by AZ Kelvin
Katy smacked his arm with a split look of embarrassment and surprise on her face.
“Sex in the engine room, huh?” Cat couldn’t help but tease her friends. “You should try a med bed on message mode sometime.”
“Givin’ away our secrets?” Cal asked, as he slowly walked into the room.
“Hey, there he is!” CJ greeted him.
“Good morning, sir, everybody. I have to say, Captain, you are quite the runner. I don’t remember much, except that I was always trying to catch up to you. Not many people can beat me.”
“Then it was an honor to do so!” CJ nodded his head. “I only wish I could remember it.”
“I do have it on video,” GABI stated simply.
CJ narrowed his eyes at her. “Someday I want to see this blooper reel of yours.”
She smiled in return. “It would be my pleasure.”
“Anyone hear from Boss or Gina?” CJ asked.
“They are on the bridge,” GABI answered.
“Ah, early birds, eh?” Katy asked.
“They are not yet awake,” GABI added.
“Oh,” Katy said as understanding seemed to dawn on her. “Ohhhh.”
CJ hit the bridge icon on the comms unit. The sound of someone snoring could be heard in the background. “Good morning, campers!” he said loudly.
“Wha—who’s that?” Boss asked, somewhere far from a comms unit. “Where—the bridge—I’m on the bridge? G—G, honey, get up!”
“What—are we late?” she asked. “Oh shit, we’re on the bridge? Where are my clothes?”
“Here, and there’s some over there,” Boss could be heard over the comms.
“Dammit! We need to get out of here before anyone comes on duty,” Gina grumbled. “Where’s GABI?”
“She’s sitting right here with me in the crew’s mess,” CJ said over the open comms line. “Don’t worry its audio only.”
“Captain?” Boss stammered, “We, ah…”
“Captain, I apologize,” Gina said. “This is completely unprofessional. I—”
“Will make sure that my bridge is clean before you leave,” CJ interrupted her. “Then get yourselves squared away and report to the mess ASAP. You better not have been in my chair, either.”
Silence came from the two people on the bridge.
“You guys shagged in my chair?” CJ joked with them.
“Well, last night or ever?” Boss asked. “I was Captain for eight years, after all.” A wave of laughter went through the group.
“Bernie!” Gina sent out a mild warning. “We’ll be there straightaway, Captain.”
“Very well.” CJ closed the comms line to the bridge.
“Powerful stuff, that Corvina,” Katy said in everyone’s defense.
“Yes, the events of last night shall be stricken from the log,” CJ promised. “Especially since I haven’t written them in there yet. So what all did we discover in the first load? Corvina, black-market Hologames, jewels, blank deeds to worthless properties, adventure gear, guns and ammo, outdated mem chips, did I miss anything?”
“What didn’t this guy smuggle?” Katy asked.
“We have two more bundles ready that we didn’t pick up yesterday,” Cal said. “And we have seventeen more containers to search, yet.”
“What about the habitat and the ships?” Cat asked.
“Salvage what we can,” CJ answered. “The ships will be hard to sell without proper titles and the black-market price wouldn’t be worth the trouble for a hundred-year-old freighter and an outdated shuttle. To be legal, we’d have to register a claim.”
“And I wouldn’t plan on going too far in either ship without a complete overhaul,” Katy pointed out. “After eighty-six years of no maintenance, something’s bound to break in the first light-year.”
“Is there any bounty or reward on the guy?” Cal asked.
“GABI, let’s hear about Fulson Stile,” CJ said.
“Very well, Captain. Fulson Stile, born in galactic year four-fifty-one, married Rose Resner in year four-ninety-four. They had one male child, Leland. Several class three illegal contraband convictions, no major arrests. Founded Stile Freight Lines in year four-eighty-one, which operated for twenty years before being closed and all assets seized by the Empire for back taxes in five-zero-one. No creditable discoveries or accolades of any kind have been registered. According to the logs over the final three years of entries, Fulson Stile had forsaken all other things in his life in pursuit of one item. A chart and several files listed under the heading ‘Find of the Century’ shows an image of a device with ornate drawings of flowers and stars around a grid work of buttons. There are poems, or perhaps riddles, along the bottom. There is also a set of coordinates that are well outside of Marlacuer space.”
“Hang on a minute.” CJ stopped her. “You’re going to have to run that by me again. A riddle and a set of coordinates? That has me written all over it.”
“Who’s writing you?” Boss asked as he and Gina walked in.
“Captain, I’m really sorry,” Gina apologized.
“Forgiven and forgotten, take a seat.” CJ waved at her.
“So, what’s happening?” Boss asked, moving a mound of nibbles onto a plate. “Fill me up a coffee, will you, Cal? Thanks.”
“GABI was telling us about our friend Fulson,” CJ informed him. “So he blew off his family and friends, bankrupted his business, and risked Imperial trouble to go after this Find of the Century? What’s the riddle?”
“There are two. Here is the first,” GABI recited:
“Some are stiff and stout, and like to swivel about…
Some are made of words, with nouns and verbs…
Some others must be seen, in order to be gleaned…
Think hard and do your best…
There’s only one chance to make your guess…
To retrieve the living treasure from inside this chest…
Start your quest at the golden star…
And let the Starfire guide where you are.”
GABI looked around the group once and then continued. “Here is the second…”
“Three paths go a different direction.
Four scouts run the race.
Seven stars from the same creation.
One chance to keep the pace.
Three queens attend the coronation.
Five bandits rob the place.
Seven demons sow damnation.
Two angels dance with grace.
Four diamonds sparkle in the ocean.
Six hounds continue the chase.
Three ghosts drift in slow motion.”
“The information in this file predates everything else, even Fulson Stile himself, by thirty years. The digital creation date shows five, twenty, four-twenty-two.”
“Four-twenty-two?” Boss asked, amazed that it was so long ago. “That’s a hundred and seventy years ago.”
“GABI, will you push a copy of that to my pad, please?” Katy asked.
“Yes, of course, Chief.” A second later a message arrival notice sounded on Katy’s datpad, which she pulled out and opened to look over the riddle poems and the image of the device.
“Do the logs show if he ever went to the coordinates?” CJ asked.
“No, sir, a jump of that distance would require a jump-capable ship and a quantum processor. Even a high-speed courier ship would have a ten-year journey at star-drive speeds past the last jump hub in Marlacuer space to get there. The last few entries of Fulson’s personal log dealt with trying to acquire a ship with a jump engine, which at that time were far too expensive.”
“We have a jump engine and a quantum processor,” Boss said.
“Yes, yes we do,” CJ replied thoughtfully. “GABI, tell me about the coordinates.”
“They are located beyond the far side of the Arzian Alliance on the edge of Kang-occupied space.”
“Kang space?” Katy asked uneasily.
“Yes, however, eighty-six years ago, that would not
have been common knowledge,” GABI explained.
“Please tell me we’re not going to Kang space?” Katy asked as she looked at CJ.
“Seriously, that’s a decision for another day. What we have to decide right now is what to do with what we’ve found. I think the stuff has been abandoned for so long, that it’s open for legal salvage. Fulson dying here might make the legal claim a little fuzzy.”
“That’s correct, Captain,” GABI said. “The assets of Fulson Stile could be legally claimed by his heirs or anyone holding a lien on the estate. That would not pertain to any ill-gotten booty of smuggling, however.”
“So, we take whatever hidden stuff we find and leave the rest?” Cal asked as he tried to work out what was going on.
“That depends on what we find, Cal,” Boss said. “How much it’s going to cost us to bring it in to sell. If someone else can lay legal claim to it then it may not be worth it.”
“Katy, evaluation of the ships?” CJ formed up a plan.
“Well, after a quick inspection, it’s obvious we’re not flying them out of here. Airlock seals would have to be replaced. The integrity of the entire propulsion system is questionable at this age. So, it looks like we need to either bring a space dock out here or haul the ships to a dry dock. Either way is going to be very expensive from this rock. The ships are almost a century old. Probably not worth it, expense wise.”
“What about the rooms in the habitat?” CJ asked.
“Everything you could possibly need, or want, to run a station like that, except it’s all eighty-six years old. Outdated beyond compatibility,” Boss reported. “As to the supplies, there’s not much that we can use, after being at sub-zero temperatures for so long.”
“GABI, is there anything else from the logs that we need to know about the base?” CJ finished up with his plan.
“Negative, Captain. We have the construction plans, schematics, and access codes. We have seen all there is to see.”
CJ sat quietly and thought for a few minutes. “Okay, anything we took from the habitat goes back, except for the holoframe. We’ll take that for proof we found Fulson. We can track down the family later to see if there’s a reward for location or bounty for capture. We sweep the rest of the containers for loot, and then we pack up and get out.”
“Sounds good to me,” Gina said. “I need to fly in the sky.”
“I know, right,” Boss said. “I feel like a halfling stuck in this hole.”
“Cal, you up for EV?” CJ asked.
“You bet, Cap. I can float around easier than I can walk around.”
“Now you sound like me,” Boss said with a laugh.
“Okay, I need three people with me outside, plus Gina and Moonshadow.” CJ outlined the day. “GABI, you have the Moon. Chief, finish any repairs needed to get us underway. Cal, Cat, and Boss you’re with me. We leave in fifteen.”
The group acknowledged their orders and broke to get the day’s work going. With luck, they’d be out of there sometime late in the day.
*~*~*
Chapter Ten
CJ and his group were clearing their first containers of the day when Boss posed an odd question to CJ.
“Captain, what about the door when we leave?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if the power is down, then we can’t close the inner door. Anyone who did happen to come and investigate, as we did, will find the habitat and the ships.”
“Yes, you’re right and no outer wall now, either, thanks to us blowing it to hell.” CJ ran things over in his head. “Well, I guess we leave a power cell.”
“Leave a power cell?” Boss had to be sure he’d heard CJ correctly. “Captain, that’s a lot of coin to leave behind.”
“There’s another way. We could seal up the tunnel with a thermal charge,” Cal said.
“But we’d still have to leave a power cell if we ever wanted to get back in,” CJ said. “How are you going to operate the secondary doors from outside if there’s no power inside? Plus, if we close the inner wall up, anyone who does come to investigate will find a chamber with a blown open outer wall and a bunch of empty cargo containers. They probably won’t look any further than that. Katy, do you read?”
“She is not linked in, Captain,” GABI told him. “One moment.”
“This is Latimer, go ahead,” Katy answered after GABI linked her in to the open comms.
“Katy, can you rig the power cell we left in the habitat to be activated and deactivated by remote?” CJ asked.
“Oh, yeah. It already is, really, remote access is built-in. I just have to ping the unit’s system ID number and tell it to power up or shut down.”
“Perfect, ping that baby and power it up. GABI get ready to transmit the sequence to close the door.”
“Captain, wait,” Cat spoke up. “We made a marker for Fulson. We thought that somebody should. Can I put it up before we close the wall?”
“Oh, right. Okay, just let me know when you’re done. Cal, go with her.”
“Aye, Cap.”
“Captain, you need to see this,” Boss said over the comms from inside another container.
“On my way.”
CJ joined Boss beside a pile of cargo pods stacked in the middle of a container. Boss had already moved some of the pods out to reveal different ones hidden away inside the pile. The pods underneath weren’t sealed off like the others they had found. These had an alloy frame with heavy wire mesh walls. Boss held out a chunk of strange rock made of reddish orange crystals from one of the ten crates.
“What is this?” CJ asked as he took the rock from him.
“That is a mineral called metastibnite.” Boss rummaged further through the crates. “And this”—he held up a silvery-white rock with a multicolored sheen—“is titanium.” He pulled out a glossy grey rock that looked like a miniature mountain. “And this beauty is beryllium, an incredibly rare metal in the universe. All these are used in the manufacture of hull plating. Metastibnite is used in the SlyCore alloy Nelson used to make up the core of the Moon’s stealth plating.”
“You lost me there, Boss. Is that good?”
“Good? Seedge, my friend, if we can sell this ore, we’ll make a blasted fortune! More than we’ve made in the last two years. We’d be rich!”
“Seriously?” CJ started to smile and then stopped. “Wait a minute. You said ‘if we can sell this ore.’ Why ‘if’?”
“Well, mineral refinement is tightly controlled by the Marlacuer Bureau of Imperial Resources and we may have to have a permit of some kind, or several licenses.”
“Oh, I see. So, we’d have to settle for dumping it on the black market for a fraction of the price?”
“A fraction of what this could bring is nothing to sneeze at, CJ. The beryllium ore alone is probably worth more than everything else we’ve found so far. Does it make sense to you that a guy would just sit on something like this while his business and family fall into ruin?”
“No, none of this really makes sense to me. Why so far from anywhere? Why that booby-trapped outer wall? And, you’re right, why not sell off the goods?”
“Maybe someone was after him. Maybe he was cut off or trapped,” Cal said as he listened to their conversation over the comms. “Whatever the reason, it was more important to him than anything else. Let’s tie these up, Boss, and we’ll take them over to Moonshadow.”
Boss called over the comms, “Hey, Gina, how about coming around for a pickup?”
“Already at your door, sweetness.”
“We’re all set over here, Cap. Headin’ back to the containers.”
“Copy that, Cal. GABI, Katy, we’re clear of the habitat. Go ahead and close her up.”
“Aye, sir,” GABI answered.
The perimeter lights of Stile’s Hideaway began to glow then quickly came to full on as Katy triggered the power cell to activate them. GABI transmitted the close sequence. The massive fake wall slowly lowered into place, and Fulson Stile, with his ships and
habitat, was once again entombed behind it.
“Rest in peace, Fulson Stile,” CJ said. He and Boss loaded the ore crates onto Moonshadow and moved on to the next container. The next couple of hours passed on with only moderate results consisting of two small, two medium, and two long, narrow, sealed cargo pods found hidden away. The excitement of this run was dulled only a tiny bit by the anticipation of finally leaving this rock behind. The EV crew loaded the last of the cargo pods along with themselves onto Moonshadow and Gina flew them home.
“Okay, listen up!” CJ addressed everyone as they helped to move the cargo pods to the crew’s mess. “We’re going to open up the last of the loot, grab some chow, head back down the tunnel from hell, and get some open space under our feet. Boss, Gina, and Cal report to the bridge when we’re done with the loot.”
The final haul of goods from Stile’s Hideaway yielded four very beautifully hand-forged ceremonial long swords. Two swords were packed away carefully in each sealed case with the scabbards just below them. The sets were identical to each other in design, except for the colors and the pommel figures. The scabbards bore an emblem with a golden star system orbiting around a fancy golden capital ‘R’ in a field of cobalt blue.
“What crest is this?” CJ asked.
“Let me see,” Boss said. “Ah, it’s a set of wedding swords from Banyan. The ‘R’ would be from the name of the groom. You see the different pommels and the colors; they represent joy, honor, compassion, and wisdom. This is beautiful workmanship.”
“Look, old-style datpads—two pods of them, probably go with the blank mem cards.” Katy said, “This would have been worth a fortune on the black market, oh—eighty-six years ago.”
“What’s this?” Cal asked, as he opened one of the small pods and pulled out a notebook and a file folder. “Names, coordinates, figures…”
“That’s Fulson’s little black book, I’ll bet,” Boss said. “May I?”
“Yes, sir.” Cal gave the stuff over to Boss.
“Look here.” Gina poured the last pod out on the table. A dozen sets of credentials with Fulson’s picture on them and each one had a different name. Stashes of a dozen different kinds of currencies spilled out as well.