Venatoris: An Aurora Rhapsody Short Story

by G. S. Jennsen

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean….”

  She spared Kennedy a quick, closed-mouth smile. “And I didn’t either.” Kennedy, or more specifically her family, was wealthy beyond the numbers to count it, but it hadn’t mattered since seven minutes after they’d met as freshmen at university.

  With a sigh she started to pull away and shift her focus to the inner bodies when the scanner beeped to inform her of another vessel in proximity.

  She glared at the screen incredulously. Kyril was ghosting her?

  Shit. His ship was faster than hers, one reason she desperately needed the proceeds from this contract. If he could track her, he’d be able to leapfrog her the instant she struck figurative—or possibly literal—gold and sling a beacon. He could steal the discovery out from under her while she watched in impotent fury. And he would do precisely that without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Dammit, I should have spent last month’s money on a real dampener field instead of a new ionized gas analyzer.” The dampener field was on the list, but the list was a busy place. And now she floated out here with no way to mask her engine’s emission signature and no way to shake Kyril’s tail.

  “You know, IS Design recently introduced a new prototype dampener field which is nineteen percent more effective at eighty-one percent the power requirements of the previous gen model.”

  “Did you design it?”

  “I helped. A lot, in truth, but I’m still too low on the corporate ladder to get the credit for it.” In response to Alex’s questioning gaze, Kennedy grinned smugly. “Soon.”

  “I’ve no doubt.”

  Alex pretended to be scanning the planet below, like there might legitimately be something worthy of finding, while she racked her brain for a solution to the problem that was Joaquin Kyril.

  It seemed she was not going to be allowed to explore the system, investigating every object for possible valuable elements. She’d only have one real shot at finding and claiming the mother lode.

  So where could the mother lode be hiding?

  She leaned down and grabbed a handful of Kennedy’s almonds. The second suspected planet had, by the timing measurements, a notably strange orbit. She considered it a minute…and palmed her forehead with her free hand.

  “I’m an idiot.”

  “Not usually.”

  “The second object the researchers detected isn’t orbiting Shanshuo. It’s orbiting this planet. It probably got brought along for the ride when the gas giant was captured.”

  “So?”

  “So regardless of whether it’s a moon, planetoid or true planet, it’ll be small and rocky. Small and rocky is—”

  “Boring?”

  Alex chuckled. “Well, yes. Okay, this leaves the innermost body. It’s zipping around at an orbital period of 3.2 hours, which means it’s close to the pulsar. Damn close.” Dangerously close, at least for a puny little personal scout ship.

  She imagined the Siyane protesting the insult with an aura of miffed indignation, and apologized silently. It certainly was not puny to her; it was, in point of fact, everything she had ever wanted.

  “The type of relationship exhibited here—a tight, rapid orbit in the shadow of the pulsar—pegs it as a companion star rather than a planet. A white dwarf having its matter leeched away by the primary star?”

  “Were you directing the question at me? ’Cause I’m an engineer, not a space junkie.”

  Alex mumbled a distracted reply. White dwarfs were a dime a dozen and as boring as the gas giant. But if it was a true white dwarf, the researchers should’ve been able to identify it as such relatively easily.

  She swung toward Shanshuo in feigned casualness so as not to pique Kyril’s interest, tuning out the voom-voom-voom strobe of the pulsar in favor of trying to catch sight of the orbiting companion.

  She blinked.

  There.

  Blinked again. Gone.

  But it had been there, a tiny dot of absence racing across the X-ray light. She readied the spectrum analyzer to take a broad spectrum reading. She’d filter out the pulsar’s spectrum signature afterward to reveal the companion’s data.

  The scanner panned until she relocated it. Fantastic. Effective surface temperature estimated at….

  She frowned. “That can’t be correct.” Either the white dwarf was older than the universe—a dubious supposition—or the pulsar had siphoned off the outer layers completely, evaporating the star and leaving behind naught but its core.

  Possibly its exotic carbon diamond-like core? What were the odds?

  Vanishingly low, but higher than they had been a few minutes ago and doubtless higher than the first option.

  Kennedy stood and peered out the viewport. “What’ve you got?”

  “Maybe, just maybe, something wonderful.”

  She didn’t elaborate for now; she’d been dallying for too long, and Kyril would be getting suspicious. And now she really needed a plan.

  The small, rocky planet orbiting the gas giant had a thin atmosphere and varied terrain. Terrain she’d be able to lose Kyril in for several seconds at a minimum. Since her in-atmo pulse detonation engine didn’t emit an identifiable signature, it might be enough.

  “I need help. I need someone else. Who else is here?”

  “I’m here.”

  Alex laughed. “I mean another ship.”

  Kennedy shrugged and returned to the floor. “Ah. Can’t help you then.”

  The potential payout marked this as an enticing contract, if a marginally risky one. Pulsars didn’t qualify as friendly environs for humans. The ionizing radiation alone, not to mention the powerhouse X-ray beacon, meant an early death for anyone not in a strongly shielded vessel.

  Luckily for her, she did have those shields. The best radiation shielding last year’s money could buy.

  She tuned the emission sensor to its farthest range and filtered out the quite noisy pulsar radiation. Kyril’s ship showed up immediately, right up her ass, leading her to growl a particularly colorful Russian curse under her breath.

  “Your dad teach you that word?”

  “Not intentionally.”

  After another pass two additional dots materialized, which earned another, nearly as colorful exclamation.

  Once the targets were pegged, she refined the scanner’s parameters until she had definable signatures then fed them into the ship database. The first one didn’t match any entries, but the second….

  Alex sent a secure comm hail. “Hey, Bob. What brings you to the void today?”

  “Solovy? Dammit. Whatever brought me here, I’m not going to get it now, so I might as well turn around, head home and go get plastered.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Bob Patera may be a better scout than Kyril, but that wasn’t saying much. “Glad to see you accept the inevitability of my triumph, but don’t rush off yet. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Be still my heart.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Simmer down. It’s not that kind of proposition. Joaquin Kyril is glued to my ass and I need to ditch him. Help me do that long enough for me to find elements which will satisfy the Astral contract, and you’ll get ten percent of the proceeds.”

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “Twelve percent.”

  “Twelve percent and you have a drink with me next week.”

  She drummed her fingers on the dash. “All right. But a drink means a drink, nothing else.”

  “Oh, come on. We should at least have sex, if only to get all this sexual tension out of our systems.”

  Kennedy arched an eyebrow in interest, but Alex shook her head in a vehement no. “There is no sexual tension between us, Bob.”

  “Sure there is.”

  “Those are your dreams. This is reality. So are you in?”

  “Point the way.”

  She exhaled in relief. “Terrific. You’ve got a Genyx VII impulse drive, right?”

  “I won’t ask how you knew that. Yes, the C2 model.”

  Alex
toggled the comm and waved Kennedy up off the floor. “Can you figure out what he needs to do to his engine to make it approximate my emission signature?”

  Kennedy nodded and jogged to the data center in the main cabin.

  Her outward demeanor made it easy to forget—especially when the woman was in full-on vacation mode—but Ken was smart. Exceptionally smart. And she knew more about all the major components of starships than anyone Alex had met. Odds were she had the specs on the Genyx VII drive memorized, along with the specs for all the other commercial engine models.

  Alex switched the comm channel back on. “In a minute I’ll send you some adjustments you need to make to the power flow to your engine and a tiny tweak to its negative mass regulator.”

  “You want me to mutilate my engine?”

  “Improve it, actually. You’re going to pretend to be me. Once you’ve made the adjustments, move to the far side of the middle body and wait there until I tell you to come in-atmo. When you get close, I’ll go dark. You’ll take my place, then bail and get back to the gas giant.”

  “This body is…where? In case you hadn’t realized it, I legitimately meant ‘point the way.’”

  It wasn’t his fault he was a bad scout. Not even a bad scout, really—merely an ordinary one. “It’s orbiting the gas giant, inclination 27.6° off the pulsar’s reference plane at 1,722 megameters, give or take.”

  “I can work with that. What are you planning to do once I lead Kyril astray?”

  She hesitated. She liked Bob as far as it went, but it didn’t mean she trusted him. Not when hundreds of thousands if not millions of credits were at stake. “I’m going to go earn our riches.”

  Kennedy returned to the cockpit and, at Alex’s gesture of approval, input the calculations and sent them to Bob.

  “Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just fly around jerking off until you decide I can stop.”

  “What you do on your ship is your own business.”

  “It most definitely is. Got your instructions. Give me five minutes.”

  Alex veered around a bit to make it look as if she were chasing down a potential find, shaking her head when Kyril followed like a proselyte. Still, he had to be getting suspicious by now. But what was he apt to do? Find anything of value himself?

  Abruptly she stood and paced through the main cabin to burn off a fraction of her mounting nerves. She needed razor-sharp reflexes for what came next, not the jitters.

  “So, where are we running off to once you lose this Kyril guy?”

  Alex pointed out the viewport in the direction of the pulsar.

  Kennedy canted her head to the side. “Sure. Why not?”

  It took six and a half minutes, but Bob reported in. “I’m on my way to you.”

  She returned to the chair in a flash. “I see you. Come in under the planet’s profile so he won’t pick you up.”

  “Yep. You truly hate this guy, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “He’s a gilded-spoon prick, no doubt.”

  “He’s a thief. He lets others do the work then finds underhanded ways to steal what he can from them. And he is brutal and unrepentant about it.”

  “Fair assessment. I guess I don’t take it as personally as you do.”

  One of a thousand reasons why she was better at this than him, and would soon be the best.

  Alex accelerated away from the gas giant and toward its satellite, and this time she smirked when Kyril followed behind at some distance. Did he honestly think she didn’t know he lurked out there?

  The atmosphere turned out to be even thinner than she’d expected. She glanced at Kennedy. “Will the pulse detonation engine operate in this weak of an atmosphere? I mean it should, right?”

  Kennedy scrutinized the HUD screen displaying the gas percentages and cringed. “Uh…probably?”

  “Good enough.” She pointed the nose of the ship down and dove. When the atmosphere began to fight her she reached over and activated the transition from impulse power to the pulse detonation engine. They held their breath.

  The ship jerked as the engine struggled for a minute…then began humming quietly.

  The meager cloud cover dissipated to reveal a mountainous terrain. Perfect.

  She leveled off a kilometer above the surface. “You’ll want to strap in to the jump seat.”

  Kennedy’s eyes widened. “Should I get a drink, too?”

  “After.”

  Her face contorted into a grimace as she retreated to the main cabin.

  Alex guided the Siyane toward the mountains, seeking out a path through the crests and valleys.

  Kyril’s ship was faster than hers in space; she had to assume it was faster in-atmo as well. But she could fly circles around him in her sleep using nothing but her left pinky. It wasn’t arrogance; it was fact.

  Perhaps a smidge of arrogance.

  She cracked her neck and dipped until she cruised thirty meters from the sloping incline and tilted the belly of the ship toward it. No trees softened the scenery, and boulders rushed past in a blur.

  Ahead, a ridge split into a deep fissure, more gorge than valley. She plunged into it, staying close to the ground.

  Kyril emerged from the bluffs behind her. He’d drawn far closer, which represented a problem. He must think she was zeroing in on a find.

  This gorge was doing nothing for her. She spotted a narrow cleft to the right. Too narrow? Nah.

  She increased her speed, flipped the ship sideways and slipped into the gap.

  “Alex, the hell!”

  She gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on flying. The gap hadn’t widened yet. “I did tell you to strap in.”

  Reluctantly she spared a brief motion to activate the comm channel. “Bob, get down here and head to…33.2° N, 114.1° W.” The coordinates lay a hundred kilometers northwest of her current location. It should work.

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  “Bob.”

  “Right. Heading there now.”

  Finally the terrain opened up, though the mountains grew far steeper. Jagged spikes jutting up from a dead landscape.

  She swerved to the left to dart between two peaks then dropped down as low as she dared.

  Kyril’s blip followed. Motherfucker.

  But it stayed more distant now. He was flying safely. “Coward.”

  Emboldened, she sped onward, dipping and weaving through the range. When another fissure came into view, she pivoted hard and raced through it, a mite too snugly for comfort. She was glad Kennedy wasn’t up here to see how near to the cliff walls they flew.

  On the scanner, Kyril slowed almost to a stop, handing her the break she needed. She found a basin on the topography map six kilometers to the northeast.

  “Bob, shift to 33.8° N, 113.9° W and get ready.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  One last corkscrew turn…and….

  She decelerated hard and plummeted toward the ground; when ten meters remained she killed the engine. “Now, Bob—17.8° N heading, then get back to space ASAP.”

  The ship shuddered roughly as it slammed to the ground. A couple of yellow warnings flashed across the HUD, but nothing critical.

  “You are one crazy woman, Solovy.”

  “Thank you. I’m flattered.”

  Kennedy’s voice sounded shaky behind her. “Um, did we crash?”

  “Not technically. It’s not crashing if it’s on purpose.”

  Kyril had begun moving again and closed in on her location. Alex peered up as he passed overhead, but the paltry light didn’t allow her to make out his ship. Keep going. Keep going.

  He kept going, following Bob’s blip into the darkness.

  Bob did a surprisingly decent job of picking up where she left off. She was moderately impressed, not as if she’d tell him so.

  But if she reengaged the engine too soon, Kyril’s scanner might pick up the energy flare.

  She breathed in. Out. Waited.

  Slowly, caut
iously, she lifted off the surface, spun and climbed through the atmosphere in the opposite direction from where Bob had flown.

  They exited on the opposite side of the satellite from the gas giant, at which point she had no choice but to run the impulse engine for a minute or so.

  “You can unstrap now.”

  Kennedy stumbled into the cockpit. “Okay, that sucked. What’s next?”

  Alex didn’t answer. Better for her friend not to know until it was already done.

  No time to reconsider. She activated the sLume drive and executed a pinpoint superluminal traversal to barely outside the not-a-white-dwarf-not-a-planet’s orbit.

  The warp bubble had hardly formed around the Siyane when it evaporated. Only then did the surge of adrenaline hit her.

  A 2.7 AU superluminal trip was not a maneuver one did every day, mostly due to the fact it was dangerous as all hell. If she’d delayed another second—three-quarters of a second—before disengaging the sLume drive, they would’ve found themselves inside the pulsar. And dead.

  “Did you…oh my God, you did. I think I’m…yeah, I’m going to go back to the couch and faint.”

  Alex grinned a bit wildly. “What? It worked, didn’t it?”

  “And if it hadn’t?”

  “We’d never be the wiser.”

  “Because we’d be vaporized.”

  “Yes. Now I don’t have a lot of time, so hush.”

  Kennedy nodded weakly and wandered off. “Couch. Fainting. This is the worst vacation ever.”

  Alex blinked and worked to focus the adrenaline rush on productive endeavors such as catching up to the object, whatever it was, and matching its orbit. Something else guaranteed to be fun, since it was moving fast.

  At such close proximity the pulsar taxed the radiation shield, but it would hold. She hoped. If this panned out, Astral-owned industrial vessels equipped with far stronger shielding would be able to hang out here for weeks at a stretch, but she couldn’t risk staying more than…she checked the diagnostics…twenty-four minutes.

  She had a solid bead on the orbital path of the object now, and she accelerated into a parallel trajectory. It gained on her from behind; she continued increasing her speed until she’d matched its velocity and it whisked along a sliver under four megameters off her port.