To Fire Called (A Seeker's Tale From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 2)

by Nathan Lowell

  “I’m glad we can provide entertainment,” I said.

  “And a living wage, sar, for which I am grateful. Do you think we’ll get liberty here so I can visit my mother? She’d be so surprised.”

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Well, sure. She’s working here somewhere, sar. Dr. April Torkelson. Particle physics. She’s been out here since I was just a kid. Works for Mellon-Merc in their research arm.”

  I looked at Al. “Did you know?”

  Al shook her head.

  “Nobody’s supposed to know, sar. I figured since we’re here now, I don’t need to keep quiet any more.”

  I straightened up and considered our helm. “You knew all along.”

  “Knew what, sar?”

  “That she was here in Telluride.”

  “Well, sure. She’s been sending money home to cover our living expenses for stanyers. Those transfers were tagged, but she always included a little message about how exciting the work was but how she missed us. Once she even sent a picture.”

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” Pip asked.

  “Oh, it’s been a while. I’ve been working up the ranks, see? So she’ll be proud of me, sar. I can’t handle the maths the way she can, but I love being on the helm.”

  “How long a while?”

  “I left home in ’68, I think? Yeah, ’68, but Da sent me a note before we left Dree. He’d gotten a Happy New Year message from her.”

  “So you figured we’d get out here eventually and you’d be able to visit her?” I asked.

  “Well, sure, Captain.”

  “Why, in the name of all the wide spaces between the stars, did you think we’d be visiting here?” Pip asked.

  “Because of the picture, sar.”

  “The picture?”

  “Yeah. The one she sent with the money. It was her, standing with a buncha spacers under the sign.”

  “The sign?” I asked.

  “The one on the brow, sar. Chernyakova written in big letters?”

  “You thought that we’d continue supplying Telluride?” Pip asked.

  She blinked and looked around at us. She shrugged. “Well, sure. We are, aren’t we?”

  I sighed. “So you actually signed on because you figured we’d be able to give you a ride to see your mother?”

  “Oh, no, sar. I signed aboard because I needed a berth and I love flying. You had a berth. She may be a brick, but she’s a good brick.” She patted the console beside the helm, like it was a pet. “Visiting Mum was just icing on the cake.”

  Pip sat down hard at the spare console. I looked up in time to see the chief turn her back to look aft along the dorsal ridge of the ship. Her shoulders shook slightly and I had the uncomfortable feeling she might have been laughing. I looked at Pip. “Well, you got a bite.”

  He shook his head and scrubbed his face with both hands. “Just not where I expected it to come from,” he said.

  “Something wrong, sar?” Ms. Torkelson asked.

  “No, Ms. Torkelson. It’s fine,” I said. I sighed and considered the long-range scan again. “I don’t know what to make of this guy, though.” I looked back at her. “You wouldn’t know anything about this?”

  She shook her head. “No. Mum never talked about her work or what’s going on out here other than she’s working on a new Burleson drive that should be really exciting.”

  “The Zeta?” I asked.

  She frowned. “The Zeta? No, sar. They haven’t been working on that for—I don’t know. A long time.”

  Pip stiffened and leaned forward. “You know what they are working on?”

  She shook her head. “Not the Zeta. She wouldn’t have mentioned it if she was still working on it. She’s not allowed to talk about the work she’s doing now. Something didn’t work right so they had to give up on it.” The helm hummed a warning tone and she made a slight adjustment. “We’re drifting off course, Skipper. Sliding into the well and running slightly ahead of track.”

  “Expected, Ms. Torkelson,” I said. “We don’t have the sails to counter the inward pull. It can’t be very much after such a short time.”

  “It’s not, sar. I can probably hold it with thrusters.”

  I looked at Mr. Reed. “Is it enough to register on our projected track?”

  He consulted his display for several long moments. “It is to us, Captain, but I’m not sure it’s enough to show to him yet. He’s still a long way out there and his projection of our vector is bound to be off because of the distance and time delay.”

  “Can you run us a ballistic projection, Mr. Reed?”

  “Of course, Captain. One tick.”

  He fiddled with a couple of screens on his console and routed a display to the bridge readout. “There it is. Yellow is our original course. Blue is a ballistic trajectory. Red is our friend’s projected path with a five-percent probability cone.”

  I stepped up to the screen to look at it closely. “We’ll be past his track at the one-light-minute mark?”

  “Yes, Captain. Slow down to catch up.” Reed shrugged. “The sails were balancing us against the primary’s gravity. Without them?” He shrugged again.

  “Can he catch up?”

  “Yes, Captain. He just needs to let his vector fall off a bit and he’ll run the chord between us.”

  “How soon before he could intercept us on this new vector?” I asked.

  “One tick, Skipper.” Reed tapped keys for just a few heartbeats and added an orange track to the display. “Four days instead of six, Captain.”

  “Route the blue track to helm, if you please, Mr. Reed,” I said.

  “Blue track to helm, aye, Captain.” He fiddled with keys and the helm beeped.

  “New course at helm, Captain,” Al said. “Logged.”

  “Now we are just a brick, Ms. Torkelson. Can you keep us on this track?” I asked.

  “Well, sure,” she said. “The challenge would be getting us off it, sar.”

  “Ms. Fortuner, outgoing channel, please?” I said.

  “Outgoing voice, aye. “Three, two ...” She held up a finger and then used it to point to me as she clicked the key.

  “Unknown vessel on intercept course from Telluride, this is the solar clipper Chernyakova inbound with a shipment of food. Be advised. We’ve adjusted our course to avoid collision. Over.”

  She clicked a key again. “We’re off, Skipper.”

  “You warned him, Captain?” the chief asked.

  “Yeah. I want to know his intentions while I still have some options. The sooner he notices, the sooner we’ll know.”

  She nodded and looked at the displayed plots. “Can’t fault that logic.”

  “Is there anything else we can do here?” I looked around at the various faces peering back at me.

  I got a variety of shakes and shrugs in return.

  “Nothing I can think of,” Pip said. “It’s all going to depend on whether we can find a dock.”

  “What about the yard?” I asked. “We found that pretty quickly.”

  The chief said, “It would be hard to overlook us if we knocked on that door.”

  “My concern would be whether or not they knocked back,” I said.

  Ms. Fortuner looked up, eyes wide, but Pip only nodded and pursed his lips.

  Chapter 43

  Telluride System: 2375, November 16

  We’d just wrapped up breakfast in the wardroom the next morning when Mr. Reed bipped me to the bridge. I led a parade of the usual suspects up the ladders.

  “What do you have, Mr. Reed?” I asked, stepping onto the deck and scanning the displays.

  “I may have a line on a miner, Captain.” he said.

  “That would be interesting,” I said. “Where?”

  He tapped a few keys and the overhead display changed. It showed a dispersed collection of shapes. Some small. Some large. They looked like separated freckles on the Deep Dark.

  “A belt?” I asked.

  “T
his belt,” he said, pointing to the system plot on display at his console. “It’s the outermost, but we’re drifting closer to it.” He tapped a few keys and the screen shifted. Most of the freckles disappeared but several of them stayed, showing various shades from pale gray to a deep crimson.

  “False color?” I asked.

  “Thermal overlay. Red is hot. White is one percent above ambient.”

  The spots ran in a rough arc through the belt.

  “Are they burning the rocks?” I asked.

  “Combination of laser drills, grinding heads, and explosives, I believe, Skipper,” Al said.

  “The rocks get hot but can’t radiate the heat away very quickly,” the chief said from her corner.

  I examined the display. “So this is a miner working along the belt, one rock at a time?”

  “That’s my guess, Skipper,” Mr. Reed said. “He’s less than a light-minute away.”

  “How long have you been tracking this?” I asked.

  “I just started when I came on watch,” he said. “It came to me in the night. I thought we might be able to spot the habitations by heat signatures rather than just radar and lidar echoes.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Thank you, Captain. The sensor suite doesn’t have the resolution for finding small heat sources much beyond two light-minutes, apparently. We can’t see our friend over there on thermal. When I looked at the nearest portion of the belt, I found this.”

  “We’re not exactly set up for exploration and research,” I said.

  Al snorted but Mr. Reed nodded. “Still better than I’d have expected.”

  The chief cleared her throat. “I might have upgraded the specifications a step during the refit,” she said. “We don’t have a Scout’s sensor suite but we have a few tricks.”

  “Why habitations?” Pip asked.

  “Since we couldn’t find anything large, I wondered if there might not be a lot of smaller habitation platforms clustered around the yard and fabrication plant.” He clicked some keys and brought up a system plot on the big display. A pulsing white spot appeared. “They’re well out here between the H and M bands. If we stay on this trajectory we should catch up to them in a couple of months.” A green dot drew an arcing line around the system, across the belt and intercepted the white spot.

  “Thermal imaging didn’t show anything?” I asked.

  “No, Captain, but I still think it’s a viable model.” He clicked a few keys and the display zoomed in on the dot, expanding it to a white circle. “The images are still fuzzy, which would be consistent with sensor resolution errors, but as we work around the rim here, we’re getting better and better imaging with repeated pings from slightly different angles. We’ve got pretty solid imaging from rocks on the I belt, but these installations remain fuzzy even though they’re clearly artificial.”

  “So there are a lot of smaller returns masking the larger installations,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “Any of them moving?” I asked.

  “Like ships?” he asked.

  “Those facilities must have some degree of traffic between them. Refineries need to be here somewhere. If we’re right about that being the large-component fabrication platform, there have to be some smelters for the ore and some zero-gee manufacturing capability to convert the refined tellurium to thermoelectric substrate,” the chief said.

  “How big would they have to be?” I asked.

  “Not that large,” she said with a shrug.

  “Could they be piggy-backed onto either of these two platforms?” Pip asked.

  She pursed her lips and stared at the plot for a moment. “Possible, depending on the mass of those larger constructions.” She shrugged. “Not what I’d do.”

  “What would you do?” I asked.

  “I’d put the semiconductor fabrications on the Lagrange points. Probably L5. Easy to get the products to the assembly and fabrication platforms. Isolated completely from any gravitational influence from them. Cleaner.”

  “Not L4?” I asked.

  “Depends on whether I wanted to pass more material back to the platforms or boost it ahead. Orbital mechanics. The round trip is going to be about the same.”

  “Slow down to catch up,” Mr. Reed said.

  “Right,” she said.

  “Long-range mapping showing anything at the Lagrange points, Mr. Reed?” I asked.

  “Just a moment, Captain.” Reed tapped some keys and the big display zoomed out. A few more keystrokes and circles appeared around areas on either side of the one we suspected to be platforms. “Working,” he said. After a few moments, the circles blinked out. “Nothing significant showing, Captain.”

  I looked at the chief. She sat staring at the display, leaning forward, her hands steepled in front of her mouth. “What about L3?” she asked.

  “The other side of the primary?” I asked.

  Her head nodded up and down slowly. “It’s not ideal for a manufacturing process flow, but if I were trying to mask what I was doing here, that would be a good choice. It only matters for the first shipments.”

  “Mr. Reed?” I said.

  He clicked a few times and the display shifted to the far side of the system. He zoomed in and a collection of small dots showed up.

  “Scale, Mr. Reed?”

  “Small. Under a kilometer but we don’t have resolution under five hundred meters so somewhere in there.”

  “Big enough for zero-gee semiconductors?” I asked.

  “More than,” the chief said. “And right in the L3 slot.”

  “They’re in the rocks,” I said. “They didn’t build platforms for habitation.”

  “That would take a lot of rocks,” the chief said.

  “Look at how many we can see here.” I pointed to the L3 collection. “What is that, a dozen, maybe two dozen that we have resolution for.”

  “Computer counts sixteen discrete entities that it can resolve. Apparently it’s suppressing clutter.”

  “Which would be anything under five hundred meters?” I asked.

  “A good operating assumption, Captain,” Al said.

  Mr. Reed nodded. “I concur.”

  “Can you display the clutter?”

  Reed clicked some keys and the display refreshed. The L3 point became the center of a flower of diffuse clutter.

  “You’re on to something, Skipper,” Al said.

  “What’s the shipyard look like with the clutter on?” I asked.

  The display flipped back to the shipyard and manufacturing side, and then flickered with the clutter overlay. The clutter nearly overwhelmed the larger objects.

  “They dragged all those rocks in, just for living space?” Ms. Fortuner asked.

  “Actually, sar?” Ms. Torkelson said, her voice barely audible. “That’s the J belt. Or what’s left of it.”

  “They ate the whole belt?” Al asked.

  Ms. Torkelson shrugged. “I don’t know, sar. Mum just said they’d set up in the belt so they’d be close to their source material. According to the system chart, they’re in the middle of the J belt.”

  Mr. Reed turned to his console and laid the ephemeris data onto his scanning screen. “I’ll be,” he said. “Sorry, Captain, I didn’t think to look.”

  “No harm, no foul,” I said. “Show me the big picture on the J belt.”

  The display zoomed out, including the ephemeris. The area marked for the J belt held only small clots of clutter except around the shipyard and the L3 point.

  “They ate the whole belt,” Al said, wonder in her voice.

  “They’ve had two decades or more to do it. I suspect it held the highest concentrations of tellurium,” Pip said from his corner of the bridge. “They probably used the other metals building the shipyard and assorted support structures, and then skimmed the giants for volatiles and water using robot sleds.”

  “That’s why they’re working the outer belts now,” I said.

  “Most
likely,” Pip said. “If the J belt held the tellurium and it’s played out, they’ve got to be doing something else here.”

  I looked out at the system primary’s brilliant dot. “Maybe we’ll get to find out what it is,” I said.

  Chapter 44

  Telluride System: 2375, November 17

  We continued on our ballistic trajectory around the outer belt of the system for another full day. Our suspected pursuer proved to be a real pursuer when it shifted course to a new intercept after a few stans. Lunch mess was a subdued affair that I blamed myself for. My heart just wasn’t in it.

  After Mr. Franklin cleared the main course and served coffee and cookies for dessert, I leaned back in my chair. “Suggestions? What are our options?”

  “We can make for the shipyard,” the chief said. “That’s got the most clutter. It’s probably the main base in-system.”

  “What about our shadow?” I asked.

  “We’ll be within a light-minute in a couple of days now,” Mr. Reed said. “If we want to adjust our course for a bugout, now would be the time. Heading into the well removes that option.”

  “It would help if somebody would talk to us. The silent treatment isn’t exactly effective, particularly when they keep talking to local traffic like we don’t exist.”

  I looked at Mr. Reed. “Where’s our miner?”

  “The ship working the belt?” he asked.

  “Yeah. How far away is he?”

  “Under a light-minute. I’d have to look to see how much under.”

  “Have we tried to talk to him?”

  Mr. Reed looked startled. “Not directly. Wouldn’t he have heard us?”

  “Not necessarily,” Ms. Fortuner said. “We’ve been using a narrow band to talk to our shadow on the hailing frequency, and we’ve been transmitting our arrival message on the standard arrival protocols. He’s probably not monitoring those channels.”

  “That’s something we can try,” I said.

  Pip sat up in his chair like he’d been poked.

  “Something?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “We’re now the only ship with access to their message queue, other than the High Tortuga channels.”

  “And?”

  He looked at Ms. Fortuner. “Those messages we grabbed. They’ve got routing headers?”