We could see our surroundings on the video screens as the big jet we were mounted under trundled along taxiways with their blue lights then onto a runway after what seemed like miles of slow maneuvering. With a distant roaring and a slight increase in the jostling feeling, we knew we were on the roll. The runway lights slowly, then faster started started to whip by and in no time all was quiet with just a slight shushing wind rush sound. We were airborne and once all seemed safe we concentrated on relaxing deliberately. We watched the altimeter unwind rapidly and when we got to 55000 feet we got the yellow warning lights. The controlling officer on board asked if all was ok and Mader responded ‘affirmative’. We detached with a thunk sound and felt a brief spell of deceleration plus negative g then our rockets lit and oh boy was it a kick in the back! We felt like we weighed a thousand pounds and in three minutes it gradually got less and we could breathe again. Stars against a black sky appeared on the video screen followed a few minutes later by quickly brightening light. All functions remained in the green on our screens and we were chasing our target now. The vibration of the rocket motor subsided and we were gliding weightless through space.
The reaction jets in our nose fired to slow us down so we wouldn’t shoot past the Main Control Orbital Station. We first saw a glint of sunlight off something in the distance and after several bursts from our reaction jets we could see a huge complex of structures in front of us growing larger by the minute until it filled every direction one looked there. They were man made buildings with interconnecting cylindrical portions slowly rotating. This was huge and we felt like a tiny pea drifting in between this massive space megapolis. We seemed to be floating slowly along, then felt ourselves stop and a slight jolt as the docking arm grappled us and a door opened in one of the docking cylinders and we got pushed or was it pulled, into it. Several minutes went by while the docking cylinder we were berthed in was flushed of all vestiges of rocket fuel remnants and then pressurized. The fuel valves were ‘made safe’ by the computers on board our craft so that there would be no accidental explosions. Bright lights flooded the video screens then after several minutes we heard, “Welcome aboard Main Control Orbital Station (MOCS)” as a male voice beamed in through the speakers aboard our little vessel. The signal was given to unlock our boarding gate, which we did. Unstrapping ourselves, we attempted to stand up, only to instead start floating about our cabin into each other.
We gathered our two bags each one at a time, from where they had been stowed and sent them floating out the door to waiting personnel. Our craft may have been relatively primitive but it got us up top here with zero problems. I tapped the little rocket on its smoke smudged rump as I floated by it. Once we got out of that docking module as the crew called it, we were able to walk as there was some light gravity being generated here. Also we were given shoe covers to wrap around our own shoes which made them weakly magnetic. Walking along corridors lined with special colored carpets on the floor allowed us to essentially walk normally as our shoe covers kept our feet magnetically planted. The Commander Chu of the station actually put in an appearance to welcome us aboard. That was so nice of him. All the staff we met on board treated us with a degree of deference that we did not feel worthy of. We surmised that Buenafe had told them we were stone cold killers who were like shock troops designed to tackle the worst type of Outlaws on Toigan and in outer space too. Or maybe from what they were learning, we were on a suicide mission. We had the capability to probe their minds and we did. The vote was in. The vast majority were in the group that felt we were the best terminator humans out there. Maybe there was some truth to it; we had in fact proven to be the best exterminators of Badjans around all of Toigan.
We all knew the clock was ticking with lives on the line, so bathroom and food was the priority. We were eager to see how well our telepathy skills would work up top here in space. So we promptly mind spoke to Jongi and Breecher. The conversation was successful as always. No delays, no obvious latency that we could tell. It was as usual as if on terrafirma. Jessi and I hooked up mentally with Susan and Jace too and they were overjoyed to hear us both. We made an effort to converse with Buenafe too but he wasn’t a very strong telepath and it seemed to drain him considerably so we kept it brief. So we convened in the briefing room with the Captain Ronald and two of his crew plus Commander Chu of the MCOS Station and went over in a very methodical way, the plan for departure and stages to get to maximum speed and times involved to get close to Tsatvik. It looked like two hours plus to Baclet then another three to Tsatvik including the slow down phase.They were amazed to learn that one of our Team had made a massive contribution to developing their 0.7 light year speed drive. That was our very own Mader. I could see how Captain Ronald and Mader were going to have some deep discussions about the technology.
3. THE CELESTE
So after just two hours on the MOCS we were ready to head to the spaceplane the Celeste. Dillion was striking up conversations about food growing and plant life on board. Cherese had her eyes closed and hands extended feeling out the variations in gravity around the complex as we now made our way to one of the newest spaceplanes. We must have looked very odd as a group and honestly we were. We learned that the spaceplane had good stand off capabilities. It was capable of sending out twenty drones for surveillance, as decoys, as offensive weapons themselves or to play defensive roles. Those drones had energy supplies enough to stay away for six months if needed and could go into dormant states for years monitoring various sectors in space like silent spies. They could report in autonomously or by program. The spaceplane had six different mini spaceplanes too that could carry folks as part of exploration or for rescue missions. They also could carry tremendous firepower too. They would be five times the size of the little rocket that had carried us up here from the surface of Toigan. The plan was for us to go down to the surface of Tsatvik in two separate mini spaceplanes if there was anybody to rescue and if not, to at least collect evidence once we could pinpoint a wreck. All of our own equipment were already aboard the Celeste including our state of the art rebreathers, we were assured. As we walked behind Captain Ronald with his crew and the Commander Chu of MCOS, we practiced our spacewalking and short hops of teleporting back and forth. They didn’t seem to notice much as we jumped back and forth fifty feet at a time while we trailed behind them. So it was good practice; our skills still worked. We practiced other skills such as visualizing the miles of wiring behind the walls and hidden sensors and other equipment too.
Finally after an at least a two mile walk from where we had entered the space complex we entered an area that was cavernous with three spaceplanes inside getting worked on. It was a walk that we welcomed; what a great way to stretch after our cramped trip and get some partial weightlessness practice too. Those spaceplanes were in the final stages of completion and were sisters to the one we would call home for the next few days and weeks. They would be number two, three and four of this most advanced series with the SuperDrive 0.7 light year drive. Captain walked us around the outside of one of them as tutorial to visualize more thoroughly it’s proportions and features. We inspected it inside and out for one full hour as part of our orientation. In one area where there was an open electronics bay harboring several computers, Mader and myself reached out and touched some of the exposed wires. The group of technicians who had been working there looked at us in puzzlement as we seemed to freeze motionless for two minutes while we mentally entered the maze of electronics. The entourage that we were with, all seemed to pause at our antics. To them, when we pulled our fingers away from contact with the wires and started to talk, it was as if we had reanimated. We told the techies to make some notes and they recorded what we had to say. We pointed out several issues with the circuits and what those issues were. They nodded vigorously and thanked us for saving them several days of diagnostic work. They surely must have been left extremely puzzled at how we could do that.
After that live tour, we went through another set of corridor
s to where our lone spaceplane the Celeste was parked engines already primed for its journey. The Captain informed us that the crew had spent all these hours in preparation bringing the two fusion reactors up to full power carefully and running operating checklists. A quick tour on the inside including our living space and the airlock was sealed as the MCOS Commander Chu made his way off the ship to leave us alone. A young lady came to take Cherese and Jessi to coach them on the proper use of the toilet and bathing facilities in space and similarly we got our own practical tutorial. A lot of vacuum suctioning was involved indeed. We were all reunited to take a tour of the waste recycling facilities and we each got to drink our first glass of recycled water too! A few loud speaker announcements were made and we were easing away slowly from the MCOS. Looking at the video feed we saw the huge city-like MCOS slowly become smaller over a ten minute period then strapped ourselves in as instructed. With a jolt, power came on stream and in an instant the MCOS disappeared and Toigan which had been in the background encompassing almost all the space below and around us became like a little marble, finally blending into a pinpoint of light among billions of other pinpoints. We could now begin to appreciate a few larger pinpoints that were planets we were speeding toward and in an hour and a half Baclet appeared as a marble then as a giant orb that we could make out clouds and a few surface details on. One moment it was in-front and to the left of us and next it was a small marble on our left receding rapidly in the distance. It was mind blowing to be going that fast but at 0.7 light year speed we were gobbling up over 130,000 miles per second within our planetary system. That’s faster than humans had ever gone before over the eons that we have been striving to go faster.
4. MISCHA CRASHED ON TSATVIK
Mischa sat in his Captains chair nursing his injured right shoulder and broken pinky right finger. One of the instrument consoles had broken loose and had slammed into the right side of his body when they had crashed landed here on Tsatvik. They were all really lucky to have even survived. It was a miracle that they had survived with no catastrophic fire too. During the emergency, the crew and their passengers had just barely managed to move over into the command module from their crew quarters once they had been blasted separate from the cargo pods. They at least had some power and control in the command module. Whoever had been left in the crew quarters module would simply have burnt up on atmospheric entry. The explosives used on the interlocking mechanisms by the hijackers had jammed their landing legs in place and these could therefore not be extended. Lots of the sensors that their landing computers relied on to decide on trajectory and to help with firing the deceleration rockets were out of commission. Therefore Mischa had had to revert to a manual entry with just a little guidance from the computer system and it was a wonderfully lucky thing that they all made it down, though damaged. Collapsing equipment had also fallen on everybody and one of the passengers was severely injured, dying from internal hemorrhage. All they could do for him was comfort care. As they were about to enter the atmosphere with only just ten minutes if that, to prepare for the inevitability of it, they blasted off emergency signals on every radio system possible. Knowing that it would take around one and a half hour to even get those signals to Baclet and worse yet to Toigan, he decided to use his telepathy to contact his Aunt Jongi. He had no way of being sure that he would get through. They were just hitting the upper reaches of the moon’s atmosphere and there was brilliant plasma flaring all around the lighting up the inside of the command console via the two small peep hole windows. This was a wonderful gift he had been born with and it had come in handy. Jongi was a super powerful telepath and he was at least halfway decent at it, so why not try. He had heard stories of it being used in emergencies creating almost a quantum type situation of one particle existing at the same time in two different places type of effect. He couldn’t even be sure all his radio signals were even truly getting out or that it would reach Baclet or beyond.
Anyway made it we did; it sure was a rocking and rolling ride down to the surface with only enough time to select a narrow valley just north of the largest mountain on this moon Tsatvik, the third one of Threeme. We’d flashed by the big mountain, still going too fast but we were conserving our limited fuel for the last instant. The valley was fairly narrow and as we arrived above it still a thousand feet up, we tweaked the rocket throttle into a sustained blast and eased the command module down but ran out of fuel at about one hundred feet. Just in time, we hit the emergency main power breaker switch. That thankfully shut down all power in our electrical generators and with no electric power running through their wiring, no fire got started. The crash was awful and we hit and rolled over twice. When we finally stopped, we all had various pieces of shelving and monitors on top of us. Most were able to scramble up and get stuff off of them and help others to do the same. One crew member seemed to have broken his back and his legs were paralyzed. They were able to get him into one of two hibernation chambers after carefully restoring partial power so he was sedated and cooled plus had some medicine injected to decrease inflammation and minimize death of his nerve cells. He might eventually get some nerve function back by surgery to re-approximate the damaged nerves helped by infusion of growth factors if someone realized where they were and sent help quickly enough. It turned out that there was a loss of structural integrity in their pressure vessel. There was some crack somewhere though likely quite tiny. This meant that though we were generating some breathable air, there was not enough of it especially since this module was designed for no more than eight people and we now had fourteen as one person had died. There were crew and passengers all over each other and we had handed out sedatives to our passengers to keep them calm thus preventing hyperventilation. This served to keep our useable oxygen from being consumed too quickly. The noise of the wild animals outside was nerve wracking. The limited camera views showed like a hundred of them, crawling all over our crashed craft looking for a way in. They could smell us when we vented stale air. They knew good food and we were just that. Maybe they had gotten a taste of human flesh from previous crashes. The howls from the vishes were blood curdling and we could hear, almost feel the claws of scampering vinbeests all over the damaged craft. Every now and again, the vinbeests were cornered by much larger vishes and there was a fight with sounds of feasting afterwards, best we could tell. We were praying that they didn’t find a weak spot in our vessel to get in. It was now about fifteen hours since we had crash landed.
We had gone to Trat with empty cargo pods, a crew quarter module with thirteen engineers and workers who were swapping out and of course our command module. Now all transport up and down from the surface of Trat is by polar anchor with rare exception. So we slotted into a five hundred mile polar orbit just to the side of the transfer center which is a large base anchored to the surface of Trat by three separate sets of cables based on carbon fiber nanotube type technology. Pods filled with people and cargo of all types including refined ores take between ten and twenty five days to go up and down, slower if there are strong winds or storms in the atmosphere to prevent too much swaying in the cables. There are live as well as AI based controllers based both at the surface and in transfer center (TC) Trat orbit. The whole mining operation is run by the private conglomerate Trat Mining which has majority shareholders in the form of private investors, plus the Threeme, Baclet and Toigan Governments. This was an incredibly expensive project to build and maintain. All these home worlds have benefitted from the mining of this moon Trat which seemed to have been formed when two very ancient planet cores collided and fused together. Those cores were almost fully ferromagnetic with healthy chunks of heavy metals just sitting there all over the surface. Just about anywhere you scratched you could pick up chunks of platinum, gold, mercury, iron etc. It certainly was a unique moon and extraordinarily valuable. The problem was making sure it was crushed, separated into pure metals, made into appropriate ingots or preferably wire forms or thinner fibers which was easier to work with. The second pr
oblem was how to get it to Threeme, Baclet and Toigan up from the surface of Trat. Ultimately most of these materials ended up being used in orbital plants to build and expand orbital platforms and cities which formed important jumping off points for each planet. Energy was easy up in space. The sun provided much of it with all forms of electromagnetic radiation just begging to be harnessed. Deuterium and Tritium was harvested from some of the moons and used in fusion energy reactors that by and large were the workhorses for humans far and wide. Occasionally fission reactors were used in very limited applications for small needs as it was certainly less technical and simpler to do, like in a few isolated outposts run totally by AI and robots.
5. THE HIJACK
As Mischa sat in his chair surveying his sick and injured crew and shattered command module, his thoughts strayed back to Trat during the high pressure mating of his command module with the new crew quarter module and his cargo pods laden with ores. He figured that somehow, someone at Trat mining had bolted on some explosives between his command module and the cargo pods whether from on the ground on Trat or possibly at the Transfer Center in orbit. Looking back though, nothing had seemed any different from any other time and he had made this trip over twenty six times, delivering his precious cargo and people safely every time. He knew that space travel was truly fraught with danger but he had never counted on being almost killed deliberately nor having his cargo hijacked. He was also aware of the fact that on Baclet there were people in Government who were rumored to have links with undesirable Outlaw type humans who formed various illegal cabals or mobs. He had not heard of that sort of instability on Threeme so far. Threeme seemed to have good stable government with a reliable law enforcement culture. He knew that there had to be a basis for those rumors. There had been one major theft or hijacking of valuable materials in space before, close to Baclet and the case had never been solved that he knew of. Again the rumor was that those mob folks had gotten hold of the information through their moles in government and or private sector and were able to pawn the goods off at a ransom back to the original owners. It could be that this was an escalation of their tactics. Greed knows no bounds!
Invisible Hijackers Page 3
