Ion Trail 15: Calm Before the Storm

“Alright folks,” I said over the intercom, “We’re about ten minutes from drop out into Stroika. It’s a small station, so it won’t take us long to taxi in and get docked.” I verified fuel reserves and coolant levels; we’d need to refill on the latter here, but we’d be good for another month or so of travel before fuel became a concern. The ion drive was idling and ready for regular space, and I’d rigged the cover to open as soon as we’d dropped out. Normally this would be a manual task, but I didn’t want the delay; I’d read about similar settings for freighters who jumped into hostile areas a lot. I’d been doing a lot of reading about stuff like that, including a combat jocks message board which was nearly a month out of date, but the archived posts were solid.

The alarm chirped and I settled my hands onto the yoke, ready for real space. There was almost no chance of trouble, as I’d done a quick HyperWAN ping yesterday, but I’d decided it was always better to be ready, whether or not you expected problems on drop out. I watched the countdown decrement own to zero and felt the slight lurch as we reentered real space. The cover slid open, revealing the station directly ahead in the distance. I alerted the crew that we were taxiing, then hailed the station for docking authorization. Once received, I brought us in to our assigned berth, where we’d offload our cargo for turnover to Kristina’s factor at Stroika and we’d get paid. I told Diaz to have everyone disembark and I’d drop the ramp from the cockpit before joining them.

In the star dock I found the factor waiting for us, already talking to Diaz. I joined them and listened as they finished the arrangements, then nodded to him when he offered the datapad.

“I’ll take that,” I said. He passed it over and I checked over the information. “Everything seems to be in order. Will you need assistance transporting the cargo to your warehouse, or can I release my crew once we’ve offloaded?”

“You should be fine to release them now, if you like,” he replied. “I can manage the offloading and transport.” I glanced at Diaz who nodded slightly, so I agreed.

“Sounds good. Anything I need to know about Stroika Station?”

“Don’t go drinking with the locals,” he said, quite seriously. “It’s something of a point of pride and it rarely ends well if you’re not from around here.” I snorted.

“Got it.” I handed him back the datapad after keying in my acceptance, which would also authorize payment to my account. “Could you point me to a public terminal?” He looked at me strangely, but gave me perfunctory directions before turning his attention to unloading the cargo. I told everyone they could take off, but to be back to the ship by 2100 station time. I’d disbursed a bit of money from the last payout to everyone, and most of them still had personal accounts as well, so they’d want to get some comfort items. I intended to do the same, once I’d had time to check my messages.

It turned out that was a waste of time, with no new messages at all; it seemed that StyxRatt hadn’t contacted me yet. I followed the signs to the commercial district, which was, like everything about this station, small and rustic. Suited me fine though, and I ran into Sister Estrada and Clinton walking into a small restaurant and hurried to join them.

“Aww, man,” Clinton said as we were seated, “I’m looking forward to this. I did some research, and Stroika’s known for a few things: Meat, potatoes, and booze.” He snatched up the menu and started scanning it avidly as he continued talking. “No offense to the cook, but I’m getting me a big ol’ steak and enough vodka that you ladies will have to carry me home.” Sister Estrada chuckled, and I poked him in the ribs.

“If you think you’re getting carried home, you’ve got another thing coming,” I told him. He laughed and looked around the restaurant, where it seemed the afternoon crowd was just starting to trickle in.

“Maybe I’ll just find someone else to take me home then,” he said, waggling his brows suggestively. I knew exactly what he was getting at; it’d been a long several weeks for me too, so I just winked at him before picking up my own menu.

“It does appear that your assessment of their culinary strengths was accurate,” Sister Estrada commented, looking at her own menu. “The stroganoff and knish sounds good.” Clinton nodded approvingly, but when the time came, he stuck to steak and potatoes. He didn’t go quite as strong on the vodka as he’d suggested, but against my better judgment I decided to join him in a couple shots. It had me feeling warm and loose before the meal was done; I’d probably also need to apologize to Sister Estrada later for the direction our conversation took.

“You know, if I wasn’t your Captain,” I teased him after a particularly ribald and improbable story about a fellow salvager and a recovered box of ‘marital aids’, “you might not need to worry about finding someone else taking you home.”

“Flattering, Cap’,” he slurred a bit, “but you’d be barkin’ up the wrong tree.” He glanced over at a trio of tall, well-muscled men at a nearby table, then turned back and grinned wickedly at me. I blinked at him a few times before his words sank in.

“Oh!” I said, a little dismayed. “So you and Kyle-?”

“Nah, nah, nope,” Clinton said, shaking his head so hard he nearly overbalanced himself. “Kyle’s definitely not my type. Too soft.” He took another shot. “Besides, he plays for the other team. As I recall, him and Kris have an on-again, off-again thing.” I nodded solemnly, as though this were some grave pronouncement and he laughed. Sister Estrada, who’d managed to slip in her share of sly quips from time to time was looking at me with a half-smile, and blushed a little bit. She recognized I’d been putting myself out there a bit, even if Clinton didn’t seem to. Woman was far too observant sometimes, I thought uncharitably.

“On that note,” she said, rising from her seat, “I think it’s about time I got you two home before I really do have to carry you.”

I thought that it was just as well she did the next morning when I woke up with only a minor headache. It’d been far too long since I drank more than a glass of wine or two, but it’d been fun cutting loose for a bit. I’d risen early and taken advantage of a few automated kiosks to pick up the stuff I’d meant to the night before, as well as making an order for food resupply. I didn’t know where we were going yet, but I wanted to be ready to go as soon as I did. I stopped off at the public terminal on my way back to the ship, and found another message stripped of sender and subject. Instead of abrupt, alarming sentences it was a series of numbers that after a few moments I recognized as coordinates. I typed the coordinates into a note file on my commlink and returned to the ship.

The crew was barely stirring, though Clinton seemed none the worse for wear after last night’s antics. I glared at his cheerful smile in passing as I made my way to the cockpit to check the coordinates. It turned out that they weren’t too far out from the station, but a check of the charts showed nothing in that vicinity. I guess we’d need to go and see. I gathered the crew together to tell them what I was about and most of them elected to stay aboard ship. Shanna wanted to go aboard the station to check back with a contact, and Lorna would go with her; Shanna’s health was a lot better, but Lorna wanted give it another week before she was confident in her recovery. I told them that we’d be back in less than an hour and bid them luck before they disembarked.

I requested temporary clearance from traffic control, citing drive testing and we lifted off. It was only about fifteen minutes to the coordinates with the ion drives at full, but we didn’t know what to expect when we got there. I saw nothing on approach, and asked Omar to monitor sensors as we got closer; it was only when we were nearly there that he detected an extremely weak radio pulse, and deployed one of the mining drones to investigate. When the drone returned, it brought back a small hand-cobbled radio buoy. I, along with the rest of the crew, crowded into the airlock to see it.

“Well, let’s see what SR left for us,” I muttered as I knelt down by the buoy.

“SR?” Janice’s voice was suspicious as she challenged my comment.

“StyxRatt,” I clarified. “I feel stupid saying it out like that.” I stared at the buoy, barely paying attention to the cluster of people behind me.

“StyxRatt is a deepsphere legend,” she protested, outraged.

“So you’ve said,” I agreed amicably, reaching out to poke at what looked like a panel on the side, then pulling at it until it opened. Janice grumbled behind me, things I was probably better off not hearing anyway, as I pulled out a small datastick. Its size was deceptive; Higher-end datasticks had capacities similar to my ship’s local datasphere. This one didn’t look high end, but you could never tell. I turned and offered it to Janice. “Care to do the honors?” I asked. “See what StyxRatt has for us?”

“Yes,” she said, and snatched the stick from my hand. “You’d probably fall for whatever minor traps they put into it anyway, to keep it out of the wrong hands.” Without another word she stalked out of the room. She certainly does a lot of that, I thought wryly.

=+=

We were back in the star dock and receiving our food resupply before she came back with the decrypted data. Shanna had also just returned with a list of possible cargos she was able to put together; She’d sold our services pretty well, and any one of the jobs would be good for us, if we found we were going in the right direction. Apparently Stroika didn’t get a ton of freighters passing through.

“This is great, Shanna,” I said, waving the roll of plas sheets that she’d procured. “I think you’ve found your new calling.” She was smiling and about to respond when I heard a curt voice from behind.

“Captain.” I turned to find Janice standing near, staring at me with those deep, unblinking brown eyes. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen the girl blink, honestly. “Come, I have decrypted the stick.” Before I could I more than consider delaying to see if I could get her to blink, she’d turned and was gone back inside the ship. I had little choice but to follow her.

“What you got for me?” I asked as I caught up to her in the engine room. She’d moved in there after Bekter’s Rim, despite the empty cabins we had. I’d decided not to fight it.

“Look,” she said, and stepped back from the console, where there were lines and lines of SR’s unformatted text. After several minutes of trying to parse it, I keyed in a basic formatting pass to put it in proper case, determine some sort of sentence structure, and basically manhandle it into something a person could read without giving themselves a headache. Then I sat down to read what appeared at first to be some sort of tract or manifesto, and ended up being something… else. Even with the machine-assisted formatting it was a difficult read, and when I was done, I sat back and shook my head.

“What is it, Captain?” Diaz leaned forward to peer at the document, but then just looked at me.

“It’s a lot,” I temporized, trying to digest what it all meant. “It’s… something useful, I think.”

“Can you give us the digest version?” Sister Estrada’s calm presence did what it did, and I felt my mind clearing.

“I’m not sure I can honestly, but if I had to sum it up, it’s that there’s a pattern to the black ship attacks,” I told her. “Something the TU can use to predict their next attacks, and with enough time, maybe figure out where they’re attacking from.”

“That’s great news,” she said, but her voice was reserved. “Why do I feel that there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere?”

“Because there is,” I agreed. “SR’s too paranoid to give the data to the TU themselves, or transmit it over the datasphere. Says the whole datasphere is compromised.”

“So they want us to deliver it for them?”

“Yeah,” I said with an exasperated sigh. “They want us to go to Terra Primus.” Terra Primus was the headquarters for the Terran Union, where their ship yards were located, and where they had several planets devoted to their administrative infrastructure and training grounds. It was also the last place I’d ever wanted to go.

“Are we going to?” Diaz’ voice seemed relieved, though it was obvious that he was picking up on my distress, even without understanding the reason. I didn’t know how to even begin to explain my deep-seated distrust of the TU, or my desire to somehow strike out at the black ships myself, despite being an unarmed freighter.

“Yeah,” I said again, laden with reluctance, but seeing no other reasonable alternative. I couldn’t keep this sort of information from the TU simply because I didn’t trust their governance. There was literally no one else with the strength to oppose the black ships. Terra Primus was a bit longer jump than we’d done previously, so I knew we were going to need to recalculate our food supply, and go ahead and make sure we were topped up with extra coolant. We’d have time to worry about fuel once we arrived at our destination. Plus, of course, cargo; a ship flying without cargo was a ship throwing money away, and we didn’t have any to waste. I looked up resignedly at Shanna.

“Tell me you’ve got something good?”

“Captain,” she said with a bright-eyed, self-satisfied little smile, “I’ve got something that’s going to make you happy to be headed to Terra Primus.”

In the end, she was almost right. We ended up having to disassemble some of the empty rooms, but we ended up with three separate cargo loads all bound for Terra Primus, and a fourth, smaller load for the listening post at Percyval’s Rest that would only add a day to the trip. With how competitively Shanna had worked the various vendors, we would also receive premium rates for the trip. While the destination made me less than happy for a few reasons, I couldn’t help but smile when I looked at the transaction summaries. She didn’t know how narrowly she missed getting a big fat kiss when she told me the total fees we’d receive. Now we were on our way, headed out of the interdiction zone.

“One minute to jump,” I announced over the intercom, watching the station recede behind us on sensors. “It’ll be a week and a half into Percyval’s Rest and most of a day from there into Terra Primus, so hopefully everyone’s comfy.”

“Captain?” I was surprised to hear Clinton’s voice come over the commlink. We hadn’t been using it much since we’d left Bekter’s Rim. His tone set off alarm bells in my head.

“What’s up?” I asked apprehensively.

“The nanites,” he said. “They’ve just reactivated.” Instantly, I reached for the key to cancel the jump but I was too slow. The cover had already slipped shut, and I caught the brief flash of hyperspace through the viewscreen before it closed.