The trip from the mine to the refinery took over a day. The cargo hauler was not fast and the environment it travelled through did not lend itself to speeding for obvious reasons. They spent the time going over what to do if it all went horribly wrong and they were detected. Mostly the discussion centered on how fast they could get the Skip Drive online and vanish outsystem.
“If worst comes to the worst, we disappear out beyond the planetary disk and then wait until they give up looking for us. Then we’ll have to sneak back here and try and find a ship and head to the rendezvous point. The mission will be a bust at that point.” Hamilton told them.
“That’s assuming we can get the Skip Drive online before we get pounced on ourselves.” Klane added, unhelpfully. The others looked concerned.
“We’ll just have to see we don’t get detected, then.” Hamilton stated.
By the time the refinery appeared, visible to their passive sensors as a vast power source, they had gone into extreme low power mode. All of them wore suits for life-support and the maintenance craft was, to all intents and purposes, just a lump of dead metal.
Even the emergency chemical thrusters, which they intended to use to move the maintenance vessel from the cargo hauler to the bulk carrier, were currently offline. They were being ultra cautious.
Despite showing up on the passives, the refinery remained invisible through the observation ports for several hours as the cargo hauler made its sedate, but determined progress towards it.
“If they scan for life-forms, we’ve had it.” LeGault said as they drew within range.
“Why would they?” Klane told him. “We’re just a cargo ship on a regular run. I doubt they’ll give us any kind of scan at all.”
“The database suggested a skeleton crew of three to run the whole place.” Hamilton added. “An assignment like that, you spend as little time working and as much time goofing off as you can. They’re probably not even in the control room. Off sleeping or playing cards, relying on the automatic systems to alert them to any trouble.”
It seemed as if he was right. The cargo hauler maintained a steady pace until it was a few kilometers from the refinery, which by then had grown to huge proportions through the viewports. Much like at the mine itself, it then joined the back of a queue of similar vessels, all waiting their turn to unload their shipment at a purpose built lock. As each vessel ahead of them docked and unloaded, they timed how long it took for the operation to be completed. It was less than an hour.
“Weird how much less time it takes to unload than it did to load these pigs.” Jones observed.
“Not really.” Hamilton told him. “Loading requires a supply. The mines don’t have much in the way of a storage area, I believe. It gets loaded pretty much as it is mined. Here, we’re just dumping it out.”
The refinery was huge. A testament to man’s engineering skills and ability to automate almost anything. The cargo haulers unloaded their ore on one side, the ore was processed into metals through various smelters and mills internally, then the metals, in uniform sized blocks, came out the other side to be loaded onto the massive bulk carrier docked there.
The problem they had was getting from one side to the other in the maintenance craft without being noticed. There might only be three people on the refinery but the automated systems would hardly fail to notice a vessel traversing the distance from one side to the other, some eight hundred meters.
Not surprisingly, their plan was to repeat the procedure they had used at Aurica. Whilst their cargo hauler was unloading, Hamilton went out in a suit and connected up a fiber-optic link to the loading lock’s data ports. Then Jones made his way, electronically, through the systems of the refinery until he found the sensor and alarm sub-systems. Marten Janes had given him all the engineering codes he knew, which made the process that much quicker. Standardization, it seemed, was rife among technical maintenance crews.
Well before the hour was up, Jones had added a simple command to the sensors, making them ignore, at least for alarm purposes, any objects they detected for the next two hours. The sensors still worked, they just ignored everything. Apparently, refinery time was noted as very early morning, so it was likely the crew wouldn’t, even if they were so inclined, be monitoring the sensor data. Of course, only the lack of an alarm would tell for certain.
By the time their cargo hauler had finished unloading and started to move away, the little maintenance craft had transferred its grip to the refinery. Some power had been restored to the little craft in order to power the arm and thrusters, but virtually everything else was shut off.
“Okay Philip.” Hamilton told LeGault. “Let’s get to the other side.”
The arm’s grip was released and ever so slowly the maintenance vessel began to thrust its way around the refinery’s hull. Meter by meter they watched the plating slide past. Like the cargo haulers, the refinery was heavily reinforced against impact from debris and micro-meteoroids. Most of the hull was unblemished but, here and there, the marks of impact were evident as melted holes and long scoring marks on the plates.
“Wonder how long something like this lasts for?” Carl murmured.
“Decades.” Hamilton suggested, not really knowing for certain. “I imagine the internal machinery will fail long before the hull becomes a liability.”
“Surely they don’t scrap something this big?” Johnson frowned.
Hamilton shrugged. “Who knows? It would probably cost more to ship it to a scrap depot than it would be worth in scrap. I guess they keep it going as long as they can. But eventually it probably gets abandoned.”
“Isn’t that a hazard?” Jones asked.
“Sure. They’ll put a derelict beacon on it and probably shunt it out into a long orbit. Or maybe just send it into the star to be destroyed.” Hamilton explained.
“Seems like such a waste.” Johnson noted.
Hamilton nodded. “It is. I’m guessing it was much the same during your day, we just do it on a much larger scale now.”
They were silent for the rest of the journey as LeGault gently nudged the maintenance craft along the outside of the hull, skimming barely a couple of meters above the surface.
Hamilton was glad it was LeGault and not Veltin at the helm. The younger pilot was undoubtedly brilliant, but Hamilton doubted he could have ever have been said to be subtle. The slow, stately pace that LeGault was using would not have been to his taste.
Even allowing for the slow pace, it only took fifteen minutes or so to drift from one side to the other.
“Now we just have to look for a convenient place to latch onto on the bulk transport.” LeGault muttered, more to himself than anything.
The bulk carrier was huge. As much as the Morebaeus had dwarfed the Ulysses, this vessel would have dwarfed the Morebaeus. It had one simple purpose. To transport as large a quantity of refined metals to the factories around, and on, Mars, as possible in one go.
There were factories in Earth orbit too, but Hamilton had picked this refinery precisely because it only shipped to Mars. Some of the others were exclusively Earth refineries whilst a few shipped to both, depending on the positions of Mars and Earth relative to the refinery itself.
The carrier was long and compartmentalized. A series of loading tubes, much like the one that had connected the smaller cargo hauler to the mining facility, led from the refinery to the carrier. Each of the separate tubes and compartments loaded different metals, processed and refined from the ore arriving on the other side of the facility.
“In the old days,” Klane told them. “The carriers had no Skip Drives. So they were easy meat for pirates whilst en route to the inner planets. Then they were escorted by warships. But when the Skip Drives came in there was no need to protect them anymore. The only vulnerable parts of their journey are the start and finish points and they are heavily monitored.”
“Don’t the pirates have Skip Drives now?” Jones inquired.
Klane shrugged. “Some, probably. But as fast
as they could Skip in, so could a warship. And, let’s face it, it’d take a fair old while to unload something like this of its treasure!”
They nodded, all of them still staring at the gigantic vessel that they were now skimming over in search of a latching point.
“If this thing has a Skip Drive, how will we hold onto it when it jumps? Won’t we affect it’s mass, or something?” Jones frowned. “And won’t the sudden acceleration tear us free?”
“Ordinarily, yes.” LeGault replied from the helm. “But we’re such an insignificant addition to this giant that we won’t make more than a fractional difference to its power requirements. All ships generate a field around themselves when going into hyperspace. That field extends well outside of the hull, to protect comms antenna and the like. It’s kind of like a bubble, I suppose. We’ll be well inside that, for certain. It protects the ship from the entry into hyperspace and all the unpleasant relativistic effects that entails.”
“You worry too much!” Hamilton told Jones.
“Someone has to do the worrying.” He said defensively.
“There!” LeGault stated. “That looks like a good spot.”
He indicated an indented section just forward of the first massive cargo compartment. Beyond, the control area of the ship occupied the bow, housing sensors, navigation and comms gear and so on. The section made a small valley between the two areas. Additionally, there were support struts for the carrier’s structure that ran between the two sections, offering a solid point for the maintenance craft to latch onto with its arm.
LeGault guided the craft into the gap carefully, although there was plenty of room for it. Carl and Jones went down to the arm booth to secure their hold once they were settled in to LeGault’s satisfaction.
Then they allowed themselves the luxury of powering up the life-support system again in order that they could get out of their suits. Nestled in amongst the structure, the relatively low power emissions would most likely be mistaken for part of the carrier’s own systems should anyone be looking, so they felt fairly safe doing so. No one relished the idea of spending any more time in the suits than they had to.
Then it was just a matter of waiting for the carrier to finish loading. From their earlier connection to the refinery’s systems, they already knew they had a couple of days wait ahead of them.
Jones suggested tapping into one of the carrier’s data ports so that he could keep an eye on things. It would be more than possible for him to access the refinery from the carrier whilst it was docked but nobody felt like donning a suit again and trailing a spool of fiber-optic wire behind them whilst they went hunting for an access panel on the giant ship.
Since the maintenance craft was designed for a crew of four and had only pairs of bunks in two compartments, they had bought extra bedding. It was Carl and Klane who lost out on a proper bed, since she was too tall and he too wide to fit comfortably in the bunks. Instead they made a place for themselves in the mess area. LeGault and Jones shared one compartment, leaving Hamilton and Johnson the other one. There wasn’t a lot of room for one person, let alone two, in the bunks and in the end they pulled the flimsy mattresses out of the bunks and put them side by side on the floor and slept on that.
The two days turned into three before the carrier finished taking on its load. Even then, once the loading had ceased, it took several more hours before the loading tubes, one by one, disconnected from the massive vessel.
Finally, however, the carrier was free of the refinery and slowly moving away into space. Although it was a massive vessel, it was nowhere near as heavily engineered as its smaller cousin, that they had recently piggy-backed on. It had no need to venture into the debris field amid the asteroid belt. Plus, most of its journey time was spent in hyperspace courtesy of its Skip Drive and, in hyperspace, there truly was nothing to hit. No dust, no particles, no atoms. Nothing at all. People thought of space as a vacuum but the truth was that hyperspace was the real vacuum.
“Well.” Hamilton told them as the ship got under way. “This is where the fun really begins. We’ve had a smooth run so far. From here, we’ll have to make it up as we go along.”
“How long will it take us to Skip to Mars?” Jones asked, looking at LeGault.
The pilot shrugged. “Best part of a day, I guess. Maybe longer with a ship this huge.”
Jones didn’t look too happy with the non-committal answers.
“We’ll get there when we get there.” Klane told them. “In the meantime, I suggest everyone check and rechecks the equipment they have. We’re likely to need it soon.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As LeGault had predicted, the Skip from the asteroid belt refinery to Mars took more than a day. The carrier was massive and its Skip Drive only just powerful enough to propel it into hyperspace.
In fact it was the best part of two days later that the familiar starfield of Earth reappeared to replace the grayish nothingness of hyperspace.
All six of them wore their body armor underneath their normal clothing. Over the top of that they wore the suits that the Marines on Ulysses had given to them from their armory. The suits were military-issue, obviously, and packed with the latest tech that the Empire could afford to give to its soldiers.
These particular suits were classified as “light” use, meaning that they were intended for non-combat purposes. There was no armoring integral to the suits that was intended to stop weapon’s fire. They were strictly intended for peaceful duties.
That said, the suits were robust and easily as tough as any normal, civilian, equivalent. Where they outshined the more normal, commercially available space wear was in the tech they contained.
The suits had a much more advanced rebreather arrangement, allowing the wearer to stay inside them for days so long as exertion was kept to a minimum. Likewise the comms and visual display gear incorporated into the helmet was military grade and the suit incorporated all the equipment necessary for a Marine to evaluate his surrounding and environment fully.
In case of suit punctures or tears, they had a pocketful of slap on patches of various sizes and shapes. The patches had a tear-off membrane on one side. You simply tore off the membrane and pressed the patch over the damaged area. The material actually bonded at the molecular level with the suit, sealing the hole and becoming a part of the suit itself.
The six of them had practiced donning the suits quickly and had been wearing them during the journey so far when needed. So they were all fairly used to the data displays that were projected onto the inside of the visor and how to manipulate them. Each of them had their own suit, that they had taken time to tailor to their needs.
However, with the exception of Klane and Hamilton, they were now wearing them with a certain amount of nervousness. Because now, they were wearing them for real. The air on the maintenance craft had been pumped out into the storage tanks and the suits were the only thing keeping them alive.
The precaution had been taken by Hamilton after the carrier had emerged from its Skip jump.
Mars orbit was rife with activity. There were so many orbital facilities, satellites and vessels moving about that any notion of simply having the maintenance craft slip free of the carrier and head planetwards was doomed to failure.
Likewise, having the craft transfer to another vessel, or shuttle was equally impractical. The Martian orbit was thick with sensor scans of all sorts. Even on minimal power, using the thrusters only, their craft would be spotted almost as soon as it moved. Spotted, challenged and, when no transponder response was forthcoming, set upon. The only upside to all the activity was that they were able to do a quick scan of their own without it being noticed amid the general free-for-all of sensor-mania.
For Hamilton, it was obvious that their time aboard the maintenance craft was at an end. It could take them no further and certainly not down to the Martian surface. If they wanted to get planetside, they’d have to jump ship onto something that wouldn’t get blown to bits.
So he had ordered everyone into their gear and had LeGault shut the craft’s power down entirely. The last scan they had performed had revealed the carrier headed towards an enormous freight-handling terminal. Much like the refinery, most of the terminal was automated. Ships docked, their cargoes were unloaded by robots and then loaded onto smaller vessels bound for other facilities in orbit, or down to the planet below.
As the big carrier closed in on the terminal, they filed out of the wide open airlock and out onto the hull of the carrier.
“Won’t they be able to detect us crawling around out here?” Jones wondered aloud through the suit’s secure comms channel. He was looking a little awkward in the suit. Of them all, only Hamilton, Klane and LeGault had spent much time in a suit. Johnson had, recently, of course, but Carl and Jones looked far out of their comfort zone.
“The suits mask most of that. Enough so that it won’t trigger alarm bells.” Klane told him.
“I’m more concerned about that EMP warhead we’ve left behind.” Hamilton muttered. “It stands out more than we do, right now.”
Bringing the EMP along had seemed like a good idea. An emergency use only device that might have given them a fighting chance of escape had they been detected.
Just roll it out the bay and set it off in your wake. He had thought. Now, it was a millstone waiting to drag them down. It just takes one operator to do a weapons scan…
But there was no need for anyone to do such a scan on the big carrier. It was unarmed and entirely automated. It wasn’t like it was a ship coming in from another system, with unknown intent and capability. The carrier was a known quantity. Why would anyone scan it specifically?
So far it seemed that nobody was much interested in it. It received general sweeps but they were mostly aimed at triggering its transponder and making sure it was heading on the right course and speed. No one was interested in what it carried.
A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) Page 22