Echoes of Starlight

by Eric Michael Craig

  “How the hell can you be so calm while she’s trying to figure out how to ruin you?”

  “She’s really not,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s trying to figure out how to protect the cargo with the least amount of damage to all of us. It’s what she does, and what she has to do.”

  “Still—”

  “Just go and talk to her.” He waved his hand toward the door. “I’ll hold the deck for as long as she lets me.”

  Once the door had closed behind her, he popped up from his seat and paced the small riser along the back of the ConDeck. It was too small to walk off his frustration, but being in motion felt a little better than sitting and watching the storm gathering. He knew he had to keep his real level of frustration from visibly erupting, but it was tough, especially when he was trying to defend the person that wanted to end his career.

  He had to keep peace on the ship, so he swallowed it and put on the mask. Fortunately, the conversation hadn’t gone on longer or he might not have been able to keep his true rage bottled up.

  “Captain you are receiving a transmission from the FleetCom Multicruiser Magellan,” Marti said, interrupting his three hundredth orbit of the deck.

  “Not from Deep-Three?” he asked.

  “Negative,” it said.

  “Put it through,” he said, dropping back into his chair and opening the com. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, behind her the control deck seemed to disappear into the distance. He’d never seen the Magellan, but it was one of the new Explorer Class multicruisers. The expanse of open space over her shoulder looked to be bigger than the entirety of his ship.

  “FCM Magellan to CSV-1070 Olympus Dawn. You are instructed to remain on station at K-186e Starlight until we can rendezvous and complete a situational assessment. Continue monitoring for signs of life or communication signals. Should you detect either, you are to contact the Magellan directly before taking any action.

  “Under no circumstances are you to return to the surface of Starlight.

  “We will be over the threshold at K-186 in thirty-nine hours at 0940 hours Zone One Standard Time.

  “Colleen MacKenna, Captain, Magellan. Out.”

  Walker sat for almost a minute before Marti asked, “Do you want to confirm receipt of the instructions?”

  “Yah, sorry,” he said. “I was thinking it sounded like there was something else that Captain MacKenna wasn’t saying.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I’m not sure. It felt like there was more that she could have said but didn’t.”

  Marti paused for almost two whole seconds. “Human intuition is a delicate contrivance. Now that you are facing a personal crisis, is it possible, that you are coloring your interpretation of Captain MacKenna’s message with an emotional desire to externalize the cause of your circumstance? ”

  “I think that’s got to be the most polite way I have ever heard to call someone paranoid,” he said, shrugging off the implication. “You’re right though, I might be grasping at straws.”

  Swiveling in his chair, he tapped the control to bring the deep-comm transmitter up. When the green indicator flashed that the system was up he cleared his throat.

  “CSV-1070 Olympus Dawn to FCM Magellan. Captain MacKenna, Instructions received. Standing by. We will rendezvous with you on 2368.014. Be aware that there is no signal from the beacon, so navigation in the system is by local reckoning.

  “Safe travels. Walker, Commander Olympus Dawn. Out.”

  He punched the icon to transmit the message, his mind hanging on the fact that this might be the last official message of his career.

  Nuko was right, it seemed damned trivial to hang him for just doing a quick walkabout. But that’s not the only infraction, he reminded himself once again.

  He sighed. “That certainly puts a timeline on my command doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps,” Marti said. “It also means you will have to inform the passengers that regardless of the results of their analysis, they will not be allowed to go down to the planet.”

  “That’s true, but at least they can’t blame me for that. It’s on FleetCom now.”

  Chapter Nine:

  Ethan knew everything around him was winding into an uncontrollable spin. No matter which of the dozen ways the situation might play out, he knew he had no choice but to keep pushing through and hope he could eventually steer it to the softest possible landing. The farther he tore into the details in his mind, the more convinced he was that CSL would, at the minimum, slap him with a fine and formal reprimand. If it went down hard, he could lose his lease on the Olympus Dawn.

  Especially if Smythe or CSL pushed forward with charges of internal piracy.

  Because he’d not been paying attention, he’d allowed his passengers to cross a line that he was responsible to hold. It was the biggest thing hanging over him. He should have anticipated that Kaycee would try to do something like this. He knew she was desperate to learn what had happened to the colony. He should have taken precautions to make sure neither of them could circumvent his orders. In that, he screwed up.

  Doing an excursion to the surface before he alerted the authorities wasn’t a minor thing, but whether that was endangering the crew and payload was still up for debate. If they hadn’t brought anything contagious back to the ship from Starlight, then luck might give him an edge in defending himself, when all the incident reports were filed.

  When Nuko got back to her quarters after her interview, she gave him a bit of good news by letting him know the Triple-C wasn’t trying to take him down. Leigh was trying to figure out how avoid filing a formal report. Unfortunately, she told Nuko that she felt like there were no options. The Triple-C had come out and told her that she was shuffling things along as slowly as possible.

  Depending on how things played once the Magellan arrived, there might be enough water swinging in the situation to get him off gentle. It still was far from inevitable that it would cost him his command, but he knew it was prudent to brace for the worst, even if he wanted to hope for the best.

  Since the ship flew with no need for human supervision, he’d only stayed on the ConDeck to be out of reach to his passengers. The entire upper deck was off limits to all but the crew, and he used it to hide. There were only two passengers aboard, but since they were the biggest source of his frustration, he needed to be away from them to think.

  He had a small ready room behind the ConDeck. It had a command console and a conference table with enough chairs to seat the entire crew as long as everyone had recently showered. He seldom used it, so it was a good place to sit alone with his thoughts.

  He’d propped his feet up on the corner of the table and was reclining with his eyes closed and his fingers laced behind his head when Kaycee appeared at his door unannounced. “Captain, can I have a word with you?”

  No, he thought, but he held his tongue. Her presence snapped him back to the immediate world. He didn’t care at this point if he offended her or not, but she wasn’t alone. Preston and Rene both stood behind her looking apologetic. He needed to maintain appearances in front of his people.

  She sat down without waiting for him to invite her in. She’s obviously used to pissing uphill, he thought, frowning as he nodded to chairs at the other end of the table. Both men took the seats he’d indicated. “I assume you’re here because you’ve got results?”

  “Yah,” she said, pulling a thinpad out of her coverall and sliding it across the table in his direction.

  He didn’t pick it up, but he glanced at the screen. “Since I don’t speak doctor, what’s it say?”

  “I did a Genotype Replication Analysis on all three of you and then did a fractional biographic projection to compare your scans to the baseline I ran on Wolfe and Chandler. The results came back negative.”

  “Sure, whatever that means,” he said. “I assume negative is a good thing?”

  She nodded. “What that means is I built a mathematical model of each of you and comp
ared the actual organic scans against the absolute replicate form to determine there were no alterations to the real you.”

  Walker wrinkled up his forehead and rubbed his fingers over the creases. He shook his head. “I still don’t follow you.” He pinned Preston with a glare and added, “Do you understand what she’s saying here?”

  “A little,” he said, shrugging. “She’s saying we’re clean, but I am not sure how she got the answer.”

  “That’s all I need to know I guess,” the captain said. “I think I’d hurt myself trying to chase you into the fascinating world of whatever this ‘genotype replication’ thing is.”

  “I did a deep genetic scan, and then cloned you, mathematically. This allowed me to reproduce your structure, plus all the microflora that normally lives inside your body.”

  “People are all basically communities of microscopic bacteria and other stuff living together inside our skin suit,” Preston clarified.

  “The replication I did, allowed me to model everything that’s supposed to be inside you accurately,” she said. “With that I could do a comparison of what was really there, versus the projection. Anything that showed up as not being indigenous in your metabolism, I flagged and chased to ground.”

  “As long as you’re certain we’ve got nothing inside us we shouldn’t have, then I can take that to Leigh and let her know her concerns about risk are unfounded,” Walker said.

  “I am one hundred percent sure of that,” she said. “There was only one thing that was consistently abnormal in all of your scans. Fortunately, it wasn’t something contagious.”

  “Is it a problem?” he asked, looking back down at the thinpad like he expected to understand more of it than he had before.

  “Not at the level I detected, but it is concerning,” she said. “You’ve all three picked up traces of an unusual radioactive residue in your lungs. It’s well below the cumulative level for ionization so there’s little risk at this low dose level.”

  “I assume it’s from something we breathed in down there?” he asked.

  “It looks like dust particles. Only the three of you show signs of it,” she said. “The control scans I did on Wolfe and Chandler didn’t detect any of the contamination.

  “Dust covered everything down there. Is it indigenous to the local environment?”

  “No. And that’s what troubles me,” she said. “Something has created a low level background radiation that wasn’t there before. We would have picked it up on the original assessment of the planet.”

  “Is it possible it was low enough level that it fell below the threshold of note?” Rene asked.

  “If it was, you wouldn’t have accumulated enough in your systems from a few hours of exposure to be detectable,” she said. “Something with this high a level in the environment would have made the cumulative effect concerning for colonists living their entire life on Starlight.”

  “How long would a person have to be exposed to it to be dangerous?” the captain asked.

  She shrugged. “Probably years. But it was enough that I picked it up on my conventional detecting gear and not on my special equipment.”

  “We need to talk about her gear for a minute,” Rene said.

  Why?” Ethan asked. Her equipment was a sore issue since it was still the big stink-storm hanging over him.

  “When I volunteered to help them hook up their hardware, I realized something was way out of spec,” he said. “They needed almost half our combined reactor output to run their stuff.”

  The captain whistled.

  “If we’d been running in cruise, we couldn’t have powered the field and the MedBay at the same time,” Rene said.

  “What kind of medical equipment takes that kind of power?” he asked, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table.

  “You’re going to love this,” the engineer said, nodding and grinning.

  “I don’t think so,” Walker said.

  “I’ve got some hardware from the Shan Takhu Institute in the payload modules,” she said. “STI gave me a research loan—”

  “Shan Takhu technology? I didn’t think they’d released any of the alien tech into the wild,” he said.

  “Your ship is loaded with it,” she said. “Where do you think you got artificial gravity and faster than light engines?”

  “That’s different. We built it ourselves by reverse engineering their designs,” he said. “I assume that is why we picked up the load at Armstrong Station?”

  “I studied at the STI Biosciences Research University on L-4 Prime,” she said. “I worked under Professor Drake for five years before they credentialed me to do my own work.”

  “Dr. Tana Drake? Holy frak she’s like the mother of all non-terrestrial medicine,” Preston said, his eyes going wide in a severe case of rapid-onset hero worship.

  She nodded and winked at the med-tech. “I wrote a research proposal in my last year of post-doc studies there and she offered me a chair in one of their departments. When I got called home, they almost canceled the project, but Smythe Biomedical picked it up and leveraged STI to loan out some of their cool toys.”

  “We’re carrying alien technology, and nobody thought to tell me that?” the captain asked.

  “I’m sorry, but they decided to keep it down low because of the security risk,” she said, looking embarrassed and frustrated enough for both of them. “The less that people know, the less the odds of it catching the attention of undesirables.”

  “I assume Leigh knows?” he asked.

  “That would explain why she’s against the ceiling so hard,” Rene said. “That’s stuff that would be irreplaceable if anything happened to it.”

  She shrugged. “I haven’t discussed it with her, but I’m sure the descriptions of the hardware on the manifest are pretty technical, so she might not understand exactly what it is. Although if she did any homework, she could have figured it out.”

  “Pruitt is your private security for this?” the captain asked.

  “No, he’s really a bio-med systems engineer,” she said. “At least as far as I was told. He’s from Starlight, and Smythe hired him to install the equipment when we got home. He happened to be visiting Earth after doing an internship at STI.”

  Walker glanced at Rene, who shot him a skeptical eye. Obviously, they were both on the same screen when it came to Elias.

  “Well the good news is you’ve proved that we’re not all about to die of Starlight Fever or whatever,” the captain said. “I’ll go tell Leigh. That will make at least one of my black marks a bit grayer.”

  “It’s a start,” the engineer said.

  Ethan pushed back from the table and stood. “Thank you, Doctor—”

  “There’s one more thing I need to discuss with you,” she said.

  Here it comes, he thought crashing back into his chair. “Unfortunately the answer is no,” he said, anticipating her question.

  She blinked in surprise and opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off.

  “Before you start arguing with me, I got an answer from FleetCom and they said that under no circumstances are we to go down to the surface unless we detect signs of life or get a signal. And then only with permission.”

  “Why not?” she asked, anger and frustration showing in equal measure on her face.

  “They didn’t say, but you can take it up with Captain MacKenna when the Magellan arrives,” he glanced at the chrono over the door. “They should be here in about thirty-four hours.”

  “But at the least we need to get a sample of the soil to see if we can confirm it contains the same radioactive signature that’s in your lungs,” she said.

  “It’s out of my hands,” he said, shaking his head and making sure she understood that it was non-negotiable. “I understand how you feel, but for now you can stay busy by getting your equipment packed back into the cargo modules.”

  “We might need it again,” she said.

  “No we won’t,” he said. “The Olym
pus Dawn isn’t a science vessel, and I’m not going to have your toys lying around and reminding my Triple-C how far out of spec this has all gotten. Pack it up and put it away.”

  “Ethan, please …” she said, stopping herself when he stood up again and she realized he was done with the discussion.

  Leaning forward he put both his hands on the table in front of him. “Doctor, I understand that you are used to being a person of some importance in your field, but I don’t care who you are in that world,” he said. “You don’t realize how close you’ve come to ending my career, or perhaps you simply don’t care. In either case, I’m done with it. You are on my ship, and you will do what I say, or I will have my people do it for you. If you force me to do that, I will have you confined to your quarters until I can hand you over to the Magellan. Is that clear enough?”

  She sat motionless for several seconds before she nodded.

  Chapter Ten:

  Ethan sat at a dining table on the mid-deck watching Preston and Rene supervising Elias and Kaycee. The two of them were breaking things down and packing them away. They’d started at 0600 according to Marti, and his two cargo handlers had been keeping an eye on the process since they’d first set foot on the deck. He had stationed one outside MedBay and the other was watching the interconnect tube that allowed access to the payload modules.

  He’d given orders that when they had safely stowed their equipment, they were to retract the connecting corridor and power down the containers. It wasn’t standard procedure to cut off the support connections, but he wanted to make it as difficult as possible for his passengers to decide they needed to get back in to pull something else out.

  It had taken them almost twelve hours to hook it all up and from the rate of progress, he expected it to take at least that long to get it all returned to the cargo container. He expected to have to sit guard duty for at least part of the shift, but he refused to let them work unsupervised at any point.