Captive Galaxy 1: The Bellerophon: Ambush

by J. W. Kurtz

  "Yeah, I think we all have a 20-meter length. About a centimeter thick. Rated for 10-tons weight. Not quite as strong as the space elevator tether stuff but it does what we need it to do...why?" Bachman asked.

  "Just give me a length and I'll show you why. Then you'll kick yourselves for not figuring this out for yourself," Wray said.

  Chavez complied and withdrew his coil of buckyball-poly rope from an auxiliary pouch affixed to his matte black colored light armored battlesuit and presented the Captain with the requested line. Wray then went to work. He quickly began weaving the material with his well-worked hands, hands that worked in a fashion that could only be described as a furious magical blur.

  "While at the academy they taught us astrogation," he said as he completed a couple fast knots and weaved strands in his build, "they instructed us on the finer points of space combat tactics," he continued as his creation began to take a real discernable shape, "we learned about the broad engineering aspects of interstellar space craft and problem solving in high stress situations such as is common on starships," and finally he presented Chavez and Weston with a cradle wide enough to bear the small but very heavy box complete with a set of braided handles for ease of carry. "And they also taught us how to tie nautical knots, that until now I have never once used, seeing as how there isn't much use in this age of magnetic couplers and what not. Now take this thing, log it in the system, and secure it in the pursers vault. I'll grant you two biometric access before you get there," Wray directed.

  "Oh, and if I may add... maybe find an analog scale so we know exactly how much that thing actually weighs. Just out of curiosity. So we know just how little it actually weighs and how big'a pussies you two are being," Bachman said.

  "Roger, Boss!" the two replied in unison enjoying what they perceived was a good natured ribbing amongst warriors.

  The pair, Chavez and Weston, placed the heavy Minervan box, protecting the mystery material, onto the cradle and hefted the load using the thickly braided handles.

  "Wow. Perfect! Why didn't I think of that?" Chavez asked.

  All three heads immediately turned to Weston for the expected smartassed response. She bit her lip refusing to give them the satisfaction. After a moment, when the pair were about to depart, no doubt in search of an analog scale before locking up the haul, Weston finally broke her silence but it was with a question and not with a barb aimed at her partner.

  "Captain, how much do you think this stuff is worth?"

  It was a common question on the mind of a privateer crew undertaking such work and the crew of the Bellerophon was no different in this regard than any other operating about the transit space lanes of humanity.

  Hand scratching his chin in thought, the Captain responded, "hell, we don't even know what it is, but I'm betting the science division of I2 will pay through the nose for it. The box alone could be worth the cost of operations for the time we've been sitting out here with our line in the water. Who knows what's even inside it...could be worth a lot. I can tell you it's something I've never seen or even heard about before. Let me make this clear to you two before you are off," both Chavez and Weston were looking intently at the Captain, " DO. NOT. OPEN. IT. Got it?"

  "Affirmative, Boss," the two answered again in unison and then the mismatched pair tromped off on their mission and left Wray and Bachman in their wake. The grav sled, sitting on the deck nearby in its artificially induced non-functional state abruptly sprung back into the air with the departure of the Minervan box, showering the immediate area with nuts, bolts, small parts, and tools from haphazardly piled surface of the conveyance.

  Wray and Bachman silently watched Chavez and Weston walk away toward the main maintenance locker. Both new that the two were most likely in search of an analog scale prior to heading to the secure lockup in the pursers compartment. A smirk steadily grew on the face of Bachman as he thought of the two weighing the item, which had only been suggested as a joke.

  It was Wray who broke the silence first with a question that he was sure he already had an answer to in his mind.

  "What do you think they talk about? You know when they're together with their badly kept secret."

  "I don't think they do much talking when the hatch is secured, Captain. They're a funny pair I'll admit that. If they aren't fucking they're fighting," Bachman said with a sarcastic tone.

  Wray smiled at Bachman's observation.

  Chapter 4:

  Time: 14:25 (Zulu)

  Wray led Bachman up the short ramp of the Standard Class shuttle Osprey. The two did a quick review tour of the ship in the same order Bachman had gone through immediately after the ship had been taken and secured by his team. Nothing new stood out to the Wray, but he did inspect further the antique firearm in the common area for several long moments. He had never fired anything like it, and with caution due to his unfamiliarity, he was very observant and careful in not putting his finger anywhere near the trigger.

  The 23rd century still saw slug throwers in use, many in fact, but they fired caseless ammunition and had little felt recoil due to an integrated dampening system. A dampening system, or mass canceller, that was of course backwards engineered from technology recovered from one of the Minervan sites and exploited by one of the three major corporations.

  A single round from the rifle Wray now held sat upright on a side table nearby where Chavez left it after demonstrating the antique weapons operation to the boarding team almost an hour earlier. Chavez's "expertise" of such operation having been gained by watching old entertainment vids. The Captain handled the live round for a moment and then dropped it into a side pocket of his overalls. Wray nodded a silent "ok" to Bachman who then led him to the adjoining stasis-sleep cabin.

  Most of the system on the Osprey were on standby, with the power supplied by auxiliary internal backups. None of the displays were operating and the lighting was clearly cut to minimums in the cargo area, commons, and cockpit, but in the stasis-sleep cabin it was a different story. Here the more than half-dozen data displays were very much alive. There was a buzz and hum clearly audible in the air as energy fed the laboring systems to keep the occupants of the stasis couches alive.

  Wray thought to himself it rather amusing that the stasis couches were ever considered to have a remote relation to any sort of leisure furnishing such as a couch. To him, and he was sure to most any other person, the "couches" more closely resembled coffins. The six stasis-sleep couches in the compartment appeared to fit the description of coffin nicely in that none of them had viewing ports. Wray wondered if the idea of calling them "coffins" was every submitted by a wiseass engineer who thought himself a vampire only to have the marketing department name it "couch" so those that signed on for interstellar flight didn't panic. If you looked at it logically just being in a ship already placed you in a coffin of sorts. And stasis couches were really nothing more than a coffin within a coffin.

  Lost in his musings, the Captain didn't initially pay mind to the lone figure in the room looking over the displays and checking the readouts next to each occupied receptacle.

  "Captain, welcome to the Osprey," Ayad said with a wide smile. "I don't think she's been in service very long. Before we shut everything down, except in here of course," he waved to the stasis couches and occasionally beeping displays, "I downloaded her communications records, registry info, and engine calibration logs. The frame and engines are matching serials with less than 10-roundtrip jaunts between the Minerva system and Sol. Just over twelve hundred light years in total. She's practically brand new. She'll fetch a pretty penny if we part her out, once we re-write her serials, of course. But if we could swing it, I'd suggest we consider doing a mask job, install a cloned transponder and such, and retain her. She'd be a nice multipurpose boat. Lots of modifications and upgrades can be done to this frame. I've always found it strange that The Corp always keeps these things stock...I wonder if their quartermaster and transportation divisions require that their directors all have OCD or somet
hing. You notice how every interior of their corporate ships, be it a security ship or shuttle, is white? White deck, white bulkheads, white overhead. Makes me dizzy sometimes..."

  Wray noted Ayad started to talk faster and faster. He did this when he got excited. He slipped into Farsi when he was really excited. Wray put up a hand to stop him prior to Ayad reaching that point.

  "Sounds good. We'll have to run the numbers and take a look. I agree she'd be a handy tool to use. But, if we can sell her whole or even part her out and pay for some of the laundry list of repairs the Belle' needs, then that's what we'll have to do."

  Ayad's shoulders slumped slightly at this. He was really getting excited about the prospects of keeping the Osprey and "tricking her out" as he would say. Wray had truly caught him just prior to an excited Farsi slip.

  "Aye, sir," Ayad said. "If it helps to keep her, please consider taking my share for this last hop and putting it toward repairs for the Belle'. I really want this boat."

  "Noted, Ayad. I'll be running the numbers as we transit back to the Cove. I'll have a plan before we dock." Wray said. "Now, if you wouldn't mind, I'm interested to hear about the crew here and that datapad you recovered."

  "Sounds good, sir."

  Ayad gestured with a wide sweep of his arm at the four active and well lit couches. The two that were unoccupied remained darkened boxes. All six, active and inactive alike, were lined up against the port inner hull plating between two heavy bulkheads ribs. Numerous conduits, both clear and opaque, ran from the couches like shepherded snakes across the deck to the monitoring station near the hatch where Wray, Bachman, and Ayad stood.

  "Four sleepers. And four mysteries. One of the three is either I child or a small adult woman I suspect. Normally there is a full bio and log for each sleeper. Strangely this is absent. We also ran an RFID scan which came up a big empty. If we popped the couches open for a visual it would then auto initiate the waking sequence, which we don't want to do right now, correct?" Ayad stated rhetorically knowing the answer from his knowledge of the standard operation procedures of the Captain. "I can't alter the auto waking sequence with a software fix because that particular command sequence is hardwired into the firmware of each individual couch. It's a safety protocol. Now, two of the four appear to have injuries that, though significant, do not register as being life-threatening at the moment. They'll survive as long as they're kept under, I think."

  A frustrated look came over Ayad's face, temporarily obscuring his dark features.

  "No word's come from the Doc yet regarding the data I sent him. No news is good news maybe, yes? I ran a diagnostic on the medi function and it comes back clean. Nothing wrong with the unit. I don't know why the medical nanites aren't having any positive impact on treating the two. Again, they aren't dealing with life-threatening trauma so they should be working fine. Instead the medi nanites were having the opposite effect."

  "What? The medical nanites are hurting the two injured sleepers!?" Bachman asked with surprise.

  "Yes. Exactly. So I shut 'em down until Dr. Skansi can figure out a proper line of treatment that won't require breaking operational protocols, like taking them out of stasis," Ayad stated. "Almost immediately upon shutting down the intravenous release of medi nanites, the two injured sleepers biosigns actually began to improve, and rather quickly at that. This is an enigma to me. I Don't know what to say. I'm hoping to hear, or maybe not so much hear, but read the report the Doctor completes. We know he won't say anything. The mute. But at least we can expect a lengthy detailed report. He seems to enjoy writing dissertations or something."

  "He wasn't hired to talk your ear off, Ayad. He was hired because his medical work, especially emergency aid, is top notch. Oh...and he was the best I could afford with the available credits. I'll get word to him to hurry up his assessment of the data you forwarded. For now we'll keep 'em all under, because if we wake them and they regain consciousness...well, I don't want to deal with that. You both know that goes one of two places. I don't space people," Wray said looking a silent Bachman in the eyes as he made the statement clear, "and 'indentured servitude' is just slavery by another name, and that's not how I do business so selling them is also out. I'll have to sort through the options when more information is available especially if one of the four is a kid," Wray stated definitively. "Okay. Now how about this datapad. Will you be able to unlock it, Ayad?"

  The atmosphere in the room became perceptively more comfortable as the subject changed. Talk of 'spacing' people or selling them into 'indentured servitude' was well known to be a sore topic for the Captain. Most, if not all of the contemporary privateer operations of the time, didn't hesitate to do such things. Wray would always operate at a loss rather than resort to such immoral acts to prop the bottom line and he never hesitated to remind his crew of this solid policy. Standard operating procedure for the Belle' operation, regarding non-valuable detainees, meaning they were of low ransom value or high-risk, was to drop them still sleeping in their acceleration couches in secret at or near a settlement so they could be retrieved. Ideally they would wake up from stasis never knowing they were taken by privateers.

  "I think so. It'll take me awhile," Ayad replied. "But, like I said just after the boarding, the encryption is pretty tough. I estimate that only...about 10 percent or so is protected by a more simple level of encryption. I have an algorithm that should open those files in I'd estimate...an hour or so? I wouldn't want to even attempt to unlock the remaining 90 percent though. That stuff is tagged and laced with some pretty heavy crypto and what look to be traps that are at a level, I'm afraid to admit, surpasses my skills. Maybe with the help of...no, I'm not even going to suggest it."

  "You were going to say, to suggest, 'with the help of Samantha,' weren't you?" Bachman asked.

  "Shhhhhh!!! She'll hear you!" Ayad replied.

  "Ayad, it's okay. She's deactivated. We haven't had her online this whole hop," Wray assured his very worried crewman.

  "Yeah. Yeah, okay. I'm certain though, even when she's offline, she knows who and when she's been talked about. I know I'm paranoid but we all know the Belle's A.I. is nuts," Ayad said. His statement received no argument from Wray or Bachman. It was well known that the ships A.I. was batty, which was why she was nearly always offline. "She'd help for sure but I'm not going to be the one to suggest it."

  "Well, we'll hold off then...for now," Wray said evenly.

  "What about copying the whole datapad over to one of our empty and non-connected, non-synched, datapads and try to crack the whole thing there?" Bachman offered.

  Ayad nodded at Bachman for offering a possibly solution but his smile said that he had already considered the idea.

  "That would ordinarily be a good solution. But, in this case anyway, it's not gonna work. Each file folder, of which there are many mind you, has 'hooks' that the software allows you to grab, clone, and reposition a copy of a file from one location to another. We should be able to contact-share this datapad with one of our spares, or anything with a contact-share port for that matter." Ayad paused to make sure both Wray and Bachman were following his explanation as sometimes he talked over their heads. Seeing that they didn't have that lost look on their faces, he went on, "but it isn't going to work in this case. There are no hooks on the folders. No way to grab, clone, and copy the files. Now the copy function may be un-lockable, and maybe the 10 percent that my algorithm will open-up will allow us to unlock the copy function for the other 90 percent, but I very much doubt it. You don't go to this much trouble locking down a piece of tech and have such an easy workaround. Also of note, as you can probably see," Ayad said as he handed Wray the datapad in question, "is that this pad is of no make I've never seen. I'm willing to bet it was a custom job, which is rarely ever done because datapads are a credit a dozen. I mean shit, real paper is more expensive. Why spend the time and effort crafting something to the level of this datapad?"

  Wray held the thin semi-familiar piece of tech in his hands. Semi-famili
ar in that it was a piece of tech that as common as anything but it was easy to see that it was built like no datapad he had ever used or seen before. There were absolutely no seams on the front, back or sides. There were two small bumps or protrusions on the front, one on the lower left and one on the lower right. Were the protrusions sensors or inputs of some kind? It was very obvious that this device was not put together via mass production on a fabrication line. It was also light as air. Wray felt he should be afraid to drop it but it was absolutely rigid and solid in his hands. He turned it over and over again. It felt strong like a block of ferro-ceramic. He handed the odd datapad back to Ayad.

  "Okay. Get what you can on it unlocked and then bring it to me in my cabin. Don't let it out of your sight and definitely don't let anyone read what's on it once you unlock those portions. I want to have the first look to see if there are any hints as to why the rest of it is locked up so tight. Bachman will stay here until someone relieves him. Get to work on it."

  "On it, Boss," Ayad said before departing with datapad in hand to complete his assignment.

  "Bachman, I'll have a relief here for you in a couple minutes. I'll tell 'em myself not to touch anything in here, but it wouldn't hurt for you to add a reminder to the relief before you head out. I don't want anyone screwing around with anything they don't understand. That Minervan box, the unknowns in stasis here, those antique firearms, this datapad...if they come across anything I don't want any tinkering. They are to contact me directly," Wray stopped for a moment as he considered further instruction. "Task assignments will be online before the end of the next shift. You guys will be on stand down until then. Oh, and Kyler?" Wray asked.

  "Yeah, Boss?"

  "Your team did a good job today. I'm betting this minnow may indeed turn out to be a marlin afterall...once we sort out all the puzzle pieces that is."