Defenders of the Rim: Beginnings: A Far Future SciFi Thriller

by Randal Sloan

  Lift-off that next morning had been anti-climatic, the flight out completely routine. Her small crew had already done their own testing of all the ship’s systems, even though the ship had completed its shakedown cruise prior to its delivery to the spaceport. All the systems were performing perfectly, but Jarra didn’t push things in their flight just yet. First, she wanted to get her own feel for the ship and how well it would handle, and secondly, she didn’t want any potential spies for their enemy to know just what this ship could do.

  As they neared the hyperspace boundary, she used her implants to query Galen for an alternate course. She wanted one a little more conservative for all her watchers to see and she also wanted the destination to appear to be somewhere other than where they were going. Once again, any potential spies needed to be kept in the dark.

  “Gabo,” Jarra spoke out loud so the entire crew could hear. “Please make sure that we haven’t been followed. I don’t want anyone to know we were given scans of the probes entry point, so I want to keep our approach to that area a secret.”

  Gabo spent a few moments looking at his 3D VR display. “We’re clear now if you wish to alter course.”

  “No, let’s give it a couple more minutes; if it’s still clear, then we’ll go.”

  A few moments later brought them to where they were now. Gabo was still working his scanners, but their course was clear. Finally, he appeared to be satisfied, looking up to her smiling face.

  “Everyone ready?” Jarra asked, more or less rhetorically. Of course, there was no answer. “Then here we go. Off to who knows where, working for the good of the Empire and the Rim Patrol. No turning back now and who knows what tomorrow may bring.”

  Little did they know!

  #

  Sasha had wondered what she would be assigned to work on next after she sent her report off to Prince John. Although she reported through the Imperial Intelligence office, her orders had come directly from the Crown Prince. She figured she would be forgotten about for a while and would be stuck on Rigelus until someone remembered she was still there.

  Most people wouldn’t think Rigelus was a bad place to be located, Sasha knew. A rather temperate climate covered most of the northern hemisphere of the planet and the District Capitol’s location near the eastern seaboard of the main northern continent made that even more compelling. She even had better quarters than a sub-lieutenant was supposed to be given, not that she was complaining. After that frigate, anything else seemed roomy anyway. No, it was just a little too far off the beaten path for her to do her usual full data dives.

  Sasha’s speculation wouldn’t take long to come to an end. The next day after sending her highly encrypted message off to the Crown Prince, she received a reply. She immediately noticed Prince John had done a good job encrypting his reply to the same high degree, bringing a smile to her face. He wouldn’t make a bad Intelligence weenie. She immediately started decrypting the message.

  Impatiently she awaited the results from the decryption program. What could the Prince be sending back to her? Sasha realized her impatience was more so than normal, finally admitting to herself she was anxious to hear from him. Finally, the decrypted message appeared on her implants.

  Thank you for your detailed report. Your abilities may well prove to be an extremely important advantage to the Empire over our enemies. Know that plans are already in motion to act upon the information in your first report. As part of that effort, I will be out of contact for some time, so please don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while.

  Unfortunately, your second report has placed me in a dilemma. I cannot divert resources to you right now for your protection, much as I wish to do so. I need you to follow up on your research on the Governor and his staff, even though I fear that will place you in danger. I can only ask you to be very careful.

  If you do get into trouble, I have worked in the past with Sergeant Jashion Kruger, currently serving as Armory Sergeant out of the Rim Patrol District office. Contact him and he will be able to protect you to some extent.

  I cannot express how important it is to me for you to be safe. As soon as I can return to the area, I will check in on you.

  Your friend,

  John

  Sasha couldn’t help but stare at the message for some moments. Perhaps she was reading more into it than she should, but it just seemed something more was there than would be there if it was only her marching orders. Maybe that was just her own feelings getting in the way. And he called me his friend!

  Finally, shaking her head, Sasha got to work. No sense in worrying about it. After all, she had a job to do. This was going to take much time and care to do it safely as John said. She still needed to get results, so there was no way to play it completely safe.

  #

  At first the search by the Aeres was uneventful, the ship merely following the breadcrumbs. Unfortunately, although there were no interstellar birds to eat the breadcrumbs, other phenomenon existed on the edges of the space-ways that for practical purposes did eat the trail. More than once they had to double back on the path to pick it up again, but Gabo always managed. Truth be told, the Aeres’ sensors were as good as anything out there in the Empire, especially with his expert manipulation. Any other ship would have lost the trail, which was what the powers behind the drones had counted on.

  Nevertheless, the search took them days. Gabo had trained the others on the sensors, so they were able to spell him at times when the trail was clearer, but it was slow going. It wasn’t as bad as some of Jarra’s trips which she had taken with her father in the past, and there were sections where the hyperspace clouds were thin enough they could make up time in those areas. The good thing about the time was that it gave them all a chance to learn their ship and its capabilities. Jarra had found their top speed to be even faster than she had believed and all of the systems were cutting edge. Their stealth systems were second to none, something she expected to need when they reached their destination, wherever that was.

  Finally, the trail reached a relatively unknown system on the very edge of galactic space. It was so poorly represented that the system had only a designation and not a name. Jarra had Galen find them a hiding place in a small nebula just outside the system. She called a team meeting with them all in the ship’s galley.

  “This is it. We’ll rest here tonight and tomorrow we’ll rig the ship for stealth, taking her into the system in front of us. Before we enter, we’ll launch a com probe back to the District Capitol with all the information we have gathered so far, just in case something happens to us. That probe will take over a week to reach its destination, so I intend to complete our mission and return, if possible, before that probe makes it back.

  “I need all your input on the infiltration plan, but first, Gabo, tell us what little you can of the system from a long distance passive scan.”

  “Surprisingly more than you would think. With a red dwarf star at the center, the system only has three planets, but it has a couple of asteroid belts, probably the leftovers from would be planets. The system also has very limited hyperspace access, the eddies and currents only allowing access in a couple of places. Besides the remote location, that may be the reason they chose this site; they would only have to defend against the limited access points.

  “Only one of the planets is habitable, but it’s surprisingly temperate. It’s smaller than Earth, but it appears to be somewhat denser, so gravity should be only a little under earth norm. No jungles and no large deserts are apparent and the ice caps are small. Three small moons, none of them of any substantial size. It would have been a good find if it had been closer to the District Capitol, but stellar real estate is just like any other: location, location, location.”

  “Sara, what can you tell us about the social and economic factors regarding the planet?”

  Sara smiled pleasantly. She had done her homework too. “The planet was originally discovered over two hundred years ago, but it was too far out for col
onization. For some reason, a consortium of corporations purchased the rights to the planet, but they have no official presence here. Officially, as I said.

  “Buried in a shell game that would have been normal for a company with rights to a planet located in a much denser star group, I’ve found evidence that we have a small manufacturing plant in operation. Guess what is their only product produced here.”

  When no one answered, she smiled at them. “Educational drones, primarily sold to botanical gardens, museums, and what not.”

  “That pretty much pinpoints our source then,” Jarra said. “What we need to determine is if the manufacturer is an intentional accomplice, an innocent victim of someone hijacking the plant, or the source of something more sinister such as a rebel takeover or an alien invasion.”

  “We’ll include all this information in the data dump to the probe. Let’s talk about our plan for our next steps.”

  Jarra filled them in on the plan she had sketched out. With a few modifications as proposed by her team, by the end of their meeting they had a good plan. Would it be good enough?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Reconnaissance

  The planet was the perfect place if you wanted to hide — not the place to clandestinely investigate. But with Aeres’ state-of-the-art stealth technology and by moving slowly, they were able to slip into the solar system and hide away in the closest asteroid belt to the planet. There Gabo repeated his passive scans, building a picture of not only the target, but also the planet in general. His data grew rapidly, to the pleasure and surprise of his team. Unfortunately, among other things, he found something that none of them wanted to find — a surprisingly powerful defensive network!

  Sara was already working to hack into the plant’s systems and it didn’t take her very long to get into the first levels. They were actually using unencrypted transmissions for the basic functions! She knew that wasn’t going to give her the information they needed. However, one of the things Jarra had stressed to her team was patience. After all, their mission didn’t have a time limitation, and Sara was trying her best to keep that in mind. She finally found one of their encryption keys in an unprotected system and she was able to use that to get her into a deeper level. That led to other parts of the puzzle. After a few hours, her work started to come together.

  Galen, on the other hand, found himself running out of things to do. He quickly plotted a course to the planet using the moons to hide them in addition to their stealth. He plotted a course to bring them down to an area just outside the plant using the night side of the planet to slip them in undetected. He was getting bored, so he started scanning the radio frequencies being used by the plant. That was when they caught their first break.

  A small batch of drones launched from the plant. Because he was doing his frequency scan, Galen was able to pinpoint the frequency used to control the drones. He quickly verified it was correct by bouncing a signal off one of the moons to query one of the drones. Knowing the control frequency would possibly allow Sara to later take control of the drones, he excitedly sent the information to the team.

  Jarra had been building an overview of all the information they were gathering. Finally, she thought they’d had enough. Gathering the team back into the galley, she filled them in on additions to the plan she’d fleshed out over the past hours. She also gave them one more bit of information she knew they might need.

  “Great work, team!” Jarra told them. “Based on the defenses Gabo found, our plan has to depend on a stealth approach. Between the natural space defenses and the extensive planet-based defenses, this little planet is obviously important to someone who wanted to do bad things. Because of that, brute force will never let us get close enough to complete our fact-finding part of the mission.

  “As I see it, we have two choices. One, we could pull back and wait until they can send someone else to give us the firepower needed. Under that option, we would withdraw far enough out to just maintain surveillance until they get here.

  “The second option is much riskier. We have to figure out how to get down to that planet and take a look at that plant, attempt to capture one of the drones, and escape back out of the system. I wouldn’t be surprised if whoever is responsible for this has at least one ship hiding in the system. So our risk may be quite high with that option, especially since we know how easy it would be to block access to hyperspace from inside this system. Even a single destroyer might be able to block us so that we can’t escape.

  “That has to be a team decision. I believe our orders would support either choice, although I would say the spirit of them leans more toward the second option. Nevertheless, the risk is for all of us. What are your feelings about this? Any questions or concerns?”

  Galen looked over at the other two, making sure they were good with him being the spokesman. “First, I want to say that none of us want to stop now and hand our mission over to someone else. If they can even manage to do it. We have unique abilities that no one else has. Our stealth ability alone probably would make the difference.” When no one disagreed with his statements, he went on, “I do have some concerns about how you anticipate we can complete the second option.”

  “Let me outline the plan I’ve come up with and see what questions you have. Getting down there using stealth still looks to be relatively easy. We follow Galen’s course to get us down on the planet and close enough to the plant to approach. We hide the ship somewhere and observe on foot. If we can breach a section of their perimeter, I have something that will allow me to get inside to complete as much of our mission as possible. I’ll explain the details later.

  “Sara and Gabo will work on taking control of the drones. Sara, it is critical for you to find a way to put them in suspend mode so that we can capture at least one to study. In addition, if at all possible, I need you to figure out how we can interrogate one of the drones without our enemy taking back control and without it triggering a memory wipe or self-destruct.

  “Once we have our data from the drone, we will withdraw and call for help. Based on public and personal information, I believe we have help that has been clandestinely following us. I’m not sure how closely they’re following, so we still have to be careful.

  “So, what do you think? What changes to the plan do you suggest?”

  Once more Galen spoke for the group. “By far my big concern with your plan is this: Just how do you intend to safely get inside? We can’t risk our commander on a dangerous venture trying to personally infiltrate that plant.”

  “I’ll be as safe as I would be on this ship on a mission as dangerous as this one has turned out to be. I have something in our hold that I must swear you to secrecy regarding. No one outside the team can know. Do you all swear on the Emperor, who you swore to when you accepted your service to the Patrol?”

  When they began to nod, she went on, “I must have your verbal agreement.” She turned to each member of the team, recording their responses with her AI.

  As she looked to each of them in turn, all of the responses were, “Yes, ma’am, I do so swear.”

  “Sorry about that. It’s not my requirement by the way. I was required to agree to keeping the existence secret before I could retain possession of the item. I had to give the same oath.”

  By this time, the curiosity of the team outweighed their concerns. Galen looked at her with a near pleading look in his eyes. “Just tell us. You’re killing me with the suspense.”

  “I have a suit of stealth Marine Reconnaissance armor.” Jarra told them. She saw the eyes of the team widen at the implications of that and then a few questioning looks. “I’m going to have to get you to trust me that I have the legal right to own this, and that I know how to use it.”

  Jarra knew the last comment didn’t help them resolve their questions, probably raising even more questions as they thought it through. “I’m also going to ask you to wait until this mission is over and if you still want to stay with the team, I promise I will tell you everythin
g.

  “Any more questions?”

  This time there were none.

  #

  Carefully following the plot given to her by Galen, Jarra brought their ship down to the planet. She was so proud of her team. Not a one of them had even considered backing out of the mission, just as she knew they would decide. As they neared the planet’s surface, she switched over from the main drive, flying her ship entirely on anti-grav, using slight variations in the field to control their movement. She knew very few pilots that could duplicate that and she knew there was a level of risk associated with it, but it was necessary for the mission. It helped that the weather on the planet was quite tame. It was nighttime in the target area and it looked like the plant they were there to investigate was in suspended mode for the moment. That would be very helpful for their mission.

  Gabo was furiously working his scanners, trying to find them a safe place to land. Finally, he said, “I’ve got it. Bring us close to the cliff area over there. I’ve spotted a cave that looks like it’s big enough for you to fly the ship into. It should make us invisible to overhead flyers and we’ll only have to disguise the view from the entrance.”

  Jarra followed his directions carefully, navigating entirely on passive scans except for the feedback she received through her controls due to the anti-grav. Finally, they were close enough that she was able to spot the cave, easing them in until she felt it was safe to risk a tiny pulse on her active navigation equipment to finish the landing. She carefully settled them down, switching the outside stealth to match the view someone would see when looking into the cave.