Privateer's Moon

by gerald hall

  "No, Ma'am. I'm just doing what I have been told to do. I'm not falling in love with him or anything like that. Jonathan's more like a brother to me than anything else."

  "Well, you better get your 'brother' to start telling us what he knows, or he will end up praying that we had left him with the Truists after I'm done with him." Sarah coldly said.

  A terrible shiver ran down Angela's spine as she imagined what the pirate first officer would do to Jonathan. This thought filled Angela's mind throughout her work shift and kept her up the entire time she was supposed to be getting some sleep later on.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Jump Tender Alacrity

  YBP 1194 Star System, M 67 Star Cluster

  January 9, 2321

  Alacrity flashed into normal space about one hundred and twenty AU from the star. After taking a few moments to recover from the effects of the jump, Alec and his bridge crew looked out through their optical sensors to see where they had arrived.

  “We really struck out with those first eight star systems that we went to first, Sir.” Joanna sourly remarked.

  “You know that I disagree, Joanna. We really did need to investigate the neighboring star systems first before coming here. If this system is as promising as you believe, then we needed to make sure that we didn’t have any unfriendly neighbors around us. We wouldn’t want to set up shop here and then have to quickly abandon everything.” Alec replied.

  “I know, Sir. But it still seemed a waste of time, especially with what we are seeing here right now.”

  “I think that the time that we invested in surveying the other star systems will end up paying off in the long run. There were quite a few of the systems that had asteroid belts just waiting to be mined. We didn’t see any additional worlds that were suitable for terraforming or easy colonization though.

  Well, this is truly amazing. That star could indeed be a twin brother to old Sol.” Alec noted with great interest as he viewed the star system through Alacrity’s long-range optics.

  “What I find amazing is what is orbiting right next to that star. It is astounding that a gas giant could still be intact while that close to a star.”

  “She has to be undergoing tremendous loss of her atmosphere though. It is either being stripped away by the solar winds that star is generating or that star’s gravity is directly ripping the gases away. That gas giant had to have been truly massive at one point to have survived this long.”

  “We will be able to do all sorts of observations of this situation, I’m sure. But first, let’s see if we can find any other worlds in this star system that might be suitable for us to set up shop at.” Alec informed the others on Alacrity’s bridge.

  Alacrity then turned and accelerated to the more outer planets in the star system at the command of her pilot, Ethan Moran.

  “Brandon, what else do we have here to look at?” Alec asked his bridge sensor tech as his jump tender accelerated towards the edge of the system.

  “Sir, it looks like we have five more occupied orbits. Orbit Two is a small rocky world that is around three thousand kilometers in diameter. I’m not picking up anything more than a residual atmosphere from her. The third orbit has a world that is slightly larger than Mars though. She must have one hell of a hydrosphere because she is has over eighty percent cloud coverage.” Brandon Kiel reported.

  “Do you think that planet is suffering from a runaway greenhouse effect, Brandon?”

  “No, Sir. We are picking up large masses of ice on her northern and southern poles. The equatorial temperatures appear to be around 34 degrees Celsius. She’s also well within the distance range where liquid water is likely to occur on worlds orbiting there.

  She only has about a three degree axial tilt, so whatever seasons that it has should be pretty mild. The equatorial region might be a little warm, but well within our ability to handle.”

  Alec nodded his head in approval before continuing.

  “Are they any electromagnetic signals or anything else being picked up by your sensors that would indicate that any sort of civilization or visiting sentient beings might be around?”

  “No, Sir. With the exception of the normal background noise coming from the star and the system’s gas giants, we have no indication at all of a technological presence here besides ourselves.”

  “Gas Giants?” Alec asked.

  “Yes, Sir. In addition to the one that is closely orbiting the star, there is one other gas giant within the five other occupied orbits. Orbit four has a large number of objects located in it, probably an asteroid belt left over from a planetary collision or a close encounter with the gas giant in Orbit Five. That world is much larger than the one being stripped by the star, though still much smaller than any of Sol’s gas giants except possibly Uranus. Orbit Six appears to be another small rocky planet with a very thin atmosphere. That last world has lots of ice but doesn’t appear to ever get warm enough to have liquid water.”

  “The outer gas giant will be ideal for us to harvest hydrogen and methane from to fuel our engines and power plants without leaving a footprint. Let’s get closer to the planet in Orbit Three, Ethan. I want to find out as much as I can about her. Send down a shuttle to get an even closer look below the clouds when we get close enough.”

  Alacrity turned and set an intercept course towards the planet in Orbit Three. At the same time, a small shuttle was set up with a modular sensor pack and launched an hour later to speed ahead of the jump tender.

  Four hours later, the shuttle entered the planetary atmosphere. Almost immediately, Brandon began to receive huge amounts of data from the shuttle’s sensors.

  “This planet is definitely a water world. The world’s few land masses of note all appear to be relatively small and volcanic in nature. The oceans are fairly deep too except in the immediate vicinity of the islands. There are quite a few underwater mountains also, based on our initial scans”

  “Let’s get in for a much closer look while our shuttle continues its survey. I want to know everything there is about this planet so we don’t have any unwelcome surprises. Please take Alacrity into orbit around that planet, Ethan.”

  As the privateers’ jump tender swung into orbit, her sensors were used to make a close inspection of the planet’s orbiting companions.

  Eventually, Alec Martinson ordered his jump tender to move in close to one of the small moons orbiting the third planet in the YBP 1194 star system.

  “All I see are clouds and water around that planet.” Brandon Kiel noted while looking at his sensor’s console that continued to receive a data.

  “She will be a welcome source of fuel for us then along with the gas giants. It looks like she’s only about eighty percent of the mass of old Terra. That will make things easier for our shuttles to go in and out of her gravity well. Does she have any land masses at all that we can establish a base on?” Alec asked.

  “None of the islands down there are very large, based on the information coming in from our shuttle. The planet only has somewhere between five and ten percent of her surface above water. The poles also have small ice caps, but little solid underneath them. Based on my radar imaging, there is nothing higher than about three hundred meters above mean sea level anywhere on the planet’s surface. The islands do have active subterranean heat sources that indicate that the islands are volcanic in origin. In any event, they would be a hell of a place to be at in the middle of a storm, I would imagine.”

  “How’s her magnetosphere?”

  “Pretty decent. It’s not as powerful as Terra’s, but plenty strong enough to keep the solar wind from stripping off her atmosphere fortunately. I’m guessing that her core is still plenty hot to keep her magnetic ‘engine’, running for many millions of years to come.”

  “Any signs of habitation?”

  “Nothing showing on any of the land masses, Boss. If it’s got any life, it’s all under the waves. The temperatures are good enough for life to exist here. As I mentioned before, she h
as about a three-degree inclination so the change in seasons is relatively mild. The temperatures around the equator are around 35 degrees Centigrade.”

  “Well, that’s makes sense for a water world. Living on those islands would have to be humid as hell. We shouldn’t have too many unannounced visitors then. Still, it would have been nice to have a solid place where we could set our ships down for repairs. I guess that is why no one set up a colony here.

  What can you tell me about her moons, Brandon?” Alec then asked.

  The Alacrity’s sensor tech spent several minutes scanning the bodies orbiting around the water world with the jump tender’s own powerful sensors before turning and answering.

  “She’s got a lot of moons for such a small world. There are four in total. Only one of them appears to have been born with her. That one is about 500 kilometers in diameter and is pretty much a rocky ball. The other three all appear to have been captured bodies from the asteroid belt. They range from twenty to fifty kilometers in diameter. None of them are regular in shape.

  There is something that is more than a little odd about one of them however.”

  “How is that?” Alec asked.

  “Take a look at this one moon here.” Brandon pointed out on his sensor screen before continuing.

  “She’s an oblong piece of mostly nickel-iron that is about thirty-five kilometers in length and a little over fifteen kilometers wide at its thickest point. She has no atmosphere at all. So she’s a barren rock as far as life goes. She probably had been part of a planetary core that had been shattered by a close encounter with one or more of the system gas giants.

  Anyway. For starters, this rock’s in a perfect equatorial orbit. You couldn’t have deliberately placed her in a more ideal spot, in my opinion. The second thing is that she is slowly rotating along her long axis while having about four degrees of axial tilt. Finally, her mass is off based on my magnetometer readings.”

  Alec looked closer that the sensor readings on Brandon’s screen as the sensor tech continued.

  “She’s too heavy?” Alec wondering if there were perhaps some rare earth elements or radioactives that could be mined from this moon.

  “No, Sir. On the contrary, she’s somewhere between eight and twelve percent light. Someone or something has apparently already been inside and hollowed her out. There is no way for anyone to pick that up except with a very close inspection like we just did, though. Alacrity does have some very good sensors though, I have to admit. ”

  “Assuming that you are right, I need for you to look for any obvious openings or caverns on the surface of that moon. I wonder why no one else has noticed this anomaly.”

  “We should probably send out Tessa and Colin with their battlers along with as many shuttles as we can get running to do a close inspection of that moon. They may even need to land on it and send out personnel on foot to see what they can find.

  There is only so much that we can do even with our sensors out here, I’m afraid. We were damned lucky to have spotted this as it is.” Brandon noted.

  A few minutes later, the two battlers that Alacrity had brought with her, were released from the jump tender’s docking collars. Once the two heavily armed vessels cleared Alacrity’s hull, they accelerated forward to make a very close inspection of the suspicious moon’s surface.

  After nearly an hour, Tessa radioed in her first report. It didn’t surprise Alec that Tessa would find something first since her battler’s sensors were much more modern than those of Colin’s Orca.

  “We have one bloody big opening down here on this end. It appears to be at least three hundred meters in diameter. The outside looks like an impact crater from a meteor impact, but the hole goes a lot deeper inside than any meteor impact would make for sure. I’m going inside for a closer look.”

  “Be careful in there.” Alec replied.

  “I always am, Sir.”

  About ten minutes passed before Tessa radioed back to Alacrity.

  “Tessa, here. We’ve made a hell of a discovery here. About a hundred and fifty meters inside the crater, there is a huge steel iris valve door that has been left wide open. I suppose that normally it would be closed for security purposes though.”

  “Good work. Before we send a ship further inside, I want some sensor drones sent inside past that door first. I don’t want any of ships to run into a nasty surprise inside of there from some sort of defense system.”

  “Roger that, Sir. I’m set things up for a drone launch right away.” Colin quickly replied.

  “Same here, Sir.” Tessa answered a few seconds later.

  Eight small probes were soon flying inside of the opening and travelling deep within the hollow asteroid. They immediately began transmitting data to the waiting battlers just outside of the mysterious opening.

  “Well, I’ll be, Captain. Someone has hollowed out a cavern big enough to put a pair of City-class combat tenders side by side inside of it with room to spare for more than a dozen heavy battlers.” One of Alacrity’s crewmen exclaimed as she looked at the feeds from the drones that were flying around the inside of the captured asteroid cum moon.

  “It looks like a lot of this chamber is already full of wrecked and cannibalized ships stacked around a bunch of scaffolding. We can also see at least a couple of decent-sized repair gantries inside too. I wonder how much of this useable?” Colin reported.

  “Obviously, we are going to have to go inside ourselves and find out.” A curious but very excited Alec answered as he also watched the imagery being related from the battlers to Alacrity’s own displays.

  “Roger that, Sir. I am maneuvering Alacrity towards the opening of that passage now.” Ethan quickly responded.

  “We better make sure that no one from Galactic Expeditions or anyone else learns about this place. It could start getting very crowded, very quickly here, if they were to learn about what we have discovered here.” Alec said to everyone on the bridge.

  “Yea, the folks from GE are pretty nosy, aren’t they?” Brandon replied with a smile.

  An hour later, Alacrity slowly eased its way into the small moon’s mysterious passageway, following behind Orca and Hart’s Challenge. As the vessels proceeded deeper within the passage, they turned on powerful spotlights to illuminate everything inside. What Alec and his people discovered was far beyond what they had dared to imagine.

  The hulls of dozens of vessels, large and small, began to be seen in the glare of Alacrity’s spotlights. Virtually all of these vessels either showed some degree of damage or had been partially dissembled.

  “Look at the markings on the sides of some of those hulks, especially the military vessels. That’s a red nova sunburst.” Joanna remarked.

  “Do you know what it represents?”

  “I am trying to remember. I do recall seeing something about it among the research material that I have uncovered. One thing is for sure. Those markings haven’t been seen in person in a very long time, Sir.”

  “Do you think that we might have discovered one of those lost colonies from the early days of human exploration?” One of the other techs on Alacrity’s bridge asked.

  “There were many human expeditions out beyond the border over the past couple of centuries that were never documented with the Alliance government. Who knows how many of these were lost?” Alex asked.

  “I would imagine that quite a few of those expeditions were lost after running into the Lu’non. But somehow, I don’t think that this was one of them.” Brandon interjected as he closely monitored his sensors.

  “I wonder how many of these expeditions were actually never meant to be found. There have certainly been enough rebel groups who wanted to build their own power base outside of Terran-controlled space for a future war. It is also not uncommon for ambitious men and women to plan for the future when their opponents exhaust each other in conflict. Their future plans are to set up a power base from which they would build their strength undisturbed. Then these ambitious people would come
back and take over everything that they had left behind.”

  “You think that the facility inside this moon was set up by one of these apocalyptic groups?” Alec asked.

  “It certainly seems that way, based on the markings of the ships and the age of the facility. The facility is even much older than the Alacrity, I dare say. There are absolutely no signs of any fighting inside of here. Yet, there are a significant number of ships just sitting here, just like if they were in one of the colonial militaries’ boneyards.

  But someone went to a lot of effort to set this base up. It is also obvious now that this was an asteroid that had been moved here and deliberately placed into orbit around this water world, not captured naturally within its planetary gravity well. The equatorial orbit was just too perfect. ”

  “I think that this base was set up for another reason, Sir.” Joanna noted. She knew something that the others on Alacrity’s bridge were not aware of that gave her a far different perspective.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the types of ships that are in here and the markings on some their hulls. These are mostly military ships and civilian cargo shuttles, not civilian colony ships. I think those markings on most of the military ships are from the Red Star Collective. You can see the same markings on some of the support equipment here also. Do you remember the history on that group, Sir?”

  “The Collective was an old socialist political group that started some sort of insurrection, didn’t they?”

  “Actually, they were the sources of about a dozen different insurrections. All of them had a common political theme, but the Collective was the political patron and sometime military partner of these revolutionary movements. The Collective mostly gave clandestine support but, on occasion, also gave direct military support to their subordinate movements.”

  Didn’t the Collective just disappear pretty much without a trace about a century ago?”

  “There was a battle where some ships supposedly belonging to the Collective were destroyed not too far from here. But after that, the whole movement just collapsed and vanished without a trace.”