CHAPTER 29 - PERIL
"Comms range?" Kuw said.
"No… not without a massive delay," Rachel shook her head.
"Then is there anything we can do, reaaally?"
"No... I'm just… how does this happen? Just how? HOW? How do they find us, amid the thousands of systems near Ilsh space? It's a compact empire, but there's just… so much… to cover…"
Kuw leaned back in her seat. "I remember taking a statistics course. This kind of thing iiis unlikely, yes, but think of the mitigating factors: there aren't many relatively safe, that is, not immediately deadly, approaches to ilsh space that aren't heavily guarded by the Alliance, thus this cuts down the search area to only a few dozen syyyystems. But then they had to know, somehow, that we are going to Ilsh-Bewruw… and if they have an ulterior motive, they have likely figured out we're going somewhere in this direction, way back in chohjozra space, when they started tracking us… waaait wait wait… Rachel, that lady we delivered the snail to? Sonia? Do ya remember her? I wasn't there."
"...somewhat. And she was named Sofia."
"There was something off about the whole thing. And the guy who gaaave us the box. Not sure about Sofnia herself, though, I wasn't there at the chohjozra station with ya and Elektra… Did ya talk about the mission to anyone?" Kuw asked.
"No," Rachel shook her head. "I remember that clearly at least."
"If ya remember it clearly, then tell me about Sonfia. Did she do anything of note?" Kuw said. "I don't remember the guy in the cloak doing anything except looking kinda shady."
Rachel put her hands to the sides of her head as she thought. She pried deep into the chasms of memory, rocking her mind and trying to recall anything that might have given a clue to the reason for this chain of events.
"When I and Elektra handed her the box with the snail, she took out some small thing the size of a pen cap…?"
She thought so hard that a vivid yet garbled memory appeared in her mind's eye, then began fading again. "It was… black but had… some kind of… antenna maybe? And a mic…? Oh shit…"
The catgirl limply fell onto the keyboard once again.
Kuw sighed. "Well theeeen! It looks like ya, for all your expertise in detection, failed to notice a bug! I have no idea how that led to us being tracked, but whoever is doing it likely knows of our mission aaand wants to prevent it. Treat the yacht as a hostile."
"But Jamaad gave it to the detective guy…" Rachel shook her head. "Did he not notice it?"
"...let's go and check thaaat."
Rachel, already weary despite only waking up a few hours ago, followed her partner as they walked down the corridor. By now, this was as effortless to them as walking in the fairly low gravity of New Arizona.
They knocked on the door to the security room. Achariya was there.
"Why didn't you see the bug?!" Rachel said, raising her hands. Her claws were extended. "WHY!?"
The detective looked away from one of his screens, hastily clicking the 'X' on what looked to be a chess match in a complicated middle-endgame. Nevertheless, Rachel's keen eyesight led her to notice a black knight deep inside white's position, ready to strike with a devastating fork. But the white bishop and a few pawns were positioned in such a way to cut off all of its escape squares.
"...what are you talking about, miss Beka?" he said as he turned his swivel chair.
"The snail from Chimera land. The box… it had a bug in it!"
"I thought… its whole purpose was to hold a bug?" Achariya scratched his head.
"Idiot!" she leaned forward.
"...oh, like a listening bug?"
"Exactly! You were supposed to check the whole fucking box for anything like that! You dipshit!" her face flushed red with anger. The detective furrowed his eyebrows and tried to speak, but recoiled as a clawed fist narrowly missed his face. "You motherfucker! Incompetent! You–"
Kuw put one hand over Rachel's mouth, and used the other, as well as her knee, to gently subdue the enraged sensors officer.
"What… even… is happening?" Achariya scratched his head.
"Please calm down, dear," Kuw said, holding her down. "Anyways, Achariya, remember that time we delivered Spots the snail in a box? We have found out that, apparently, there was a listening bug in the box that you hadn't seen. That's why the yacht haaas… oh right, ya don't know."
Kuw explained everything to the detective as he recovered from the shock. Rachel, too, calmed down somewhat.
At the end, he simply sighed. "I fucked up, okay? It must have been well-hidden. I didn't want to dismantle the whole thing because the scanner revealed that the box's construction had so many pointless interlocking joints that I was afraid I'd never put it back together. And I couldn't non-invasively see the outline of anything suspicious because of the mess of lines on the 3D scan… it was like a 3D jigsaw puzzle!"
"Chimera engineering…" Rachel said. "Ugh. I understand now. I'm sorry."
"It's fine. Not the first time in my career… what now?"
"Well, do you know how we can't evade them now as we did before? I guess we have to live with being hounded until we get there," Rachel said.
"Can't we somehow ask the authorities?" Achariya leaned back.
"What authorities?! The local peyrhyll warlord?"
"...well. Good luck."
***
The two went back to the command room to properly scan the rest of the system.
Doyr Mnyl was a yellow dwarf, almost exactly like Sol. And much like Sol, it had several inner terrestrial planets– three, precisely– and several progressively bluer outer gas giants. However, the asteroid belt was much denser and was closer to the star than any of the planets, almost resembling a ring in its form and position. There were also many, many dwarf planets in the outer reaches of the system where the Pheidippides was. None of these dwarf planets, except one, passed anywhere near the ship's projected trajectory, and the exception would actually give a slight gravity assist.
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One of the terrestrials was in such an amenable position as to have liquid water on its surface. But unlike in Sol, this water-bearing planet, called Vylhdoyr, did not have any signs of native life. Where there would have been green, there was yellow, gray, and brown. Only a few extremely faint city lights on the half-shadowed face of the world betrayed the existence of a struggling society.
There were few ships: most traffic was limited to hops between Vylhdoyur and its two moons. A free-floating Lagrange-point station was the only other notable installation in the system, the glimmers of torch drives revealing the existence of a swarm of military ships around it. Said station was well out of the way of the Pheidippides' trajectory, ensuring that valuable time would be wasted if it was to take a detour for repairs. Perhaps if it was a civilian or regular military ship, with a regular torch drive, then such a change of course could have made sense.
"...not to mention that, you know, the whole thing is under the control of that mafia guy. At least they're too far to try to mug us. I think," Rachel finished her report.
"I really like how ya describe everything, love," Kuw said and leaned in to hug her. "A vivid image always forms in my head. It's as iiif your words dissolve into raw concepts. How do ya interpret… this… into that?" she gestured to the readings on the screen. "Just looks like lots of rapidly scrolling numbers and some colored circles."
"Training. Superhuman reaction times. Intuition," Rachel smiled.
Elektra and Patch opened the door. "All good here? I heard yelling," the blue genemod said.
"...all good," Rachel kept up her smile as she turned her chair. It looked comical and pasted-on.
"Something tells me otherwise," Elektra said, looking around.
"Don't worry about us," Rachel continued to keep up that false smile. "Don't worry. It'll all be okay."
All the while, on the screen behind her, the triangle representing the Greenish Pearl continued to inch closer… and so did a transponder-less peyrhyll ship. Elektra squinted and shook her head, then went to the medbay. The robot, on the other hand, merely emitted a short, low buzzing tone and followed.
***
A feeling of finality began to finally creep over those present in the ship's rooms and halls. Maybe two more jumps, at most, were required. And then there would be the end of the road for the journey of the valiant scout ship. It took less than a month, but Rachel in particular felt she lost around five to ten years.
Jamaad woke up early. After getting himself into shape, the captain sat down in his private quarters, lit only by the warm glow of the desk lamp. As he had a feeling that in the very near future there would be little time for bookkeeping, he set a few hours aside to verify all papers, receipts, and various credentials– digitally, of course, by looking over the cryptographically-signed files on a small computer with a monitor that would not look out of place in a pre-Space-Age office, what with its sleek gray casing and gently curved screen that had far fewer pixels than was usual in this more enlightened time. The ilsh were infamously jumpy, both due to their temperament and due to their precarious situation, right on the border of the Hegemony. If the Alliance had not acted fast to set up the Barrier, their monarchy would have been subverted through invasion or coup.
And if this mission failed, that could happen anyways.
He contemplated the last-known state of astropolitical affairs in the Barrier. Why would the dal-ghar take such a risk attacking a Barrier state? Such an attack could provoke an Alliance response and cause the Space Cold War to go hot… on paper. In actuality, Jamaad had a hunch that the Hegemony had calculated the risk here. The Union of Ilsh-bewruw Kingdoms did not have much astropolitical or economic importance. There could have been a lot of sanctions, including from neutrals. There could have been a local-level conflict, with Barrier states fighting Hegemony forces with Alliance backing– and likely only partially winning at absolute best. Neither would outweigh the benefit of gaining a new Viceroyalty.
And yet, the risk was there. The risk of the First Elliptical War breaking out right then and there. Even though the best psychohistorical models predicted a 72.63% chance of a major war between blocs breaking out before 2300, nobody would expect it to happen in 2231. Not so soon. Such a war would be devastating to the entire Oval, and the Hegemony did not have a good chance of winning it against the brunt of the Alliance and opportunistic neutrals. Why, then, did they do it?
Because, in the end, if the Hegemony did not act and take risks, they were doomed to be surrounded even further, and technologically and culturally outpaced by the Alliance, then crushed or simply forced to fade away into irrelevance. Jamaad remembered how in human history, the forces of fascism and reactionary traditionalism– the same forces that the Hegemony represented now– started clawing at straws in full force once the inexorable tide of history began sweeping them away. In the end, after the flames of the Age of Protests burned to the fertile ashes of the Age of Recovery, fascism was defeated for another hundred years, and capitalism was permanently crippled, if not destroyed. And when fascists struck again after First Contact happened, they were swiftly and ruthlessly quashed, and driven from the core worlds of humanity once and for all. And the last time, after the defeat of the Human Republic during the Civil War, they were chased out of human space as a whole.
Now the Dal-Ghar Iron Empire was the one housing their remnants, on some squalid desert planet, sharing it with several other unsavory groups.
And the hand of the Federation would reach them there too, in due time.
***
The yacht and the peyrhyll ship were not faster than the Pheidippides. Knowing this, the former turned to the edge of the system, likely in order to wait for the scout ship to jump before starting its own warp, while the latter continued its futile pursuit.
"These guys are really persistent," Rachel said. "It'd take days for them to even think about getting into weapon range."
"Maaaybe they want to tell us something?" Kuw tilted her head.
"Whatever they have to say won't be of use to us. We could only lose from hearing them out. They're pirates and mobsters."
"Maaaybe we–"
"Frankly, don't even say we don't want to talk. Don't say 'we are on an important mission'. Just ignore them. If they call us, don't even hang up, just don't answer the call. Maybe they'll think we're some kind of confused courier drone. There is literally nothing they can say that could possibly help us. Even if they need help, fuck them, let them die," Rachel's face began flushing with red again. "Fuck them! If I could press a button and have them all just keel over and die right now in exchange for getting to Ilsh a few hours faster, you fucking bet I would mash that sucker for twenty minutes straight. I want to kill them– I want to stomp on their– I hope every single fucking peyrhyll in this system–" foam began to drip out of her mouth as she slammed her fist on the desk.
She was interrupted by Kuw pouncing on and hugging her as tight as she could. Immediately, Rachel's anger sublimated and was replaced by horror at what she had just said.
"It'll all be okaaay," Kuw said. "There's no need to say such things… I know you're better than this."
"This mission is killing me," Rachel said. "Conditioning, schmonditioning, it's been murdering me mentally no matter how I was trained."
She leaned into her partner's chest and just quietly cried.
***
Jamaad went back to sleep to try and somewhat fix his long-destroyed circadian schedule. But though it was still the second shift, Elektra and Patch joined the couple in the command room.
The ship was swinging right past a nameless dwarf planet. Perhaps it had a peyrhyll name, but there was none in the ship's database. Though both the list and the ship computer's model were kept updated for almost the totality of the Oval's celestial bodies, that did not extend to unimportant objects in obscure frontier systems of collapsed empires.
This was the first natural celestial body that the mission had seen up close. The more poetically-minded of the crew were glad that the ship was passing by light side of the object, as that allowed them to see its surface, which took up a noticeable area of the viewscreens.
Radd, who had recovered from his injury but was currently off-shift, watched it from one of the crew rooms. In the bunk across the aisle sat Denisov.
A whitish gray circle with brown splotches slowly crept across the window-like screen. Its surface was almost bare of craters, unlike what would be expected from an airless world. Instead, it had a multitude of complex-shaped patterns and spots of dark dust, contrasting with clean ice.
"Looks like Pluto," Denisov said. "But only a dwarf planet."
Radd raised an eyebrow. "What are you saying, dawg? Pluto is a dwarf."
The assistant doctor turned around and crossed his arms. "My parents are from Pluto! I spent my whole childhood there. We are a PLANET! We don't care what the astronomers on Earth say."
Radd did not respond to this contention. Instead, he pointed at the viewscreen. "Look!"
The unmistakable glimmer of a ship's engines flashed brightly against one of the dark spots. Judging by its rapid increase in size, it was approaching straight on.
And in the command room, Rachel, of course, noticed it. "...looks like there's some kind of hidden hangar there. Forget what I said. Figure out what this means, dear."