Chapter Twelve

September 5, 2940

Bastien sat back in his desk chair and heaved a sigh of exhaustion while glancing over at his bed. The warm covers were calling to him after such a long day. A quick check of the time showed that Gamma Shift was nearly done, though Bastien already knew that since his roommate Dante was currently getting cleaned up in their shared bathroom. The engineer had been asleep only a few minutes earlier but had jumped out of his bed the moment the alarm alerted him.

“You finished with those reports?” Dante asked as he came out of the bathroom; ship’s suit unbuttoned and hair still wet.

“Finished them a while ago,” Bastien answered. “Been working on odds and ends for the past couple of hours.”

Dante ran his towel through his hair. “Anything interesting?”

“A command module certification. Some expense reports from you and Spencer. Reading some of the data we picked up from Orthon Station.” Bastien rotated his chair so he faced his friend. “But I think I’m about to call it a night.” Alpha shift started momentarily and, eight hours after that, Bastien would command Beta Shift from the Bridge. He needed to get some sleep.

“Do we have many credits left from our last port?” Dante asked, tossing his towel into the bin before buttoning up his uniform. “For the ship, I mean.”

“Some,” Bastien responded. “Our cargo hold is pretty full so that’s where most of the credits are tied up. But our stop the other day did net us a tidy profit and the captain has set aside a bit for future needs and crew pay.”

“I wish we could have gone onto the station,” Dante said while gathering his things. “Too bad the captain didn’t declare liberty.”

Bastien nodded in agreement. The Grace had docked with Orthon Station on the afternoon of the third but had only remained at the orbital port long enough to trade out some of the cargo she carried and purchase more. They’d undocked and engaged their engines later that evening, the captain having learned that Orthon Station was having some civil unrest related to dockworker contract disputes and not wanting to put the crew at risk if they were to wander the station. “Yeah, we talked about it at length during the final approach. It would have been nice to get off the ship for a few hours and stretch my legs but she was right about the risk being too great.”

“That still amazes me,” Dante said with a shake of his head. “Going on the station would have been too dangerous but heading to the Macroom system for a rescue mission isn’t?”

“Now you’re just whining,” Bastien teased. Dante cracked a smile.

“Yeah, I know. It would have been fun to see Noah’s eyes bug out if she had given the crew liberty, though.” Dante chuckled at that and Bastien found himself grinning.

“Sure. Sure. But I do feel bad for Noah. He just wants everyone to be safe so we shouldn’t tease. Anything planned in Engineering today?”

“Nothing major. A few diagnostics to run. We need to recalibrate the manifold for the TR Drive. My team and I are also doing a reverse-engineering work-up of the Dandelion. It’s a great little ship.”

“Good,” Bastien said as he thought about the small shuttle that Mr. Aldram had donated to the Grace’s mission. Designated the Dandelion once Brice and Dante officially signed off on her acquisition, the vessel would allow the crew to maneuver around the Macroom system with a bit more anonymity than the massive and alien Grace could pull off. “What do you mean by a reverse-engineering workup?”

“Well,” Dante said. “Brice and I tore her apart when she arrived and we don’t think there is anything hidden in her hardware or software. But that evaluation was for security purposes. Now that she’s been in the cargo bay for a week and my team and I have the time, we intend to go through her with a fine-toothed comb and see what we can learn about her underlying engineering principles.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, she’s pretty similar to a lot of AVAL shuttles but she is alien technology. We might be able to learn something from her that could help us improve the Grace. Better electronics. Thruster design. That sort of thing. We’ve been looking through the technology that the Link shared with us but, for all we know, Mr. Aldram’s people made improvements on the universal base tech. The Dandelion might tell us if that’s the case.”

Bastien nodded. It made sense. “Let me know if you turn up anything. Sounds like an interesting challenge.”

“I will. Do you want to come by before Beta Shift? I can give you a tour?”

“Great,” Bastien said. “I haven’t seen the inside of her, yet.” It was true. Bastien hadn’t been inside the new shuttle yet as he didn’t want to get in the way of the operations and engineering techs that had been working on her since she was handed over by Mr. Aldram.”

Dante’s grin split his face. “Well, don’t get too excited about her interior. The cockpit has room for four and the main cabin might hold ten. There isn’t a galley or living quarters. One small bathroom that we will need to modify slightly for human use. No shower. Pretty cramped inside. That said, she’s got some fast legs on her and the maneuverability looks like it will blow your mind. Her small grazers pack a nice little punch, too. I’ve been joking with my team that she must have had an ancestor who was a fighter-class vessel.”

“Then I look forward to seeing her,” Bastien said with a yawn. Dante checked the time.

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“Got to go. See you at end of shift.” With that, Bastien’s best friend left their quarters.

With the space suddenly quiet and with no more distractions, Bastien looked back at his computer screen and shook his head. He wouldn’t be getting any more done this morning. Bastien tapped at the screen, turned the console, and stood to stretch. Then he yawned. “Bedtime,” he said aloud before changing into some sleepwear and crawling under his covers.

Sleep was elusive.

At first, Bastien’s sluggish mind simply thought that he couldn’t get comfortable so he shifted his position and snuggled deeper into the warm bed. That failed. Then he wondered if, perhaps, he needed to relieve his bladder but a quick trip to the bathroom did nothing to bring on sleep. Finally, Bastien wondered if the ambient light streaming into the room from the outside stars was bothering him – a first, if true – so he used his IBP to send a command to the ship’s system and an impenetrable shade slid down the bulkhead and blocked out the universe. It didn’t help.

Why can’t I get to sleep?

His thoughts wandered to the Dandelion and what Dante had said. She was fast, maneuverable, and had teeth. Not a comfortable vessel and one which wouldn’t be suited to long journeys, it was still nice knowing she was on board and could open up the Grace’s operational options moving forward. Unlike the Blackbird…

That vessel was another story! Bastien, his eyes closed and wondering when sleep would finally take him, considered the odd revelations from a few weeks earlier about the mysterious Supernova LXT Luxury Spacecraft sitting in Cargo Bay Gamma. It was a doppelganger; the scientific analysis conclusively demonstrating that it was not an Oxidine Industries vessel and was not made in AVAL space. Indeed, it wasn’t even made in the Milky Way since… since…

Bastien’s eyes shot open. “Trinary brown dwarf system,” he exclaimed. Rolling out of his bed, Bastien rushed over to his computer and turned on the terminal. A few quick keystrokes later and the data they had acquired from Orthon Station appeared. “Where is it?” Bastien muttered as he flipped through the menus. He’d read something about a trinary brown dwarf system while perusing an analysis of regional trade routes but the brief mention of the unusual stellar phenomena hadn’t caught his attention as he’d been focused on comparing cargo capacity with hypothetical profit margins.

Thinking about the Blackbird, though, had reminded Bastien of what he’d learned weeks earlier. Namely, the variance in atomic density within the Blackbird’s metallic alloys could only have come from a trinary brown dwarf system. The Milky Way had no such systems. If this galaxy did…

“There!” Bastien said aloud as he found the particular citation. “Got it!”

*****

“So, what am I looking at?” Cait asked an hour later as she shifted the perspective on the three-dimensional display and looked between Bastien, Dante, and Brice. The four were in Cait’s office just off the Bridge, with the three Alpha Shift officers having an early shift meeting when excitedly Bastien interrupted. Dante and Brice had offered to leave when Bastien appeared but Bastien had waived for them to stay seated. Having the input of the Operations Head and Chief Engineer would be valuable, he’d said.

“It’s a map of this local region of space. Specifically, it’s centered on the rock the Grace was resting on when we first woke up from cryogenic sleep.” Bastien grinned.

“And it’s importance?” Cait prompted.

“The Blackbird,” Bastien answered confidently.

“The Blackbird?” Dante echoed.

“Yes. The Blackbird. Three weeks ago, Noah examined the ship and reached a particularly strange conclusion.” Bastien pointed to Brice.

The lieutenant shrugged as the spotlight fell on him. “His analysis was that the ship wasn’t actually made by Oxidine Industries.”

“What else?” Bastien prompted.

“It wasn’t made in AVAL space and likely wasn’t made in the Milky Way,” Brice continued.

“Why?”

“Because the atomic variance meant that the metal had to have come from a trinary brown dwarf system and there were no known trinary brown dwarf systems within the Milky Way.”

“Exactly!” Bastien exclaimed. “I know we’ve all discussed the matter, both in staff meetings and in private, and we keep reaching the same conclusion.”

“That the ship designers, from a galaxy not our own, went to a lot of effort to make the Blackbird look like an AVAL vessel,” Dante said. “And we don’t have any answers…”

Bastien sighed. “In all of our discussions, we’ve speculated about the purpose of the Blackbird. Why was it on the Grace? Why does it look like an AVAL ship? Why can’t we seem to get much information from its computer core? Right?”

“That’s right,” Dante said.

“Those are natural questions to ask,” Bastien pointed out. “But I think we’ve missed something obvious.”

“Go on,” Cait said as she looked from Bastien to the map.

“Where did the ship come from?”

Dante scoffed. “Bastien, we know where it came from. A trinary brown dwarf system from a different galaxy.”

“Right! But while we knew that, we were too focused on what that knowledge represented. We were too focused on the fact that the Blackbird was here. That it was alien. That it had something to do with how we ended up in this galaxy. But we never really asked the question: Where did it come from?”

“There is no way to know,” Brice responded.

Bastien tapped the display and three red dots appeared within the three-dimensional map. “Maybe someone in one of these systems can tell us,” he said.

“Huh?” Brice asked as all eyes focused on the image.

“See those red dots?” Bastien asked. Everyone nodded. “Those three dots represent trinary brown dwarf systems. From the Grace’s initial position and using the TR Drive, the Grace could reach any one of them within three months.”

“Alright…” Cait responded dubiously, though her eyes were growing wide.

“And that matters, why?” Brice asked.

“Because we know that the Blackbird was made in a trinary brown dwarf system. These are trinary brown dwarf systems. They are each relatively close to where the Grace ended up; beat up, powered down, and with us in stasis.”

Dante held up a hand. “But Bastien, hold up. If there are three trinary brown dwarf systems within this relatively small area of space, wouldn’t it be reasonable to conclude that there are a lot more of them in this galaxy? Hundreds of thousands, maybe? Millions? On what grounds could we possibly think that one of these particular systems is the system that built the Blackbird?”

“We can’t know,” Bastien responded. “But do we have any other leads besides hunting down the types of nebula in which we found ourselves when we woke up?”

Dante didn’t respond and Bastien could see that he and Brice both looked contemplative. “I agree,” Cait said, breaking the silence. “Every time I think about the Blackbird, I wonder what it was doing in our cargo bay. I knew it came from a different galaxy but I guess I never thought to wonder if it came from this particular galaxy.” She indicated the map. “What brought on this revelation?”

“I was reading through the data we picked up on Orthon Station and came across a reference to a trinary brown dwarf system. I didn’t think much about it at first but it stuck in the back of my mind. After I made the connection, I did a quick bit of research using Syndicate data and created the map. One of those points, by the way, isn’t too far from the Macroom system.”

Cait smirked as she leaned in to see the red dot Bastien was indicating. “Then I think we know where we are going after our rescue mission.”