“Right around thirty kilometers now.”
“That’s what I figured too,” Zoya said. “Now, did you see the ship from the deck up there?”
Natalya felt her eyes widen. “I didn’t notice it.”
“Me, either, and I looked. That far away, I’m not sure we could without assistance.”
“So, how did Kim see the crew get incinerated?” Natalya asked.
“I can chalk it up to hyperbole, but that’s still a hell of a blast to reduce the whole station to small pieces of debris.”
Natalya nodded and frowned. “That wasn’t a fusactor failure.”
“Not unless it was a cascading fault that bypassed all the safeties and emergency eject protocols. You’re the engineer. You tell me.”
“Fusactors don’t explode,” Natalya said, a cold puddle in her gut. “They melt.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Zoya said. “A melted fusactor would be pretty bad but ... ?”
“But if they get too hot, they eject themselves.”
“That’s the only explosive anywhere near a fusactor and the only thing that could have created a shockwave big enough to destroy the station,” Zoya said.
“Ergo: bomb,” Natalya said. “How’d I miss that?”
“We were a bit distracted by finding a missing station and a disabled ship,” Zoya said. “But, yes. Bomb. Probably in the incoming can unless somebody had a problem with the Mindanao.”
Zoya slipped back into the galley and returned with two cups of coffee. She handed one to Natalya and took her place in the other couch. “So. Lumineux is some kind of military outpost.”
Natalya almost choked on her coffee.
“Military?”
Zoya shrugged. “Maybe not military but a bunch of things only make sense if it’s not like every other station we’ve ever visited.”
“Hit me.”
“Only two people identified themselves to me. The head of security—a woman named Rachel Carstairs—and a name you might recognize.”
“Besides my father?”
“Oh, I forgot him, yes.” Zoya frowned. “He was there. How I did miss that?”
“What?” Natalya asked.
Zoya shook her head. “Besides your father. Does the name Dr. Margaret Stevens ring any bells?”
Natalya struggled for a moment. “I know that name.”
“Principles of Starship Propulsion?” Zoya asked.
“Third-term engineering. How could I forget it?” The answer flashed into her head. “Stevens.”
“Yeah. She was my only real contact on the station. Every time I left the ship I had an escort. Granted, that wasn’t often. The first time was this Carstairs woman. The second time was a uniformed man who went by the unlikely name of Escort.” Zoya sipped. “Uniforms, not shipsuits or station jumpsuits. Like undress khaki but a charcoal color. I saw only one collar flash. Three chevrons. Nobody else wore any kind of rank or job designation. No name tape on their chest. Nothing. Stevens always wore undress khakis when I saw her. No rank.”
Natalya took a gulp of coffee and stared. “You said military. So far it could just be a cult or something odd.”
“All right. They gave me access to station net so I could get messages. That was great but when I tried to order something from the chandlery there wasn’t one.”
“How did you fuel up?”
“Same way as normal. Landed on the pad. Shore tied connected and the tanks started filling.”
“How did you pay?”
Zoya shook her head. “I didn’t. I just requested clearance to depart. They disconnected the shore tie and opened the door.”
“Nice work if you can get it.”
“That’s what I thought too. It’s also why I think it’s military or something that doesn’t need to turn a profit on the operation. Or recoup costs for that matter,” Zoya said.
“Meaning they’ve got financial support elsewhere?”
“Or something. Not CPJCT, as far as I could tell.”
“Why not?” Natalya asked.
“No warning posters. No hazard signs. No nothing as far as I saw. Even the doors in the passageways had no designations.”
“None that you saw,” Natalya said.
“All right. None that I saw. Can you imagine a CPJCT installation without a ‘Caution: Vacuum Warning’ sign?”
Natalya laughed but shook her head. “No. I can’t.”
“There was also the fleet of really big ships out on the periphery of the system. Six of them arranged in two lines of three.”
“How big?”
“Huge. I picked them up on long range. Individually. At that distance they had to have been thousands of kilometers apart. They were either ships or some kind of installation.”
“My money’s on installations. Nothing that big can jump and why have ships that large in system?”
“Well, defensive platforms,” Zoya said.
Natalya took a sip of coffee and considered it. “Possible.”
“There was also the cloaked ship that shadowed me in to the station.”
“Cloaked. Ship.” Natalya felt her eyebrows climbing her forehead.
“I don’t know what else to call it. It didn’t show up on short range. It had no lights.”
“How did you know it was there if you couldn’t see it?”
“I squirted our message for Pop-pop directly to the buoy. Not half a tick later, I was cautioned against using the buoy that way again.”
“Somebody monitored that?” Natalya asked. “I didn’t even think that was possible.”
“Me either, but I figured there had to be somebody pretty close to detect it and warn me about it even before the signal had had enough time to get there.”
“Yeah, I can see that but how’d you spot them?”
“Spun the ship on a couple of axes and found a black spot in the star field, directly astern and about forty degrees or so above my plane of travel.”
“Sitting in your blind spot,” Natalya said.
“Yes.”
“Cloaked.”
“I don’t know what else to call it. Physically present but invisible to short- and long-range scanning.”
Natalya sagged into her couch and took another sip of her coffee. “That’s different.”
“I thought so.”
“How does this relate to the Mindanao?” Natalya asked.
“It might not, but when I met Stevens she was surprised it was me and not you on the Peregrine.”
“She knew me?”
“She knew me, you, the ship, our real backgrounds, all of it.” Zoya shrugged. “I walked in and she called me by name. She was surprised I was the only person on the ship since it belonged to you.”
“I can see why she might think that.”
“She knew about this place. No surprise. She didn’t know it was gone.”
“So hardly the all-seeing, all-knowing divinity that I was concerned about,” Natalya said with a grin.
“Yeah but she knew something about the Mindanao. I’m not sure what but as soon as I mentioned it, she looked it up. The only registered Mindanao is over in Tellicheri, I think. That one isn’t a Barbell.”
“Well, and the Melbourne Maru wasn’t always called the Melbourne Maru,” Natalya said.
“She knew that, too.”
“What? About the Melbourne Maru?”
Zoya nodded and took a sip of coffee.
“Spooky?” Natalya asked.
“I’m leaning that way,” Zoya said. “If not military then at least paramilitary. Clandestine fits that frame pretty well.”
“Then why list it on Inky’s charts?” Natalya asked.
“Why was your father there?”
Natalya actually felt her eyeballs bulge.
“There’s probably a reason for both of those things and we just don’t know what they are.”
Natalya’s train of thought returned to an earlier stop. “So you told Dr. Stevens about our run-in with those assholes?”
“I did. I suggested that they might know who put a nuke in a can of food.”
“You sound pretty certain,” Natalya said.
“I am.” Zoya shrugged. “I had a lot of time to think while I waited for the non-instruction from Gram. Unless somebody decided to wire a couple tons of high explosive to the fusactor, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Why would they do it?”
“I don’t know. Claim jumpers, maybe?”
“They certainly didn’t leave enough of the station to loot,” Natalya said.
“They weren’t supposed to wipe out their own bridge and forward Burleson emitters either, I bet.” Zoya paused. “But that’s a good question. What would have happened to that can if it had gone off a stan or so later?”
“Which brings us back to the Mindanao,” Natalya said.
“If we got rid of the infestation, we’d have some basic housing and power. They’ve got a nice environmental section and crew berthing for what? A couple dozen?”
Natalya shrugged. “Something like that. The mess deck and galley would be useful until we could get our own up and running.”
“My thinking as well. The bridge is gone. It looked like the data closet was gone, too, but there must have been enough autonomous processing power that the ship’s maintaining a basic life-support protocol.”
“Yeah, it’s all nice but it presupposes the assholes are gone. We don’t have that capability.”
Zoya grinned. “No, we don’t.”
Natalya frowned at her for a moment before she caught the meaning. “Spooky.”
“Not like we can ask for help from them, but we can lay out the argument and let them make up their minds,” Zoya said.
“So we have a place to put an advance team. All we need now is the advance team,” Natalya said.
“Well, we think we’ll have a place, but essentially. Yeah.”
“Where do we find an advance team?”
“I don’t know yet but I suspect we’ll hear from your father soon. If not, we should have comms back within a few days. We can ask Pop-pop.”
“Would he tell you?”
“Depends on whether or not he has to dodge Gram.”
Chapter 29
Smelter Seventeen:
2368, February 13
Natalya studied the console for the millionth time. “A bigger hammer?”
Zoya nodded. “I thought it meant something to you.”
“He always said, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, get a bigger hammer.’ It’s apparently some really old joke from ancient Earth.”
Zoya looked at her with a laugh. “Really? Ancient Earth?”
“It was a joke. I used to ask him if it was from some time period or place or other and he’d always answer ‘older.’ I’m not really up on ancient history so I ran out of guesses after a while.”
“Well, he said his place was two stars over from here.” Zoya shrugged. “Just not which two stars or what direction.”
Natalya frowned. “It couldn’t have been very far if he was a regular visitor.”
“Can you get a list of every system within three Burleson units?” Zoya asked, sipping her morning coffee.
“It’s a long list. None of them are hammers.”
“So no Mjolnirs or John Henrys or anything?” Zoya asked.
“Nothing I recognize as a big hammer.”
“He’ll be around. You can ask him then.”
“It may not even be on here,” Natalya said.
“I’m pretty sure he was looking at the console when he said it.”
Natalya snorted in frustration and shut the terminal down just as the lock-call buzzed.
“You expecting company?” Zoya asked.
Natalya laughed in spite of herself and wandered back to look. The lock opened to Ahokas standing on the ramp, a frown on her face.
“Hi. Something wrong?” Natalya asked.
The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. You might want to see this.” She stepped off the ramp and walked out of the bay.
Zoya looked over Natalya’s shoulder. “If she thinks we should look, maybe we should.”
Natalya nodded and followed in Ahokas’s wake with Zoya strolling along beside. Ahokas waited at the foot of the stairs but started up them as soon as Natalya came through the door. Natalya glanced at Zoya with a shrug and they followed along behind the woman.
At the top of the stairs, Ahokas pointed in the direction of the Mindanao. “I noticed it about five ticks ago,” she said. “I wasn’t sure it was real until it repeated.”
In the distance a light blinked. At first Natalya thought it was just random flashing until she saw the staccato pattern. “Morse?” she asked, looking at Zoya.
Zoya nodded. “I think that’s our cue.”
“Can you read it?” Ahokas asked.
“It says ‘ahoy,’” Zoya said. “Do you have any way to shine a light in that direction?”
Ahokas shook her head. “Sorry. No.”
Zoya patted her on the shoulder. “Never mind. We’ll just go check it out.” She nodded to Natalya and they trotted down the stairs. In less than five ticks, they launched from the dock and aimed the Peregrine toward the flashing light.
“You know what you’re doing?” Natalya asked.
“Not exactly, no,” Zoya said. “But I think I know that pilot.”
“I thought you said you didn’t meet anybody over there besides that Rachel woman, Dr. Stevens, and my father.”
“Remember the cloaked ship?”
“Of course.”
“When I was rotating the ship to try to find them, I stopped the rotation when I spotted them so the bow was pointing right at them. I flashed the front spots.”
Natalya looked at Zoya. “You sent ‘ahoy’?”
Zoya nodded. “There’s only one person out there who knows that, unless the pilot reported it.” She shrugged. “We’re out and moving in their direction now so they know we’ve seen them. I’d expect them to bug out before we get close enough to see anything incriminating.”
As if on cue, the flashing stopped.
“Now what?” Natalya asked. “Just wander over than go aboard?”
“One of us should. You’re the more qualified to determine if we can move the ship safely.”
The thought of getting back into her softsuit did nothing for Natalya’s peace of mind, but she stood and headed for engineering. “Do we have any more lifelines?”
“Should be a couple in my suit’s thigh pocket. I always keep spares.”
“If I’d known we’d be going through them so fast, I’d have picked up a case at Margary.”
Zoya’s laugh echoed all the way down the passageway and into engineering.
The distance melted away while Natalya got suited up. She plopped down in the pilot’s couch and looked out at the damaged ship. Zoya had the external spotlights on as the Peregrine drifted around it. The big ten-meter docking ring at the bow yawned open, a flare lighting up the entry.
“Looks like our invitation,” Zoya said. She looked over at Natalya. “You ready.”
“As I’ll ever be, but I swear if they shoot at me again, I’ll kill somebody.”
Zoya chuckled. “There aren’t a lot of things I’d bet on. This is one of them.”
Natalya stood up again, fumbling with her helmet for a moment. “Yeah, but which way?”
Zoya shook her head. “I thought you were the fearless Toe-Hold explorer.”
“I’m good with Toe-Holds. It’s people shooting at me that makes me unhappy.”
Zoya stood and gestured at her helmet. “Latch it. Lemme check your suit.”
Natalya latched her helmet down and made sure all her seams were tight.
Zoya walked around her, tugging here, patting there. When she completed the circuit, she checked the helmet seal before giving Natalya a thumbs up.
Natalya nodded and headed aft to the lock.
Zoya’s voice came through her helmet speakers. “Just like
before.”
“Got it,” Natalya said, spooling out one of the lifelines.
“Maneuvering,” Zoya said. “Grab something.”
Natalya wrapped a gauntlet around the locking lever and held on.
“Just a little closer,” Zoya said. “You’ll be right in the mouth of the docking ring.”
Natalya peeked out the tiny porthole in the outer door and watched the ring get closer and closer.
“The Peregrine could almost land in there,” Natalya said.
“We’re just a bit too big for the lock to cycle with us in it,” Zoya said. “I’m pretty sure we don’t want to chop off the tail—or the bow.”
“I said ‘almost.’”
The view stabilized as Zoya matched the vector.
“It’s stopped spinning,” she said.
“What?”
“The ship has stabilized. Last time we did this, the ship had a bit of wobble on it.”
“Wonder who did that?”
“We’ll probably never know. We’re here. You can go any time.”
Natalya snorted. “Don’t rush me.” She pushed the lock cycle control and listened as the sounds around her faded out. The light turned green and the outer door opened. “You weren’t kidding,” Natalya said.
“I may have gotten a little too close. Are we clear of the outer door?”
Natalya got a firm grip on a conduit and leaned out to look at the ring. “Yeah. Looks like at least a meter clearance. You sure this is the way to go?”
“Just clip on and run a line to the outside latch on the door.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m just checking.” Natalya swallowed hard and reached out to clip her new line to the grab bar outside the lock, made sure it was clipped to her suit, and stepped out into nothing. The tiny push from her boot started her spinning into the interior of the lock. “Newbie mistake.”
“What’d you do?” Zoya asked.
“Pushed off before I was ready and started to spin.”
“You all right?”
“Just embarrassed. I’ll bump into something soon and can get reoriented.” It took only a moment to do so and get her first line linked onto the outer door. She clicked in her second line and pushed into the lock, lowered herself to the deck, and keyed the cycle. “Cycling now.”
The big door closed and Natalya felt the familiar relaxation of her suit as she began hearing more around her. When the light turned green, she keyed the inner door open and stepped aboard.