by M. D. Cooper
Katrina knew what Troy left unsaid.
If they had jumped this far through space and time, an expectation that the Intrepid had exited anywhere close to the same location in both time and place was unrealistic.
If they had exited the Streamer in the same millennia, it would be a miracle.
“What do we do, Troy?” Katrina asked. “Do we go insystem?”
Troy said after a few moments of silence.
“Seems prudent,” Katrina said as she spotted a strange pattern in a familiar range of the EM spectrum. She isolated it and pulled the signal into the comm systems.
“Yeah,” Katrina whispered in a shaky voice.
“That’s…that’s Sirian encryption.”
Neither of them knew exactly what it meant—Sirians being in 58 Eridani, four thousand years in the future—but it couldn’t be good.
Katrina tried her old keys from her time as a spy for the Lumins and found that they opened the outer layer of the message, revealing the header and meta data.
“Well, now we know the name of this place,” Katrina said. “Bollam’s World.”
Troy’s tone was derisive.
“I’m seeing something really weird on scan,” Katrina said.
“Well, two ships just disappeared not far from here…”
A view of the system appeared on the cockpit’s main holodisplay, and a marker highlighted a point half an AU from the Voyager.
“Yeah…ohhhhhh.”
Katrina felt her mouth go dry as she read the label on the marker: ‘Jump Point 4A – New Eden’.
Neither of them spoke, and then another ship disappeared from Scan before two others appeared from nowhere. All the ships were appearing and disappearing at various locations around the periphery of the system, none closer than 50 AU to the Bollam’s World’s star.
Troy said eventually.
Katrina drew in a deep breath and fell back into her seat. “Me too. They have FTL. Troy…I…I don’t even know how to process this. I’m going to make some coffee.”
Troy replied.
Katrina pulled off her harness and pushed herself back down the ladder shaft to Deck #3 where the galley was located. Once she reached it, she paused and surveyed the room.
It was meant to seat over fifty people—the Voyager being intended to carry all three hundred of the Gamma Site’s personnel.
The large, empty space had always felt lonely while they were searching for the Intrepid, but now…now it felt worse. The Intrepid could have arrived at Bollam’s World hundreds of years ago. Or it could have shot past, and be further out, maybe as far as the Orion Nebula.
She had felt so certain that they would find the Intrepid, that in just a few years, she’d be sitting at Tanis’s kitchen table in her cabin by Ol’ Sam’s lake.
Now it felt like she had an entire galaxy to search.
Sorrow and despair suffused Katrina, and the emotions she had been holding in check for so long threatened to drown her. She placed a hand against the bulkhead, gripping a handhold as tears flowed from her eyes, forming small salty droplets all around her.
She let herself wallow in the sadness for just a minute before choking back the tears and wiping her face. There would be time enough for regret later. For now, she would allow herself a cup of coffee, and a snack of some sort, and then she needed to rejoin Troy in studying the system’s feeds.
Katrina reached one of the storage units and pulled out a packet of coffee. In zero-g she couldn’t brew it properly, so the instant suck-pack would have to do.
While the packet was heating up in the prep unit, she pulled some chips out of a cupboard and prised open the container. It was close to the last of the real food. Soon enough she’d be on paste.
Unless we go into this system…
There weren’t a lot of options. They needed more intel, and floating around out here wasn’t going to get it for them. What’s more, if these people really did have FTL, then determining if the Voyager could be upgraded to support it was high on the list of priorities.
The incongruity of being in a ship that had just—maybe—travelled faster than light, now needing an upgrade to travel faster than light was not lost on Katrina.
She pulled the coffee packet out of the prep unit and uncapped the straw, taking a long pull of the bitter, not particularly pleasant brew.
“I thought you went dark?” Katrina asked aloud.
“And it’s just ‘wondering’?” Katrina asked aloud.
“I’m on my way back up,” Katrina replied.
While she drifted up the ladder shaft, she reviewed the nearby habs and stations.
The system sported two habitable worlds, and there was a third, that may be in the early stages of terraforming, in orbit of the sixth planet, a large jovian listed as Kithari on the scan data.
That world was too deep in the system to visit, but the twelfth planet, a rock and ice plutino, had a number of stations near it. One was named ‘Tsarina Commerce District #3’.
Not too creative, but it looks well trafficked. Perhaps we can blend in there.
When she reached the cockpit, Troy already had the facility up on the holo.
“Yeah, it seemed like a good candidate,” Katrina replied. “I didn’t really look at a lot of details.”
“Sounds solid,” Katrina said in agreement.
As Troy communicated with the STC NSAI—who he referred to as ‘surly’ more than once—Katrina discovered that the beacons on the edge of the system could be queried for various databases with history, culture, and trade information.
The closest beacon was fifteen light minutes away, and a half hour later, Katrina was browsing the Bollam’s World Tourism Department’s welcome packet.
What she found flabbergasted her.
The Bollam’s World System had been colonized by Sirians, by a ship named the GSS Yewing. The name was familiar, and she dredged up memories of the Yewing from her school days.
The Yewing had left Sirius in 3814, supposedly travelling to Alula Australis where it had been granted a world to settle in the Future Generation Terraformer controlled system.
Katrina had always wondered why the FGT had opened up a world to the Sirians, of all people. She’d long harbored a suspicion that the Generation Ship Service had never made the world available to the Yewing—and that its destination was just another lie the Lumin government had perpetrated on the Sirian people.
In the end, it hadn’t mattered, the GSS Yewing had never made it to Alula Australis; it had been declared lost in 4012. Yet somehow, the Yewing had hit Kapteyn’s streamer and ended up here.
Katrina pulled up the stellar cartography suite. She knew that there was no way that Kapteyn’s Streamer passed anywhere near the Yewing’s route to Alula Australis—which meant the
ship had always been headed elsewhere.
It wouldn’t have surprised her to find that the Yewing had always been destined for New Eden with a plan to snatch the system from whomever it was legally assigned to.
However, it seemed that the Yewing had hit the Streamer as well, and arrived at Bollam’s World in 5123. At that time, the system had a few settlements and no terraformed worlds. The records made brief note of clearing out existing settlements before beginning terraforming work.
Katrina suspected she knew what the nature of that ‘clearing out’ had been. She bet that the Yewing’s colonists got to enact their plans of forcibly stealing a system after all.
And now, four thousand years later, they were still here.
Which meant that they knew about the Streamer, and possibly where ships would likely exit it. Though maybe exit points were effectively random, and no one would be looking—especially with ships appearing and disappearing via FTL all the time.
“We’ve just arrived, and already I’m looking forward to getting out of here,” Katrina replied.
“Oh, yeah? How fast?”
“Sweet starlight, that’s fast,” Katrina whispered. “I guess people can go pretty much anywhere now…it wouldn’t even be three weeks to get back to The Kap. I wonder—”
“Don’t what?” Katrina asked, suspecting what Troy was going to say, but hopeful it was something else.
Curiosity burned in Katrina’s mind, but she could tell by Troy’s statement that he was serious, and that wondering was probably better than knowing—for now.
“What is it?” Katrina asked.
Katrina let that sink in for a minute before replying. “What are they missing?”
“Are these graviton emitters all that’s more advanced?” Katrina asked.
“You can say that again,” Katrina interjected.
“I think we’ll need to hide that we’re from the past,” Katrina said. “That we have better tech than they do in so many ways puts us at risk.”
Katrina sighed. “Which we don’t have.”
Troy said.
“I don’t know,” Katrina said. “Feels too risky. I think that perhaps I should take the pinnace into the station and have you move further out…preferably stealthed.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
* * * * *
Katrina settled into the cockpit of the Victory’s small pinnace, and pulled herself down into one of the two seats before triggering the cockpit’s canopy to close over her.
Though the pinnace was small, it was well equipped. Behind the cockpit was a cabin with bunks for two, a small weapons locker, and even a san with a water shower. It also had beams that were more than just defensive, though she didn’t know what they would do against gravity shields.
In theory, such a shield could simply bend light away. She wondered if weapons in the eighty sixth century had upgraded as well to pack more punch.
The final feature of the pinnace was an ability to manage planetary landings, although she hoped not to need that ability on this trip.
“You worry too much, Troy,” Katrina replied. “You’re turning into a crotchety old grandmother.”
Katrina sighed as she fastened her harness. Troy was right; everything was turned on its head. Separating felt crazy, but no other plan had any higher chance of success.
“There’s some serendipity,” Katrina said. “The way they’re holding onto Sirian customs here, I’ll be able to blend right in. Don’t forget, I spent thirty years as a spy back in Sirius. Given the nanotech these people have, I should be able to do whatever I please down there.”
“If all goes well, I’ll be back in seven days. If it takes longer, I’ll get a message to you.”
Katrina smiled. Troy was a good friend, and he meant what he said. It felt good to know he had her back.
TSARINA COMMERCE DISTRICT #3
STELLAR DATE: 11.13.8511 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Bay 1342, Tsarina Commerce District #3 (station)
REGION: Tsarina, Bollam’s World System (58 Eridani)
Katrina eased the pinnace into the bay designated by Tsarina station’s STC. The ship drifted through the grav shield that stretched across the bay’s entrance, and she felt a slight jolt as the station’s graviton-powered docking system took over.
She powered down the vessel’s chem thrusters and watched a cradle rise out of the deck ahead, ready to accept the ship.
Through the pinnace’s windows, she could see that the bay was mostly occupied by smaller craft; some shuttles and small freighters also rested on cradles nearby.
Amidst the ships stood stacks of cargo. Streams of passengers and service teams threaded their way between the stacks and the loaders who were ferrying crates to and from the various ships.
It was just the sort of organized chaos one would expect from such a place.
Something that was missing was the familiar gravity assisted cargo sorting systems. Normally, outbound cargo was dropped down to receiving ships from warehouses and the ships making deliveries, which would be positioned high up in the bay. Here it was just one flat bay, with cargo being moved on floating pads.
Another change graviton emitters had wrought.
Katrin
a barely noticed as her pinnace settled into the cradle, but she assumed the docking was complete, as a ramp rose from the deck and extended to the cockpit.
When it stopped, Katrina punched in the command for the cockpit to open. As the vessel equalized atmospheric pressure with the bay, she stood and stretched.
It was time to put on a show.
The woman who stepped out of the pinnace was not the same as the one who had entered it. This one was an aristocrat who was used to getting her way, and unwilling to suffer fools.
Katrina knew that the best way to maintain a cover was to become that cover. This cover had a name: Verisa.
Verisa was dressed for the part. Before leaving the Voyager, Katrina had used a fab unit to alter a stasis suit and create a skinsheath, which was the current style within the Bollam’s World System.
The mode of dress was not entirely dissimilar to what she had worn back in Sirius—when she wasn’t undercover on Noctus stations.
The stasis suit was a light blue, and fit snugly. Katrina had even managed to enhance it to emit a soft blue glow; though it wasn’t capable of putting on the sort of light show that had been common back on Sirius—and may be required here to pass oneself off as a member of the upper class.
As she stood at the top of the ramp and surveyed those nearby, Katrina saw that few of the people present had clothing that glowed. She hoped that what she had managed with the stasis suit would suffice.
Her review of the bay complete, Katrina strode down the ramp toward a woman waiting at its foot.
“Weird hull configuration on your skiff,” the woman said.
The woman wore the uniform of a Tsarina Station employee. A tight, green, one-piece suit with brown boots that came to her knees, a wide brown belt, and a broad yellow stripe down her right side and arm. The suit had a soft glow to it, and in the center of her chest was the Tsarina logo: four yellow concentric circles, with a red, upside down, equilateral triangle overtop. A pair of brown gloves hung from a hook on the woman’s belt, along with a variety of tools and two datapads.
Handheld datapads; now that’s archaic, Katrina mused.