My head was a little poundy, and I felt dehydrated, but otherwise this had been an easy one. Eight weeks frozen, combined subjective and real time. That was forty-eight weeks of life support saved on, when you added everybody up. That gave our mission an extended Action Life, as the phrase went. Assuming, of course, everything had gone to plan while we'd slept.
Mavis and Chris were supposed to always revive at the same time, with the captain of Shady Lady going off to see to her vessel and the status of our mostly automated journey, while the Mission Leader saw to his people. In point of fact, this should have been the second time they'd both been revived by computer systems, with a quick spell of consciousness for a day or so right after arriving from starjump. This, so as to be sure we were on-target and undetected, way out there on the edge of the star system.
At that time, and at Chris' discretion, he could have revived any of us if he saw fit. The intended plan, though, had been to also wake up one or both of the Sensor Specialists in order to take a closer look around. Assuming there was nothing amiss, they would all then re-enter cold passage, and wait until the ship travelled -- mostly ballistically -- to a point near the solar orbit of PS2GG, the gas giant, much deeper in-system. We should have now been on the far side of the primary from its only natural satellite of note, so as to be in a position to creep around the star and observe.
Our bunks were aligned on both sides of a cramped companionway, interspersed with personnel and equipment lockers, as well as control panels for various ship systems. Aft a bit was a wide spot that opened onto the ship's sole exterior hatch on port side, with the fresher opposite, on starboard. Further back, the companionway terminated in two small spaces with lockable hatches: Engineering and Gunnery.
To the fore, was a larger multipurpose space designed for meetings and mission prep, as well as recroom and relaxation duties, meal prep and consumption, and whatever else we needed. A round central table could be raised from the floor, and chairs for it could be unlocked from a rack on the bulkhead. It made for cheek-to-jowl conferences, and intimate dining. A small, but very capable Tri-D was installed here, so this space was mostly given over to SS1 and SS2. The holographic display made for an advanced interface to the impressive suite of passive and active sensors packed into Shady Lady. This tool allowed various data perspectives to be presented and studied, including an animated system map that I could see John reach up and manipulate with precision.
Beyond the Common Room was the cockpit. One seat. Mavis' duty station. As captain, the entire ship was her responsibility, but most everything was automated, and she'd have little to do elsewhere -- if all went well.
Crammed into every conceivable spot between these places were access panels, control pads, and storage lockers of various kinds. These compartments contained such things as pressure suits, frozen and dehydrated meals, emergency medical equipment, specialist gear, extra parts for the ship, extra flight suits for the crew, and a whole lot more.
It was cold...or I was.
With a slow, rocking effort, I managed to sit up on my bunk, very nearly bumping my forehead on the rolltop lid, still partially extended, and begging me to attack it with my face. A look up the companionway showed everyone sitting or standing around the table, except Mavis, whose shiny head I could see further on. She turned this way and that, scanning instruments. At least one cable draped down from above, plugged into her skull. A series of ghost-like holographic images of scrolling computer code and maps, hovering over the table in the Common Room, made it a little hard to see her.
Stinna, sitting there and interacting with the holograms, was facing aft. She noticed me getting up, and stared long enough to draw John's attention.
"Hey," he offered. A few of the others looked back and said the same.
"Hey," I replied. "Everything cool?"
"Yeah," Chris called, leaning over from the side, so his head bobbed into view. "Looks okay. Clean up and come get something to eat."
That sounded good.
I pushed to my feet and toddled back to the fresher. The shower was the best thing ever, and I felt a heck of a lot better under a pulsing jet of hot water -- simultaneously energizing and relaxing, the way a good shower should be. In a few minutes, I was less like a dead thing.
Once in a clean jumpsuit, I made a quick stop at Gunnery to power up systems and get diagnostics running; I wanted to do a full hardware check, which always took time. Then I went forward, stopping along the way at a locker. I fished out my wristcomp, and walked into the Common Room, fiddling with it.
Dieter wasn't present now, though I'd seen him in here when I woke up. He was back in his Engineering closet (and I was assured that it really was one), so there was enough space to get around the table. I fished out a frozen meal of scrambled whatevers and popped it in the re-heater. I also filled a cup with some Vaussermin -- a brand of nutrient water which the ship had on tap. There were various flavors available, ranging from Orange Chemical Spill all the way to Purple Gym Socks (at least, that's how I always thought of them), but I had wicked dry-mouth, so I still wasn't complaining.
"How are you doing?" Chris asked, as I bumped around behind. Meals, coffee, and datapads were spread on the table, and it looked like they'd been up for a while.
"Getting there, getting there," I mumbled. "Injection went smoothly?"
"Looks like it," he replied, glancing at the map that Stinna had overhead.
"We're undetected," she confirmed, doing a spreading action over our heads on a timeline that appeared in the Tri-D. It represented ship movements in the system which Shady Lady had passively monitored over the past few weeks while we lay frozen, crawling furtively into the stellar well.
"Then that masking tech on the starjump engine really works?" I asked, quite impressed.
"Yep," Chris put in, digging for a report on his datapad, which he then turned over to me, "though we're lucky we didn't pop in much closer to anything. The ship's wake is greatly dampened, but it's not gone completely."
It was the brief he'd written some forty days previous, when we first arrived on the outer edge of the star system. We had returned to the normal universe on the outer edge of 216-11B, at over 100 million kilometers from the nearest manned vessel, yet only ten million from a nav bouoy. Neither one picked up the ship's graviton discharge -- which is an indicator of shifting to or from jumpspace -- nor had monitored communications traffic revealed any sign that we'd been noticed.
Between this quiet arrival, and the advanced stealth shielding that the ship sported (topped off with a special black paint job over the exterior armor that absorbed over ninety-nine percent of visible light) we were rather hard to spot. Shady Lady's thrusters were on the slow side, due to a smart pre-cooling system that ejected reaction mass at the exact current temperature of the ambient micro-matter, thrown off by the natural action of the system primary, surrounding the ship at that particular moment. The mass itself was scattered widely by some clever spreading system I didn't understand, except to know that this was expressly why we were so slow.
But slow was good. Fast got you noticed.
Chris' report stated that, in addition to Mavis, he'd had SS1 wake up, too, and perform a detailed passive sweep of the jump point, noting a few vessels coming and going.
One of those entering the system had been a Linebreaker Class Security Cruiser.
Seeing my expression, Chris said, "Yeah, you noticed that?"
"The Linebreaker's the most advanced warship in space," I replied with a shake of the head, and feeling daunted. "Half the size of any ship in the Alliance doing the same job, and twice as powerful. I don't think they even have more than two of them, they're so expensive."
"They don't," he replied, "but...Stinna, bring up the ASR for day 299? Check this out..."
SS2 brought up the Automated Sensor Report for the day in question, now over two weeks old, which covered a period of time when Shady Lady was yet half way to our current orbit. Everyone aboard was frozen down at th
at time. The exit cone highlighted above our heads was unmistakeable.
"Is that another Linebreaker leaving, or the same one?"
"It's a different one," he replied. "Its military transponder put it as, uh, Wildcard. The other one, which is still here, is called Liquidator."
The two most powerful military vessels of their type, anywhere, and The Handshake had them tag-teaming in this very star system.
"So it's a clear violation of the treaty."
"I dunno about that," John put in with a flick of his finger at the image. He drew down a long list of graviton cones cross-referenced with transponder ID's, all sorted by date.
"Fifteen arrivals and seventeen departures since we got here. Only three vessels of size have had military profiles: the two cruisers, and one smaller patrol ship. Tons of couriers have been coming and going, though, some of which are Team."
"Eighty-eight percent of open comm traffic is without any milspecs," Stinna added, laying another file of statistics over the holographic list.
"Hey, do you mind?" John asked her shortly, swiping it back out of the way. He highlighted one of the jump cones on his display, and opened up its details for everyone to see. It's identifying becon showed a familiar style.
"Cargo ship?" Chris asked.
"Yeah. Some of these graviton profiles are unclear, but the corresponding transponder ID's are all for medium freighters in the Sanjin Hauling fleet. Montaro has millions of those things all over space. We have this same class coming and going at least a dozen times."
"Not all one ship, surely," Chris punched up the freighter's specs on his datapad, which I'd given back.
"No, the ID's are all different."
"And Team has its own haulers," I added. "So...there must be a station here. Civvie freighters like those need docking facilities for cargo transfer."
"There's a highdock out by the jump point for the sake of the couriers," Chris observed. "But these cargo haulers have been making deliveries deeper into the well." He swiped open another file overhead, which only added to the mid-air muddle.
A carefully annotated profile of a space station appeared. Size was hard to tell right off, but it was clearly big, and had a wide ring with a very capable-looking docking Hub at its center. This picture was from an image gallery, composed of several thousand telescopically-enanced optical sensor captures that Shady Lady had obtained as we slept.
In this particular shot, bright sunlight played off metallic curves and angles almost artistically. It was tagged as being a T22VZ Wayfarer Class Multipurpose Deep Space Station, named Mylag Vernier. It was a member of the extensive industrial and colonial line built and shipped galaxy-wide by the massive Mylag company, here in Corporatespace.
"Lagrange Point 2, between the primary and PS2GG," John said.
"I thought this system was unincorporated." I asked no one in particular. "Is that a permanent station?"
"Permanent civilian station," he clarified, then drew my attention to the specs for the thing off to one side, and even tapped an entry to highlight it.
"A Wayfarer. Aren't those starjump capable? A slow engine, right?"
"Yes," Stinna answered quickly, as if making an effort to be included. "Most owners uninstall the drive later on, and sell it as used."
I looked at the specs and the accompanying hologram above the table while they compared notes back and forth. This was no small operation. There appeared to be forty-two jump capable vessels in-system now, not counting ourselves or the station. Currently, only one was military, Wildcard having left a week before.
I accessed Liquidator's specs on my wristcomp, scrolling through the particulars until I found what I was after.
"Okay, that cruiser carries twenty support craft, including ten fighters. It's like a small base all on its own."
"It is," Stinna agreed, running a search over the image above the table for a particular set of files. A moment later, she opened up the comm traffic record. She had to drill down quite a bit, and then do another, more detailed search on the lists that remained, but she finally opened up a long series of gibberish entries. "These are encrypted, but I think they're from fighterboats."
"Have we cracked that yet?" Chris asked, turning to John.
"Oh! Yeah, sorry," he replied, changing the code into clear text. It was all the back-and forth communications of the military vessels. "Shady Lady broke their code a few weeks ago. But, take a look at this..."
He then opened up another window on top of Stinna's, in order to get an update on the decryption process of a dedicated anti-cipher machine installed before launch. This was a piece of advanced spy tech the like of which I'd only ever heard about, and it was fully integrated into the rest of the sensor analysis hardware. Where Meerschaum had layed their hands on the thing was anybody's guess. SS1 and SS2 were the only ones with the authority and the codes (and, for that matter, the skill) to use it, but they had the output piped to the Tri-D. Letters, digits, and other odd characters flew by, with a few, here and there, staying locked in position.
"What is it?" Chris queried, studying the nonsense code with wrinked brows.
"Some of the comm chatter coming and going between the station and different civvie support craft. It uses a fifteen-thousand character key. That kind of encryption is beyond state-of-the-art. I've cracked similar stuff in lab tests, but this is the first time I've ever seen it used in the field."
"Top Secret communications then?" I asked.
"Above Top Secret, I'd say. It's even more secure than what the military ships are using."
We were all quiet for a long time, pondering that.
"Well," I ventured at last, "this is either a research operation or a manufacturing one. Nothing else makes sense."
"They do have a military presence," Chris observed.
"Not a build-up, though," John said. "It's more like guard duty."
"One ship, no matter how advanced, isn't enough to secure a star system," I stated.
"Your food's getting cold," Chris mentioned, off-handedly. The non sequitur throwing me for a moment, I started eating automatically. Or, rather, while pondering.
"It's not a factory," Chris and I said almost at once -- me, through a mouthful of scrambled faux-eggs; him, through a deep tunnel of thought. The others looked surprised, while Mavis, up front and following it all without comment, snorted a laugh.
"What could they possibly be working on that requires a top-of-the-line military ship for security?" Chris asked no one in particular. I just nodded and swallowed, pointing at him with my spork. "They're building something that needs parts. And if the station got here on its own, then they aren't still working on that."
"Soooo...then it's not a violation of the treaty," John concluded. "If it's research, then what we're doing here is industrial espionage. Meerschaum will have to delete all the data we've gathered."
"We should leave," Stinna put in blandly.
We all just looked at her -- even Mavis, who had twisted in her seat. It was, after all, an essential conclusion.
Then we turned to our ML, who just glanced back from one to the other of us for a long time.
"I think she's right," I said in the silence. "I'm curious, too, but if we're sure they aren't violating the treaty, we have no grounds, or right, to be here any more."
"Yeah, but are we sure?" he replied questioningly, as if the prospect of turning tail was abhorrent.
I knew how he felt, but we were operating on the edge of the law as it was. I needed a work reference from UH, not legal hassles.
"I don't actually have a problem with staying for a while," John put in, while switching views on the Tri-D.
He brought up an overlay of the system, including orbital trajectories for all the objects Shady Lady had been tracking these past weeks. A large yellow ball, representing the local star, sat in the middle, with a smaller ball for the gas giant in orbit around it. A whole bunch of circular and elliptical lines designating all the vessels in-system, radiated outward
to various distances. Each of these was marked with the name and call sign picked up from their transponders. The Team cruiser was about half way inside the system's gravity shadow, a fair distance from the station. Our own ship was highlighted in red.
"Is this current?" Chris asked.
"Yep. Looking for something in particular?"
"Run it chronologically in reverse, can you? I want to see what the other Linebreaker was doing when it was here."
Stinna and John knocked hands, reaching up to respond to the request, conflicting gestures confusing the display and zooming it back through a week of time, and to a close-up of space near the primary.
A broken vector line appeared on a date marked as five days previous. It was gone again when the display settled further back on seven days.
"He asked me, all right?"
"But those are my routines," Stinna told him with a blank stare. "I should explain what's going on."
"No, as SS2, you should prepare your material for presentation, and then let SS1 handle it. Me."
"Somebody?" Chris interrupted. "This shift, if you can?"
Irritated, John held up his hands in a gesture for her to go ahead.
"No, it's okay," she replied, and sat still, hands in her lap. She looked passive.
SS1 sighed, then moved the display back to the way it was, setting it on an automatic rewind and plugging in data from the collected automated surveillance results. It showed ships coming and going, with frequent stops at the station by the cargo vessels. When our ship arrived, Wildcard was already here, though it left soon after Liquidator showed up.
"That's all of it, since we jumped in," John pronounced, setting it to move forward again.
"Can you bring it back five days?" I asked. "There was...I don't know. Something weird."
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 3
