Lieutenant Robert Herston slumped languidly in Stampede’s captain’s chair. His first officer stood next to him, reading aloud.
“Registered eight years ago in the Federation from Tengying Universal. Zero past violations and still under the same ownership,” he summarized. “The owner is one Mercer Brooke, an Appiation citizen.” The first officer looked up from his datapad. “Not too surprising considering they dove in from Svea a few days ago.”
Herston examined the optical. CSV Zanshin was 6lm out and offered him a three-quarters view of her bow. He counted six cargo containers spread evenly between her fore and aft. “Where’d they pick up their cargo?”
“Here.”
“Captain, we have a message from that freighter,” Stampede’s sensor officer announced.
“Play it,” Herston ordered.
A smiling man with hair to his shoulders gazed back at him from the wall screen. “Greetings, SFS Stampede, this is Zanshin sailing to the Vulsia tunnel point.” The man’s smile widened. “We can’t help but notice your intended track toward us. We will heave to at five light-minutes and prepare to receive your shuttle. Please note that your party may either dock with our bow airlock or use our hangar but for the latter we will have to launch our own shuttle due to hangar size restrictions. I am forwarding you our licensing information and captain’s affidavit along with our cargo manifests.” The man tapped at his console before finishing, “We look forward to your boarding party and they are invited to tea after they have completed their inspection. Zanshin out.”
“They’re certainly agreeable,” the first officer noted. “Kind of a strange Svean accent...”
“Let’s see their formwork,” Herston stated.
The two men huddled with their Operations section head. The sublieutenant brought up the information on her console and made check marks with her fingers as she pointed at various parts of the screen. “Registration looks good. Lochlain’s captain’s license is valid. There’s his affidavit on his crew’s licenses.”
“What’s the crew complement for that ship?” Herston queried.
“Four minimum,” she answered quickly. “Three deck officers and an engineer.”
“Very good,” the first officer complimented. “Did you notice anything unusual about the engineer’s name?”
The junior officer wavered a moment. “Uh… Oh! The engineer owns the ship!” She twisted to look at her mentor. “Is that a red flag?”
“No,” Herston answered in his place, “but what other inference can you make with that knowledge, Nora?”
The Operations officer looked up in thought. “It’s a private freighter so maybe family owned and run?” she speculated.
Herston nodded. “And what are the odds that a family works hard enough to buy their own cargo ship, operates it for eight years without a single violation and then suddenly decides to turn criminal?”
The young woman smirked. “Pretty low.” She swiped at her screen to move to the cargo manifests. “Five consignment containers right from the orbital. Those containers get inspected when they enter the station’s storage yard.” She skipped to the bottom of the list. “The last container is sealed certified. The seal check passes; it hasn’t been tampered with.”
“Captain,” Stampede’s sensor officer interrupted the group’s discussion. “Zanshin is heaving to, sir. Down to point-zero-eight-C and decelerating. They’re coming to relative rest.”
Herston looked at the Operations officer with a critical eye and quizzed her a final time. “Is this ship worth the time and expense it will take to inspect it or are the Federation’s resources better spent elsewhere?”
* * *
“If they choose the airlock, Elease, I want you to make it as hard for them to dock as you can without looking like you’re trying to cause trouble,” Lochlain reminded her. “We absolutely want them to use our hangar.”
Lingenfelter nodded. “I can nudge the thrusters a bit to ‘help’ them align and throw off their trajectory but keep in mind that if they’re persistent enough, I’m going to have to let them soft dock eventually.”
Lochlain smiled cruelly. “If it comes to that, I have a few cargo master tricks up my sleeve that can frustrate them too.”
A descending warble sounded on Truesworth’s panel. “Here we go,” he said as he used his controls with one hand and crossed his fingers on the other.
“CSV Zanshin, this is Stampede. Your licensing and manifests are valid. Contact Vulsia Approach to resume your course and speed. Good day, Stampede out.”
Smiles erupted on the bridge until Lochlain asked, “Now who wants to volunteer to move those bodies and guns out of the shuttle?”
* * *
Lochlain stood behind Brooke at the gaming table in Zanshin’s entertainment lounge. She was slowly rotating her left arm, testing its mobility. Over the last sixty hours, the stiffness in her shoulder had peaked and was beginning to subside. She had even insisted she no longer needed an overprotective escort for trips to Engineering. Per the auto-doc, she was scheduled shortly to begin light exercise to strengthen the healing muscle in her shoulder. The plasti-skin over the gash on her leg had been fully absorbed and the wound itself was little more than an angry, red trough of new skin on her calf.
It was 13:30 and Zanshin would be diving out from tunnel space in a little over seven hours. Brooke had skipped most of her morning shift, performing only the routine examinations of the freighter’s systems, to spend time with Lochlain. He had ordered all hands to be at their stations when they initiated the dive that would see them into Vulsia later tonight, but for now he wanted them to relax. Rather than nap, Lochlain and Brooke played in the entertainment lounge.
“Ready?” she asked with a smile. On the first day in tunnel space, the couple had spent a relaxing hour in front of the holo-game, searching for lucrative future trade routes and cargo for Shinshin to take on after its humanitarian run. The virtual ship was in tunnel space headed for the doomed planet. Lochlain had abandoned his old Tarandi trade plan entirely and the pair had collaborated to test out the routes inside the CCZ. Brooke brought the game screen to life while saying, “I’m still hoping for some kind of reward for completing this side mission.” She unpaused the game and the freighter entered normal space inside the Brevic Republic.
The Harmleikur star system in the game mirrored its real-life counterpart with one notable exception. The second planet from the M2IV star was marginally capable of supporting life in the holo-game’s universe. That life, however, hung precariously as sensor readings from Shinshin showed an enormous disturbance in the planet’s magnetosphere and the cold, dense portion of the atmosphere below it, the plasmasphere. Rather than working in conjunction to protect the planet, the magnetosphere appeared to be siphoning the plasmasphere out into space.
“Well there’s your problem,” Lochlain said sarcastically. “Looks like we got here just in time.”
“Yeah, that seems like more than a problem,” Brooke agreed as she stared at the upper atmosphere of the digital planet. For as old as the game was, the view of the planet was spectacular. “It looks like it’s just getting blasted away by the solar winds.” The screen flickered with an update. “We’re receiving the same distress call,” she said as she skipped the message. Two commands later, the system plot opened on the screen. Only four civilian ships shared the system with Shinshin. All of them had made obvious trips to Harmleikur and were currently on their way out-system, traveling toward the Adrastea tunnel point that would keep them in Republic space.
The game chirped. “We’re being hailed,” Brooke said. She scrolled around the screen. “Oh, there’s a ‘Vic frigate fifteen light-seconds from us.” She accepted its communications request.
Unlike the life-like, three-dimensional projection of Chief Engineer Shi, the frigate captain’s image was a still portrait. “This is BRS Bayonet, are you responding to the distress signal sent from Harmleikur Two?”
Dialogue options appeared on the screen and Brooke read them over. “Yes, Captain. We stand ready to assist the evacuation effort,” she murmured as she highlighted her choice.
The portrait of the handsome ship captain did not change but the words below him did. “Proceed in-system and contact the outpost’s manager. Please note that you must depart Harmleikur via the Adrastea tunnel point. The Ctama tunnel point is closed to out-bound traffic. Once you arrive in Adrastea, the refugees will be off-loaded and you will submit your ship to a safety inspection.”
“Wait a minute,” Lochlain blurted. “That’s a load of bull. I don’t want the ‘Vic navy on our ship. Besides, our shipping plans call for us to return to Ctama.”
Brooke frowned as well. She skimmed her new dialogue options. “I think we’re stuck. There’s no way to refuse now.”
“Can we turn around and dive back to Ctama?” Lochlain asked as he folded her arms over his chest. He huffed unhappily. “Leave it to the Brevic Republic to make you regret helping them.”
Brooke brought a hand to her chin. “The frigate is taking a position between us and the tunnel point. There’s not even an option to tell him that we’re abandoning the rescue.” She tapped a few keys on the game panel and shook her head.
Lochlain grumbled. He pointed at the trail of ships sailing away from Harmleikur-2. “Is there even anyone left on the science base to rescue?” The distress signal emanated from the hidden, far side of the planet’s surface.
“I assume so,” she answered. “I’d hate to have come all this way and be late to the party. I’m setting course for the planet.” She entered more commands and looked up to Lochlain. “It’s going to take a while to reach orbit.” She looked dejectedly at the game screen and added, “I guess this ends our session.”
“We can play again tomorrow. Are you going back to sleep?” Lochlain’s question was subtly insistent.
She pointed at an exercise machine in the corner of the compartment. “I was thinking about starting my physical therapy a little early. I have a few hours before I need to start prepping Zanshin for the dive.”
“Don’t overdo it,” he cautioned as he moved away from her. “I’m going to do a sweep through the bridge and then make some lunch.”
“How’s Elease dealing with the nightshift?” Brooke asked, testing her shoulder again as she powered off the game’s display.
“She said once you get used to the sleep cycle, it’s just like the day shift.” He offered a final nod and left the compartment.
Lochlain spent under five minutes on Zanshin’s bridge. The ship was well trimmed and on course inside the tunnel. Lingenfelter’s navigation console had a running countdown showing when they should initiate the tunnel effect with the Deltic drive. There were still nearly seven hours remaining.
After entering a quick note into the ship’s log, he left the bridge for the mess. It was empty when he arrived and he resigned himself to a quiet lunch. Down the hall, he could hear the thrumming of Brooke’s fitness machine. He opened his datapad and browsed the trade pages of Vulsia. Vulsia was the last inhabitable star system between Kett and Carinae on the trailing side of the tunnel loop. Menali, the intervening system between Vulsia and Carinae, possessed an ultra-rare white giant that blasted away any chance for indigenous life inside the system. Ever since the Federation’s push to colonize the Carinae star system, Vulsia’s trade pages had boomed.
The cargo consignment pages alone ran five deep. Vulsia was truly the last stop for freighters on this side of the Carinae loop as most captains were unwilling to risk their ship and crew to a run inside the Izari Nebula. After dropping off cargo at the Federation trade station orbiting the fourth planet, the overwhelmingly favored routes used the tunnel points leading back to Ancera or into Tengying-controlled space.
The result was a stockpile of cargo containers languishing in the orbital’s storage facilities and a market favoring haulers willing to proceed to Carinae. Lochlain salivated at the ransoms freighter captains commanded for carrying even the most benign freight. He performed some rudimentary mathematics and the sums had him up and moving to Zanshin’s chartroom.
Once inside the cramped compartment, he sat at the head of the chart table and opened the sector map. Menali was a two-day dive from Vulsia. The tunnel at Menali leading to Carinae spanned just over another four days. If Zanshin successfully navigated the depths of tunnel space and found the exit, she would have traversed one of the most inhospitable environments in space due to the nebula. Inside the compressed reality of tunnel space, lethal amounts of radiation would be pumped into Zanshin that could not only kill biological life but destroy mechanical constructs as well.
Even the normal space inside Carinae was not without hazard. The only safe refuge in the system was near the second planet, whose enormous iron core generated enough of a magnetic shield to deflect the massive amounts of radiation away from the planet. The cost of such a dense planet core was a superearth with gravity almost four times standard. While human life would never thrive on Carinae-2, cities with robust artificial gravity systems could counteract enough of the crushing forces to make them habitable.
Overall, Carinae’s colonization was a mammoth Federation enterprise but the government was in desperate need of a new coreward district system. With the Federation’s expansion away from Kett, that old anchor system had slipped farther and farther away from the frontier. If Carinae could be established and navigation made safer, the system would provide the much-needed springboard to maintain Solarian influence in that direction of the galaxy. Failure could mean ceding that frontier to the ever-expanding Brevic ambition.
Lochlain rotated the view of the star system. Leaving Carinae would be much easier than entering. One of the system’s priceless Type-B tunnel points offered instant access to Iaslone, a star system outside of the Izari Nebula’s influence. Iaslone opened the second half of the tunnel loop back to deeper inside the Federation. He frowned slightly as he counted the three, barren star systems Zanshin would have to negotiate to arrive at the major star system of Vellin. Given his ship’s limited endurance, it would spend an entire fuel cell run just returning to populated space. He scrutinized the trade pages again while rehashing the promising math.