The only actuals on the display were the icons of their own ships. Some of those ships, the Earth-built Hussar-class vessels, were moving out into the blackness. They might not have the stealthier profile of the LRG scout-ships but they had incredible maneuverability. They made for an ideal screen vessel, being incredibly hard to land shots on.
Assuming, of course, that they were handled by an alert crew.
“What do we have here?” she asked, pointing to a new icon that had appeared in front of one of the Hussars.
“Contact conforms to scout-ship profile,” the sensor officer said. “Looks like they were starting a push-to-contact. They’ve halted! I’d say we’ve surprised them for a change!”
“Excellent!” June replied. “Hail them, send the standard greeting.” Computer, she sub-vocalized, message to private quarters. Odin, wake up, the scouts have arrived.
This Place is a Dump
Deep inside the Bled
Freya was worried. She was keeping it to herself but they’d been searching for days and the supply dump still hadn’t been found.
They were being careful not to make too many course corrections. With nothing to go on out here but inertial records, each maneuver added to the overall cumulative error. If you spent too long in the Bled, floundering around, you might never come back out.
If they didn’t find it soon, she’d take everyone back out of the Bled, get an accurate nav-fix and then try again. She had that luxury, thanks to the freighters they’d brought along. They didn’t need the supplies in the dump; it was just a useful waypoint.
Ranulf came onto the bridge, a coffee in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. His suit had the aural part of the helmet deployed. Two flexible rows of plates ran up the sides of his neck, terminating in a semi-closed dome over each ear. It let in ambient noise while still projecting whatever sounds he wanted from the suit’s system.
He tapped the sensor officer on the shoulder, accidentally dropping a crimson leaf onto the deck from his flatbread sandwich. “I’ve put an audio feed in your queue,” he said, a little too loudly. “Put it on the bridge sound system for me, will you?”
The sensor officer caught Freya’s eye and she gave him an affirmative nod.
The sound was a light layer of static with a recurring percussive pattern.
Ranulf had retracted his helmet sound. “Hear that?” he said. “Been waiting for it since we dropped out.” He rotated slowly, then suddenly stuck out his hand. “That way!”
“You convert the signals into sound?” Freya asked.
“It’s always worked well for my dad,” Ranulf said. “He was a bluff old traditionalist.”
“That’s what we’ve been looking for?” the sensor officer exclaimed. “Its strength is too low to even get past the filters. It could be anything…”
“Anything?” Ranulf cut him off. “A com-sat sent out here by some corporation with more money than sense, perhaps? Trying to corner the market on empty unused space, are they?
“Or maybe it’s the only signal out here because my crew placed it,” he suggested forcefully.
“But you said we could find it…”
“No,” Ranulf countered. “I specifically said that the signal was weak but that I could find it.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Me. You can’t rely on the computer to do all of your thinking out here. You gotta use your own filter and trust your gut.”
The sensor officer sighed, turning to Freya for support, but she was grinning. “Ran’s right,” she told him. “I should start rotating crew through the scout-ships. You can get complacent serving on a Hussar-class ship. Being crammed into a tiny little hull gives you a much more personal relationship with the Universe!”
“So we found the first dump, Ran.” She turned back to him. “What’s the next step?”
“We need to find the second dump.” Ran confirmed the signal as an actual entity so it would remain on the holo-trace. “Captain was in the habit of marking his courses with small supply dumps. There’d be another one near here. If we spread the whole fleet out, including Odin’s ships and your freighters, we stand a good chance of finding it quickly.”
He raised a hand, palm out, as he thought about the problem ahead. “You know, we used to spend a fair amount of time sending out search teams on linear return trips until we found the second dump – no sense in making them easy for an enemy to find, after all – but we often took a day or two.
“If we can get Odin to launch all of his combat shuttles, we can use a couple for each ship, form a chain…”
“And push our search ships out farther than normal!” Freya finished his sentence for him. “I’ll let him know.”
Even with the fleet stretched out as far as it could go, it still took a few hours to find the second dump. The third, oddly enough, was found while they were still discussing the need to find it.
“Captain always left three dumps so he’d have a way back out of the Bled,” Ranulf said. “More than once, we’ve had to retrace our way back to a drop like this and then follow the vector out. Two are enough to get you back in an emergency but we’d drop a third, just in case we were still bent on trying something new and needed a radial orientation.”
Thorstein frowned at him from the engineering station. “This the green guy you told me about? Seems a little too clever for the fella you described.”
“No, his dad.” Ranulf confirmed the final location and then created a plane based on the three dump locations. “I was ‘inherited’ by the son, you might say. In the course of a few seconds, all of our crew’s history went out the window and we had to ‘prove’ ourselves to a new captain.”
He pointed at the line created by two of the dumps. “The planet we’re looking for is along this line. We did a two-day jump followed by a couple days sweeping at sub-light. There was supposed to be another set of dumps out that way and we were hoping to link up with them, build on our ability to dip deeper into the Bled.”
“And you found a whole hidden solar system instead,” Freya observed. “You didn’t investigate?”
“We sent in a probe,” Ranulf explained. “Set it to pass the horizon of whatever was bending our sensor data and then come straight out again. We waited for a couple hours but it didn’t appear. Database had some references to unconfirmed reports.” He shrugged. “If they were true, we’d found a medium-tech world filled with dangerous fanatics. Not worth raiding or trading…”
“Folks that don’t have any idea of how their world is hidden,” Freya said, nodding. “I’ve heard the same stories. Why not put that in the LRG database?”
Ranulf had a calculating look now. “We thought it might be worth something someday.”
“A planet not worth raiding or trading?”
“Got me this job, didn’t it?”
The Shy System
Near the estimated center of the Bled
Freya stepped out of her command chair and took a stroll around the bridge, talking to staff at each station, mostly to give her backside a break. Midgaard ships had no seats on their bridges but the Hussars were built on Earth where folks had different ideas about what a bridge should look like.
The intense acceleration available to a Hussar helmsman was another deciding factor. The wildly successful design’s only drawback was that it could outstrip the inertial dampening systems under extreme maneuvering. A captain who insisted on standing during combat could easily find themselves plastered to the ceiling.
She was also using her walkabout to bleed off her frustration. They’d been sweeping the area for the better part of three days now and still no results.
She came to the nav-station and leaned over Ranulf’s shoulder. It looked like he was sweating. There were beads of moisture on his close-cropped scalp. “Is it possible that we’ve missed it?” she asked him.
“It is,” he admitted. “You know how hard it is to find anything out here but it’s here, I know it is!”
Thorstein was off-shif
t but he was hanging out at the nav station. “It might be something as silly as a calibration difference. Their pitch drives might have a slight error in their distance calculations when they link to the inertial system. That could throw us off by a day or so.”
“I hope you’re right, Thor,” she said dubiously. “We’ve used up a lot more beacons than I thought we would. I’m close to running out. If you’re right, though, we might be on the verge of finding this place.”
She tugged at the armor on her left shoulder, a sure sign she was coming to a difficult decision, though she was unaware of the habit. She had enough beacons left for a few more spreads and then they’d have to limp back out and try again after replacing the units she’d already committed.
“Alright,” she said, turning away to the comms station. “Mikka, time for another spread.”
Mikka passed the command to the fleet and a small constellation of glittering beacons streaked away from ships around the fringe of the fleet. Each beacon contained a transmitter suite that emitted light and a comms-ping. A tiny pitch drive enabled them to fall away from the fleet at a constant acceleration.
They weren’t the most useful item and it had raised a few eyebrows when Rick had bought up several thousand of the things. He’d claimed they were doing a mapping expedition around 3428 and, given that world’s insular nature, most of the vendors at least seemed to assume that his home-world had something to do with it.
“My Lady!” the sensor officer called out. “A couple of beacons are swerving off course!”
“You mean that they appear to be swerving off course,” Ranulf corrected. “Use that algorithm we worked on.”
In the central holo, the curved paths straightened and an opaque sphere came into view. The callout tab indicated that it was large, roughly a solar system in size.
Odin’s body appeared on the bridge as a holographic projection. “I see we’ve found our lonely world!”
“A reliable waypoint,” Freya confirmed, “almost exactly between the Alliance and Republic sides of this part of the Bled!”
Knowing where to look for – and find – a solar system in the middle of the Bled cut the cumulative nav-error in half.
All of the little things – accidental gas vents, mathematical rounding, calibration -- that the computer would correct by consulting nearby stellar positions, went unchecked in the Bled. With no stars visible, there was no way for the system to update itself and purge accumulated error.
“You know,” she added, slowly, “this also suggests the Bled may not be so empty as we thought. If there’s one hidden system, maybe there are others out here as well and, if it follows normal distribution for this region…”
“There could be thousands of worlds out here!” Odin blurted. “Fornication! We could have passed right through a sun while in distortion if we’d been a little less lucky!”
“A lot less, you mean,” Freya countered.
Odin’s holograph shrugged. “True enough,” he admitted. Space is a big enough place for a collision to be unlikely but it still makes my skin crawl. I don’t like not knowing what’s in our way.”
“Agreed,” she said. “That answers two questions for us, then. I was trying to decide if it was worth taking the time to investigate this system but we’ll be here long enough to scout the way ahead anyway.”
She’d be sending out unmanned scout-ships, pre-programmed to return. It would take longer but she’d already dragged this fleet into a sketchy mission. The last thing she wanted was to get them all killed out of a lack of basic precautions.
The whole region was eventually going to need investigating. There were bound to be inhabited planets near 3428. Folks with the ability to hide an entire solar system…
“Frankly, I’m also concerned that we might have neighbors near 3428 and we just don’t know about it. We live pretty close to the Bled.” She looked over at Ranulf.
“How did your captain not realize there may be more worlds like this one?”
A shrug. “He drank a lot,” Ranulf confessed. “I mean heroic quantities but he was always lucky…”
“Lucky?” Thorstein asked, incredulous. “You told me he was eaten by a swarm of carnivorous insects on Madagornia!”
“Well…” Ranulf scratched at the back of his neck. “…Nobody’s perfect…”
Land of the Dumbed
That crappy hidden World…
“Are you sure you want me flying?” Tim Fletcher asked. “We’re not exactly on a routine run here…”
Rick took a sip of water from his suit’s reservoir. “You figure one of our other pilots has more experience at flying through what we believe to be the event horizon of some kind of black-hole-based stealth cloak for an entire solar system?”
“Well, I haven’t been asking around or anything…”
“As a Midgaard leader,” Rick said, “your stories are going to be important. They’re more than just entertainment. They’re a way of showing others that you’ve faced danger. This is a great opportunity for you, young Fletcher. There’s likely to be danger involved. You might even get horribly disfigured!”
“Thanks!” Tim rolled his eyes. “Great pep-talk! Let’s just get on with the urgent business of killing ourselves in the space-time shear of this black-hole-based whatsathingy.” He started them moving toward the anomaly.
“How certain are we about the physics model for this?” Tim asked.
“Certain?” Rick repeated in surprise. “Not even close to certain! It’s just the best model we could come up with to explain what we’re seeing. Folks that can harness a black hole might have all kinds of startling tricks up their sleeves. The only way we can know anything is to go in there and see for ourselves.
“Leading a great house involves a fair amount of personal risk,” Rick added. “You might as well get used to it because I doubt your dad’s going to settle down in Solomon after his tour on the Canal is done. He’ll make himself the lord of some world and he’s going to look to us for support.
Tim concentrated on the controls but he looked gratified at his lord’s optimistic view of his particular branch of the Fletcher clan. “It must be hard to send your kid off,” he mused.
“To serve under some reckless jackass?” Rick asked.
“He didn’t quite say that.”
“Didn’t say I’m reckless?”
“He said ‘reckless asshole’,” Tim corrected, “but he was smiling at the time. Come to think of it, he farted right after, so the smile might have been a fart-grimace…”
A shudder ran through the scout-ship.
“We’re in some kind of flow,” Tim advised. “I don’t have control anymore. It’s like were caught in some automated system.”
“Congratulations,” Rick muttered, looking out the front windows. “You’re now the most experienced pilot at flying into black hole whatsathingies and all you had to do was move the ship ahead a few kilometers.”
“I suppose the horrible disfigurement comes next?”
“Chicks dig horrible disfigurement,” Rick said distractedly. “Or that might have been scars…”
“Not that I can really tell for sure right now,” Tim said cautiously, “but I think this space-time slipstream we’re in is moving us pretty damned fast! We might even… Shit! We’re passing out of it again!”
“Or in,” Rick ventured. “We… Look! A whole damned system! Looks like eight planets… two of them in the hab-zone!”
“Picking up a lot of EM traffic from the inner one,” Tim said, “and we’re still not under control. Whatever brought us in here is taking us straight to that world.”
“I should mention,” Rick said, tightening his harness, “there’s a chance we might encounter a civilization that’s extremely reluctant to let us leave.”
“You were saving that for a surprise?”
“See?” Rick reached over and gave Tim a friendly punch on the shoulder. “You’re having fun!”
They sat quietly for a moment, w
atching the planet loom larger.
“Also,” Rick added, “they might want to cut into our skulls and put implants in our brains.”
“Yep,” Tim said, not quite under his breath. “That was definitely a fart-grimace.”
They slid into a mildly sloppy orbit.
“Correcting our path,” Tim said. “Funny that a system this powerful can’t put us into a better orbit. I suppose Thorstein would say it’s so old that the calibration is off.”
“He’s probably right,” Rick agreed. “Smart fella, that Thorstein… What’s also interesting is that nobody has tried to make contact with us.”
“This place is hidden literally in the middle of nowhere,” Tim said. “I’d be surprised if they had anyone watching for visitors. They probably think the entire Universe consists of this one system.”
“Well, there are stories of people finding this place just a few thousand years ago,” Rick said.
“Facts tend to have a short shelf-life,” Tim retorted, “especially in an insular society.” He accessed a series of holo screens.
“Not getting much signal strength up here at all,” he complained. “Can’t run a quantum brute-hack from up here.”
“Alright…” Rick took a deep breath. “…Let’s spend as little time down there as possible. Land us in a city square or something similar.”
“Isn’t that a little flamboyant?”
“It’s a lot flamboyant. We don’t want to spend a lot of time getting in touch with the local authorities. Land us where we’re likely to get arrested.” Rick was looking at a close-up of one of the main cities.
“This square looks busy.” He placed a marker. “We get in, steal some info and then get out before they find a way to make life uncomfortable.”
“Taking us in at half pitch,” Tim said. “Don’t want to give away our ship’s capabilities, right?”
Rick gave him an appreciative smile. “You’re a lot like your father, you know? Tactical considerations seem to come naturally for you.”
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