This Corner of the Universe

by Britt Ringel

  The chime sounded a third time.

  “Enter,” Heskan said irritably.

  The cabin door opened to reveal Ensign Jack Truesworth and Petty Officer Third Class Brian Deveraux. Truesworth cleared his throat and said sheepishly, “Uh, sir, if this is a bad time, we can come back.”

  Heskan shook his head and motioned the two crewmen into his cabin. “No, it’s fine, Jack. I was just lost in thought. What did you need?”

  Truesworth motioned to his PO and said, “Brian found it so if he wants to give the briefing…”

  PO Deveraux nodded and smiled at his section leader. “Thank you, sir.” He moved into the room and handed Heskan a circuit board. “This is from the buoy that was positioned at the Skoll tunnel point, Captain.”

  “The one that suffered a radiation malfunction, right?”

  “Correct," Deveraux agreed. “This is the culprit,” he said as he pointed to the circuit board. “This board should cycle through the read/receive lines but it’s fried. It’s one of the most common failures in a high radiation environment.”

  Heskan handed the circuit board back to the petty officer. “So nothing suspicious about that, huh?”

  “Not in and of itself, sir.” Deveraux turned the circuit board over and pointed to tiny, stenciled indentations built into the board near a corner. “Here is the part number. It tells us what it is, where it was made and when it was made.”

  Truesworth interrupted, “There’s really no reason to check them after construction. It’s more for the factories that do the initial build and then the preliminary tests to ensure they work.”

  Deveraux continued, “But you had us check everything so I did and I found something I can’t explain.” The petty officer paused for effect while he pulled out his datapad and handed it to Heskan.

  “This circuit board is part number RR-XHL-ISNE-SIN1-FAC3D-1024-982.” Deveraux looked up and added, “What you’re looking at, Captain, are the part numbers from every other part this circuit board connects to.”

  Heskan scanned through eight separate part numbers. “I’m not seeing what you’re getting at, PO.”

  Deveraux took two quick steps to stand by the captain. “Sir, look at the location identifier here,” he said as he pointed at the fourth and fifth groupings of each part number.

  “JAN3-FAC1A, for all of them,” Heskan read out loud.

  The petty officer gave Heskan a moment to sort through the implications. As the repercussions struck him, Heskan spoke involuntarily, “Oh. OH!”

  Both Deveraux and Truesworth started smiling and nodding but it was Truesworth who spoke next. “This buoy was built on Janus Three at factory facility One-A. However, this fried circuit board was produced on Sinope One at factory Three-D.”

  “There’s no reason to ship this part the eight-odd star systems from Sinope to Janus, is there?” Heskan asked.

  “No, sir. Not when Janus Three makes its own circuit boards right at the same factory. Which means that after construction, someone cracked open the buoy and inserted this board from Sinope,” Truesworth answered. “I had Brian go back and track this board and it turns out that it failed nine years ago. The buoy it originally belonged to was decommissioned and sold for scrap.”

  Heskan brought his hand to his chin. “So, someone bought that part, shipped it all the way to Skathi and then EMU’ed out to the Skoll buoy to swap it with its functional circuit board. Presto, failed buoy.”

  “It’s almost perfect. Out here, the navy is more likely to just replace the buoy with a new one and if they do recover it for inspection, the failure looks legit because it is legit,” Truesworth added.

  “Yeah, nine years ago it was,” Heskan said sardonically. “Okay, we need to think this through. Brian, excellent work.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Deveraux answered back quickly and then turned to leave. He had been a petty officer long enough to know when he was dismissed.

  Heskan opened a comm link through his datapad and spoke into it, “Attention, Anelace, this is the captain. Section head meeting in fifteen minutes in the main briefing room. Out.”

  Next, Heskan turned to face Truesworth again. “Jack, that was some mighty nice work. I know you and your section must have felt like this was just pointless busy work but you really made something out of it. I want Deveraux’s recommendation for commendation on my desk by next week, ok?”

  A broad smile spread across Truesworth’s face and he saluted, “Yes, sir!’

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Heskan had outlined Deveraux’s findings to his section leaders. “We finally have undisputed proof that someone is tampering with the navigation buoys in this system. The questions are who and why. Any ideas?” Heskan finished.

  Ensign Selvaggio tentatively raised her hand and offered, “If they EMU’ed to the buoy, then the ship carrying them would have to have gotten very close to it. The buoy would have detected it and recorded a near collision with it. Was that in the buoy’s memory?”

  “No, the buoy shows nothing like that and there are no signs of altering the record,” Truesworth answered.

  Selvaggio looked up to the ceiling in thought as she continued, “So how do you get a ship close to a nav buoy without detection…” She trailed off, lost in thought.

  “You use a stealth ship,” Lieutenant Jackamore stated. The engineering officer cleared his throat. “A ship with proper stealthing and moving slow enough could get within a light-second of a buoy undetected. Then the crew EMU’s out and performs the operation on the buoy, returns to the ship and they move away with nobody the wiser.”

  “That suggests a military ship. We’re at least nine dives from the Hollies,” Riedel said.

  “It wouldn’t have to be military if the ship was small enough,” replied Jackamore. “Sure, we’re used to thinking in terms of military-sized ships and if that were the case, we’d be looking at something like one of our destroyer-sized scouts. However, it’s possible to stealth civilian ships too. There’s black market, near military grade, stealth equipment for sale and if it was installed on something small, like a civilian sloop,” Jackamore tilted his head, “it’d be awfully hard to detect. Plus, add in this star system’s ambient radiation and you have a bona fide stealth ship lurking out there.”

  “What would something as small and expensive as a stealthed sloop be good for out here besides wrecking buoys?” Riedel asked.

  “Not much,” Chief Brown offered. “They’d have a crew of maybe seven or eight with hardly any cargo space; at most you might be able to mount an external railgun or laser on her.”

  “Holy crap!” Lieutenant Vernay exclaimed. All eyes turned toward her as she began to turn a bright shade of red. “Oops. Sorry, sirs.”

  Heskan couldn’t help but smile a little. “Keep working on that Tourette’s, Stacy.”

  She giggled softly, “No, sir, uh, I mean yes, sir.” Vernay shook her head, “Whatever. What I mean is I think I know how the other buoy, the one at the Narvi tunnel point, died.”

  “Space object debris strike,” Truesworth said.

  Vernay waved a finger at Truesworth. “Yes and no. What if the space debris was fired from a railgun on that stealth ship?”

  Truesworth shook his head. “Whatever hit it was roughly point one meters wide. Stacy, you said yourself that no political entity in known space uses point one as a caliber,” Truesworth countered.

  “Yes but now I’m saying something different. Two possibilities. The first is the debris was fired from a custom railgun. Now why go through the expense and trouble of building a point one railgun? It’s stupid when almost anyone could go to Lieutenant Jackamore’s black market stealth supplies and weapons emporium and get a standard point two. The power costs would be about the same, even the size would be nearly the same and ammunition wouldn’t have to be custom made.”

  Vernay took a breath and then continued, “However, if you wanted to make your hits look like space debris, then using something nonstandard makes more
sense and might be worth the trouble.”

  “And the second possibility, Lieutenant?” Riedel asked.

  “The ship carries a standard caliber railgun but they used a sabot round.”

  Selvaggio interjected, “Stacy, I’m just a navigation officer. They tell me where to go and I make the ship go there really fast. Can you translate that into something understandable, please?”

  Vernay smiled at her friend. “The gun barrel is this big,” Vernay said as she used both hands to form a large circle.

  Selvaggio exaggerated her nod and expression as if in wonderment.

  Vernay then used only one hand to form a smaller circle and added, “But the bullet is this small. Now, to get the bullet to fire cleanly out of the gun, the bullet is wrapped in something, probably a carbon foam of some kind, so the bullet is now big enough to be fired accurately out of the large barrel. But when it clears the barrel, the wrapping detaches and all that is left is just this smaller bullet with an innocuous caliber.”

  Selvaggio stayed silent.

  “‘Innocuous’ means…”

  “I got that part,” Selvaggio cut her off as she rolled her eyes.

  Heskan lightly tapped the conference table with an amused expression in his eyes. “So we might have a sloop-sized ship with stealth capability and a railgun lurking around in this system. What are the implications of that?”

  “A lot,” Riedel offered. “Most sloops don’t have a tunnel drive. So how did it get here?”

  “Transported by a freighter, most likely,” Brown said.

  Heskan turned toward Brown, “Chief, would something the size of Vagabond have the cargo capability?”

  “Absolutely, she has more than enough continuous hold space an’ the doors on those bulk carriers could open wide enough to get it in an’ out.”

  Riedel continued with his train of thought, “But why is she here and how long has she been here? How long can a sloop operate independently? When would it need to resupply?”

  “My estimate would be a sloop wouldn’t be able to operate unsupported for more than a couple weeks,” Jackamore said. “If she is still in-system from the time the first buoy went out to now, we’re talking many months, maybe years.”

  “Heck, Captain, even Anelace can’t go without logistical support for several months. We’re stopping by the RALF every week or so,” Riedel noted.

  Heskan nodded in grim understanding. “This is bigger than a single sloop. The sloop is just a tool that’s being used. The question is, to what end?”

  “To keep us blind, that’s what the sloop is doing,” Riedel stated. “Someone didn’t want Renard to see what they were doing. Nor us, now that we’re here.”

  “If you’re a criminal enterprise, what do you do in a remote system with two high emissions asteroid fields?” Heskan asked.

  “You hide something in it,” Vernay answered. “Then when the Republic has the audacity to come here and buoys are positioned in the system, you ‘encourage’ them to malfunction—”

  Selvaggio interrupted, “And when Renard comes here, accidents are ‘encouraged’ to happen in a system where it’s already insane to attempt mining operations.”

  Vernay flashed back to her theory. “Sure, Joe Miner in his excavator is just minding his own business, he’s not even looking for other ships let alone a stealth one and then boom, he’s hit by the railgun and that’s that.”

  Riedel considered the possibilities. “That makes sense but some of the ships Renard has lost have been a lot bigger than excavators. We’re talking surveyor ships and a bulk cargo carrier and it would take a lot more than one tiny railgun to destroy those and still stay unseen.”

  “There’s got to be more than a sloop out here,” Heskan said. “Jack, bring up a system chart of all the ships that have been lost in this system.” Heskan waited for the information to appear on the conference table. “Look, every ship larger than an excavator has been lost in an asteroid belt. We know civilian ships can barely see in the fields and without a functional buoy to transmit data, they’re down to, what—a couple light-seconds’ worth of detection radius?”

  Truesworth agreed, “About that.”

  “How long would it take to kill a blind, unsuspecting freighter with an average pirate ship, Mike?”

  The first officer thought for a few seconds before answering, “A pirate ship the size of a ketch, roughly our size? Not long. They could cripple them before they even know what hit them and once their communications go out, it doesn’t matter how slowly they die.”

  “A ketch would also have more cargo space fer supplies but they’d still need to be replenished. How’s that happenin’?” Brown asked.

  Inspiration hit Heskan. “Same way they killed those freighters, Boats.” Heskan zoomed the system view on the screen to the Beta Field. “Any freighter that travels in-system has to go through the Beta Field and unless we’re escorting it, we don’t see it clearly again until it comes out the other side. They simply rendezvous and off-load supplies inside the Beta Field. They have to slow down to a crawl while in the field anyway giving them all the time they need.”

  Heskan rocked back in realization as another piece fit into the puzzle. “The RALF base manager confirms this! The day I met him he had a freighter captain in his office and he was complaining about why the freighter was coming in with less than a full load. I’d bet two ensigns that it did arrive in-system with a full load—”

  “But off-loaded supplies to our mystery pirate ketch in the Beta Field,” Riedel finished the thought for him. “Damn, that fits together nicely but it still doesn’t explain why they’re going through all this trouble.”

  “What if the asteroid fields aren’t just fer hidin’?” Brown said. “There are some drugs that require high radiation environments to cultivate. This system is a pharmacologist’s dream in that respect.”

  Heskan agreed, “That’s possible, Chief. It’s hard to hide an illegal drug facility that’s emitting lots of radiation to create those drugs, that’s one of the reasons they’re so expensive. System police can easily locate such a facility, and there are so few places in a normal system where there’s enough background radiation to hide in that those locations can be routinely monitored. Skathi, on the other hand, is perfect because it has two complete asteroid fields to put a facility in.”

  “Whatever the contraband, it could also be loaded as a product onto freighters leaving the system in the Beta Field and we’d be none the wiser,” Riedel noted. “We haven’t been inspecting out-going freighters; there was never a reason to do it.”

  “Agreed but that changes today, Mike. We need to update our inspection schedule. Jack, I also want you to get me data on that freighter at the RALF the first day we docked,” Heskan ordered. He leaned back in his chair. Damn, I hate meetings because they’re usually just a colossal waste of time but this one has been highly productive. Maybe I need to re-evaluate the value of staff meetings, he thought.

  “Okay, to summarize: we think we have one pirate ketch and a sloop with stealth capabilities plus a possible drug production facility in one of the asteroid fields. If this is the case, this is bigger than any drug operation I’ve heard of. With that kind of money at stake, it wouldn’t surprise me if there is more than one ketch out here to protect these pirates’ interests.”

  “I’ll start working on some combat simulations with Anelace encountering pirate ketches in the Beta Field, sir,” Vernay volunteered.

  “Good thinking, Stacy. Is there anything else?” Heskan asked the group. When no one spoke up, Heskan adjourned the meeting and watched as his officers and senior chief filtered out of the room. Riedel stayed seated at the table with Heskan.

  Once the others had left the conference room, Heskan said, “Mike, if we’re right about all this, it’s going to end badly.”

  The first officer assented, “Yup, they’re trapped here like us. They won’t abandon the facility and run, and we can’t go to Narvi and return with overwhelming fo
rce. Neither of us has any good options.” Riedel paused in contemplation. “So, how do we find them?”

  “It won’t be necessary, Mike. When we start interrupting their outbound drug shipments, they’ll find us.”

  Chapter 9

  “Captain Heskan, we have a tunnel drive disturbance at the Narvi point. Signal is from a HandySize bulk carrier. She IDs as the cargo freighter Orphan but her beacon is red, sir!”

  Heskan shook his head, there’s no freighter coming in-system today on the schedule.

  It had been a slow two weeks since the staff meeting. Heskan had taken Anelace to the RALF to resupply and to talk once again to the station manager. Together, they had compiled a list of all of the freighters that had come in carrying less than eighty percent of their standard cargo loads. Heskan had then started to match these ships to their travel itineraries. Initially, that had proven fruitless as there were no correlations. However, when Heskan looked at their future stops, a pattern emerged.

  Without exception, every ship that docked at the RALF with less than an eighty percent load would find its way to the Erriapius system within two months of departing Skathi. Erriapius was another frontier system that connected to Narvi. Erriapius-2, also known as Baradis, was a good agricultural planet and generated a fair amount of freighter traffic as the planet began to boom. With freighters entering and exiting the system daily and with the planet undergoing a sort of population explosion, the local law enforcement was stretched thin. Erriapius had just one corvette and several smaller patrol craft to regulate system commerce and although Brevic headquarters had promised more support in the future, nothing had materialized to date. The sad truth was that Bree was expanding its coreward or “northern” border faster than the republic could safely regulate. However, to restrict expansion would be, in essence, forfeiting many systems outright to the Hollaran Commonwealth, which showed no signs of slowing their own ever-expanding coreward border. As a result, the frontier systems were increasingly on their own. Erriapius is the perfect place to distribute contraband from a large freighter to smaller ships and beyond, Heskan thought.