“Dutch?” Kaycee asked, speaking up for the first time. “I thought it self-terminated.”
“Who’s Dutch?” Ethan asked.
“It’s the AA that was part of the crew that made the first contact with the Shan Takhu archive in Zone One,” she said.
“Chancellor Lu mentioned that it had shut itself down voluntarily several years ago,” Nuko said.
“Dutch is a lot more than an AA at this point,” Kai said. “It was once a hybrid quantum core AA, but after it contacted the Tacra Un awareness that runs the archive in the solar system, it was assimilated into a far more advanced hardware matrix. It ended up being orders of magnitude smarter than even the best computer AA we have now.”
“But you’re saying Dutch is still alive?” Kaycee asked.
“This is all Dutch’s plan,” she said. “After Dutch terminated, it transferred itself to the probe we sent out here. He’s been waiting for us to follow.”
“That’s all fascinating, but what does that have to do with the fact that we’re talking about breaking one of the tallest laws in the Coalition,” he said.
Now he understood why she said it could get worse. She was right.
“We’re not in the Coalition,” she said, holding up her hand to forestall his expected protest. “I know that might be a technicality, but it is the truth.”
Ethan shook his head. “That’s thin and won’t keep us warm when they lock us up.”
Kai drew in a deep breath and let it out. “If you’d known before we left Coalition Space, you’d have been obligated to report our intent. At this point if anyone ever asks, you can tell them you didn’t know until it was too late to turn back. It will at least give you some legal legs to stand on.”
“There is some validity to that,” Nuko said. “It makes us a witness after the fact and not a willing accomplice.”
“So, this is all about stealing Shan Takhu technology for your own use?” Kaycee asked.
Ethan was disappointed that he hadn’t seen that before. That makes her no better than Jetaar.
“Not at all,” Kai said, looking back and forth between Ethan and the doctor. She sighed. “Fine. It won’t matter in the morning, anyway.”
Glancing at Qara, she jerked her head toward the door. She waited as the telepath got up and walked out. Not that it was possible to keep a secret from her, but apparently what she was about to say was over her air supply.
Once she was well out of earshot, Kai looked down at the floor and leaned forward, bracing herself on her elbows. “Several years ago, Dutch discovered that the Tacra Un in our home system was hiding something important. He could tell it was huge, but no matter how hard he pressed for an answer, there was no way to dig it out.”
“And that lands us out here?” Nuko asked.
“Exactly,” she said. “He decided the only way to figure out what it was hiding was to find a new Shan Takhu archive and convince it give us the information. We’re out here to get a second opinion.”
Kaycee dropped into Qara’s jump seat. Ethan could tell she was fighting demons far more serious than he understood. “I think at least some of the STI suspects,” she whispered. It sounded like she was tearing chunks out of her soul to say it, and when she looked up, her eyes looked like she was pleading for Ethan to make it all go away. Whatever she’d realized appeared to be scarier than what she could face alone.
Kai nodded. “Maybe.”
“If they do, then that ties STI directly to the Red Wall and One Earthers,” Ammo said. “They’re muscle to help keep the secret buried.”
“Do you know what it’s trying to conceal?” Kaycee asked.
“Not yet, but Dutch thinks we will.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ethan sat alone in his office with the lights off. The only illumination in the room was through the window where the collar of stars danced brightly in the black. It wasn’t enough to see well, but he didn’t need to see anything, anyway. He’d spent a lot of the return trip coming to grips with what had happened and the loss of the Elysium Sun.
He remembered things like they were through a fog bank. Specifics seemed lost and confused in his mind. Kaycee said it was the trauma of losing the Elysium Sun, but he knew it felt like something else.
Nuko seemed to compartmentalize it so much better than he did. She sat a shift on the ConDeck every day and as far as he could tell, she was almost back to normal.
Because they were still double crewed, they had an overabundance of qualified pilots, so Ethan let them sit the seats and he spent his time in the office, digging at his memories of what happened.
Mostly he beat himself up for what he’d missed, and what went wrong.
He knew there would be another inquiry, and he’d face a review of his licenses, but he expected he’d walk through it and come out the other end intact. He hadn’t disobeyed corporate rules passed down from somewhere so high above his air supply they had no connection to reality. There would be no thousand kilo gorilla looking to force him to take a fall for doing what was right but doing it the wrong way.
They had a record of it all and that would get him off. Insurance would even cover the loss of the Sun. He also knew he’d have a legitimate reason for losing a crewmember.
They were attacked.
Ships were lost to raiders all the time, and this time it had been his number that got scraped. But something just felt wrong about it. There was something else in what happened that profoundly didn’t make sense.
And that was the thread he kept pulling at.
What is missing? He’d asked himself that question so many times it had become a mantra to his life. It was an ever-present back beat that drummed through his reality with every breath he took.
What. Is. Missing.
He tapped his fingers to that rhythm. He walked to that rhythm. Even his heart kept time.
“We’ve got company” Ammo said over his collarcomm, interrupting his steady circular mental march.
He realized, if she was on deck, it must be secondshift already. He looked around and noticed that the tray of food that Quinn had delivered sat uneaten on the corner of his desk.
They were still two hundred light years from Coalition Space so any ship within sensor range might be trouble. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not like anything I’ve seen before.”
“It is not a conventional design,” Marti added.
“What’s it look like?” he said, standing up and realizing his legs and backside were numb from sitting stationary too long.
“It’s too far away for a visual,” she said. “It’s a quarter light year to starboard and maintaining a parallel course.”
“I can detect nothing other than its presence,” Marti added. “It has an extremely unusual power signature.”
Picking up the sandwich from the tray, he looked at it for several seconds and then tossed it back down on the plate, opting instead for the thermocup of coffee. Pushing through the door, he turned toward the ConDeck to look at the screens for himself. “What is it doing?”
“Pacing us,” Ammo said as he stepped up behind her seat and leaned against it.
Ethan stared at the screen and frowned. “Is it the ship that attacked us?”
She looked up at him and shrugged.
“How long has it been with us?”
“I just saw it,” she said. “It’s like it appeared out of nowhere.”
“Let’s get everybody on deck,” he said. Something about the power readings looked familiar to him but he couldn’t place why. Maybe it’s somewhere in the fog, he thought. Irrational anger flashed through him and he swallowed it.
Charleigh showed up first and he pointed her toward the engineering station, leaving his command seat for Nuko.
She arrived less than a minute later, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Marti said we’ve got a ship out there?”
He nodded, patting the back of his seat to tell her to sit. “A quarter lig
ht year out and paralleling us.”
“What is it?”
“Dono,” he said. “It’s too far to eyeball, but it looks strange.”
“It looks like a fast multicruiser to me,” Charleigh said.
“What?” Ethan asked, glancing over his shoulder at her.
“She is correct, Captain,” Marti said. “We are detecting another ship on an approach vector. Range one point five light years.”
“Are we sure it’s not another one of the alien ones?”
“Nothing indicates either ship is of alien origin, but the second one appears to be a light multicruiser,” it confirmed. “It is on a heading that puts it out of Draco.”
“Out of Draco?”
“Its transponder says it is the Argos.” Nuko said.
“Records indicate that the Argos is operating in Draco Sector Zone-Six,” Marti said.
“What are they doing this far out of Coalition Space?” He frowned.
“We’re still two hundred light years beyond the edge,” Nuko said. “It could be a trap.”
“If we remain on our current course and heading, they’ll catch us in just under thirty-five minutes,” Charleigh said. “They’re cooking their engines, so they’re hot for something.”
“What are our options?”
“If it’s a fast multi, we can’t outrun them, even if we turned straight away,” Ammo said.
She’d apparently had the same emotional response he had.
Run!
“There’s no real reason to believe it isn’t a Coalition ship,” he said.
“Has the other ship reacted to it?”
“There is no apparent change in its status,” Marti said.
“It’s possible they haven’t seen it,” Nuko suggested.
“If we can see the Argos at over a light year how did this unknown get to within a quarter light year without us seeing it?” he asked.
Ammo shook her head. “It just appeared out of nowhere.”
“Are we the target of the Argos?” he asked. “We’re sure it’s not coming for the other ship?”
“Heading checks to ten decimal places,” Charleigh confirmed.
Frak! Two hundred light years out. It still felt off the beacon to him.
“We’re receiving a transmission from the Argos,” she said. “Transmission delay is twenty-four minutes.”
“Put it on,” Ethan said.
“FCM Argos to CSV 1070 Olympus Dawn. You are to cut your drive and hold position for boarding and inspection. All personnel and passengers are to submit to interrogation by FleetCom Border Security. Failure to comply will result in forfeiture of your vessel. Confirm Receipt of transmission and stand down from cruise.”
“FleetCom Border Security?” Nuko asked.
“It makes sense, even if I’ve never heard of it.” he said, frowning. The FleetCom Wing was the largest of all of the branches of the Coalition government. It had divisions everywhere, and just because they’d never encountered a particular section didn’t mean it didn’t exist. This was the first time they’d ever been beyond the edge, so it probably was a matter of never having run into them before.
“My concern would be that, although FleetCom does not technically have jurisdiction beyond claimed Coalition Space, failure to comply might have consequences once we do return to controlled territory,” Marti said, apparently anticipating that he might choose to ignore the orders.
“They’ve already read our transponder,” he said, nodding. “Confirm we’re standing down but let them know we might have a raider sniffing us.”
“It’s not there,” Charleigh said. “It vanished when we received the transmission from the Argos.”
“Where the frak did it go?”
“Unknown captain,” Marti said. “I replayed the sensor logs, and she is correct. It disappeared.”
For some reason he wasn’t surprised. “Fine, stand down from cruise, and let the Argos know we’ll receive them aboard when they get here.”
What is missing? He shrugged. Obviously, it was something important, even if he couldn’t find it.
Chapter Forty
Captain Burton Coldwater remained aboard the Argos while his crew of trained sadists tore through the Dawn like chimpanzees on a mating frenzy. They stormed from place to place in teams of chaotic fury, tossing anything they thought was interesting.
Or shiny.
Or just needed to be tossed for no reason at all.
From the moment they’d come aboard, they had confined Ethan to his office with a four-man team of guards outside his door. For over three hours, the insanity shredded his ship and enraged his crew. They sequestered everyone in the staterooms on the lower deck and the interrogations had apparently been relentless. Only Marti had access to the comm system, so the only word that Ethan had of their progress was its secondhand reporting.
He paced back and forth across the narrow open patch of deck across from his desk and paused each cycle to stare out at the multicruiser, and the massive guns that it had trained on their defenseless ship. At the end of one of his orbits, as he looked out the window, a small two-man shuttle launched from the Argos’ upper hangar and shot toward the Dawn. It arced above and looped back toward his upper lock in a hot, and risky, approach.
“Their captain is coming aboard,” Marti announced.
“Must be to apologize for the damage his baboons have done,” he said, walking around and forcing himself down in his chair to wait.
“I anticipate that is unlikely.”
“Me too.” He snorted, struggling to swallow another wave of rage. He set his hands flat on his desk and tried to calm himself with several deep slow breaths.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
A minute later, there was a knock at his door. A guard opened it and stepped in without waiting for him to respond. He had Nuko in one hand and he pushed her toward the chair in the far corner of the room. “Captain Coldwater will interview you both now,” he announced.
Ethan started to stand up, and the guard dropped his hand to the butt of his pistol and shook his head.
Coldwater was a short, wide, man with dark eyes that never sat still not even when he was staring at a person with intent to commit bodily harm. It gave him the effect of a raven, calculating, sinister, and maybe a bit evil.
He walked in and, pulling the remaining chair back toward the door, he sat. Well back out of arms’ reach. As Ethan studied him, he realized that he had a scar across the bridge of his nose. For some reason he knew that it was from the one time he’d been too close to a previous captain and had suffered for that mistake.
“Captain Ethan Walker?”
He nodded but didn’t confirm the obvious answer. He wasn’t sure his anger wouldn’t affect his words.
Coldwater turned and looked at Nuko. “And you are Captain Nuko Takata. Excuse me, First Officer Takata now that you no longer have a ship.”
She glanced at Ethan and then looked down at the deck.
“I’m sorry, that was insensitive of me,” he said, his words hollow and carrying not even the slightest bit of sincerity. “It appears that’s a touchy subject. I understand that.”
“What’s your goal here, Captain Coldwater?” she asked, not looking up and keeping her hands folded in her lap.
“I need to know where you left your ship?”
“It was destroyed,” Ethan said. “We were in the Eastern Veil Nebula region of the Cygnus Loop.”
“It was destroyed, but somehow you and your crew survived? That sounds to me like you abandoned it,” he challenged.
“We got out before it blew up. All but Elias,” she said.
“That would be Elias Pruitt?”
She nodded.
“Why didn’t he make it out?”
“He was trying to save the Sun by manually dumping the antimatter storage,” Ethan said.
“Pruitt was an STI trained engineer, wasn’t he?”
“He was,” she confirmed.
“
And aren’t they some of the best engineers in the Coalition? Why couldn’t he get it to jettison? It seems to me almost nothing should be beyond his skillset.”
“The attack damaged it,” she said. She still hadn’t looked up at Coldwater, but she rolled her eyes toward Ethan. They told him she would lose it if he kept digging.
“Yes, some of your other crewmembers said you were attacked,” he said. “They didn’t know who attacked you. Do either of you know?”
“We didn’t stop to get their names, we were too busy being shot to shit,” Ethan said, sarcasm flavoring his words with acid.
“Of course,” he said. “What kind of ship was it? Most raiders fly older freighters.”
“It was big and came at us out of the nebula. We didn’t get a good look at it before they took out our sensors.”
“How’d they do that?”
“Probably with a pulse charge of some kind,” Nuko said. “I don’t know.”
“Were they humans?”
“What else would they be?” she snorted.
He rolled his eyes in an exaggerated display of condescension. “If you were in the Eastern Veil, you were almost a thousand light years outside of human controlled space. They might not be from here.”
Ethan looked at him and shook his head.
“Did you communicate with them at all?”
“No, they shot us up, took our cargo, and then left us to die. They didn’t seem too interested in conversation,” he said.
“So, they shot you up? Your ship doesn’t look like it took weapons fire. It looks like you surrendered your cargo and ran like hell.”
Ethan balled both fists and thought about coming over the desk at Coldwater. His guard unsnapped his holster and stared at him. Everything about Coldwater’s personality seemed designed to infuriate.
“They took out our power couplings and that left us dead in space. When we got our systems restored, the Elysium Sun was gone and the cargo canisters from both ships were missing.” Ethan closed his eyes and clung to the details he could remember. They felt strange to him, and he struggled to put them together. “You can check our systems storage to confirm that there are at least two transfer couplers missing. We’ve been running on a thin margin since we don’t have more spares.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 83
