by R. A. Nargi
“But you work together, don’t you?”
“Not really. I mean, I work for the company. Beck Salvage. But we don’t really work together.” I changed the subject and asked how it was going at her aunt’s ranch. So we ended up talking about horses for a while.
“You want to see them?” Preity asked. “When you get back, I mean?”
“Sure.” I definitely did not want to see any horses. I was not really a big fan of them and, besides, I was all horsed out from Lirala. But I wouldn’t mind seeing Preity again. She was so easy to talk to, I felt that we had known each other all our lives.
“So when do you get back?” she asked.
“I’m not really sure. I’m waiting on something here. And then it will be a few days after that. But I’ll be in touch.”
She smiled at me. “Bye, then.”
“Bye.”
5
I tried to nap again, but my mind was racing. Maybe I dozed off, or maybe not. At some point I got the call that the Rhya had announced the opening of the Fountain.
It would be another eight or ten hours before any non-Rhya ships were allowed through, but the clock was now officially ticking and everyone began to scramble. First on the agenda was the crew briefing.
I rode with Hendrik Lim and Goard, who was one of his ops guys, through the access tunnels of Tor-Betree. We skirted the public terminal and drove past the massive freight warehouses to the private hangars. I had actually never been to Beck Salvage’s hangars before, since I was never involved with an actual mission before. Despite myself, I was curious.
As I exited the coach, I got a lung-full of that typical deep spaceport smell: stale air, ozone, and the faint chemical odor from the scrubbers. The gravity was a little off here as well, I could tell.
We walked down a wide access hall cluttered with repair modules. The hall ended in a door that led to the hangar’s entrance. Security was very tight and we all needed to be scanned before being allowed in.
We walked through the door into a wide, cavernous space that was buzzing with activity. A half-dozen short-range orbiters stood parked by the bay doors, but one was clearly the focus of all the preparation. It was surrounded by flight prep workers, buzzing around like bees in a hive, adjusting power couplings, loading in equipment crates, and scanning every square centimeter of the hull.
“That’s the Spiridion Arrow,” Lim said. “Our newest addition to the fleet.”
I recognized it as a Barnes PV-3200 Barracuda-class survey vessel. Top of the line. Very expensive. Which made me think of what Wallace had told me about the company’s finances. How were they able to afford this?
“The briefing room is this way,” Lim said. We walked towards the back of the hangar, through another security cordon, and into an office that had been converted into a conference room, where a dozen or more people all seemed to be speaking at once. I saw Wallace, Yates, Sainecourt and some other members of Sainecourt’s team. Towards the back of the room sat four bored-looking individuals that I had never seen before. They were a motley group, for sure. Three males, and one female. One of the males was a Plargond—a stocky nonhuman who stood less than a meter tall and had bulbous features and gray skin. These four were most likely my fellow crew members.
Wallace caught a glimpse of me and beckoned me into the room. “Attention everyone!” he shouted. “Let’s have some quiet. Captain Beck is here, so we’d like to get started in a second.”
Most folks on the team turned to acknowledge me with a respectful smile or a nod, but the four crew members just glared. I decided to take the bull by the horns and strode over to the head of the table.
“How about some introductions?” I asked Wallace.
“Absolutely. Mr. Sainecourt, what’s your ETA?”
“Less than a minute.”
“Splendid.” He clapped for attention. “Everyone, this is Jannigan Beck. He’ll be captaining the Spiridion Arrow—as far as the Shima are concerned. But, in reality, he’s more of an observer.”
“Don’t you mean a waste of space?”
The genius behind that quip was a balding man with a bushy brown beard. Based on his somewhat prominent nose and his swarthy complexion, I’d bet he’d never set foot in a cosme parlor. In fact, from the looks of them, I’d bet none of them had.
Wallace pointed at the guy and told me that he was Hap Galish, the pilot.
“Seriously,” Galish said. “I thought this mission was a big deal. Why did we have to lose Khaor and Ymirandora?”
“We’ll get into that in a second,” Wallace said. He continued with the introductions, gesturing to the Plargond. “Providing security is Xooth.”
“Hattah-hattah-hattah!” Xooth said.
I wasn’t sure if he was speaking his native language or just screwing with me.
“Our engineer is the esteemed Mr. Obarral.”
“It’s just Obarral. Like Madonna. Or Anasia.” He was a heavyset human, but from what I could see, he was completely hairless. Yet he had intelligent-looking eyes and a hint of a smile on his face. “I am your servant, sir.” He bowed formally.
“You know Virgil Yates. Our resident expert on the Ambit.”
He smiled at me.
Wallace continued. “Finally, we have Ana-Zhi Agrada. Normally she captains the Arrow, but during this mission she’ll be acting as your first mate.”
The woman looked like she’d be a good person to have on your side in a bar fight. She was tall and solid-looking, and probably weighed more than I did. I’d guess that she was twice my age, although maybe a life of hard living had aged her prematurely. Ana-Zhi Agrada looked me up and down, but didn’t even deign to insult me.
“Who are we missing?” I had counted six crew members including myself. We were allowed a crew of seven.
“We’ve agreed to allow the Shima to place one of their staff on the crew. She’s a human named Chiraine Portelle. They plucked her out of Marlington University. Probably knows more about the Yueldian culture than anyone else alive.”
“Another waste of space,” Galish said. “We don’t need a cultural anthropologist. We need someone who can work with Xooth to keep Yates from croaking while he runs the Raker. Like Ymirandora.”
“Dr. Porter is a data scientist first and foremost. Studying nonhuman cultures is her hobby.”
“I don’t care if this chick’s hobby is blowing Lumandrians. I’d rather work with someone I know.”
Wallace said “If Dr. Portelle doesn’t show up before launch in t-minus three hours, we’ll bring Ymirandora in. She hasn’t left Tor-Betree and she’s standing by.”
“If I know Dora, she’s most likely soaking in a neddi moss bath right now,” Obarral said. “Jealous.”
“Well, then,” Ana-Zhi said. “Makes me wonder. If the Shima’s girl doesn’t show, do we have to take junior?”
“What do you mean?” Wallace asked.
“I know that was part of the deal and all, but how would they know if he was on board or not? It’s not like we’ll be beaming reports back from dark space.”
Wallace shook his head. “Everything about this mission will be recorded and documented for the Shima’s review.” He pointed towards me. “Which means once we step outside the doors of this room, he’s not Jannigan Beck. He’s Sean Beck.”
“No offense, sonny boy,” Ana-Zhi said. “You might look like your papa, but you ain’t him. Not even close.”
“You’re right,” I said, feeling a flush of anger. “And I’m glad about that. But, listen. You do your job. And I’ll do mine—”
“Sitting on your ass,” Galish murmured.
“Steer clear of me, and we’ll do just fine,” I said, locking eyes with Ana-Zhi Agrada.
She didn’t say anything at first, but then her thin lips formed a half smile. “Aye aye, Captain.”
There was a fair amount of overlap between this crew briefing and the briefing I was given before the meeting with the Shima. But now Sainecourt was spending more time explaining the
nature of the Ambit and how we intended to use it to locate the Kryrk.
Apparently the Ambit was a primitive analogue to our own H-mesh, a series of connected data networks used for communication and the storage of information. Its range was limited to the planet Yueld and the moons and space stations that orbited Yueld.
Once it was discovered, the Ambit easily yielded its secrets. Several missions had tapped directly into the network and archived it into their ship’s databases. Over the years, researchers—including Chiraine Portelle—had combed through reconstructions of the Ambit, searching for references to certain artifacts, and in many cases, discovering their specific locations. But there was a problem.
Even though the Ambit was still somewhat functional—nearly 700 years after the fall of the Yueldian civilization—parts of it had broken down. Over time vast nodes of the network had become disconnected. And the data scientists believed that those disconnected nodes held valuable information. Such as the location of the Kryrk.
The Shima, through Dr. Portelle’s work, had discovered a clue to a previously undiscovered node—A782—which seemed promising. We would begin our mission by finding the node and, using an RK-11 “Raker” data slicer, extract and parse the data. With any luck, that would lead us to where the Kryrk had been stored away over a thousand years ago.
“So you’re saying if the flunky doesn’t show, the gig’s off?” Galish asked.
“Not at all,” Wallace said. “It is my understanding that the Shima will then provide us with their research and we will proceed. It’s not their preferred option, but we all know that this opportunity came about rather suddenly.”
Galish was about to ask another question when the meeting was abruptly interrupted by one of our security officers bursting into the room with a panicked look on his face.
The Spiridion Arrow had been sabotaged.
I didn’t learn all the details for another half hour, but it didn’t look good. Someone had smuggled in a particularly nasty pathogenic scidatium which spread to all the ship’s systems, destroying the programming, controls, data, everything. It would take a week to replace everything. And we didn’t have a week. We had an hour.
We were screwed.
Or were we?
I looked down at the row of ships in the front of the hangar. They were all part of Beck Salvage’s fleet. “Why don’t we just take one of those?”
Wallace shook his head. “Those vessels haven’t been vetted by the Rhya. They won’t allow—”
“They’ll allow the Freya,” Ana-Zhi said.
“The Freya?” Yates shook his head. “No. It’s too old. And it’s not properly outfitted.”
I recognized the name. The Freya was the ship my dad was on during his last mission seven years ago. Yates was right. It was an old Mako-class that Beck Salvage had bought from a mining company. One of Beck Salvage’s first big purchases. The Freya was easily as old as me.
Wallace leaned back against a bulkhead, lost in thought. I actually felt sorry for him. He had fucked up badly and everything he and my dad had built was about to come crumbling down. Then he gets one shot at pulling it out of the fire, one very long shot, and now this happens.
I turned to him. “Let’s give it a try.”
My uncle looked shocked. So did Ana-Zhi Agrada.
“How much time do we have?” I asked.
Wallace checked his datapad. “Sixty-seven minutes.”
“Let’s get going then!”
The Rhya moved quickly. Maybe they even knew about the sabotage before we did. It’s hard to know with a species so far above you on the technological scale. Within fifteen minutes, six of them swarmed the Freya, presumably checking the ship for technology compliance. The Rhya looked like glowing translucent eels—about a meter and a half long. They floated in the air, as if they were swimming in some invisible ether.
No one knew much about the Rhya, other than they pretty much left the Empire alone. They appeared content to observe our civilization. The most involvement we had with them began when the Fountain was discovered. Immediately, the Rhya stepped into their role as caretakers and imposed the rules the Empire had to follow in order to be allowed access to the Fountain.
While the Rhya did their thing, an army of mechanics and other workers raced to prep the Freya. They loaded in crates of supplies, weapons, support vehicles, electronics, and—most importantly—a rack of state-of-the-art exosuits. Hendrik Lim saw me checking them out and walked over with a big shit-eating grin on his face.
“You can thank me for those,” he said. “Top of the line Welkin B series.”
“I didn’t think these were out yet.”
“They’re not. But I play chuiwan with Dalen Moch, their CFO, so we’re getting early access.”
“Nice.”
Exosuits were miracles of technology and Welkin led the pack in terms of miniaturization, power usage, and even nano features. On exploration and salvage missions, exosuits were easily the most important piece of gear on a ship. If things went wrong, these suits could basically keep you alive. Even the older models had a long-term emergency hibernation mode.
Lim bragged that the new B series had a lighter exoskeleton, three-phase crystal metallic fiber mesh, and an even more powerful magtouch system.
“Good to know.” I tried to drift away, but he kept droning on and on about the suit’s specs. Fortunately, the Shima’s scientist showed up.
“I need someone to load in my equipment,” she huffed.
Dr. Chiraine Portelle appeared to be my age or even a few years younger, although she dressed and had her hair styled more formally—like an older woman. She had striking light green eyes and red hair, although not the bold red hue that Essida favored. It was more natural—as were her features. Likewise Chiraine Portelle’s full lips and aquiline nose seemed untouched by any cosme procedures.
“I’m Sean Beck, captain of the expedition.”
If she recognized the name, she didn’t show it. “Good for you, Captain. Can I get someone to load me in?”
Ana-Zhi had witnessed the exchange and smirked at me.
The next hour went by in a blur, and I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to make it. Especially since the Shimese representatives decided to pay us a last-minute visit to inspect our preparations. I had to do some improvising around the choice of the Freya as our ship, but they seemed satisfied. We almost lost Chiraine again, when they took her to the conference room for what I assumed was a private last-minute meeting.
But then the klaxon sounded, and she hurried on board and I turned to follow her.
“Sean,” my uncle called.
I turned.
“Godspeed, brother!” And then he silently mouthed the words thank you.
As the hatch closed beyond me, I got my first good look at the interior of the Freya. The main hold area was a hodgepodge of metal panels, pipes, ducting, cables, and displays. It looked like it had been scavenged from a dozen other ships and then thrown together in a weekend.
“What a dump,” I muttered.
“Agreed,” Chiraine said. “I’d be surprised if it doesn’t fall apart the second it hits open space.”
“Don’t you worry. The Freya has stood the test of time.” Ana-Zhi patted an oversized junction box. Someone with zero artistic talent had painted a grinning clown face on it—along with the words ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?
Ana-Zhi said, “She may not be the most comfortable ride in the fleet, but we’re not going far. And, besides, she’s sturdy enough to hold up for three days.”
“Is she?” Obarral asked. “Is she really? Because, pardon me, I didn’t really have enough time to check her out thoroughly.”
A moment later the starway track kicked in and I felt the ship moving. The towing mechanism pulled us through the launch bays and then began to rotate the Freya into takeoff position.
Ana-Zhi barked orders into a comm unit and Galish confirmed that they were almost ready for takeoff.
“I’ll
believe that when I see it,” Chiraine said.
“You may want to sit down and strap in, missy,” Ana-Zhi said to Chiraine. “If I recall correctly, the inertial dampening on this rig tends to cycle a bit during liftoff. I wouldn’t want you to lose an eyelash.”
Xooth, Yates, and Obarral were already reclining in stained old high-backed flight seats, hooked into acceleration straps. Chiraine looked at one of the remaining seats dubiously. “I’m really afraid I’ll stick to it and won’t be able to get out.”
Ana-Zhi strode over, and in one quick motion jabbed her finger at the other woman’s chest, knocking Chiraine back into the seat. “I said, sit down!”
Then she shot me a look. “Captain, this way please.”
She marched me down the access corridor towards the bridge. There Galish sat in the pilot’s seat, running through the final launch sequence. “Everything looks good.”
“Really?” she asked. “Because I hear the thermal dispersers rattling like a banshee. Don’t you hear that?”
Ana-Zhi sighed and eased herself onto the bench behind him and patted the seat next to her. As I sat down beside her, she asked “You fly?”
“Nothing like this. I’ve got a Swallow hover-jet.”
“Of course you do,” she smirked. “What year?”
“’57. The XK.”
“Respectable.”
“And sometimes me and my friends go out on quad-jumpers and skimmers. Just messing around.”
“Well, let’s just hope you never have to fly this thing. It’s a damn sight less maneuverable than a skimmer. Pushing around a hundred and sixty thousand k’s through atmosphere with an old Kiyoshi R-drive is not for the faint of heart.”
“Believe me, I have no desire to take the wheel. I’m just doing this for my uncle. If it was up to me, I’d be back in New Torino right now.”
She fixed me with a hard look, but didn’t say anything.
