Callsign J-KR2

[wAsh67]

Prologue



Losing It
(Signals)​

3169

Sheron.











“Beautiful, isn’t she.”

Sofia Archer raised her eyes from the star chart that she was studying and glanced up at the bridge forward viewport. The arrow-shaped warship slid slowly from port to starboard across the bow of their own ship, cutting across the space ahead of them at a range of a little over five kilometres. Even at that distance the size of the approaching vessel was seriously impressive, dwarfing the far from insignificant mass of their own interstellar megaship.

“Bl**dy white elephant.” Sofia growled quietly, being extra careful to ensure that her mutterings were inaudible to those around her, aware that captain Valero wasn’t speaking to her specifically, but half talking to himself and half addressing the entire bridge crew. She’d had quite enough of being stuck out here in deep space wasting her youth away hundreds of light years from the night life and the partying that she had left behind on Lave. While the girls she had grown up with were living the high life back in the biggest city in the Milky Way, she was patrolling the coreward reaches of the Inner Orion Spur, scanning empty skies for an enemy that no longer existed and hadn’t been seen by anybody in almost twenty years. The Galactic Co-operative were wasting their time – wasting her time.

Signing up with GalCop had been a huge mistake, she realized. She should have sucked it up and faced the music back home, rather than running away to the black and signing up with this shower of clueless jack-offs. Done the time, paid the fine, laid low until the dust had settled, her misdemeanours eventually forgotten. By now she’d have snagged herself a rich surgeon or a lawyer and dug her hooks in, biding her time and staring at the ceiling until the divorce and then she’d take the sucker to the cleaners and be set for a life of leisure on her own terms. Not stuck out in deep space in a tin can surrounded by gormless losers who couldn’t hack it on a planet, and several metres thickness of steel encased water that soak up the X-rays all spacefarers are subjected to. Or most of the rays, she grimaced as she rubbed her hands over her face tiredly, glancing at her watch to see how much longer she had to endure this monotony before her shift was over.

Every time she looked in the mirror she seemed to have aged a little more, she thought depressingly. Whether that was down to the radiation leaking through the shielding, the abysmal diet, the lack of natural light, the four on, four off watch rota, the lack of decent exercise, the low gravity in this part of the ship, the recycled, heavily scrubbed atmosphere or the gallons of coffee and the cigarettes that she seemed to be addicted to since taking this job was anybody’s guess. By the time her tour of duty was over she figured she’d look at least ten years older than she actually was.

She felt tired, so very tired, and every day was no different to the one that came before. Listening out for strange signals, identifying them, cataloguing them, triangulating them, filing them and finally reporting her findings back to Equinox control before moving on to the next transient signal. And that was on the good days. On the bad days the AI did the job for her, and all she had to do was read and approve the AI’s reports before forwarding them to Equinox. The monotony was literally driving her crazy.

Five years. Five years she had signed up for, and here she was just three months out of training and already losing her marbles.

“They’re hailing us, sir.” One of the watch announced from the communications chair.

“Open a channel. Put it on screen.”

The picture of the sleek silver and black warship faded out, replaced by a head shot of the warship’s commander, a grey haired, bespectacled, slack-jowled woman with a smear of grey grease below her left eye running halfway down her cheek. “Captain Valero!” she exclaimed with a smile.

“Good to see you again, Admiral. Problems with your new toy?” Valero asked, gesturing at his own cheek.

“Never ends,” she laughed, wiping her face with a tunic sleeve. “She is the first of her class, so teething troubles are to be expected. The engineering staff can’t get their heads around all this experimental technology, and the eggheads that supposedly invented the stuff don’t seem to be much wiser. To be honest, it’s starting to feel like this ship runs on hydrogen and blind faith in equal measures.”

“They all do.” Valero smiled. “The science guys make their quantum leaps, and us mere mortals spend the rest of our lives playing catch up. May we render assistance in any way?”

“Nah, we’re pretty much on top of it, just get that Calvin shuttled across and we’ll be on our way. How are things out here in this sector?”

“All quiet, as usual. Nothing to report. At all.”

“Long may it stay that way.” The admiral nodded.

“Don’t you want to see what all that new-fangled engineering can do?” Valero grinned.

“I did my bug fighting in the forties and fifties, Mike. At my age, I’m happy wargaming on the sims on training cruises.”

“They named that thing yet?”

The admiral shook her head. "Not officially. We’re still a black project. As lead ship of her class she’s just unit one for the moment.”

“And unofficially?” Valero pressed.

“As she’s the prototype, we’ve named her after the project.”

“A name steeped in history.” Valero nodded approvingly. “Let’s hope she lives up to it, though given how quiet things are with the bugs at the moment she may turn out to be GalCop’s white elephant.”

Sophia cringed inwardly. Damn that man and his Vulcan ears....

The admiral was suddenly distracted as the background illumination of the warship’s bridge dimmed, then the emergency lighting flickered back on in a lurid red that made the entire bridge crew look like they were covered in blood. In the bottom right corner of the display a pop-up window appeared with a striking, raven-haired AI avatar calling for Valero’s attention. “Captain!”

“What is it?”

“I’m detecting unusual power fluctuations in the power core of the approaching vessel.” On the main screen the admiral abruptly jumped out of her chair and a second later the view of the warship’s bridge blanked off and the pop-up window expanded to fill the viewer. “Strongly recommend we withdraw immediately.”

“Helm.” The captain snapped. “All back full, smartly.”

“All back full, aye sir.” The helmsman responded reflexively.

“All hands brace! Now, now now!” The captain called over the shipwide intercom, dropping back into his seat and strapping himself in. “External view.”

Sofia tapped a command into her terminal with her free hand while the other steadied herself against it as her body was thrown forward by inertia. The main view screen switched back to a view of the glittering warship. She scanned her console quickly, commanding a three-dimensional fast scan of the space around them. “Scanner clear, sir. Whatever is going on, it seems to be internal to the warship.”

“Understood Archer. What the hell is going on over there, Dr. Calvin?”

“I….I don’t know, Captain.”

“The warship is now accelerating. Moving away.” Archer reported.

“Helm, all stop.” On screen the ship could be seen side on, but the aspect was shortening as the vessel began a turn to starboard, unmasking engines that seemed to be running at full power, the hard burn flaring of the exhaust so bright that the Sarasvati’s external camera filters had to kick in to prevent being overloaded with light and saturating the display.

“She’s turning away, Captain. Velocity passing five hundred metres per second and accelerating.” Sofia called out.

“Wow, look at it go!” somebody on the bridge said in disbelief. Already it was travelling faster than safety protocols allowed, faster than even most interceptors were allowed to fly in regular space.

“Helm, pursuit course. Full ahead. Hail them. Archer, keep track of it.” Valero shouted.

“Aye sir. I have it locked on optical and IR”

“They aren’t answering hails, Captain.”

“Keep trying.”

“It’s gone through one thousand metres per second and still accelerating.” Sofia called. “Aspect angle constantly changing. It’s pulling G’s that no human can tolerate….Oh no.”

“Archer?”

“I’ve lost it. IRST, FLIR and optical.”

“What do you mean you’ve lost it, dammit?” Valero demanded angrily, jumping out of his seat and dragging himself across to her console, fighting the G forces of the Sarasvati’s own acceleration. “Try radar.”

“Aye, sir.” Sofia responded, calling up the control panel from a drop-down menu. “Pinging. No return.”

“Lidar?”

“Same story, cap.” Sofia replied, having received no return scatter from the laser light detection and ranging system either.

The captain appeared over her shoulder. “Talk to me, Archer.” He said softly.

“Sir,” she began, taking in a deep breath while she tried to put what she had seen into words. “I had a hard lock on optical and infra-red, sir. Despite the acceleration and the corkscrewing, it was well within sensor range. Then….”

“Put it on main viewer. Take the time frame back one minute and talk me through it.” Valero said patiently. “Helm, adjust course to match the target's last known heading.”

Sofia cued her replay up and cast it onto the main view screen. “Okay, sir, here you can see the prototype breaking a thousand metres per second and begin a hard bank to port and upward in relation to our position. That was a thirty gee turn at that speed.” She explained. Valero winced at the estimate. He didn’t want to think about what that might have done to the internal organs of a human body, never mind what it would have done to the bodies of any crew not strapped in at their duty stations. He was surprised the ship didn’t break up under the torsion, but then it was brand new. No metal fatigue to weaken it as older hulls suffered. “You can see the main engines at full burn, and directional thrusters firing to make that turn. You can also see navigation and running lights blinking and internal lighting from portholes, and the hull plating and armour is still visible in the light from the star, even with the flare from the hard burn whiting our cameras out. Now watch this…”

Suddenly the warship disappeared from the viewer. Valero reached past her and used a finger on the touch screen to rewind the video feed to just before the ship vanished.

“You see, sir? It’s not my fault. One moment it’s lit up like a Christmas tree on visual and infra-red - main engines, thrusters, nav blinkers and internal lighting and then, all at the same time, it all disappears.”

“It jumped?”

“No, no. Sir, look at the starfield. It looks like the engines and the lighting failed as if there were a ship wide power outage, but somehow the starlight reflected off the hull also disappears. Look at the constellation Vega.” Sofia said, turning to look directly at him while she rewound the recording. “Look at the hull of that thing. Here, I’ll zoom in. And watch the stars in it’s flight path.”

Valero peered at the screen while she talked him through it, scratching his chin thoughtfully, his jaw dropping open slightly as the video played through the warship’s disappearance.

“See? The lights go off and the hull reflecting starlight stops at the same time. And see this star? It winks out, then comes back. And that star,” she said, stabbing the screen with a non-regulation red nailed finger further left. “See, it’s there, then it’s gone, now it’s back again.”

“What the hell?” Valero muttered.

“It’s like I said, sir. It's still there. It just went dark.”




1. Working Man
2. In The Mood
3. Lessons
4. Witch Hunt
5. Ghost Rider
6. Clockwork Angels
7. La Villa Strangiato
8. Scars
9. The Weapon
10. Nobody's Hero
11. In The End

tbc



Notes:
I'm not apologising for any disagreements over my interpretation of ED Lore.
No aspect of Lore will escape unscathed from this novel. There will be no mercy given and some of you will be upset by my utilisation of lore, both canon and non-canon. If you don't like it, walk away.
As in the first part of this series, each chapter heading will be drawn from a rock band's catalogue. With J-KR it was AC/DC, with this it'll be Rush, in remembrance of Neil Peart who passed away this year.
While Callsign JK-R was completed before posting here, J-KR2 is a work in progress. As such it will not be posted daily, as with J-KR. Therefore additional chapters will be posted as and when completed. I have four in the can, current count 60k words, and these will be posted over the next few weeks.
Please remember this is written for fun, not profit. I don't see myself as a writer, just a story teller.
Comments, criticism and encouragement are always welcome.
Stay safe.

 

[wAsh67]

1



Working Man
(Rush)



​

3306



“Fancy a good time, sweetheart?”

I glared up from my bottled beer of locally brewed rotgut at the ‘entertainment’ girl who had slid her fragile frame into the seat opposite me at the corner of the bar where I was hiding. It hit me how right Simon had been when he’d told Mal that you hit a better class of skank in the lighter, airier sections of pubs. Back here in the smoky twilight was where the D grade hookers plied their business, as one look at this gal confirmed. The A grade you had to order well in advance and they were far too expensive for the likes of me, and would never be seen dead in a dive bar like this one anyway. The B grade you went to licensed brothels for, not that I ever did, of course. The class C skank slid along bar stools in places a little more popular than this, offering to buy you a drink if you bought them for half an hour. Or so I was told. The D grade pounced on the loners in the depths of the shadows in the seedier bars, one hand going for your wallet as the other homed in in your bolls. I knew all about those, having spent most of my grown-up years in bars just like this one, in booths in the murky recesses just like this one, fending off hookers just like this one. Well, mostly fending them off. Needs must, you know, even if nailing a D-grade was, if you could forgive the pun, degrading, and generally demanded a profligate consumption of antibiotics afterward.

The starports were all the same, the dive bars were all the same, the hookers were all the same. Most of them had the same names. Candy. Crystal. Scarlet. Kitty. Skye. Coco. This girl in particular typified the class D type, being just one rung above the E class crack wars (sp) who ended up jammed into unlicensed brothels run by organized crime and drug dealers. This girl was anorexically thin, taller than me – probably born in low g and lived her entire life there – frail, brittle boned and pale as a frightened ghost even in this light, bust barely apparent even in the skimpy top that she wore, hair lank and stringy, with make-up applied thickly and quickly to cover bruises and adult acne – well, I hoped it was just acne. As I studied her the cloying scent of cheap perfume sprayed liberally to cover the intermingled odours of sweat and recent sex hit my nose, which wrinkled reflexively in revulsion.

I framed my response carefully. You can’t be too sociable with hookers or they’ll take that as an invitation to try harder to snag you with their dubious wiles. On the other hand you can’t be too aggressive with them, because they might be supervised by their pimps, and that makes you a target if the hooker makes a complaint. Sometimes a simple ‘kcuf off’ works fine, but that’s not my style. Call me old fashioned but swearing at a woman just feels totally wrong and unnecessary to me. So I went with my alternate response, smiled wanly and told her that I was gay.

Without another word, without even a flicker of disappointment, she got up and slunk off in search of fresh blood. It’s amazing how often that approach works. Just tell a hawker that you have something that they can’t compete with and watch them walk away. Want to shine on a Jehovah’s Witness? Tell him you’re a Catholic. Want to get rid of a dealer hassling you? Tell him you’re an undercover cop. Getting bugged by a recovery service salesman? Tell them you fly a company starship. Make them feel like winning you over is too much like hard work and they’ll jog on to an easier mark. Never fails.

A buff teenage boy in tight pants slid into the chair opposite me that had only moments before been vacated by the hooker. “Hey, handsome.” He began, batting his neatly sculped eyelashes at me.

Okay, sometimes there are complications.

“I’m waiting for somebody.” I told him.

“Aren’t we all?” The male prostitute smiled suggestively. I rolled my eyes and took another drink from my bottle of warm beer that had started out cold just a few minutes earlier. The guy leaned on his elbows and gazed into my eyes, showing no intention of moving on.

“Just kcuf off, will you?” I glared at him. I have no problem swearing at blokes – even if they are fairies.

“Jerk.” The prozzy spat, but kcuf off he did.

Almost immediately his seat was taken by another bloke. This one was nearly as hairy as a grizzly bear and not far off the size, either. Instinctively I picked up my beer bottle by the neck and held it tightly in my right hand. It was the closest thing to a weapon that I could find, seeing as the chairs and tables were bolted to the floor in case of sudden gravity loss and my sidearm was secured in a locker on my starship about half a mile away. I raised an eyebrow questioningly. All he did was stare at me, unblinking, either sizing me up or attempting to intimidate me. If it was the latter then it was working.

“Screw it, you can have the booth.” I muttered, rising to my feet.

“Sit.” The giant demanded, opening the lapel of his loose jacket to reveal a handgun in a shoulder holster. Another goon materialized at his back almost instantly, one hand already inside his own jacket in preparedness to draw down on me. It seemed that I had brought a beer bottle to a gunfight. If they were guns and not harmless replicas, that is. Anybody caught carrying a weapon – even a non-lethal one - on a space station faced mind numbing fines in the best case and serious prison time at the other end of the scale. Or tasering to death if they were dumb enough to draw down on a station copper.

I chose to sit. It was the easy option. “Wow, I seem to be popular today. You’re the third war (sp) to proposition me in the last five minutes. Oh, how I wish I hadn’t told the first one that I was gay, big boy.”

“Who hired you, smart mouth tough guy.” The bear demanded, his lip curling up in a sneer, his voice not much above a growl, the accent almost Aussie like. His sidekick shuffled into the booth beside me, watching the bar beyond the big guy’s back more than anything else. As soon as he saw that nobody was paying any attention to us the violence would start, I figured.

I leaned forward and set the beer bottle back down on the table, all the while inching away from the smaller goon who still had his hand tucked in his jacket, no doubt pointing his own sidearm at me through the fabric. “Hired me for what?”

“To kill my brothers.”

I hoped he meant that figuratively rather than literally or I was in all kinds of tihs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I told him, my throat suddenly going dry.

“Sure you do.” The big guy snarled. “Two Vipers, one Hauler, an Eagle and a Cobra Mark 4.”

Ah, those brothers. I’d iced a lot of wanted pirates in this system during the last few weeks. I’d had a bee in my bonnet over the Xendes Mafia for a long time, and taking out a dozen of their ‘profiteers’ for one of their rivals was a contract that I could not turn down. I knew getting caught was a possibility, especially at this station where the Zen, as they called themselves, maintained a strong presence and they no doubt had an informer in the rival outfit telling them who was wasting their pilots, but I had to come back here to hand in the gun camera footage and claim the bounties. In hindsight, perhaps it was a bit dumb of me to go on a bender at a station bar here instead of heading off to my apartment on Hudson Ring and getting plastered, but the money was so good I could afford a suite at this station’s classiest hotel and it had been a long day. Mal had warned me that the hunter becoming the hunted was a distinct possibility in this line of work, and in heed of his words I’d taken a booth in the shadows at the back of the bar where I could see people coming and going, but what I hadn’t considered was that I wouldn’t recognise the danger until it was too late and end up trapping myself in a corner with no way out. I’m not as clever as I sometimes take for granted.

“We were in one of the Vipers.” The mini goon whispered to me conspiratorially.

“Hey, it was nothing personal.” I began, reaching slowly for the bottle again.

“It was to us,” the big guy began, just as my fingers clipped the neck of the bottle and tipped it over. The bottle clattered against the table and spat its contents out at the big guy, who instinctively thrust himself away from the incoming flood with his hands. Simultaneously, I was up and gone, twisting away from hands that tried to grab me as I fought my way past them. The miniature goon hadn’t fired. Which was wise on his part as shooting a laser weapon through a jacket invariably sets it on fire. I headed for the door, hunching up my body in anticipation of one of them taking a shot at me but I guess there were too many people in the bar for them to risk it.

The throng of bodies seemed to miraculously part before me as I bounded toward the exit. However, close to the bar’s doors a crowd of meandering ssip heads blocked my way. I jumped, launching myself into a flying dive, as if I were a Welsh winger in a game of rugby going for a try right in the corner of the pitch. They all ducked, eyes wide, arms over their heads trying to fend me off as I vaulted over the lot of them in one mighty bound, thanking my lucky stars that I’d stopped to drink at a watering hole just a few decks away from the hangars where the gravity was less than one half of standard.

A laser beam appeared beside me to my right, bright red and searing hot, and I hunched into a ball as the gunman adjusted his aim and swept the beam left, raking it across my back and my feet. I didn’t feel much, just a warmth in the arch of my right foot and then a burning sensation along the right side of my back as the jacket that I was wearing began to smoulder. I hit the floor in a roll, glanced backward to see the two goons forcing their way past the people that I had leaped over and shrugged out of my jacket as I bounded across the atrium. I retrieved my phone from its pocket and tossed the smoking jacket to the floor. Smoking jacket, I smiled inwardly, making a mental note to include that phrase in my memoirs, should I survive long enough to compose any.

Ahead of me the safety of the rapid transit terminal beckoned. Normally there were station cops patrolling them, especially the ones near the entertainment zones, but at this terminal I couldn’t see any. A glance over my shoulder showed me that the smaller goon had paused at my jacket and was rifling through the pockets, but the big guy was coming on strong, hopping expertly across the atrium while I hobbled awkwardly on my one useless boot, it’s gravity simulating electromagnet probably burned out by the laser hitting its sole.

A transit capsule waited at the station platform, its door open invitingly and I launched myself up the steps and into the bubble, slamming my hand on the door close button and yelling the first words that came into my head. “Hangar Eighteen!” The capsule began to move forward as I stumbled into the seat, and it was lucky for me that I did as the red beam of the laser weapon swept through the carriage through the glass, passing within inches of my face as I fell backward into the seating.

The beam disappeared abruptly before the goon could adjust his aim, either the auto cut-off of the laser weapon kicking in to prevent it overheating in his hand, or the rear aluminium wall of the carriage occluded it as it accelerated out of the platform siding and merged with the main traffic flow. I breathed a sigh of relief. Even though there were other carriages waiting at the station, the goon couldn’t follow me as he didn’t know what my destination was, and “follow that carriage!” isn’t a valid input for the destination interface. Of course, he might have heard me shout “Hangar 18” before the door slammed shut…..

I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and dialled 111 for station security, only to be put into a queue of waiting callers. I was number twenty-seven. kcuF that. Muzak began to fill the carriage. I had no idea what it was but at least it wasn’t ‘The Blue Danube’. That gets old fast. Through the glass walls of the carriage I watched a residential zone pass by, trees and houses and people wandering about, then the carriage plunged into a hole and curved away into the innards of the station, the glass automatically tinting to an opaque white so that passengers wouldn’t be able to see that this microcosm of humanity floating in space was held together by baling wire and duct tape. An advertisement for a night club in the entertainment sector began to play on one of the opaque windows.

A digital clock mounted on a blister in the ceiling told me it would be forty-five seconds to my destination, so while somewhat distracted by the vid of scantily clad women writhing sinuously to thumping bass music on the advert I used my phone to log into the app that connected me to my Challenger, summoning the internal and external cameras just in case my pursuers had accomplices that had managed to sneak on board or were staking the ship out. It all looked normal. Nobody seemed to be on board, and the hangar itself was deserted. From a drop-down menu I commanded the access stairway to descend from the belly of the starship.

The carriage slowed noticeably, then swayed left as it veered off the main circuit and branched off onto the landing bay loop. Presently the countdown reached zero and the carriage drew up at hangar eighteen’s halt, the glass immediately turning transparent again and the door sliding open. As I leaped out of my seat I found the halt’s platform blocked by a short, squat, Oriental looking man whose gun was pointed at the centre of my body mass. I halted and raised my hands.

“Supplies!” He said as he grinned, then he shot me.




tbc

 

[wAsh67]

I recoiled reflexively as the twin barbed hooks fired out of the shock gun lodged in my shirt, then I grinned to myself as the barbs began to spark against the double-sided stab vest that I had taken to wearing since becoming a bounty Mountie. The zero resistance across the conductors shorted out the taser, causing it to sputter and spark in the Oriental’s hand as it overheated. The guy looked at it bemused for a moment, the grin sliding from his features, then he dropped it before it could burn his fingers. I rushed over and kicked him in the nuts with all the strength I could muster, the impact launching him five feet into the air and sending him spinning over backwards in the low gravity near the rotational axis of the starport.

“Surprise yourself, mothetrucker.” I told him, then bounded the thirty or so metres to the door for Hangar 18, the taser grip dragging along the floor behind me and leaving a smoking smear of molten plastic where it bounced. I barged in through the hangar door and ran headlong to my ship, thanking Dan with silent mind prayers for fitting me out with the stab vest. On the outside it was reflective, conductive silver for dissipating the effects of lasers and tasers, but inside it was insulated carbon-fibre/Kevlar weave that could stop anything up to a .45 calibre slug from penetrating. Beneath a black polo-neck sweater it was impossible to tell I was wearing it, the extra bulk transforming me from regular, slightly skinny dude who obviously lives in low gravity to something a little more stocky like a planetside farm hand, but with chicken legs.

Comfortable that the taser was by this time depleted or a useless lump of molten sludge, I tugged out the thin wires and threw them on the floor before leaping up the stairwell and into my Challenger, slapping my palm against the door close button at the top of the flight.

I began to laugh, an almost maniacal release at yet another brush with death, and strapped myself in to the pilot’s seat, mashing my finger down on the start button and keeping it there until the engine began to purr. In the Challenger I was safe. The armour could withstand anything hand held, even without the additional protection of the engineered shielding that it was equipped with. Here I was untouchable. Outside of the hangar was another matter, though. I wondered what might be waiting for me outside in space, what sort of rag-tag armada the Xendes Mafia might be able to throw together with what was left of their fleet. Knowing my luck they’d hired a half dozen Elite mercenaries in Corvettes and Cutters to greet me when I departed.

Time to go boy racer on them.

“STC, this is Juliet Kilo Romeo on pad one-eight requesting clearance for immediate departure.” I asked the starport traffic controller more calmly than I felt, laying the habitual pilot’s Chuck Yeager drawl on thickly while slapping an Inst-Alert patch on my forearm to negate the effects of the alcohol that I had consumed at the bar. The headache when it wore off was going to be a total mothertrucker, I knew.

“Juliet Kilo Romeo, this is STC. You are cleared for immediate departure.” A bored, male voice replied in his own lazy, laid back drawl. “Be advised station traffic is light at this time, but within five kilometres of the station entrance it seems to be unusually busy. Maintain forward velocity below one hundred metres per second at all times until you are clear of the dock access port. Thank you for visiting.”

The pallet that my Challenger was locked to rotated one hundred and eighty degrees so that the nose of my ship was facing the starport’s entrance, moved forward until it mated with the elevator that would lift it up to the main deck of the port, then slowly rose into launch position. The magnetic clamps disengaged with a metallic clang and I nudged back on the cyclic to send a brief pulse of chemical energy to the belly thrusters. I checked the scanner and fired the reverse thrusters up, backing deeper into the station.

“Er, Juliet Kilo Romeo, the exit is thataway.” The traffic controller advised me with a dry chuckle.

“Roger that, STC.” I responded, unable to suppress a grin as I set the power distributor to spread the reactor’s energy evenly across engines and shields, then switched into the synthesis interface. “I'm dealing with a minor technical issue here, just bear with me a moment.”

“Roger that, Juliet Kilo Romeo. Station inside is still clear. No traffic on pads, nothing on final approach. Do you want to abort departure and relog for landing permission?”

“Negative, control. I’ve got this.” I told him as I waited for the synthesizer to complete a frame shift drive overcharge injection that would double the Challenger’s jump range to almost fifty light years. I nudged the nose down and to the left a fraction to line up perfectly with the dock exit mouth.

“Very well, Juliet Kilo Romeo. Watch out for them there wall things, commander.”

“I appreciate the advice, control. Thank you for your patience. Departing now.” I told him as I rammed the throttles to the detent and punched the boost button. In moments I was at the Challenger’s maximum velocity of four hundred metres per second and the mail slot was hurtling straight at me in fast forward. I’d done this before in a Cobra3 during the wild and reckless days of my youth, and it was always a rush, but the Challenger was a significantly larger ship, took up more of the space in the exit channel than I was comfortable with, and I cringed inwardly as I anticipated the worst.

“Jack ssa.” The controller muttered over comms as I burst out into space.






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

The fleet of ships out there associated with the Xendes immediately began to move in on intercept vectors, no doubt alerted to my impending departure by observers in the viewing lounge, but my excess speed had thrown off their plans. Another punch on the boost button as I banked onto the course for my hyperspace jump to a system that lay right at the upper edge of my injection enhanced range caused the g-suit’s air bladders to pinch at numerous points to prevent the blood from draining out of my brain and knocking me out cold. My breath, inhaled, held and then explosively exhaled to increase the pressure in my lungs and chest and also increase the blood pressure on the inlet side of my heart, helped to keep me conscious even as my vision tunnelled to a narrow corridor, my concentration locked on the compass that would guide me to the correct jump vector.

A gimballed beam laser aimed with the assistance of tracking lidar tickled my shields, draining them slowly, then a plasma accelerator shot slammed into the side of the Challenger, taking a large chunk out of the shields’ remaining energy and knocking me a few degrees off course. The scanner warned of incoming missiles, and I dumped chaff and a heatsink. Even though at this speed I could probably outrun any seekers locked on me that had been fired from behind, I couldn’t be sure of dodging anything coming in from ahead or off to the sides if the pirate king planning this ambush had arranged his ships in layers.

The mass locked light winked out and I engaged the FSD. I couple of seconds later I was in hyperspace and momentarily safe – permanently safe if none of my pursuers could make the fifty light year jump once their wake analyser determined my destination star. Some of them may have been able to, but not all of them and that was the critical aspect of my plan. I couldn’t tackle them all, but if they came through in trickles, one or two at a time, then that vastly increased my chances of survival. All I had to do was take out the ships that could match my jump range, then I could high wake out and none of the ships with shorter jump ranges would be able to keep up with me.

When I came out of hyperspace at my destination, I throttled back and waited. First to come through was an Imperial Courier, which immediately locked onto me and tried to pull me out of supercruise with its interdictor. I submitted without even a half-hearted fight, dropping back into normal space, deploying weapons as I hit boost and rotated the Challenger to face my enemy, flying away from it using what is known as reverski – in essence flying backwards. Adjusting my power distribution to half weapons and half shields, I selected a fire group that brought the majority of my weapons to bear on the target and unleashed everything in my arsenal. The Challenger, with no less than seven hard points, could hit harder than most ships of its size, as the Courier pilot was about to find out.

Three overcharged beam lasers ate away at its shielding as it slowly closed on me, and as the Courier’s shields flickered offline a carefully timed stream of high explosive shells from a pair of multi-cannons loaded with premium ammunition that dealt additional damage over normal cannon shells slammed into the Courier’s leading edges. I switched to the next fire group and for good measure sent an engineered seeker missile and a reverb cascade torpedo, both travelling at a combined closing speed of seven hundred metres per second, to hit the ship right in the face. The pilot wisely banked away, dumping chaff and heatsinks to disrupt my aim and to decoy a second missile that wandered aimlessly off into space before detonating harmlessly, unable to reacquire a target lock. Hopefully all that concentrated fire on the flight deck area of the Courier had caused some damage to the canopy, perhaps even venting air out into space through a crack in the reinforced glass and giving the crew an additional survival problem to deal with outside of a fight to the death. Re-engaging with a damaged canopy was insanity – when your canopy goes, you go. I had taken a few hits myself once the iCourier got within range of its own weapons, but my shields had absorbed the incoming fire and still stood, albeit significantly depleted.

I let the iCourier escape rather than finish it off – there was little to gain in wasting time chasing him down and destroying him for any bounties that he might or might not have generated. All that did was gave his comrades time to catch up and join in the fight. I had fulfilled my mission requirements for my employer, cashed in the chips before fleeing and that was good enough for me. Now my only job was survival. I recharged the FSD with another synthesized injection and jumped away forty-five light years this time, to a star that I could refuel from before making my final twenty light year jump back to Hudson Ring on Polecteri where I could rest and rearm. If the iCourier wanted to follow me, then it would most likely be a one-on-one match-up given the distance that I had travelled in such a short time frame – not many pirate ships or even professional assassins could match that, and those that did probably had to sacrifice other aspects of performance or combat capability in order to achieve that range. I didn’t think the iCourier’s pilot would be very keen on a rematch given how quickly my Challenger had reduced his ship’s shield integrity.

I called up the post engagement analysis on the ship’s codex and logged the pilot’s ID into what I call my “spank bank.” If we met again I’d be automatically reminded of our history and a little more wary of him or her. A Xendes death mark doesn’t disappear overnight. Hudson Ring starport loomed large ahead of me, and I banked hard about to orient myself to face the toast rack, one eye on the scanner for anything coming out of supercruise behind me, hand poised over the throttles to override the docking computer and perform my docking manually – which can be significantly quicker if you don’t mind paying for landing pad repairs and spending a couple of days hammering out dents and filling in gouges - should another aggressor appear.

I relaxed once the Challenger passed through the security shield of the starport and allowed the docking computer to set the ship down on its designated pad. Once my comms system handshake with the station’s email servers had completed I checked my inbox for messages. There was one from my mother asking why I hadn’t replied to her last email yet, and another from Max, directing me to make my way to Garay Terminal in the Deciat system for a rendezvous as soon as possible. About time, I smiled. I hadn’t had an official tasking for months. I had been hoping for a reply from Karen on 58 Ursae Majoris B3, but a quick scan of the spam in my inbox and the rejected mail in my junk folder showed no response to my request for a booty call as yet.

I booked my ship in for rearming and refuelling at the outfitters and clambered back to the ship’s passenger compartment, which I was using as a state room, and proceeded to clear my stuff out of the compartment and give it a quick tidy up. If Max wanted me for a mission, then it was likely that I’d have passengers along for the ride. Once that was done I headed straight back out to Deciat.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

2



In The Mood
(Rush)



​

If the Xendes had done their research and figured out that I based my operations out of Polecteri, then they were in for a long wait before they caught up with me to exact revenge for my decimation of their fleet of pirates and scavengers. There was no way in the ‘verse that they could track me to Deciat. The roundabout route that I took, the considerable jump range of the Challenger when using synthesized FSD injections, the natural rate of decay of high wake disturbances and the sheer distance between Polecteri and Deciat meant that my trail would have vanished long before even the most dogged and determined of pursuers could figure out where I had gone to. Somewhere behind me the trail had gone cold. It would take sheer luck or a mole in Alliance Covert Ops to grass me up in order for them to catch up with me.

In my favour, the Xendes weren’t that widespread an organization outside their own smattering of backwater systems, so it was unlikely that they had a presence way out here in the Deciat region, but the fact that Deciat was a relatively busy, high traffic system played against me. It would be typical of my luck to be in-system just at the moment a Xendes operative, made aware of the deficiencies of his jump drive by the manner of my escape, arrived en route to Farseer Inc. for FSD enhancements.

I let the automated docking computer handle the landing at Garay Terminal. In an earlier volume of my memoirs I stated that anybody who relied on an ADC to park his boat wasn’t worthy of the term ‘pilot’, but this Challenger had one already installed when I had bought it and I’d not yet found a good enough reason to warrant its removal. So I left it in its slot. Once I got used to it, I began to use it more and more often. It’s precision, unsurprisingly, proved to be better than my own. Despite its strict adherence to the speed limits it was also, to my chagrin, somewhat quicker than I was, too. It never forgot to lower the landing gear, either. As my old mentor Alain had once told me in a bar-room argument, why wash your smalls by hand if you can just toss them in a washer machine and let it clean and dry them for you?

ADCs weren’t perfect, however. They took their direction from traffic control and slotted your ship into a waiting stream of incoming vessels at busy starports and wouldn’t push their way in front like you could if you flew manually, so while they were often faster at getting the skids down on the deck once you were through the mail slot, sometimes it took absolutely ages to progress that far in the first place. Occasionally they totally kcufed up, with sometimes fatal consequences for the unwary, which is why I never left the flight deck while the ADC did its thing, remaining strapped to the pilot’s seat while the computer threw the ship around with scant regard to the G-forces it was putting the pilot and passengers through, even at the ‘graceful’ setting. Needless to say, I never used an ADC while ferrying passengers. I’m not keen on cleaning puke up at the best of times – it makes my stomach heave – and having vomit sprayed around my passenger compartment / personal state room in zero gravity makes it a very unpleasant place to sleep in. The kcufing stuff gets everywhere.

Once the ship had been clamped down to the deck and had descended into its designated hangar I changed into my civvies and headed out to finish what I had started earlier in the evening in a dive bar three hundred and something light years away. As usual, Max hadn’t left specific instructions on where to meet up with him. Eventually I’d get an email, text or phone call with directions to the rendezvous. Until then I had some drinking to catch up on.

I used to struggle to understand why people went to bars to tie one on by themselves. I used to think that they must be incurable alcoholics who had run out of booze in their apartments. I mean, why go out alone to a room full of strangers who carried all manner of exotic alien pathogens when you can stay in the safety and comfort of your own place watching exactly what you want to watch on the gogglebox, having paid supermarket prices for precisely the booze you wanted rather than extortionate fees for a grubby barman to serve you watered down bootleg or synthesized swill in a glass that tastes of hand sanitiser? I soon came to realise, however, that being a singleton in a bar made you a focal point for other singletons. Humans are social animals, with the odd exception, and the natural thing for any human being to do when confronted with other human beings just sitting around minding their own business is to stick their nose in and ruin their solitude. Because if they wanted peace and quiet they wouldn’t be hanging out in a bar in the first place. Single people go to bars alone in the hope that they don’t have to go back to their apartments alone.

Of course, most people who frequent bars don’t go there alone. They already have their social circle nailed down and arrive in packs, hoping to be the last to buy a round as by then one or two of their companions will have fallen behind in the race to oblivion and won’t need a refill. To those, a bloke drinking alone in a bar is either a Billy-no-mates or a psychopath, and there is no point in befriending him because the brain balks at inefficiency – it knows you’ve gone there with friends already, and to actively seek to make another friend is just too much effort given that the friends that you have gone there with are right there with you buying you drinks. But to another barfly, the bloke alone in a bar is something of a kindred spirit, or at the very worst somebody to halve their troubles with.

A glance around assured me that I wasn’t the only barfly in the joint. My eyes locked with another gentleman sat on a barstool nursing a shot glass of something purporting to be scotch but was probably synthesized out of ethanol, urine and various flavourings, receiving a nod of acknowledgement from the stranger. My eyes took in his worn and faded flight suit, a fairly faithful reflection of my own that I had left hanging up in a closet back on board the Challenger. I raised my glass in salute to a fellow pilot and sipped, turning my head aside as I did so to deter any further interaction.

Talking to a fellow pilot was always the same. Was my profession trader, explorer or combateer? What was my Pilot’s Federation rank in each discipline? Have I been to Sagittarius yet? These conversations always descended into nothing more than ssiping contests that I had no interest in partaking in. The pilot across the bar recognised my reticence and returned to his own drink, eyes cast down at the shiny wood effect bar top in silent contemplation of his own woes. Sooner or later the inevitable would happen and a hooker would hit on us. The loneliness of the long-distance hauler is irresistible to the professional sex worker. We tend to cave in easily to their promises. The economics work in their favour, too. Their fees tend to work out far cheaper than financing a one-night stand that might not even go all the way. Dinner and drinks aren’t cheap on starports, whereas half an hour’s sweaty writhing back in the ship’s passenger compartment with a C-grade skank war (sp) is. That was why I was wearing civvies and not a flight suit.

Movement caught my eye across the bar, a bright yellow flight suit with curves in all the right places slid into a vacant seat. My gaze followed her movements, but the other pilot was faster – perhaps he was Elite - and already moving sideways along the bar, shot glass in hand as he moved in to try his luck with the woman. I resolved to wait a while, certain that the overly keen (i.e. desperate) predator would be shot down in short order, destined to crash and burn into the smoky remains of his glass of unidentifiable liquid.

After about ten minutes that had cost him at least two vodka and cokes, my prediction came true and the crestfallen pilot slunk away from his uncooperative quarry to nurse his wounded pride and wait for a less discerning hooker to swoop in and fix his loneliness for a few hours. It would come crashing back in all its miserable depression in the morning, probably with a nasty rash and a hangover in tow, but for an hour all his troubles would be forgotten, which was precisely why those scarlet women homed in on us pilots with the unerring accuracy of seeker missiles.

Then, breathed warmly in my left ear; “Buy a thirsty lady a drinky-poo?”




tbc

 

[wAsh67]

I hadn’t even seen her approaching me. I studied my beer, wondering how potent a brew it must be if it could obliterate my situational awareness so easily. “How much will it cost to make you leave me alone?” I asked.

“Well, nice to meet you too.” A breathy but sweetly feminine voice drawled. “I’m not that kind of girl, but neither am I averse to taking a tip for something that if you played your cards right you could have got for free anyways. If you have money to burn and really want me to disappear that badly then maybe ten creds for a quick hand{redacted} in the gents rest room might cut it? I can buy my own drink with a tenner.”

“Ha,” I laughed. “I can give myself a hand{redacted} for free, in the comfort of my own state room watching VR babes way hotter than you do that girl on girl thing.”

“Okay,” the woman shrugged. “How about I blow you out the back for thirty, and don’t tell me you can do that yourself!”

“You’d be surprised. I’m not as old as I look and I’m still pretty supple.” I grinned, studiously avoiding eye contact while I wished the girl away.

“Jeez, I’d offer to screw you for a hundred, but I reckon you could go kcuf yourself.” She smiled sweetly at me, batting her eyelids provocatively.

I barked out a sharp laugh, caught out by her sense of humour. “Good one. See you around, honey.” I said, maintaining my focus on my drink.

After a few moments I felt a nudge of an elbow against my ribs. “You’ve hardly even looked at me yet.”

“I’m gay.” I told her.

Now it was her turn to bark out a sharp laugh. “The hell you are.” she almost giggled. “My gaydar hasn’t made a sound since I walked in the door. Well, it may have given a short squeak when I walked past the flat chested ginger girl in the shiny yellow flight suit, but around you it’s as silent as an open airlock.”

“Listen, honey, there’s a guy over there that’s been shot down while on final approach once already this evening. Why don’t you go hassle him?”

“I told you I ain’t a hooker.” She sighed, not seeming in the least upset that I’d all but called her a prostitute. “Anyway, I don’t like the look of him. His nose looks more like a snout. And he’s a bl**dy pilot.” She explained, wrinkling her nose up in distaste. “I have higher standards to maintain, which is why I’m asking you, handsome stranger, out of all the other hunks in this nearly deserted bar, to buy me a little dinky drinky-poo.”

I finally turned to look at my stalker. She wasn’t half bad looking, truth be told. Not quite up to Karen’s standards but Karen was two hundred light years away and the memory of our weekend together was more than three months rusted. She didn’t look like a pro, I had to admit. Her make-up was immaculately applied, her jet black hair was tied back in a perfect pony tail that told me either she definitely wasn’t a hooker or she had only just started her shift. And her dress looked much too expensive to be hanging off the shoulders of a bar crawling junkie. A shimmery golden, low-cut, knee length thing like that wouldn’t last five minutes once a john got his greasy paws on her, and it would take a week of on-her-knees trade to earn enough to replace it. No, not a hooker I concluded, my interest now piqued. “Sorry, bad day.” I apologized, now feeling about half an inch tall.

“Yeah, you’re lucky I’ve got a thick skin. Barman!” She called overly loudly, attracting the attention of everybody in the bar, including the pilot who then shook his head and scowled at our disparate fortunes and the woman in yellow who eyed my companion up appreciatively before returning to her own drink. “Mistaking me for a prozzy will cost you dear, buddy.” She grinned at me before turning her attention to the bartender. “Lavian brandy, please. On this schmuck’s tab.” She said, tossing her head in my direction.

“Ouch.” I winced. A shot of Lavian brandy cost more than most people earn in a day, but on the other side of the coin the stuff was so strong she’d be barely conscious after the third glass. Which, after due consideration, didn’t bode well for the end of the evening for either of us.

“Don’t got none o’ that.” The bartender said with an apologetic shrug.

“The kcuf kinda dive is this joint?” She asked, rolling her eyes.

“The lady will have your premium beer, please mate. And I’ll have another.” I told him.

“Ooh, I like a take charge guy. You have a name?”

“What would you like it to be?” I enquired with a smile and a lewd wink of my right eye, which elicited a brief bark of laughter from my potential paramour.

“Basil.” She declared after a moment’s reflection. “No, Heathcliff. You look more like a Heathcliff than a Basil. You don’t look anywhere cool enough to be a Baz.”

“Which would make you?” I pressed as she raised the bottle to her lips.

“Well, duh!” She said with another roll of her eyes. “Cathy, of course.”

“Of course.” I nodded, not having the slightest idea what the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy was in whatever context existed in this young woman’s imagination. She might as well have called us Tom and Jeri. In fact, I was beginning to think Tom and Jeri would be more appropriate. As in her being Tom, the mouse eating cat and me being Jeri, the mischievous mouse. Who was this girl, and why was she focusing on me? I was usually the last guy in the bar to attract female attention, especially from an attractive one, what with my too big nose, sticky out ears, chicken legs, gangly spacefarers frame and receding hairline which wasn’t really receding but had always been halfway down the back of my head since I was a teenager. Then it hit me like a thunderbolt. The kcufing Xendes.

They couldn’t kill me with starships, so they sent a femme fatale to see me off by sliding a knife between my ribs when I slipped out of my bullet proof, anti taser vest. What was the saying again? Revenge is a dish best served with knives? They must have done their research. They probably guessed that I’d make a bee line to my bolt hole and, as unlikely as I had considered it to be, had got somebody in a ship with decent jump range to track me all the way from there to Deciat. And here she was, seducing me into a state of relaxation, tricking me into letting my guard down so that she could kill me easy, without having to risk having a reverb cascade torpedo forcibly rammed up her, er, whatevers. A woman like this, under any other circumstances imaginable, probably wouldn’t be seen dead with me. It all fit.

Maybe I should kill her first, I considered, looking down into her sparkling blue eyes, do it to her before she did it to me. But, the devil’s advocate on the mouse’s shoulder in this episode whispered in my ear a caution that she may just be a woman looking for a night of passion in a strange starport with a ‘bit of rough’ that in another time and place would be deemed so far beneath her that he might as well be planetside. What if I ended up killing a woman whose only crime was being light years from home and horny?

“Where are you from?” I asked her.

“Right here.” She replied without hesitation, without breaking eye contact, without any body language tell-tale of a lie that I could detect. “I teach at the resident’s school in the hab’ section.”

“You teach?”

“Just elementary. ABC’s, 123’s, that sort of stuff.” She cast her eyes down for an instant, as if embarrassed at the admission, which on its own brought her very close to earning my trust. Damn, if she was a hired killer then she was a damn good role-player. “So what about you? What’s your story?” ‘Cathy’ asked.

“I’m just passing through. I’m kind of on the run.” I admitted.

“Wow, cool! What did you do?”

“The authorities in another star system figured their home grown bad guys were getting too bold and overt with their law breaking and needed their wings clipped a little. I helped them with some pruning to make the problem more manageable for them.”

“White hat guy, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“Bad guys wear black hats, good guys wear white.” She explained.

“I don’t own a hat.”

“It’s metaphorical.” She sighed, this time managing to refrain from rolling her eyes in exasperation. “So, does that make you a cop or something?”

“Or something.” I replied with a flicker of a smile. “I don’t usually take that kind of work, but this gang had it coming.”

“Oh?” she pressed for me to elaborate.

“I used to fly with three other pilots running haulage. They were the only friends I had and the Xendes mafia killed them all.”

“Ah, sorry to hear that. So, you’re another bl**dy pilot.” She sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that, as well.” She smiled. “I suppose it could be worse. I once picked up a sanitation worker in a bar like this one. God, he was an even bigger bore than most pilots are. Looking back, I think it’s safe to say he was full of tihs. You know there’s a saying that before you embark on a mission of revenge that you should first start by digging two graves?”

“Just two? I reckon they need at least eight or nine.” I smiled wryly as I drained my first beer and picked up the fresh one. “At the risk of sounding clichéd then,” I smiled, “I take it you come here often?”

“Every Friday night, when I can afford it.” She admitted. “Teachers don’t get paid much. I usually steer clear of pilots. You not wearing a flight suit blindsided me.”

“Sorry.” I told her. “Feel free to move on now you’ve had a drink bought for you. I don’t mind at all. No hard feelings and all that jazz. I hope you have better luck meeting with somebody who lives up to your high standards.”

She set the bottle down on the bar and glanced up at me, her mouth contorting into a grimace of mortification. “Do I really come across as that much of a cow?”

“Yup. But if it’s any consolation, I’ve had the company of a great many women who could give bitchiness lessons to Arissa Duval.” I smiled at her, before turning back to the bar. “Fortunately, just like you, they turned out to be nothing more than fleeting acquaintances. Been nice talking with you, Cathy.” I said dismissively, raising my bottle of beer to my lips.

She retrieved her bottle from the bar and stepped back. “Stay safe, Heathcliff.” She told me, and then she was gone.

I waited for a few minutes, letting the bartender finish serving a group of teenagers before calling him over. “You worked here long?” I asked.

“Coupla months.” He replied warily.

“That woman in the gold dress I was talking to, you seen her before?”

“Not a once.”

“Thanks.” I told him, offering my thumb and its embedded RFID contactless chip for him to scan. “Get yourself a beer on me.”

“You da man.” The barman nodded, then helped himself to a double vodka from the racks, which told me more than I needed to know about the ingredients of the beers that he was serving. I turned around and scanned the room, my eyes drawn to ‘Cathy’s’ gold dress, her legs crossed and showing a significant amount of brown thigh as she chatted to a businessman in a buttoned down grey suit and tie, still clutching the beer that I had bought her. It was all an act, I knew, but what I didn’t know was how much of that act was for my benefit. While I stared at her I caught her glance my way for a fraction of a second, only to look away quickly when she realized that I was watching her. Even in the dim, hazy light of the bar I could see her face redden slightly. Could you fake a blush, I wondered? Perhaps I had judged her too harshly.

A half hour passed with nothing notable happening, other than three more premium beers disappearing to add to my paunch. The bar had gotten busier, but it was far from crowded. I had got a bit of a buzz on, and I realized it was time to head back to the Challenger and sleep it off before Max collared me and I’d need to spend the next few days sober while I performed whatever role he demanded of me this time. Haulier, courier, taxi driver, ninja, I had no idea. There were no flashpoints flagged up on any AIS database, no regions of concern, combat hot spots or civilian unrest incidents. To all appearances, this region of the bubble was a haven of tranquillity. Of course, up here around Deciat was not strictly a part of Max’s domain – that was the narrow stretch of colonised space from Polecteri down to the Pleiades and Witch Head sectors.

As I made to leave, purely by coincidence or - dare I say it - fate, the businessman got up, presumably to go to the rest room. The girl in the golden dress was still there, looking decidedly bored by my reckoning. I sauntered across as stealthily as I could and slid into the vacated seat. While her eyes didn’t exactly light up, the corner of her mouth did flicker up in surprise.






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

“Ready to go, Cathy?” I asked.

“That’s very presumptuous of you Heathy, baby.” She frowned, swirling what looked like the dregs of a vodka martini around in a glass stained with grubby grey finger marks and rimmed with smears of greasy red lip gloss. “I happen to like it here.”

“The stuffed shirt isn’t going to do it for you.”

“Oh really?” She laughed, draining what little remained of her drink. Yep, she was ready to leave. Right now.

“He’s too old by at least a decade. Maybe two.” I pointed out, hopefully she’d pick up on the compliment that I was paying her.

“He still has more hair than you.” She shot back.

“And most of it’s going grey.” I laughed. “I bet you any money he needs Viagra to get it up.”

“Maybe I prefer the rigidity and staying power the little blue diamonds endow upon a man.” She said with a visible twinkle in her green eyes. “If he’s gone for Cialis instead then maybe we can make a whole weekend of it?”

“Hmmmm.” I frowned. “He is just passing through, you know.”

“So are you.” She retorted.

“I can come back here any time I like.” I told her, leaning forward and placing my hands on the table. “Or any time you like. He won’t be back until his boss lets him.”

“He is his boss.” She smiled, leaning back into her seat.

“That’s what they all say.” I chuckled in my most manly manner, wondering if ‘Cathy’ leaning back in the chair was a body language tell-tale for a desire to escape me but more concerned that I might have body odour, bad breath, or a fetid combination of both that over time I had become nose blind to.

“His job won’t get him killed.” She persisted.

“We’re in space.” I said, with an expansive shrug of my shoulders. “All of our lives hang by a thread. But I have a far greater degree of control over my fate than he does. Something goes wrong here, I’m gone. He’ll be by the airlocks, banging on the doors, trying to hitch a ride.”

“Why are you here? Right now, I mean. At this table.” She asked, suddenly leaning forward, propping her chin in her hand and her elbow on the table. Our faces were just inches apart. It was a small table.

“I’m here to save you from a mistake that you’ll regret the moment you wake up in the morning.”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, cowboy.” ‘Cathy’ laughed. “So long as I ain’t regretting it while its going down tonight,” she added with a wink, “then I can live with regretting it in the morning.”

“Let’s go, before the accountant gets back.”

“Let’s wait.” She countered. “I’d like to see if he can pound your skinny ssa even thinner.”

“Talking about pounding ssa-es, I bet he’ll be done in less than a minute.”

“Are you talking mine or yours?” Cathy smiled mischievously.

She glanced to her left. I glanced to my right. And up. Looming over me, the stuffed shirt had returned and he did not look at all happy that his investment in an unknown quantity of vodka martinis was about to go south. “Is this guy bothering you, Criss”

“Criss?” I said to her. “You told him your name was Criss?”

‘Cathy/Criss shrugged her bare shoulders and leaned back in her chair again. I could tell that she was enjoying this immensely. Truth be told, so was I, though I hadn’t factored in the possibility that our verbal sparring might involve physical violence with an outsider before it got recreationally physical between her and I. I reached into my jacket and withdrew my wallet, flipping it open and flashing him a Federation system security badge modelled closely on several that I had seen during my travels. As he leaned in to inspect it, I flipped the wallet shut and pocketed it. While it was an accurate facsimile, it would probably not stand up to close scrutiny from a Federation official which, as far as I knew and dressed as he was, this guy might well have been. The Deciat star system was, after all, under Federation jurisdiction.

“Criss here, sometimes Ellie, sometimes Abbi, aka Cathy,” I told him, staring directly up into his eyes, ”Has outstanding warrants across several nearby systems for multiple cases of identity theft. I’ve been chasing her down from starport to starport for three weeks and the fact that I am sitting in this seat right now means you are one lucky mothertrucker because left unchecked she will have cleaned out your personal and business accounts before you wake up alone in a cheap hotel room tomorrow morning.” I picked up his half-finished bottle of premium beer and handed it to him. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you. Her usual approach is to wait until her mark goes to the rest room or the bar and while their backs are turned laces their drink with a binary compound that when triggered with the activation chemical that is embedded in her lip gloss incapacitates her victims. One brush of the lips and you’ll be out like she whacked you upside the head with a baseball bat.”

By this time ‘Cathy/Criss’ was grinning from ear to ear, struggling not to burst out laughing.

“Laugh all you like, Ivy.” I told her, wondering if she understood the reference to one of Batman’s antagonists famed for waylaying her own victims in a similar fashion. “You’re leaving with me right now, so this gentleman can return to enjoying his evening.”

“Are you going to cuff me, officer?” She asked, offering her upturned wrists to me and batting her eyelids provocatively. By this time the fuming businessman had retrieved his jacket and was backing away, heading for the exit and another bar or, more likely after having half his night wasted, the starport’s red-light sector.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I asked her as the guy slid out of earshot.

“Oh yes,” she giggled, reaching across and taking the businessman’s drink, draining the bottle in one gulp. “But I prefer soft velvet ropes. Or silk neckties. That guy wore a lovely necktie. Did you notice? Purple and shimmery, flecked with silver glittery stuff it was.” She sighed wistfully as she watched the stuffed suit disappear out the bar’s entrance. “I would have kept it as a trophy.”

“Can I get you another drink?” I asked, wondering if I was biting off more than I could chew with a woman who collected trophies from her amorous conquests in the way that some guys cut notches in bedposts, or painted skulls on the sides of their ships.

“Hell no,” she glared at me. “For getting rid of somebody who may have been my soul mate, my destiny and one day the doting father of my three beautiful children you can buy me trucking dinner, sunshine.”

Two hours later I stood behind her as she hesitated before pressing her thumb against the access scanner of an apartment deep in the habitat sector where it was shielded from the heat, radiation and noise of the starport’s reactor, docking bay and industrial areas. She turned to face me expectantly, and I leaned into her. She melted against me, arms and legs sliding over my sides and thighs as our lips locked passionately, tongues intertwined hotly, hungrily, her soft chest pressed firmly against mine, her [redacted] gently moving in up and down motions against a hardening in mine that she was undoubtedly aware of. I reached a hand up to cup a [redacted] tenderly, thumb brushing across [redacted] through the thin fabric of the gold dress and what felt like a lightly padded bra beneath it. She pulled away from the kiss with a breathless gasp.

“I’ve had a lovely evening, so far.” She whispered as she reached for the door entry scanner and slid her thumb over it. The door beeped acknowledgement, and as she twisted out of my embrace the pressure door slid open with the muted whine of a hidden motor and the hushed rumble of guide wheels in runners. So far, she had said. What might that promise for the rest of the night? I wondered with a lascivious smile beginning to form on my lips. I eagerly followed her through the door and into the apartment.

“What the hell took you so long?” An impatient voice called from the depths of the apartment. A man’s voice. “His ship docked over five hours ago!”




tbc

 

[The Golden Knight]

Prologue



Losing It
(Signals)​

3169

Sheron.











“Beautiful, isn’t she.”

Sofia Archer raised her eyes from the star chart that she was studying and glanced up at the bridge forward viewport. The arrow-shaped warship slid slowly from port to starboard across the bow of their own ship, cutting across the space ahead of them at a range of a little over five kilometres. Even at that distance the size of the approaching vessel was seriously impressive, dwarfing the far from insignificant mass of their own interstellar megaship.

“Bl**dy white elephant.” Sofia growled quietly, being extra careful to ensure that her mutterings were inaudible to those around her, aware that captain Valero wasn’t speaking to her specifically, but half talking to himself and half addressing the entire bridge crew. She’d had quite enough of being stuck out here in deep space wasting her youth away hundreds of light years from the night life and the partying that she had left behind on Lave. While the girls she had grown up with were living the high life back in the biggest city in the Milky Way, she was patrolling the coreward reaches of the Inner Orion Spur, scanning empty skies for an enemy that no longer existed and hadn’t been seen by anybody in almost twenty years. The Galactic Co-operative were wasting their time – wasting her time.

Signing up with GalCop had been a huge mistake, she realized. She should have sucked it up and faced the music back home, rather than running away to the black and signing up with this shower of clueless jack-offs. Done the time, paid the fine, laid low until the dust had settled, her misdemeanours eventually forgotten. By now she’d have snagged herself a rich surgeon or a lawyer and dug her hooks in, biding her time and staring at the ceiling until the divorce and then she’d take the sucker to the cleaners and be set for a life of leisure on her own terms. Not stuck out in deep space in a tin can surrounded by gormless losers who couldn’t hack it on a planet, and several metres thickness of steel encased water that soak up the X-rays all spacefarers are subjected to. Or most of the rays, she grimaced as she rubbed her hands over her face tiredly, glancing at her watch to see how much longer she had to endure this monotony before her shift was over.

Every time she looked in the mirror she seemed to have aged a little more, she thought depressingly. Whether that was down to the radiation leaking through the shielding, the abysmal diet, the lack of natural light, the four on, four off watch rota, the lack of decent exercise, the low gravity in this part of the ship, the recycled, heavily scrubbed atmosphere or the gallons of coffee and the cigarettes that she seemed to be addicted to since taking this job was anybody’s guess. By the time her tour of duty was over she figured she’d look at least ten years older than she actually was.

She felt tired, so very tired, and every day was no different to the one that came before. Listening out for strange signals, identifying them, cataloguing them, triangulating them, filing them and finally reporting her findings back to Equinox control before moving on to the next transient signal. And that was on the good days. On the bad days the AI did the job for her, and all she had to do was read and approve the AI’s reports before forwarding them to Equinox. The monotony was literally driving her crazy.

Five years. Five years she had signed up for, and here she was just three months out of training and already losing her marbles.

“They’re hailing us, sir.” One of the watch announced from the communications chair.

“Open a channel. Put it on screen.”

The picture of the sleek silver and black warship faded out, replaced by a head shot of the warship’s commander, a grey haired, bespectacled, slack-jowled woman with a smear of grey grease below her left eye running halfway down her cheek. “Captain Valero!” she exclaimed with a smile.

“Good to see you again, Admiral. Problems with your new toy?” Valero asked, gesturing at his own cheek.

“Never ends,” she laughed, wiping her face with a tunic sleeve. “She is the first of her class, so teething troubles are to be expected. The engineering staff can’t get their heads around all this experimental technology, and the eggheads that supposedly invented the stuff don’t seem to be much wiser. To be honest, it’s starting to feel like this ship runs on hydrogen and blind faith in equal measures.”

“They all do.” Valero smiled. “The science guys make their quantum leaps, and us mere mortals spend the rest of our lives playing catch up. May we render assistance in any way?”

“Nah, we’re pretty much on top of it, just get that Calvin shuttled across and we’ll be on our way. How are things out here in this sector?”

“All quiet, as usual. Nothing to report. At all.”

“Long may it stay that way.” The admiral nodded.

“Don’t you want to see what all that new-fangled engineering can do?” Valero grinned.

“I did my bug fighting in the forties and fifties, Mike. At my age, I’m happy wargaming on the sims on training cruises.”

“They named that thing yet?”

The admiral shook her head. "Not officially. We’re still a black project. As lead ship of her class she’s just unit one for the moment.”

“And unofficially?” Valero pressed.

“As she’s the prototype, we’ve named her after the project.”

“A name steeped in history.” Valero nodded approvingly. “Let’s hope she lives up to it, though given how quiet things are with the bugs at the moment she may turn out to be GalCop’s white elephant.”

The admiral was suddenly distracted as the background illumination of the warship’s bridge dimmed, then the emergency lighting flickered back on in a lurid red that made the entire bridge crew look like they were covered in blood. In the bottom right corner of the display a pop-up window appeared with a striking, raven-haired AI avatar calling for Valero’s attention. “Captain!”

“What is it?”

“I’m detecting unusual power fluctuations in the power core of the approaching vessel.” On the main screen the admiral abruptly jumped out of her chair and a second later the view of the warship’s bridge blanked off and the pop-up window expanded to fill the viewer. “Strongly recommend we withdraw immediately.”

“Helm.” The captain snapped. “All back full, smartly.”

“All back full, aye sir.” The helmsman responded reflexively.

“All hands brace! Now, now now!” The captain called over the shipwide intercom, dropping back into his seat and strapping himself in. “External view.”

Sofia tapped a command into her terminal with her free hand while the other steadied herself against it as her body was thrown forward by inertia. The main view screen switched back to a view of the glittering warship. She scanned her console quickly, commanding a three-dimensional fast scan of the space around them. “Scanner clear, sir. Whatever is going on, it seems to be internal to the warship.”

“Understood Archer. What the hell is going on over there, Dr. Calvin?”

“I….I don’t know, Captain.”

“The warship is now accelerating. Moving away.” Archer reported.

“Helm, all stop.” On screen the ship could be seen side on, but the aspect was shortening as the vessel began a turn to starboard, unmasking engines that seemed to be running at full power, the hard burn flaring of the exhaust so bright that the Sarasvati’s external camera filters had to kick in to prevent being overloaded with light and saturating the display.

“She’s turning away, Captain. Velocity passing five hundred metres per second and accelerating.” Sofia called out.

“Wow, look at it go!” somebody on the bridge said in disbelief. Already it was travelling faster than safety protocols allowed, faster than even most interceptors were allowed to fly in regular space.

“Helm, pursuit course. Full ahead. Hail them. Archer, keep track of it.” Valero shouted.

“Aye sir. I have it locked on optical and IR”

“They aren’t answering hails, Captain.”

“Keep trying.”

“It’s gone through one thousand metres per second and still accelerating.” Sofia called. “Aspect angle constantly changing. It’s pulling G’s that no human can tolerate….Oh no.”

“Archer?”

“I’ve lost it. IRST, FLIR and optical.”

“What do you mean you’ve lost it, dammit?” Valero demanded angrily, jumping out of his seat and dragging himself across to her console, fighting the G forces of the Sarasvati’s own acceleration. “Try radar.”

“Aye, sir.” Sofia responded, calling up the control panel from a drop-down menu. “Pinging. No return.”

“Lidar?”

“Same story, cap.” Sofia replied, having received no return scatter from the laser light detection and ranging system either.

The captain appeared over her shoulder. “Talk to me, Archer.” He said softly.

“Sir,” she began, taking in a deep breath while she tried to put what she had seen into words. “I had a hard lock on optical and infra-red, sir. Despite the acceleration and the corkscrewing, it was well within sensor range. Then….”

“Put it on main viewer. Take the time frame back one minute and talk me through it.” Valero said patiently. “Helm, adjust course to match the target's last known heading.”

Sofia cued her replay up and cast it onto the main view screen. “Okay, sir, here you can see the prototype breaking a thousand metres per second and begin a hard bank to port and upward in relation to our position. That was a thirty gee turn at that speed.” She explained. Valero winced at the estimate. He didn’t want to think about what that might have done to the internal organs of a human body, never mind what it would have done to the bodies of any crew not strapped in at their duty stations. He was surprised the ship didn’t break up under the torsion, but then it was brand new. No metal fatigue to weaken it as older hulls suffered. “You can see the main engines at full burn, and directional thrusters firing to make that turn. You can also see navigation and running lights blinking and internal lighting from portholes, and the hull plating and armour is still visible in the light from the star, even with the flare from the hard burn whiting our cameras out. Now watch this…”

Suddenly the warship disappeared from the viewer. Valero reached past her and used a finger on the touch screen to rewind the video feed to just before the ship vanished.

“You see, sir? It’s not my fault. One moment it’s lit up like a Christmas tree on visual and infra-red - main engines, thrusters, nav blinkers and internal lighting and then, all at the same time, it all disappears.”

“It jumped?”

“No, no. Sir, look at the starfield. It looks like the engines and the lighting failed as if there were a ship wide power outage, but somehow the starlight reflected off the hull also disappears. Look at the constellation Vega.” Sofia said, turning to look directly at him while she rewound the recording. “Look at the hull of that thing. Here, I’ll zoom in. And watch the stars in it’s flight path.”

Valero peered at the screen while she talked him through it, scratching his chin thoughtfully, his jaw dropping open slightly as the video played through the warship’s disappearance.

“See? The lights go off and the hull reflecting starlight stops at the same time. And see this star? It winks out, then comes back. And that star,” she said, stabbing the screen with a non-regulation red nailed finger further left. “See, it’s there, then it’s gone, now it’s back again.”

“What the hell?” Valero muttered.

“It’s like I said, sir. It's still there. It just went dark.”




1. Working Man
2. In The Mood


tbc



Notes:
I'm not apologising for any disagreements over my interpretation of ED Lore.
No aspect of Lore will escape unscathed from this novel. There will be no mercy given and some of you will be upset by my utilisation of lore, both canon and non-canon. If you don't like it, walk away.
As in the first part of this series, each chapter heading will be drawn from a rock band's catalogue. With J-KR it was AC/DC, with this it'll be Rush, in remembrance of Neil Peart who passed away this year.
While Callsign JK-R was completed before posting here, J-KR2 is a work in progress. As such it will not be posted daily, as with J-KR. Therefore additional chapters will be posted as and when completed. I have four in the can, current count 25k words, and these will be posted over the next few weeks.
Please remember this is written for fun, not profit. I don't see myself as a writer, just a story teller.
Comments, criticism and encouragement are always welcome.
Stay safe.

The ending of that first chapter...that sounds like what I describe as "Stealth Mode" and "The Panic Button". I've used it in my OWN adventures. But of course, without me being able to probe your brain, that is my outsider's best-guess.

Also Hanger Eighteen in Chapter 1...I liked the Megadeth reference.

 

[wAsh67]

I knew it! I shoved her hard in the back, sending her sprawling into the apartment while I spun about to make my escape, but the door had already slid shut behind me. I slapped my hand against the ‘open’ panel, but the door stubbornly remained sealed. I turned around, fists clenched, ready to charge whoever was in the room before they could draw down on me, but the sound of the man laughing loudly slowed my advance.

The man, I realized, was Max.

“You are very, very good.” I told Cathy/Criss, a relieved grin spreading across my features. “Almost awesome.”

“Thanks for dinner. The old man would have grumbled at buying me a kcufing cheese sandwich and made me fill in the expenses forms before going to bed.” She told me as she slumped into a faux leather sofa and crossed her legs, reaching over her shoulder with her left arm to rub her back where I had slammed my palm into it.

“Nice work with those Zen rats.” My handler told me with a brief nod of his head as he walked over to the coffee dispenser. “I was a little concerned that you’d gotten in a little bit over your head, but it seems you’ve turned that wreck of a Challenger into a bit of a monster. Are you ready for some real work now you’ve gotten your beef with those amateurs out of your system?”

“Who the hell is the girl?” I demanded. I was struggling with mixed emotions as the adrenaline ebbed away. Relief that she wasn’t a Xendes honey trap leading me to days of torture and an agonizing death at the hands of a gang of mafioso. Disappointment that after blowing more than four hundred credits including a generous tip on an admittedly excellent steak dinner, that I wasn’t going to be ending the night with what I had believed to be an all but guaranteed reverse cowgirl yeehaw session, and embarrassment that I had been completely duped by this [redacted]-teasing [redacted] into believing that she was in fact nothing more than a man eating school ma’am.

“Just what have you been doing for the last two hours if you don’t even know her name?” He enquired, then shook his head. “Forget I asked, I don’t wanna know.”

“Chill out, dad.” ‘Cathy’ told him. “I got him here, didn’t I?”

Dad? Was that just a derogatory figure of speech, a dig about his age perhaps?

“All you had to do was tell me that Max was ready to brief me.” I glowered at her. Dad?

“Where’s the fun in that?” She smiled sweetly. “And would it have gotten me a mighty fine dinner and enough drinks to get me a decent buzz on?”

She did have a point, but it still irked me that I had been so easily played. “Dad?” I finally enquired, with an eyebrow raised for effect. What happened to the Max who claimed he’d never met a woman he’d wanted to waste more than one night on, I wondered.

“So she claims,” Max muttered as he swirled sugar substitute into a mug. “I’m not so sure myself. Do you think she looks like me?”

“Lucky for her that she doesn’t.” I deadpanned. However, deception coming naturally to her and a seeming proclivity for one-night stands – just like Max – made it quite plausible that she was indeed related to him. I wondered how many more of Max’s illegitimate offspring were scattered across the galaxy, then had a little micro-shudder at the thought. “Nice place,” I commented, changing the subject as I glanced around the apartment. “A little too much grey for my tastes, but nice nevertheless. Yours or a rental?” I asked Max.

“Neither. Alliance Intel maintain it as a safe house, so don’t go breaking anything.” Max explained. “We’ll be using it as a rendezvous point until the rest of the team have arrived and then we’ll be heading off into the black.

“What’s this about?”

“Ancient history.” ‘Cathy’ yawned dismissively, stretching on the sofa like a cat.

“The survival of mankind.” Max scowled at her. “Same as usual. Floss’ll be here shortly, we’ll outline everything then.”






tbc

 

[The Golden Knight]

“Ready to go, Cathy?” I asked.

“That’s very presumptuous of you Heathy, baby.” She frowned, swirling what looked like the dregs of a vodka martini around in a glass stained with grubby grey finger marks and rimmed with smears of greasy red lip gloss. “I happen to like it here.”

“The stuffed shirt isn’t going to do it for you.”

“Oh really?” She laughed, draining what little remained of her drink. Yep, she was ready to leave. Right now.

“He’s too old by at least a decade. Maybe two.” I pointed out, hopefully she’d pick up on the compliment that I was paying her.

“He still has more hair than you.” She shot back.

“And most of it’s going grey.” I laughed. “I bet you any money he needs Viagra to get it up.”

“Maybe I prefer the rigidity and staying power the little blue diamonds endow upon a man.” She said with a visible twinkle in her green eyes. “If he’s gone for Cialis instead then maybe we can make a whole weekend of it?”

“Hmmmm.” I frowned. “He is just passing through, you know.”

“So are you.” She retorted.

“I can come back here any time I like.” I told her, leaning forward and placing my hands on the table. “Or any time you like. He won’t be back until his boss lets him.”

“He is his boss.” She smiled, leaning back into her seat.

“That’s what they all say.” I chuckled in my most manly manner, wondering if ‘Cathy’ leaning back in the chair was a body language tell-tale for a desire to escape me but more concerned that I might have body odour, bad breath, or a fetid combination of both that over time I had become nose blind to.

“His job won’t get him killed.” She persisted.

“We’re in space.” I said, with an expansive shrug of my shoulders. “All of our lives hang by a thread. But I have a far greater degree of control over my fate than he does. Something goes wrong here, I’m gone. He’ll be by the airlocks, banging on the doors, trying to hitch a ride.”

“Why are you here? Right now, I mean. At this table.” She asked, suddenly leaning forward, propping her chin in her hand and her elbow on the table. Our faces were just inches apart. It was a small table.

“I’m here to save you from a mistake that you’ll regret the moment you wake up in the morning.”

“This isn’t my first rodeo, cowboy.” ‘Cathy’ laughed. “So long as I ain’t regretting it while its going down tonight,” she added with a wink, “then I can live with regretting it in the morning.”

“Let’s go, before the accountant gets back.”

“Let’s wait.” She countered. “I’d like to see if he can pound your skinny ssa even thinner.”

“Talking about pounding ssa-es, I bet he’ll be done in less than a minute.”

“Are you talking mine or yours?” Cathy smiled mischievously.

She glanced to her left. I glanced to my right. And up. Looming over me, the stuffed shirt had returned and he did not look at all happy that his investment in an unknown quantity of vodka martinis was about to go south. “Is this guy bothering you, Criss”

“Criss?” I said to her. “You told him your name was Criss?”

‘Cathy/Criss shrugged her bare shoulders and leaned back in her chair again. I could tell that she was enjoying this immensely. Truth be told, so was I, though I hadn’t factored in the possibility that our verbal sparring might involve physical violence with an outsider before it got recreationally physical between her and I. I reached into my jacket and withdrew my wallet, flipping it open and flashing him a Federation system security badge modelled closely on several that I had seen during my travels. As he leaned in to inspect it, I flipped the wallet shut and pocketed it. While it was an accurate facsimile, it would probably not stand up to close scrutiny from a Federation official which, as far as I knew and dressed as he was, this guy might well have been. The Deciat star system was, after all, under Federation jurisdiction.

“Criss here, sometimes Ellie, sometimes Abbi, aka Cathy,” I told him, staring directly up into his eyes, ”Has outstanding warrants across several nearby systems for multiple cases of identity theft. I’ve been chasing her down from starport to starport for three weeks and the fact that I am sitting in this seat right now means you are one lucky mothertrucker because left unchecked she will have cleaned out your personal and business accounts before you wake up alone in a cheap hotel room tomorrow morning.” I picked up his half-finished bottle of premium beer and handed it to him. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you. Her usual approach is to wait until her mark goes to the rest room or the bar and while their backs are turned laces their drink with a binary compound that when triggered with the activation chemical that is embedded in her lip gloss incapacitates her victims. One brush of the lips and you’ll be out like she whacked you upside the head with a baseball bat.”

By this time ‘Cathy/Criss’ was grinning from ear to ear, struggling not to burst out laughing.

“Laugh all you like, Ivy.” I told her, wondering if she understood the reference to one of Batman’s antagonists famed for waylaying her own victims in a similar fashion. “You’re leaving with me right now, so this gentleman can return to enjoying his evening.”

“Are you going to cuff me, officer?” She asked, offering her upturned wrists to me and batting her eyelids provocatively. By this time the fuming businessman had retrieved his jacket and was backing away, heading for the exit and another bar or, more likely after having half his night wasted, the starport’s red-light sector.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I asked her as the guy slid out of earshot.

“Oh yes,” she giggled, reaching across and taking the businessman’s drink, draining the bottle in one gulp. “But I prefer soft velvet ropes. Or silk neckties. That guy wore a lovely necktie. Did you notice? Purple and shimmery, flecked with silver glittery stuff it was.” She sighed wistfully as she watched the stuffed suit disappear out the bar’s entrance. “I would have kept it as a trophy.”

“Can I get you another drink?” I asked, wondering if I was biting off more than I could chew with a woman who collected trophies from her amorous conquests in the way that some guys cut notches in bedposts, or painted skulls on the sides of their ships.

“Hell no,” she glared at me. “For getting rid of somebody who may have been my soul mate, my destiny and one day the doting father of my three beautiful children you can buy me trucking dinner, sunshine.”

Two hours later I stood behind her as she hesitated before pressing her thumb against the access scanner of an apartment deep in the habitat sector where it was shielded from the heat, radiation and noise of the starport’s reactor, docking bay and industrial areas. She turned to face me expectantly, and I leaned into her. She melted against me, arms and legs sliding over my sides and thighs as our lips locked passionately, tongues intertwined hotly, hungrily, her soft chest pressed firmly against mine, her [redacted] gently moving in up and down motions against a hardening in mine that she was undoubtedly aware of. I reached a hand up to cup a [redacted] tenderly, thumb brushing across [redacted] through the thin fabric of the gold dress and what felt like a lightly padded bra beneath it. She pulled away from the kiss with a breathless gasp.

“I’ve had a lovely evening, so far.” She whispered as she reached for the door entry scanner and slid her thumb over it. The door beeped acknowledgement, and as she twisted out of my embrace the pressure door slid open with the muted whine of a hidden motor and the hushed rumble of guide wheels in runners. So far, she had said. What might that promise for the rest of the night? I wondered with a lascivious smile beginning to form on my lips. I eagerly followed her through the door and into the apartment.

“What the hell took you so long?” An impatient voice called from the depths of the apartment. A man’s voice. “His ship docked over five hours ago!”




tbc

Ah, sounds about as successful as MY love life. "The Search for RAXXLA Continues!" Seriously. Whenever I'm not alone, I'd ALWAYS find someone just EAGER to stab me in the back. Kinda sucks that this hit close to home for me.

 

[wAsh67]

3



Lessons
(2112)​

“Are we sitting comfortably?” Farseer asked, her beady eyes locking with each of us in turn – Max, ‘Cathy’, if that was indeed her name, Daniel and I. Farseer and Daniel had arrived together, more by coincidence than design as Daniel had bumped into her while she was trying to make her way to the safe house from shockingly vague directions that Max had given her earlier. The other three paramilitary operators under Daniel would be briefed the specifics pertinent to their role in this operation by Daniel, their team commander, separately, once the details of their mission were hammered out. Dan, I noted with a pang of irrational jealousy, seemed to be overly attentive to ‘Cathy’, sneaking sidelong glances at her occasionally. Truth be told, the way she was sprawled across the sofa with her shimmery gold dress riding up her shapely brown legs, I was finding it hard to take my eyes off her too.

“In 3303 an abandoned listening post in the Jotunheim system was discovered as being still active. When it was scanned it was found to contain a message that it promptly began transmitting upon accepting the scan.” Farseer began. “That listening post had been silently orbiting a moon that was in turn orbiting a gas giant in Jotunheim for almost a hundred and fifty years - unmanned, forgotten, a low value asset somewhere near the bottom of a ledger in GalCop’s inventory that nobody had gotten around to dismantling and recycling. The listening post was right out there on the edge of the frontier, it’s scanners trained outward, listening.”

“For Thargoids?” I asked, my attention piqued. Thargoids were my thing. The time frame fit. The First Thargoid War – some people claimed we were in the opening skirmishes of the Second Thargoid War right now – had ended in 3151, which was one hundred and sixty years ago. It made sense that in the post war years distant early warning stations had been constructed and placed at the frontiers of colonized space for long range detection of a potential reappearance of the Thargoid threat.

Farseer nodded somewhat reluctantly it seemed, her forehead wrinkling and her brow furrowing at the unwanted interruption. “Obviously,” she all but growled.

“I’ll shut up now.” I acquiesced.

“Jotunheim was named for an ancient Earth pagan legend that alleged the inhabitants of Jotunheim were the Jotnar, a race of giants who sought to overthrow the humans in Midgard and the gods in the realm of Asgard. Midgard and Asgard are not real star systems, that’s just Norse legend.” Farseer continued with a roll of her eyes that demonstrated an atheists typical disdain for mythology and religion in general.

“Er, sorry to cut in again.” I interrupted. “But Midgard is a real star. I’ve been there. There’s not much there other than a Coriolis station– Rontgen Port, or something like that - but it is definitely a real star system. Not made up at all.”

“Joe, for Chrissakes shut the kcufup.” Max growled while ‘Cathy’ struggled to hide her laughter behind a hand that covered her nose and mouth.

“Just saying….” I finished meekly.

“Anyway,” Farseer glowered, fixing me once again with a steely no-nonsense stare that would have turned a lesser man’s knees to jelly. “Once the war ended with the Mycoid genocide perpetrated by INRA, the Thargoids retreated faster than we could chase them back toward wherever they came from and we lost track of them.

“The Galactic Cooperative of Worlds, in the mid thirty second century, seeded these listening posts in systems where the Thargoid’s were known to have maintained a regular presence and where they had fought hard to repulse human incursions. This was as part of a project called Equinox.” Farseer carried on. “It was considered that these frontier worlds were strategically important to whatever the Thargoids were doing in space that humanity had rather arrogantly claimed as its own. If the Thargoids ever returned, it was thought systems such as Jotunheim that they had fought so hard to control would be the first ones they attempted to reclaim.”

“Records that the Alliance have reconstructed from GalCop archives indicate that thinking back then was that there are a number of star systems which the Thargoids used as rapid transit hubs for theoretical Witch-space superhighways” Max interjected. “Jotunheim was thought to be one of them, Maia is another. The theory prevalent at the time was that the Thargoid’s ability to manipulate Witch-space for faster than light travel was based on singularity harnessing technology, but after the war a comprehensive survey of the Jotunheim system revealed no evidence of gravitational anomalies like Einstein-Rosen bridges, wormholes or black holes like Maia has that could bend space-time in order to create stable shortcuts across the galaxy, or even to other galaxies. More recently it was surveyed for meta-alloys once we learned how important they were to the Thargoids, but again no indicators of that alien infestation were found.”

“The main things that Jotunheim possesses that most systems don’t,” Farseer explained, “ are a human habitable world and a water giant. Those planets are probably what made it of particular interest to the Thargoids back in the first war. Having a human habitable world and a water giant in one system made it highly desirable for mankind for colonisation and agricultural purposes, and if it also happens to be an emergence point for a witch space conduit, as was suspected, then that made it crucial to the Thargoids that the system not fall into human hands and thereafter become heavily populated and militarised.”

“By 3172 the listening post had been upgraded with a rudimentary non-sentient AI and made fully autonomous.” Max continued as Farseer sat back and sipped at a brandy laced coffee. It irked me that she accepted Max’s interruptions while mine were met with impatient disdain but, I conceded, she and Max seemed to have what may most carefully be termed a ‘special relationship’, which was something that I certainly wasn’t looking for with the old girl. “Soon after that, with the disintegration of the Galactic Cooperative in 3174 came the demise of it’s cold war projects like Paradox, Equinox and Chatterbox and the listening posts were forgotten, especially as they hadn’t detected anything alien in over twenty years. Most of the listening posts eventually succumbed to lack of maintenance and dropped offline. The DEW line ceased to exist. Or so we thought.”

Farseer took over the storytelling once again. “When this listening post’s beacon unexpectedly went active, it’s message contained several components that caused a degree of excitement amongst the superpowers, foremost among them being a pointer to an abandoned Equinox megaship once operated by GalCop called the Sarasvati.”

I knew of the GCS Sarasvati. It was nothing more than a tourist destination, a derelict starship adrift in space that stood as a relic of remembrance to an almost forgotten war against the first race of sentient spacefaring life forms that mankind had encountered, a cenotaph to lives lost, a beacon to gawkers and a source of illicit materials for scavs and trinket dealers. Anything of value had been stripped out long ago. It was a dimly lit shell carrying navigation hazard markers to distinguish it from the black and nothing more. I only knew of the Sarasvati’s existence as it was common to see requests from tourists looking to visit the wreck on the job boards at starports.

“We managed to decode the data stream from the listening post before anybody else.” Max added. “The decryption algorithm for the message was on file in the archives we maintain on GalCop and its history, so we had a head start on the rest of the vultures that descended on the wreck as soon as the code was cracked and its location became common knowledge. By then we had stripped out the Sarasvati’s memory cores and its data storage infrastructure and quietly slipped away. The Sarasvati’s technology itself was archaic and useless, but the information we managed to retrieve from devices that remained intact and had not decayed beyond recovery was worth its weight in Painite. There was a wealth of information on anti-Thargoid operations and technology, their tactics and methodology on how to combat them. It put us ahead of the game when the Thargoids recently resumed their incursions into our space and allowed us to fight them to a standstill. Even so, we still lag behind when it comes to exploiting discoveries that were made a century and a half ago – discoveries of technologies that were put in place to keep the Thargoids at bay but have subsequently been lost.”

“Technology has advanced immeasurably in that time.” I pointed out, risking another dose of Farseer’s ire. “What good are obsolete hundred year old technologies against modern weapons and shielding? Surely it’d be like pitting convict colonists armed with longbows and boomerangs against marines with plasma rifles and body armour.” I said with a nod to Daniel, who before joining Alliance Intel had been just such a marine.

“There’s still a place in war for a skilled archer.” Daniel countered. So much for his support.

“And aside from that,” Max added, “technologies created to counter specific threats often disappear when the threat goes away. GalCop’s role towards the end of its existence, along with INRA, leaned heavily towards combatting the bugs. Once the ‘Goids scuttled back off to the shadows GalCop soon followed and when that imploded, what assets and intelligence they had were divided up or simply lost in the chaos of upheaval. The Federation wouldn’t share what they had learned with INRA, the Empire or us in the Alliance of Independent Systems, so in line with that approach we kept what we had been able to salvage to ourselves. When INRA disbanded in 3253, even more data was lost with it. AEGIS has tried to pick up where GalCop and INRA left off, but just like us they have been hindered by the lack of co-operation from the Empire and the Federation who we know both possess old GalCop and INRA research and technology.

“GalCop black projects intended to enhance their abilities in combat with the Thargoids were shut down, the records lost and in some cases even erased from existence. To restart such projects would take time and resources. We could do it, but by the time we got those weapons into mass production the Thargoids would probably have already rolled the bubble back into the dark ages. Man has focused on war against its fellow man for so long that we’ve forgotten how to fight the bugs. The Federation and Empire don't care about Thargoids - their focus is on the cold war that has always existed between them. There are no navy starships configured for anti-xeno operations in any one of the superpower’s orders of battle – not even Farragut and Majestic battlecruisers are armed to fight bugs – they just exist to pound the tihs out of each other.”

“The ‘Goids have had a century and a half to spy on mankind and research it’s technologies after their defeat at our hands, and to advance their own capabilities against us so that next time we go toe to toe they’ll be ready to counter anything that we can throw at them.” Daniel added. “All we’ve done in that time is invent more efficient ways to blow up our own ships.”

“Which brings us back to why we’re here.” Max said, steeping his hands as he leaned across the table. “Floss?”

“I do wish you wouldn’t call me that.” Farseer scowled through gritted teeth. “So, this listening post in Jotunheim at some time in the past received a signal from somebody in a manner that raised just as many questions as it answered. It gave us the location of a megaship, which was supposed to have contained records from somebody called Calvin, project Equinox’s lead scientist, but exhaustive searching by not just Alliance researchers, but also representatives from the Federation and the Empire, found no such archives on board the Sarasvati.”

“Locating that archive has been one of Alliance Intel’s top priorities since we learned it existed.” said Max as Farseer paused to form her next statement.

“There were a number of conundrums associated with the listening post’s transmission.” Farseer went on. “The first was its claim that it had detected an encoded transmission from the Sarasvati, which was almost six hundred light years away. For that to be accurate, the signal must have been sent six hundred years ago – about three hundred and eighty years before the Sarasvati was built – because as of right now we still have no way of sending a message across space any faster than tachyon streams, which are short range only as they decay to illegibility over longer distances. Even if a tachyon stream could be made powerful enough to travel across that much space, it would still take more than fifty years to bridge the gap between Sheron, where the Sarasvati is, and Jotunheim.”

“We took a tech team into the listening post and found no FTL comms machinery capable of receiving a tachyon stream – which hadn’t even been invented until long after the listening post’s final documented upgrade.” Max explained. “All it had was conventional detection and communications equipment.”

“So, it seems that the Sarasvati couldn’t have sent that signal, which begs the question, where did that message come from?” Farseer postured.






tbc

 

[The Golden Knight]

Got a big exposition dump this time, a handful of misplaced apostrophes, but beyond that, no major complaints so far.
By the way, I also saw you paid my work a visit.

 

[wAsh67]

“The data logs were pulled from the listening post and analysed at our laboratories.” Max interjected again. “The logs show that a standard radio signal was indeed received in the year 3294, which uploaded a subroutine into the listening posts core software with an encrypted message containing the location of the Sarasvati that then triggered the activation of the alert beacon and a call to arms to all GalCop personnel for the archive to be retrieved. Due to waning power and transmission malfunctions on the listening post, the alert was short range and on a Ka-band frequency not normally used in the 34th Century. Nine years passed before an explorer stumbled across the beacon and investigated, downloading a message that found its way into the public domain. In the header of the message was a reference to the original communication’s source. It named it Gail.

“We pulled every personnel record we could find for the Sarasvati, from the day it was launched to the day it was abandoned.” Max continued. “There was not one single person with Gail as either a Christian name or a surname ever on board that ship. It was a dead end.

“Why was it asking for GalCop personnel to find the archive?” Cathy enquired.

“We believe the listening posts AI was unaware of the demise of GalCop and just issued a generic summons in response to the signal. The whole message reads as if it was generated internally by the listening post’s AI in direct response to receiving the data packet revealing the existence of Calvin’s archive.”

“So in short, somebody calling herself Gail found the Sarasvati, travelled back in time a couple of hundred years and beamed a sub-light radio message revealing its location to the listening post, which then went active?” I ventured. Max and Farseer looked at each other.

“What?” I asked, anticipating rolling eyes, derision and a volley of tutting noises.

“In a nutshell, your summary is one of the scenarios we gamed that seemed to make the most sense, logically speaking.” Farseer nodded. “Except for the travelling back in time bit. That’s impossible and always will be, which is why it took us so long to figure out exactly what happened. For a while we even had researchers looking into time travel theories to see if it could be feasible. Needless to say, that avenue of investigation hit a brick wall.

“Another thing that didn’t add up was the distance the signal travelled across space.” Farseer continued. “Over a six hundred and fifty light year journey, that message would have weakened significantly. As a rule of thumb the signal strength reduces by the square of the distance travelled, and degrades from a multitude of external factors like star system background noise and solar activity. By the time it travelled all the way from Sheron to Jotunheim, it was a miracle the error detection and correction algorithms could make any sense of it. Normally that signal would have simply disappeared before it got half way there.”

“Did Jotunheim’s listening post track system traffic?” I asked.

“It logged everything that moved through space within it’s detection range. It may not have known what it was, because a lot of the emissions from modern starships weren’t around when it was built, like the frame shift drive’s unique signature for example, but it logged it as an unidentified signal anyway.” Max smiled as if he knew what I was thinking. “The logs showed us the exact time, down to the millisecond, that the message purportedly transmitted from Sheron arrived, and the three-dimensional vector in space that it was received from, as determined by the listening post’s radio direction finder. Nothing that travelled through that system passed by either through that vector or during the time frame that a radio transmission from the ship would have been detected at the distances those ships passed the listening post. As best we could tell, that message was indeed sent from a time traveller visiting Sheron six hundred years ago.

“At that point Alliance Intel gave up.” Max admitted. “We shelved the file with our unsolved mysteries department and forgot about it.”

“Who,” Cathy interjected, “About a month or so ago, in the absence of any further information pertinent to the case, handed the data over to Miss Farseer here to see if she could make sense of it. She owed us a favour due to the meta-alloys that you sourced for her late last year.”

“And make sense of it I did.” She beamed smugly. “I spent weeks poring over all of the listening posts logs and at approximately the same time the radio event supposedly from the Sarasvati was received, I discovered that there was another event that was logged and filed in a junk folder. It was a low intensity energy pulse of a type whose signature occasionally pops up out of nowhere in space, most commonly when two rocks collide and smash each other to bits, emitting a momentary pulse of heat and light. We call them natural transients, and we generally ignore them.

“When I analysed the vector of this event, one that the listening post’s analysis software had automatically classified as a transient low energy pulse, it was precisely on a line between Jotunheim and Sheron, at exactly the time in 3294 that the mysterious radio message would have had to be transmitted for it to arrive at the listening post as logged. We assume that a ship at silent running, or perhaps a small probe of some kind on a low power setting, passed through the vector approximately ten light hours from the listening station and as it passed through the vector between Sheron and Jotunheim, powered itself up just long enough to transmit a burst radio message and then powered down again.”

I paused for a second while I processed the obvious. “So this is all a hoax?”

“Unlikely.” Max said. “And to what end?” he asked.

“To make people run about like headless chickens while they laugh at them behind their backs. That’s what hoaxers do.” I pointed out. “You have a fake signal made to look like it came from a time travelling mega ship, giving information that can’t be confirmed as factual. Hoax.”

“There are too many details that have been confirmed.” Farseer countered with voice raised, apparently affronted. “First there was the lost megaship actually being found at Sheron as the message indicated, when nobody knew that it was there beforehand. Then there’s the ancient coded signal activating a dormant listening post’s beacon and satisfying long forgotten security protocols to authorize the insertion of a subroutine into its core program. The message also coincided roughly in time with the first unconfirmed sightings of Thargoid scout ships in the Pleiades – they weren’t made public knowledge back then, but there was a flurry of reports of ships entering hyperspace and never being seen again.”

“The best lies have a grain of truth at their core.” I fired back, sticking to my hoax theory.

“Hear the lady out, Joe.” Max told me.

“I studied the discarded data logs, looking for more low energy transients with the same signature as the suspect one, and noticed that every few hours there was a similar pulse, and the track showed that whatever was emitting the pulse was moving at a constant velocity while still remaining undetected by conventional scanners. I plotted the track on the system map and with each pulse that track got more and more accurate. It was heading out of the system, but at sub light speeds, and on a solid vector to another system. It didn’t jump. The transients just got weaker and weaker until they became undetectable to an ancient listening post with unmaintained tech that was over a century out of date. My assumption is that it’s a ship or probe of some kind travelling from star to star through interstellar space without a jump drive.”

“Without FTL? Like an old generation ship?”

“Exactly. And we’re going to find it.”

I leaned back in my seat and wrapped my hands around my cup of coffee, untainted by milk, sugar or brandy. I once heard from somebody that real men don’t take milk or sugar with their coffee and that sounded quite reasonable to me. Unfortunately, it was after I discovered that coffee does taste so much better with milk and sugar in, so I only drank mine black when in company. Not that I’m insecure with my manliness. Well, maybe a little, but that comes with being on the wiry side rather than being of the musclebound ilk. Drinking black coffee in company was my way of sending a subliminal message that said; ‘don’t kcuf with me cuz I’m hard.’ I doubted many people picked up on it, but it made me feel a little bit better about myself. And it kept me awake after all the alcohol that I had consumed at the bar earlier. I’d left my InstAlert patches on the Challenger.

“This phantom ship is going to great lengths to remain hidden from mankind.” I said, thoughtfully. “It went to a lot of effort to mask its presence in Jotunheim by firing the radio signal precisely as it crossed the Sheron vector. It’s not risking leaving a jump wake that gives away it’s presence, location and destination. There’s every chance that when we find the thing, it might turn its weapons on us to preserve its anonymity.”

“If it has any.” Said Daniel.

“If it still even exists.” Mary pointed out. “3294 was twelve years ago. A lot can happen in twelve years.”

“We have faith you’ll get us out of any scrape intact.” Daniel laughed, slapping me on the back which slopped some of the coffee out of the mug and onto the table. I smeared it across the fake wooden surface with my sleeve, then wiped it up when Max threw a tea towel my way.

“Have you computed this anomaly’s velocity?” I asked Farseer.

“Just under one hundred thousand kilometers per second.”

“Whoa.” That was one third of the speed of light. “So this is a sightseeing mission?” I ventured. “I can only reach those sorts of speeds in supercruise, which means if it is a ship or a probe we won’t be able to board it because the Challenger will be in its supercruise bubble while the bogey is in regular interstellar space.”

“All we need you for is to find the damn thing, take some pictures, maybe see if there’s a way of initiating contact with it.” Max clarified. “For all we know it might be a Thargoid ship on a disinformation mission, in which case we just log it as a hoax, as you call it, and high wake out. Boarding it if it is man-made is something that can be dealt with at a later date. By our calculations it’ll be years before it reaches the star system that it is heading for, so we’ll have figured something out by then. As I said a while back, our objective here is to find Calvin’s archive. Perhaps the occupants of that ship can let us know where in hell on the Sarasvati they’ve been hidden.”

“When do we leave?”

“In the morning. Oh eight hundred do you?”

I glanced at my watch. It was only twenty-two hundred and a smidgeon so I could still get a good night’s sleep before we set off on a wild goose chase in interstellar space where nobody bothers to go anymore. I nodded and made my excuses. Nobody saw me out.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

I decided to walk back to the hangar bay rather than waste any money on a rapid transit capsule, seeing as my next few days would be spent unpaid. I let an app on my phone guide me down the endless maze of corridors, elevators, escalators and stairwells that made up the inside of a space station. Imagine a city where all the houses, businesses and apartment blocks were jammed tightly together and interlinked and that’s pretty much how the inside of a Coriolis starport is. A world of metals, plastics and fibreboard and all of it painted white, black or some shade of grey in between those two extremes, the only variation being the ducting and trunking that carried the power and utilities down colour coded pipes and channels for ease of maintenance.

The corridors and elevators were wide enough to allow both people and LaZButt carts to pass comfortably, but there were no windows facing out into space. Those were reserved for the privileged who could afford accommodation on the exterior of the hull. As you travelled deeper toward the centre of the space station things got more grimy and industrial, noisier and warmer.

People that you came across in the habitat sectors were generally friendly and approachable, but down amongst what spacefarers call the nitty gritty things were a little more tense and dangerous. There were places down there where bodies could be hidden and not found until there was nothing left but bones. Furtive glances mixed with open hostility near the axis as some sought to be left alone while others searched for prey to fleece or or murder. There were areas where even station security feared to tread and order was only maintained by the threat of venting entire sections out to hard vacuum if things got too out of hand, a measure normally reserved for dealing with fires, which was something all who lived in space feared – fire thrives on oxygen and there’s only so far you can run before you hit hard vacuum.

Although weapons weren’t allowed to be brought on board a starport - they had to be kept locked in ships at all times - that didn’t stop rudimentary armaments being manufactured from the wealth of materials that existed on space stations. It wasn’t unheard of for the unwary to be waylaid by gangs armed with knives, axes and spears fashioned from discarded construction materials, but here in the Deciat system it was rare that things went that way, which is why I was walking back to the hangars. Some systems you could get away with it, while in others a stroll through the down below was a Darwinian survival of the fittest contest.

The corridors eventually opened up to the commercial district, where the pubs, restaurants, stores and such were situated. Neon lights advertising tattoos and happy ending ‘massages’ blinked on and off as far as the eye could see through vape haze, the corridors populated by hawkers, drunks and various grades of prostitute. As tempting as the latter was after being teased into a moderate state of arousal by ‘Cathy’, I could do without waking up the following morning with my crotch on fire from some exotic STD so I kept my head down and shouldered my way past the propositions and the insults that came with ignoring the ladies and the fairies of the night.

Soon I reached the hangar deck and pressed my thumb against the RFID scanner mounted to the door frame of landing bay three six. The door unlocked with an electronic beep and the dull clunk of an electromagnetic catch releasing. I pushed hard against the rust stained door and was welcomed to the spacious hangar that held my Challenger with the squeal of long neglected hinges.

The ship’s nose faced me, looking like a squat, dark grey one-eyed frog. I clambered down the stairway to the hangar deck, using the handrail to keep my feet as close to the steps as possible in the low gravity, pulling myself downward, taking the steps four or five at a time. Using my phone, I commanded the door in the belly of the beast to open and launched myself up the narrow steps and into the air lock.

It didn’t take but a moment for the airlock to adjust to ship’s atmosphere and the access light went green. I smacked the big, red door open button with my palm. “Honey, I’m home.” I called, but the COVAS ignored me. Using embedded hand holds to stabilize my low gravity bounding through the lobby, I wound my way to the business class passenger compartment that doubled as my state room when I had no passengers aboard. I was down to my underwear and about to settle into some digital girl on girl action on the Vu-wall when my phone rang. It was she who calls herself Cathy. Casting my mind back to the briefing in the safe house, I couldn’t seem to recollect anybody calling her by name at all. I donned a threadbare dressing gown and cast the call into the Vu-wall

“Max gave me your number, Heathy.” She explained. “May I come aboard.”

“I’m Heathy now?”

“Your given name sucks. It’s a joke. Your parents were cruel.”

“Ouch.” I winced. “Talking about parents….Max?” I enquired, raising an eyebrow in scepticism.

“Hey, not my first choice as a father but what can you do?” she shrugged. “The story goes that him and my mom hooked up at a security conference on Achenar way back in the when.”

“And now you work for him?”

“Long story short, when my mom eventually managed to track him down to tap him up for years of missed child maintenance payments, he promised to get me a job when I was all grown up instead. I was a bit of a handful in my teens, according to my mother. And my teachers. And maybe some cops, too.” She added after a moment, “But I don’t see it. Anyway, I started out in admin and worked my way up to analysis and here I am, on a field op. Yay!” she cheered, throwing her hands up in the air in a mimic of celebration. “So, are you going to let me in your window?” She pressed.

“Pardon?” I blinked, confused. Anybody with half a brain knows that the windows don’t open on starships.

“For somebody whose name is steeped in the culture of ancient Earth’s popular literature, you seem to know very little about it.” She said, rolling her eyes. Then she broke into song, a screeching imitation of some singer who must have set people’s teeth on edge with the ear-piercing banshee wail that she proceeded to assault me with. “Heathcliff, it’s me – Cathy - I’ve come home. So coooo-ooo-oo-old, let me in your windo ooo-oo-oh.”

“I’ll be right down, so long as you shut up and hang up in that order.” I grimaced. The phone went dark and, thankfully, silent. I killed the Vu-wall before the blue movie progressed from the titillation of a shower scene to more lurid action in a bedroom, quickly dressed myself in an obviously sloppy manner and left the ship to let her in at the hangar’s pressure door. She gave me a beaming grin as she edged past me to stand at the guard rail of the steel stairway, gazing down at my ship and frowning. I noted she had a medium sized backpack slung across her shoulder. More interestingly, I noted that she had slipped into what looked like a figure hugging light blue cat suit of some sort, a little like the inner suit you squeeze into before putting on an EVA suit but in two parts – sleek leather pants and a zip up waist length jacket. Not being up with the latest in ladies’ fashions I’m not sure how to describe the outfit more accurately.

“Are you planning on moving in or something?” I asked her, gesturing at the backpack.

“Or something.” She smiled at me. “Do you really expect me to stay in the safe house while Max and Flossie are getting it on? Shuuddrrrr.” She said, emphasizing her revulsion at the prospect by giving her body a brief shake that drew my gaze down to bits that jiggled provocatively. “What’s she called?” Cathy enquired, nodding her head at the Challenger in a deft change of subject.

“It doesn’t have a name.” I told her, heavily emphasising the first word of that statement.

“Oh, Heathy, you are such a curmudgeonly stick in the mud.” She said, turning to face me. “I’m going to call her the grumpy toad.” She smiled.

“Grumpy toad?” I scowled, wondering what the hell a curmudgeon was.

“It’s either her or you.” She warned me sternly, glaring up at me. “Grumpy old toad.”

“Ah, whatever.” I sighed. In a couple of days she’d be gone and the Challenger would revert back to J-KR2. I had to admit the name she gave it did somewhat suit the Challenger, with its stubby fore wings and the bulky rear vectored thrust engines that looked like they were ready to launch a frog in a leap across a pond. Grumpy toad. I had to consciously suppress my lips from crinkling up into a lopsided hint of a smile.

“Permission to come aboard, commander?” She asked, snapping rigidly to attention and firing a sloppy salute my way. I couldn’t be certain, but I’m sure she placed a little inflection on the third word of that sentence with both her voice and her eyes.

I rolled my eyes and gave a half nod, gesturing down the stairway for her to go ahead. Instead she hopped up onto the guard rail, balanced there for a moment like a playful child who had lived in minimal gravity her entire life, then soared out into the hangar, landing gracefully just a few feet from the front left nose skid of the ship and dropping to one knee before glancing back over her shoulder with a beaming smile on her face as I made my way carefully down the stairwell and hopped in my usual ungainly manner across to where she waited. Smug show-off.

I followed her up the stairwell and into the airlock, which I had left on manual override so that it was an open tunnel into the starship. Once through to the lobby she shrugged off her backpack and let it float down to the deck. “Do you have anything to drink on board?”

“There’s a fully stocked mini-bar in the passenger compartment.”

“Cool. Which way?” She asked.

“Follow the blue line.” I told her, drawing her attention to multicoloured markers stuck to the wall. “Red goes to the flight deck, which you will find locked. Green leads to the galley. Yellow to the head and the shower stall, though there are also conveniences in the passenger bay.”

“Blue, blue, blue.” She murmured, dragging a finger along the wall as she sauntered out of the lobby and down the narrow passageway that led to the passenger compartment. The view of her shapely derriere in those tight fitting faux leather pants was mesmerising. Presently we arrived at the door to the room. She placed a finger on the touch pad and the door slid open with a quiet swishing noise. Lights embedded in the room’s ceiling automatically flickered to life, illuminating a spacious room containing a large double bed and a corner sofa, coffee table and a work desk.

“Nice passenger compartment. Business class?”

I nodded.

“Bed looks nice and comfy. Where are you going to sleep, Heathy?” She asked.

I almost told her that I had a fold down back in the comfort cabin just back from the flight deck, but instead said “On top.”

“It’s not a bunk bed.” She pointed out. “But I do like a man who knows what he wants.” she added with a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she turned to face me and began to pull at the zipper at the front of her jacket.




tbc

 

[The Golden Knight]

I like the bit of personality added this chapter. Also our protagonist has his priorities straight, down to his underwear with a racy feminine video (though not naming your ship is a bit of a no-no in pilot culture, as that shows apathy and/or a tiny ego). Also I sure wouldn't mind Cathy being real. XD She's no Amanda, but still...really cute and tough; I like that.

 

[wAsh67]

Why this character doesn't name ships is explained in Callsign J-KR novel 1

You have some catching up to do....

 

[The Golden Knight]

So this is a sequel? Hoo boy... XD You weren't kidding.

 

[wAsh67]

4



Witch Hunt
(Moving Pictures)​

“Jotunheim. We come in from behind the target.” Max insisted. “That way, if we’re approaching it faster than light, then its crew will have no idea we are on its tail until we drop below C, if it can even detect us in its baffles.” C, for clarity, is what spacefarers call the speed of light. For example, 2C is the shorthand for travelling at twice the speed of light.

“My way is better.” Cathy countered. “We approach from LTT-182 and place ourselves just off its projected path with silent running engaged and let it fly by while we gather sensor data and imagery.”

“We risk early detection and evasion that way.” Max argued. “We may never even get a glimpse of the thing before it’s gone.”

“With your way we guarantee detection when we slow to scan the bleedin’ target.” Cathy pointed out. “Once we do that, whatever they are will know we are onto them and may begin taking further steps at evading us which we may not be able to counter. With my way it’ll blow right past us like we don’t exist, unaware that it is being hunted down. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we’ll be able to plan our next steps accordingly.”

“So not Jotunheim, then?” I grinned, idly flicking between screens on the navigation terminal as Max leaned against the back of my seat, literally breathing down my neck. Cathy had called dibs on the co-pilot seat, but I knew it was only a matter of time before Max pulled rank and turfed her out into one of the fold-down jump seats in the lobby.

“As pilot, what’s your opinion?” Max asked me. A loaded question. Do I go against my boss or against my new girlfriend, if indeed that was what she was?

“Your way is technically the easiest.” I admitted to him. “And it doesn’t really expose us, as we’ll be in supercruise at that speed and able to see into regular space-time, while nothing in space-time can detect ships in supercruise. So long as we stay in a supercruise bubble we should in effect be invisible to it.”

“Traitor.” Cathy spat. I suddenly realised that I liked her better when she was calling me Heathcliff.

“The head on approach is more complicated.” I continued, understanding that I may have just blown my prospects of a repeat session in the sack with the girl. “It becomes a question of timing and trying to record an object flying past at one third of the speed of light. Any images we capture may be blurry, even if we record the intercept with the opticals running at their maximum frame rate outside of the slight optical distortion created by the supercruise field. And we have to hope that whatever it is doesn’t crash into us when it goes past. At that speed it’ll be an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb going off. Even if we had shields powered – which we won’t in silent running – we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You’re assuming whatever it is doesn’t have technologies capable of detecting space-time anomalies like supercruise bubbles.” Cathy persisted. “If it’s got Thargoid technologies, then it may be able to detect us even when we’re travelling in supercruise.”

“Why would it have Thargoid tech?” I turned to her and asked. “As far as I can tell from what you lot said last night, it’s trying to warn us that the bugs are returning, not to mention laying a trail of breadcrumbs supposedly leading us to information that should help in the fight against them, or am I missing something?”

“It could be Oresrian in origin, getting us to do their dirty work by pitting us against their Klaxian enemies. It’s how their minds work.” Cathy insisted. “Disinformation. You can’t trust the kcufers, they all have their own agendas and goals to pursue. Humanity is seen by both sides as meddlesome busy bodies, and while the Klaxians are content to ignore us, so long as we aren’t messing with their artifacts and alloys, the Oresrians will use humans as unwitting pawns, manipulating us into unnecessary conflicts to keep the bubble of humanity as a buffer between the Thargoid and their own domain in order to keep Raxxla from them.”

“Whoa,” I breathed, “Slow down. Raxxla?”

“Careful, Mary.” Max cautioned.

I blinked. Mary? Her real name was Mary? I had to bite my lip to stifle a laugh. I had reckoned her real name would be something exotic or contemporary like Chantelle, Aria or Xantha, not a frumpy name that goes back to biblical times, as in The Virgin Mary, who was somebody that Cathy had last night demonstrated to me she sure as hell had absolutely nothing in common with. Mary?

“Raxxla doesn’t exist.” Farseer snorted dismissively. “I have been analysing cartographic data for decades looking for it, sifting through gigabyte upon gigabyte of scanner readings looking for clues that might have slipped through the cracks, and I never even got a sniff. Raxxla and the Dark Wheel station are locations that all explorers are on the lookout for – they are right at the top of our bucket list of things to find before we die – and every time we eliminate another possibility we become more and more certain that both are nothing more than myths, legends and fictions. Hoaxes, as you call them, Joe.”

“A tiny percentage of our galaxy has been accurately mapped, even less thoroughly explored.” Mary/Cathy fired back. “I’ve accessed Alliance records going back more than a hundred years and the name crops up repeatedly, usually in association with past Alliance interactions with the Oresrians. Raxxla exists. We know…”

“Enough.” Max snapped sternly, cutting her off. “Joe, you’re flying. Your call.”

“Frankly,” I began carefully, addressing Max. “I don’t see how we can use anything other than Mary’s method,” I shot her a sidelong glance. “We just don’t have the fuel for a supercruise stern chase across those kinds of distances.” I offered. I didn’t particularly think Mary’s idea was sound, either. Once we came out of supercruise, our presence would be broadcast at the speed of light. Any optical sensor would pick up the pulse of light that emanates from a ship when it enters or leaves supercruise, and the ship would be visible on the visual spectrum, electromagnetically, and on infra-red, even when stationary. Silent running isn’t as silent as laypeople think it to be, and it certainly doesn’t make ships invisible. Either of the mooted approaches could give the game away, but to my mind, Max’s stern chase in supercruise was the better option stealth-wise, particularly if our quarry was a human built ship and thus not equipped with theoretical alien tech like supercruise bubble detectors. Max and I, as combat experienced pilots, understood this and I could tell from the narrowing of Max’s eyes that he felt I was letting my temporary infatuation with his daughter cloud my judgement. The only way Mary’s approach would be the correct one was if the ship was an advanced Oresrian or Klaxian vessel.

Unfortunately the only way Max’s method would work was if we were in a bigger ship with a fuel tank at least double the size of the one fitted to the Challenger. If we tried chasing the target from Jotunheim to LTT-182 in supercruise while scanning for it, then at our top speed of 2000C we’d be out of fuel in no time at all. In the twelve years that had passed since the signal had been processed by the listening post in Jotunheim, a ship travelling at one third of the speed of light would have travelled somewhere in the region of four light years, which was beyond the Challenger’s fuel range at maximum supercruise. Coming from the destination meant burning half the fuel we’d expend if we came at it from Jotunheim. That was do-able, but only just.

“I’ll plot us an intercept that’ll put us in the vicinity.” said Farseer, seemingly agreeing with me. I could see Max visibly deflate at her words.

“LTT-182 it is, then. Punch it in, Joe.” He said reluctantly. We’d have words about this later, I knew.

“Roger that, boss.” I acknowledged, risking a sidelong glance at ‘Mary’ in the co-pilot’s seat. She seemed to be chewing at her lower lip, staring straight ahead at the hangar’s front wall as the Challenger’s engines warmed up. “Strap in or hold onto something, ladies and gentlemen.” I called across the ship’s intercom. “We will be ascending to the docking bay in under a minute.” I buckled up my own harnesses while Max and Farseer retreated out of the flight deck to the lobby where flip down seats complete with five-point safety belts were fitted to the bulkheads.

“You ok, Mary?” I asked once the flight deck was clear. “You did get your way in the end.” I pointed out.

She exhaled loudly, a noise not unlike a fart passing her lips as she expressed her frustration. “You think Max is right.” She said bluntly. “I didn’t need your charity.”

“Tactically, assuming whatever we are hunting is not able to locate a ship in supercruise, his way is the logical way to go.” I admitted, not really subscribing to what I was about to add. “And it wasn’t charity. We don’t know what it is we’re after – human or ‘goid - so it makes sense to plan for contingencies, as you said. But what sealed the deal was that we can’t do a supercruise chase of four years in this ship because we don’t carry enough fuel. We do carry enough to jump to the target’s predicted arrival star and then track back down it’s predicted trajectory until we meet it. That’s not much more than two light years.” I had a feeling Max would come to me at some time in the journey and, if we had the fuel, recommend we abandon Mary’s ‘let it come to us and wait’ in favour of remaining in supercruise and looping back into a stern chase once we tracked it going past our position, which would have been my preferred approach. However, if I had mentioned that then I’d have ended up ssiping both of them off, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

Submitting a request for departure clearance, I entered the destination star into the navigation computer. Presently the hangar elevator ascended to the floor of the docking bay. Blast deflectors rose into place around the Challenger, then the magnetic docking clamps released with a dull thud. Mary sat there silent, stewing in whatever ire she was storing up for later, arms folded tight across her chest. My concentration was on the landing pads around the Challenger, or should I say ‘Grumpy Toad’. I glanced at the scanner, noting the contacts that were moving and anticipating their flight paths, both inbound and outbound. When the way was clear to the starport’s gateway, also known as the mail slot, I lifted off the pad, turned toward the channel and accelerated up to seventy metres per second.

“So, what’s Raxxla, other than a dive bar at Kirk Landing on Goldstein’s Rock in Epsilon Eridani?” I asked, more to break the silence than out of interest. I had picked up snippets of chat during my years in space that mentioned Raxxla. It was the space equivalent of Atlantis. There were many hypotheses pertaining to it, but theories were all they were. Nobody knew for certain where or even what it was, but everybody had their own pet theory on the subject, ranging from it being a gateway accessing alternate universes to merely a state of mental enlightenment. It was often said that anybody engaging in the search for Raxxla would be better served trying their hand at milking unicorns. I wasn’t searching for enlightenment or looking for parallel universes. I had my hands full just trying to eke out a living and staying alive in this one.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

“Raxxla is the holy grail of space exploration.” Mary sighed. “There are some subjects that all Alliance Intelligence personnel and associates are instructed to report back on, whatever their primary mission happens to be. If any information is turned up on these back-burner objectives, then that data is uploaded to Central Command, which is where I come in.”

This was news to me. I was contracted to Alliance Intel and I’d not been tasked with reporting back rumours that I might have heard about ancient mysteries, but I was just a pilot.

“My job is to filter the incoming data packets, compartmentalise them for the relevant departments and archive them in the most appropriate folders on the central database, putting electronic security flags on the files so that researchers and analysts can access them based on their clearances.” Mary continued. “Obviously, I get to see all that stuff while I’m segregating and cataloguing the data. I am in a unique position to build up an overall picture and flag anything that looks like it might alter the big picture to Command for further investigation.”

“So Raxxla is on this list?”

“Raxxla, The Dark Wheel, Soontill, Salome, The Club, Black Flight, Project Dynasty and the Formidine Rift, basically anything mysterious or not fully understood. We call them background objectives.”

“That sounds like quite a wide remit.” I commented. “So I guess this means that you’re an unexplained phenomena analyst of some sort, like that Scully bird in the X-Files?”

“Wow,” Mary exclaimed, raising both eyebrows in an expression of surprise and turning to face me as the ship rumbled with its passing through the station’s access corridor. “So, you do know some of old Earth’s classical culture after all. No, I’m more administrative, though in some cases I do take on an investigative role, such as where this tasking is concerned. The analysts take the data that I flag up to them based on the subject matter. My primary role is to prevent irrelevant or highly classified information from distracting them. I don’t do field ops, and I don’t generate taskings. Those are above my pay grade.”

“So why are you here, out on a field op? Or did I not get the memo that it’s take your kids to work day?”

“Har, har.” She drawled, rolling her eyes and giving me the finger. “I asked for this assignment because the Sarasvati and all the various communications surrounding it raised too many unanswered questions about too many mysteries. Calvin’s disappearance and the whereabouts of his fabled archive, Cassandra Lockhart, the deaths of Julian and Isobel Lyons, Project Thunderchild, Gail, Unit Zero One, Equinox…. If I can get to grips with what links all these mysteries together, then perhaps something will come to light that helps us in the fight against the Thargoids.”

I nodded slowly as I carefully banked the Grumpy Toad onto a vector that would lead us towards the first waypoint on our journey to LTT-182, slowly rolling the ship in an upward trajectory that would create an artificial gravity focused on the floor as that was always the most comfortable for passengers to handle and less likely to generate clouds of vomit. I put my finger on the ship’s intercom and pushed the button. “Ladies, gentlemen, we have cleared the starport’s mass lock. Please remain seated and harnessed until further notification, we will be making our first jump to hyperspace in a few moments. Thank you.”

“You almost sounded like a proper pilot, then.” Mary smirked.

“The more I practice, the more it appears like I know what I’m doing.” I deadpanned. “Hopefully one day I’ll be able to walk the walk as well as just talk the talk.”

Slowly, I ramped up the speed with the throttle, keeping the acceleration at just over a tolerable and not unpleasant two G until our forward velocity maxed out. I bumped the jump handle with the heel of my hand and the countdown began.

“Frame Shift Drive Charging

Five

Four

Three

Two

One

Engage”

The universe slipped away, replaced by the mysteries of hyperspace. The starfield expanded into a blur of brilliant white and blue lines for a few moments, before yielding to the random colourful shapes of accelerated particles washing around the bubble outside of space-time that the frame shift drive created to carry the Challenger from star A to star B in, literally, a matter of seconds. What I was seeing didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand why the starfield transformed into a blur of white and blue in the opening phase of the jump, nor did I understand what the pretty colours and shapes were. Physicists went to great lengths to explain what was happening in both phases of the jump but to me it was gobbledygook. Subspace particles exploding into their constituent atoms as the bubble ripped through the space in between jump and emergence made as much sense to me as the pineapple being named thus when it ain’t made of pine and there ain’t no apples in the damn thing. After a while you stop thinking about it and instead get on with preparing for emergence.

It didn’t take long to travel the 160 light years, even factoring in refuelling at main sequence stars. We arrived at LTT-182 to find it a barren system, just a single star – no planets, no asteroid belt, nothing at all - and paused for a few minutes to top up the fuel tank from the fringes of the star’s corona. Farseer transferred a dog-leg course from her datapad and onto the navigation computer and I headed for the first waypoint. Two minutes later I brought the ship to a full stop at the approximate position Farseer calculated a ship would arrive at if it was travelling from Jotunheim – more precisely her best guess of the mysterious object’s trajectory - then I turned to the correct heading for the next waypoint – Jotunheim itself - and accelerated past the speed of light.

“My calculations take into account the last known course of the object and its speed.” Farseer explained. “Jotunheim is six light years from here. If we drop out of supercruise after two light years, or nought point six one parsecs if you prefer, and take a passive scan we should be in the region to detect it.”

“Why would a ship travel from Jotunheim to LTT-182 at one third of the speed of light?” I asked.

“More to the point,” Mary added, “Why LTT-182 anyway? There’s kcuf all here.”

“Except a main sequence refuelling star.” I offered before anybody else could point out the glaringly obvious.

“Perhaps it can’t FTL.” Max hypothesised. “Maybe it’s drive has malfunctioned or it doesn’t have the fuel for a six light year jump.”

“If all it needs is fuel, then there are a few stars closer to Jotunheim than this one that show on the charts as main sequence.” I noted, running my finger down the list of scoop-suitable stars that were closer to Jotunheim than LTT-182 was. “Why not go to any one of those rather than spend more than a decade travelling here?”

“Secrecy.” Farseer stated. “It’s still trying to hide.”

Mary nodded agreement. “Coming here makes sense given its apparent predilection to conceal itself. There’s nothing here, no reason for anybody to stop for any longer than it would take for their FSD to recharge. Pulling up at a busy star in a colonised system just wouldn’t fit its modus operandi.” She rationalised. “I’m off to the passenger compartment for a nap. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Coming, Joe?”

I glanced at Max, who scowled and motioned for me to get out of the pilot’s seat. “Watch the fuel gauge.” I told him. “I’m not sure how far we can travel in supercruise on this tank. Don’t let it drop below the point that we can’t jump out to the closest main sequence star or a star system with a fuel stop.”

What we were doing here was something that pilots didn’t normally have to concern themselves with. Burning fuel making multi light year jumps took large gulps of fuel that disappeared in moments but travelling in supercruise burned fuel constantly at a rate in the region of one and a half to two tons per hour, depending on class of starship and its efficiency. I could travel almost two hundred light years in the Challenger on one tank of fuel by making a sequence of small, fuel-economical hyperspace jumps, but using the FSD to travel across interstellar space would probably empty the sixteen-tonne tank before we’d gone even three light years. It wasn’t so much the distance travelled that sucked the fuel tank dry, but the time spent burning it in the frame shift drive’s catalysers.

“According to the pilot’s handbook there should be an audible warning when the tank drops below a quarter full, but I’ve never let it run that low to test it.” I admitted.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” Max sighed impatiently. “Just set your alarm for four hours from now and if there’s any fuel left you can have the stick back.” He told me, turning to face Farseer who he winked lewdly at. “Then it’s our turn, Floss.”

Mary pulled a face behind them, pretending to stick two fingers down her throat and gag.

* * *




​

tbc

 

[wAsh67]

“So, Raxxla?” I asked her before either of us dropped off to sleep. Her bare thigh was draped across mine, the warmth of her mound almost burning against my leg, a damp, sticky heat both a little uncomfortable yet at the same time not in the least unpleasant. An oversized quilt was draped over us, its edges trimmed with permanent magnets that stuck it to the deck of the compartment through the thin carpet, holding us down against the bed and preventing us from floating off the mattress in zero g. It wasn’t an ideal solution to sleeping in the absence of gravity, but it was cheap, effective and you didn’t wake up in the morning to find your face pressed against a hot conduit and suffering livid third degree burns.

She sighed in what I hoped was contentment after our exertions, threw an arm across my chest and pulled me a little closer. “Raxxla,” she murmured. “Why is it always Raxxla that people want to know about? Why not The Dark Wheel or the Club? At least they can be explained to some degree. With Raxxla you might as well ask me to describe what heaven is like. Or hell. Nobody knows.”

“Yet everybody has a theory. Max yanked pretty hard on your chain when you were about to go into greater detail back on the flight deck just before we left Garay’s.” I reminded her. “He ain’t here now, so spill.”

“Scholars have studied the myth around the word ‘Raxxla’ since ships mechanic Art Tornqvist mentioned it in passing over a thousand years ago in his personal journals, in the same breath as pirate treasure.” Mary whispered after a few moments probably contemplating how much trouble she might get in with her father. “Nobody thought much of it for centuries. The word Raxxla was spoken in the same tones as Shangri-La, Xanadu and Atlantis. Then a historian named Robert Holdstock brought it back to the attention of the public with his biography of Alex Ryder.”

“Remember Raxxla.” I hissed dramatically. Holdstock’s ‘The Dark Wheel’ was mandatory reading for any pilot and had been dramatized on vid by more or less every cinematic director worthy of the name, a cautionary tale of the dangers that await anybody who ventures out into the black whilst simultaneously a romantic glimpse into the life of a starship commander and the potential for riches and glory that await the bold and the brave.

“Aye. Remember Raxxla. Never before in history have two words been the cause of so much wasted time.” She laughed. “Later in his works he calls it ‘the mythical planet Raxxla’ and describes it as a gateway to other universes. Jason Ryder, Alex’s father, was allegedly a member of The Dark Wheel organisation, and was killed on the eve of mounting a serious expedition to locate the planet after claiming that he’d found solid evidence for the existence of Raxxla. It’s commonly accepted that he was assassinated to keep Raxxla a secret known only to members of what we call ‘The Club’.”

“The Club?”

“We know a little more about The Club than we do Raxxla, but not by much. It’s a collection of powerful people steering the course of human progress for their own profit, or so it is claimed.” She yawned. “One of Holdstock’s contemporaries, an investigative journalist by the name of Wagar, tried to blow the lid off The Club and their activities, but his writings were suppressed, written off as the raving fictions of a conspiracy theorist, and generally disregarded other than by obsessive conspiracy theorists, which suits The Club and their homicidal need to remain mankind’s anonymous puppet masters just fine.”

“So, getting back to Raxxla?” I nudged her before she could succumb to the urge to drift off into sleep after the under the quilt, on top of the quilt and even at one stage half across the floor exertions

“All we really know of Raxxla is that it’s a sibilant word spoken by two people separated by over eight hundred years. Anything else – what it is, where it is, what it does – is purely conjecture. Which may be why the subject draws the attention of so many fruitcakes. It can be whatever one imagines it to be.” She said, beginning to wake up again. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t know what the picture you’re trying to make is.” She tried to explain. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what a jigsaw puzzle was other than an archaic turn of phrase used to describe an unsolved mystery, but I didn’t interrupt her for further clarification. “There’s lots of individual pieces, some of which can be connected, but some of them are just bits of colourful board that you aren’t sure even fit into the picture. I collect and collate the puzzle pieces for Alliance Intel and because I get a glimpse of everything that gets submitted by our operatives, I can make a guess as to what it might be that stands a better chance of being more accurate than anybody else’s best guess.”

“So what do you think it is?”

“My personal belief is that Raxxla is a Witch Space portal to Andromeda or perhaps another nearby galaxy, opened up by the Thargoids - or maybe even an unknown race - long ago to bridge the gap between their galaxy and ours, but nowadays closed off to them and guarded by Oresrians. The Thargoids are keenly aware of its existence, but don’t know its precise location, although it is widely believed that it is somewhere within humanity’s bubble. This is one of the reasons why they keep making incursions into our space. Meta-alloy plantations seeded throughout the galaxy and given time to mature is another, of course. Our colonised bubble has grown to encompass not only their blossoming meta-alloy fields, but also Raxxla itself.”

Andromeda, for those who don’t know, is a large spiral galaxy near to our own Milky Way, relatively speaking - about two and a half million light years distant. Andromeda is destined to one day (about four billion years in the future) collide with and merge with ours to create a supergalaxy that will be known as, you guessed it, The Milkomeda. “So if this Raxxla planet is in the bubble, how come we haven’t already found it?” I wondered.

“Before the jump drive, mankind had to travel through space in generation ships that took years to travel from star to star.” Mary explained, becoming more and more animated as she spoke. “Back then the bubble was just a handful of habitable worlds. Then the first hyperspace drives were invented and the bubble grew exponentially, which led to the discovery of alien life and triggered the first Thargoid war. Shortly after the end of that war, GalCop disintegrated and the formula for the fuel that powered hyperdrives was supposedly lost with it, so the bubble’s rapid expansion once again slowed to a crawl for about a century. Exploration looked inward, rather than outward, as exploring outside of the bubble became untenable – trips to distant stars took months and often led to stardreamer sickness.” More on that later, dear reader. “Then, out of nowhere, came the creation of the Frame Shift Drive – based on reverse engineered Thargoid technology - and galactic expansion once again began to be focused away from the bubble and out to distant regions of unexplored space.”

“Consider this,” she persisted. “Since the FSD was developed, mankind has dispersed significantly, scattered to the four winds by the ease and relative safety of long distance interstellar travel. Tourists are now able to visit the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy with negligible risk to themselves and daredevil pilots compete to be the furthest to travel out into the empty space outside the Milky Way. We, as a species, are more divided and weakened than we have ever been since we broke the bonds that tied us to Earth and Mars.”

“What are you saying?” I turned to face her. “That the Thargoids allowed us to capture a functioning vessel so that we could create a device that spreads us out more thinly and makes us easier to conquer?”

“Why is that so difficult to get your head around?” She asked. “Think about it. They backed off for over a century to lick their wounds after INRA hit them with the Mycoid bacterium. This has given them the time to develop technologies to counter our military capabilities and given us time to get the FSD reverse engineered and operational. A decade or two later we’ve scattered our starships right across the Milky Way.

“Nobody looks inward to the less than one tenth of a percent of the galaxy that humanity’s bubble encompasses when there is ninety-nine-point nine percent of the galaxy still uncharted.” She continued. “Who explores the eight million square light year region of space and seventy thousand star systems inside the bubble any more? Humanity has expanded deep into the Pleiades and out to Colonia, which is twenty thousand light years from the bubble, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the unexplored ninety nine percent of a galaxy that contains another four hundred million stars. With all that uncharted space, littered with habitable planets and valuable resources that have not yet been exploited, why do the Thargoids keep coming back to this region out on a remote spiral arm where star density is relatively low, where they have already had their asses handed to them by both humans and the Guardian race before us? Why, if not for something that is important to them, important enough to risk death for?” Mary demanded. “There must be something in our itty-bitty bubble that they want badly enough to keep coming back for.”

“And you believe it’s Raxxla rather than meta-alloys.” I finished for her. She had a point. Meta alloys thrive in young nebulae where chemical density was high, not in regular space, and there weren't any of those in the bubble if you discounted the Pleiades and Witch Head nebulae being a part of that bubble.

“I believe the Thargoids - Oresrians, Klaxians, whatever you want to call them - came from Andromeda originally as explorers, using Raxxla as the conduit, and were trapped here for reasons we still haven’t figured out. There have been rumours of some sort of civil war between them, but that is again uncorroborated hearsay. The race of Thargoids that humanity defeated has grown in strength and numbers in the one hundred and fifty years since they were driven out of human space and are ready to fight their way back home, but we now stand in their way and the opposing race are using humans as a buffer zone to keep them away from the Milky Way’s side of that inter-galactic conduit.”

“So where is this mythical place?”

Mary laughed out loud. “C’mon, Joe, a girl’s gotta have some secrets.” She told me, digging me in the ribs with an elbow. “A slap up dinner and a couple of middling orgasms ain’t going to buy you my theories on where Raxxla lies. I may be easy, but I sure ain’t cheap.” She grinned. “I need to get some sleep. Max said he’d wake us up in four hours, and I would guess that after this chat and the sex we had before it that we’ve only got about three hours and fifty-five minutes of that idle time left.”

“Cheeky cow.” I laughed as she snuggled back in to my side. Middling orgasms? I lay awake for a while, thinking about her hypothesis. I knew that very little of what she had just told me was fact and was instead almost entirely supposition, that much of it was just her interpretation of what was going on based on the data that she was given. She could be right about some of it, but more likely – just like every other Raxxla hunter that ever was – she was probably completely wrong about a great deal of it.

I had done some basic research of my own regarding Thargoids under the principle of knowing one’s enemy and I knew that the word Thargoid was a term created by the human media to more easily describe the species. I was well aware that there were two opposing factions. Supposedly the Alliance had made contact with at least one individual of the Oresrian faction long ago, so some of Mary’s information would have come from historical records of those interactions. Whether the Oresrian delegate lied to make them look like the friendly, benevolent faction was open to speculation. What wasn’t open to argument was the fact that a Thargoid had never been seen in combat against another Thargoid. Whatever race we were fighting against was only concerned with sweeping humanity aside.

It was also widely rumoured that the Alliance had indeed obtained captured Thargoid ships from what they had been able to salvage, blag and steal from the collapse of the Galactic Cooperative and from those examples had managed to prototype a working frame shift drive in the late 33rd century by reverse engineering them. Rather than using this breakthrough to become the pre-eminent superpower, over and above the Federation and Empire who lacked FSD capability, instead the designs and prototypes disappeared from AIS laboratories and workshops and somehow found their way into the hands of the Sirius Corporation, who quickly established a monopoly on the technology that exists to this day.

Sirius conduct their business under a policy that makes their products available to whoever wants them, so long as they can afford them – an approach widely acknowledged as having prevented an intergalactic war for control over the technology. Was this down to ‘The Club’, as Mary called them, manipulating the trajectory of humanity’s progress? And if so, were they really a malevolent organisation, given the billions of lives that would have been lost, the decades of destruction and the hundreds of poisoned worlds that might have resulted had the Alliance themselves monopolised the invention? If there had been an intergalactic war over the licensing of the drive, then the Thargoids would surely have found a mankind weakened by years of internal conflict a total pushover? Perhaps ‘The Club’ were only concerned with saving mankind from themselves, and if that was so, and they had indeed been behind the assassination of Jason Ryder in order to keep the location of Raxxla a secret, then maybe the whole Raxxla mystery was something that we shouldn’t be meddling with in the first place.

The only thing that I had gotten from all this pillow talk was the certainty that we still had no real clue about what Raxxla was and no idea what the Thargoids were really after. It wasn’t the extinction of mankind, or they would be bombarding colonised planets from space with asteroids. I doubted it was an internal civil war as there has never been a report in recorded history of a Thargoid on Thargoid fight to the death. A desire to return home to Andromeda was as believable a goal as any, and using Raxxla as the device to make that theory believable was reasonable conjecture. That was the one thing Raxxla was good at – being anything that you want it to be, so long as you could plausibly jam it into whatever hypothesis you were promoting.

I rolled over, extricating myself from her arms as she snored contentedly beside me – well, presumably contentedly given her orgasms had been merely ‘middling’ – but sleep remained elusive. I couldn’t help the feeling that what we were doing was unwittingly going against the deliberate machinations and carefully plotted schemes of this ‘Club’, and that by doing so we were going to be causing big problems for somebody somewhere along the line. Hopefully that would not be by placing the future of humanity in jeopardy. While by no means an advocate of ‘The Club’, I didn’t want to be fighting against them when something in the back of my mind was telling me that they might not be the real danger here. Okay, they may have murdered Jason Ryder just before his Raxxla hunting expedition, but I couldn’t erase from my mind the suspicion that they may have had an overwhelmingly compelling reason to do so.

* * *




​

tbc