Treasure of the Silver Star
Copyright 2013
Michael Angel
ISBN: 9781301948963
Includes a sneak preview of the
action-packed post-apocalyptic
sci-fi tale by Michael Angel
Strangelets with a
Side of Grilled Spam:
Season One
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.
Thank you for downloading this eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.
Treasure of the
Silver Star
by
Michael Angel
Chapter One
Treasure hunters.
Captain Benjamin Drake restlessly paced the bridge of his ship. The fact that the cramped confines of the command room only allowed him five or six paces didn’t help his mood in the slightest. He shook his head in wry amusement as he surveyed the cluster of ships moving through the dazzling starscape. A dozen asteroids silently tumbled through the empty blackness on the edge of his viewscreen like half-glimpsed phantoms.
Drake kept his gaze fixed on the viewscreen. His eyes were dark circles that moved restlessly under a closely shaved crop of blond hair, and they missed nothing. Space at the edge of the solar system wasn’t exactly crowded, under normal conditions. But the Kuiper asteroid belt wrapped the entire solar system in a loose rocky sphere, and that sphere wasn’t evenly spaced. Shepherded by the gravitational pull of Neptune into the cosmic equivalent of sandbars, tightly clustered asteroids could snare unwary spaceships.
Out there, tossed up on the largest local asteroid like a metallic jellyfish on a stony beach, lay one of those victims.
A long-abandoned derelict.
Drake’s ship, the patrol vessel Ranger, had been assigned to guard a pair of salvage sloops that could slip between the densely packed asteroids to reach the battered derelict inside the Belt. One of the four-man vessels slid by the viewscreen. Even at a distance, the sensors could make out the bold letters, stenciled in a bright shade of neon orange, loudly advertising the ship’s purpose:
TALLYHO, INC.
SALVAGE OPERATIONS & TREASURE HUNTING
“Give me our status,” Drake ordered his navigation technician, or ‘navtech’. The captain’s deep voice echoed off the bare metal and plastic surfaces that made up the bridge panels and tactical screens. “Which of those salvage ships is approaching the target?”
“That’s the Margarita, Captain,” came the reply. “The second sloop, the Atocha, is holding position further out.”
“Interesting choice.”
“I’m guessing that Miss Taylor wants to use the second ship as a scanning platform.”
Drake considered. The first salvage sloop had slowed to a stop above the dark brown surface of the large asteroid.
“Which comm channel can I reach her on?”
“I was told that she’s on the Margarita. Channel one, then.”
Drake stopped his pacing and sat in his command chair. The well-worn piece of bridge furniture let out a creak as he leaned forward to press the correct button.
A male voice came on the line. “Bridge, Margarita.”
“This is Captain Drake of the Ranger. Patch me though to your boss.”
“She’s down at the transport tube with the Salvage Chief. I can put you through to one of the helmet visors, if you want.”
“That would be fine.”
“Just a moment.”
Damn well about time I found out if my crew’s presence here is even necessary, Drake thought.
Benjamin Drake had spent most of his life in the military. That said, he’d never been ordered to perform guard duty for a private salvage operation. It seemed to him that the head of Tallyho, Incorporated was a woman who had enough political influence to demand such security from the government and actually get it.
The main viewscreen blinked, and then displayed a shaky view down a long, flexible tube as it extended out into space like a wobbly drinking straw. The smashed remains of a ship were just visible beyond the end of the straw. Her bow lay crumpled against the dark rock below, and the surrounding debris field glittered like scraps of tinfoil in the salvage vessel’s beams. A set of green readouts on the side of the screen showed that the picture was coming from a camera mounted on a suit helmet. The lettering under the display read SALVAGE CHIEF WILLIAM GAMBLE.
Like most visor models, it notified the operator when a second source was using its channel.
“Heads up, Boss. I’ve got a ‘rider,” came a sun-browned, Texas drawl.
A reply came from a woman’s voice. “It’s probably from whoever’s running the show out there. Turn your head so that the camera points at me.”
The helmet camera obediently swung to the left. Now the view showed a woman who had her hands full manipulating the controls of the extended docking tube. Though the neon orange space suit she wore masked most of her body’s contours, Drake could tell that she was both tall and lean. Once she was satisfied with the tube controls, she turned to look at the camera. Her face, with its pert nose and high-boned freckled cheeks, gave her the appearance of a dewy teenager. But the sharp cunning in her hazel eyes would make a keen observer think twice.
“All right, who am I speaking to?” she asked.
“This is Captain Drake of the patrol vessel Ranger,” he replied. “Miss Taylor, I was calling to confirm if we were still needed.”
She cut him off with a diffident wave of her hand. “I don’t have time for formalities, Captain. First off, nobody on my operations calls me anything but ‘Tally’. Second, this is a major haul, and it’s going to be worth a great deal. I’d feel a lot more secure if you’d stay right where you are.”
And with that, Tally lit up the viewscreen with the ivory-toothed smile that had graced the news screens from Earth to the Outer Colonies.
“So you’ve identified the ship?” Drake asked, with considerably more enthusiasm. Now that he could justify his presence here, his interest in the project had been piqued. “If it’s old military, our records could find out who she is.”
“No, it’s not a Navy ship. I’ve got some hunches, but all I know for sure is her age.”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “If you can figure her age, then I’m impressed. From what I can see of the stern, this ship doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s because you’re used to flying around in ships that use antimatter drive. Those bulbous things you’re seeing smashed all over God’s creation down there are ion dispersion shields. How does that strike you?”
“Ion drive? That was given up decades ago.”
“One hundred and sixteen years ago, to be exact. Right after the First Interstellar War. I’m guessing that she was a blockade runner. You need to look at these crush marks so you see what I mean. Gamble, tilt your helmet down a bit so the Captain can have a look.”
The man did so, and Tally stepped into frame to point at a series of wave-like ripples in the side of the wrecked hull.
Drake squinted at the marks. “And those mean what, exactly?”
Drake considered the crushed expanse of the ship that lay splayed out along the asteroid like a giant had bashed it with a sledgehammer.
“Bad choice,” he muttered under his breath.
“According to my data,” Tally continued, “only two vessels of this type were constructed towards the end of that war. Those were the Bellevue Lady and the Flying Dutchman. I salvaged the Lady three years ago.”
“I gather that the Dutchman was carrying valuable cargo?”
“Let’s just say that I feel a lot safer with someone riding shotgun today.”
The viewscreen picture from Gamble’s visor trembled slightly as something jarred the tube’s control booth. A grey metal plate, pitted with age and speckled with dust, appeared at the end of the tube.
“We got contact!” Gamble reported.
“Readings still steady?” Tally asked.
“Looks like. I got my booster pack on. You get yours, and we’re good to go.”
The helmet camera swung to look at Tally again. She rested one sleek, booted foot on the lip of the Margarita’s hull, arching her neck to peer down the well created by the tube. The pose made her look as aerodynamic as the nose cone on a rocket speeder.
She paused to shrug on and fasten a booster pack to her back. The unit contained a propulsion jet as well as a network of pockets crammed with the tools of her trade. A metallic cylinder ran from the pack around her left arm and into the shining cone of a modified welding laser. The way she held the welder made her look like a pirate ready to plunder a victim’s spoils.
“It’s action time,” she declared.
With a pulse of power to their booster packs, Tally and Gamble shot across the tube to land at the derelict’s door. They were now outside the artificial gravity field of the Margarita, so they shifted their magnetic boots to stand on the side of the tube.
Gamble switched power to his welder as Tally pulled a flashlight-shaped scanner from her pack. The tip of the welder took only a second to glow a bright, hot blue.
Tally frowned as she looked at the readings. “I’m showing a strong magnetic flux. An electrical one, too.”
“How’s that?” Gamble powered down the welder in an instant. “Scanner didn’t show damn near anything like that before.”
“Confirming. Yep, the Atocha’s reading it too.”
“Atocha, this is Gamble,” the man called, annoyed. “What didn’t y’all tell us this before?”
A third voice came on line, sounding tinny through the double transmission. “Keep your shirt on, Chief. We only started reading it just now, as you two touched down.”
Tally considered. “Touch sensitive booby trap. It has to be, Bill.”
“If it is, it’s pretty advanced for the time.”
“It’s valuable cargo. I can just smell it. They’d be using their best technology to protect whatever they were carrying.”
Drake didn’t like where the conversation was heading. “Hold on, now. A touch-sensitive trap? How dangerous is this?”
“The last ditch defense of a courier vessel from this era was a contact field trap,” Tally said, as Gamble oriented his helmet camera back at her. “If the ship is disabled, it activates a circuit keyed into the magnetic fields of both its own hull and the ship touching it. The transport tube’s contact on the hull must’ve triggered it. Now that the connection’s been made, when I withdraw the transport tube or otherwise break the circuit...”
Drake sat up straight in his command chair. “Yes?”
Tally leaned towards the camera. She placed her cupped hands together, and then quickly moved them apart, while making the sound of an explosion. She leaned back on her heels. “That’s all she wrote, folks.”
“Great. Anything else we should know?” Drake asked resignedly.
Gamble replied this time. “With this kind of trap, the engine’s core is rigged to blow. But it’s pretty badly decayed. At worse, the Margarita would probably get only the tail end of any explosion. Of course, whatever’s sittin’ off to the side still gets vaped.”
‘Vaped’ as in ‘vaporized’, Drake thought sourly. Aloud, he said, “All right. I’ll send a shuttle to get you out.”
“Abandon the Dutchman?” Tally said, incredulous. “You’re joking! There’s treasure beyond that plate, and I mean to get at it.”
“Does it sound like I’m joking?” Drake put an edge into his voice. “Whoever pulled the strings to get my crew out here didn’t fill you in properly. Involving the Terran Home Defense fleet officially makes this a military operation. So it’s my call to pull you out.”
“Really?” Tally gave the camera a wry look. “What exactly are you going to do from your little patrol ship? Arrest me?”
“Look, there’s no need to fuss about this. We’ve seen this all before,” Gamble said, trying to defuse the situation. “The ship’s computer on the Margarita can mimic the field put out by the magnetic circuit. That way, we can trick the derelict into believing the field is whole when we separate.”
“That trick usually takes the computer a half-hour or more to pull off,” Tally added. “I don’t plan to sit around and wait in the meantime. So we’ll be exploring the ship’s interior.”
Drake didn’t like it, but he kept his ire in check. “If you believe that you can carry on safely, then there’s not much I can object to.”
“I’m glad you’re open to reason, Captain.” Tally made a ‘go-ahead’ gesture to her Salvage Chief.
Gamble turned on the power to his welder again. This time, he put the bright blue tip to the metal surface of the derelict and began to burn a thin red line through its hull. Drake leaned back in his chair and watched the progress as Gamble focused on his task. In a few minutes the cut was complete. Tally used a claw-shaped coupler to pull the plate from its resting place and the opening in the ship loomed before them.
Tally took a step inside, making sure to keep her suit away from the glowing hot edges of the hull cut. Her suit lights winked on, shining a pair of beams from each side of her helmet. Gamble’s did the same as he followed a step or two behind Tally, and the view from his helmet camera resolved into a dim, cavernous room rimmed with damaged catwalks.
“Looks like we’ve cut our way into the main cargo bay,” Tally noted. “Let’s shed some more light on this scene. Transfer Captain Drake’s camera channel to the portable lamp set. It’s less likely to give him motion sickness as we explore this ship.”
Gamble retreated back to the docking tube. In a minute, he’d brought in the equipment. He kicked shards of debris away from a level section of floor, unfolded a broad-footed metal tripod, and switched it on. A blink of static, and Drake’s display shifted to the view from the light’s camera mount.
This time, the entire chamber was illuminated in crystalline clarity.
The rectangular bay turned out to be larger than expected; Drake figured that it was large enough to hold a pair of cargo shuttles. The metal catwalks that ran the length of two walls had bent or snapped in several places from the violence of the crash. Piles of debris full of jagged metal shards and tangles of electronic cabling covered the floor.
At the far end of the room lay a set of octagonal containers which had survived the impact unscathed. Their jet-black cases gleamed in the salvage crew’s lights. The broadcast got quiet enough to hear the muted breaths of the two explorers on board the Dutchman. Drake found to his surprise that his fingers had dug into the arm on his command chair. He reminded himself to relax.
“How’s our structural stability looking?” Tally asked. “I don’t want to go clambering over that mess if this room’s ready to collapse.”
The salvage chief tapped a readout mounted on the wrist of his suit. “Decent. Nothing’s going to rock n’ roll with us in here, at least.”
“Good.”
“That’
s odd,” Gamble said, after a moment.
“I only want to deal with ‘odd’ if I have to. What’s the news?”
“Looks like the metal makin’ up the room shifts mid-way through—” Gamble rapped the readout with a knuckle. “I probably need to get this thing looked at when we get home.”
Tally nodded. “Well, if anything changes, sing out. In the meantime, let’s go check out those black containers. See if today’s going to be Christmas or April Fool’s Day.”
Chapter Two
It took a few minutes for Tally and Gamble to pick their way through the debris strewn about the room. The damage to the Dutchman’s hull got much worse as they approached the far wall. The entire chamber had been deformed and blackened, as if from intense heat. Twisted metal beams lay askew, and the debris lay in heaps large enough to obscure the walls.
Tally came up to the first of the strange obsidian cases. The container came up to her waist, and it was large enough so that she’d have problems putting her arms around it. She ran a hand over a thin raised lip that marked the edge of a secured lid, stopping only when she touched a blackened smear of half-obscured lines.
The computerized brain in the room light’s camera mount zoomed in as best it could, but it was too far for Captain Drake to make out anything further.
“Looks like lettering,” Gamble observed.
Tally nodded in agreement and rubbed at the smear. The lines resolved themselves into a numbered keypad set flush against the case’s surface.
“Well, how about that,” Tally observed. “An old fashioned keypad lock.”
She took a moment to pull a new hand-held device from her pack, one tipped with a gnarled silver knot. A press of a button, and the tip unfolded into hair-thin metallic tendrils. The tendrils worked their way into the crevices between the keypad’s numbers, burrowing their way through the accumulated dust and grime. With a faintly audible click, the case’s lid slipped back an inch before it jammed.
Treasure of the Silver Star Page 1
