Blood on the Stars Collection 1

by Jay Allan

  System Z-111 (Chrysallis)

  Deep Inside the Quarantined Zone (“The Badlands”)

  309 AC

  “Vig, are you seeing this?” Lafarge moved forward, slowly angling her head back and forth. She still held the portable lamp in her hand, but now she flipped the switch, turning it off. The corridor had been dark when she and Merrick had first entered, but then the ceiling had begun to glow, some kind of lighting units activating in response to their presence. It was dim at first, but the illumination grew until the area around them was as bright as Pegasus’s bridge. She felt a tightness in her gut, a combination of excitement and fear. Whatever it was her people had found, it was still operational, at least to some extent.

  “I am…” Merrick turned, reaching out and touching the nearest wall, running his hand over the smooth metal. “It’s spotless. No dust, no debris. What kind of material is this?”

  “I have no idea.” She stepped over to the side of the corridor and put her hand on the wall, following his lead. “It’s warm. Some kind of heating system?” She looked over at Merrick, aware as she did that her number two didn’t have any more answers than she did.

  “Could be.” Pegasus’s first officer moved his hand along the smooth gray surface. “How can this be in such good condition? It looks like whoever was here left an hour ago.”

  Lafarge nodded. “I know.” She’d spent the last eight years scouring the Badlands. One of her earlier finds had been so substantial it had funded her purchase of Pegasus, but even that cache had been nothing but broken bits of advanced circuit boards…certainly nothing functional. Not to mention so large. She’d never even allowed herself to imagine finding an intact ship, much less one that made a Confederation battleship look like a lifeboat.

  “Let’s see what there is this way.” She gestured down what looked like an endless corridor. She’d brought Pegasus in at what looked like a docking portal, but she’d still been surprised how easily she’d managed to adapt her ship’s own umbilical to the artifact’s port. It hadn’t been a perfect fit, of course, but as much as Lafarge eschewed the occasional designation as a pirate, her ship bore many marks of a past serving one or more buccaneer captains. The extremely adaptable docking portal was just one of those.

  The two walked slowly, cautiously, peering ahead as additional sections of the strange overhead lighting activated at their approach. It was the same everywhere—no visible lighting panels, just a strange glow from the ceiling material itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how it worked.

  There were a number of hatches and doors along the way, but they were all locked. Lafarge had paused at the first few, trying to figure out to open them, but she’d given up. There were no apparent locks, just smooth doors almost imperceptible from the walls surrounding them.

  She pushed ahead, walking down the corridor, alert, her eyes fixed forward. The hall had to lead somewhere, and that was as likely to be important as whatever lay behind the doors.

  “This corridor doesn’t end,” Merrick said softly.

  “Well, the ship’s a little over fifteen kilometers long, which is big but still definitely finite, so I’m thinking it will end at some point.” Lafarge’s voice was light, an abortive attempt at humor. She was trying to control her anxiety, with at least some superficial success. But inside she was scared to death. About what lay ahead. About what this ancient wonder actually was. And about what she was going to do with the discovery. Her mind had been working around various schemes for selling the find, but she’d discounted each one as unrealistic almost immediately. She was beginning to realize she was in over her head. Deeply.

  But if I report this to the authorities, they won’t pay me…they’ll just take it. And they’ll probably harass me about why I was here to boot…

  She kept walking, trying vainly to push aside the worries. There would be time enough later to decide what to do. Perhaps she could find some portable items, small artifacts she could remove from the ship, unimportant relative to the massive vessel, but with enough value for all her people to retire on. Then she could make an anonymous report to the naval authorities, and let them worry about what to do with the hulking artifact.

  “There’s something up ahead, Andi.” Merrick stopped, reaching out instinctively, pointing. But Lafarge had seen it already. The corridor ended up ahead at a doorway. An open doorway.

  “Let’s go, Vig. This is no time to stop.” She quickened her pace. She liked to think that she was out in the Badlands chasing after bits of ancient technology solely for the money, driven by nothing more complex than the dedication to remain free of the poverty she’d once known. But she was driven by an intense curiosity as well, and she’d studied every artifact she had found before turning them over to her shadowy buyers. That inquisitiveness drove her on now. She was standing inside the greatest discovery in Confederation history, and the immensity of that fact was beginning to crystalize in her mind. She’d always operated in the shadows, and she liked it that way. But now she was at the center of something that would change history. It was more than she could easily comprehend, and she tried to ignore the implications, focusing instead on what was around her now…and how to proceed.

  She stepped up to the door, her hand dropping instinctively to her pistol. The weapon was old, its grip worn smooth from use, but it was in perfect condition. She took it apart once a month with solemn regularity, replacing any parts that showed signs of wear. It had saved her ass more than once, and if she needed it again, she knew it would be there for her.

  She peered through the doorway into a vast chamber. The ceiling was close to a hundred meters above the deck, and she could barely see the other side in the gloomy distance. It was the largest room she had ever seen, certainly on any kind of space vessel.

  She took a few steps inside, stopping again and looking around. It was a hanger of some kind, that much was apparent. A row of cradles extended in out from where she stood, all of them empty. All save one.

  Her eyes fixed intently on the sole remaining craft. It was small, at least by the standards of the giant vessel in which it lay, though as she jogged forward to it, she began to realize it was nearly as large as Pegasus.

  A shuttle? Lifeboat?

  The absence of any bodies or signs of a crew in any of the corridors began to make sense as she counted the almost two dozen empty docking cradles. Whatever had happened centuries before, the great vessel’s crew appeared to have abandoned ship. For all she knew, there were a dozen bays like this scattered throughout the ship, each of them as empty as the one in which she now stood.

  She stared at the remaining shuttle. It looked fine, but she knew there were a hundred technical problems that could ground a ship, only a few of which would be readily apparent on cursory inspection. She guessed it had malfunctioned somehow all those centuries before.

  “I wonder why the crew left,” she said, not really expecting an answer.

  “I suppose there could have been a lot of reasons.” Merrick paused. “But the ship seems sound, and it’s still here after all these years, with functioning life support…so it doesn’t seem like it could have been anything dire.”

  “I don’t suppose it really matters. A lot of bizarre things probably happened near the end of the Cataclysm.” She turned and looked back at her friend. “This was probably a warship of some kind. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I didn’t see any gun emplacements along the hull, but who knows how a pre-Cataclysmic ship was designed. It doesn’t look like any kind of freight hauler, so what else could something this big have been? Especially with those energy readings.”

  “Speaking of which…let’s try and find that energy source.” She had come to realize she’d have to let the Confederation authorities handle this one…as much as it hurt to give up something so incalculably valuable. But she wasn’t about to leave without something. She might not be able to haul back a giant ancient battleship, but she was damned
sure going to stuff Pegasus’s hold full of anything portable she could find. And if that included anything related to the tremendous energy readings her scanner had detected, so much the better.

  Merrick pulled a scanner from his belt, looking down at its small screen for a few seconds. “It’s below us, Andi. About two hundred meters. We need to find some way down.”

  “Okay, let’s…”

  “Andi…” It was Rina Strand’s voice on her comm unit. The instant Lafarge heard the tone, she knew something was wrong.

  “What is it, Rina?” she snapped, ripping the small unit from her belt and bringing it to her face.

  “We’ve got a contact moving toward the vessel. Still too far out for positive ID, but I’d bet a good pile it’s military. A frigate, maybe.”

  “Confederation?”

  “Too far to tell, but it’s not broadcasting any beacon.”

  Lafarge’s gut clenched. The lack of a beacon was hardly conclusive evidence, but Confederation vessels usually followed international protocols. And if that wasn’t a Confederation ship out there, that probably meant…”

  “Rina, get the hell out of here.”

  “We can’t leave without you, Andi!”

  “It will take us too long to get back.” She shot a glance over at Merrick. There was fear in his expression, but he gave her a slight nod of agreement. “Get that ship out of here. Before it’s too late. Get back to the Confederation and report this.”

  “Andi…”

  “Now! We’ll be fine. This is a big damned ship, and we’ll find someplace to hide. Go! You’ve got to get some help.”

  There was a short pause. “Yes, Captain,” Strand finally replied miserably.

  Lafarge cut the line, looking again at Merrick. “Shugart sold us out. It’s the only answer.” Her voice dripped with menace.

  “You think so?”

  Rolf Shugart was a provider of…information, one with whom she had worked before. He’d come to her with the sketchy data that had led her to this find, and she’d paid him well for the scraps of information he possessed. She didn’t trust him, but she was still surprised he would have double dealed her so blatantly…and even more so if that was a Union ship out there as she feared.

  Lafarge was a profiteer, certainly, and one who had violated a law or two in her time. But she’d never sell the Confederation out to the Union. And she wouldn’t have thought Shugart would either.

  “What else could it be? A coincidence? We’re twenty transits from the nearest inhabited system…you think that ship just happened by?”

  Merrick shook his head. Then he asked, “You think it’s a Union ship, don’t you?”

  “I think there’s a good chance…which makes it all the more important for Rina and the others to get away.” Lafarge suspected she knew a little more about how the Union handled captives than the rest of her people did, but they all had enough knowledge to generate a healthy fear.

  Merrick stood silently for a moment. Then he said, “What are we going to do now?”

  “We’re going to find a place to hide, my old friend. A damned good place…and then we hope for the best.” It wasn’t the kind of well-thought out plan she liked. It was far from that. But it was also the only one she had. “Let’s go. This ship is huge, and if that’s a frigate out there, they only have maybe a hundred, hundred fifty crew, not enough to search this monster very quickly.”

  She looked across the shuttle bay. “This way,” she said, pointing across the vast open space. “There must be some passages at the other end.” She was speculating that the Union ship—if it was a Union ship—would dock where Pegasus had, probably assuming her people had some knowledge of where to board the ancient vessel. And if they did that, she wanted to head in the opposite direction.

  She nodded to Merrick and started across the bay. She wasn’t running, but it wasn’t exactly a walk either. Time was suddenly a precious resource.

  She didn’t know what she was going to do yet, except hide. Her mind was working as quickly as possible, trying to come up with a course of action, but the realization was beginning to sink in. She and Vig were in trouble.

  She did have one plan, though it wasn’t useful, not for surviving the next days and weeks, nor for getting her out of this mess. But if she got back to Dannith, and if she found out that Rolf Shugart had sold the information for which she’d paid him so handsomely to the Union…there would be a reckoning, and that gun she cared for so meticulously would see use. She would put the slimy bastard in the ground for sure.

  * * *

  “The small ship has broken free of its docking, Captain. They’re running.”

  Captain Nicolas Pierre nodded. “Pursue, Lieutenant. Full thrust.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the tactical officer.

  “Captain, a word?”

  Pierre turned his head, looking across bridge toward the new voice. Jean Laussanne was Chasseur’s political officer. As far as Pierre was concerned, he was also a colossal pain in the ass. Most Union captains viewed their political minders with at least some level of suspicion and disdain, but Pierre couldn’t imagine most of his peers had to deal with officers involving themselves as constantly in routine matters as Laussanne did. Pierre would have ignored the fool each time he opened his mouth, but every helpful-sounding suggestion carried the implied threat of Pierre being labeled “unreliable” if he didn’t offer at least a show of compliance. A few words from a well-placed political officer could derail a naval career. Or worse.

  “Yes, Commissar?” It took considerable energy to maintain tone that suggested he gave a shit what Laussanne wanted.

  “I don’t like to interfere with your command decisions, Captain, but…”

  You like nothing more than interfering, you pompous ass…

  “Do you think pursuing the small vessel is a reason to move away from the artifact? We have been seeking this find for some time, and the implications are…”

  “Commissar Laussanne, I appreciate your perspective…” He didn’t. He also knew interrupting the political officer was probably stupid, something that would bite him later, but he did it anyway. “But it’s very unlikely this massive structure is going anywhere. It’s probably been stationary for centuries, since before the Cataclysm. But allowing an unidentified ship to escape is highly problematic. We need to maintain secrecy until we can get word back to headquarters. I remind you, we are closer to Confederation space than we are to our own. Until reinforcements arrive, we have no chance of moving the artifact…and little hope of defending it against any significant Confederation force.” He paused, telling himself he should shut up. But he didn’t. “So, unless you think you can fly that thing, we’re going to need a lot more resources to get it home with us.”

  Laussanne glared back at Pierre, his gaze a vague promise of future retribution. But he just nodded his acceptance of the captain’s rationale.

  Pierre knew this was no time to humor the political officer’s pretensions. This was the most important mission of his life. He hadn’t really believed he would find anything…apparently, no one had, or they would have sent a far stronger force to investigate.

  You know you’ll end up in the sub-basement of Sector Nine headquarters if you end up losing this thing…and no one’s going to listen when you say you botched the job doing what Laussanne told you to do…

  “Very well,” Pierre said simply, trying to mask the disdain in his voice. He turned back toward the tactical officer, who was staring back motionless, like a startled animal unsure which way to run.

  “You have your orders, Lieutenant.” Pierre’s words were terse, but not hostile. He didn’t expect a junior officer to have the guts to stand up to a commissar. He barely did himself.

  “Yes, sir. Engaging thrusters now.”

  Chasseur was a frigate, a light escort when she served with the fleet, typically assigned to scouting duty or to supporting one of the battleships in combat. But on a mission like this, there was no capit
al ship to fall back on, no reinforcements. Chasseur and her sister ship had been sent on an expedition that had almost certainly been a waste of time…until suddenly it wasn’t. He was still trying to come to terms with how important the mission had suddenly become. The computer was reviewing the scanner data, trying to offer a hypothesis on the massive structure’s purpose. But it didn’t take an AI’s review for Pierre to realize that he had stumbled onto the greatest old tech discovery in history…he’d found a ship of some kind, almost certainly some kind of warship, one that looked very much like it was intact.

  As the senior of the two ship captains in the minuscule task force, he’d dispatched Arbalete back to Union space to report the discovery. Captain Rouget was a reliable officer, and Pierre knew his colleague would drive his ship to the limit to get home and return with reinforcements. Until then there was nothing he could do. Nothing but stop this freebooter’s ship from getting away.

  His frigate was more than enough to handle a smuggler’s vessel like the one he was pursuing. All he had to do was catch it. But as he watched the scanner, he felt the tightness in his stomach worsen. His prey was an adventurer’s ship, probably a modified trader or freighter, scouring the Badlands for scraps of ancient technology to sell on the black market. But the thrust level he was seeing was worrisome. His target had a head start, and she was blasting away with nearly as much thrust as his own ship. Given enough time, he could catch her…but the transit point was too close.

  He could follow his target into the next system, chase her down and destroy her. There wasn’t much doubt about that. But pursuing a ship across this system was one thing. Leaving the artifact entirely was quite another. His rational mind told him the ancient ship would be just fine, as it had for the centuries it had remained in orbit around this silent world. But then his eyes connected with Laussanne’s…and he saw flashes of himself in a Sector Nine interrogation cell, answering questions about why he left the greatest discovery in history completely unguarded.

  “I want full thrust, Lieutenant.” He glared over at the tactical officer. “Take the reactor to one hundred five percent output.”