by Henry Vogel
Lost and Found
Our first jump into the unknown lasted close to three hours. The second jump was over almost as soon as it began. Thirteen minutes after jumping, the wormhole exit alarm sounded. A minute after that, we popped back into normal space.
A bright, yellow star filled our view screen, blocking out everything else around us. The screen automatically darkened and the ship’s cooling system kicked on. The proximity warning light strobed, meaning we were within fifty million kilometers of the star.
“Um, aren’t we a little close to the star, Matt?” Michelle feigned nonchalance but I heard the tension in her voice. The last eleven days traveling with me had subjected her to lots of new and not always pleasant experiences. Here was one more.
“A bit, but it’s nothing to worry about. The M&M can take the heat for a while.”
“A while?”
That was the wrong choice of words. “Sorry, I should have been more specific. The ship can handle these temperatures for ten hours before heat becomes an issue for her systems. We’ll be far from the star by then.”
To reassure Michelle, I angled the ship away from the star and increased power to the engines. To distract her, I said, “Can you track that drone? I don’t want to lose it while we’re getting clear of the flaming ball off the port bow.”
Michelle dragged her eyes away from the view screen and concentrated on the scanners. “That’s odd. The drone is holding its same course. Won’t it get dragged into the star after a while?”
“Oh, that is clever.”
“Are you going to expand on that, Matt, or do I have to guess what you mean?”
“There’s no need to guess, my dear, it’s just logic. I bet you can figure it out if you try.”
Michelle gave me an annoyed expression, but she wasn’t thinking about our proximity to the star any more. “I don’t see what’s so clever about losing a messenger drone and its messages because someone was too stupid to program a course away from the star.”
Once again, as soon as she said it, Michelle figured it out. “It’s a kind of self-destruct system. If the message’s intended recipient can’t get to it, the star destroys the drone before anyone else can get it.” But Michelle took that line of thought one step farther than I had. “Crap! Shut everything down, Matt. Run dark now!”
Without another word, my fingers flew across the control panel, shutting down everything except the life support system. Michelle did the same with sensors and communication. A minute later, the air scrubbers and the passive sensors were the only systems still running.
“Now that we’re running dark, Michelle, would you please explain why we had to go dark right now?”
Michelle turned a devilish smile my way. “It’s just logic, my dear. I bet you can figure it out if you try.”
“You turn my own words against me. How-”
“Appropriate? Fitting? Irritating?” Michelle asked.
“I’d been going to go with ‘appropriate’ but I’m leaning heavily toward ‘irritating’ now. And you can wipe that smug look off your face. I’ve figured it out.”
Michelle propped her head on one hand. “I’m breathless with anticipation, honey.”
“The drone will get pulled too close to the star to survive after just a few hours. It’s an effective message self-destruct system because no ship can get in here fast enough to save the drone unless they’re positioned close to the star and watching for the drone’s signal. That means a ship should be here soon to pick up the drone. And if we weren’t running dark, they’d pick us up on the sensors, too.” I leaned back in the pilot seat and put my hands behind my head.
“Yes, you’re very smart, Matt. Almost as smart as the girl who figured that out first.”
“Which she only realized after the smart guy figured out the solar self-destruct procedure.”
The passive sensors beeped, cutting off our one-upmanship. We both hovered over the sensor console, watching a ship match courses with the drone and then merge with the signal. We waited for the ship to pull away, but it maintained its course. Ten minutes later, the ship still held its position. Meanwhile, the temperature inside the M&M rose to twenty-six degrees. It wasn’t much of a rise—only a couple of degrees—but the cooling system had only been off for twenty minutes.
“What do you think they’re doing?” I asked.
“Sending a reply, maybe?” Michelle ran a hand across her brow.
“But why is that taking so long? Drones are dead easy to program—just upload messages, set coordinates, and turn it loose.” An idea occurred to me. “Unless that crew is just the pick up and delivery team. In that case, they’d have to talk to someone with authority to find out what message to send back.”
“So we’re going to burn up because the evil genius sent minions to pick up messages from their crony, Hector?”
“They’re going to have to hold position for more than ten hours before we need to worry about burning up.”
“Yeah, but what about broiling? The temperature in here is rising pretty fast.”
I didn’t have an answer for her. The minutes dragged by and still the other ship maintained its position. The temperature inside the M&M continued climbing, passing thirty degrees after another fifteen minutes. Both of us sweated freely as the pick-up ship continued to hold its position and the temperature reached thirty-five degrees.
“Matt, what are the chances that ship’s sensors will pick up the cooling system if you turn it on?” Michelle’s sweat-soaked clothes stuck to her body and she looked as miserable as I felt.
“I don’t know. The star might cause enough interference to mask it or the sensor tech on the other ship might miss it if he’s inattentive. If it gets up to forty in here, I’ll risk it.”
“If they do detect us, can you restart the engines fast enough for us to get away?”
“From that tub? Sure. But we still don’t know what else is in this system. And we won’t know where to look for other wormholes if this system isn’t on the charts.”
“How far do we have to get from this sun before you can take star readings?”
“No farther than we are now, but I need full sensors. Give me those for five minutes and, if this system is on the charts, I’ll know where we are.”
We lapsed back into silence, sweated, and watched the sensors in the hopes the ship would leave. It didn’t, and the temperature climbed steadily to forty degrees. I turned an inquiring look on Michelle. She nodded.
“Pray for solar interference,” I said and switched the cooling system on.
Blessed cool air blew through the cabin and across our sweat-soaked bodies. Michelle and I took turns spinning in front of one of the blowers while the other watched the scanners for any signs the other ship had detected us. It held its position for another forty minutes. By then, the temperature in the cabin was back down to a comfortable twenty-three degrees.
“Matt, the ship is doing something.” Excitement tinged Michelle’s voice. I didn’t blame her after the monotony of the previous two hours.
I checked the scanners. “They’re probably launching a drone to carry a message back to Hector.”
We continued watching as the ship’s engines came to life and it gently pulled away from the object it had left behind. Once the ship was clear, a drone flared to life and accelerated toward the wormhole.
I settled into the pilot seat. “Okay, give them another fifteen or twenty minutes to get clear and we can get going ourselves.”
“It’s going to be sooner than that.” Tension pushed the excitement out of Michelle’s voice. “The ship is swinging about. They aren’t pointed at us yet, but I can’t imagine any other reason they’d change course.”
“They must have picked up some kind of reading from the cooling system.” I sighed. “Why can’t that ship have a lazy captain who doesn’t worry about little sensor anomalies?”
“Time to go?”
I began the emergency restart procedure. “Time to g
o.”
Ten seconds later, Michelle announced, “We’re no longer an anomaly on their sensors, Matt. The ship has gone to full engine burn and is picking up speed quickly. Are you sure they can’t catch us?”
I took a quick glance at the sensor screen. “I don’t think so.”
“This is not a good time for a vague response, babe. Can you skip any startup steps?”
“I’ll do what I can.” I pointed toward a switch on Michelle’s control board. “We’ve got enough power for the full sensor suite, now. Toggle that switch and tell me what we’re facing.”
Michelle hit the switch and studied the readings. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s got heavy heat shielding, really big engines, and- Uh oh.”
My hands flew over my control board, skipping such trivial things as the fire suppression system and—though I hated to do it—the inertial dampeners. Saving them for later shaved thirty seconds off the startup right now, but it also meant I couldn’t simply duck back into the wormhole and go back the way we came.
A garbled voice spoke from the comm then cleared. “Come in unidentified ship. Are you in distress? Hold position and we can take you in tow with our tractor beam.”
“Tractor beam?” I risked a glance at Michelle.
“That was the ‘uh oh.’ Am I right in guessing ML tractors are military grade?”
“Uh oh.” Ungainly as that ship was, if they caught us in the tractor beam we wouldn’t easily break free. I skipped the next four steps in the startup procedure and hit the engines.
“Repeating, this is solar research vessel GCS-1017. Are you in need of assistance?”
My brain locked down and my hands stopped flipping switches. “What did he just say?”
“Matt? This is not a good time to freeze on me.”
The comm crackled again. “Unidentified ship, please respond.”
I gave myself a mental shake and resumed the emergency startup. “Whatever you do, don’t respond to that ship.”
“I wasn’t planning to. But once they’re in our wake, you had better tell me what spooked you.”
I hit one last button and reached for the throttle. “Hold on to something. This might be rough.”
Rough didn’t begin to describe it. The engines rattled and shook the M&M as they went from cold to full thrust in a split second. I muttered a fervent prayer to the red-robed patron saint of engineering and chose a course at right angles to the course of the approaching research ship. With a lurch, the M&M’s engines roared to life. A giant hand pressed Michelle and me back into our seats, leaving us gasping to breathe through the press of five gravities of force.
“Tractor beam’s on and sweeping toward us,” Michelle forced out.
“Hang on.” I angled the nose of the ship down and slightly toward the other ship. The M&M shook as the tractor beam brushed our tail, but it wasn’t enough to stop her. The other ship swung ponderously around toward our course, but by then we were beyond the range of the tractor beam and moving faster than the research ship’s likely top speed.
I eased back on the throttle, giving Michelle and me a chance to breathe a little easier. As soon as I could lean forward through the g-forces, I started bringing the inertial dampeners online. Thirty seconds later, the dampeners blocked the g-forces. Michelle and I drew deep lungfuls of air and she flashed me her dazzling smile.
“Nice job getting us out of there, Matt. Though I seem to recall you claiming you could outrun that tub without any problems.”
“We are outrunning that tub without any problems.”
“Granted, but you led me to believe getting away from the ship would be just as easy.”
“Um, I didn’t want you to worry about something beyond our control?”
Michelle’s smile vanished. “That had better be stupid guy bravado and not your take on ‘I didn’t want you worrying your pretty little head over it.’ Care to try again, Matt?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean either of those. It was supposed to be a joke.” Michelle’s glare didn’t waver, so I tried another approach. “A poor joke, obviously. The truth is I had no idea that ship would have such powerful engines. The whole design—the engines, the tractor beam, the shielding—makes perfect sense for a solar research ship. That ship needs the engines so it can go a lot closer to the sun and come back. The heavy tractor beam lets it tow large sensor arrays into and out of the heavy gravitational pull of the sun. Once they identified themselves-”
“I’m glad you brought that up. What did the captain say that made you freeze up for a few seconds?”
“The ship’s identification. GCS stands for GenCo Ship.” I stared out into space. “Everyone on that research ship works for me.”
Michelle concentrated on the sensor control board for a few seconds. “I’ve started taking star readings. We ought to know where we are in just a few minutes.”
“Did you hear what I said, Michelle?”
“That the people in that ship, the ones working with Hector, work for your father’s company?” Michelle turned a level gaze on me. “Yes, I heard you.”
“And you don’t have anything to say about it?”
“What, like ‘I am so shocked?’” Michelle shook her head. “After someone on the GenCo Board of Directors tried to have you killed on the maglev back on Draconis? And after Daddy told you they’d be willing to accept massive casualties just to insure you didn’t inherit and follow through with your plan to search for your parents?”
“It was my plan to liquidate my inheritance, not the search itself that pushed them to do all that.”
“Was it?”
I turned away from her frank gaze, looking back after she took my hand in hers.
“Matt, you’re too smart not to have considered the possibility some faction within GenCo was behind your parents’ disappearance. Heck, I even brought it up back on Draconis. In that case, the last thing that faction would want is you spending billions of credits searching for your parents.”
“I’d hoped I was wrong, that it was some rival company using Mom as leverage to force Dad to do research for them.”
“That might still be the case, though I doubt it.” The sensor board beeped and Michelle turned back to the screen. “The sensors have calculated our location. I’m feeding it to your piloting board now.”
“It’s the Pegasus system, isn’t it?”
Michelle turned and stared at me. “How did you know?”
“A bit of logic, a bit of jumping to conclusions.” I called up the system charts on the piloting console. “On the plus side, there are four charted wormholes out of here. That ought to make getting away from here easier.”
“Don’t clam up on me now, Matt. What made you think of the Pegasus system?”
I sighed. “The Pegasus system was the source of my family’s early fortune. My great-grandfather setup a shipping and receiving station in this system and got really rich moving ore. There are still those who claim he worked with pirates to ship and fence stolen ore. Everything I’ve seen so far today makes me believe those stories are true.”
“That’s food for thought—after we’re clear of this system.” Michelle concentrated on her sensor readings. “That research ship is broadcasting something. Maybe they’re calling for more ships to cut us off and round us up?”
“Can you pick up anything on the comm?”
“No, the comm is clear. They must be using a private channel.”
“Scan the H band, frequencies below five sixteen. GenCo uses those for company-only broadcasts.”
A few seconds later, Michelle crowed, “Got ‘em. Frequency two oh one.”
The comm came to life with squelches and garbled speech. Michelle sighed. “Damn, they’re scrambling the broadcast. So much for figuring out what they’re doing.”
I flipped two switches and slowly spun a dial. The comm squawked a bit more, then, “…getting away. We almost had them. Their pilot must have skipped every safety protocol in the book to get mov
ing that quickly.”
It was the voice of the research ship’s captain. Michelle turned wide eyes on me yet again.
“Corporate encryption system. Most ships only have a preset encryption protocol, two at most. Dad and I put a master unit in the M&M.”
A different voice spoke from the comm. “Does the ship match the description we got from Rock Jock?”
“Rock Jock?” Michelle mouthed.
“Slang for asteroid miners. Hector’s codename, I guess.” I responded.
“Yeah, it’s a Draconis Starburst. Heavily modified, though. It’s a lot faster than any fifty year old ship should be.”
“Got it. I’ll scramble some company ships that can keep up with it. They’re not our guys, but they’re all I’ve got right now. You keep tracking the ship and stay on this channel. We don’t need the system authorities poking their noses into this.”
“What if the ship gets past your guys and makes a run for one of the wormholes?”
“They won’t. Just concentrate on your part of the plan. What’s the ship’s transponder reading?”
“Dammit, I should have shut off the transponder when we stopped running dark.” I couldn’t believe my stupidity might cost us everything.
The ship’s captain replied, “There’s no transponder code.”
It was my turn to give a wide-eyed stare. Michelle smiled, “You were busy running the startup, so I disabled the transponder.”
The other voice spoke. “That should have been part of your original report, Fred. You realize this probably means we’re dealing with a Federation agent?”
Michelle and I burst out laughing. I’d love to see the guy’s face if he realized he was dealing with a couple of college students.
“He could just be a smuggler, Arthur.”
How generous of them to give us their names. First names only, but how many solar research ship captains could GenCo employ in the system? And how many of those were named Fred?
“We’ve got a solid lead for our search, Matt. You know this area best. What do you want to do with the information?”
“The M&M is too well known among our enemies for us to risk staying in-system. Let’s get out of the Pegasus system and take stock.”
