The Lost (The Maauro Chronicles Book 3)

by Edward McKeown

  “Not much equipment here,” she added.

  “Yeah. The room is used for many different things. Stardust is too small for a real gym. Besides I’m the only one who uses it. Never saw Dusko here and other than wrestling the crab-robots there’s nothing onboard that would serve as exercise for Maauro.”

  “What about Jaelle?” Olivia asked. “She looked pretty fit.”

  I was a little nonplussed by her mention of Jaelle. “Ah. Occasionally. She didn’t seem to have to work at it as hard as a human. Nekoans are strong but not much on endurance. You’d have caught her on Tir-A-Mar but for Maauro.”

  “You keep in pretty good shape,” she said.

  “Not like you,” I couldn’t keep admiration from creeping into my voice.

  “I could use some upper body work.”

  “Why? So you could kill a Conchirri with a single punch.”

  Her grin widened. “Wouldn’t mind that but we’d have to find some that hadn’t gone extinct. Then extinct ’em.”

  “God forbid those monsters still live.”

  “Space is wide. Who can say we got all of them?” She toweled her face. “What do you say to putting some mats down here and doing some sparring sometime?”

  I nodded, but groaned inside seeing weeks of bruises ahead of me.

  “Good,” Olivia said. She walked past me and playfully snapped the towel at my butt.

  I spent the next two hours breaking a sweat and trying to forget what she’d looked like walking away from me with the tights stretched over that taut body. I thought of Jaelle, the smell of her hair, the tigery way she walked across a room. How she liked being kissed on the neck. Then also how she’d told me that if I needed human women that I should indulge that need. Wasn’t she somewhere getting pregnant by a Nekoan? Her need had been for family, for a future. Mine just seemed to be about sex. I worked out till I was too tired to think about it anymore.

  The next morning I was sipping coffee and reading an old mystery novel on a tablet when Maauro called me to the bridge. The others joined me on the way. When we got there, Maauro pointed out what looked like a small silver ball with a few spiky antennas.

  “It says SS New Hope,” Maauro said without preamble.

  “They left a marker?” Dusko said. “After all they did to avoid being trailed, why would they leave a marker buoy?”

  I looked at the small silver globe sitting where it had for over eight hundred years. “They were going into the Great Dark,” I said, slowly. “They didn’t know what awaited them, if anything. Maybe they were afraid that no one would ever know what became of them.”

  “Or, it could be simpler,” Olivia added. “If they jumped back this way they might have wanted a buoy to confirm this was the system they came out of while they were still near the warp point. You have to remember how primitive their equipment and techniques were. All this was being done for the first time. Parallax location confirmation would have taken them a long time.”

  “So we know they came to this warp point and jumped out. Where does it lead?” Dusko said.

  I consulted my charts. “Depending on your angle of entry, this point can lead to three systems. Two are on the periphery of known space. RW Cephei, that’s a hell of a jump, 11,000 lights. It’s been made only once by an automated probe a century ago. It took seventy-three years out and twenty-three years elapsed galactic time back.”

  “Well we won’t be doing that one,” Olivia said, with a glance at Maauro, who nodded quickly.

  “Nor is it likely Bexlaw, mad for the quest as he was, did so,” Dusko added.

  “The next is Wolf 363, but there is an old Enshari colony there. One of the few they ever had. It’s abandoned now as they moved back to their homeworld to repopulate it after the disaster, but it was thriving eight hundred years ago.” I said.

  “Enshari are friendly,” Olivia said.

  “New Hope wouldn’t have known that,” Dusko said, “but it is likely that the Enshari would have detected the ship if it came close enough to the planet to scan it.”

  “True,” Maauro said, “enough so to relegate it to the bottom of the probabilities.”

  “Great,” I said, grimacing. “That leaves yellow-orange star about 695 lights from Earth on the other side of the Helix nebula.”

  “The old Voit-Veru border from before they joined the Confederacy,” Olivia said.

  “Someone please tell me it isn’t Mounus,” Dusko groaned.

  “No, that’s some luck. Fenaday and Rainhell are too well remembered there,” I said.

  “That will happen when you atom bomb a port,” Olivia said dryly.

  “It’s in the chart as 1363 Canum,” Maauro said.

  “Can we see it?” I asked.

  A beam flickered from Maauro’s right eye. She projected a blue world onto the table top. Charts and stats on the planet and its population accompanied it. “The Voit-Veru call it Velsust: one habitable planet, a world with a lot of water and not a lot of land. Some of that land is new, the Veru terraformed it by shading the poles so that some icecaps built up, draining some land. That colony was not there eight hundred years ago.”

  Olivia whistled at the hologram. “How do you do that? The image is perfect. Any better and I could see the fish.”

  I smiled. “Maauro has better holography then a high end theatre.”

  “The Voit-Veru won’t be overly pleased to see us,” Dusko said.

  Olivia shrugged as she studied the screen. “All Voit-Veru aren’t from the Aporek clan. Looks like there are Hersi clan there.”

  “Meaning?” Dusko snapped.

  “The Hersi were the only Veru that Fenaday offered reparations to,” I said. “The Aporek clan held Lisa Fenaday prisoner, and he never forgave that. But he hijacked a Hersi freighter, The Queen of the Night, to sneak onto Mounus. According to the few interviews he did on the subject, he regretted the necessity for that. With the fall of the Aporek clan, the Hersi led the Veru into the Confederacy. I agree a warm welcome is unlikely however.”

  “You talk like they’re not part of the Confederacy anymore,” Olivia said.

  “By the time we get there,” Dusko said. “Who knows? Maybe they won’t be.”

  Maauro looked at me. “Wrik, I must leave this decision up to you. Do we proceed further or turn back?”

  “What do you think?” I returned.

  She shook her headful of glossy hair. “I will not influence you. I want you to make the choice. Of all of us, you have the most to lose by a long and mistaken voyage.”

  I stood and walked over to the portal, staring out at the stars and the small point of light that was New Hope’s old beacon. I thought about Jaelle, about why I had come on this voyage. To turn back now, with so little to show, seemed to mock all the effort we’d made so far. Beyond that I found the thought of facing Shasti Rainhell and telling her we’d given up after two star jumps too grim to contemplate. To be found wanting in the jade-green eyes of a woman whose voyages I’d read about as a child? No, it was not to be contemplated.

  “I say we go to Velsust. It’s the best bet. We’ve got plenty of trade goods on board to make a trade mission plausible, along with Confed starmail straight from Sol System. That in itself would make a voyage there worthwhile for a trader. We should arrive at Velsust before any word of us could catch up from our enemies.”

  “That should have been true here,” Dusko said.

  Again Maauro shook her head. “You must remember the ISM’s assets. If an automated spacecraft were dispatched at max speed by parties who had greater knowledge of Bexlaw’s route than we have, it may have preceded us.”

  “We’ll have to risk it or turn back,” I said. “My vote is we go on.”

  “I agree,” Maauro said.

  Olivia nodded. “Go on.”

  We looked at Dusko, who raised one of his pale eyebro
ws. “What? I get a vote this time?”

  “You do,” Maauro said.

  “Then we’ll make it unanimous. Jump.”

  “Okay— how soon?” Olivia demanded.

  “Let’s get some sack time,” I said. “Eight hours, breakfast for those who jump on a full stomach, then we go. We’ll be better prepared to face whatever happens if we are fresh.

  Olivia, Dusko and I stood. Maauro merely smiled. “Go rest. I will keep watch here and start the jump calculations.”

  Nine hours later we had checked everything for the jump. Maauro inspected our new prize, and made sure of the grapples. I’d named the captured Daitan bomber after my old ship, the Sinner II.

  Since we were going to an at least nominally friendly port, I let the engines go up to max cruise as we closed on the warp point.

  I hooked into the jump rig, seeing the indicators for the warp point ahead of us. To an observer on our hull, it would have looked like any other empty patch of space. On the sensors it roiled and snarled with its warning of another reality waiting for those entering its grasp. I tweaked Maauro’s approach vector some. The hyperdrive approach to a warp point was not strictly a mathematical endeavor; there was an element of “feel” to it. Humans with psi ability made the best pilots, having some ability to see into the point, almost to communicate with it. This ability eluded Maauro and a good approach could save weeks in elapsed transit.

  “Everyone hold on to your underwear,” I called.

  “I’m not wearing any,” Maauro said.

  “I can never tell when she’s trying to be funny,” Dusko grumbled, staring at the screen.

  “Five, four, three, two one, jump!”

  We popped into a binary star system of a G-class star with a white dwarf only about a light year away. The sight would have been compelling but the proximity alarm demanded my attention. My board lit up as my hands seized the instruments. At our speed we could only turn so fast…

  “Proximity alarm only,” I called out as the board populated with data. “No collision. There’s a vessel on scan about 180,000 kilometers ahead and five degrees below.”

  Olivia and Dusko exchanged worried looks. Maauro, standing next to me, directly accessed the ship’s AI. “IFF is coming through now,” she said. “Confederate light cruiser, Hsien. I am flashing ours across now. “

  “From her course,” I added, “she’s headed for the warp point in about five minutes. Doesn’t look like she was waiting on us.”

  “Hsien is hailing us,” Maauro said. “Voice only.”

  “Open communications,” I said, “voice only.”

  “This is Captain Charteis of the CSS Hsien to SS Stardust. Please advise your destination and intentions.”

  “Hello Hsien, this is Stardust, Wrik Trigardt, master. We are a general trade, break-bulk freighter. Our manifest and details are coming across in a data packet now along with Sol origin starmail. We are bound for trade on Velsust II.”

  “Acknowledged Stardust. Mail from Sol. Most welcome. We’ve credited your ship’s account. I’ll even do you a favor and take your download with me. You can resell it to the Veru.”

  “Thanks from one captain to another. I’m hoping to pick up a cargo here, then who knows? Didn’t expect to see a Confed warship all the way out here.”

  “Well you won’t again. Not a navy one anyway. We’ve been relieved and sent back to our homeport. ISM sent an auxiliary for system protection. It’s not much, a 35,000 ton tender for corvettes and scouts. Still there’s been no action in this area for decades.”

  “ISM?” I said. “Isn’t that unusual?” I looked at Maauro and Olivia.

  “It’s strange days. Your manifest shows three humans and Due-Denlenn for crew.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “A little bit of friendly advice. Don’t linger on your business here. The Aporek run the planet for all that there are a considerable number of Hersi and lesser clans here. They haven’t been overly hospitable to human, Moroks or Denlenns. Had a number of scrapes with my crew and the locals.”

  “Thank you, Hsien, that sounds like good advice to follow.”

  “Stardust, did you want us to tell anyone in particular that we saw you out here?”

  I felt strongly that Hsien’s captain was signaling to me. That there was more he wanted to say, but not on an open channel. The fact he had told me of a military deployment of an ISM tender was very odd, and in itself suggested he was warning me of more than surly locals.

  “Check packet 53 Alpha in the data load we sent over to you,” I said. “You might find that one particularly interesting.”

  “Got it, Stardust. We’ll make sure it gets through. Hsien over and out.”

  “53 Alpha?” Dusko asked.

  “It’s to Candace, reporting where we are and what we have seen so far. God knows when she’ll get it, but she will know we entered the system.”

  “Excellent,” Dusko said. “When they lay a wreath for the repose of our souls at least it will be in the right system. Very comforting. I’ll be in the galley.”

  I looked at his departing back. “Cheerful as always.”

  “A Confed frontier system with the Navy turning over security to the ISM?” Olivia said. “Sounds like things have worsened fast.”

  “Perhaps,” Maauro said. “Or it might be related directly to us. Remember our enemies know at least some of the trail we must follow.”

  “Still, this is a civilized port,” I said. “We can get refueled, reprovisioned and trade some. I don’t think we have to fear pirates here.”

  “No. Worse,” Olivia said. “Inspections, possible trumped up arrests, all manner of bureaucratic delays. If the ISM uses the color of law on us, we’ll wish for pirates; we could kill those.”

  “Maybe we should have brought a lawyer with us,” I said.

  “An excellent idea, Wrik,” Maauro said. “I shall see what is in the library computer on aerospace law.”

  “Well won’t you be the proud poppa when your little girl gets her juris doctorate,” Olivia said.

  “Wrik’s relationship to me is not parental,” Maauro said.

  “Oh,” Olivia said, sweetly. “What is it?”

  “I believe the human expression is, ‘none of your goddamn business,’ Maauro returned, her expression pleasantly bland.

  Red and unexpected alert, I thought, but before I found it necessary to intervene, Maauro stood, nodded and headed off the bridge.

  “Hmmmm,” Olivia said. “I wonder what that was about?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I didn’t see that particular asteroid coming. However it might be as well for you to be a bit more careful about teasing Maauro. She has emotions, usually cooler than ours, but there. In some respects she’s very young and you don’t know her well enough to tease her. Don’t forget that beneath the cute exterior—”

  “Not likely to forget that,” Olivia said, eyebrows raised. “A thin-skinned android, who’d have thought it?”

  We came in to Velsust II Control Area two days later. The world of blue and white held so little land that at first it seemed to be all ocean.

  “There’s the ISM tender,” Maauro said, pointing to the scanner for our benefit.

  I looked over. The ship was only barely within visual range of our scanner and it showed a boxy vessel, not a sleek warship. Still the tender was armed and its force was in its small fleet of sloops and corvettes. There was no question but that we were seen and possibly known by this vessel.

  Maauro parked the Sinner II in a geosynch orbit with a buoy, until we needed it again. Uncoupled, Stardust was now ready for landing. As we came into lower orbits we began to see scattered islands and archipelagos. Finally a large series of islands nearer the equator began to show up, through nothing that merited the word continent even as a joke.

  Space control
gave us an entry vector, took our starmail and uploaded payment to us. Everything was efficient and courteous and there was no sign of the hostility that Hsien’s commander had warned of. We lined up for a powered landing with their automatic landing system. Maauro and I rode down on the bridge, ready to intervene immediately if anything suspicious happened with the ALS. Nothing did.

  We came down slowly. I was able to look out at the spaceport both on the screens and through the ship’s cockpit.

  “Looks like the city is partially in the sea,” I observed. It was true. The main spaceport and capitol lay spread over dozens of small islands that were linked by a spidery collection of bridges and causeways.

  “It is similar in concept to Venice on Olivia’s homeworld,” Maauro said, “and Aria on Oceanus. All the land was built on and supplemented by artificial islands and recovered ground, as the freezing of the polar icecaps lowers the sea. They must live with the ocean in a way that few do. It is fortunate that the moon here is small and far away.”

  “Yeah, less in the way of tides and storms.”

  We came down on the Celbas, a large artificial island dotted with a dozen spaceships. Surface vessels and airships also used the island further to the deep ocean side. A huge causeway connected it with the city proper.

  “Engines off,” I called, “standby for customs and cargo.”

  “What shall I do?” Maauro asked.

  “Stay with me,” I said. “I doubt there will be any humans on the C&C crews, so they won’t notice anything about you. If they know already, then hiding behind goggles won’t help anyway.”

  We trooped down and opened the hatch, enjoying the smell of salt sea air. Mobile ramps and lifters rolled up to the ship, large vehicles all. Voit-Veru took up a lot of space. As they dismounted from the vehicles I looked them over. I’d never seen one in person before. They did bear some resemblance to Terran kangaroos, in the same sense that Jaelle did a cat, or I, a naked ape. They were as tall as men, but had legs made more for hopping then for walking. When they did hop, they held their tails out behind them. Around their middle were three thick ropy tentacles, the face held a muzzle and large mobile ears atop the heads. The eyes were curious, looking more like fuzzy patches of black then proper eyes. The effect was comical in some respects, but they were nuclear-armed and had developed stardrive on their own. Sixty years ago a military government under the Aporek had drawn them into a short war with the Confederacy after Fenaday and Rainhell discovered them backing a separatist movement on her homeworld of Olympia.