by Jim Rudnick
She said, “Lets’ go back to the tents, shall we?” and they all turned and left the cargo bay. As they did, the lights dimmed on the ship’s AI as it now knew there were no visitors within the cargo bay.
On the walk back, the Baroness didn’t talk at all; instead she was thinking about just how long it was going to take to find out if the wreck held any usable secrets. She’d been more than happy with the contents of the arctic warehouse—and had been able to use some of same almost immediately. The new Barony Drive used the copper and blue anti-grav plates to make travel here almost instantaneous, and there had been thousands of matched sets.
Major Stal was in the process of looking into another find, and she was awaiting word back from him today. But all in all, Ghayth had become a mine of its own; she needed to find more gold in same was her thought for the day. Maybe she could make a real addition to the Barony ... from ancient aliens.
#####
Bram knew this was a chance he’d not get again. He waited beside the long curtain on the kiosk that sold fresh fruits at Dessau city center. Capital of Eons, the city of Dessau had an open-air farmer’s market that was open all days, and today, he partially hid behind the edge of the kiosk, between the curtain and the big stack of melons.
The market today was full of citizens. Some bought food to take home or snack items to eat now. Others purchased clothing and gift items from the large craft area on one side.
For more than five hundred years, the market had been set up where the main street in the city met the central city square. Vehicles were still permitted to run on the other side of the street, and Bram watched carefully. He was soon rewarded with the sight of the Issian car that carried the Master Adept as it pulled up. Moments later, she was on the curb, out of the large car, and looking around.
Rather quickly, she turned and stared directly at him as she felt him with her mind. In his head, using mind speak, she said, “Come over, yes, Bram ...” She motioned for an aide to open the car door so she could get back in.
He quickly moved across the street, opened the rear door on the other side, climbed in beside her, and smiled. “I know that this is unusual, Master Adept, and I ask for your forgiveness right here at the onset of our conversation.” He didn’t bother to try to shield his mind. If she wanted to look inside, he knew he’d not be able to stop her.
She nodded to him and said quite politely, “And to what do I owe this honor, Bram?”
He shuffled his feet on the car mat below his seat as he realized he was going to have to fully vocalize his issue today. Perhaps that was just the Master Adept’s attempt to stop him before he began. So he began in a rush.
“Master Adept, I am, as of today, hereby resigning my station within the Issian faith. I wish to no longer be a part of the whole Issian way of life—and I’m sorry, Ma’am, but that is not negotiable ...” he finished off, his voice firm.
She just looked at him.
From what he could tell, as he searched his mind, there looking trying to look inside his head. Not a single thing.
She continued to just stare, one finger rubbing on the thumb of her right hand.
He went on. “Ma’am, so you know—I find myself at a place in my life, where I need to do things, to live life the way that I want—and that means that I can no longer be faithful to both the Issian way of life—and to myself. I ask, Master Adept, that you just let me go. With more than thousands of new Adept officers coming up via the naval academy, I do not think that I will be missed at all.”
She shrugged as she said, “But a part of being an Adept officer is the skill and learning that comes along with experience—and you have had much of that, Bram.”
He nodded but went on. “Master, I ask then that you let me go—I will make the solemn promise that all ex-Issians make to never, ever, use my powers for enrichment of myself but for others only. I so swear here and now.”
He felt the reachings in his brain as the Master Adept leaned toward him and grasped his arm. With direct touch, one Issian cannot hide from another, and their two minds melded for a moment—and then she let go.
She nodded to him, and on her face was the slightest of smiles. “You have chosen a very tough road to travel, Bram. But I—the whole of the Issian faith—wish you well. May you be successful in life—and in love,” she said.
He nodded to her, and in moments, he stood outside the car as it pulled away.
“Guess she cut short her walkabout today,” he said to himself.
“Guess I surprised her.” He took a step back and turned.
“Guess I’m no longer an Adept officer in the Duchy Navy.”
He walked slowly back along the sidewalk, and as the pedestrian traffic was slight, he made good time on his way out of the city center. Farther along the main street, he hailed a robo-cab and told it to take him to the Dessau Landing Port, so he could find a ride back to the Duchy d’Avigdor.
“One more person to tell this to ...” he said to himself, “my mentor ... the Duke d’Avigdor.”
#####
Each of the Leudies sat and nursed their own psyches as only Rulers can—neck snakes tightening around their necks. Eyes bugged out slightly as they—all thirty of them—were angry now about the report just tendered to the Leudie Trading Rules group, the council of thirty full trading members who ran the Leudie realm. Niels Lofton tried to find a way to swallow the news they’d just been given.
Around him at the huge round table, the rest of the Rulers sat, dressed in the usual Leudie black cloak with those dark green inserts. Some toyed with their tablets, others stroked their neck snakes to calm them, and a few even had doffed their toques and were spit polishing their badge of office, those three gold bars in a row.
“My neck snake is fine, my tablet I couldn’t care less about, and my three bars are shiny,” he said to himself.
But what was not fine was the report from the Leudie science ministry. The red power belts found on an inward-bound trip that held so much promise had an issue.
The science report stated plainly that nothing could pierce the force field generated by the simple red belt strapped around a wearer’s waist. Nothing. No projectile, plasma bolt, energy weapon ray, or even a small tactical nuke could injure the person wearing the belt.
How it was powered was still beyond the reach of the science study so far. However, the force field around the wearer was a universal shield, which was the issue.
To hold off an enemy, one would turn on the belt and couldn’t be injured at all. One could do almost anything. One could walk and swim and ride and fly about in a ship.
But what could not be done was to injure the person attacking you—unless the belt itself was turned off first.
This meant that an attacker could simply draw their weapon and wait while the wearer had the belt enabled. When the wearer tried to foist off the attacker, which meant turning off the belt, the attacker could then harm you.
Niels Lofton shook his head and sighed as he worked through and simplified the report’s findings. The belt created a waiting game and locked the wearer and his attacker, whether man or machine, into a hold pattern. A simple robot weapon, aimed at you, could keep you at bay, waiting for you to turn off the belt and in milliseconds fire at you.
The findings in the report were not good. Every single Leudie at the table understood that, and every single Leudie realized the power belt had limitations.
One of the Rulers, a few seats to Lofton’s right, spoke up. “So, I take it you’ve tested all weapons from within the power belt’s interior? None work, right?”
That got a nod from the scientist in front of them.
“And I take it that until we understand more about the belts themselves, they are a simple defensive tool. No one wearing one can be hurt. But neither can they do any damage to any attackers around them—correct?”
The scientist once again just nodded.
“It was a letdown for sure,” Niels said to himself, “yet surely just
a defensive weapon would have some value, right?”
“Are there any more tests that you can think of—to try to get around this universal blocking?” another trader across the table questioned.
The scientist replied, “Well, yes, there are some more, of course—but we’re having no luck no matter what we try. We even tried sending a live animal out—our test subjects held Garnuthian mice before activating the belt. Once the belt was activated, they threw the mice which simply hit the interior of the force field and fell to the floor. Still inside the belt’s range and unhurt.
“Obviously, no living creature or any projectile or energy beam or light can leave the area being protected by the belt. Even a rockslide stops dead from crushing the belt wearer, suspended above the force field until the subject moves. Once the subject moves, the rockslide then falls to the ground. We are still investigating other items or means ... but as the report says, this may well be a simple defensive item that cannot be used in battle or conflict. At least not yet,” he said.
Not a word was spoken from any of the Rulers. Each Leudie present, the top thirty traders on the planet, realized that perhaps their hopes were dashed.
But they all nodded, and the trader who was acting as the chairperson said, “We’ll table that report, and let’s move along. Item number eight today—the exclusionary exemptions on those new electronics from Roor. Trader Vidda, please ...”
“Got to think of something,” Niels said to himself. “Surely there’s a way to fix those belts ...”
#####
Bouncing carefully across the bottom of the crater, Mel said to himself, “Working in airless space is, well, something that always makes me feel, well, less than efficient.”
The Exeter had found the moon’s asteroid after a hunt that involved going to the coordinates he’d been given—and then finding dozens more asteroids in that space.
Launching a shuttle, he’d had the helm put up a search grid, and they’d visited each one of them in turn, flying over and around each asteroid. Some were small at less than a few hundred yards across, but some were almost a mile wide. None, of course, was a sphere; all had lobes, valleys, and jutting crags that a meteorite could hide in. And each had to be looked at. Thank God for the eagle eyes on the Exeter science officer.
“Bingo, Captain,” the lieutenant said, and he pointed at the screen.
On this asteroid, about halfway through the search grid, there was a valley that had craters from smaller meteor strikes from eons ago. At one end of the almost flat plain, a ridge of crags jutted up and into the blackness above. This body of asteroids was in a system that lay near the mid-point of Pentyaan space.
At approximately twenty lights wide and forty lights long, this space was claimed by the Pentyaan Oligarchy. The fact that the Exeter was even here, inside that space, was a serious offense. But they had come in from outside the normal flow of inbound traffic and had used a nebula just one system over to hide even more.
The Exeter sat in the nebula, clouded by the purple and green clouds of gas, and she was safe.
And the shuttle now lay just behind him on the relatively flat crater floor on the mile-long asteroid, as he bounced up the side of the crater and met the team involved with the mining of the ore. He’d been more than a bit perturbed when he’d received the mission documents from the Baroness just a week ago, which let him know the ore he was after could not be cut using lasers.
Somehow, lasers didn’t work on that ore—something that was beyond his knowledge. The Exeter science officer had commented that just wasn’t right—physics or some such thing had laws that can’t be broken. But no matter, as the Baroness had also had huge band saws delivered to the Exeter that same day.
“Hard to use, yes,” he said to himself as he watched the action fifteen feet below him in the mining pit.
Against an outcrop of the red ore from the tail end of the meteorite, they’d erected three scaffoldings around the thirty-foot-wide ore block. One of the crew stood up top, and around his waist, he had tied and supported the metal framework of the saw. Below him and off to either side, two more crew stood, and their jobs were to swing the saw from side to side from the focal point above, held by the man on top.
It was slow work, and it took almost a full two hours to saw off a piece that was about ten feet long and six feet wide. Each slice was only four inches thick, and while cumbersome to manage, other crew carted off the pieces. The pieces were stored in the shuttle for transport back to the Exeter later.
This was day three, and each day they’d been able to get about six slabs of ore. They had to switch crewmen since the air supply in their spacesuits was only good for three hours. “Still, the job was getting done, and that was a good thing,” Mel said to himself. “Good indeed.”
“Should get me some props from the Baroness,” he said to himself as the next slab fell slowly as it was sawed free from the meteorite body. With almost zero gravity, the slab weighed next to nothing, and Magnusson stepped back and out of the way as support crew moved in to manhandle the latest slab back over the crater floor to the shuttle.
“At this rate,” he said to himself, “we’ll have, what, maybe ten tons of ore in the four days we figure we can hide out here without being found.” The shuttle was on full dark and the only real lights being used were those fifteen feet down in the hole. They had almost no footprint on the asteroid.
Still, being found was a no-no, he knew. That would start some kind of diplomatic incident, and already the relations between the RIM Confederacy and the Pentyaan Oligarchy were poor. The latest rumors were that there was unrest on the rise here and talk even that one or two of the twenty-three realms that the Pentyaan Oligarchy controlled here were fighting for their independence.
Just the kind of rebellion that would be best to avoid, he thought and grinned as the crew manhandled the slab out of the hole and the cutting crew positioned the saw to begin on a new slab.
“Four more days,” Mel said, but in his suit helmet, no one could hear him.
He smiled. In four days and a bit, the Baroness would receive his “mission complete and successful” EYES ONLY. I wonder what might that be worth to my career ... he thought, the grin still plastered on his face as he watched the next cut begin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Up on the Ghayth space station, things were, as usual, slightly askew. In the last few minutes, three ships had come in, and each ship wanted landing permissions and of course, each wanted to go first. The TN Crockett from Tillion was making the most noise, as it was once again arguing that as an all-male ship, it would, of course, have precedence in landing order as those other two ships carried mixed gender crews.
At least that’s what Captain McDonald, the duty officer up on the station bridge got from the rant that the Tillion captain had just spewed at him via Ansible. He shook his head. Tillions were uni-gendered it was assumed. A few months back, a video had been released showing why that was, and Tillion had issued a public denial stating the video was fraudulent. Captain McDonald, like most RIM citizens, had not been swayed by the Tillion claims. He smiled to himself and decided one of the other ships should be allowed in first, and as he was the duty officer, that choice was his.
“Ansible, contact the Thrones freighter. Allow them to go down first. Pad number twenty-one is for them. Don’t notify the others, just let them sit,” he said.
That ought to pay back the Tillions for their uni-gender stance, he thought.
The Thrones freighter yawed to its port side and then began the long glide down toward the Ghayth landing port. The Ansible notice up on the station view-screen flashed as the Tillion ship asked for recognition.
Captain McDonald chose to ignore it and said, “Blame it on the newness of the systems here on the station,” to the Ansible station.
The sergeant who manned the Ansible console on the bridge nodded. New to Ghayth, the space station had been in service less than a month; as always, one could expect some short
falls in how things worked and at what speed too.
The sergeant spoke into his throat mic to the other two ships, and they all watched as the Thrones freighter became smaller and smaller as it dropped down on its aft side to land a hundred miles below.
“Normal station stuff,” the captain said to himself, and then he nodded to the sergeant to send the Tillions down next. He placed them on landing pad twenty-four—well enough away from the Thrones ship to make them happy. The last ship was the RIM Confederacy frigate the RN Henderson, who had the duty this month of making Confederacy deliveries around the whole RIM.
“Barony Drive has made the duty of mail run easier for the Henderson,” the sergeant said as he finished up with the final landing permissions and instructions for the RIM Navy ship, and the lieutenant smiled.
“It has done that, but as we’re learning—while the time between planets has shrunk to seconds—it also has made redundant the long-range scans. By the time we get a notice that a ship is approaching, it’s here. No prior notice means that three arrive at once like today—and that might be problematic sometime in the future ...” he said as he sipped his coffee.
With Ghayth lying just at the far edge of the RIM Confederacy space, all alone in the immediate area, the duty on board the Wilson was a solitary type of duty. Yes, the planet below with almost a hundred thousand new immigrants was well worth the shore leave, but overall, McDonald knew that being captain of the Wilson was much like babysitting. “Not much happens, not many care, and for the most part, the station would be a simple portal down to the planet. Easy duty,” he said and snorted to himself. “Pretty much a boring job.”
Not that navy jobs were all boring, he did rationalize to himself, like the three ships showing up with no prior notice.
Navy men all over the RIM had commented on that already, and he knew it had been discussed at the Barony Captains Council too. He’d been at that Captains Council meeting just a month back, when this brand new Ghayth space station, the BN Wilson, was being barged into place.
