Law enforcement took strident steps to discourage baffle-riding through nit-picking, contradictory and frequently draconian local policies or unabashed harassment of anyone who appeared likely to offend. As a result the tiny ships lurked on the skin of Nivia Station and its associated docking platforms like parasites, concealing themselves in shadows and radiant hot-spots. It was a constant game of cat-and-mouse, a test of skill, luck and daring.
Philip Sorenson had worked all day to maneuver himself into position near the Ladybird, a freighter bound for Tammuz. It was the most distant system he’d yet had the opportunity to visit and beat the current record among the loose gang of locals he ran with. It didn’t matter that ships to and from Tammuz were rare at Nivia—Philip had been stranded twice before and his father had readily shelled out the freight and passage costs to get him home.
The freighter uncoupled from the platform and began its tack into the traffic pattern, passing within eighty meters of Philip’s vantage point. He released his magnetic grapples and flexed his hands on the controls. He had to be fast if he didn’t want the starship or Orbital Security to spot him.
“Don’t even think about it, laddie,” a static-distorted voice advised. “I been here three days; my ride.”
Philip spotted his competition: a patched-up rattletrap of a ‘Rider emerging from behind a nearby radiator vane. It surprised him that the hobo chose to contest the right to the ride. Baffle-riders were generally reclusive and typically yielded to the local gang. Nevertheless, the other ‘Rider had called dibs fair and square. Etiquette required Philip Sorenson to cede the ride but Philip Sorenson had little use for etiquette that didn’t suit him.
“Tough shit old buddy,” Sorenson shot back, and fired his OMS.
The hobo fired his a second later. Too late, Philip realized the ‘Rider wasn’t going for the freighter; it was running at him! Philip threw his arms up instinctively. The OMS cut off when he released his controls and the hobo clipped him broadside—just a bump, but enough to bounce him against the platform. Alarms went off in the cockpit as momentum sent him spinning away from his concealment. The hobo ‘Rider slipped into the radiation plume of the freighter’s drive—the baffles—while Philip fought to bring himself back under control.
“You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “I see you again I’ll have your ass!”
“You’ll suck vacuum, you don’t mind the rules, laddie,” the voice warned. “Count this your one free lesson from ol’ MacLeod.”
Philip scampered back into his hiding place, steamed but grateful that none of his peers had witnessed the equivalent of a bitch-slap he’d received at the hands of a fucking bum. He wasn’t likely to find another ride that day; there were no more departures for anyplace worthwhile close by, but a few minutes later a good-sized yacht eased by in the freighter’s wake.
A yacht implied wealth and exotic destinations. With bare seconds to make a move Philip gave no consideration to the consequences of ill-prepared travel. He goosed his OMS and slid into the sweet spot behind the larger craft. He matched thrust and velocity, his own drive plume swallowed up in the hellish radiation pummeling his shields. He quickly realized that he couldn’t employ his normal tactic of creeping close to his host and grappling on; the yacht lacked the rigging mechanisms on larger vessels and his additional mass would significantly alter his host’s center of gravity.
Holding position manually during the hours-long run out to the jumpzone was physically exhausting. Philip was happy to release the controls when the yacht jumped, carrying him along with it, and he settled in for a rest.
It wasn’t long before the ship’s sensors alerted Philip to a fluctuation in the jump field. His expectation of an exotic destination evaporated with the reality that such a short transit time meant an intrasystem jump. He strapped in again quickly. The egress was the most dangerous moment; his stomach knotted in anticipation as the adrenaline rush he craved roared through his veins.
Even in the best of circumstances—arriving with knowledge of the destination’s traffic patterns and the intercept capability of local authorities—a ‘Rider might have only seconds to react. In most cases massive delta-v carried them safely away from their host and into the traffic pattern where they disappeared before they could be intercepted.
This time he had nothing. Would his unwitting host slow suddenly, causing a crash assuredly fatal for him? Would it go full throttle before he could back away from the deadly core of the drive exhaust? His senses seemed to extend beyond his body into the skin of his tiny ship, watching for the slightest vibration, the most minuscule change in his instrumentation to clue him to the larger ship’s intentions.
For all his anticipation, the drop was routine, without so much as a flash of dying matter. Philip’s host maintained its heading and brought its engines up smoothly, leaving him plenty of time to fall back fifteen or twenty kilometers in the exhaust plume before he lit his own drive.
He kept pace with the larger ship, hidden in its baffles, while he worked to determine his location. His passive sensor package compensated for the radiation-induced interference and scanned common radio and beacon frequencies. The receivers found nothing and switched to the secondary frequencies. Failing that, the scanning cycle defaulted to the low end of the RF spectrum and began scanning up. Still nothing. No ship-to-ship, no Space Traffic Control, not a single radar pulse.
They’d emerged at an unofficial waypoint, Philip decided, denying the cold dread gathering around him. His host was merely calculating the next leg of its journey and it would slow to reorient itself before long, allowing him to slip in close for the next jump.
The yacht continued to accelerate.
Philip’s thrust-to-mass ratio was ten times that of the yacht; he could catch up within minutes if need be, but the baffle-rider’s necessarily small size limited his fuel capacity. He’d already used a significant portion of his reserves to maintain his position and before long he’d be down to nothing but his OMS. He had a decision to make: stay with his host on the diminishing chance that it would jump shortly, take a chance on the other captain’s good nature and contact him, or coast on this unwavering course to save fuel for rescue or escape later on.
He cut his throttle and let his host walk away, hoping he could pick up some signal once he was clear of the radioactive exhaust. The other ship shrank to a star-like dot and vanished altogether from his visual instruments. Hours later it crawled off the edge of his scope leaving him utterly alone in the black void of interstellar space.
Philip coasted for three days along the yacht’s last course. He’d endured much longer flights alone, but never as alone as this. He’d heard tales of ‘Riders who’d spent weeks stranded alone, with no apparent way out of their predicament, who survived. Such adventures required mental discipline and emotional strength to survive. Philip compensated for his lack of those qualities with a stash of drugs secreted away in one of his storage compartments. He was not a person comfortable with himself; he needed an audience to be at his best and it wasn’t long before he began to wonder how much he could use and still have a lethal dose left if he needed it.
His receivers locked on a frequency for a split-second. Philip stared at his indicators. Nothing. A natural spike in the background noise.
Then it happened again.
Moment by moment the interval between signal losses shortened until it chattered in his ears and finally locked on solid. Within moments his passive sensor array indicated a direction and his Navcomp determined the optimal burn to put him on target.
He wouldn’t reach the signal’s source for several days, but the mere presence of a human artifact lifted his spirits. Philip dug out his stash to celebrate.
TEN
Nivia System: 2709:05:35 Standard
The T-108 reentered the sidereal universe as the bubble of energy encapsulating it shoved aside the incumbent space-time to make room for its payload. A few dozen hydrogen atoms died in the space-compression tsunami, vanishi
ng from existence in a burst of gamma rays an instant before the usurping volume blinked into existence.
Terson and Zarn fell to the tasks of establishing their actual position relative to the theoretical point of emergence, locating their destination and altering course to reach it. They communicated in the monosyllabic shorthand of men who’d spent enough time together that each instinctively knew what the other was doing and therefore had no need to expound on it.
“Son of a bitch,” Zarn mumbled angrily over the intercom. The change in routine caught Terson’s undivided attention. “Navcomp crashed and won’t reboot,” Zarn replied to his query. “I have to translate the beacon by hand. Damn thing was fine until we dropped!”
Terson loosened his straps and settled in for the wait. By rough calculation they should have emerged about six million kilometers and fourteen hours away from the platform, out of range of the T-108’s modest radar. The navpoint itself lay perpendicular to the orbital plane of the Nivian system at a distance roughly twice that of Hades from the sun. Terson scanned the sky with the 108’s optics, searching first for the primary, a distant but significantly brighter star than the rest, then her planets. The only two he could identify with any certainty were Caliban and Othello; the rest, including Nivia, were lost in the expanse of stars in the background.
“Stand by to set reference,” Zarn said. “Vertical plane fifteen point seven degrees. Horizontal plane two hundred fifty-six point eight degrees. Reference range to beacon five hundred thirty six thousand, one hundred eighty nine kilometers.”
Terson echoed the settings as he entered the data in his console. “Got it.”
“Target coordinates: vertical plane seventy degrees, horizontal plane one hundred twenty five. Range unknown.”
“Set and locked,” Terson said. “Hang on.” The OMS fired, reorienting the craft with a lurch. He goosed the acceleration to two gravities for nearly half an hour to build up momentum before backing off to a comfortable one-third G. Their calculated fuel consumption left a reasonable reserve for docking, but they’d need to take on a full load to make good time on the last leg. “Going to auto and transferring control to Nav,” Terson said. “Wake me in ten.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Terson unstrapped and pulled himself into the narrow corridor leading aft. The long period of continuous thrust confused his body and he lost his equilibrium momentarily as his mind’s concept of up and down fought physical reality. He swallowed a surge of nausea, concentrating on a single point at the end of the corridor until it passed. He made it to the bunk without losing his stomach and strapped down, catching a few fitful hours of sleep until Zarn buzzed him and he woke with hands flailing, convinced he was falling.
“We’ve got the platform on radar,” Zarn explained, “but I’m painting two targets. I think we’ve got another ship out here with us.”
Shit! Terson unstrapped and pulled himself hand over hand to the cockpit with visions of their carefully crafted schedule falling apart. It was entirely possible that someone had been rerouted due to a platform failure at some other navpoint and was at that moment gulping down the fuel he and Zarn desperately needed.
“What’s the transponder say?”
“No transponder from either target,” Zarn informed him. Now the possibility existed that this platform was the one experiencing the malfunction and the ship with it was a maintenance crew. Neither option boded well for their schedule, but a maintenance ship should still exhibit a transponder code.
A third possibility came to mind, one which might not have occurred to civilized folk such as Zarn: the school’s unmanned training platforms were vulnerable to anyone who knew where to find them. Looting and vandalism were rare but not unheard of.
“How much longer before our reverse burn?”
“Four hours,” Zarn said. Terson sucked his teeth. Once they rotated and fired their engines to slow they would be blind. If the second target was a maintenance crew there was no worry. If it was a thief, they might be in trouble. Zarn acknowledged Terson’s concern without debate. “Are you suggesting we abort? They’ll give us credit for extenuating circumstances.”
“It’s too late,” Terson explained. “We’ve got enough fuel to rendezvous with the platform but not enough to get back to the jump zone even if we start now.” That wasn’t technically true: stopping used about the same delta-v whether it happened at the platform or four-fifths of the way there. The vapors left in the tanks in either scenario could send them back to the beacon at a few hundred KPH, but it would take so long that they’d run out of food, water or air before they got within range of its transceiver, leaving them to hope that Malone would realize they were overdue and send assistance before that happened.
The other option was to jump from where they were and take their chances with the mayhem an unscheduled arrival would generate at Nivia. With any luck they wouldn’t emerge on top of some other vessel, destroying both in the process, or run up someone’s ass before they got slowed down to the authorized speed limit.
Precedents in Commonwealth law held that self-preservation was insufficient excuse to hazard another vessel or habitat and that doing so subjected the offender to the possibility of capital punishment. The concept of death through voluntary inaction went beyond the pale of human instinct, but it was pounded into the head of every ship’s crew until their ears bled.
“Let’s power up the communications laser,” Terson suggested. “See what we get back from a hard ping.” They trained the optics on the distant platform, though at such extreme range they could barely discern one point in infrared.
Terson locked the targeting cursor on the approximate center of the mass and double-checked to ensure the range determined by radar was within a few percent of that entered into the laser. The beam could reach a distance one hundred times greater than the radar and he didn’t want to burn a hole through the platform’s thin skin by inadvertently miss-setting the power.
He gave the platform several minutes to detect the beam and reply. When the estimated time came and went he began the painstaking task of sweeping: adjust the bearing a micrometer, wait; adjust again, wait. Every minute without a response brought them closer to their burn point.
Finally the platform’s transponder data leapt to the screen, proof that the platform wasn’t dead, suggesting that the problem might be nothing more than a malfunctioning RF transmitter and that the mysterious companion really was a repair crew. Terson intended to confirm this now that he had a reference and knew generally which way to steer the beam to interrogate the companion object. Instead of a response from a transponder, though, he got one from Zarn:
“He’s moving away! Three hundred KPH, perpendicular to our course.”
“Recalculate the burn,” Terson ordered. “Three separate bursts; keep from giving him a solid ETA.” If they overshot the platform at a thousand KPH or so they’d get a chance to look the bogie over without burning up all their fuel. If they didn’t like his look they’d just keep going and decide what to do when the time came.
“I’ve got an idea about that,” Zarn said. “Instead of jumping for Nivia we could jump to a Standard Traffic Entry Portal. The traffic laws are a lot more forgiving and we should be able to get off an SOS through the hyperlink.”
“If we’re still alive when we get there,” Terson said. The nearest STEP was a long way off and the T-108’s jump drive was capable of neither the range nor relative speed of a true starship. “Getting there would take as much time as staying here until Malone figured out we were missing.”
“I didn’t hear you come up with any better idea,” Zarn groused.
Terson didn’t think he could get back to sleep, but the monotony couldn’t sustain the worry and he dozed for a couple more hours in his seat. Zarn woke him for the first burn and Terson took over the watch. The bogie lingered a few kilometers away from the platform, giving no indication if it was waiting to pounce or flee. By the time they initiated their last burn they co
uld pick out two distinct objects with the optics but the mysterious vessel either could not or would not respond to repeated laser pings.
“He’ll be at eleven o’clock, fifteen degrees above our horizon when we cut thrust,” Terson said. The seat cushion rebounded with enough force to unseat him, had he not been strapped in. His stomach argued with zero G while Zarn got a visual lock on the bogie.
“What the hell is a baffle-rider doing out here?” Zarn exclaimed. Baffle-riders ranged from those cobbled together from spare parts to those professionally built for thrill seekers. Judging by the sleek lines, garish paint job, and the unmistakable shape of a fusion drive bell housing, their bogie was one of the latter.
“He’ll be disappointed if he thinks we’ll let him ride us back,” Terson said. How he reacted to that disappointment could be interesting. It was patently illegal to arm a civilian vessel without Commonwealth licensing, a process that took months if not years to complete, but baffle-riders squabbled with each other frequently and weren’t known for compliance in that regard. Fortunately, the types of armament capable of escaping the notice of the first law enforcement agency to lay eyes on it tended to be crude projectiles launched via one or more compressed-gas tubes mounted on the hull and camouflaged as an OMS port. Blowguns weren’t particularly lethal, but could do significant damage to an unarmored hull.
A factory-built hot rod wasn’t likely to come equipped that way and Terson didn’t see any indication that this one had been retrofitted, so his greater concern was the question of how it got out to the middle of nowhere. “Scope’s clear,” Zarn reported in answer to the obvious question. “Maybe he came out with a refueler.”
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