by Jason Fry
They turned the corner and saw the inner door of the airlock open. Lights were flashing inside, illuminating a crowd of men and women in spacesuits. Sirens sounded, signaling that the lock was about to close.
“Never mind—we’re running!” Carlo said.
They broke into an awkward trot, helmets clutched to their chests. Tycho heard someone yell. He pushed past a brawny refinery worker, who barked indignantly at him. They were ten meters from the lock when the sirens stopped.
“Go faster!” Carlo urged.
The gap between the airlock’s heavy doors began to narrow. Carlo dashed inside, with Tycho right behind him. He turned and saw Yana still a couple of meters away.
“Yana!” yelled Tycho, looking for a way to stop the doors.
“Idiot kids,” grumbled someone behind them. “If I get docked for being late, it’s coming out of your hides.”
Yana turned sideways and slipped through the closing doors, yanking her helmet in after her. The doors banged shut, and she shook her head, gasping.
“Helmets,” Carlo said, fitting his over his head and locking the collar. The airlock’s venting mechanism began to hiss.
Tycho locked on his helmet and pulled on his left glove, fumbling with the seal. Wind tore at his right hand as the lock’s pumps began sucking out the air. Yana struggled with her helmet, still panting. She had only one glove on.
The workers around them were yelling.
“Seal it up, you stupid dirtsiders! Seal it up!”
Tycho cinched his right glove shut. Yana looked frantically around the lock. Tycho saw her other glove lying on the deck. He dropped to his knees and handed the glove to her. The wind whipping past them began to subside as the pumps did their work.
“Tyke, we need to check seals,” Carlo said urgently, over the angry commotion around them. “If anything’s open, we’ll all burn.”
Tycho’s instincts screamed to help his sister, but he knew Carlo was right. He forced himself to look at the readouts on Carlo’s chest.
“You’re green,” he said.
“So are you,” Carlo said.
They turned and found Yana fumbling with her wrist seal. Sweat was pouring down her face, and they could hear her breath thundering over their suit radios. The workers around them had backed away, but there wasn’t enough room in the lock to protect them in case of an open seal, and their frightened gazes showed that they knew it.
The sirens began to blare again. Yana yanked at her wrist seal so hard Tycho feared she might tear it open. He forced himself to focus and examine the readout on the front of her suit.
“Yana,” he said, “stop. You’re green. It’s all right.”
Wind ruffled around them as hidden machinery pumped the nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Titan into the lock. The workers turned away, muttering in mingled anger and relief. A moment later, the outer doors split in the center, revealing the landing pad beneath a featureless orange sky.
“That was fun,” Yana gasped. “What was that crazy old woman so mad about?”
“Quiet,” Carlo said as the lock began to clear. “We’re not safe yet—we need to get on the ship right now.”
“What’s wrong?” Yana asked. “Nobody followed us—I was the last one in.”
“I’m not worried about who’s back there,” Carlo said. “I’m worried about who’s out here.”
They moved across the pad at a brisk walk, eyeing the spacesuited workers busy at various tasks. To their right stretched the broad expanse of the Kraken Mare. Undisturbed by wind or ripples, its surface formed a perfect mirror of the featureless sky. Glancing at it left Tycho momentarily confused between up and down, and he forced himself to look away.
“There’s no point hurrying,” Yana said. “It’ll take at least an hour to get a flight plan filed and approved.”
“We’re making our own flight plan,” Carlo said. “If those guys don’t stop us first.”
Tycho followed his brother’s eyes and saw a pack of spacers emerging from a squat structure near the shore of the lake. They wore mismatched spacesuits—all of them decorated with the white wolf against the black background.
Yana, behind her brothers, couldn’t see where Carlo was looking.
“What guys?” she asked. “We can’t just blast out of here, you know. It’s a big fine—”
“They can bill me,” Carlo said.
The lead spacer was pointing at them.
“Carlo—” Tycho warned.
“I see it! Run!”
They jogged for the gig, struggling in the bulky suits, breath booming in one another’s ears. Carlo tapped out a command on his wrist control as he ran. The gig’s gangplank began to descend.
“I’m flying,” he said as they rushed up the gangway. “Tyke, you handle the atmosphere exchange. Yana, sensors. Forget preflight.”
Tycho peered out the viewports as the gangplank sealed itself behind them. The spacers raced toward the siblings, carbines in their hands. Some came to a halt in front of the gig, while others ducked beneath it, out of sight. Something clanked against the hull.
“They’re breaking in!” Yana warned.
“Not with hand tools, they’re not,” Carlo said. “And they don’t have time to burn through. Just get the atmosphere exchanged and strap yourselves in.”
“You realize they’re all around us,” Tycho said.
Carlo grinned, the scar on his face flexing. “They’ll move.”
He slammed a bank of levers into the upright position, and lights winked on across the pilot’s console. A recording started to warn them about proper flight procedures. Carlo silenced it with a slap of his hand and pulled back on the control yokes. The engines whined, and the gig rose a meter above the landing pad.
“We are going to be in so much trouble,” Yana said. “Those aren’t pirates out there, you know. They’re port security, and—”
“I’m not sure there’s much difference out here,” Carlo said. He whipped the gig’s nose around in a full circle, and the spacers dodged, arms held protectively over their heads.
“We’re at vacuum,” Tycho said. “Opening the air tanks.”
A rattle told them the gig’s landing gear had retracted. Carlo nudged the gig forward on its maneuvering jets. Several spacers still stood ahead of them. One raised a carbine uncertainly, then lowered it in disgust, retreating as the whine of the gig’s engines rose to a roar and Carlo pointed the craft’s nose toward space.
“Don’t cook anybody,” Tycho warned.
“Not my style,” Carlo said. The gig rose smoothly into the orange sky, and within a few seconds the landing pad was a tiny rectangle far below them.
A chime sounded on Tycho’s board. “Atmospheric cycling complete,” he said, tugging off his helmet gratefully as his siblings did the same.
Yana swiped at the sweat on her forehead. “Now will somebody please tell me what happened back there? Starting with whatever that old woman was yelling about.”
“Right,” Tycho said. “She was talking about a secret. And Iris. What is that?”
“An old spacer’s tale from our great-grandfather’s day,” Carlo said. “And apparently it’s what Captain Lumbaba was looking for. There’s no platinum in the Hildas, but maybe there’s something else.”
“What are you talking about?” Yana asked.
“A fortune,” Carlo said. “Waiting out there for somebody to claim it.”
4
THE TALE OF THE IRIS
The Shadow Comet sat nestled in a docking cradle, one of dozens of starships moored in orbit above the gleaming white sphere of Enceladus. Workers in spacesuits swarmed over her hull, attaching fuel lines, cleaning fouled conduits, and patching damage from bits of space debris.
Yana was busy with her mediapad, leaving Tycho to watch as Carlo shut down the gig’s engines, then tapped the maneuvering jets so the craft rose smoothly and latched into its socket in the larger ship’s belly.
As he shut down his console, Carlo noticed
Tycho’s envious look.
“All in the touch, little brother,” he said with a waggle of his fingers. “Well, that and a few thousand hours of practice.”
They climbed up the ladderwell to the Comet’s ventral airlock and found the lower deck silent and still—the crewers were away, enjoying a brief shore leave. But their parents were on the quarterdeck with their jumpsuits unzippered and bunched around their waists, revealing ratty T-shirts.
“Ah, able hands and eager young minds,” Mavry said. “Exactly what we need to finish recalibrating the fuel injectors!”
Tycho and Yana groaned—that was a tedious job, even as shipboard chores went.
“You might want to hear something first,” Carlo said.
Diocletia frowned at the account of their getaway from the refinery and the men with the wolf insignia, then asked them to go over what Japhet’s grandmother had said again.
“Dad, you’re going to want to come up here,” she said into her headset.
“Does this mean someone will finally tell me who Iris is?” Yana asked.
“Not a who—a what,” Diocletia said. “The Iris was a mailboat that made runs between Earth and its corporate outposts in the outer solar system. She mostly carried documents and bulk freight, but luxury retailers started using her for moving more expensive goods around. Somebody told somebody who told somebody else, and so about eighty-odd years ago, a flotilla of pirate ships ambushed her between Jupiter and Saturn. They cleaned out her hold, then scattered with the Defense Force on their heels.”
“The Iris?” said Huff, stomping onto the quarterdeck from the companionway that led aft to the engine room. “Arrr, that’s a name I ain’t heard in a long time. Father came to regret that particular escapade.”
“You mean your father? Johannes?” Tycho asked as six bells rang out.
“Aye, ol’ Johannes Hashoone. He was one of the Jupiter pirates what hit the Iris. Some said he was the leader, though soon enough nobody much wanted that honor. Like yer mother said, they scattered in all directions after the raid. Wasn’t the Defense Force chasin’ their tails, though—it was the Securitat.”
“The secret police?” Yana asked. “Why would they care? Seems like a pretty routine bit of piracy to me.”
“Nobody ever figured out why,” Huff said. “There were rumors, of course—there’s always rumors. The Iris was carryin’ the ancestral jewels of the heiress to the Amalgamated Social Graph corporate fortune, things like that. Whatever the reason, Earth raised enough of a ruckus with the Union that the Securitat was sent after the raiders. The dumb pirates shot it out with them and died, while the smart ones went to the brig—Father spent four years locked up on 1172 Aeneas. The Iris cache was never found, but good riddance to it. They say it’s cursed, an’ from the history I don’t doubt it.”
“Cursed?” Yana asked. “Cursed how?”
“Generations of fools ’ave hunted that treasure, and plenty of ’em ’ave come to bad ends,” Huff said. “We knew better than to discuss the cache around ol’ Johannes—said he never wanted to hear about it again.”
Huff trailed off, his flesh-and-blood eye narrowing in suspicion.
“But why all this ancient history? What are you not tellin’ me?”
Tycho watched his grandfather as Carlo explained what had happened. The living half of Huff’s face registered shock, then dismissal. But in between, Tycho saw a flash of the last emotion he would have expected: fear.
“What a load of bilge,” Huff said. “Listen, boy, there’s two kinds of people what never tell the truth, and that’s Earthmen and prospectors.”
“But we have the Lucia’s flight log,” Tycho said. “We know where she was headed. The old woman said Lumbaba searched his whole life for the treasure—what if he was following a lead when the accident happened?”
“Ain’t you been listenin’, boy?” Huff demanded. “I told you the Iris cache is cursed, and what happened to that ore boat proves it.”
“Come on, Grandfather—that’s just superstition,” Carlo said. “How can the contents of a mailboat be cursed?”
“I bet Cap’n Lumbaba believed they was, there at the end. There in the dark.”
For a moment, all on the quarterdeck were silent.
“I don’t believe in curses,” Mavry said. “But I also don’t believe in wasting valuable time and fuel on prospectors’ fantasies.”
“But Dad—” Yana began.
“That’s enough, all of you,” Diocletia said. “We don’t have enough information to make a decision—but we can change that. And Dad, your power indicators are red.”
Huff glowered down at the lights in his chest, which were warning that his cybernetic parts needed to be recharged. Still grumbling, he clanked laboriously up the ladderwell to the crew quarters on the top deck.
“Well, then,” Diocletia said, “get your consoles up and running. Mavry’s loading the navigational data from the Lucia. Let’s see if we can figure out where she was going.”
“We know that,” Yana said with a sigh. “It’s the end point of her flight plan.”
“This should be easy, then,” Diocletia said. “Vesuvia, are you monitoring? We’re going to plot some potential flight plans.”
“Acknowledged,” the ship’s AI said. “Awaiting input.”
“Vesuvia, plot these points,” Yana said. “Here are the coordinates where we intercepted the Lucia, and here are the coordinates of her destination.”
“Plotting onscreen,” Vesuvia said.
The main screen lit up with the ellipses of planetary orbits and a pair of blinking crosses.
“There’s nothing there,” Yana said. “Deep space.”
“That’s not a surprise,” Diocletia said. “Who can tell me what it means?”
Tycho swallowed. They were being tested again, and even though they were in orbit above Enceladus and not in combat, their success or failure would become another note in the Log.
“What if someone found the Iris cache, put it aboard a gig or in a message capsule, and launched it in the direction of Sirius?” he asked. “Didn’t the old pirates used to do that? They’d memorize the heading instead of writing it down, right?”
“Right,” Mavry said. “And then half of them would forget it after the next shindy.”
“If that’s the case, the treasure’s gone forever,” Carlo said.
“Wait a minute,” Yana said. “You said it wasn’t a surprise that there’s nothing at those coordinates.”
“Yes, I did,” Diocletia said, then waited.
Carlo’s hand shot up.
“We don’t care what’s at those coordinates now,” he said. “We care about what was there twenty-four years ago. Basic law of piloting: you don’t fly to where things are, but to where they will be.”
“Or in this case, to where they were,” Mavry said.
“Correct,” Diocletia said. “What we’ve got here is the kind of navigational problem every captain encounters. Wait a minute, Carlo. Tycho, how do we find the coordinates we want to fly to now?”
“You . . . you can’t,” Tycho said. “We can determine where the Lucia was heading twenty-four years ago, but that doesn’t help us, because we don’t have the heading of what she was trying to intercept—the ship or message drone or whatever it was. The number of possibilities is basically infinite.”
Diocletia said nothing for a moment. Then, to Tycho’s dismay, she nodded at Carlo.
“This is ridiculous, Mom,” Yana complained. “It’s a piloting question. Of course he’s going to know it.”
“Incorrect, as you might have realized if you’d been thinking instead of sulking,” Diocletia said. “It’s a navigational question.”
That stung both twins, who sank deeper into their chairs as seven bells sounded.
“Tycho’s assuming the Lucia was on an intercept,” Carlo said. “But what if she were going to a celestial body—one with a natural orbit?”
“That’s a big assumption,” Tycho obje
cted.
“Right, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” Yana burst out. “It’s like Grandfather said the other day: pirating is half guessing.”
“Sometimes a lot more than half,” Mavry said.
“Let’s plot those twenty-four-year-old coordinates against the orbits of charted celestial bodies,” Carlo said. “Pick an eighty-five percent confidence interval to start.”
“Three potential matches,” said Vesuvia.
An X appeared on the diagram of the solar system, connected by a curved line to the coordinates the Lucia had never reached. “The first is a centaur, designation 356925 Powhatan. Records indicate it was the site of an Earth scientific facility that was decommissioned in 2874.”
“That’s after contact was lost with the Lucia,” Tycho said before anybody else could. “No one would hide a treasure on a rock that had an inhabited science lab sitting on it.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” Diocletia said. “What’s the second potential match, Vesuvia?”
“P/2093 K1 is a short-period comet inbound toward the inner solar system,” Vesuvia said, displaying a new X and a different loop on the screen.
“That’s out beyond Ceres,” Mavry said. “Any data about P-whatever-it-is?”
“I have 6.2 terabytes of compiled observational data about P/2093 K1,” Vesuvia said. “Along with compositional—”
“Any interesting data?” Mavry asked.
“I do not know how to define ‘interesting,’” Vesuvia said.
“I’ll consider that a no,” Mavry said. “And the third object?”
“The third object is an asteroid, designation 2144 ND1. Orbit is eccentric.”
“To say the least,” Carlo observed, peering at the screen. “Any interesting data?”
Vesuvia paused, no doubt assessing that troublesome word again. Tycho and Yana grinned at each other.
“No data reach sufficient confidence levels for presentation to crew,” the AI concluded primly.
“All right then,” Diocletia said. “Good work, Carlo.”
The Hashoones regarded the orbits on the screen.
“So what are you thinking, Dio?” Mavry asked after a few moments.
“I’m thinking that we’re privateers, not treasure hunters,” she replied.