Pickyrd lifted the small ship and headed towards the engineering station’s hangar door. The marine teams were due to arrive in minutes and they wanted to free up the space in the hangar for them.
‘Stop,’ shouted Ed, peering intently at something out the side window of the cockpit. ‘Put the ship down again.’
Pickyrd shrugged and did so, as Ed jumped up and reopened the airlock. By the time he’d shut the antigravs down, Ed was kneeling beside something at the side of the hangar. Whatever it was had been obscured behind a stack of composite pallets, but had become visible as the ship had moved forward.
‘Who’s she?’ Pickyrd asked, as he realised it was the prone body of a young girl dressed in a shabby pair of overalls. ‘Is she alive?’
‘She’s breathing,’ Ed replied, looking up at him. ‘Must have been in the hangar when the other ship jumped. She can’t be more than sixteen – give us a hand.’
They carried the unconscious girl onto the ship and returned to the 28 as quickly as possible. Pickyrd organised a medical team to meet them in the hangar as they landed. She was quickly whisked away to the nearest medical centre as soon as Ed opened the airlock.
‘Must have been a junior mechanic or something,’ said Pickyrd, as they watched the gurney disappear out of the hangar.
The bridge was a hive of activity when they got up there. A large proportion had been commandeered by the ship’s senior marine officers, busy orchestrating the search of the engineering station and interviewing the considerable number of staff.
‘Were we able to track where the Tallin ship jumped to?’ Pickyrd asked, as soon as they arrived.
‘Sorry, Captain,’ came the reply. ‘The jump was embedded and because he jumped from within the station, there were no residual emissions to characterise.’
‘Hmm,’ grunted Pickyrd. ‘Back to square one.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Ed, tapping his chin thoughtfully. ‘Ask them to go through the station’s flight logs and see if that Tallin ship has flown to and from the station before.’
The lieutenant who’d just spoken glanced at the captain, his eyebrows raised.
‘You heard the man,’ said Pickyrd.
‘Yes, sir. I’m on it.’
‘Captain,’ called one of the marine officers, his hand in the air.
‘What is it, Major?’ he asked, strolling towards him.
‘They’ve found a whole upper deck of the station set out as a luxury apartment. The crew have confirmed that’s where the owner lived. Someone called Noilstoy Salft, hence Salft Engineering.’
‘Is he there?’
‘It was an elderly lady apparently and no, she’s not. She has her own ship that can dock directly alongside the apartment. She was quite a recluse, we’re told. No one will admit to actually having seen her for many years.’
‘Is the ship there?’ Ed asked.
‘Negative, sir. They’re going back through the airlock camera feed as we speak and…’
He stopped speaking and appeared to be listening on his headset.
‘A ship left two days ago,’ he said. ‘One hooded person dressed in black passed through the airlock, but shielded their face from the camera.’
‘Can they see the ship?’ Pickyrd asked.
After a brief pause, he replied.
‘An exterior camera shows a ship of Tallin design, Captain.’
‘Show us an image.’
A still picture of a similar design of ship to the one that had jumped out of the hangar earlier appeared on the screen in front of the major. He scooted back on his seat so they could all see.
Ed and Pickyrd’s eyes met.
‘Now we really need to find that vessel,’ said Pickyrd.
It took the best part of an hour for the report on the Tallin ship’s previous movements to come through. Unsurprisingly, the Tallin system had been popular, with a couple of voyages to Dasos, twelve trips to Sidero in the Exo system and one that piqued Ed’s interest: a single journey to Uskrre in the Uskrre system, or as Ed would know it, Alpha Centauri.
He pointed to it and grimaced at Pickyrd.
‘That’s where you said the Klatt invasion fleet was hiding, wasn’t it?’ said Pickyrd, nodding. ‘Although, I’m more interested in the twelve visits to the Exo system.’
‘What’s there?’ Ed asked.
‘Exo is an abbreviation for Exoplismoi, or in your language, armaments. Sidero is a huge planet of predominately iron ore and is the source of near on eighty percent of the GDA’s military ships and equipment. This ship, along with all the other cruisers, was constructed there.’
‘I would like to go get my ship before we go anywhere,’ said Ed. ‘And check on how they’re doing recommissioning the Klatt invasion fleet. I know it was going to take them a long time to get all those ships operational and get them into space, but with the way everything’s been going for them recently, I don’t want them doubling their efforts and bringing the invasion forward.’
Pickyrd chewed on his lip for a moment and stared out over the bridge.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll give Vasi Stathmos a quick visit and then on to Uskrre next – but remember, we can’t engage any of that fleet until they’ve actually threatened someone.’
‘Trying to blow up yours and my ship was quite threatening,’ said Ed, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning on a console.
‘We haven’t yet got any evidence the two are connected. I’ve seen how the council work in the past. They want cold hard facts and irrefutable evidence. Everything we have so far is circumstantial and could easily be explained away by a half decent lawyer.’
‘Can we at least send a coded message to James Dewey on Earth, so he knows the situation and can message us back if the Klatt fleet turns up?’ Ed asked.
‘I can do better than that,’ said Pickyrd. ‘What the Klatt haven’t realised is for a while we’ve had their most commonly used shield codings and from what you’ve told me, those ships are old models and would most likely still have some very old codes anyway.’
‘So, they’d be wide open?’
‘Uh, huh,’ mumbled Pickyrd, concentrating as he tapped away on his bridge terminal. Finally hitting the last icon with a flourish, he snatched a small data chip from a port on the side of the console and surreptitiously handed it to Ed. ‘It’s done and I never gave you that,’ he said soberly, while checking around to ensure no one had noticed. ‘Send that to them for self-defence only, is that clear?’
Ed adopted an innocent expression and slipped it and his hands into his pockets.
‘Use what?’ he responded, shrugging.