Her childhood had been full of stories about those adventurous personages. First on a planet, called on in emergencies, trained to survive and even thrive in any situation. Her father hadn't been one, and when she had asked him why not, he'd laughed a ruffled her hair.
"Too old, too slow. I get out there with the Company and that's enough for this man. I don't need to be on the pointy end of the stick."
“But what are they like, Da?”
“Fast, sometimes, when things need doing. Other times it’s like watching a tortoise move when caution is needed. Always smartest folk around. You meet one, you can trust ‘em, Sera.”
Sera sighed. She hadn’t known her Da all that well, considering, but he loomed largest in her life with her mother what she was. Her Da was gone... Sera cried a little for the first time since she’d gotten the news. This was what she had always wanted, to leave Copper, but it was supposed to have been with him. He’d promised to come get her on her emancipation day, but instead a year early had come the death notice. And just a few weeks later, this remarkable scout.
Serene pulled open the door and heard voices. Frowning, she went to the piloting room. Lia was sitting at her board talking to a disembodied male voice.
"I know you are on a retrieval run." the man said evenly. "But you are the closest Scout we have to Belandir."
"I have a child aboard, Gerry."
"She's sixteen Standard and bound for Hudson Bay. A little experience will be good for her."
During the seconds long lags in their speech - even faster than light took a little time - Serene considered that they were talking about her, and they needed Lia to investigate something. She stepped all the way into the room and cleared her throat. Lia looked over her shoulder, doing the brow-raising thing again.
"I'll be good and stay out of your way." Serene offered.
Lia sighed. She turned back to the screens. "Gerry, we'll do it. It'll give her a story to tell at the Academy, if nothing else."
"That's my girl,” the voice boomed out into the cabin a moment later. "Belandir with all speed if you please. I have the details beamed into your computer already. Report in a week. Gerrivale out."
"Liatris out."
She swiveled to look at the girl. "Nothing heroic, Sera. Just checking on a derelict."
Serene beamed. Lia calling her by a nickname must be a good sign. "I would rather not have anything heroic. What is the Academy like? And Hudson Bay? How many students are there? Do you think I could become a Scout?"
Lia raised both eyebrows at the onslaught of questions. "Let's go to the breakfast nook and I'll fill you in."
On their way down the hall Lia told her that it was also the lunch nook and the dinner nook. "Not a lot of room on this ship. We'll be a week in transit to Belandir, and in each other's hair the whole time."
Reminded, Sera put her hands to her head, grimacing at the fuzzy mess she could feel there. "I wish I could keep my hair like yours." she gave Lia's wavy crop an envious glance.
#######
"Why not?" Lia eyed the redhead. Her braids were loose and soft strands curled around her face. Even disheveled she was lovely. This girl was going to be walking dynamite at the Academy.
"Da asked me not to cut it."
"Ah. Perhaps in time." Lia thought she knew what Sera was feeling - that her hair was a last connection to her dead father. "But for now, I can help you put it to rights if you need."
"No, I will. I've always done it myself."
"Of course. After breakfast."
They had scrambled eggs and toast. "The computer can't mess these up too badly."
"The computer?"
"Yep. Everything on board is made up by the computer, drawing on the raw materials we load at port, and by regenerating some waste materials, although most of that we sell at port for agricultural purposes."
Sera puzzled over that for a moment and then wrinkled her nose. "Ew. I didn't know that. On Copper, we grew all the food in the Aquaculture area."
Lia nodded. "Not many planets are that limited, though. Wait until you get to Hudson Bay and taste real beef and ground-grown vegetables. Hydroponics grow a great lettuce or strawberry, but they fail miserably at carrots or beets."
"It should be...interesting to try."
"Many things will be that. You'll do all right. School is hard, as it should be. But the students will become friends and later colleagues and that will be a joy."
"Do you still keep in touch with your classmates?"
"Yes, I'm a scout and often alone and I like that, but I also like getting together with friends when I can, and sometimes I work a mission with them." Like the one your father died on, she thought but didn't say aloud to Sera.
"What does a scout do?"
Lia laughed. "A little bit of everything, really. You know the history of the Company, right?"
"Sera nodded. "It used to be on Old Earth, and it was explorers and traders who went out into the unknown and brought back new things along with known commodities."
"That's the company line, all right. The planet Hudson Bay was founded by a group of people that idealized the original Hudson’s Bay Company, and now we are explorers, traders, Xenobiologists, something like the legendary Mounties, ambassadors of humanity, and pretty much whatever our mission requires of us. When the Spore shut down trade a millenia ago, it was the HBC that first figured out how to ward it off, so we had the head start in restarting space exploration. In outlying galactic reaches, a Voyageur is usually the first on-scene when bad things happen. Hence our current mission. Which I am going to study now, while you brush out that rat's nest on your head."
Sera left for her hairbrush, and Lia pulled up the download Gerry had sent her. Frowning, she read that a large capacity cargo carrier had been discovered in orbit around Belandir, its distress signal bleating, but no one at all onboard. There were no signals emitting from the planet below, although a grainy image of what Lia thought was a shuttle in a clearing was included with the file. Cautiously, the local Navy ship (six men in a corvette, she guessed with amusement) had declined to descend to the planetary surface and had instead put out the call to the HBC, which in its wisdom had fallen upon her as the closest Scout to the planet nicknamed the "Blender.” She (and her charge, she thought with yet another sigh) was to proceed to Gavan and interview the crew of the Naval vessel, and then to Belandir for a full assessment and report.
It took two days to arrive in Port at Gavan. Sera sucked Lia dry of stories about her father. Lia hadn’t known him well, either, they had only served on two missions together, but she filled in details of a Voyageur’s daily life. When she ran out of those, she started in on the people Sera would meet at school. Copper was not the most... diverse planet. Sera was spellbound at the thumbnail sketches of different cultures.
Lia hid her amusement well at the discovery that it had been four men, a woman, and a cat aboard a corvette. The captain, very young by any Navy's standards, had stammered and blushed at her questions.
"We didn't have the equipment to run any tests, you see." He started to apologize for not landing on Belandir.
Lia waved that away. "You did the right thing. Protecting your crew was a wise decision, as there were no emissions to lead you to believe anyone is even still alive down there. I'm surprised you even boarded the cargo ship."
"Well, we could tell there were no life signs."
"There could have been lingering pathogens."
He blanched. He obviously hadn't thought of that. "There weren't any bodies."
She nodded. She'd known that from his report, but she wanted him to think next time. "No, and none of you have gotten sick. There would have been at least a dozen people on that ship. Did you find any clues?"
He shook his head. "No, ma'am. No records even of why they were at Blender, let alone where they had gone."
"Thank you, Captain." she dismissed him gracefully.
While Lia was on the space station, Sera stayed aboard their ship.
She was very glad to not have to be seen. Until they had docked at Gavan, she hadn't thought about what it would be like to appear with a naked face in public. Lia had just raised her eyebrow in a silent query when she opened the hatch, and Sera had backed up into the nook, hastily saying she needed to study. Lia had given her a reading list to help get her ready for the Academy.
##########
She sighed after Lia left. "Sera, you are a coward."
She pulled up the screen to study - Astrogation for beginners - and stared blankly at it. If she couldn't even go into the space station with Lia, how was she going to manage all alone at the Academy?
Lia found her still at the screen when she came back aboard. "Buckle up, Sera!" she called laughingly as she swung through the hatch.
"Coming, Lia."
Sera folded into the acceleration chair and fastened herself in. Lia, she was learning, liked to do things fast. Lia was already at the piloting board, fingers flying as she set course.
"Off to the Blender. Didn't learn much here, except that the corvette crew is still alive, and now I'm as mystified as they are. Seems that there aren't any log entries for a week before they actually reached Blender. The computer shows navigational changes. Someone manually set course for the Blender, but they didn't enter why."
Sera didn't comment until they had lifted. She still felt breathless during lift, although Lia could and would keep right on talking through the pressures. "What are we going to do on Blender, then, if there was nothing to find aboard the ship?"
"Well, I have instrumentation they didn't have. And we will be taking a much closer look at the shuttle that landed. It would have had to take at least two trips to land all the crew, if indeed they were all taken down to the surface in it."
"But there were no bodies aboard?"
"No, not on the ship."
Sera shivered. The thought of being dropped into space scared her. Even if they had been dead, it was still a shuddery thought. She changed the subject.
"Lia, I'm not sure about, when I go to school..." she stumbled awkwardly to a stop.
"It won't be easy for you, it isn't easy for most cadets."
"But I'm not used to my face."
"Ah. You liked having a shield to hide behind."
"I never thought of it that way, but yes."
"Well, practice in front of a mirror. Use your expressions to shield your thoughts."
"I'll try." Sera said dubiously.
############
Lia changed tacks with Sera during the trip to the Blender. She ran tests to see what the child knew and had her poking through the guts of the ship until Sera could troubleshoot most common problems... in short, she kept the girl too busy to worry about what they would find aboard the abandoned ship, or how her arrival at school would go.
Lia herself researched the known ghost ships in the last hundred years or so. Centuries before Terra had sprung off planet into the starry void, a sailing ship named the Mary Celeste had been found abandoned. Legends of ghost ships had sprung up here and there ever since.
Late one night she leaned back and yawned. Then she frowned ferociously at the computer as it graphed out the results of her research. There was a sharp spike in the number and frequency of ghosts in this sector of the galaxy in the last ten years. Yes, that meant... she checked, nine ships found drifting near a planet, lifeless. Not a lot, no, compared to the millions that plied the spaceways trading with far-flung settlements, but enough to be a concern.
She yawned again and sent the report to Gerry. Pirates, or insurance fraud, or something more suspicious, they would raise the Blender in the morning, and that meant hard physical evidence, something she felt better about.
The morning brought the final short jump through foldspace into the system as close to Belandir as Lia cared to emerge in an unknown planetary system. It took them six hours to crawl close enough to the planet to begin looking for the other ship. Once they had the emitter locked in, finding it wasn’t difficult as the computer triangulated and guided them.
“What if the locater stopped working?” Sera asked.
“We’d probably never find it. As large as that ship is, it’s tiny in space. It would just circle that planet until the stars went cold.”
Sera shuddered. “I don’t know if I’d want to travel alone out here.”
“It’s something many people don’t want to do. You create your own little universe aboard a ship, with friends and family with you. One person alone can’t do that, quite. I like the feeling of being a part of the universe, coming around corners and seeing things no one else may ever have seen. My ancestors back on Earth were like that. They took off from Society and rambled into a world they were the only ones got to see, until Settlers followed them.”
Lia lapsed into silence as she studied their quarry. The bulky cargo container glittered ahead in the starlight, to Lia’s eye evident that the ship was abandoned, as it orbited with an awkward spiral motion. A live captain would never have kept that course. Humanity lived to exert order on its surroundings, and few captains allowed eccentric orbits.
They docked with the ship after a leisurely lunch. Sera made them a salad with some fresh fruit Lia had picked up while on Gavan. Sera was jittery, and Lia calm. Lia hoped that calm would keep the girl from worrying too much while Lia was aboard the ghost ship.
Lia donned her form-fitting space suit before entering the airlock. An almost tearful Sera seized her in a hug. “Be safe.” she begged.
“I’ll be fine, child. Nothing can get through this suit.” Short a weapon, she thought but did not vocalize.
The ship itself was almost an anticlimax. No dust could settle here, in a place where the only atmosphere was measured in cubic feet, not miles. The corridors were worn, but clean. The ship’s bridge was dim and quiet. She accessed the log and listened to a quiet, bored monotone as the captain recited the days. There had been ten aboard, not a dozen as she’d originally speculated. The captain and his wife and child, and seven crew members. Nothing out of the ordinary was mentioned in the first ten days of the trip. On the eleventh entry, the day after they had departed Gavan, she thought the voice seemed more animated than it had been, although the captain simply reported three successful micro jumps.
“All is well and well good enough!” the captain babbled. Lia looked at the video image of his face. Young enough, with a full, neatly trimmed beard that bespoke a colonial planet origin. “Headed for Princeton, planet named for a college or university or some such thing. Mary, what is the difference between those?” He looked towards someone offscreen. Lia guessed his wife. She also thought he must be high. She enhanced the image until she could see his eyes, and the dilated tell-tale pupils.
Checking the course computer, then the log entry, she sat back in the Captain’s chair with a long sigh. The kids from Gavan, spooked, hadn’t caught this. The log said one thing, the computer another. While the Captain, drugged off his head from the sounds of it, cheerfully thought they were traveling to Princeton, the computer reported the course change toward Belandir.
She listened to the next two days. The cheerful tone and inaccurate reports didn’t change. The computer told a different tale as they made orbit around the Blender while the captain blithered about another jump taken well. He fell silent as though it were only done for the day, and there was no more, although the computer reported another 36 hours before the shuttle left, returned, and left again never to return. That had been three weeks ago.
Lia burned a record of both the log and the computer to a chip and stood up slowly, feeling decades older than when she had sat down. She made her way to the living quarters. Nothing obvious was missing, she found. Clothes and toiletries still hung on hooks and lay on shelves. She found the ship’s cat curled up on the first mate’s bunk, stiff and cold. She touched it gingerly with her gloved fingers. It was skin and bones, starved after the crew disappeared.
Saddened, she went into one more compartment before returning to
the scout ship. The object she was looking for was exactly where it should be, the crew either hadn’t known to look there. Perhaps, mercifully, they had never known anything was wrong.
She started back to her ship, evidence bags sealed and stowed. The decontamination procedure seemed to take a year. Sera was waiting in the outer lock for her. Lia tried to smile reassuringly, but from the stricken look on the girl’s face she knew she’d failed.
“I am fine. No, no...” she stopped the girl from trying to help her with her suit. “I’m tired. That was... stressful.”
“What did you find?”
“Evidence.” Lia responded grimly.
She went to the bridge and inserted the chip into the console. Without bringing it up, she sent the entire contents to Gerry and the base. The log, the computer records, the suitcam recordings. She didn’t send commentary, she knew he’d see and hear what she had, and the inquiry would no doubt reach the same conclusion. Analysis of the cat’s tissues would show exactly what drugs had caused the crew to lose track of their surrounding reality. The canister from the ship had been limpeted to the air supply, and had to have been placed there at one of the ports of call.
Lia sighed. The person who had placed the canister would have been a customs official. No-one else would have been able to access the ship without an escort. It was the age-old dilemma. Who watches the watchers? She had no doubt that the intent was to incapacitate the ship within range of the pirate base, board, loot, and dispose of the crew. The ship would turn up a few systems away, serial numbers figuratively filed off.
Duty led her to one more task, and Sera would have to accompany her on that one.
“Sera. Ready to become my sidekick?”
Warp Resonance Page 5
