by M. D. Cooper
Once again, the Sexy transitioned to the dark layer and began its journey toward Star City.
Though the ship had been drifting at 0.09c for half a day, the trip would still take over ten hours, with little to do in the interim.
“Ready for a re-match?” Trevor asked.
Jessica arched an eyebrow. “In what? Snark, or sex?”
“Both of course.”
* * * * *
As predicted, Jessica and Trevor filled the next ten hours with sex, Snark, and a bit of actual sleep. She was cleaning up the small galley when Trevor called down the ship’s central passageway.
“You coming, Jess? Just a minute ‘til we’re back in regular space.”
“Yeah,” Jessica replied as she grabbed the Snark case and stowed it in the closet. “Just making sure that everything’s battened down.”
Iris added.
“Prudent,” Jessica said as she entered the cockpit and settled into her seat, pulling on the harness for good measure.
“Expect things to get crazy?
Jessica cast an appraising look at Trevor. “You don’t?”
“Good point,” Trevor replied as he pulled his harness on too.
A second after he finished, the stars snapped back into view, and scan pulled in a visual of the system.
“Huh…” Jessica said after a moment. “It’s smaller than I’d thought it would be.”
Iris supplied.
“Why’s that?” Trevor asked.
“Good point,” Trevor replied.
Jessica examined the sphere 5 AU distant. It was rotating slowly, not fast enough to see, but the holodisplay noted that it was moving at just over twelve-hundred kilometers per hour. Its surface would have been a brilliant white—had there been anything other than ambient starlight, and the glow of the Stillwater Nebula to illuminate it. Instead it gleamed a ruddy-grey color, crisscrossed with strange lines and frequented by large circles.
“Anything else?” Jessica asked.
“This place is creeping me out.” Trevor said.
“You’re telling me,” Jessica replied. “How is it that they made the sphere so small? The mass of this star system is over one solar mass—its gravitational effect is apparent on the nearby stars. But a sphere that small will have punishing gravity, well over 5g.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re spinning it,” Trevor offered.
“Would have to spin it a hell of a lot faster than that,” Jessica said.
“Damn. Well, I did want to see something like this torn apart. Now I know that we’d just have to spin the dyson sphere.”
“That’s morbid,” Jessica chastised Trevor. “People live there.”
“I meant if we found a derelict sphere,” Trevor said.
Iris’s Link avatar shot Trevor a strange look.
“Hmmm…” Trevor replied and stroked his chin.
“What’s this over here?” Jessica asked, pulling up an image of an object just over one AU from the dyson sphere. “It’s small, Mars-sized, from the looks of it.”
“So that’s what they did!” Jessica snapped her fingers. “Binary accretion. There must have been two neutron stars here and they used one to strip the other down.”
“Wow, that must have been some serious engineering to pull off in a few thousand years.”
“That must have been some light show,” Jessica said wistfully. “Though I imagine the nebula blocked a lot of it from the rest of humanity.”
Trevor nodded. “I bet that’s why they came out this far. Didn’t want anyone to know what they were up to.”
“Seems strange, though,” Jessica said. “Star City probably predates the Transcend/Orion schism. The Transcend has never eschewed advanced tech. Why hide out here?”
Iris said.
“Man, there is just nothing else in this system…” Trevor said after a minute. “They must have stripped everything down to build their sphere—and the ring around the other star.”
“Could be,” Jessica mused. “Think these stars going up caused the Stillwater nebula? Or a part of it?”
“This sure is a lot of hurry up and wait,” Trevor said after a few minutes. “Mind if I go take a shower? I’ll make us something to eat too.”
Jessica nodded absently as she stared at the sphere they were approaching. “Sure, hon. I could use a good meal.”
Trevor laughed. “You got it. I’ll see what I can rustle up from the supplies.”
Jessica barely noted his departure as she wondered at who would build such a thing as Star City, and why they would build it way out here in the Perseus Arm….
EVASION
STELLAR DATE: 11.17.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, near the Star City System
REGION: Interstellar Space, Orion Freedom Alliance, Perseus Arm
“Fun fact, Sabrina,” Cargo said as he rolled his shoulders. “Telling someone they’re not going to like something kinda makes it worse. ‘Cause now I’m imagining the worst-case scenarios.”
“Great. Now what is it?” Cargo asked.
“Unghhh,” Cargo groaned.
Sabrina said cautiously.
“It’s pretty obvious,” Cheeky said from her place at the pilot’s seat. She twisted around to look at Cargo. “Jessica took the Sexy to Star City.”
“I swear,” Cargo said with a long sigh. “Not only do I regret letting you name the ship the Sexy, I regret having it at all. The middle of enemy territory is the last place we should be splitting up.”
“Sabs, baby, you gotta stop equivocating. What is it?” Cheeky asked.
“Shit!” Cargo swore, and brought up the Orion Guard ship’s course on th
e main holo. “Damn, they’re coming around toward the location of our last burn.”
“The one we did moments before we saw them,” Cheeky added. “Still, they’re over half a light minute out. At their current velocity, it will take them two days arrive.”
“Unless they extrapolate our course,” Cargo said as he leaned back in his seat.
“Captain?” a voice said from the entrance to the bridge.
Cargo turned to see Finaeus entering the bridge. “What is it?”
“I caught the alert on the general shipnet. The OG boat picked up our burn.”
“Sheesh, where were you?” Cargo asked. “Hiding in the passageway?”
“No, Terry and I were talking about the sensor suite on the ship in the lounge, there’s an amazing view of the nebula back there.”
“Hi,” Terry said, waving from behind Finaeus.
Cargo nodded to Terry and turned his attention back to Finaeus. “You’re wearing your ‘I have an idea’ face,”
Cheeky chuckled, and Finaeus appeared not to notice the annoyance in Cargo’s voice.
“I probably am. It’s a good idea, even by my standards,” Finaeus said. “I was telling Terry about how the Orion Guard can stealth its ships using light and rad benders. It’s not absolutely perfect, but it’s enough that at these types of distances, the ships are entirely invisible.”
“Right. We’ve been on ISF ships,” Cargo said. “They can fly right up to you and you can’t see them. Even optically.”
“Oh!” Finaeus exclaimed. “The Intrepid has fifth millennia stealth tech as well? I can’t wait to meet the engineers aboard it.”
“You have a point, I assume?” Cargo asked.
Cargo replied.
“I do,” Finaeus said with a curt nod and a glint in his eye that told Cargo the old man was well aware of Cargo’s mood. “I think we can use the grav shield as a lens to spot stealthed ships.”
“How so?” Cheeky asked.
Finaeus gestured to the main holo and the view changed to show their location relative to the Stillwater Nebula. The nebula stretched for four hundred light years along the galactic disk, spreading along the coreward edge of the Perseus arm. On the rimward side, long tendrils of gas reached out, almost like the red-and-purple hued cloud was raining.
“You can see how the angular momentum and inertia of the nebula is pushing gas out on the rimward side. However, what you can’t see—unless you’re looking for it—is the superheated hydrogen that’s suffusing space for dozens of lightyears rimward of the nebula.”
Cargo shrugged “So? There’s superheated hydrogen everywhere—outside of a galactic core, that is. What’s so unusual about this?”
“This stuff is even hotter, and it’s way denser,” Terry said.
“I think it should be possible to detect eddies left in space by any nearby ships,” Finaeus added.
Cheeky rose from her seat and walked toward the holotank. “But if we use an active scan to look for eddies in the interstellar medium, it’ll be like hanging a big flashing sign over Sabrina saying ‘ship over here, come find us’.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Finaeus said with a grin. We don’t have to run active scan. The neutron stars at Star City must be positioned perpendicular to this region of space, because they’re flooding it with X-rays. If we use our shields to funnel an amplified quantity of X-rays into our sensor suite, we should be able to scan for stealthed ships passively.”
Cargo stroked his chin. “You been listening to this Nance? What do you and Erin think?”
“Merit? Risk?” Cargo asked.
Nance’s avatar nodded—after casting a resigned look at Erin.
“Excellent!” Finaeus exclaimed, rubbing his hands. “I can’t wait to try this out.”
“Scan console’s right there,” Cargo said. “This was your idea. Have at it.”
“With pleasure,” Finaeus said as he gestured for Terry to join him.
Cargo saw a brief look that he didn’t recognize pass over Cheeky’s features. It was a narrowing of the eyes, a short intake of breath.
Cargo verbalized a soft hmmph.
Cargo didn’t deign to respond to that comment, and instead left the bridge to get a cup of coffee from the galley. When he arrived, the pot was empty—probably Finaeus’s doing, the man never restocked anything. Misha wasn’t present, so Cargo made a fresh pot himself.
By the time Cargo returned to the bridge, the holotank was showing a broad swath of space, roughly ten light hours across. A marker noted the position of Sabrina, and another showed the location of the Orion Guard patrol craft.
Nine other markers were visible in the holotank. Two of them much closer to Sabrina than the patrol craft.
“Is that what I think it is?” Cargo asked.
“We don’t know yet, Captain,” Terry said as she frowned at the holotank. “They could be anything, rocks, stray comets, whatever. Once we get a bit more data we should be able to sort out their vector.”
Cargo glanced at Cheeky, who was back in her seat with a view of the detected signatures on her display.
Cargo stroked his chin and considered their options.
Cargo sighed and shook his head. Testy too. That was even more unlike Cheeky.
“Confirmed,” Finaeus announced. “The two signatures closest to us are converging.”
“On us?” Cargo asked.
“A bit behind us,” Terry said, then blushed. “Uh, Captain.”
“You don’t need to call me captain all the time. This isn’t a military ship,” Cargo said. “About those stealthed Orion ves
sels—they must think that we’ve slowed more than we have. If they have those two ships closing in, why move the visible patrol boat? It got us looking for them.”
Finaeus shrugged. “Maybe they’re bad at tactics.”
Cheeky glanced back at Finaeus. “They probably don’t want to give away their stealthed ships unless they need to. Once those two ships find us, they’ll send the patrol boat to us. Then, if we’re unruly, the stealth ships take us out.”
“When did you become such a tactician?” Cargo asked.
“I’ve been paying attention.”
“Makes sense,” Cargo replied. “I think we should transition to the DL. It’s only a matter of time before they find us, and I’d rather not have the net close in before that happens.”
“Seems logical,” Cheeky replied. “I’ll plot a path once we’re in the DL.”
“You sure?” Finaeus asked. “Chances are that they’ll spot the transition. They’ll know our vector.”
“Fin, you may be a grillion years old, and done more crazy shit than half of humanity put together, but I have more time in this seat than you. Now, reset the grav shields so we can transition.”
Cargo raised his eyebrows as he watched Finaeus shrink back into his seat and nod. “Yeah, sure.”
Terry was looking back and forth between the two and suddenly she drew a deep breath and raised a hand to her mouth.
“OK, shields are reset, dumping to the DL in…oh fuck it, now!”
The glow of the Stillwater Nebula disappeared from the forward display and Cheeky switched the image to show the location of the ship and Star City.
“We need to shed 0.05c and then boost back at about 0.3. From there we’ll need to make corrective burns to get on the right vector for Star City. I think we can do it in places where none of the enemy patrol craft are lurking.” As Cheeky spoke, the display showed the locations of the burns, the Orion Guard ships, and the vector changes and burn lengths.
“Those are serious burns,” Cargo said. “You’re going to wipe our antimatter reserves.”