“Pneumatic tubes?”
“It’s a simple system, but it works,” Drake explained. “Since we launch projectiles with cold gas, we call them torpedoes, not missiles. But about that jolt you felt. Sixty years ago, this ship was state of the art. But ‘state of the art’ back then didn’t include inertial gravity dampers. That’s what keeps your body from smashing into the rear hull every time the navtech steps on the gas pedal.”
“So your engineer must have added one.”
“You got it. Ferra built the one we use out of spare parts. But this way, we can feed a little more power to the main engine. It allows the Ranger to accelerate faster than anything in her class. The downside is that you get a bit of a jolt whenever we kick her speed up.”
“Wait, hold on a second.” Tally held a hand up to halt the conversation. “She built you a gravity damper. That’s the most complex piece of shipboard equipment, and the ones I bought on the gray market were always breaking down!”
Drake sighed. “Ferra worked R & D for the Interstellar Marine Corps ten years ago. She’s actually one of the top propulsion researchers. She had the misfortune to blow the whistle when she caught her boss taking kickbacks for parts they manufactured.”
“You’d think they would have promoted her,” Tally said, with a frown. “What about the others? I mean…you said that the Guard was a place they sent people who would normally be drummed out of the service.”
“Yes. This branch of the military is the last refuge for incompetent officers.”
Drake said it in an offhand way, but his eyes weren’t smiling. Tally took a nervous sip of her champagne, but the Captain continued.
“I don’t know what happened with Sebastiàn, but it must have been pretty damning. Top one percent of his class, could damned well pick any ship he wanted to serve with, and they stuck him here.” Drake touched a finger to his lips. “Take Doc Kincaid, now. He’s been in the Guard almost as long as I have, and his story is similar to Ferra’s.”
“So Kincaid blew the whistle on someone too.”
“He found out that his Special Ops commander was incompetent. She kept sending troops out on hazardous missions as cannon fodder. Thought it was a medtech’s job to clean up the messes that command made.”
“An Elite Operations team,” Tally mused. “He’s probably pretty good.”
“One of the best in the Fleet, if they’d ever taken the time to find out. He’s a depressing son of a gun, but not a bad person when you get to know him after a while.” Drake stopped for a moment, and then added, “After a long while.”
“What about—”
“What about you, Tally?” Drake asked, cutting off her next question. “What brought you out to space in order to do salvage work?”
“The same things that I thought I found out there, with you,” she replied, with a mysterious smile. “Spanish doubloons.”
“Now you have me curious.”
“If you’ve watched any of the holo-programs about me, you know I grew up near Ogala City. What the programs never mention was that ‘near Ogala City’ also meant ‘near the swamp’, ‘near the dump’, and ‘near the oil refinery’. Between bouncing from paycheck to paycheck, and parent to parent, I finally got my mind set on getting out of there.”
Drake noted that Tally’s hands clenched. He doubted that she was even aware of it as she continued, “There was really nowhere for me to go. Not without any employable skills, anyway. I started combing the local beach with an antique metal detector. Figured I could at least make food money off of the change I found. That’s when my metal detector found gold. A whole doubloon, dated authentic to 1543. Care to guess how much I sold it for?”
“How much?”
“Quarter of a million credits.” Drake gave a respectful whistle. “I decided that I preferred being rich and adventurous to being poor and hungry. I enrolled in the best archeology program I could find, and found out that I was damn good at this business. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“An inspiring tale,” Drake acknowledged. He was about to say more, when the ship’s comm chimed in his ear.
“Captain,” came Sebastiàn’s voice, “we’re approaching the Kuiper Belt...and there’s something I think you might find interesting.”
“What would that be?”
“I have the asteroid where the Dutchman crashed on visual.”
“And?”
Sebastiàn’s voice took on a puzzled tone. “It’s completely white.”
Chapter Ten
Captain Drake strode onto the bridge, his attitude more curious than excited. He took his seat and made note of his ship’s position and speed. Tally stood by the sidebar, wanting to be in on this while giving room for Drake and his officers to do their work.
“Visual,” Drake ordered. After a moment’s consideration he added, “Give me tactical, starboard quarter.”
The image of their destination in the Kuiper Belt appeared on the main vidscreen. Sebastiàn quickly added the tactical display in the screen’s lower right-hand quarter.
Drake frowned. Small pieces of rock and metal cluttered the view, forming an elliptical cloud of debris within the belt. At the center of the cloud lay an irregularly shaped chunk of rock. It was pitted and scarred, but it shone with a white gleam.
“What do you make of it, Tally?” Drake asked.
She shook her head in reply. “Beats me. My sensor equipment from the Margarita should be better at penetrating this clutter than yours. Want me to give it a try?”
“Be my guest.” Drake turned to address Sebastiàn. “Lieutenant, how far does that debris field extend from the asteroid?”
Sebastiàn checked. “About twenty clicks.”
“Bring us to a stop. Hold us at a thousand meters beyond that.”
The navtech fired the maneuvering thrusters as Tally commandeered the science console next to the communications chair. Her preliminary scan took less than a minute.
“Well, now,” she said with some satisfaction, “that’s not what I expected.”
“What was that?”
“The debris count and composition matches with what I estimated.” She sent the numbers over to Sebastiàn’s tactical screen. “Five thousand tons of metallic debris from the three destroyed ships and the original derelict, the Dutchman. Thirty thousand tons of non-metallic ore from the asteroid. That was about half the mass of the original rock.”
“And the whitish object on the screen?”
“I’m thinking that it was man-made. Looks like the remnants of a base, one that had been buried before the Dutchman’s engine core cooked off and unearthed it. As to what the base is made of? It doesn’t even register on the periodic table.”
“Even synthetic alloys should register their components,” Drake considered. “This is very strange.”
“You’ll like this one better. I’m reading signs of atmospheric replenishment.” Tally looked up at him. “There’s a functioning pressurized chamber down there.”
“Lieutenant,” Drake ordered, “give me maximum zoom on the vidscreen.”
The image on the screen blinked. In the close-up, the view was clear. The cubic shape could only belong to the outer seals on an airlock. A battered door was marked clearly against the whitish surface.
Drake stood, his voice lost in thought. “I’m for checking this one out in person.”
“I had an idea you would be,” Tally agreed. “I have three suits. You can borrow one.”
Drake switched the comm circuit to connect with engineering. “Lieutenant Ferra, to the conn.” He turned to Sebastiàn next. “Lieutenant, can you thread a way through that debris field?”
“I’ve already programmed in the course, sir.” Sebastiàn turned in his chair. “Captain, one of my final classes at the Academy was in ship-to-ship boarding. I’m qualified for spacewalks.”
Drake gave Tally a look. She nodded agreement.
“All right, you get Tally’s last suit.” Drake didn’t take his eye
off the screen as he added, “Let’s see if the Academy is training our new people as well as they say.”
The Ranger slid through the debris field with ease. The ship extended its docking tube out as far as it could go, extending the tube like a metallic accordion, until it contacted the base’s door.
Drake followed Tally and Sebastiàn as they exited the Ranger’s airlock and began walking down the length of the tube. A crackle as he patched his suit’s comm into an inter-suit link.
“Tally, are you sure that there’s no booby traps this time?”
“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“Why is that?” Sebastiàn asked. Each member of the party wore a blast gun holster with a fully charged weapon, but the young officer was still a little nervous.
“Because of something I should’ve seen the first time I went in.” She pointed at the plates of whitish metal that made up the surface below. “Remember what Gamble said when we first entered the derelict spacecraft?”
Drake thought back for a moment. “If I recall, his scanner showed that the metal making up the room shifted mid-way through.”
“Exactly. Gamble and I were looking at an older site which was lying underneath the wreck of the Dutchman. This site…my gut tells me that it wasn’t abandoned. The owners didn’t just wander off and booby-trap it in case some random group of mercenaries or salvage people showed up at the front door. No, if this thing has defenses, they won’t be as passive as that.”
Sebastiàn grimaced. They were just a few meters away from the battered white door, and the strange metal had taken on a menacing gleam. He added, in an unhappy voice, “If you’re right, then what are we walking into?”
“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question.”
Suddenly, Tally thrust her shoulder between Captain Drake and his Lieutenant. Drake stumbled for a moment. With a soft, strong backhand, she knocked him back a half-step. Sebastiàn drew his weapon, eyes alert for any danger. But Tally moved quickly down the remaining few meters of tube. She pulled a small disc-shaped object from a hip compartment and slapped it onto the metal by the door.
“What the hell are you doing?” Drake demanded, as he and Sebastiàn caught up with her.
“Staking my claim.” She raised her chin, defiant.
“We don’t even know what this damned thing is, and you want to claim it?” Drake’s eyes narrowed. “Unless you’re not telling me everything you know about this place.”
“I’ve told you all I know, Captain,” Tally replied evenly. “But it could be worth something. So I’ve planted a salvage beacon before you could touch it.”
“Why would we want it?” Drake snapped. “I don’t know what it is either.”
“You don’t know what my business is like,” Tally insisted. “People can be oh so friendly until you’re looking at real money. I know my salvage law, and I know it well. If you touched this place first, you could try and claim that you had possession of it before I planted my marker.”
“So what if it’s worth something? You’ve got enough money, from what I can tell.”
She shook her head sadly. “Not for long, Captain. The Atocha’s gone, the Margarita needed repairs, and I’ve got five families bringing suit against me for my ‘negligence’ in not bringing more security out here. Yes, I have a nice pile of money right now. But in three months? After I sell off the artifacts you saw in my house, I’ll be lucky to have two credits to rub together. So I damn well need this find – any find – to pay off.”
“But you’ve already been here before. You’ve staked your claim.”
“Not in a way that can’t be contested. A court might say that the place I had intended to claim was that derelict ship, and that anything inside the asteroid was coincidental.”
“Ah, Captain?” Sebastiàn asked, “I hate to interrupt, but I’ve found the controls for this airlock.”
“All right. Let’s open it.”
Sebastiàn worked the pressure controls. The door swung open silently. A wan light flickered on inside. Drake pulled his own sidearm and led the way into an eight-person airlock. The dim light illuminated a work area complete with benches and tool compartments.
The Lieutenant found a second set of controls on the opposite wall. With the press of a few keys, a hiss sounded as air filled the room. Tally looked at the scanner on the wrist of her suit.
“Standard pressure,” Tally reported. “And I’m not showing foreign chemical or biological substances in the air.”
She pulled off her suit’s helmet. The two military men followed suit. The air smelled stale, but it lacked an odor of decay that Drake had expected for some reason. Sebastiàn tapped some more keys to open the airlock’s inner door, revealing a narrow gray corridor beyond.
Tally placed a suited hand on Drake’s shoulder. “Captain, we’re going to have to go single file down that. I should lead from here on. I’ve got more experience in places like this.”
Drake shook his head. “It may be your claim, but this mission is mine.”
He pulled his blast gun from his holster as he proceeded down the corridor, more excited than he wished to admit. The silence, broken only by the sounds of their movement and their breathing, made Drake all the more alert. They passed piles of broken wire and scorched sections of wall. In some places, piles of debris threatened to choke the passage. Drake felt a change in the air around the party as he stepped into a large, open chamber. He looked around cautiously, motioning for the others to come ahead.
The room was about as large as a cargo bay. It was plated with the same whitish metal as the outside. To Drake’s eyes, the chamber looked like it had been a machine shop. Tools and other attachments hung limply in coiled metal arms alongside the walls. In the center of the room were a row of old computer consoles. A fine layer of dust in the room draped everything in a gray sheet. The walls were scarred in patches with the same black soot as they had seen outside.
Sebastiàn brought a gloved hand to the wall and scraped one of the patches.
“That’s from blast gun fire, Captain.”
“That’s what I thought,” Drake agreed gloomily. “There aren’t any bodies, but that doesn’t necessarily prove anything. This could have been someone’s last stand.”
Tally walked up to the consoles and exhaled, blowing the dust off the nearest keyboard. A couple of taps confirmed that the unit lacked power, even though the room lights were functional. Frowning, she traced the path of the unit’s power cables to a section where blaster fire had severed them. She fumbled at her belt pack and called over to Drake.
“I’ve got a battery pack here. I should be able to hook it into those consoles, get them to work. But if there’s a security program on it, I could use some help to crack it.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” Drake toggled the comm channel on his suit. “Ferra, do you still read us?”
“Loud and clear, Captain,” came the woman’s reply. “You need anything?”
“We’re bringing one of the base computers on line in a second. Establish a data connection with it as soon as you can. We might need some of your diagnostic skills.”
“Of course, sir.”
A hum filled the room as Tally finished hooking up her battery pack.
Then a flickering red light blinked a few times as a mechanical grinding sounded overhead. Drake felt a chill run down his spine as the flickering coalesced into a crosshair of red light, targeting the back of Tally’s head.
“Down!” he cried.
With a move that would have done credit to a running back, he knocked Tally out of the way with a rib-squeezing tackle. A beam of red hot laser light slashed through the console, sending up a boiling cloud of foul-smelling smoke. Tally gasped, trying to breathe as Drake rolled on top of her.
Two more scarlet crosshairs centered on Lieutenant Sebastiàn as the laser units, mounted on mechanical arms, folded out of the wall sockets and oriented on their targets. With a speed that was a blur to Drake, Sebastiàn drew his bl
aster. He squeezed off a pair of shots as he dropped to his knees, rolling. The two antique weapons exploded and hung limp from their perches as yet another laser mount folded out to replace them.
Drake risked a quick look over his console to see the first crosshair weaving along to the left. Instinctively, he whirled to the right, seeking out the source. He spotted the wall mount by the door. He brought his blaster up. Squeezed off a volley of shots. The unit flamed out in a shower of sparks.
Sebastiàn ducked behind a wall brace as the final laser sought him out. With a noisy red blast, it shattered the brittle material. He flinched as he felt something slash open his cheek. He moved again. Heard the motor whine as the unit moved to bear on him. He pivoted, squeezing his weapon’s trigger. His shots connected, and the room was silent again. Sebastiàn got up, eyes moving nervously from side to side, his heart whamming frightfully in his chest.
Drake leaned against the wall to catch his breath. Ferra was all but shouting in his ear, so he got back on the comm channel.
“Ferra, this is Captain Drake. We ran into one of the base’s automated defenses, but we’re all still alive.”
“Thank God for that,” she replied. “Anyone hurt?”
“Not sure yet. Send Doc Kincaid over, I know we’ve at least got some bumps and bruises.” Drake eyed Sebastiàn, who still stood with his weapon drawn, looking for new threats. “At ease, Lieutenant. It’s over.”
Sebastiàn holstered his blaster. “Sorry, sir. I’ve...that was, ah, más intensa than a combat simulation.”
Tally got up. She looked at a bloody streak on the back of her hand with annoyance.
“That’s the last time I try to hook up military hardware,” she remarked, half to herself. She looked at Drake, smiled. “Thanks, Captain. I owe you one.”
“You’d have done the same for me.” Drake returned his attention to Sebastiàn’s face. “You’re hurt as well.”
Treasure of the Silver Star Page 7