"Stop groveling," Ada demanded, not willing to see if the terrified Musi would continue. "Grossmek, what is your destination?"
"We sail to the moon Querid where our ancestors once lived," he answered.
"Querid?" Ada asked, looking over to Jonathan.
"The second and only other generally inhabitable celestial object within the Mhina system. Better known as Faraji, it is the seventh moon of the gas giant Kobe and in the fifth planetary orbital position," Jonathan rattled off. "If the captain will recall, when we first observed this moon upon entering Dwingeloo so many stans previous, we discovered ruined Musi cities on the moon's surface."
"They were shite-holes," Tabby said. "Like that bridge they're sitting in."
"It is well-established that Musi are actually very sanitary in their practices," Jonathan said. "In that they prefer to be surrounded by what most species consider clutter, they have developed an undeserved reputation of being dirty."
"Please let us go. We meant no harm," Grossmek begged again.
"You shot at us," Ada answered. "Jonathan, any way to figure out if they were headed to Faraji or Kito?"
"They were indeed headed to Kito and not Faraji as Captain Grossmek has indicated."
"Nooo …" Grossmek screamed and clawed at a control surface that was out of the vid-sensor's range. "Why won't it turn off?"
Unsuccessful at stopping the transmission, the rat-faced captain turned and raced to the bridge's exit, a rooster tail of garbage flying up behind him. Frantically, he pounded on the security controls as he reached the door. The captain looked around in panic as he realized it would not open.
"Grossmek, calm down. Answer my question. I don't plan to shoot you today," Ada said.
It took a bit more convincing, but Grossmek finally returned to the sensor.
"When ships chase, they kill Musi," he answered. "We just want to go home."
"You're lying," Ada said. "You were not headed to Querid. You were headed for another moon, where Abasi once lived."
"We have nothing," Grossmek admitted. "Felio have everything. We were only going to take what we needed for our children to grow. Please do not make us die in the cold of Querid."
"Why would you come all the way out here if you couldn't survive? How'd you get that ship?" Tabby asked. "It's worth a lot more than supplies."
"We have performed an inventory of the freighters," Jonathan said. "Indeed, they will struggle to survive on Faraji without additional supplies. They do, however, have enough for many ten-days and perhaps as long as an orbital cycle." Ada's HUD showed that planet Kobe’s orbital cycle was one-point-four standard years. "Longer if they are able to learn to harvest what Faraji has to offer like their predecessors before them."
"Can you reprogram their nav-computer to only allow them to go to Faraji or back to the worm-hole and Tamu for half a stan?" Ada asked.
"Perhaps we could simply disallow navigation to the moon Kito or the planet Elea which Kito orbits," Jonathan suggested.
"That would work," Ada answered. "Captain Grossmek, I assume you understand what I've requested from my crew. Neither Slefid nor Carisfid will be capable of navigating to the planet Elea. I assure you, if you do figure out how to visit, you will discover that you are neither welcome nor safe. I will utilize Intrepid in a most unpleasant way. Do you understand?"
"You are most gracious, Captain Ada Chen of the Bold," he answered, bobbing his head up and down solicitously, his beady black eyes focused on her.
"Show up on Kito and you'll discover just how welcoming I am not," she snapped, cutting comms.
"Captain Chen?" Jonathan asked.
"Yes, Jonathan?"
"We propose that you do not divert to the moon Kito," he said. "Liam has successfully lifted from Zuri and Hornblower will reach Kito only seven days after Intrepid. If you were to reach out to him and explain your concern, he could direct the Abasi sloops Shimmering Leaves and Ice Touched Field to make all haste. Their arrival at maximum acceleration would only be forty-eight hours behind Intrepid's."
"That is a reasonable idea," Ada answered. "Tabby, what do you think?"
"If Kroerak are attacking the planet from my visions, every minute we delay means death for thousands," she answered. "I hate that Kito might be picked clean by looters, but I don't think they're equal considerations."
"Good point," Ada answered. "Set a course for where you think that wormhole is. It's time to go exploring."
"Copy that," Tabby answered.
"I'll be in my quarters." Ada stood and walked from the bridge, turning aft. Even with a crew of twenty, Intrepid felt unusually empty to her. Walking past her quarters to the galley, she grabbed a fresh pouch of hot water and turned back. She palmed her way into the oversized captain's quarters, sat at the ornate, wooden desk and took a moment to pour steaming water over some of her quickly dwindling supply of tea leaves.
"This is Hornblower." A voice she didn't recognize answered the quantum comm set. Unlike Intrepid, Liam had installed the comm crystals onto Hornblower's bridge. "You have Stolzman. Go ahead."
Ada recognized the name if not the voice. The man was one of the pilots in training she'd been teaching to sail large ships. "Ken, this is Ada on Intrepid. It's urgent I speak with Captain Hoffen."
"I copy, Bold Tertiary. Will comply," he answered. "The old man just went down two hours ago, but prioritized any comms from Intrepid. I'll wake him."
Ada winced, hating to wake Liam. Two minutes later, she heard rustling and then Liam's tired voice. "And here I was thinking to get a good night's sleep without all you around."
"How did lift-off go? Any problems with the load?" Ada asked. In her estimation, Hornblower wasn’t well suited to the task of ferrying so much weight in and out of the atmosphere.
"We're hauling livestock," Liam answered, dryly. "You'll need to define problems. Turns out poultry have an adverse reaction to space flight. Three crew were wounded by terrified chickens. Also, that whole thing where livestock void bowels when transitioning to and from fold-space?"
Ada chuckled. "Yeah? Hornblower doesn't even have fold-space engines."
"Well, turns out these same chickens have that reaction to gravity transitions, like when you switch from repulsors to hard-burn," he said.
"Every time?"
"So far. Yes."
"It feels like livestock and space travel probably aren't compatible," Ada answered, doing her best not to laugh out loud.
"And yet, we keep doing it."
"I take it you're underway then."
"Copy, that, we're currently thirty-two hours from the Santaloo-Tamu wormhole," Liam said. "I suspect that's not why you pinged the bat-phone."
"Bats?" Ada asked.
"Never mind. What's up?"
"We ran into trouble coming through to Mhina," Ada started. "A couple of freighters loaded with Musi fired on us. They said they were headed to the old Musi city on Faraji, but Jonathan did some snooping on their systems and discovered they were first headed to Kito. We believe they were planning to load up on supplies and fuel before making the trip out to Faraji."
"They fired on you?" Liam asked, obviously concerned. "Did you put them down?"
"Their blasters were barely bigger than rifles," she exaggerated. "Intrepid took no damage. I've gotta say, they're pathetic little buggers. I decided not to return fire. Jonathan reprogrammed their systems so they can’t go to Kito, but we believe there are probably other ships already there, looting. I'd planned to head over and take care of them, but Jonathan talked me out of it."
"How?" Liam asked. "We're depending on those supplies."
"He says if you send the Abasi sloops at max burn, they'll get there almost as fast as Intrepid could. If Kroerak really are attacking another planet, that means people are dying. I don't feel like we should make that trade," she answered.
"Yeah, I see what you're saying," Liam answered. "Appreciate your thinking on that. I'd have been blinded by the looting."
"Wasn't my
idea," Ada answered. "It was actually Tabby’s."
"You must be rubbing off on her. It's not like her to walk away from a fight," he said.
"These Musi were pathetic, Liam. There's no fight where they’re concerned. Jonathan had to lock the bridge doors on their ship. The captain was so scared, he kept trying to run off the bridge during our conversation."
He heaved an audible sigh. "That's just great. Really looking forward to dealing with these guys. Go ahead and stay on mission. We'll send the sloops. Everything else good?"
"I think Tabby misses you. She's been hitting the gym equipment hard. Make sure you give her a call after you get up," Ada said.
"Copy that," Liam answered. "Hornblower out."
"Jonathan, are you picking anything up?" Ada asked, starting to believe that Tabby's dream of an undiscovered wormhole out of the Mhina system was just that – a dream.
"We can say with ninety-percent confidence that there are no cosmic anomalies resembling those we associate with wormhole travel within four-hundred thousand kilometers of our position," he answered.
"A simple no would suffice," Tabby grumbled.
Intrepid had sailed to three different locations at Tabby’s direction and each time they discovered nothing more than the vast emptiness of the deep dark. At the outset she'd felt such confidence, but now she felt like a fool. She'd taken to holding the Iskstar crystal in her hand as she slept, hoping for another dream that would clear things up.
"And yet it would be inaccurate," Jonathan answered.
"Can it," Tabby snapped. "I'm gonna go work out. Let me know when you're done scanning or whatever you do."
Irritated by both her friend's attitude and the situation they found themselves in, Ada considered challenging her. Technically, Tabby was under her command and needed to ask permission to leave the bridge. She also knew that enforcement would be impossible.
"I believe you misunderstand our statement," Jonathan said. "We do not seek to be pedantic. While it is significant that no anomalies are present, we failed to communicate that we have picked up on fuel residue from a significant passing of Kroerak vessels."
"The Kroerak fleet came this way?" Ada asked.
"It is the only reasonable explanation," he answered.
Tabby sat back in her chair and looked out into space, trying to see what wasn't visible. "What are the odds of us coming across the Kroerak fleet's path this far from the Mhina-Tamu wormhole?"
"While an interesting arithmetic problem from the perspective of working with extremely small numbers, most of us believe the actual answer is insignificant beyond that it is not possible," Jonathan answered. "You seek to verify the veracity of the information delivered by the Iskstar. This incident confirms what most of us already believe. Iskstar is a sentient and communicates via the Iskstar crystal."
"Nice to know I'm not crazy," Tabby said, her body relaxing. She’d been holding onto a great deal of stress that she hadn’t wanted to admit to.
"Can we trace the fuel trail?" Ada asked.
"Our sensors are not well tuned to this," Jonathan answered. "If permitted, we could manufacture a sensor strip that would allow for better tracking."
She nodded. "I'm not sure I see an alternative."
"We propose that you set Intrepid's heading as we've transmitted. It is possible the sensor is unnecessary, although we've directed the replicator to commence construction of one presumptively."
Ada felt Intrepid accelerate. Once again, she felt irked by Tabby's unwillingness to follow chain of command. Practically, there was no reason to question Jonathan's direction, but it was not the role of pilot to make that decision.
"Um, guys, are you seeing this?" Tabby asked.
"Seeing what?" Ada asked, her voice more peevish than she'd like to admit.
"It's blurry, like there's something in front of us," she said.
Ada peered at Intrepid's super-high-resolution screen but found nothing unusual. "I'm not seeing anything." Disorientation occurred as a familiar sensation hit her stomach.
"Tabby, what's going on?" Ada asked, through clenched teeth.
"I don't think we're in Mhina anymore."
Chapter 11
Full of Crap
Tamu System, Hornblower
"We really lucked out when you decided to do a full install on those septic fields at refit," Nick said. "Laterals two and three are completely down and four is under quite a bit of pressure. We're also bleeding O2 almost as fast as we can manufacture it. We've started venting hydrogen and methane as we're out of storage for both. I think we're going to need to shut down the waste drains from the livestock. If we blow the last two fields, the final few days of this voyage are going to stink."
The trip from Zuri to Kito was dragging on much longer than I thought possible. There seemed to be a competition between the livestock and the thousand-plus passengers to clog Hornblower's brand new septic. It was true most of these people had never been on a ship and I really should have anticipated problems, but I couldn't imagine how I had missed making clear that trash and bio-waste were completely different ideas.
"What do you expect when you take a half tonne animal and fling it into space?" Curtis Long drawled.
We'd gathered the command crew and community leaders into our largest conference room and were working to hash out issues. Mostly, I was trying not to get worked up about the treatment of my ship.
Long continued, "Yer lucky all they did was crap buckets. We've got half of 'em sick of some new thing we've never seen and there've been two bovine miscarriages. If you shut down the drains, we're gonna be knee deep if it keeps up like it has."
"From what I saw, I'd guess they're probably empty by now, wouldn't you think?" Hog asked, grinning widely.
"No," Long answered, annoyed.
"We're shutting down the drains," I said. "Curtis, you'll need to deal with the crap best you can. If you need more labor, let us know, we can get some folks to help."
"There's a positive to all this," Nick said.
Hog looked at Nick with eyebrows raised in surprise. "Just how in tarnation do you get anything good from piling hog crap in the bottom of a ship?"
"There's the matter of restarting a new waste treatment plant for York's new home," Nick said. "That requires live bacteria. Seems like we've a good head start on that."
"We'll see if you still feel that way in six days," Long answered.
"As annoying as slogging through poop is, it sounds like septic is managed and O2 is holding," I said. "Let's change topics. We need your final choice for the city of York."
The four cities on Kito were arranged like points of a compass around the lake which had a name that translated simply as Clear Lake. The northernmost city sat nestled against a mountain range to the northeast, the westernmost by a broad forest, and the eastern and southern cities both opened to broad plains. My expectation was one of the latter two would be chosen. While less scenic, both the eastern and southern locations had more ready access to tillable soil.
Clear Lake had been naturally formed and fed from snow-pack on the mountain range to the northeast. A roughly egg-shaped basin, the lake was thirty kilometers across east-to-west and fifty kilometers north-to-south. According to Jonathan, the climate of Kito was such that the lake's edges would only freeze during a short part of the winter period. It was a romantic notion to look forward to a time when the four cities would be thriving and tied together by trade across the lake. I'd been holding onto that idyllic picture for the times when I panicked, thinking about all the things that could go wrong.
"We have," Hog answered. "We choose the western city."
"Isn't that a bit short on farming ground?" Mom asked, having done the same analysis Nick and I had.
"There are only ten who expect to start farms," Bish answered. "The value of the lumber generated from virgin forests looks to be considerable. The industry would jumpstart our economy, providing Mrs. Hoffen would consider granting logging permits."
&
nbsp; "It's not something I'm familiar with," Mom answered. "If we harvest responsibly, I don't see why an agreement couldn't be reached."
"I was thinking the same thing," Bish said. "I've pulled resources from our old data-stores. The North Americans had a good model. Did you know that trees are more productive if thinned? And fires are critical for some forests to repopulate?"
She looked straight at him. "I was a secondary school teacher."
"Western city it is," I said. "The area isn’t one I flew over directly, but you already know that from the quality of the data-streams. I'm glad you're concentrating on how to generate capital from natural resources."
"What of Loose Nuts Mining and Manufacturing?" Merrie asked. "I'm not sure what's become of the entity, now that all of our equipment is lost."
Merrie and her blacksmith husband, Amon, were an ambitious couple we met on planet Ophir. Like York, the citizens of Yishuv had been stranded by the Belirand Corporation when their mission hadn't met the corporation's objectives. Perhaps the thing I most appreciated about Merrie was her desire to own something. Her admission about being set back to zero, while a shared experience with many of York, hit me particularly hard. She'd followed Mom to Zuri on Petersburg station out of loyalty and a sense of adventure. That decision had cost her significantly.
"What would you like the company to be?" Nick asked.
"Cash assets were roughly a hundred twenty thousand credits in the Abasi banking network," Merrie said, "While sailing through Tamu, I attempted to access these funds. The banking network is closed and there's talk of revaluation of credits. I doubt that we can count on those funds. As it is, we have no equipment. We also don’t have right of land ownership under the arrangement with York since we all lived on Petersburg."
I glanced at Mom. She was aware of the issue and wanted us to get it out on the table.
"You didn't say what you wanted," I said.
"I want things to be back to where they were before the Kroerak came. We had so much demand, we were fighting off customers, but I know that can't happen," she said. "Instead, I want to salvage the broken Abasi ships that were used to transport and defend Felio when the Kroerak attacked two centuries ago."
Judgment of the Bold Page 12