Rin was in the zone. Strapped into one of the twin pilot seats on the bridge she flipped switches, looking through diagnostics, route plans, flight maneuver lists and timings. On, and on, and on.
Zag knew better than to disturb her by checking in. He decided to be useful instead. He activated his throat-comm. “Thirty seconds till we’re in the shadow. Damien, ready with the transponder drop?”
Strapped to his flight seat in the engine room, Damien must have heard the transmission.A green light blinked to life on the ready-board indicators built into the bridge screen, and Damien’s voice rang out over the comm, “Ay-firm, Flavus-Actual,”. The militaristic, sing-song cadence of the remark was flattened by the static of the radio. “We’ll be on time.”
Zag smiled. The engineer was reliable; if a little rigid. He continued, “Hads? Are you strapped in and prepped?”
Another green light blipped on the bridge screen. Then Zag’s smile died on his lips as the light dimmed back to lambent amber.
“Hadrial, report.” Zag insisted into his intercom. Hedesperately flipped through CCTV feeds on the main screen, trying to find the communications annex, if he could just-
The light flicked back to green.
She’s messing with me, he realized. He shook his head ruefully and sighed.
“Alright guys let's do this. Damien, start us off.”
Without reply there was a sudden thud, and a momentary jolt as a mass ejected from the port side of the ship. The decoy beacon had been dropped.
The curve of the asteroid grew large in the main view-screen as the celestial body interspersed itself between the Flavus and Jupiter. As direct line of sight back to their home port was lost, Zag reached up and switched off the main transponder. On the main console a prerecorded message began to play. The sound of his own voice came loud over the speakers. The message was beaming straight back to the control room on Jupiter, direct from their dropped beacon.
Jove control be advised, this is Flavus. We’ve run into some software issues. We’re going to full stop and troubleshoot. Will advise if further assistance is required.
Zag clicked the throat-comm again, “Decoy beacon is transmitting, we’re in the shadow and main-transponder is offline. Prepare for maneuver.” Before Zag could even turn to look at Rin in the main pilot seat, he was forced back by the sudden, violent thrust of their main drive.
The ship shuddered and creaked as Rin throttled the space-frame to within an inch of its tolerance limits. With the opaque visor of her black pilot's helmet down, Zag could read nothing of her expression. He knew she would be smiling. For Rin, piloting a ship was the only worthwhile thing in the world.
Zag groaned in his seat. Despite himself and the efforts of his G-Resistant flight suit, he was losing consciousness. The grayness was closing his vision to pin-point, and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He desperately tried to force another breath and couldn’t. Darkness overwhelmed him. When he regained consciousness, red-emergency lighting filled the cabin.
It was Rin’s voice on the comm now, “Maneuvers are done for now. I’ve scaled us back to life support power only. I’ve also put us into a light tumble, so don’t unstrap unless you want to get close and personal with the wall.”
Zag was breathing hard, his vision returning rapidly to normal. It never ceased to amaze him how casual Rin could be.She spoke as though she’d just put in an order for a round of beers, not piloted a hard burn through a dense asteroid field.
She noticed his gaze, and tilted her head questioningly.
He recovered, “So we’re on course then?”
“Oh sorry, yes we’re on course. It’s a thirteen hour tumble, but we should be in the right place to intercept. A little thruster adjustment on the way but no main engine.”
“Good flying Rin,” Zag continued. “Everyone strap in and keep eyes on passive sensors, no-one should be able to tell us from a rock powered down like this, but it always pays to be careful.”
Now the waiting, Zag mused. Behind him, Rin had begun flipping switches again.
The wait was interminable.
In truth it was a small wait compared to what one could encounter traveling in space, but the claustrophobia of being strapped down for long periods in a windowless room always got to Zag.
He looked up at the main-screen display and checked the countdown. Five minutes remaining. The course plotter showed their circuitous route as a long thin strand of fiber. The long voyage out from the Jovian stations, then the hard burn and tumble. At this point the thread split into two. The blue thread continued its stately course to Luna, where Zag had been contracted to collect a consignment of vintage liquors for transport back to the Federations Jupiter headquarters.
The red thread; the one they were currently following, took them out to starboard at about ten degrees. There was a red blip ahead of them on the route tracking, and they were fast approaching. Its marking simply read: ‘Intercept’.
The point had been precisely and painstakingly chosen. When the countdown reached zero, that marker would be the exact midpoint between the martian moon Deimos, and a particular station on Europa.
Zag desperately hoped the client's information was good. He had been adamant that the transmission would come from the high-gain tight-beam relay on Deimos, and that it was for the ears of the Shipbuilders Guild on Europa. If any of that information was wrong, or even mildly inaccurate, this would be a colossal waste of time. That’s not even to mention if the client was wrong about when the data would be sent.
“This is it guys. Rin, make sure we’re good on timing and make any final adjustments. Hads, final antenna alignments please, full spectrum record.”
Rin was checking and rechecking the plotted flight path, checking attitude, velocity and most importantly timing. She made some small adjustments to the yoke, and Zag felt a small weight come off his chest as the ship stopped tumbling. Rin lifted her hands off the control yokes and looked over at Zag. “All up to Hads now.”
Up in the comms annex, Zag knew Hads would be making the final antenna adjustments, and plugging in to her station. She’d be hard at work once the intercept came through. On the main screen they drifted directly towards the Intersect. Zag clenched his teeth as the last seconds counted down. They approached the intersection point. The countdown timer on the main screen of the bridge read zero.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
For three heartbeats there was no noise on the bridge. Zag subconsciously held his breath.
The silence was broken by the chime of the crew-comm channel, and Hads spoke her first words of the voyage.
“Got it.”
Zag breathed a heavy breath and held his face in his hands. Across the bridge console Rin slipped her helmet off over her head, and began to rub at her temples, the tension and focus of the mission taking its toll as the pressure relaxed. The tension was broken, and was replaced with the almost reverent silence of relief.
And then Damien was on the intercom, his feverish need to talk bursting forth from under the containment of his waning stress.
“Holy flipping hell that was perfect. Did we get it all? Rin what a flight! Bloody girl can fly I tell you what! Do we know what the data is? And Hads-”
Zag muted the channel on his personal headset, and looked over at Rin.
“How long till we’re back on our registered flight plan?”
She was letting down her auburn hair, which she had pinned up to fit in the neck seal of her helmet.
“Twenty hours or so, we’ll be concealed by another large enough asteroid in a few hours, and we can course adjust back to our beacon there. I’ll be slowing us with thrusters till then, and then a hard burn and drift, as before.”
Zag’s head was still in his hands, but he nodded in reply. These missions always wore on his nerves. Hijacking signals was a lucrative way to make money, but there were downsides. The waiting and the stress were the obvious two, but there was also the ever present risk of discovery and criminal conviction. Unauthorized intercept was a grade 2 felony, and Zag had little desire to wind up on a penal moon somewhere. Add that to the fact that deviating from your registered flight plan was a great way to draw attention to yourself and you’ll see why it wasn’t a popular pastime.
As far as Zag knew, no-one else in the system provided the service.
Over the crew-comm channel Zag gave out the last few instructions, “Alright, Rin get us back on course as quietly as you can. Make sure to thank Jove control for their patience. I’m going to get some sleep so you’ll be on solo.”
She didn’t respond, she just gave a comically overdone salute from across the bridge.
“And Hads, the second you have that signal decrypted, encode it with our personal encryption and fire it off to our wealthy benefactor. He can have the codes when he pays for services rendered.”
A ping acknowledgement from Hads lit up on the center console.
“Any questions definitely don’t wake me up.”
Zag pulled his helmet from its cache under his seat, turned the opaqueness to one-hundred percent, and closed his eyes.
Sleep enveloped him easily.
They had resumed their trip, picked up their consignment at Luna, and returned to Jupiter without incident.
At Minerva station the reception was as professional as it got.
The lead drones came out to meet them, and Rin took the Flavus in, following their guidelights down the approach that ran down the hollow center of the cylindrical station. . Besides them, ships were thick as flies, each following their own guidance drones towards the gargantuan entry hangars of the station.
Their guide turned them slowly towards a hangar, one of the largest, reserved for business of the Jovian merchant guild. A blue-green opaque oxygen membrane flickered over the enormous entrance to the hangar, and Rin set them into a gentle burn to match the rotating velocity of the hangar, and to keep them just short of the field. From within the hangar itself, a robust armature of articulated metal emerged, and attached itself to the keel of the Flavus, by means of multiple hardpoints along the ship's spine.
Rin drew the throttle back to its zero point and flipped the main drive’s kill-switch. They were now officially docked. The armature gently drew them in through the atmosphere membrane and locked the ship into its designated honeycomb-shaped descent tunnel. These tunnels ran the length of the station, connecting the inner surface of the spinning ring to the outer surface. A ship would slowly descend to the outer levels of the station, so that a departing ship could simply uncouple, and use the rotational velocity of the station itself to assist their departure. This system had the additional benefit of preventing potential collisions between incoming and departing ships.
There was a distinct clack as the armature released the Flavus, and they were deposited onto the platform of the ship elevator.
The internship comm pinged,and the sigil of the Federation Customs Association displayed proudly on Zag’s console.
Zag flipped the switch to accept the call.
The customs officer was a middle aged man, attired in the sober gray suit of his office. His badge was displayed chained around his neck, showing his registration number and rank; inspector first class.
“Flavus please transmit cargo and crew manifest. Any passengers?”
Zag typed his command key into the keyboard of his console. “Sending cargo and crew manifest now, no passengers. Transporting a consignment of high-value circuit boards on behalf of the Luna Miners Guild.”
The customs broker looked away from his camera, clearly consulting a second monitor.
Zag knew he was checking all his relevant data. They were being weighed whilst transiting to their dock, and the officer would have access to their weight recorded at last departure, their crew record and flight plans.
The customs officer turned back to the comm-screen.
“Ran into an issue along the way it seems? Thirty-Three hour unplanned stoppage?”
Zag nodded, “Our navigation system keeled over on us, we had to spend the better part of a day restoring the entire system, and another day getting it calibrated again. I’m going to have to get a specialist to look at it while we’re docked up.”
“Uh-huh,” was the only response the gray suited bureaucrat offered. “You’re cleared. Enjoy your stay at Minerva station.”
“Thank you very mu-”
The link closed unceremoniously.
Zag had never had much time for the Federation’s army of soulless bureaucracy. The only redeeming factor he could find in the system was that it was so woefully unreliable, it was easy to circumvent. He knew one day the Federation would tighten its stranglehold, but for now he was content enough to slip through the cracks where he could.
There was a soft thud, as the elevator finished its descent. Rin flipped a switch and internal bulkheads opened, a pressure seal somewhere normalizing the ship to station pressure with a soft hiss. Zag unbuckled and stood to stretch his legs. Rin was up and making her way to the ship's central ladderway. From the annex immediately above the bridge, Hads was already sliding down the ladder, making her way to the ship’s exit at the bottom.
Rin called out, “Hey, wait up!” and jumped down after her.
From far further down in the ship he heard a Damien call after the two women his unmistakably cheery voice, “Hey you two! Goddamnit I don't want to buy the first round again!”
Zag let them get well ahead of him. It was their tradition to race for the nearest bar on docking back at Minerva after a successful interception. Loser picked up the tab for the first round, and Damien, with his slow and bulky build, seldom got to enjoy any charity from the much more agile crew.
Zag never participated in that tradition. Whenever they returned home from a signal hijack there were always a few things to sort out; payment for the job they just completed being the first, and lining up a new job being the second. In truth they’d ideally pick up two new jobs. A meager-paying bit of legitimate cargo hauling, and a well-paying but illegitimate bit of signal intercept work. The closer the particulars of the former covered the latter, the better. Once that was done he’d join the crew at the bar, probably just in time for last drinks.
Leaving the ship, Zag walked across the extended docking limb, towards the heart of the station. The docking tube was made of clear hard plastic, and he took the time to look over Flavus before entering the station proper.
The Flavus was a small cargo freighter by all standards. The hull resembled nothing so much as a black iron piton, except for the flare of the engine cone at the base. The vessel could support a crew of four, and transport roughly one-hundred-twenty-five cubic meters of cargo. Compared to the enormous haulers operated by the bulk-transport firms, it was an ant.
Where the Flavus found its niche was in its speed and its security. The oversized main drive ensured that the Flavus made its runs quickly, but more importantly, the speed the drive afforded made the Flavus a difficult ship for most pirate ships to catch and hold. Prospective clients could be assured that their cargo would not be easily intercepted.
Furthermore the black painted hull, which had been surreptitiously imbued with radar and lidar dampening pigments, dampened the return of most civilian sensors. Given all these features and the unassuming profile of the Flavus, practically all the pirates, ne’er-do-wells and authorities seldom paid the ship any attention.
And that was just the things that were apparent from the outside. Internally, the Flavus boasted one of the most advanced civilian sensor packages, the most comprehensive software suites, and the best crew one could hope for outside of the Federation Officer cadre.
In truth, often Zag thought the only thing she lacked was a good captain.
Directly above the docking limb he spotted the ship crest, emblazoned in a quintessentially understated fashion; gloss-black on a background of black matte. It showed a stylistic river, flowing down around a world, before looping back around another, forming the shape of a lemniscate.
Zag’s first stop was to the guild offices. There he used his guild membership to access secure communication. The guild had a reputation for discretion to uphold, and it had proved it over the years. Although the guild’s paperwork was always in perfect order; its permits and logbooks pristine, it had been recalcitrant when it came to the privacy of its clients; and thus by extension, its employees.
He accessed his guild associated bank account; registered in the name of The Flavus and saw the deposit from his client. The remarks simply read:
Consulting fee on the safe handling of sensitive cargo
That made Zag laugh out loud. Hads had tightbeamed the data to the client enroute back to Jupiter, but since she had encrypted it with the Flavus’ personal encryption, the data was useless to the client without a decryption key. Zag quickly typed at his keyboard, and sent the decryption key off to the client with his thanks attached. Zag took the fee and distributed it into five shares. One went to each crew member's personal bank account, and the fifth remained in the account registered to the Flavus, for whatever expenses might arise.
That account had grown quite significantly over the last few years and Zag was at odds with what exactly to do with the funds. He had considered an engine retrofit, perhaps some minor modifications to the hull to reduce their radar profile further, but if Zag was being honest with himself all options had seemed surplus to requirements. The Flavus was as mission capable as it could be. Any further upgrades would only serve to draw more attention to them.
Zag decided the search for more work could wait. He was sick of having a timeline hanging over his head, and decided it was probably healthy to spend the night recuperating. After the fee they had garnered from that last mission, none of his crew would be hurting for cash for a while.