On the bridge all four of the Flavus’ crew were assembled to review the mission. It was crowded with all four of them present. Unlike the bridges of larger vessels, the Flavus’ bridge was only designed for two pilots to be present at any given time. Zag and Rin were seated in their customary flight seats, while Hads and Damien pulled themselves tight to the seatbacks to allow the bulkhead to close. The Flavus was not a pleasure craft, nor a large military ship. There was no mess, no private quarters, and no galley. Food was pre-packaged and kept in the storage cupboard on each floor, and the crew practically lived strapped into their flight seats. The only time one would likely ever leave their station would be to use the head, which itself was barely larger than a cupboard.
Up on the main screen of the bridge Rin had pulled up a detailed map of the solar system, and had plotted in the coordinates provided by the client. It showed a point well out in the far reaches of the solar system, just north of Neptune. There was a moment of contemplative silence.
Damien broke the reverie first, “It would be nice to give the ship a proper long run out. It's been a long time since she’s done that much legwork away from the inner planets.”
Rin ventured another positive, “And we’d be well away from the federation flight tracking. Neptune doesn’t even have a federation office, much less a tracking installation.”
Zag took up the train of thought, “And we’re not likely to be trackable from Jupiter. Should give us room to make the job easy.”
Hads stood quietly, staring intently at the single dot illuminated on the planetary chart. She was quiet when she spoke her mind, “I don’t understand though, what signal out there could possibly be worth stealing? And why just the single coordinate point for the intercept? Why not just tell us the transmitting and receiving locations and let us figure it out?”
She paused and looked over at Zag, and under her cool demeanor Zag thought he could sense misgivings. Anxiety. Worry. Concern. “It just feels wrong.”
Zag looked up at the chart, desperate to find something to encourage Hads, “Well lets see, what can we intuit from the data at hand?”
Rin was already typing into her keyboard, and scrolling through data on her personal monitors, “We can probably determine the transmitting and receiving locations ourselves, see what that tells us?” That was quintessential Rin, Zag thought. Analytical in the most direct and practical ways. Rin had little track with dissecting motivations, politics and social connections, but give her a problem with empirical data at its heart and she would find you a solution.
On the main screen glyphs were rotating and spinning around an exaggerated sun, each glyph representing a planet. Rin dialed the simulation forward to the timestamp specified in the mission brief. Lines appeared, tracing straight paths between planets.
“Doesn’t intersect with our given coordinate.” Rin reported.
“Try adding in stations, anything inhabited.” Zag offered.
More lines, still no joy.
“Uninhabited stations?” Zag persisted.
“Still no.” Rin commented.
It was Hads from the back, “Other celestial bodies?”.
Rin struck several keys, and a soft chime sounded from the bridge speakers. A glowing green path appeared before them on the monitor. Written along its path was the words, Neptune // Eris.
Damien made a resounding woop and cheer. Everyone turned to regard him quizzically.
“Oops, sorry," he ventured sheepishly, "But it's good news right?”
Zag turned back to the map. Eris was a dwarf moon, small even by those standards. Its large and eccentric orbit had made it a seldom visited place, generally considered unworthy of visiting, let alone settling near.
“Eris is uninhabited though, there's not even anything automated out there as far as I’m aware. Nothing with a signal we could intercept.”
Damien brightened even further, “What about the mining guilds out of Neptune?”
Now everyone turned to stare at him.
“Explain.”, Hads insisted.
All of a sudden shy, Damien continued, “Well last night I after you all disappeared I kept the night going by myself. Just chatting at the bar at Hiro’s, and then a few other bars down the road. There’s this great new place a few blocks down from the Saviour, and it has the best lager you've ever tasted.”
Zag rubbed at his temples. Why did all of Damien’s stories take so long?
Seeing Zags obvious displeasure, the shipman skipped forward, “Anyways, I ran into this group of Neptunian Ice haulers who were out on shore leave. They said they were getting their R&R in because they were about to ship out on a major expedition. They seemed to imply that every mining vessel on Neptune, or those with ties to Neptunian guilds, had been requisitioned for a special deployment.”
Zag still didn’t quite get it, “You think this ‘deployment’ they’re talking about involves Eris?”
Rin and Hads both seemed to be thinking hard. Rin was first to speak. “Eris is about as close to Neptune as it ever gets. It’ll be another five-hundred years before it comes back around.”
Hads followed on, “If they’ve found something valuable there it could be very lucrative information to certain people. Commodities traders in other parts would have a massive edge if they could figure out what was going on.”
There was another long silence.
Zag made up his mind. “So if all of that is true, they’re likely about to start transmitting prospecting data back to their mining fleets. Data that our client wants, to make himself a mint before the market moves. He’s also graciously agreed to share some of the mint with us. All in all that sounds like a fair deal to me.”
Rin and Damien nodded agreement immediately, but Hads hesitated. She held Zag’s gaze for a few long moments, and then, having made her mind up, nodded assent.
----------------------------------------
The burn out to Neptune had been just under a month of ship-time.
In the tight, cramped confines of the Flavus, long journeys were always difficult. Once Rin had put them on course and accelerated up to a one-gee burn the ship’s simple auto-pilot was more than capable of keeping them on course, so there was precious little to do except wait. Rin had spent the time running simulations of various flight scenarios. Damien had slept for stretches that seemed to Zag to be humanly impossible, while Hads worked quietly on new cyphers and decryption tools. In truth she was the only one who enjoyed these sorts of voyages, where the isolation and quiet provided her with the opportunity to focus on honing her craft. Zag simply fretted over the job.
On the twenty-fourth day-cycle they were approaching Neptune, decelerating slowly towards the Neptunian Station Primaris. They docked and off-handed their cargo into the remit of the Neptunian Mining Guilds. It was eerie to Zag how simple the process was. They had not been hailed by the station on approach, nor were their manifests and papers checked. They simply queued for docking, unloaded their cargo and were on their own. The dock worker who took their cargo had not even inspected the goods, he simply signed for the goods as proof of delivery, and left Zag standing on an empty docking platform.
The Neptunian station was cold, even by the standards of space stations. Rhime clung to many of the stations surfaces, and it was damnabled slippery in places. Zag noticed that the dockworker had been wearing crampon-like devices, mounted to the outside of his vac-suit boots to help him maintain grip on the icy floor.
This far away out in the system, far from the heat of the Sun, the station’s climate control must have struggled to keep the station at a reasonable temperature. It was surely not helped by the fact that all of the resources in this part of the system, primarily methane and water, were mined as ice, and the presence of so much frozen matter onboard would likely have an effect on the station temperature.
As the stevedore was exiting the docking chamber, Zag activated his throat comm. “Rin how are we for timing?”
“We’re approaching the end of our window if you still want to run dark.”, she replied. “If we’re burning out there with our main engine lit we can delay for a while.”
Zag thought about it. This far out near Neptune, there was precious little in the way of flight tracking. It was likely they could burn at full speed to the co-ordinates, transponder ablaze and still not have anyone take any notice of them. With that said, this far out in the void, and on their own, Zag didn’t want to take any chances. “Let’s do it the proper way. Prepare for departure.”
By the time Zag had climbed up to the bridge and taken his seat Rin had already started the process of undocking.
She was on the ship comm, “Stationmaster this is The Flavus requesting clearance to depart from dock station thirteen. How copy?”
The response, crackling over the speakers in the bridge was as verbose as Zag had ever heard, “You’re good to go. Ready for depressure?”
“Affrim.”
There was a rushing sound as the air was pumped from the docking platform, followed by eerie silence. Zag knew the airgate that he had just walked on was gone, and now the Flavus was being held over empty space by the docking armature alone.
Rin flipped a switch and the docking armature released rapidly.
Free from the armature the Flavus fell straight 'down', and Zag could feel his stomach lurch as the rotational velocity of the station flung their ship clear, and he was slammed upward into his chair restraints.
Then they were in ‘freefall’, clear of the station and drifting in Zero-g.
Rin took control and expertly flipped the Flavus, bringing the bow around and firing the main engine. As she did so, Zag experienced a brief disorientation, followed by the sudden reassertion of gravity.
There was a brief respite to catch their breath, then Rin fired the engines to a hard burn, putting them at speed, onto their intercept course. Zag managed to stay conscious this time, and when Rin powered down the engines and began the slow drift, Zag was there to cut power back, and disable their transponder.
Once again, they were an unremarkable bit of space junk, floating towards a very meticulously planned pay-day. They would drift for a long time, out to the intersection point, then around the dark side of Eris, where they would begin their acceleration back to Jupiter.
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It was three hours before they were due to arrive at the intersection point when Rin discovered the problem.
Rin had it pushed onto the main screen. There, illuminated against the blackness of space, and magnified to human eye size, was the unmistakable blue-white fire of a main-engine drive plume. Bridge lighting changed to red, and up on the main screens warnings appeared in bold fonts.
The bridge speakers read them out in robotic, urgent tones.
Collision alert. Collision alert. Collision alert.
Rin flipped a switch and the insistent voice died away suddenly. The text warnings on the screen remained, a timer counting down to the projected collision.
“Sensors just picked it up now,” Rin began, at full alert. “It’s decelerating. Computer’s plotting the exact route now but it looks like they might be in our general vicinity near the signal intercept.”
Zag paused and thought hard. In the vastness of space between stations, having two ships pass within sensor range of each other was improbable to say the least, usually ships were only detectable because their transponders broadcast their location constantly. If it weren’t for the overly capable sensors of the Flavus and the boredom of her crew, no doubt this ship would not have slipped by unnoticed. Out here in the far out reaches, beyond the farthest planets, the odds of running into anyone by chance were so astronomical that they were laughable, and yet here they were.
“No transponder on it?” Zag asked Rin.
“No transponder.” Rin confirmed.
That settled it for Zag. Someone else was burning out to this exact point they had been given, and they didn’t want anyone to know they were there. That precondition alone precluded the possibility the ship was being sent to meet them or assist them in any way.
“It’s probably just the client being an idiot. He’s probably figured that he’ll hire two ships to pirate the signal, and give himself redundancy.” Zag ventured, hoping to calm fraying nerves.
Zag didn’t mention that it was equally likely that they were hurtling towards a set-up. The client could just have easily lured them out here in the long dark in order to steal or destroy their ship. Perhaps he represented interests they had crossed in the past, and who were looking for surety that such events would not be repeated. The ‘why’ of the situation was impossible to say at this point, and mostly irrelevant.
There was a chime from the bridge computer, and on the main screen a new trajectory appeared.
The red runes on the main bridge dulled to amber, their warnings changing from “Collision Alert” to “Proximity Alert”.
Rin let out a low whistle, “Looks like we will come very close indeed. At current trajectory and speed they will dead-stop within our clients intercept coordinates. That being said, presuming they don’t wriggle around too much in there we should miss them.”
Zag wrinkled his nose in annoyance. The coordinates represented a cube in space a kilometer in each dimension, but with the speeds at which they would be traveling, attempting to pass in that space would be like holding your nose a millimeter away from a train while it sped past at full speed. “I suppose there’s not much we can do navigationally at this point?”
Rin thought for a moment, “Not much unless you let me fire up the main drive.”
Zag ground his teeth together. Their main advantage right now was stealth and momentum. They were traveling at significant speeds and running completely dark. Assuming that they hadn’t been detected yet they would likely be able to make it past the unknown vessel before they even realized they were there. From that point they would have enough residual momentum that they need only accelerate onward to escape. If they attempted to slow down or alter course using the main drive, their inertia would need to be addressed. They may have to decelerate hard, or bank away, which would rob them of their speed. The unknown ship, already at low speed as it prepared to full stop, had no such qualms about its agility.
It wasn’t a given that they would be caught if they lit their drive early, but it limited their options, and their chances significantly. Still it rankled to leave a potential collision up to chance.
Zag clicked his comm, “Hads you monitoring the situation? Report please.”
“I’ve got no active radar or lidar pings on record,” Hads replied immediately, “and it's unlikely they will have picked us up on passive sensors the way we have with them. The only reason we saw this is because they’re lit up like a christmas tree and headed straight towards us. Well that and the fact the optical sensors we have installed are as sensitive as they come.”
Damiens voice broke into the comm channel without prompt, “If we’re taking votes I’m down for playing a little space-chicken. I don’t want to make the thirty day crawl back home with nothing to show for it.
Hads was back on channel, “This reeks of a set-up Zag. There’s no reason for anyone to be out here, except if we’re being set up.”
Zag clicked his comm once, a nonverbal acknowledgement.
Zag looked over at Rin and signaled against his helmet, a closed fist pattern that requested the recipient cease transmitting over radio. Then he took his helmet off, and Rin matched his gesture.
In the privacy of the bridge he asked quietly, “So, the others seem to be keen on this little fly-by, but you’re the one who has to actually fly this ship. What do you think?”
In a display that was atypical for Rin, the pilot hesitated. Her eyes flicked up towards her furrowed brow and she frowned as she weighed the options over.
“It’s risky. There’s no doubt about that. With the significant speed we have, and as we get closer, it will become more and more difficult to avoid a collision if these guys move unpredictably.”
Zag felt the need to play the other side, to reassure. “We could scrub the mission. Turn and burn hard, or peel off and hope they can’t keep up with us. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done it, and noone on the crew would blame you for it.”
The statement seemed to have the opposite effect Zag expected. Where he expected doubt, he now saw confidence. Rin’s eyes met his, and she was decided. “If we maneuver now we only increase the risk of being captured by whoever these people are. Which in my book isn’t any more a victory than a collision with their ship, which I can probably avoid regardless.”
Zag sighed, resigned. “So we stay on course and hold our nerve?”
She nodded, “Make sure you’re strapped in tight. If we do need to avoid a collision in a hurry, it's going to be a very rough adjustment.”
Zag smiled, but inside he was disquieted. He regularly felt that way when the metaphorical die was cast, and all that was left was to wait and see what number came up. In that space there was no practical use for him, no longer any way to spin the odds in his favor. Afterwards, even when the results were positive, he often felt resigned to a fatalistic outlook, as though his life was not his own.
He shook off his rumination, donned his helmet and opened the crew channel.
“We’re going to give this a go cold. Everyone needs to be strapped in and ready. Hads I need to know the second that ship has become aware of us. Also direct link our sensors so Rin has live updates on their trajectory. Damien, any issues with cold starting the main drive?”
Damiens voice broke slightly as he responded, “She’s been primed and fuel has been injected for startup.”
He’s afraid, Zag realized. When he thought about it he realized he was too. Damien was just the least capable of hiding it.
“Good luck everybody. Rin, we're in your hands.”
“Oh goody.” She responded.
Zag groaned internally. She never was any good at cool one-liners.
After the decision was a long wait, and on the bridge screens Zag watched the shape of the unknown ship grow larger, against a backdrop of stars. The vessel resolved into a clear shape, and after some calculations, the ship's computer identified the gunmetal gray ship as a Praeses-Class vessel. That meant little to Zag. There were a million-and-one different classes of ship roaming the system. He would have to research further on their return to Jupiter.
On Rin’s side of the bridge there were only charts and data. It was safer that way, she had insisted to Zag once. According to her, pilots often became entranced by visual feeds, relying on them in situations where they shouldn’t. Seeing the view made you lose sight of the big picture.
Then there was void trance, a particularly nasty affliction some pilots fell prey to when viewing the blackness of the void for long periods. Such pilots went catatonic for days on end, not responding to their crews, their flight plans, nor even their need to eat and drink.
Zag had heard the stories before. They often came out of Federation flight schools, part cautionary story, part old wives tale. Zag also knew Rin’s father had been a Federation pilot before his untimely death. In some ways Zag saw Rin’s adherence to these rules as her attempt at remembrance, and so Zag let it go. He was of the opinion that seeing open space was essential. To him it was an experience that clarified his purpose and tied together all the parts of an operation.
Then again maybe he just wasn’t as adept as Rin at reading the charts.
The timer on the clock ran down slowly. Zag found himself compulsively checking his seat straps, checking his flight suit was secured tightly, and finally checking that his sidearm was secure in its chest rig. He always wore the pistol while on duty, though he usually regarded it as a cumbersome nuisance, always heavy and in the way. He only wore the damn thing because it was customary for a ship's captain to be armed. It wasn’t as though he expected mutiny on a ship crewed by four.
The timer ticked down over Rin’s display. She was ready, focused on her tracking computer readout. Ready to adjust at a moment's notice.
When the timer hit sixty seconds. Zag made one last quick announcement. “Hads, we’re approaching intercept now, make sure we get this data or all this stress has been for nothing. The second we are past those bastards and we know we have the message I want us jamming them. Rin, once we’re past your job is to get us clear as quickly as possible. We need to make sure we are out of range of their sensors before we slow up.”
Both women activated their comms non-verbally to indicate they had received his message.
Damien chimed in, “I’ll just look pretty then.”
Zag made one last look at his screens, checking route and flight information. He flipped them all away and brought the forward camera up on his main-display, fullscreen.
The gray dot of the ship; small at first, rushed forward alarmingly fast. Its passage began blotting out the starfield behind it with its gray bulk.
“Brace!” was all Zag had time to say.
Their ship shuddered violently, and the roar of the engines at full burn threatened to push Zag through his seat. The comm chirped, and between spasmodic breaths, Hads managed, “Got…hick..data..”.
There was another ping, as the signals expert turned the sensor systems of the Flavus to focus on the ship. Active radar telemetry was bouncing back to them, and Hads ran the radar at full power in an attempt to barrage-jam the unidentified vessel's sensors. Zag knew she would be doing more than just that, she would be turning every potential resource at her disposal into an offensive weapon with one purpose: deny the enemy the Flavus’ identity.
Zag felt the mounting of the seat he was strapped into move, as it slowly rotated him backwards. This was the last ditch system built into the bridge to maintain consciousness of pilots under high G strain. It was moving him and the entirety of the bridge module along a rotational track, so he could still read the screens, and if he had the strength, reach for the console. At the same time as this happened, felt his chest tighten as his flight suit activated, its responsive synthetic musco-architecture assisting his diaphragm to inflate his lungs. He knew, though did not feel, that the mask built into his helmet would be force feeding him oxygen.
They must be approaching near unsustainable acceleration. He dared not move his head to look at Rin, but surely they would have to slow soon. Even a well trained pilot could not stand this for long.
His vision drew down to a dot. He strained, forcing himself to breathe as he’d been trained.
Then he blacked out.
----------------------------------------
Zag found himself on a hard packed dirt floor, laying in a pool of blood. He stood and checked himself over. No obvious wounds, no pain.
Not his, he surmised.
He was still in his flight suit, though the pistol was missing from his chest rig.
Zag took stock of his surroundings. Stretching away from him in both directions was a hedge maze. The walls were not leaf and bramble in this maze. Each wall consisted of a ragged collection of clean oiled metal, from small leaves the size of a fly, through to branches inches thick, seemling impossibly fixed together. Hanging from these pseudo branches were what appeared at first to be red berries, but upon closer examination were small pieces of meat, torn and shredded from who-knows-what animal.
Although he knew he should be confused, for the situation was undoubtedly strange, Zag felt nothing, just a small icy sliver of disquiet running up his spine.
Twenty meters to his left there was a small gap in the maze, a junction of sorts. Zag tried to wander towards it, but no matter how far he walked, the junction never seemed to get any closer. He resolved to turn and try the other direction, but found as he turned that a wall of jagged metal had appeared behind him, blocking his retreat.
The sky, though he had not noted it before, was growing light overhead. As though sunrise was approaching.
Then the wall behind him began to advance, slowly creeping forward at first, then faster. He wheeled, to run back towards the junction, his feeling of disquiet quickly elevating to all out panic. He gained distance on the creeping wall, but still the junction would come no closer.
For what seemed an eternity Zag ran, but it was no good. The chasing wall behind was ever closer, and the way out ahead, ever far.
Zag fell to his knees and closed his eyes. When the razor wall enveloped him he screamed, the jagged shards of metal stripping the flesh from his bones, rendering his soul down to insensible pain.
Zag awoke for the second time, his arms flailing spasmodically and a scream on his lips.
He was back on the bridge.
Rin looked over at him. She was panting hard, her chest heaving in great lungfuls of air. He found he was too. His heart was leaping out of his chest, and he could feel its pulse in his head. Each pounding beat was accompanied by pain.
He tried to talk, ask for a status, anything. The words caught in his throat as his wretched body failed him.
Rin offered it anyway, “We’re clear. You were unconscious for longer than I’d like, and I have no idea about the others. Don’t get up.”
Zag didn’t respond, he just let himself lie limply in his flight seat. He could see on Rin’s bridge screen that she had pulled up the crew's vitals. Each flight suit sent data back to the main bridge computer, and Rin had obviously watched the vitals carefully during their acceleration. Zag didn’t doubt that had they gone on much longer, one of them would have suffered permanent damage.
The ride back past Neptune was quiet. Everyone lay in their flight seats, the backs folded completely down as a makeshift bed. Everybody but Zag was asleep, within minutes of the end of burn. Rin had activated the auto-pilot, to ensure they were on course while she slept. Such a move was uncharacteristic of her. She hated the autopilot system, and always ensured that either herself or Zag was awake to pilot. That she activated it now was evidence of the fatigue she was experiencing.
And also the fatigue she can plainly see in me, thought Zag.
She lay across her flight-seat-come-bed, curled almost into a ball. She slept soundlessly, the sleep of the exhausted: deep and still as a wintery lake. If he had needed any more evidence of the trauma this event had presented, it was writ plain on her face. A red pattina was spread across her brow, cheeks and neck, the burst blood vessels damaged by the force of gravity.
He knew it would be a long time before they arrived at Jupiter again. They had all decided unanimously to avoid Neptune and make the run straight home. Safer, and more in keeping with their official cover story. A second docking a Neptune would look odd, given they’d just left.
Zag triple checked the course was set, and that the ship's computer would alert them if any other ships were detected. He allowed himself a small smile, and reclined his chair.
He was asleep in an instant.