“Possibly,” Ethan said, gesturing toward the lift. “We just finished break… uhm firstmeal, and they might have had some left. I know we’ve still got coffee, and if you want, I could get Quinn to put together something for you.”
“Is it really bacon?” he asked as MacKenna shot him a side eye.
“Looks like you eat well,” she said.
“One of the perks of freelancing,” Ethan said as they rode up to the mid-deck.
Somehow, they’d cleared the breakfast dishes and the passengers were all in their quarters. An urn of coffee with four cups, a covered tray, and a stack of small plates were waiting on the captain’s usual table in front of the forward observation window. The smell of sugar wafted distractingly across the room.
Quintan stood by the galley door, still wearing his frilly apron, and looking ready to attend to anything they needed. “Any chance we could get some bacon to go with those sweet rolls?” the captain asked as they took their seats and he poured coffee for all of them.
“Aye, Cap’n,” he said, disappearing into the galley with a grin.
“We lucked out with our new handler,” he explained. “He’s a farm boy from New Hampshire and happens to know his way around a galley pretty well. I think it’s his crusade to make us all fat and lazy.”
Quintan reappeared several seconds later carrying a platter piled high with shriveled slabs of meat. As he approached, Farley leaned back and stared in disbelief. MacKenna glared at her ExO until the handler’s looming bulk eclipsed the lights and she glanced up, blinking several times as she took in the reality of his giant frame.
He set the bacon down on the table and smiled. “There are two kinds. Applewood smoked, and maple,” he said. “I recommend the maple with the sweet rolls and the applewood with the sticky buns.”
“You are kidding right?” Farley said.
“His advice is usually on the mark,” Kaycee said.
“I meant that you eat like this all the time,” he said.
“This? This is just snacks. Breakfast is a lot more serious,” Quintan said. “If you need anything else, let me know.” He took the lid off the tray and waited for the wall of sugar vapor to wash over their guests.
“I think we’re good now,” Ethan said, winking and tilting his head toward the galley.
“I can see you’ve made quite the comeback, Captain,” MacKenna said before her propriety failed and she and Farley both helped themselves to the sweets and more than a few slices of bacon.
“Like Kaycee said, it’s been interesting,” he said.
“We will need to look over your docs just to be sure, but why don’t you tell me how you came to be carrying a load of high-tech weapons.”
“My new broker connected us up with Dr. Alaran Makhbar and we’re supposed to be delivering them to him,” Walker said. “Unfortunately, the person we’re supposed to meet here in Escabosa is the one with the information on the location of his new archaeological site. And she went missing.”
“That would be Dr. Westmore?” Farley said around a mouthful of sweet roll.
“The Escabosan government sent us the files,” Captain MacKenna added.
Ethan nodded. “We’re waiting for a message from Dr. Makhbar with what he wants us to do, but since he holds the licenses on the cargo, we can’t unload them anywhere until he authorizes it.”
“So why are you staying here?”
“Basically, it’s a lack of other options,” he said. “We considered going back to X-04, but by the letter of law, we’d be transporting weapons across stellar boundaries without a license. As long as we’re under contract to him, we’re legal. As soon as we break the terms of our agreement, then we’re not.”
“That would technically be right,” Farley said.
“You are in a difficult situation then,” MacKenna said. “How long do you intend to wait for an answer from Makhbar?”
Ethan shook his head. “I’d say as long as we have to, but reality is going to kick in at some point and we’ll have to make a hard call.”
“And you have no clue where his operation is?”
“We know he’s set up shop somewhere about 300 light years out from Earth, so we’re hopeful we won’t have to wait much longer,” Ethan said. “The problem is that xenoarchaeology is a high profit business and he’s a little paranoid.”
“We logged your omni-comm message,” she said. “That was a risky move considering what you’re sitting on.”
“We didn’t announce it,” he said.
MacKenna sat back and sipped at her coffee. “He’s right to be paranoid. Unfortunately, anybody who’s watching him will know enough to watch you.”
“That’s why we’re sitting on the edge of the system here. If someone comes at us, we’ll bolt for somewhere safer and risk the legal consequences,” he said.
“In a freighter?” the ExO said.
Walker nodded. “Breakfast isn’t the only trick we have up our sleeve.”
Farley shot him a skeptical eyebrow, but neither he nor MacKenna pushed the point.
“The issue we’re facing is that the Escabosan authorities are more than a little concerned that if you aren’t looking to cause trouble personally, your continued presence here is likely to invite those who would be so inclined,” she said.
“They hoped we would run you off,” Farley added.
“I understand that but—”
“I know. You can’t legally leave.” She leaned forward, picked up a slice of the bacon, and frowned. “And I can’t force you to break the law either.”
“We could issue them an exemption to return to X-04,” the ExO said.
She nodded. “We could do that.”
“I’d prefer to make the delivery,” Ethan said. “We need to pay the bills and if we bail on this load, we’ll be hard pressed to keep working. Reputation is everything in this business.”
“You are aware that the longer you sit here the more dangerous your situation becomes?” she asked. “If you wait around too long, you might find that you will indeed be running for your lives.”
“I hope not,” he said.
“Have you considered that Dr. Westmore might have been kidnapped to find out where you are going?”
“The thought crossed our minds,” Kaycee said.
“Do you know who Kendrick Jetaar is?” she asked.
Ethan shook his head although the name sounded vaguely familiar to him.
“He’s a privateer operating in the sector,” Farley said.
“Escabosan Security contacted FleetCom almost a week ago because someone had reported that he was here in the system,” MacKenna said. “They lost track of him the same day that Dr. Westmore went missing.”
“That could be a coincidence,” Ethan said even though his guts told him otherwise.
“That could mean that your payload was his target all along,” the ExO said. “If that’s true, they will be waiting for you at the other end of the run.”
Kaycee let out a long slow breath beside him and Ethan looked over at her while he thought through how the topography of the situation might be changing. He’d been concerned before, but now he knew that fear might become a reality.
“I can see you’re thinking hard about that,” MacKenna said. “And you should be. Jetaar has dropped dozens of ships and crews all over the sector. He doesn’t play well with others.”
“I understand,” Walker said.
“Because you’re operating legally, I can’t order you back to X-04. And knowing your track record you’d probably ignore my orders, anyway,” she said, shrugging. “But you need to understand that if you tangle with Jetaar, it won’t go well for you.”
“Right now, all we’re doing is waiting for instructions,” he said.
“The Magellan will be staying here in the system for twenty-four to forty-eight hours while we deal with the planetary authorities,” she said. “Any time before we leave, I’ll be willing to issue that exemption.”
“If you
decide to be heroes, be sure to file a flight plan and check in and out on both ends of the run,” Farley said.
“Is that an order?” Ethan asked.
“No, it’s advice. Strong advice,” she said.
“At least then we know where to look for your bodies,” he added. His face said he wasn’t kidding.
“I don’t think we can do that,” Ethan said.
“Captain,” Marti interrupted over his command channel earpiece, “we have received a beacon frequency and location from Dr. Makhbar.”
“Excuse me a second,” he said, standing up and walking several paces across the room. When he got far enough away, he lowered his voice. “Where is it?”
“Cygnus Gamma-670,” it said. “Forty-six parsec.”
“Make ready but do not announce it until our guests head back to their ship,” he said. “We’ll head out as soon as they’re clear.”
“Understood,” it said.
Returning to the table Ethan sat down and nodded at Kaycee. “Dr. Makhbar wants to keep the location of his dig secret until he gets his findings authenticated and the Coalition grants him his finder’s certifications. He put that in our contracts.”
Captain MacKenna shook her head. “I know how xenoarch works.” She looked over at her ExO and sighed. “I assume you know where you’re heading now?”
“I’m not supposed to say.” Ethan shrugged. “But you can tell the Escabosan government we’ll be leaving shortly.”
“And you don’t intend to file that flight plan, do you?” Farley asked.
“Of course, he doesn’t.” MacKenna stood up. “Then it’s time for us to head back to the Magellan. Good luck to you, Captain Walker. I want you to keep in mind it’s a lot of personal risk you’re taking on, to protect another man’s fortune.”
Chapter Eleven
The Olympus Dawn dropped out of cruise as it passed the threshold beacon. Unlike most star systems the beacon didn’t transmit continuously, instead it waited to activate its trigger until a ship was within close range sensors. If a ship was transmitting an authorization code as it approached, it would power up and send the confirmation to drop to sub-light. It was an odd navigational protocol, but when security mattered, it made sense not to run up a sign inviting unwanted guests.
“Kick over to the passive HD sensors,” Ethan said, glancing over at Rene who sat at the engineering station behind him. “I don’t want to attract any more attention than we have to.”
“I’ve already cut in the bypass,” he said. “We’re very close to several larger ice asteroids. Three of them are under one light minute.”
“Keep your eyes on them. I don’t want to find out that someone’s hiding in the sensor shadows.”
“I’ll keep the coils hot, just in case,” Nuko said.
“Do we know where they have their base camp?” Rene asked.
“The beacon is supposed to alert Makhbar that we’re here and then they’ll send us their location,” the captain said. “Until then, we’re sitting around naked.”
“What do we know about Cygnus Gamma-670,” Nuko asked.
“The original survey records show CG-670 is a trinary star system of an unusual structure,” Marti said. “It appears to have been a binary star that captured an interloping M-class dwarf in the recent past.”
“Nothing unusual in that,” Ethan said.
“The primary pair is predominantly free of asteroids and comets and all but two of the planets that may have once occupied the system are missing. There is no evidence of a cataclysmic event, so it is possible that when the dwarf was captured, much of the original planetary system destabilized. There is only one rocky planet in an elliptical orbit below the frost line. The other planet is a gas giant with four moons.”
“What about the dwarf?” he asked.
“The planetary system of the red dwarf shows the expected orbital distortion as a result of the encounter, with a large planetary group of thirty-six bodies. They occupy widely ranging and unstable orbits. Although there is no Tacra Un detected in the system, CG-670 was listed as marginal for colonization after the initial survey eighty-six years ago.”
“So why is the threshold beacon so far from anything?” Nuko asked. “It looks like we’re almost thirty light-days out.”
“The Oort Cloud of the primary pair has a unique structural topography. It is extremely dense, but unusually far from the main stars. Gravitational interactions of the three stars have compressed the debris field into a thin shell along the plane of the M-dwarf’s orbit.”
“Does this mean we’re still more than a month from getting this payload off our back?” Rene asked.
“Along the plane of the M-dwarf the debris field has a density above safe cruise limits, but this shell is only fifty light-hours thick. Once we are inside that line we can return to cruise until we reach the inner system.”
“If it is around the binary pair, but nothing says we’re headed there,” Nuko pointed out. “We’re close to the Lagrange point with the red dwarf so it might be either direction.”
“That’s true,” Ethan said. “So, it looks like we sit here while we wait for them to tell us where we are going.”
“Yes,” Marti said.
“Maybe not,” Rene said, slapping his hand down on his console and sending the sensor readout to the main screen. “We just got pinged.”
“Is it Makhbar confirming our identity?”
“The ping was local,” he said. “Was a single hit so I don’t know where it originated but the distortion to the waveform says it has to be from the neighborhood.”
“There it is again,” he said, highlighting the origin. “It’s coming from one of the iceballs. It looks like a standing wave pulse. Someone’s measuring our mass.”
“That’s nogo,” Nuko said. Her fingers hung over the drive control as she waited for Ethan to decide what he wanted to do.
“That one’s at fourteen million klick. I’m not seeing any other EM from there,” he said. “It looks to be a simple sensor platform. They probably don’t know we’ve detected the pulse.”
“I’m not liking this,” Ethan said. “What about the other iceballs in the area?”
“I’ll have to go active on the sensors,” Rene said. “We’ll lose resolution, but we can look for EM.”
“As soon as we do, they’ll know we’ve tagged them,” the captain said.
“Another ping,” the engineer said. “Hard electromagnetic. They’re looking at our power levels.”
“Frak. Go live and let’s see who’s tagging us,” he said. “Nuko stand by to bolt.”
She nodded. “Heading?”
“Back the direction we came,” he said.
“We’ve got a major power source on one of the other icebergs,” Rene said.
“I don’t like it. Let’s make feet,” Ethan said.
Nuko slapped her hand down on the controls and the lights blinked.
Nothing else happened.
Red indicators flashed across all three of their workstations in the next instant.
“Main power is offline. We’re on backups.” Rene said, jumping up and heading for the door. “I’m on it.”
“The coils tripped and dumped,” Nuko said. “We’re sitting until we can recharge them.”
“Are we still alone out here?”
“I am detecting a power source at twelve light minutes. It is moving and therefore I assume it is a ship,” Marti said. “It was sitting dark and just powered up.”
“They were waiting,” Ethan said, swallowing a wave of acid and shaking his head.
“At their current velocity, they’ll be here in sixteen minutes,” Nuko said.
“The coils were overloaded by a surge-pulse discharge,” it said. “The power supply on the ice asteroid is building up to fire again.”
“How long until it’s ready?”
“It is impossible to say without further data, but at its current charge rate, I would estimate six minutes to get back to the pre
vious measured level,” Marti said.
“Reactors are online, but the relays punched out,” Rene reported in from engineering. “I’m reconnecting now, but we’re looking at twenty minutes to get the coils recharged.”
“You’ve got fifteen before we’ve got company,” Ethan said. “Less than that if the surge discharges again. Maybe six on that.”
“Physics is a bitch. No cando,” the engineer said. “If we dump everything but life support and controls, I might be able to cut that to eighteen.”
“Are the reaction engines up?” Nuko asked.
“Yah, but if we don’t have the coils, we’re inertial,” he said.
“The coils on the dropship were down,” she said. “Maybe they didn’t trip?”
“They did not,” Marti confirmed.
“The coils take about sixty seconds to bring online,” she said. “They won’t give us enough mass-charge compensation to jump to light speed, but we should be able to get a fair amount of acceleration before the inertial field starts bleeding through.”
“I see what you’re thinking,” the captain said. “We won’t be able to outrun whoever’s coming, but if we can buy time and distance, we might get the mains up and then be able to dust off before they get here.”
“And that surge-pulse will have a limited range,” she said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of its reach before it dumps again and we have to start over.”
“Do it,” he said.
Marti put a countdown timer on the main screen that showed the time to the DSL coils reaching full charge.
Nuko tapped in calculations on her console. “Best line away from the surge-pulse and the approaching ship puts us toward the Oort shell,” she said.
Ethan nodded. “But that also means they can’t push after us unless they want to flirt with fire. If we can get the mains back up, we can flip back along our entry line and bolt. We’ll have to chance it.”
Ethan cut himself in on the shipwide comm. “All hands prepare for hard acceleration in forty-five seconds. Inertial field controls are partially offline so this might get rough.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 25