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UNCLE RICHARD SEEMED to enjoy his newfound promotion it seemed, despite him saying he was under-qualified for it. He’d added to the captain’s two guards, with two of the youngest members of the crew quickly dressed in formals, with side arms. The chap who Lena had only previously seen as a coms operator under Ash Cento’s command, Blaney Wilson, and the youngest member of the crew besides herself, a skittish teenaged girl called Kylie Rattigan. Was joining the navy still allowed at sixteen? They assembled on the bridge and Uncle Richard straightened odd bits of people’s uniforms that didn’t seem to match up. They’d marched off into the hold and secured the bosun and the crate they were after, which Addison Johnson opened back in the bridge with great ceremony. There was a space-faring drone which looked like a black frisbee and another whole set of coms and control gear for it, which Blaney Wilson set upon with great fervour.
During some hurried diplomacy between the bridge and the shuttle deck, the state of play was that the marines and Fazar were left to get on with things in the hold. The captain settled on this as a useful compromise when Lena told her that Rowie could in fact vent any part of the ship into space, even parts that seemed to be interior to the crew. There was a brief discussion about this in which Betty had to explain, again, how Arohirohi was multi-dimensional and that the bits they all thought of as ship were illusory. The captain had called for more coffee, let Uncle Richard post a guard to the door of the hold, and shuffled back into her ready room.
Rowie had set up a schematic of the ship with all the sailors listed as little blue blobs. Everyone now knew after weeks on board, that this was open to personal interpretation, since Rowie couldn’t help but alter her layout based on individuals’ expectations. But at least they knew where everyone was in relation to each other. The blobs for the marines were in green. Each person had a tiny surname label beneath them. Fazar’s was notably under a green dot.
Schematically, the views on the bridge were getting complicated. The forward view was now a continuous clear picture of the planet below them. However, since they were now occupying a point in space above the dark side of a body that did not seem to rotate, that shed not a photon of light on the matter. The view from the light side was only the merest glimmer as the planet had just started the long trip back from the farthest point of its orbit. Lena thought it must’ve been lonely being a Plutoid, she told Rowie as much, but the ship didn’t seem to know what she was getting at.
Then the drone was launched and everyone became distracted by that. As Lena had informed everyone, the ship could launch anything or anyone into space from anywhere in the ship. The drone could be on the deck one minute and in open space the next. Instead, Uncle Richard came up with the compromise of getting Rowie to construct a new airlock to one side of the bridge. The captain and bridge crew seemed more comfortable with that. The drone’s pictures were beamed to a new tower of control gear. There were a lot of monitors showing a lot of readouts, and an operator was stationed at each. It was almost a ship within a ship.
When they discovered that Rowie could clone the image from the drone and project it directly onto the forward screen of the bridge, the captain was more muted than Lena had expected, and insisted on viewing from the monitors over Blaney’s shoulder. Everyone else watched as a long range infra-red swept the surface of the planet and beamed an odd but crystal-clear greyscale rendition, back to the ship.
After everyone oohing and aahing, they watched in hushed tones, pointing at this and that feature, seeing the contrast as the probe crossed from the dark, blasted side of the planet to the less scarred, but no less habitable-looking night-time side.
Suddenly, Cento was up from their station where they scanned all frequencies for any broadcasts or signals coming from the planet. “There!” they yelled and pointed at the massive screen. When everyone caught up to where Cento was pointing, they saw the path of a scar on the planet. “Steer her back around, Blarney!” they said to AS Wilson, who waved a hand, following his own monitor feed.
“On it,” Wilson said, and after a split second the view hoved round, over-compensated and then concentrated on following the line of the scar. And scar it was, lines and scuffs from something, getting more pronounced and deeper the farther along the track it went. Wilson had slowed the drone right down to take in maximum detail, and had activated a sensor that flashed on his console. Lena hoped he was recording for posterity, but with the increasing mass of controls and sensors each operator had it was difficult to tell.
“Lena, can you get Rowie to show this in the hold as well?” said the captain. “We don’t want our friends down there to think we’re hiding anything from them.”
“Rowie says they can see it on the back wall of the ship.”
“That’s stern to you,” said Jenny, from her console. She seemed to be checking the function of the drone on the control panel next to Wilson. Lena stuck out her tongue, but Jenny had her head down when she lifted her head, she looked right past her. “Oh.”
Lena whipped her head back to the forward view. There at the end of the scar was the fragile remains of an old, crashed ship. And beyond that in a mostly buried dome, the remains of an even older colony.
