Starbound Page 4

  “And good work on my neck as well, Commander,” she said.

  “Injury reports?” Maclintock asked of his XO.

  “Minor, sir. We broke clear with minimal damage as well,” Dobrina said.

  “Lieutenant,” called the captain. Duane Longer turned to face his commanding officer. “Well done. You and Cochrane will get a commendation for getting us out of the tunnel, but I’m afraid you’ll be buying dinner on our next stop at Candle.”

  Longer smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, then looked to me. I nodded. I’m sure the smile was because he knew I would cover more than my share of the dinner bill. It wasn’t something that a spacer on lieutenant’s pay could normally afford.

  “Request permission to dismantle the hybrid drive, Captain,” said Dobrina.

  “Sir, I respectfully disagree,” I chimed in. “That drive just saved us from a very uncertain destiny.” I was right about that. As clunky as it may have been, the hybrid drive had saved our collective asses.

  Maclintock looked to Serosian, who smiled and merely shrugged from his Historian’s station.

  “It did indeed save us, Commander,” Maclintock said to me. “But I think it needs some proving out yet. Shut the hybrid drive down and disconnect it from the main propulsion units, Mr. Cochrane. But keep it handy in case we need to hook it up again in the future.”

  “Sir, I have to protest—” started in Dobrina. This time Maclintock cut her off.

  “I hear you, XO. But for now let’s see what we can do about improving this thing, rather than just scrapping it because it might be dangerous,” he said.

  “Understood, sir,” she said, accepting her captain’s decision. I could tell she didn’t agree, but she was too professional to let that show.

  “Carry on.”

  I gave Duane Longer his marching orders for the hybrid drive, then turned my attention to our original destination. The station orbiting Jenarus 4 was about 53.2 AUs inbound from our present position, which was nearly equidistant between the fourth and fifth outer gas giants of the system, planets J-12 and J-13 on the system survey. I asked George Layton for an ETA.

  “I make it about nineteen hours at point four-oh light, sir,” he came back with. The chemical impellers topped out at about .25 light for any 24-hour time frame, due to their limited acceleration curve. We’d have to use the sub-light HD impeller system, which should be operating normally despite our little side adventure. I took that recommendation to the captain. He pulled an old-fashioned pocket watch from his jacket pocket. It was a completely archaic instrument, but one that accompanied any captain’s commission in either the Quantar or Union Navy.

  “That puts us in at about 1440 hours tomorrow, ship time,” Maclintock said, then repocketed the watch. “Make it happen, Commander,” he finished.

  And so I did.

  At the Jenarus 4 Station

  After a day spent overseeing the mothballing of the hybrid drive and a series of maintenance issues caused by our rough exit from the jump space tunnel, I found myself soaking under a hot shower in the evening. I had begged off dinner with the command staff due to the heavy maintenance schedule, and by the time I had arrived back at my stateroom my knee and back were aching. I had apparently taken more personal damage than I had first thought from our little adventure.

  After showering I sat on my sofa with a towel draped over me, rubbing ointment into my sore right knee. I had injured it a couple of times during my soccer apprenticeship with New Briz Blues, but never hurt it enough to require surgery. I probably should have iced it, but the warmth from the ointment felt good. I tried to get to my sore midback with the same treatment, but found I couldn’t quite reach the spot. Then I got an idea.

  Dobrina answered her com bell on the third ring.

  “You weren’t at dinner,” she said by way of a greeting.

  “I had a long maintenance list,” I replied.

  “No doubt,” she said in her always professional manner, “after that unnecessary shaking you gave the ship this morning.”

  “Are you still mad at me about the hybrid drive? I did save the ship, you know,” I said, only half joking. There was another moment of silence, then:

  “I am still mad, Peter. We probably would have found another solution to the crisis, but this going around my authority, it’s got to stop.”

  “I didn’t ‘go around your authority,’ Dobrina. I was innovating.”

  “Your innovation almost cost this ship dearly,” she said. Now I let things hang in silence for a moment.

  “You’re being very Carinthian right now,” I said.

  “It’s part of who I am, Peter, you know that. But, yes, I do believe in going by the book when in doubt. And I am still your superior officer.”

  “You are,” I admitted, “and I respect that. But I need flexibility to do my job properly.” She sighed audibly at this over the com line, then silence.

  “Your flexibility—”

  “I embarrassed you,” I said, by way of confession.

  “Yes.”

  I let the air hang open a bit more. “It won’t happen again. You are my ally, I know that. From now on I will clear all my ‘innovations’ through you before I start the projects.”

  She still stayed silent for another moment but it eventually seemed to satisfy her. “That would be acceptable,” she finally said.

  “And . . . I apologize for embarrassing you.”

  “Also accepted. Now was there anything else? I’m still nursing a sore neck from your little experiment today,” she said. I hesitated a moment, but decided to press on.

  “Actually, I was hoping to trade you a bit of massage on your neck for some of the same treatment on my back.”

  “Ahh . . . now we get down to it,” she said. Again the silence as she was considering her options.

  “I could just go down to sickbay,” she said.

  “And they’d never be done with you. Probably insist on a brain scan,” I replied.

  “True.”

  “Plus there’s the added benefit of my personal touch.”

  “Not sure how much of a benefit that is.”

  “Now, now,” I said. It took me five more minutes of back and forth to convince her to come over for mutual “treatment.” Our joint session lasted for over two hours, and when we were finished, all of our aches and pains had been massaged clean away.

  I drilled the marines under my command for two hours in the morning until I was satisfied they were ready, as were John Marker and Lena Babayan. We went over our proposed station ingress procedures, but they were really irrelevant until we actually got to the station. Valiant had surveyed it, but they had not sent down any teams or probes to fully map the layout. We would be going in blind, basically, and that made us all uncomfortable. I broke off one hour before our arrival in orbit around Jenarus 4 to join Maclintock’s final sitrep staff review at 1300. Colonel Babayan joined me.

  Inside the Command Briefing Room all senior staff and lower department heads were present. Maclintock looked up and down the table and then started in by asking for status reports. Each system’s chief gave their report until it eventually came down to the senior members at the head of the table. Maclintock turned to me for a report on the plans for exploring the station.

  “We’ll take both shuttles over. I’ve located what looks to be a landing bay, based on what the Valiant survey showed, but they never went inside. After that we have about three hours to do our exploration, determine what’s running, what’s not, and why the lights are still on,” I said. Maclintock turned to Colonel Babayan.

  “Do you concur, Colonel?”

  “I do, sir. This is an excellent opportunity for our teams to practice this kind of operation. And we need the practice,” she said. Maclintock turned next to Serosian.

  “Any insight, Historian?” he said. The tall man no
dded.

  “Just that the configuration of this station is unusual. It doesn’t follow standard First Empire designs for any known function, especially mining. There are parts of it that seem to be additions to the original configuration. If it’s First Empire, it could be . . . uh, many centuries old,” he said, hesitating.

  “As always, caution is the buzzword for the day, gentlemen,” finished the captain. “We’ll go in as soon as we reach an optimal safe distance.”

  “Which is?” asked Dobrina. Maclintock looked to Layton.

  “One thousand kilometers recommended, sir,” said Layton. The captain nodded.

  “Off you go then. Senior staff, please stay,” he said.

  We waited as the room cleared, leaving only the captain, myself, Dobrina, and Serosian. Once the door was shut, Maclintock turned to our Historian again.

  “So what’s with the ‘could be many centuries old’ statement?” he asked.

  Serosian leaned forward. “My initial longscope readings indicate parts of the station could be much older than that, sir. Most of it almost certainly dates from the Early Empire period, between three and four hundred years ago. But the other data I’m getting on my scans indicate carbon readings that could be in the multiple thousands of years,” he said.

  “A Founder station?” I asked. He nodded.

  “Possibly. Or it could be a Founder station that was abandoned and then taken over by the First Empire and used for their own purposes, modified to suit their needs. Either way, it looks to be an intriguing place.”

  “Or a dangerous place,” said Dobrina. She turned to Maclintock. “Captain, given the likelihood that this station is active as well as of dubious origins, I recommend we move much closer than a thousand clicks. More like ten, in case we have to conduct rescue operations.”

  “We’ll be able to handle ourselves on that station,” I said. “Rescue will not be necessary.”

  “This is an unknown scenario,” said Maclintock, turning to Dobrina. “One hundred clicks, XO. I want us close enough to act but far enough away to stay safe if something bad goes down. We’ll come in for you if you get in trouble, Mr. Cochrane, but I won’t be foolhardy with my ship either. Agreed?” he asked.

  We all nodded assent, even Serosian. “Recommend longwave coms for Mr. Cochrane and Colonel Babayan, Captain. I can keep in touch with them if conventional communications are knocked out or blocked,” he said.

  “Agreed. It seems we have a plan. I want to make it clear, Mr. Cochrane, if you encounter operating First Empire or Founder technology, your orders are to survey and catalog. Don’t touch a damn thing. Let’s just find out what this station is and what it does. Then we can determine if it’s an obstacle to First Contact with Jenarus, which is still our primary mission. Understood?” Maclintock said.

  “Understood, sir,” I replied.

  “Then let’s get to it.”

  I outfitted both units with hip-mounted cone jets just in case. The marines didn’t like them, as they added bulk, but I felt they might be essential if we encountered any zero-G areas on the station.

  We were wrapped up in our shuttles fifteen minutes prior to Layton’s signal that we had obtained a geostationary harmony with the station orbiting Jenarus 4 at a distance of one hundred kilometers. I checked my standard com links with Dobrina on the bridge and then with Marker and Babayan in the second shuttle, then switched to the longwave channel and confirmed the link with Serosian. The longwave link used a lot of EVA suit power to operate. I hoped we wouldn’t need it.

  Right on the dot I gave the signal, and both of the marine heavy bulwark shuttles started to move, each carrying sixteen marines, a commander, and a pilot: thirty-seven personnel in all, including me. We made our way out of Starbound’s landing deck and into space, making for the mystery station. Twenty minutes later and we were approaching close to what we thought was the station’s massive landing bay.

  The station seemed dark and abandoned from the exterior as we approached. I ran several scans with the limited longscope technology available aboard the shuttle but got back no readings of power anywhere. I posited that this could be because of an energy-signature dampening field as a possible defense mechanism, or it could be that Valiant was simply wrong and the station was dead. But I doubted that Valiant and her Historian could miss something that important.

  “Send out a probe,” I ordered our female shuttle pilot, Lieutenant Page. We all watched on the monitors as the probe ran over the face of the station, bouncing blue light waves off the surface both to map it and to take telemetry readings. A second later, John Marker, my marine commander, stuck his head into the cramped pilot’s nest.

  “Are we going in or not?” he asked in his usual gruff way. I turned to my friend, the descendant of fearsome Maori warriors.

  “Not just yet, Sergeant,” I said. “We’re going to let the probe do its job first.”

  “My marines are getting bored, Commander. Best hurry it up before they start chewing on the bulkheads.”

  I smiled at him just a bit. He was a comrade as well as a friend, but I wouldn’t let that sway me. “Station please, Sergeant,” I said back.

  “Sir!” he said and popped his helmet back on, disappearing back into the hold. I smiled and turned back to my shuttle pilot.

  “What have we got, Page?”

  “The probe has penetrated the landing bay’s environmental field and made it inside, sir, holding position there. Scans indicate the deck material itself is a metal alloy in some places and an indeterminate material in others, something like ceramic. The deck has gravity, but there’s no air or heat inside the bay. It’s a vacuum, sir,” she said.

  “An environmental field but no environment? That’s curious. That and the gravity field indicates there’s power on somewhere inside, even if we can’t detect it,” I said.

  “The environmental field could indicate that the bay was decompressed to vacate something unwanted, and then restored afterward, but the environment wasn’t,” Page said. I took in a deep breath, thought about Marker and his men back in the hold and Colonel Babayan’s troops in the other shuttle, and the risks to them. Then I made my decision. “We’re here to explore. Let’s go explore. Take us in, Lieutenant, and order Colonel Babayan to follow.”

  “Aye, sir,” she replied. I took one more look at the station, dark and foreboding on my display, and sighed. I hoped we were doing the right thing.

  We breached the environmental barrier without incident, a static field hugging the contours of our shuttle as we came in and landed on the debris-littered deck. I watched as the second shuttle joined us, then ordered Sergeant Marker to deploy his troops.

  Two minutes later and I was on the deck myself, surrounded by our units. The deck was strewn with debris, smashed machinery, and wrecked equipment panels. There were dark streaks of fire damage on the walls, as if there had been a pitched coil rifle battle here in the past. Whether that past was recent, old, or ancient remained to be discovered. The main hangar doors leading inside the station were blown off or disintegrated, with no trace of them except jagged edges of scorched metal near the threshold. It was enough to give me pause.

  “I want a squad to reconnoiter that hallway. Two guards each at the shuttles. The rest of us are moving out,” I ordered. Marker and Babayan barked out their orders and a squad of five went to the door threshold and then out into the darkness. The unlucky pairs of guards took their defensive positions on the shuttles, the pilots also remaining inside as a precaution. You didn’t want to risk losing your way off a hostile station on a reconnoiter. The rest of us formed a single rank to enter the hallway with a squad in front, followed by Marker and Babayan, then another squad, then me, and the rest spread out behind.

  After thirty seconds our original reconnoiter unit signaled it was safe for us to move up, and we did.

  The hallway was broad and wide, the kind
of thing you’d expect of a utility corridor designed for moving cargo, but it was massive in scale and very, very dark. The gravity was consistent with the landing bay, and near as I could tell it was close to one Earth gravity. We’d have no need to activate our own gravity units to stay stuck to the deck.

  I let Marker and Babayan deploy their troops as they felt comfortable doing, following along in my place with the pack. I flashed my helmet lights on the walls, and saw that the same dark streaks of singed metal or some other material were present all along the hallway. We progressed about thirty meters at a time, taking our time to make sure we stayed together. I watched as the helmet lanterns of the marines would push forward in groups of five and then stop, being passed by a second group, and so on, until their light vanished in the encompassing darkness. After ten minutes of this I got a private call from Marker, who was running the point for our expedition.

  “I’m here,” I said into my private command com.

  “I’m about fifty meters ahead of you, sir,” started Marker. Then he hesitated. “I think you’re going to want to see this.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. I ordered a full stop for our entire unit and then started forward alone, using my helmet lantern to illuminate the few meters in front of me as I passed by several members of the excursion squad. Up front a cluster of five marines had their lanterns running over something large blocking the hallway. Except for the lantern lights of our marines, there was nothing illuminating the hall.

  I came up and pushed between a pair of marines and in next to Marker, who was closest to the object. I walked slowly, flashing my lantern over the surface of the thing, running it back and forth. After a few moments I focused on one particular area. The object was made of a dull greenish metal, covered in singe marks and the gray/green glitter of metal exposed to vacuum for too long. But what I saw was indisputable.

  “Is that an eye?” I said aloud.

  “Looks like it, sir,” said Marker reluctantly. I ordered Babayan and another squad of five marines forward. Together we bathed the object in light with our lanterns.