As utilitarian as the top deck was, the middeck was luxurious. It was still small compared to the Dawn, but it had three comfortable staterooms, and an executive suite that all opened onto a dining and recreation room. Behind that, to Quinn’s delight, was a real galley and with a well-stocked pantry.
The bottom deck was engineering and the main reactor, plus a small cargo hold. The rest of the ship was engines and probably a full complement of weapons, although they remained well concealed in hardened mounts that made them undetectable.
Other than a little crowding, the only challenge they had was the fact that Marti’s 10K Enforcer body didn’t fit through the ship’s narrow doorways. So, she rode in the cargo hold. Although she had brought both her minimechs and her Humanform body, she interfaced with the ship’s internal communications grid because it was easier.
The Sparrow’s AA begrudgingly gave her access to the internal comm but bringing Marti along at all had almost been a deal breaker. Jetaar’s trust only went as far as letting them borrow the ship and not letting their AA fondle its secret technologies.
They’d covered almost eight hundred light-years in twenty-two days. In the Dawn that would have been at least ten days longer. “Damn this thing is a beast,” Ethan said as he stood on the ConDeck and leaned against the side of the engineering station. Charleigh sat in the front seat, and Nuko was at the auxiliary console beside him.
Charleigh nodded. “Scary thing is that according to the power controls, we’re only running at about forty percent,” she said.
“That sounds about right,” the engineer said as he walked up behind them. Carson Wayne was one of those people that disappeared into the background, and although he was over-qualified as a ship engineer, he was comfortable with his place. In more than a few ways he reminded Ethan of Rene. “Too bad absolute velocity isn’t linear to coil production.”
“This is a sweet little ship,” Ethan said. “A bit crowded, but very slick.”
Carson dropped into the engineering seat and shrugged. “We’ve put a lot of effort into it. Captain Jetaar and I designed it ourselves.”
“Jetaar?”
“Yah, he’s one of the best engineers I’ve ever known,” he said. “He came up with the new drive coil architecture after he had a run in with a freighter that got out of a pulse trap. He said they hot-wired a second set of coils from a dropship to pull off a Miracle Mike.”
“Nojo?” Ethan said, turning to face Nuko to hide his grin.
“No point in reinventing the universe when you can grind the serial number off and make it your own,” he said.
“I guess that’s true enough,” he said. “But I’d wager this is a vast improvement over a set of DSL coils slaved to the mains.”
Carson raised his eyebrow. “That was you wasn’t it? I wondered why you were carrying two loaders.”
“That’s not why, but yah it might have been us,” Ethan said. “We crossed swords with Jetaar a year or two back.”
“And you lived to tell about it. That’s pretty rare.”
“We got away. Let’s leave it at that.” He shrugged. “So, you built this thing at Tortuga?”
“We assembled it in the drydock there, but it’s got custom parts from half the shipyards in the Coalition.”
“Boss, we’re about to drop out of cruise,” Charleigh said, interrupting. “We’re ten minutes from the Draco-425 threshold.” She paused and shook her head. “Well, from where the threshold beacon is supposed to be. It’s offline and we’re getting a quarantine warning on all frequencies.”
“Can we see anything yet?” he turned to face Nuko.
“There are two ships in the system. Transponders indicate they are the Argos and the Magellan,” she said.
“Where are they?”
She shrugged. “These eyes aren’t as good as the ones on the Dawn. Maybe Ammo and Marti could tease more out of the data than I can.”
Ethan tapped his collarcomm. “Ammo can you report to the ConDeck?”
“On my way boss,” she said. “Are we there yet?”
“Almost,” he said. “Make feet. We need to sweet-talk the sensors to find a safe drop. We’re not alone when we come out, and we don’t want to get eyes pointed at us.”
“Cando,” she said.
“If we can make sure where they are, there’s a moon orbiting the colony,” Carson suggested. “If we run on cruise all the way, but hold it under ten-C, we can mask the coil field down to almost nothing. Then we dump the photons on the backside of the moon, and we’re home easy.”
“Through the Oort cloud at FTL?” Ethan asked.
“It takes iron eggs, but it’s a lot tighter than coming in slow and giving them time to see our EM radiation. The field holds in our visible radiation but radiates gravity. I can cancel that by inverting the outer coil 180 degrees out of phase, but I can’t do anything about normal light.”
Charleigh nodded. “I can fly the cloud at speed, but he’s right, if we drop and don’t know exactly where those ships are someone will catch us flashing our photon ass.”
“We do it all the time,” the engineer said. “It’s safe. Mostly.”
Nuko nodded. “It’s risky. I could probably do it but Charleigh’s a better pilot than me.”
“What am I looking for?” Ammo said as she showed up on the ConDeck. She looked like she’d been in the shower and was still shimmying into her thinskin.
Behind him, Ethan heard Carson gasp. He shook his head and rolled his eyes as she tapped Nuko out of her seat and slipped into her place.
“Two multicruisers in the system,” Nuko said. “We need their exact positions because we’re going to do a deep drop and try to get a moon between us and them. That way they don’t catch us flashing them with our photon boom.”
“What’s the range?”
“About 800 light hours,” Charleigh said. “Eight minutes and thirty seconds at our current velocity.”
“Let me see what I can do,” she said, leaning forward and biting down on her lower lip as she concentrated. “I can use the phase distortion on their transponders to…” She cranked the resolution on the sensors up to full and shook her head. “Frak. Maybe I can couple it to the navcom and get a tight beam out of it?”
She shook her head again. “Marti can you… oh, wait. Boss, I need Marti in this. Cando?”
They’d limited Marti’s access to non-essential systems on the ship’s grid and without the engineer’s permission she couldn’t control the sensor systems. Ethan turned and looked at Carson who nodded.
“Jackie dear, we need to give Marti access to the sensors,” he said as he punched in his authorization code.
“And the navcom,” Ammo added.
The engineer floated a skeptical eyebrow.
“Wide field interferometry. I’m going to use the navcom scanner and the main sensors as two discrete points to establish a bigger antenna base. They aren’t very far apart, but it will effectively give us a sensor array almost as big as the whole ship. That should give us the resolution to pick them out.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” he said.
“It’s old tech,” she said.
“Jackie, Marti needs that, too,” he said.
“That level of authorization gives their AA access to helm control. Such an action is not advised.”
“I understand, just do it,” he said. “Take notes sweetie. We might learn something if this works.”
They waited while the ship’s AA granted permission. And probably set up a dozen firewalls to protect other critical ship systems.
“Marti let me know when you’re online with me,” Ammo said.
“I am already working the calculations” she said, as a tactical display superimposed over the forward window. The planet and its moon appeared in the center of the image.
“The moon orbits at an average altitude of 337,000 kilometers. The Argos is in an equatorial orbit at 450 kilometers and the Magellan is in a polar orbit with an average altitude
of 12,000 kilometers.,” Marti reported. A red and blue dot appeared on the plot at their positions.
Carson whistled. “From this range that’s unbelievable.”
Ethan shrugged. “You should see what they can do with our kit.”
“I would recommend we angle off a direct approach so that if they have spotted us, they will think we are heeding the quarantine warning,” Marti offered. “We will need to enter from the far side of the system to minimize our exposure.” A line appeared on the display showing the suggested course.
“They probably haven’t spotted us yet,” the engineer said. “We leave a small footprint and haven’t been running a transponder since we left Cygnus.”
“Good, but let’s swing wide anyway, and leave them no reason to question anything in case they pick us up,” Ethan said.
Charleigh altered their heading and the collar of stars swung behind the display. “That puts us at just over thirty-six minutes depending on when we slow down to go dark.”
“I’ll leave that up to you all to work out. I want to plan the landing party,” he said.
“We still have to figure out how to get from the moon to the surface,” Nuko said.
“One problem at a time,” he said. “Just get us there and we’ll come up with something.”
Chapter Thirty
Fortunately, the Jack Sparrow was small. Charleigh had managed to slide them over the rugged surface of the tiny moon using docking thrusters alone, sometimes edging them through slot canyons only a dozen meters wider than the ship. It was treacherous flying and by the time she reached the small ledge that they’d chosen as an observation location, she was sweating. So was everyone else on the small ConDeck, but that might have been less stress and more crowding since everyone had squeezed in to watch the action.
The rocky outcropping where they’d settled was as far forward as they could risk moving without exposing themselves. Tamilis hung low over the craggy horizon, but at least from where they sat, they could track the multicruisers with their passive sensors.
“I’ll be frakked if we came 240 parsecs to get denied in the last 337,000 klick,” Ethan said. So far, no one had come up with anything useful.
“We have another problem,” Rene said. “I don’t know what that is, but it just appeared out of nowhere.” He was pointing at a strange object on the long-range optic.
“The Tahrat Shan Che,” Ethan whispered, leaning back on the stool, and banging the back of his head against the wall panel behind him.
“If we had the Dawn’s sensors, we’d have seen that coming,” Ammo said. She sounded as defeated as Ethan felt. She turned toward him and shrugged. “What now?”
“Well if there’s any doubt that the Institute is in this, that ends it,” he said. “In my mind we could leave now.”
Kaycee sat on the stool beside him. “We can’t. We don’t know if they’re involved or if they’re just helping with the investigation.”
“If that is the Shan Takhu ship, it doesn’t matter,” Rene said. “That is what it is, isn’t it?”
Ethan nodded. “If they look in our direction, it’s got us seventy ways from yesterday.”
He looked over at Kaycee and her eyes were almost pleading. “Like you said before. We need to figure out if it’s a singularity power plant that’s causing the TU-142. That will tell us if it’s something the STI did or something else.”
Ethan stopped and blinked several times. A singularity power plant. There was the kernel of an idea in that. He got up and walked over to the console where Ammo was watching the sensors. “Can you twist any of this high enough to get it up into the Terahertz gap?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
He glanced over at Carson who shook his head.
“How about one of the sub-harmonics below 8.516 terahertz?” he asked, leaning forward and doing some fast calculations. “This is dirty, but something like this maybe.”
He started adjusting the controls on Ammo’s screen and Rene walked up to look at what he was doing, shaking his head in disbelief.
“We won’t be able to see it if it cloaks again, but maybe we can pick up some of its gravity wake if it moves,” she said.
“And what if we adjust our inertial field to a lower harmonic below that, will it hide us under their own noise?” He tapped in another string of calculations and then put the results up on the main screen.
“It might,” Ammo said. “But you’re way outside my air supply with that one.”
“Could we get the coils to operate in that range?” he looked at Rene and then to Carson.
“If this were the Dawn, I’d say maybe. For a short sprint.” Rene turned to stare at the other engineer. “I’m sure this thing has completely different coils. The field intractance would be a lot harder to overcome in a longer winding.”
“The Sparrow uses nested short throw coils that aren’t any longer than a standard design,” Carson said. “It gives it a lower inertial inductance because of hysteretical interference and keeps the field from being as visible at a distance.” He shook his head and stared down at his console as he obviously tried to visualize how to do it. “I think we can do it, but it’ll heat like a bitch. How far are you thinking to run?”
Ethan pointed out the window toward Tamilis. “About that far.”
“To the planet on cruise? Are you out of your frakking mind?” Carson sat back and shook his head. “A couple microseconds of error and we’re buried. Literally.”
“I can pilot the jump from here to the planet,” Marti said. “If I cut the cruise as we hit the atmosphere, we can be down before anyone knows we are there.”
“That’s some damn tight driving,” Carson said.
“I have dropped a rock on a ship sized target from twice light-speed,” she said. “Hitting the planet is simple.”
“Not hitting it is better,” Ethan corrected.
“True beans,” Ammo said. “What about the other ships? They’ll see us make the jump.”
“Nojo. That coil configuration will light us up like a beacon on their standard sensors,” Carson said.
“Every twenty-two hours and seventeen seconds, the orbits of both multicruisers go into loss of sight of our current position on the moon,” Jackie offered. “The next occurrence is in eighteen minutes, and seven seconds.”
“Does this mean you’re signing off on this crazy idea too?” Carson asked.
“It is the only plan presented thus far with a chance of achieving our stated objective,” it said.
“Can you get the coils tweaked in eighteen minutes?” Ethan asked.
“With help,” he said, jumping up and grabbing Rene as he dashed for the door.
Nuko slipped into the engineer’s seat.
“While they’re working on that, we need to figure out the best place to put down. We want to get the most data in the shortest time,” Ethan said. “Based on what we know from Starlight, can we make some educated guesses where to shoot?”
“Is our objective just to find one of the power sink locations?” Angel asked. “In my mind, those would give us the best shot at finding anything useful.”
“That may be the ultimate goal, but that is also the biggest risk,” Marti said. “At least to me personally.”
“There’s no way I’m letting you take your main body down, regardless,” he said.
“I’d say we want to land as close to a population center as possible,” Kaycee suggested.
“But not too close,” Quinn said. “That’s where the multicruiser landing parties will be focusing.”
Ammo put up a map of the colony on the screen. Highlighting several of the smaller villages. “Cantos Vega was from Eastgate if I remember. We know something happened there, so we won’t be hitting a blind hole.” She tapped her screen and one of the sites blinked.
“Is that line of sight with us?”
“Barely,” she said. “It’ll be over the horizon in about an hour. That puts it heading toward local sunse
t in maybe three hours.”
“Pettyjohn said Vega was from an agricultural area. What’s the environment look like?” Kaycee asked.
“We can’t scan it with passive sensors and get any resolution at this oblique angle, so all we’ve got is from the archival records,” she said. “It shows as high mountains to the west, and flat prairies to the east.” She zoomed the map display in to show the topography.
“I could drop you near the village and then ease back toward the hills and maybe pick up some terrain cover while we wait,” Charleigh said. “If it’s farmland to the east, there’ll be nothing to hide under close to the village.”
“What’s this,” Ethan asked, tapping his finger on Ammo’s screen, and highlighting what looked like an open clearing between the town center and several larger buildings.
“It looks like a recreational area. Maybe a park or athletic field,” she said.
“What’s around it?”
“Residential districts, and to the west it’s all heavy equipment maintenance and possibly food processing. There might also be a few tech manufacturing facilities in there, too.”
“Is it big enough to put the ship down to offload us?” he asked.
“Easily,” Charleigh said.
“Then that’s where we aim unless anyone sees something that ups the ugly?”
“If we make it to ground, and if there’s nobody home, then that makes sense. If either of those aren’t true when we get there, we’ll be ass up and hammered,” Quinn said from where he stood just outside the doorway.
“Isn’t that our normal position, anyway?” Angel said, smacking him as she turned to head downstairs to tool up.
Chapter Thirty-One
“We’ve got six powered battle exosuits. You should armor up,” Carson said as they stood around in engineering watching the timer count down.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 99