Ion Trail 22: Scene of the Crime

Three more hours.

Three hours until we arrived at Kestrel Station, or where it used to be. I’d checked out photos and news articles back when we’d finally arrived at Bekter’s Rim, and there wasn’t much left; Just a massive debris field, and so, so many bodies. By now, both would probably have been largely cleared out by salvage and recovery teams. It had been strangely dissonant knowing that the station was gone while calculating the navdata; since I hadn’t dared to update the local datasphere since we’d gotten the warning from StyxRatt, my data still showed the station as being there. I’d still plotted our drop out location to put us well away from the station’s former orbit. Hopefully it wouldn’t take us long to find StyxRatt, or whatever it was they wanted us to find.

Leaving Terra Primus in such a rush hadn’t done us any favors, but we had a mostly full cargo hold of deliveries for Bekter’s Rim, which is where we’d be headed once we’d finished our business at Kestrel. Shanna had even wrangled a delivery of supplies to the recovery team at Kestrel, although I’d ended up declining that one. I didn’t want to get any closer to the remains of the station than I had to; she’d been disappointed, but she understood my reasoning. Between unpleasant memories and potentially live nanites we had plenty of reason to avoid anything to do with Kestrel Station.

In addition to my normal pre-drop checks, which were a bit more complicated than they used to be with the new upgrades and subsystems, I was running a power core stress test. Power management was a bit more of a juggling act than it used to be, since a new power core hadn’t been within our budget, but with Clinton serving as a dedicated engineer it was manageable. Normally we ran with most of the additional systems shut down, but I wanted to treat every drop as a potential combat drop.

“Alright, pushing shields to full power,” I said, watching the indicator. “How are we looking, Clinton?”

“We’re nearly at capacity, Captain,” he replied. “I’d like to see what happens when Diaz charges the guns.”

“Ready,” Diaz said. “By your order, Captain?”

“Go ahead, full charge,” I acknowledged. “But don’t actually fire.”

“No worries, Captain,” he answered. “The block’s not even loaded. I’m waiting until the stress test is over to do that.”

“Just see that you don’t forget,” I said. “How’s it looking now, Clinton?”

“Uhhh, I think,” he paused and I heard him talking to Omar, his voice muffled. “We might need to back off on the shields a bit. With the guns charged, we’re holding at ninety-nine percent of our capacity. As I understand it, there’s a small surge right when they fire, so at current levels we’re likely to lose something if we were to fire the guns.”

“Shit,” I mumbled. “Drone’s up too?”

“Yes, Captain,” Omar answered.

“Alright, damn it,” I grumbled, and lowered the shield power until Clinton told me it was good.

“That should do it, Captain,” he told me. “We can eke out a few more percent if the drone console is offline, and we can go full shield power if we’re not using the guns, but should consider this our nominal operating level for now.”

“Acknowledged,” I said, tapping a few commands into the console to mark the current level as a preset. “Deactivate all non-essential systems for now, and ensure the guns are loaded. Next hard time will be D-minus 30 minutes.”

“Copy,” Clinton replied, and Diaz echoed him. I keyed off the commlink and slid out of my seat to head down to the galley for some coffee. I found Sister Estrada waiting, and she pulled down my cup and poured it full when she saw me walk in. I grabbed the powdered creamer and sugar and fixed it up.

“You’re always here whenever I need coffee,” I told her before taking the first gulp. “Are you psychic?”

“Of course not,” she said with a self-deprecating smile. “But it’s not a large ship. I can sit in my room and wait to see if someone needs to come talk to me, or I can hang out here in the only social space we really have.” She lifted her own cup of coffee to her lips.

“Plus there’s coffee here,” I guessed.

“Indeed.”

We drank in companionable silence for a while, but her remark about people coming to talk to her kept nibbling at me. Finally I laughed out loud, and she looked at me curiously.

“I just realized that I was hoping you’d be here, because apparently I need to talk, too,” I admitted, to which she nodded.

“I get that a lot. Comes with the territory.” She gestured to her distinctive garb.

“Are a lot of the crew religious?” I asked her, curiously. I’d never wanted to pry into people’s personal beliefs, but I’d always wondered.

“A few,” she said. “But you don’t need to believe in my God to need a willing ear from time to time. That’s one of the things we’re trained for.” She looked at me directly, knowing I was stalling, but didn’t call me out on it. That was another thing she did; she always seemed to know more than you were saying, but never judged you for it.

“It’s Kestrel,” I sighed. “I’m not looking forward to going back there.”

“I don’t think any of us are,” she answered.

“But I was a coward,” I told her. “All I could think about was saving my own neck. If Diaz hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t have even let you all aboard.”

“But you did let us aboard,” she pointed out. “You were afraid. We were all afraid. But we are not given a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power and love. Whether you knew it or not, you exercised that part of your spirit that day and every day since, even if you did need a little nudge in the beginning.” I bit my lip, thinking on her words.

“Do you think I could have done more? Do you think I should have?” I looked up at her, troubled and afraid again. She just smiled that same calm smile and put her hand on mine.

“What you could have done is never a question worth asking. You did what you did, and that is all that matters. What you should have done is of similar importance, but I will answer that another way; had you done anything other than what you did, might we not be here today? Might the things we have accomplished gone undone? May we all have perished as a result of the choices you might have made?” She gestured broadly with her hands, then brought both back to clasp mine. “Look around you, and decide if the way things turned out is satisfactory. If it is, then what you’ve done is what you should have done. If it is not, then make new choices now, rather than questioning what should or could have been.”

“You could make a killing as a motivational speaker,” I breathed almost reverently after she’d finished. For the first time I saw her reserve crack as she laughed an abrupt, startled belly laugh. A bit surprised myself, as I hadn’t really meant it as a joke, I chuckled as well.

“I suppose I could,” she said, her serene mask falling back into place as if it’d never lifted. We finished our coffee, conversation turning to minor details of the galley supplies, and I returned to the cockpit feeling quite a bit better about myself.

We reentered normal space bristling with as much hostility as a small, recently refurbished freighter can be, guns charged and ready and the defensive drone deployed as well, but the drop was uneventful. I scanned our immediate vicinity, then activated the new long-range sensors looking for anything that might be a threat, but there was nothing; just a small cluster of salvage vessels, easily identified, tooling along the former orbit of Kestrel Station. Once I was satisfied I set the sensors to do a system update and left the cockpit to find Janice. When I didn’t find her in the galley, engine room or her own room, I went to the service tube in the cargo bay, and rapped sharply on the cover.

“What?” I heard her say from inside, and the cover lifted out of the way as the teenager stuck her head out to stare at me.

“Do you honestly prefer this cramped-ass maintenance tube to a proper room with a bed?” I asked her.

“Did you honestly come here to hassle me about this again? Or are we here?”

“We’re here,” I replied with an exasperated sigh. “I thought you’d want to be on-hand when we got to the coordinates.”

“Yes, give me a moment. I’ll join you shortly.” With that, she pulled the maintenance cover closed, though I could hear her moving around in the tube. I threw my hands up and returned to the cockpit to maneuver the rest of the way to the coordinates.

It was a short trip of maybe half an hour; the upgraded navcomputer had been able to get us a lot closer on the initial drop out than we’d normally be able to get, but it was still designed for navigation at an interstellar level, not in-system. Janice arrived shortly after we got underway and stood tensely behind me, staring over my shoulder at the viewscreen. As we got closer, I scanned the sensor arrays repeatedly, not picking up anything, except for an unusually dense cluster of space debris; my apprehension grew.

“Hang on,” Janice said, then leaned over to point at the viewscreen. “Can you get a closer look over there?” I glanced up at her, then keyed the viewscreen to focus on the sector of space she’d pointed to. It took me a moment to see what she’d seen; apparently she had impressive eyesight to go with her glare, because it was nearly invisible amidst the debris and the blackness of space. What appeared to be a spacesuit, apparently intact, drifted alone in space. Sensors did not pick up any electronic emissions or other signs of life.

Omar used the drone to recover the suit and had Harper meet me at the air lock. Janice tagged along despite my reservations; if this was StyxRatt, it was unlikely that they were alive, but I said nothing. Once the drone had deposited the suit in the air lock and withdrawn, I cycled it open, and let Harper go and examine it.

“Is anyone inside?” I asked after she’d flipped the suit over to its back, and started working on the seals. I thought I’d seen a flash of facial features through the helmet, but wanted to be sure. She didn’t answer right away, but instead unsealed the helmet and pulled it off to reveal what I’d feared; the face of a young man. But on a second look, I realized the face didn’t look quite right. It looked human enough, but there was a certain stiffness to it that even death didn’t quite explain, and it had none of the pallor or smell you’d expect from a dead body.

“It’s a dummy,” Harper said after feeling the throat, where she’d normally check for a pulse. “A very lifelike one, but a dummy nonetheless.” I heard Janice release her breath behind me, and slowly did the same, though I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it.

“I knew that wasn’t StyxRatt,” she declared, but there was a quiver in her voice. She turned to stalk quickly away before there were any awkward questions.

“So you figure it was a decoy?” I asked Harper, feeling relieved.

“Maybe. I’m going to take it to med bay and take a closer look at it. It looks pretty sophisticated, like it might be able to simulate life signs.” I nodded, then helped her by taking the legs while she grabbed the dummy under the arms. My collarbone twinged at me, but I schooled my face to impassiveness and helped her carry it to med bay. She watched me as carefully as she could as we manhandled the thing through the corridors, but didn’t seem concerned enough to say anything.

“Alright, I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to go rescan the immediate area, see if we missed anything else.” She acknowledged me with a wave as she got to work on opening the suit further, and I left the med bay. Once in the cockpit, I directed several deep sensor sweeps through the debris, but aside from confirming my impression that it was mostly the remains of a single small ship, maybe a shuttle, there was nothing else of interest.

“Captain?” Harper’s voice cut into the beginning of yet another sensor sweep, just in case, and I keyed the commlink immediately.

“What’s up?” I asked, rising from my seat, already headed to med bay.

“You should see this,” she replied. “Bring Janice, if you can find her quickly.”  I stopped and turned back, keyed the intercom, and announced that I wanted her to meet me in the med bay. I heard Harper’s low chuckle on the other end of the line. “I suppose that’ll do the trick.”

When I arrived, Janice was already there, staring closely at a crumpled sheet of plas. As soon as I walked in, she shoved the plas at me, and shook it until I took it from her. One side of it was covered in a hand-scrawled message. It was sloppy and hard to read, but the all-caps and lack of punctuation or any sort of structure was very familiar.

IF YOU FIND THIS I AM IN TROUBLE MAYBE DEAD

DO NOT MEDDLE WITH THE DECOY THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES 

IF ALIVE I WILL CONTACT YOU SOON

I stared at the message for a good minute, then looked at the dummy, then back at the message for another minute. I nodded, making up my mind, and turned to Harper.

“I want that thing off my ship, now,” I told her. I reached out and snaked Janice’s arm as she tried to leave, and turned to stare at her as intently as she usually did me. “Nope, you’re helping this time. You and Harper, get it to the air lock, space it, and let me know when it’s done. We’re leaving immediately.” Janice blinked first and dropped her eyes. I counted it a small victory, and went directly to the cockpit.

I was pretty sure our friend StyxRatt had packed the dummy with explosives. If it was captured by the black ships, I figure they intended there to be an unpleasant surprise waiting for them should they try anything with it. In any case, I wasn’t about to risk whatever ‘consequences’ they were warning us about. Hopefully we’d hear from them again, but if we didn’t, then we’d just keep trucking on. When I got word from Harper that the dummy was floating, I nudged the throttle up and left the debris field behind.

On a whim, I initiated a HyperWAN query for updated messages, and winced as a couple dozen popped in to the local copy of my box. We’d been almost a week to Kestrel, so if StyxRatt was going to contact us, they’d probably have done it by now. Most of the messages were TU communications regarding the outcome of our official reinstatement process, one was a satisfaction survey from the insurance company, and would I be interested in obtaining a policy? There, right at the bottom of the box, was what I’d hoped to find; a message with no subject and no sender; surprisingly, the timestamp was about ten minutes ago.

SORRY FOR ALARM 

DAMAGED BUT ALIVE THANKS FOR COMING

LEFT YOU A PRESENT 

STYXRATT 

PS NOT THE DECOY ANOTHER PRESENT

The message had a familiar string of random-looking characters below it. I sighed and keyed the intercom to call for Janice. While I was glad they were still alive, StyxRatt was starting to give me a migraine. If they knew we were here then likely they were also here in the system somewhere, but still they insisted on this cryptic, one-sided form of communication. If I ever got my hands on them, I’d probably shake them until teeth rattled loose.

“Hey,” I said without turning around, when I heard Janice arrive. “SR’s alive, sent me another cipher. Says they left us a present.” She leaned over my shoulder, peered at the message, then pulled out her datapad to snap another picture. Then she was gone. I laughed. Girl was a pain in the ass, but at least she was consistent.

I put us on a course that would put one of the rocky, barren inner planets between us and the salvage operation; I doubted that they had sensors that would reach out this far, but it was better to avoid questions in case I was wrong. Then we waited for Janice to do her thing.

It didn’t take her long; being sober probably helped to cut the time down. Maybe she was getting used to whatever cipher StyxRatt was using. Either way, an hour or so later, she came back to the cockpit and shoved a scrap of plas at me with the coordinates before stomping off again. I frowned at it, then entered the coordinates into the navcomputer and watched as it plotted them on the navigational overlay; just inside the inner orbit of the first planet, not very far away from our current location. I wondered if it was worth it to keep picking up the bread crumbs StyxRatt kept leaving for us. But then I considered the good the TU would be able to do with the data we’d delivered as well as the follow-on good effects for me and my crew; in an indirect fashion, I guess I owed my ship to StyxRatt’s involvement. I sighed, and brought the ship around.

The location was very similar to the drop-site in Stroika; a tiny radio buoy, barely detectable until you were right on top of it. As before, we deployed a drone to go recover it and bring it back in. When I retrieved it, I found what I expected to find; a datastick. I held it out to Janice who, of course, had appeared at the air lock shortly after I’d gone to retrieve it.

“Let’s see what they’re giving us this time,” I said. “Hopefully not another unpaid delivery run.” Of course, the last one turned out well enough for us, I thought a bit more charitably. “In the meantime, we’re headed for Bekter’s Rim to get a paycheck.”