development of the forty billion star systems still unexplored in their little corner of the galaxy.
The various governments generated much to-do about their new discoveries. Corporations, however, simply took what they wanted.
Well, it would be more accurate to say corporations paid people to find and claim what they wanted for them. People like her… .
“Oh, chyertu.” Alex groaned as the long-range scanner picked up the telltale signs of another vessel in the system. A database check identified the owner of the ship bearing that particular emission signature.
“Problem?” Kennedy muttered as she ascended the spiral staircase from the personal quarters below wearing far more appropriate sweats and a tee.
“Joaquin Kyril’s here.”
Her friend leaned against the cockpit half-wall and crossed her arms over her chest. “Who?”
“Asshole extraordinaire. Not a scintilla of hunter skills to his name. He wouldn’t recognize a neutron star glitch if it sauntered up and slapped him across his peevish face.”
Kennedy’s eyes narrowed in contemplation. “Wait, is he that guy we bumped into on Demeter last year? He was cute.”
“Really, Ken? I offer a string of insults by way of introduction, and you go straight to ‘cute’?”
“I didn’t say he was nice or upstanding. Just said he was cute. I can’t believe you haven’t put a second chair in the cockpit yet. Where am I supposed to sit?”
Alex shrugged. “The floor? The couch back in the main cabin? You’re the only person who ever comes out with me.”
“What about Malcolm?”
She snorted. “We’re nowhere near the stage where he goes with me… anywhere that isn’t on Earth. Seriously, he hasn’t even seen my bedroom.”
“Here on the ship or at your apartment in San Francisco?”
“Either.” She’d been on two dates with Lt. Col. Malcolm Jenner in the past month; the third might have happened this week, were she not out here in the void. Perhaps it would happen next week, if she didn’t die out here in the void.
He wasn’t her type. For one, he was military—a Marine of all things—which she’d been swearing off since… since a long time. He was upstanding and proper and gentlemanly to a cringe-inducing fault.
But he was also smart, considerate and funny in a self-effacing way. And handsome, even if he did have to keep his hair shorn in an annoying military close-crop. For reasons she hadn’t yet found the words to articulate, she liked him. Maybe. She’d worry about it later. Right now she had to work.
Kyril wandered around five AU out from the pulsar… searching for the outermost planetary body? If so, he was searching in the wrong place.
Shanshuo hadn’t been receiving scientific attention long enough for the eccentricity to be accurately measured, but the orbit appeared wildly erratic. Kyril was guessing.
Alex studied what data existed on the sequential orbits of the third body.
ORBIT 1: Inclination: 12.3°; Ω: 147°; Period: 3.8 years
ORBIT 2: Inclination: 17.6°; Ω: 132°; Period: 4.1 years
ORBIT 3: Inclination: 9.5°; Ω: 153°; Period: Incomplete (859 days as of yesterday)
She ran through some calculations then killed all the screens to stand and stare out the viewport.
They weren’t able to see the pulsar, of course, as it emitted primarily X-rays. A spectrum filter engaged over the viewport to rectify the deficiency in their eyesight.
“Ooh, that’s pretty.”
“In a manner of speaking.” Like a lighthouse on an ampaKhat high, the X-ray beam spun madly, strobing across the viewport faster than she could blink. It was hypnotizing, and she let it cast its spell. She watched without seeing as her vision blurred under the mesmerizing rhythm.
There.
She dropped back into the cockpit chair, strapped in and set a course for there.
* * *
Cold gas giant, 0.8 the size of Jupiter, sporting a standard hydrogen and helium composition. Likely a captured planet, although with an orbit this close it must have been falling into Shanshuo for billions of years. Still, gas giants, whether cold, room temperature or hot, ranked among the most common non-stellar bodies in the galaxy.
“Ugh. Boring.”
Kennedy now sat on the floor, propped up against the wall eating roasted almonds. “Are you kidding? Look at those colors, at the way the clouds swirl together. This planet is spiffing art.”
She didn’t disagree, but… . “I know, but we’re not here for art. We’re here to find elements worth money to Astral Materials, and as lovely as this planet may be, it’s not lucrative. One day I’ll have earned sufficient credits to be able to spend days gaping in wonder at such sights, but that day isn’t today.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… .”
She spared Kennedy a quick, closed-mouth smile. “And I didn’t either.” Kennedy, or more specifically her family, was wealthy beyond the numbers to count it, but it hadn’t mattered since seven minutes after they’d met as freshmen at university.
With a sigh she started to pull away and shift her focus to the inner bodies when the scanner beeped to inform her of another vessel in proximity.
She glared at the screen incredulously. Kyril was ghosting her?
Shit. His ship was faster than hers, one reason she desperately needed the proceeds from this contract. If he could track her, he’d be able to leapfrog her the instant she struck figurative—or possibly literal—gold and sling a beacon. He could steal the discovery out from under her while she watched in impotent fury. And he would do precisely that without a moment’s hesitation.
“Dammit, I should have spent last month’s money on a real dampener field instead of a new ionized gas analyzer.” The dampener field was on the list, but the list was a busy place. And now she floated out here with no way to mask her engine’s emission signature and no way to shake Kyril’s tail.
“You know, IS Design recently introduced a new prototype dampener field which is nineteen percent more effective at eighty-one percent the power requirements of the previous gen model.”
“Did you design it?”
“I helped. A lot, in truth, but I’m still too low on the corporate ladder to get the credit for it.” In response to Alex’s questioning gaze, Kennedy grinned smugly. �
��Soon.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
Alex pretended to be scanning the planet below, like there might legitimately be something worthy of finding, while she racked her brain for a solution to the problem that was Joaquin Kyril.
It seemed she was not going to be allowed to explore the system, investigating every object for possible valuable elements. She’d only have one real shot at finding and claiming the mother lode.
So where could the mother lode be hiding?
She leaned down and grabbed a handful of Kennedy’s almonds. The second suspected planet had, by the timing measurements, a notably strange orbit. She considered it a minute… and palmed her forehead with her free hand.
“I’m an idiot.”
“Not usually.”
“The second object the researchers detected isn’t orbiting Shanshuo. It’s orbiting this planet. It probably got brought along for the ride when the gas giant was captured.”
“So?”
“So regardless of whether it’s a moon, planetoid or true planet, it’ll be small and rocky. Small and rocky is—”
“Boring?”
Alex chuckled. “Well, yes. Okay, this leaves the innermost body. It’s zipping around at an orbital period of 3.2 hours, which means it’s close to the pulsar. Damn close.” Dangerously close, at least for a puny little personal scout ship.
She imagined the Siyane protesting the insult with an aura of miffed indignation, and apologized silently. It certainly was not puny to her; it was, in point of fact, everything she had ever wanted.
“The type of relationship exhibited here—a tight, rapid orbit in the shadow of the pulsar—pegs it as a companion star rather than a planet. A white dwarf having its matter leeched away by the primary star?”
“Were you directing the question at me? ‘Cause I’m an engineer, not a space junkie.”
Alex mumbled a distracted reply. White dwarfs were a dime a dozen and as boring as the gas giant. But if it was a true white dwarf, the researchers should’ve been able to identify it as such relatively easily.
She swung toward Shanshuo in feigned casualness so as not to pique Kyril’s interest, tuning out the voom-voom-voom strobe of the pulsar in favor of trying to catch sight of the orbiting companion.
She blinked.
There.
Blinked again. Gone.
But it had been there, a tiny dot of absence racing across the X-ray light. She readied the spectrum analyzer to take a broad spectrum reading. She’d filter out the pulsar’s spectrum signature afterward to reveal the companion’s data.
The scanner panned until she relocated it. Fantastic. Effective surface temperature estimated at… .
She frowned. “That can’t be correct.” Either the white dwarf was older than the universe—a dubious supposition—or the pulsar had siphoned off the outer layers completely, evaporating the star and leaving behind naught but its core.
Possibly its exotic carbon diamond-like core? What were the odds?
Vanishingly low, but higher than they had been a few minutes ago and doubtless higher than the first option.
Kennedy stood and peered out the viewport. “What’ve you got?”
“Maybe, just maybe, something wonderful.”
She didn’t elaborate for now; she’d been dallying for too long, and Kyril would be getting suspicious. And now she really needed a plan.
The small, rocky planet orbiting the gas giant had a thin atmosphere and varied terrain. Terrain she’d be able to lose Kyril in for several seconds at a minimum. Since her in-atmo pulse detonation engine didn’t emit an identifiable signature, it might be enough.
“I need help. I need someone else. Who else is here?”
“I’m here.”
Alex laughed. “I mean another ship.”
Kennedy shrugged and returned to the floor. “Ah. Can’t help you then.”
The potential payout marked this as an enticing contract, if a marginally risky one. Pulsars didn’t qualify as friendly environs for humans. The ionizing radiation alone, not to mention the powerhouse X-ray beacon, meant an early death for anyone not in a strongly shielded vessel.
Luckily for her, she did have those shields. The best radiation shielding last year’s money could buy.
She tuned the emission sensor to its farthest range and filtered out the quite noisy pulsar radiation. Kyril’s ship showed up immediately, right up her ass, leading her to growl a particularly colorful Russian curse under her breath.
“Your dad teach you that word?”
“Not intentionally.”
After another pass two additional dots materialized, which earned another, nearly as colorful exclamation.
Once the targets were pegged, she refined the scanner’s parameters until she had definable signatures then fed them into the ship database. The first one didn’t match any entries, but the second… .
Alex sent a secure comm hail. “Hey, Bob. What brings you to the void today?”
“Solovy? Dammit. Whatever brought me here, I’m not going to get it now, so I might as well turn around, head home and go get plastered.”
He wasn’t wrong. Bob Patera may be a better scout than Kyril, but that wasn’t saying much. “Glad to see you accept the inevitability of my triumph, but don’t rush off yet. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“Be still my heart.”
She rolled her eyes. “Simmer down. It’s not that kind of proposition. Joaquin Kyril is glued to my ass and I need to ditch him. Help me do that long enough for me to find elements which will satisfy the Astral contract, and you’ll get ten percent of the proceeds.”
“Fifteen percent.”
“Twelve percent.”
“Twelve percent and you have a drink with me next week.”
She drummed her fingers on the dash. “All right. But a drink means a drink, nothing else.”
“Oh, come on. We should at least have sex, if only to get all this sexual tension out of our systems.”
Kennedy arched an eyebrow in interest, but Alex shook her head in a vehement no. “There is no sexual tension between us, Bob.”
“Sure there is.”
“Those are your dreams. This is reality. So are you in?”
“Point the way.”
She exhaled in relief. “Terrific. You’ve got a Genyx VII impulse drive, right?”
“I won’t ask how you knew that. Yes, the C2 model.”
Alex toggled the comm and waved Kennedy up off the floor. “Can you figure out what he needs to do to his engine to make it approximate my emission signature?”
Kennedy nodded and jogged to the data center in the main cabin.
Her outward demeanor made it easy to forget—especially when the woman was in full-on vacation mode—but Ken was smart. Exceptionally smart. And she knew more about all the major components of starships than anyone Alex had met. Odds were she had the specs on the Genyx VII drive memorized, along with the specs for all the other commercial engine models.
Alex switched the comm channel back on. “In a minute I’ll send you some adjustments you need to make to the power flow to your engine and a tiny tweak to its negative mass regulator.”
“You want me to mutilate my engine?”
“Improve it, actually. You’re going to pretend to be me. Once you’ve made the adjustments, move to the far side of the middle body and wait there until I tell you to come in-atmo. When you get close, I’ll go dark. You’ll take my place, then bail and get back to the gas giant.”
“This body is… where? In case you hadn’t realized it, I legitimately meant ‘point the way.’”
It wasn’t his fault he was a bad scout. Not even a bad scout, really—merely an ordinary one. “It’s orbiting the gas giant, inclination 27.6° off the pulsar’s reference plane at 1,722 megameters, give or take.”
“I can work with that. What are you planning to do once I lead Kyril astray?”
She hesitated. She liked
Bob as far as it went, but it didn’t mean she trusted him. Not when hundreds of thousands if not millions of credits were at stake. “I’m going to go earn our riches.”
Kennedy returned to the cockpit and, at Alex’s gesture of approval, input the calculations and sent them to Bob.
“Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just fly around jerking off until you decide I can stop.”
“What you do on your ship is your own business.”
“It most definitely is. Got your instructions. Give me five minutes.”
Alex veered around a bit to make it look as if she were chasing down a potential find, shaking her head when Kyril followed like a proselyte. Still, he had to be getting suspicious by now. But what was he apt to do? Find anything of value himself?
Abruptly she stood and paced through the main cabin to burn off a fraction of her mounting nerves. She needed razor-sharp reflexes for what came next, not the jitters.
“So, where are we running off to once you lose this Kyril guy?”
Alex pointed out the viewport in the direction of the pulsar.
Kennedy canted her head to the side. “Sure. Why not?”
It took six and a half minutes, but Bob reported in. “I’m on my way to you.”
She returned to the chair in a flash. “I see you. Come in under the planet’s profile so he won’t pick you up.”
“Yep. You truly hate this guy, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
“He’s a gilded-spoon prick, no doubt.”
“He’s a thief. He lets others do the work then finds underhanded ways to steal what he can from them. And he is brutal and unrepentant about it.”
“Fair assessment. I guess I don’t take it as personally as you do.”
One of a thousand reasons why she was better at this than him, and would soon be the best.
Alex accelerated away from the gas giant and toward its satellite, and this time she smirked when Kyril followed behind at some distance. Did he honestly think she didn’t know he lurked out there?
