The Wolf Itself (The Kestrel Chronicles Book 1)

by mikel evins

  “Canines have extraordinarily sensitive hearing,” I offered.

  “I guess so,” said the Captain. “So what is it?”

  The image of Saturn and its moons disappeared, replaced by a wireframe diagram of a spacecraft floating among the stars. It was obviously a torch, a long, narrow ship with oversized tanks at the back and the unmistakeable rings of a magnetic-confinement jet.

  Chief Verge said, “The sound we are hearing is a pitch-shifted and greatly amplified beacon carrier from a Strom Mark VI Accipiter-class scout ship.”

  “A Mark VI?” the Captain said. “That’s an old ship. My father used to have one of those in his collection.”

  “Indeed it is, Sir,” said the Chief. “This particular ship was reported missing over a hundred years ago, standard.”

  “A hundred years! And there’s nothing more recent reported on it?”

  “No, Sir.”

  “What about mission logs?”

  “Most of them are confidential, Captain. The ones we can read indicate that the ship left on a survey mission and never returned. Nothing about this vessel is logged afterward.”

  The Captain eased slowly back in the command chair, his eyes hooded. His elbows were propped on the arms of the chair. His hands were wrapped around the coffee cup, holding it above his lap. Steam still rose from it.

  “Well,” he said, tapping his cup gently with one index finger. “Well, well.”

  “What?” said Probationer Mai. She sounded worried. She was at her station as ordered, but was standing with her paws hooked over the rail separating the inner from the outer ring, head cocked, ears up, tail wagging stiffly.

  The Chief said, “Under interplanetary commercial law, a lost ship, if abandoned by its crew, becomes salvageable after a certain length of time. Anyone who discovers it may lay claim to it.”

  “That means you, Mai,” said the Captain. “You discovered it. You can claim it.”

  He sipped his coffee and watched his newest crew member closely.

  “Really?” said Mai. “That’s good, right?”

  “It’s very good,” said the Captain.

  “How long does it have to be lost?” said Mai.

  “A lot less than a hundred years,” said the Captain.

  “And such a wreck belongs to the discoverer?” I said.

  “Actually,” said Chief Verge, “As a Probationary Spacer for hire, Mai implicitly assigns her salvage rights to the shipowner to whom she is contracted. In this case, that would be Rayleigh Shipping, whose principal owner is Captain Rayleigh.”

  The Captain said, “I sure am glad that I signed you up, Mai.”

  The probationer’s tail wagged vigorously.

  “However,” the Chief continued, “the law provides for expanded rights for the discoverer, even in cases of work for hire. Even if Rayleigh Shipping didn’t have a generous bonus policy, the probationer would stand to receive a substantial payout from the proceeds of this find.”

  I said, “I gather the derelict is likely to be valuable.”

  “Yep,” the Captain said. “Mai, your first bonus could be very good.”

  Her tail wagged vigorously again. She grinned open-mouthed.

  “How do we know how valuable it is?” I said.

  Chief Verge said, “Even if it were a bare, stripped hulk, a Strom VI of this vintage would bring a small fortune on the museum and collector market. Given the state of the records about this find, it’s unlikely it will be a bare, stripped hulk.”

  “So you’re saying it will be extremely valuable?”

  “Correction,” the Captain said. “Everyone’s bonus could be very good this time.”

  “The beacon identifies this craft as the lost scientific survey vesselAutolycus,” said the Chief. “Its mission description and published flight logs are uncharacteristically vague, which is probably why it remained lost for so long.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What?” Mai said, cocking her head at me.

  “Its mission description is vague? Its flight logs are missing? That sounds familiar. It sounds like a spy ship, most likely gathering signal intelligence for a government agency.”

  Captain Rayleigh’s smile disappeared. He took a long sip of his coffee, frowning thoughtfully.

  “We don’t know that for certain,” the chief said.

  I said, “No, not forcertain.”

  “Autolycus,” said Captain Rayleigh. “That’s an odd name.”

  “It is in the ancient Greek language,” I said. “It means ‘the wolf itself.’ It is the name of a semi-divine mythic figure who could turn himself invisible at will.”

  “No,” said the Captain with a grimace, “we don’t know forcertain that it’s a spy ship.”

  “What if it is a spy ship?” said Mai, tipping her head sideways. “What does that mean?”

  “Well,” the captain said, “About that big bonus I was mentioning…”

  Chief Verge said, “If the ship belongs to some military or intelligence agency of the League then salvage rights may be superseded. The League may assert ownership under any of several state secrets acts. The validity of such assertions of rights is uncertain under interplanetary law, but that is unlikely to matter here, where the only notable jurisdiction is the League’s.”

  “And the Titans,” the Captain muttered.

  “They won’t let us claim it?” Mai said.

  “Maybe not,” said the Captain.

  I said, “How do we…that is, how does the company go about staking a salvage claim?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” said the Captain, scratching at the back of his neck with one hand. “It’s a little tricky. In theory, we could stake a provisional claim with the data we already have. The trouble is, that would make the existence of the hulk public. Once its position is known, anybody can come along and start carving off chunks.”

  “Wouldn’t that be illegal?” I said. “I mean if you had already staked a legal claim…”

  “Sure,” said the Captain. “What’s your point?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We could guard it,” Mai said.

  “We cannot,” said the chief.

  “Why not?” Mai said.

  “Orbital mechanics,” sighed the Captain. “We’re on course to Arnessen Station, see? We’ve already turned over and we’re decelerating. We’re gonna fly right past this hulk, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Can’t we fly to the wrecked ship instead of Arnessen?” said Mai, tipping her head.

  “No,” said the chief. “On our current trajectory it will take most of our engine capacity to match velocity with Arnessen. We could burn through fuel and propellant more aggressively and decelerate a little more quickly, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough to match us to the hulk. We wouldn’t be able to rendezvous with it. The best we could do is fly on past it and stop short of Arnessen. We could then burn for the hulk, but it would take almost the same amount of time as if we had just gone on and made our delivery.”

  “Not to mention,” the Captain interjected, “that we would be breaching our delivery contract.”

  “In return for a small fortune,” I said.

  “Or a large one,” said the Captain, “But one that we would collect no more quickly, and that we might not be able to collect at all.”

  The Chief said, “The only sensible thing for us to do is to go ahead and get to Arnessen, make our delivery, and then come back.”

  I said, “So it could be that some other ship has already seen the hulk and is doing exactly what you describe?”

  The Captain scowled. “Yes.”

  “It is unlikely, however,” said the Chief.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because space is very big,” said the Chief. “The odds are astronomical that we’re the only crew that has seen this derelict. Also, no provisional claim has been registered. If it had, it would be in the Fabric for us to find.”

  “Of course,” said the Captai
n, “astronomical odds have never kept fortune from crapping all over us before.”

  The Chief was silent for a moment, then said, speaking slowly and deliberately, “It is overwhelmingly likely that this find is an extremely valuable relic, that no one will stake a claim that supersedes right of salvage, and that we are the only people who know it’s here. In short, Doctor, it is highly likely that we’re all rich.”

  “Probably,” said the Captain.

  “What about the government agencies?” I said.

  The Chief said, “Precedent suggests that if the Chair impounds the craft, it will offer us compensation that is at least an appreciable fraction of the ship’s market value. It will be a smaller windfall, but it will still be a windfall.”

  “What if we just sent a few people to guard it?” said Mai.

  “What?” said the Captain.

  “You said we can’t fly to the wreck because we can’t make enough thrust, right?”

  “Y-e-e-e-s…?”

  “But if you send less mass, you can accelerate it more, right? Can we just send a few people to guard it? Or did I misunderstand my training?”

  Captain Rayleigh looked at Chief Verge.

  The Chief said, “I’ll run the calculations.”

  2.

  Jaemon Rayleigh and I put the sled together inKestrel’sNumber Four cargo bay. It was a large space with metallized ceramic walls discolored by age, but, like everything else onKestrel, clean and working perfectly. The walls were tan and lined with mount points. Bright overhead lights made them seem warm and lived-in. Storage lockers were bolted along one bulkhead. The huge exterior access lock was sealed by gasherd membranes and a pair of interlocking covers. Two crew hatches opened on the bay from either end.

  I liked working with Jaemon. I had worked with him in the Guard. The day we met was the first day of my second tour. I had applied for a transfer from operational medicine to forensic medicine, hoping to expand my working experience, and my first day on the job was also his. Jaemon was a military policemen who had taken a post on the Consular Estate on Mars in return for a promotion to Special Investigator. We hit it off immediately.

  Our friendship grew over the years. Later, when Jaemon’s father died unexpectedly and he left the Guard to return home, I had followed.

  We assembled the sled facing the exterior bay doors. It was a black fullerene frame on magnetic runners, about five meters long and three meters wide. The frame elements were grabby. Their ends tried to clamp themselves to whatever they touched, so there was some coaxing involved in getting the segments arranged the way we wanted. We would move the parts together and the segments would try to grab each other. We would tap them to discourage the grabbing until we had things positioned just so, and then allow them to settle.

  Once fixed, the clamps were as sound as welds.

  “You’re sure this is going to work?” I said.

  Jaemon Rayleigh straightened up. He was larger than his brother—taller, heavier, more muscular. There was a strong resemblance, but where Esgar’s rugged, bony face emphasized his mournful demeanor, Jaemon’s looked cheerful, even goofy. Like Esgar’s, his eyes were large and blue and watery, with lines at the edges that crinkled when he smiled, which was often. His chin was big and square, and he had a big mouth with big teeth.

  “Verge says it’ll work. I trust her. I trustKestrel.”

  “Because if it goes wrong, I’m the one who has to put us all back together again.”

  “Relax, Lev,” he said, grinning and slapping me on the shoulder. His playful cuff made my carapace ring like a bell. “You worry too much.”

  “I hate it when you say that,” I said.

  He grinned at me.

  The day we first met, Jaemon had talked about making a career with the Guard. That ended when he got word of his father’s death. The Guard granted him a compassionate discharge and he was gone all too soon, but not before inviting me to come to Callisto. When my option came up a few weeks later later, I decided to take him up on it, so I mustered out and headed to Port Rayleigh.

  The next thing I knew, I wasKestrel’s medical officer.

  “Come on,” he said. “When have I ever let you down?”

  I cocked a camera at him.

  “Rescuing me from a catastrophe isn’t the same thing as preventing it.”

  “It’s been just as good, so far.”

  “I think we may have different standards of ‘good,’” I said.

  He grinned. “Thank goodness for diversity.”

  Kestrel had computed a trajectory for our expedition. She said she could achieve it by accelerating the sled using her magnetics. In effect, she would turn her own superstructure into a huge unconfined rail gun. She gave the computations to Chief Verge to check, and the Chief said they worked out. Then they gave them to me.

  The G-stresses were tolerable for biologicals. Barely.

  I could scarcely believe what they were proposing to do. I told them that I absolutely would not sign off on their insane plan unless they assigned a medical tech to the team.

  Me and my big mouth. Esgar and Jaemon had looked at each other. Then Esgar had turned to me and said, “We can do that.”

  I took me almost ten seconds to remember I was the only qualified tech aboard Kestrel. Like I said, I was still adjusting to life in the civilian sector.

  I checked over the support mesh of the acceleration couches. They looked good, within computed tolerances. I was still uneasy. The computations didn’t leave a lot of margin for error.

  “Tell me you’re commanding,” I said.

  Jaemon was shuffling around the corners of the sled, double-checking the attachment points.

  “I’m commanding,” he said. “Unless Esgar changes his mind for some reason.”

  “Good.”

  He stopped and looked up at me.

  “Why?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “I feel better about dangerous assignments with you commanding,” I said.

  He grinned again.

  “Don’t get superstitious on me, Lev.”

  I thought it over.

  “You’re joking, right?” I said.

  “Of course I’m joking. You’re such a mech sometimes. Help me get the tent, will you?”

  We went over to the storage lockers and he unlocked one of them. He tumbled a big black bundle out of it, about the size and shape of two double mattresses stacked.

  “How does this work?” I said.

  “When we trigger it, it’ll expand itself into a ball, double-walled. It pumps a bunch of water into the space between its walls and then it’s a habitat. Look, see that? It’s the edge of a soft airlock.”

  I eyed it dubiously.

  “This thing really works?”

  “Sure. Esgar and I used to use them all the time.”

  “For what?”

  He grinned and put his hands on his hips.

  “Mostly for hiding from Dad.”

  When he mentioned his father his grin faded a little. I had never met Milos Rayleigh, but I had certainly heard of him. He had been something of a celebrity before he flew his yacht into Jupiter. It was a shock, even to people who hadn’t known him personally.

  It was impossible for me to really know how Jaemon felt about it. We had no comparable experience. Emotion networks don’t match biological limbic systems exactly. Anyway, Mechs of my type didn’t really have families as such. The closest thing I had to a parent was a fab in the asteroid belt, or perhaps the system designers who had created my model line. My relationship to them was tenuous.

  I had a thorough grounding in hominid psychology, though, and I understood intellectually that the loss must be very difficult for him. I understood, too, that deflecting discussion of his loss was part of his personal strategy for coping with it. I tried to respect that. He was my best friend, after all.

  I said, “Isn’t this thing a little claustrophobic?”

  He looked askance at me.

  �
�Wait ’til you see how big it gets. Anyway, it’s viewtex. We can tell it to play a landscape or something if you get to feeling closed-in.”

  I said, “And we’ll shelter in the tent while we survey this derelict?”

  His bright expression returned. “Yep.”

  “You’re confident that Kestrel will be able to find us when she returns?”

  “Sure. Heck, she’ll know exactly where we are. This gear has half a dozen transponders built into it, and its own family of Fabric nodes.”

  I took a corner of the tent and dragged it into place on the sled’s frame.

  “How do we fasten it down?”

  Jaemon said, “Just a second. The fabric knows how to seal itself down, but we need to pack the supplies in around it. See these slots? Then we’ll cover the whole thing and seal it all down tight.”

  I looked at the big lump of black cloth lying half across the spindly frame and shook my head.

  I said, “I can’t believe I’m about to let myself be launched into interplanetary space by a railgun with nothing but a big canvas bag to protect me.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Jaemon said. He grinned at me.

  3.

  Launching fromKestrel was insanity.

  As we approached the rendezvous, all four survey-crew members strapped into our acceleration couches on the sled. Jaemon took the front left corner and Able Spacer Angier took the back right.

  Angier was a beefy man almost as tall as Jaemon and thicker through the body. He had a thick face, too, with a ruddy complexion and green eyes. He always seemed vaguely angry about something.

  I took the front right couch. Mai was in the rear left.

  The biologicals all wore deep-space gear. They had skin-tight pressure-mesh suits with automatic membranes. The mesh was porous, using mechanical elasticity to maintain internal body pressure, and an adaptive membrane for control of oxygen, moisture, and temperature levels. They had form-fitting pressure tanks arranged on limbs and torso like armor. They were good cellular tanks, self-sealing, with thousands of tiny internal chambers for safety. Each of us had a full set of self-balancing gas jets for maneuvering. Our safety helmets were open-faced, with active membrane shields.

  Everything was in the red and gold and blue and white of Rayleigh Shipping. They were the same as the colors of the Guard. I almost felt like I was back on Mars.