Treasure of the Silver Star

by Michael Angel

  “Captain, something’s wrong! This doesn’t feel right.”

  “It feels very, very right,” Sindal gloated, as the Ranger grew larger and larger on the screen. “You’ve got nowhere to run anymore, Drake.”

  The Ranger’s torpedoes were all but invisible as they squirted out of the aft launcher one by one, like ripe watermelon seeds. The patrol ship put on a burst of speed to get away, and the weapons immediately armed themselves.

  The warheads hung together in a tight box formation. Weightless, programmed not to accelerate, and not to give away their presence by igniting their engines. They didn’t have long to wait. The Vigilant burned through their section of space in hot pursuit.

  On the Vigilant’s bridge, the viewscreen shorted out as the multiple explosions rattled the destroyer. Sindal was thrown from her seat as the bridge shook around her. Electrical fires raged over ravaged consoles. Shouts and screams from the bridge crew were drowned out by the hoot of alarms and the hissing gush of fire retardant foam.

  “Minefield!” the navtech gasped. “They put a field of mines in our path!”

  “Impossible!” Sindal raged. “They can’t do that!”

  Her navigational systems wrecked, the Vigilant careened out of control. She disappeared in the mist of gas and dust far away from the now-open gate.

  “You know,” Tally remarked, “That wasn’t very sporting at all.”

  “You may be right.” Drake grinned at her. “But it felt pretty damned good, didn’t it?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Predatory cats, when confined in a space too small for their needs, will often pace in a defined pattern, their menace as tightly coiled as a wound watch spring. Similarly, Implacable made her presence known in Northumbrian space by cruising in lazy orbits around its spacedock. Deep inside, both the Vigilant and the Lightning were being repaired by dock workers who looked anxiously over their shoulders as they completed their welding. The soldiers on board these ships did not look like much. Most of their uniforms and weapons were at least ten years out of date, and what was new looked worn. But they held themselves with the tension of a dam that was about to burst. The dock workers felt without a doubt that it was in their best interest to get these people out of their personal space as quickly as possible.

  Commander Ruger paced up and down within the small confines of Jayden Al Ramòs’ office. To his credit, the man hadn’t looked the least bit nervous when a fully-armed cruiser had appeared through the Chandrakasar gate, gun ports open and targeting his station with weapons which could smash it like a glass ball.

  He looked nervous now.

  “Let’s try this again,” Ruger began patiently. “When did the Ranger come in, how was she serviced, and when did she leave?”

  “I’m telling you, there was no such ship here,” Jayden insisted. His eyes went in silent appeal to the man who had accompanied Ruger to his office.

  “It is possible that Drake simply docked with a large freighter, made repairs there,” Captain Cavendish reasoned. “There would be no record of something like that.”

  “Interesting idea.” Ruger turned to Jayden once more, a gunmetal cold smile creeping across his face. “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s very possible,” Jayden agreed fervently.

  “Possible, yes. But is that really what happened?”

  Ruger strolled in front of the desk again. His eyes went flat as he spotted the gleam of gold glinting from a strand that hung around the man’s neck. Then Ruger exploded into motion. With one hand, he grasped the man by the throat and picked him up, dragging him across the desk with the flex of one mighty bicep. Held him up, face to face. Jayden was too terrified to do anything but scrabble at the iron grip holding him by the collar. “But I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  “What are you doing?” Cavendish cried.

  “Look closely at the coin hanging around his neck, Cavendish,” Ruger growled. “It’s a Spanish doubloon. No doubt from the same haul Tally brought back from the Kuiper Belt.”

  With a contemptuous shove, Ruger tossed Jayden back into his seat.

  “Here…” Jayden pulled the coin strap over his head, and tossed the chain to Ruger. “If it means so much to you, take it. She said that she was going to bring back more of them.”

  Ruger caught the chain in midair. “See, Cavendish? Our friend is reasonable after all. Reasonable, but stupid. I don’t need this gold trinket.”

  Cavendish’s forehead broke out with sweat. Ruger’s going to go too far, he thought worriedly. He’s finally losing it.

  “My destiny was to be a great man, and it was derailed,” Ruger proclaimed. “Let me tell you something, Jayden. Right now, my friend Cavendish here thinks that I’m doing all of this just to get my career back on track. But that was before I had to go back and pick up one of my loyal captains. He’d been left circling this dead asteroid base, so I decided to have it checked out while I had him rescued.”

  “Fascinating story,” Jayden said.

  “Ah, but it gets better. I had the records of that base decoded, and it told me about a space temporal engine, a machine which is powerful enough to change history itself.”

  “Commander,” warned Cavendish.

  “Please, bear with me,” Ruger held up a finger. “But I’ve been doing some thinking. Why should I be content with turning over something as powerful as the Sargasso engine just to get my career as a line officer back, when I could keep it and run things for myself? There’s some leverage, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Commander Ruger! We’ve sworn to eliminate anyone with knowledge of the engine, and you’re telling it all—”

  “You’re right, aren’t you,” said Ruger, shaking his head.

  The commander pulled a weapon from his jacket. Jayden had no time to protest. With a small report, the gun bucked in Ruger’s hand and drilled a neat hole in Jayden’s forehead. The man’s chair spun in a lazy circle to the left, bumping the desk and tilting Jayden’s lifeless body at a grotesque angle.

  “You...how...” gasped Cavendish.

  “Projectile gun,” Ruger explained. “The type perfected in the twenty first century, complete with a silencer. You have to use them when you’re on board a spacedock. With all the fuel and flammables around, the spacedock monitors would pick up anything as dangerous as the flash of a blast gun.”

  Cavendish’s eyes bulged. He struggled to keep his voice steady. “You’re completely mad. The Council was stupid to trust you.”

  Ruger swung around and shot Cavendish in the throat. The man’s hands flew up in reflex to the wound. His eyes widened in horror as jets of his own blood spurted through his fingers. Cavendish groped for his gun, but his consciousness was already starting to ebb. The blackness began to rush in on all sides. Cavendish’s hand fumbled at his holster, but his fingers, slick with blood, could not get a grip on anything.

  “You were the stupid one, Cavendish,” Ruger said mockingly. “Stupid enough to think I’d let one of the Council’s pets report in on me.”

  He watched the Captain’s face darken, then go still. He stood, pulled on a glove, and impatiently moved Jayden’s body out of the way of the office console. He found the appropriate switch, and the faces of Sindal and Mackall filled the screen, their expressions completely impassive as they took in the scene.

  “Well?” asked Ruger.

  “We found a repair request for a plasma coil,” Sindal reported. “It’s a type that only a ship like Drake’s could use. That coil and the rest of the request were hidden under the service record of a fictitious sloop. Judging from the amount of fuel they were able to load on, there’s only four or five places Drake could make it to before he has to tank up again.”

  “Good work. I’m coming down to divide up the search areas.” Ruger indicated the mess surrounding him. “We should file this incident in the station report. Station manager Ramòs grew hostile at our questioning and pulled out a gun. Captain Cavendish was killed in the process of st
opping him.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Oh, and Mackall,” said Ruger, who bent down over Cavendish’s body and ripped the rank insignia from the man’s shoulder board, “I have some good news. You’re going to get to be a captain again.”

  * * *

  Naq Al Sharif burned like the flame of an alien candle in the silence of space. A soundless crack of white, and the Ranger emerged from nullspace high above the star’s only planet. The small ship circled the greenish globe as the people inside probed and scanned the planet’s surface.

  “Would you hold this down for me, captain?” Tally asked, as she struggled with the large, ungainly printout.

  “Here, let’s do this the easy way,” Drake replied.

  The Captain reached into a drawer. He pulled out a pair of hand-held scanners, a flashlight, and a blaster cartridge. He slid the scanners across to her. They placed one of the objects on each corner of the paper, which was big enough to cover his cabin table.

  It was a map of the planet below, printed out in rich greens and browns, crisscrossed with a hash of blue marks indicating longitude, latitude, topographical features, and energy patterns.

  “We’re in luck,” Tally said. “My archeological mapping program is the perfect tool for what we need.”

  “What have you found?”

  “Ah, but give me a moment to savor this. Allow me to lead up to the grand finale.” He gave her a look.

  “C’mon,” she said, “it’s usually the only chance I get to impress people.”

  “Oh, then by all means, go right ahead.”

  “Normally, you can find terrestrial ruins by programming a terrain scanner to search out man-made patterns. Geometric shapes like square building foundations or circular crop fields stand out like patches on a quilt. But I set mine to the highest level of detail, which is designed to pick out any abnormalities over ten meters in diameter.”

  “Any luck?”

  “None. So I started getting concerned. But then Ferra and I went through the computer records from the Kuiper Belt station again. There was a specific mention of ‘regular shipments’ of material and provisions. If you’re going to land ships planetside without a spaceport, you’re going to leave a big scorch mark on the flora.”

  “Won’t that just grow back over time?”

  “True. So I also looked for sediment fans kicked up by engine exhaust. Archeologists have our own favorite technical term for that. It’s called looking for ‘smear marks’. I set the computer to search for that, and presto, here’s our location.”

  She indicated a set of marks just south of the planet’s equator, on a part of the globe crinkled like the folds of a blanket. A narrow stripe of blue flowed down one of the rills, leading into a small azure sea far to the southeast.

  “Nice work,” Drake acknowledged. “But I don’t see anything else on this map. Where would the archeological dig be, if you can’t find any evidence of former structures?”

  Tally reached across the table and switched on the cabin’s viewscreen. With the tap of a sequence of keys, she navigated to the pictures she wanted to show.

  “I had your navtech calibrate the sensors so that we could see details down to a couple of feet across. That’s nowhere near the level of detail you could get with a satellite these days, but it’s pretty good for a jury-rigged system. Take a look at these pictures.”

  Drake chewed a lip in thought as Tally scrolled through the photos. Near the ‘smear’ marks were a network of regularly shaped holes, ranging in size from one to two meters. Some looked like they were simply holes punched in the ground. But others were stoppered with a cork made of a dark, glassy substance.

  “I’m assuming that there’s a structure under there?” he said softly.

  “That’s a given. This is no natural structure. Whichever species made this place, they liked to build underground.”

  Drake felt a chill, and he rubbed his arms, trying to shake loose the feeling.

  “All right, I’ve given you the good news,” Tally said. “Now, would you like to hear the bad news?”

  “Like I have a choice?”

  “Well, no. But I’m trying to be more polite from now on.”

  “Keep trying,” Drake grunted. “What’s the bad news?”

  “I’ve enlarged this whole area to improve the mapping. What this blown up version of the terrain doesn’t show you is how tight the network of canyons are down there. The mountains to the north create a serious slipstream. The high winds could smash our ship into the side of any of these gorges. And as luck would have it, the site is down at the very end of the tightest, most twisty of all of the rills right there. I don’t think that even Sebastiàn could bring us down there in one piece.”

  “To be this close, and you’re telling me we can’t even land down there....” He shook his head. “There has to be a way. You wouldn’t be able to find smear marks if there weren’t any landings.”

  “Well, if we had the time to hang out here for six months, observing the weather patterns, and if we were flying around in a fully tricked-out supply shuttle instead of a patrol ship, then I’d say we could do it. But we’re not, so that’s out of the question. That means we’re going to have to hike in overland.”

  Drake sat down, the wind knocked out of him. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “I thought you spacer types liked exploration.”

  “Exploration, yeah, but only in space. Outer space has only one thing trying to kill you: the vacuum.”

  Tally sniffed. “That’s funny. As far as I’m concerned, being on board a spaceship is like doing jail time, with the added possibility of suffocation.”

  Drake looked at her curiously. “You’ve been spending time with Kincaid, haven’t you?”

  “Here’s what I think our best option is,” she continued, indicating the deep blue of the sea. “We bring the ship in here, at the base of all those gorges. Where this stream empties out into this little sea. If Ruger’s friends come looking for us, they won’t be able to spot the ship if she’s hiding in this cove. Meanwhile, we send an expedition on foot up the length of this gorge. We’ll take explosives with us to dismantle the engine, if and when we find it.”

  “How long to get in and out?”

  “Barring unforeseen events or injuries, a full day to get in. Another to get back.”

  “Two whole days…that’s a long time to be planet-bound with no quick escape route. I don’t want to be on the ground if Ruger shows up. He could field over eighty troops from the Implacable and three armed shuttle transports. More than enough to wipe us out down there.”

  “I agree, it’s a risk. But I don’t see much choice.”

  Drake struggled with the idea. “Do we have any idea what’s down there? Does this planet even have a name?”

  “Yes, and yes. The official name for this place is Alpha dash three oh oh seven, doubleyou five four nine. According to the archeological records, the scientists here tossed the numbers out and just called the place Sargasso, after the project.”

  “Nice. Unimaginative, but nice.”

  “Sargasso’s point eighty-eight gee, with a nineteen hour day, and the atmosphere is breathable. Climate is variable, from boreal forest at the poles to sub and near tropical in the area where we’re going. As far as animals…there’s not much stuff on land that’s more advanced than an earthworm.”

  “That’s encouraging.” Drake let out a sigh. “You’re the experienced one at foot-slogging through alien jungles. Care to help me lead this little jaunt?”

  She grinned at him. “Benjamin, I thought you’d never ask.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Ranger settled into the shallow water at the edge of the little blue sea, kicking up a mass of foam as it touched down. A gangplank extended from the ship to the sandy beach. Tally stepped outside, smelled the brine-soaked air, and motioned to the others to follow her. Drake, Sebastiàn, Ferra, and Kincaid followed, each lugging a heavy pack on their backs.
They looked at the heavy trees on the shoreline with distinct unease.

  The forest came up to the edge of the sea, and it looked as if it had stood, inviolate, for a million years. Perhaps it had. Drake couldn’t help but think of some of the places he’d lived as a kid. The large, overhanging trees made the place look a lot like southern Tennessee.

  But there were subtle differences. The trees were covered in strange gray scales and the leaves were striped with rhubarb red veins. Something resembling Spanish moss hung from the high branches like matted beards, and he kept watching it to make sure it wasn’t moving.

  Ferra took a few cautious steps from the hard-packed sand at the shoreline and onto the green, loamy ground cover. No insects buzzed through the air, no birds cried out to break the silence. The ground was carpeted with the debris of the hanging moss, and it felt like she was walking on slabs of soft foam. She mentioned how strange this felt to the medtech.

  Kincaid considered. “Well, if the organic chemistry of the life forms down here really is so different, the native toxins and poisons won’t work on us.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “True, but if there’s a toxin that does work on you, there’s practically no chance that I’ll be able to cure it before you’re dead.”

  Ferra threw up her hands and walked away.

  “Captain, Ensign Campbell has the conn,” Sebastiàn said. “But I’ve put a retrieval routine into place on the ship’s computer. If we contact the Ranger, it’ll do its best to get to within five hundred yards of our location.”

  “I just hope we don’t need to do that,” Drake replied.

  The Lieutenant nodded in agreement. “Beyond this shoreline, the winds really kick up. Better than an even chance that we’d lose the Ranger.”

  Sebastiàn was about to say more, when a sudden movement next to his boots made him take a small jump back. A cluster of wormlike things had slithered up onto the beach, seeking his flesh with an eyeless tenacity.

  “Don’t mind them,” Doc Kincaid advised. “That’s the local variant of our blood-sucking friend, the leech. They’re not poisonous, and they don’t eat much.”