Terror on the Trailblazer

by John Thornton

  “Oh, yes. Sling launch forces were immense on the scout. Try that in a shuttle it would shatter into subatomic particles. Not to mention the effects on the unfortunate occupants who were inside such a foolhardy attempt,” Ken affirmed. “The sophisticated protection we had in that scout is far superior to even what this enhanced shuttle offers. Thanks for steering us away from the radiation.”

  “Of course.”

  Ken sighed out, “I also see the dampening field is putting out something labeled, ‘Negator of Turret Control’ shall I ask Johannes about that?”

  “No. He would just babble an apology, yet again. Just so long as it keeps us safe, I do not need all the engineering details,” Janae replied, and was a bit surprised at her trust of the Christianopolis’ strangers and what they had given. “They did not give detailed description the habitat beneath us—sorry not really the correct word, no orientation out her in space so much—but you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I see you are heading for that other habitat at the other end,” Ken replied. “If I am understanding this right, and have decoded their old system of numbering, it looks like habitats one through four are at the bow—which includes Ida and the Isle of Pines, and habitats five through eight are at the stern—and one of those is Christianopolis.”

  “I thought that too. And our destination was originally called, Habitat Three, but is now Ida?” Janae wondered aloud. “The history sounds like they changed names from the numerical system to these odd sounding designations. Seems rather primitive to me.”

  “Right, things should be named numerically, like Dome 17,” Ken agreed. “I would not want to have grown up in some dome called Vermeer or something like that.”

  “I used to love Dome 17,” Janae said quietly, “until I learned how the Committee was running things.” Again, as happened numerous times each day, Constance’s face came to Janae’s mind. “Then everything changed.”

  “Indeed, that is so true. I suppose, when the Trailblazer hit that micro-singularity, it changed everything as well. So, the new names were adopted by the survivors. I see we are passing that habitat, and there looks to be a safe pathway in that wide arc toward Ida.”

  Looking out the viewport, the Trailblazer was just vast, bluish-gray color mechanical hulls, with the black, star-sprinkled sky behind, but the display was different. The display had the overlay of tan colors showing the areas of radiation, as well as the safe areas, and while Janae did trust some of the technology from Christianopolis, she was not taking unnecessary risks, and maneuvered around the bands of radiation, even though she had the shuttle, her spacesuit, and her RAM suit between her and those deadly radioactive areas.

  Soon, she had brought the shuttle close to the first of the potential targets.

  “I see no differences from outside here,” Janae said. “No extra transmissions, and no landing lights or anything like that.”

  “I wonder if Diego can observe us like he did when we were in the scout? I want to ask Johannes about that, okay by you?”

  “Sure,” Janae replied.

  “Johannes? Can the people in Ida detect us?”

  “I am here,” Johannes replied. “I have no real idea what devices those people in Ida are using. I cannot really make a simulation without information and facts. If they do actually fly out there, then they must have some way to map the septic radiation, but, how they do that… I am not sure… as to detecting you? As I said, your reflective presence is very low now, due to the dampening field. Well… I suppose if they know where to look, and their equipment is similar to ours, but that is a huge presupposition, and being that the crashed shuttle showed no advancements in the basic shuttle design of a hundred years ago, and if they are able to detect the alterations of…”

  “Halt! So, you just do not know, I hear that. Do not apologize, please, do not apologize. We will figure it out. I am opening us up to all available communications channels—at least the ones installed in the shuttle—and Ken? Would you monitor those? Our turn to spy.”

  “I already have been doing that. There are a few transmissions from the far side of this habitat cylinder, but not near any of the potential targets, and not directed toward us. They might have another shuttle in flight, and if that is the case, they might get a visual sighting of us, but the size of the Trailblazer is huge compared to our size.”

  “Ken, if we find an abandoned hanger bay, that might be better,” Janae suggested. “We could land, and then hike to Hanger 5, if we could find a way. Better than getting captured again.”

  “Another good idea, and perhaps Kimberly, rampant though she is, could possible give us a directional beacon?”

  “Mister optimistic, as well as incorrigible,” Janae playfully replied. “But again, better than being captured. So, I guess, we will make a pass over all the potential targets, see what we find, and then decide.”

  “Lead on. We make a reconnaissance, and see what we can see.”

  Janae flew the shuttle past the potential targets, in order of their proximity, and that took about an hour of maneuvering, weaving in and around the belts of radiation. None of the potentials showed any signs of being unique, nor were any more or less recognized as where they had landed the FTL scout.

  “So, on that visual pass, we botched-up revealing where the scout is,” Janae said as they finished assessing the last potential. “Now, I think we should get close to the last spot, and activate that Emergency Landing trigger. Johannes said it was limited to a kilometer range, and I seriously do not want Butterfield’s people to know we are arriving.”

  “The Benefactor? Was that the person she served?” Ken asked.

  “She served herself, first and foremost. I am glad we are leaving her far behind,” Janae snapped out, but then did feel a tad bit of remorse over the fact that Butterfield might have been killed in the crash, betrayed by her associates. Janae knew what being betrayed felt like, and had pity on anyone who endured that.

  “So, we sort of back track now to the places we looked at, and check them out with the landing trigger. Good plan.”

  Using the thrusters to maneuver the shuttle to about five-hundred meters off where the hanger bay was supposed to be located, Janae double checked the display. “I cannot see anything over on the hull that actually looks like the external doors of a hanger bay, but the structures are not well illuminated here.”

  “I have the shuttle’s flood lights at maximum, but they are mere candles compared to the illumination power the scout had,” Ken answered. The spot lights did brighten up the hull where they struck it, and from the orientation of the shuttle it gave the impression that the shuttle was hanging in space next to an enormous vertical wall. To Ken, up was the top of the shuttle and down was the bottom of the shuttle, and so as he looked out the viewport, he just saw the huge ship like a wall. In some strange way, it reminded him of being inside the biomes where the wall of the biome reached way up to the sky tube. Both distances were hard to grasp in his mind, and as close as the shuttle was to the hull, the Trailblazer looked enormous.

  “Activating ‘Emergency Landing’ now,” Janae turned the switch. The display indicated that the signals were send.

  Nothing happened.

  “I will try again,” Janae stated, and turned the switch.

  Again, nothing happened.

  “Well, that did not work. Good thing it was not a genuine emergency. Should I tell Johannes?” Ken asked.

  “No, he would just fall over himself with apologies, and I have heard my lifetime quota of that. We seem safe enough out here, for now, unless whatever got Butterfield can also attack us?” Janae wondered aloud. “There are so many different terrors on the Trailblazer, I am not sure what to watch out for next. At least, out here, there are no crazed animal things.”

  “I do not miss the bruins, certainly, that is true, but radiation is its own kind of monster. Not a living monster, but a terror nonetheless. Janae… I was just thinking, which is worse? Rampaging animal things, or cruel
humans?”

  “Cruel humans are rampaging animals,” she replied. “Absolutely.”

  “So, out here, we could encounter a human-animal, in a shuttle or on the hull somewhere with a working weapon system. Whatever that Diego person did, Butterfield blamed him, and oh my, she was enraged.”

  “Better at him, than at us,” Janae adjusted the thrusters and they headed toward the next location. When they had passed over it before, it had not looked suspicious, or curious in any unusual way, but now she watched with even more acute interest. The seemingly endless hull features were nearly the same with just a few variations in unknown lights, antenna, arrays, and other surface items.

  Some moments later, the shuttle was flying near the place where the displays indicated another hanger bay was located. Janae positioned the shuttle at five hundred meters away, and hit the switch for “Emergency Landing.”

  “Eureka!” Ken cried out as he spotted the yellow lights coming on around a long rectangular shape on the hull. The lights flickered, and then came on a solid red color, but only about half of them were lit, and it irregularly cast beams of light across where the hanger bay doors might have been.

  “Do not get too excited yet,” Janae cautioned. “Looks like this place failed to cycle. It is rather close to a band of radiation, and I bet that plays a part.”

  “So, radiation ruins hanger bays. That makes sense. So, we also might not be able to open a non-radiation drenched hanger bay? If it is one that the Ida inhabitants are using, and they changed the access stuff?”

  “We have a half-dozen more to check, and then we can discuss our options. The next one on the list was more toward what I am thinking is the bow, but it is easy to get turned around out here.”

  The shuttle flew on, and came again to another spot, but in getting there they had to weave and dodge several belts of the radiation.

  “Shuttle runabout? What are you doing in a restricted space way?” Diego’s voice weakly crackled from the speakers.

  A different voice came on from somewhere else, but was even weaker and more crackly. The static was thick, “Hey, come over here. I think the scanners showed a shuttle out there, but I am not sure what it was. Diego? Did you see something?”

  “I thought I did, but that area is thick with debris and other junk. Maybe just a microparticle turret automatically blasting away and doing its job.”

  Ken quickly checked to make sure that the outgoing messages were muted. He then said to Janae, “Can you disguise your voice to sound like Butterfield?”

  Janae smiled broadly. “I could certainly try.”

  “I will lower the power of the transmission, and you could scare Diego badly. Tell him you are coming for him, and call upon that Benefactor,” Ken suggested, “all pretending to be Butterfield.”

  “Oh, Ken, that is an imaginative idea, and I would love to get revenge on these people, but if they think we are Butterfield coming back somehow, they might unleash whatever it is they did before—if they did anything except steer her off-course. And, if they think Butterfield landed in some remote hanger bay, they might send either a rescue team, or an assassination squad for her. Neither of which we want to happen. Let Butterfield stay dead, a ghost would be to our detriment.”

  “Understood. I did not cry when she died,” Ken stated bluntly. “Not a single tear.”

  “I agree, so let her stay dead, but I will head us toward another hanger bay. I do not want to risk their detection again. There is one on the opposite side of the cylinder from where those transmissions originate, and that should keep us away from them as well. Although, it would be great to deceive them about something.” As Janae spoke about deception, she felt a dull ache in her stomach. “We will take a different path this time.”

  The shuttle zoomed close to the Trailblazer, and on Janae’s display the dampening field’s effects were obvious. The radiation-clear passageway was closer to the hull than she desired, but it looked open and spacious enough to traverse. They were flying parallel to the hull in a wide arc, as they were going around the cylinder side-ways, and not lengthwise.

  As they approached the next location, Ken called out suddenly, “Another shuttle!”

  Janae fired the thrusters and their own shuttle slowed down tremendously, and stayed in the safe lane the displays indicated.

  “That is up in a radiation zone,” Janae stated as they approached.

  “I detect no energy signatures from that craft, and it moving away, relative to the Trailblazer. There was no shuttle like that when we flew over this place a while back,” Ken commented.

  The unknown shuttle was a dull black color making it difficult to distinguish from the background of space. It much larger than their own runabout, with delta-shaped, low-swept wings, of about forty meters in span, and the black shuttle was about sixty meters long. It had a look of power, and potential, but a gaping hole in one side of its fuselage showed it to be a dead craft. The permalloy around the hole was ripped in outward tears and streamers, indicating it was exit damage of some kind.

  “Janae, is our dampening field still working? Something blasted that shuttle.”

  “As far as I can tell, everything is working well,” Janae spoke softly. “There is a clear space where I can fly past and we can assess the opposite side of it.” She fired the thrusters and their shuttle slipped around the larger black one, and its opposite side came into view. “I will not follow it up into that radiation.”

  “Magnification shows a multitude of small puncture holes on this side of that poor craft. I think it ran afoul of those microparticle turrets. High-velocity particles smacked into that side, and ripped that big chunk out the other. No readings of heat, energy, or anything.”

  “Must have happened shortly after we passed this spot before,” Janae said. “I am signaling our need to land.” She activated the Emergency Landing switch. “Maybe the hanger bay here will respond?”

  Lights came on illuminating the hull. The beams of light were bright, steady, and regular. Both Janae and Ken were happy to see the hanger bay doors opening, and there was a smattering of some kind of gases or liquids which sprayed into space from inside the hanger bay.

  “We found our way inside,” Ken stated the obvious.

  As Janae was preparing to fly the runabout into the hanger bay, several large mechanical derricks deployed from the sidewalls of the bay. They had had flashing lights on them, and at the end of each was an apparatus with a large coiled cable.

  A soundless puff came from the end of each of the derrick’s arms. A harpoon of sorts, with a blunt nose rocketed toward the large black shuttle. Two direct hits connected the harpoons to black shuttle. One was on the bottom edge of a wing; the other was on the upright tail rudder. The cables drew taunt, and the winches on the derricks began to steadily pull on the black shuttle.

  Ken spoke his thoughts, “Those gantries, or derricks, must be rescue equipment. Looks like they locked onto that shuttle with cables. They are recovering that shuttle. Did someone think it was them that declared an emergency?”

  “With the size of that black shuttle, and those cables, making our landing will be tricky,” Janae adjusted the thrusters and pushed their shuttle toward the hanger bay’s open doorway. The derricks were still deployed, and their red flashing lights were not synchronized, making a strange strobe of red light which stabbed into their cabin on irregularly irregular intervals.

  The runabout flew past the cables, and entered the hanger bay. That bay also had a large display on the back wall opposite the external doors. That display was flashing a red message, “Emergency Landing In Progress. Zero Gravity in Hanger Bay. No Atmosphere.”

  The new hanger had ten stalls, and four of those were occupied by shuttles of various types, all locked down to the deck by docking clamps. Janae adjusted her mind to consider the new orientation of the deck being down, and in agreement with the existing shuttles. She flipped their runabout around in a gentle barrel roll, and headed toward the furthest away
empty stall, thinking the black shuttle would be dragged into the large and empty stall in the middle of the hanger bay. With a few more adjustments, the runabout was hovering just over the stall marked “#1” and she then settled the shuttle down onto the deck. Clanks and a low grinding noise reverberated through the shuttle as the runabout’s own docking clamps engaged the decking mechanisms.

  “They are actually bringing that black shuttle inside,” Janae said with a disgusted tone. “That might be soaked in radiation, as it was up in that radiation zone. Why would they bring those poisons and toxins inside?”

  “Maybe, this is some automated rescue?” Ken wondered. “I can find no communication links or transmissions on any of this shuttle’s frequencies. Weirdly quiet, for an emergency.”