A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (28 page)

“Do you think the added mass of the ship will be noticed?” Jones wondered.

“I doubt it.” Klane told him. “That ore ship must have tens of thousands of tons of rock aboard. Each trip its overall mass will change over a wide amount. Our little boat is nothing more than the equivalent of an extra large boulder.”

Hamilton nodded. “I doubt they even monitor that, to be honest. At least, I reasoned it was unlikely when I came up with this plan.”

Their path through the asteroid belt was not at all harrowing. The cargo hauler’s route avoided anything that was bigger than a fist. A massive, heavily reinforced, umbrella-like structure at its bow physically deflected any particles that got in its way. Additionally, the hull of the cargo vessel was so thick that any particle striking it was unlikely to do much damage. It was a triumph of brutish engineering.

Hamilton supposed that eventually the umbrella or hull would fail in such a way as to render the vessel useless for its task. As with everything the Empire did these days, the ship probably went to some recycling depot to be cut up for scrap. Given the amount of ship traffic in Sol, there was probably a major recycling depot somewhere in the system. It was simply easier to throw away old vessels. No one repaired anything if they didn’t have to. The sensor drones at Aurica were a prime example of quantity over quality. They were disposable, too.

The trip from the mine to the refinery took over a day. The cargo hauler was not fast and the environment it travelled through did not lend itself to speeding for obvious reasons. They spent the time going over what to do if it all went horribly wrong and they were detected. Mostly the discussion centered on how fast they could get the Skip Drive online and vanish outsystem.

“If worst comes to the worst, we disappear out beyond the planetary disk and then wait until they give up looking for us. Then we’ll have to sneak back here and try and find a ship and head to the rendezvous point. The mission will be a bust at that point.” Hamilton told them.

“That’s assuming we can get the Skip Drive online before we get pounced on ourselves.” Klane added, unhelpfully. The others looked concerned.

“We’ll just have to see we don’t get detected, then.” Hamilton stated.

By the time the refinery appeared, visible to their passive sensors as a vast power source, they had gone into extreme low power mode. All of them wore suits for life-support and the maintenance craft was, to all intents and purposes, just a lump of dead metal.

Even the emergency chemical thrusters, which they intended to use to move the maintenance vessel from the cargo hauler to the bulk carrier, were currently offline. They were being ultra cautious.

Despite showing up on the passives, the refinery remained invisible through the observation ports for several hours as the cargo hauler made its sedate, but determined progress towards it.

“If they scan for life-forms, we’ve had it.” LeGault said as they drew within range.

“Why would they?” Klane told him. “We’re just a cargo ship on a regular run. I doubt they’ll give us any kind of scan at all.”

“The database suggested a skeleton crew of three to run the whole place.” Hamilton added. “An assignment like that, you spend as little time working and as much time goofing off as you can. They’re probably not even in the control room. Off sleeping or playing cards, relying on the automatic systems to alert them to any trouble.”

It seemed as if he was right. The cargo hauler maintained a steady pace until it was a few kilometers from the refinery, which by then had grown to huge proportions through the viewports. Much like at the mine itself, it then joined the back of a queue of similar vessels, all waiting their turn to unload their shipment at a purpose built lock. As each vessel ahead of them docked and unloaded, they timed how long it took for the operation to be completed. It was less than an hour.

“Weird how much less time it takes to unload than it did to load these pigs.” Jones observed.

“Not really.” Hamilton told him. “Loading requires a supply. The mines don’t have much in the way of a storage area, I believe. It gets loaded pretty much as it is mined. Here, we’re just dumping it out.”

The refinery was huge. A testament to man’s engineering skills and ability to automate almost anything. The cargo haulers unloaded their ore on one side, the ore was processed into metals through various smelters and mills internally, then the metals, in uniform sized blocks, came out the other side to be loaded onto the massive bulk carrier docked there.

The problem they had was getting from one side to the other in the maintenance craft without being noticed. There might only be three people on the refinery but the automated systems would hardly fail to notice a vessel traversing the distance from one side to the other, some eight hundred meters.

Not surprisingly, their plan was to repeat the procedure they had used at Aurica. Whilst their cargo hauler was unloading, Hamilton went out in a suit and connected up a fiber-optic link to the loading lock’s data ports. Then Jones made his way, electronically, through the systems of the refinery until he found the sensor and alarm sub-systems. Marten Janes had given him all the engineering codes he knew, which made the process that much quicker. Standardization, it seemed, was rife among technical maintenance crews.

Well before the hour was up, Jones had added a simple command to the sensors, making them ignore, at least for alarm purposes, any objects they detected for the next two hours. The sensors still worked, they just ignored everything. Apparently, refinery time was noted as very early morning, so it was likely the crew wouldn’t, even if they were so inclined, be monitoring the sensor data. Of course, only the lack of an alarm would tell for certain.

By the time their cargo hauler had finished unloading and started to move away, the little maintenance craft had transferred its grip to the refinery. Some power had been restored to the little craft in order to power the arm and thrusters, but virtually everything else was shut off.

“Okay Philip.” Hamilton told LeGault. “Let’s get to the other side.”

The arm’s grip was released and ever so slowly the maintenance vessel began to thrust its way around the refinery’s hull. Meter by meter they watched the plating slide past. Like the cargo haulers, the refinery was heavily reinforced against impact from debris and micro-meteoroids. Most of the hull was unblemished but, here and there, the marks of impact were evident as melted holes and long scoring marks on the plates.

“Wonder how long something like this lasts for?” Carl murmured.

“Decades.” Hamilton suggested, not really knowing for certain. “I imagine the internal machinery will fail long before the hull becomes a liability.”

“Surely they don’t scrap something this big?” Johnson frowned.

Hamilton shrugged. “Who knows? It would probably cost more to ship it to a scrap depot than it would be worth in scrap. I guess they keep it going as long as they can. But eventually it probably gets abandoned.”

“Isn’t that a hazard?” Jones asked.

“Sure. They’ll put a derelict beacon on it and probably shunt it out into a long orbit. Or maybe just send it into the star to be destroyed.” Hamilton explained.

“Seems like such a waste.” Johnson noted.

Hamilton nodded. “It is. I’m guessing it was much the same during your day, we just do it on a much larger scale now.”

They were silent for the rest of the journey as LeGault gently nudged the maintenance craft along the outside of the hull, skimming barely a couple of meters above the surface.

Hamilton was glad it was LeGault and not Veltin at the helm. The younger pilot was undoubtedly brilliant, but Hamilton doubted he could have ever have been said to be subtle. The slow, stately pace that LeGault was using would not have been to his taste.

Even allowing for the slow pace, it only took fifteen minutes or so to drift from one side to the other.

“Now we just have to look for a convenient place to latch onto on the bulk transport.” LeGault muttered, more to himself than anything.

The bulk carrier was huge. As much as the
Morebaeus
had dwarfed the
Ulysses
, this vessel would have dwarfed the
Morebaeus
. It had one simple purpose. To transport as large a quantity of refined metals to the factories around, and on, Mars, as possible in one go.

There were factories in Earth orbit too, but Hamilton had picked this refinery precisely because it only shipped to Mars. Some of the others were exclusively Earth refineries whilst a few shipped to both, depending on the positions of Mars and Earth relative to the refinery itself.

The carrier was long and compartmentalized. A series of loading tubes, much like the one that had connected the smaller cargo hauler to the mining facility, led from the refinery to the carrier. Each of the separate tubes and compartments loaded different metals, processed and refined from the ore arriving on the other side of the facility.

“In the old days,” Klane told them. “The carriers had no Skip Drives. So they were easy meat for pirates whilst en route to the inner planets. Then they were escorted by warships. But when the Skip Drives came in there was no need to protect them anymore. The only vulnerable parts of their journey are the start and finish points and they are heavily monitored.”

“Don’t the pirates have Skip Drives now?” Jones inquired.

Klane shrugged. “Some, probably. But as fast as they could Skip in, so could a warship. And, let’s face it, it’d take a fair old while to unload something like this of its treasure!”

They nodded, all of them still staring at the gigantic vessel that they were now skimming over in search of a latching point.

“If this thing has a Skip Drive, how will we hold onto it when it jumps? Won’t we affect it’s mass, or something?” Jones frowned. “And won’t the sudden acceleration tear us free?”

“Ordinarily, yes.” LeGault replied from the helm. “But we’re such an insignificant addition to this giant that we won’t make more than a fractional difference to its power requirements. All ships generate a field around themselves when going into hyperspace. That field extends well outside of the hull, to protect comms antenna and the like. It’s kind of like a bubble, I suppose. We’ll be well inside that, for certain. It protects the ship from the entry into hyperspace and all the unpleasant relativistic effects that entails.”

“You worry too much!” Hamilton told Jones.

“Someone has to do the worrying.” He said defensively.

“There!” LeGault stated. “That looks like a good spot.”

He indicated an indented section just forward of the first massive cargo compartment. Beyond, the control area of the ship occupied the bow, housing sensors, navigation and comms gear and so on. The section made a small valley between the two areas. Additionally, there were support struts for the carrier’s structure that ran between the two sections, offering a solid point for the maintenance craft to latch onto with its arm.

LeGault guided the craft into the gap carefully, although there was plenty of room for it. Carl and Jones went down to the arm booth to secure their hold once they were settled in to LeGault’s satisfaction.

Then they allowed themselves the luxury of powering up the life-support system again in order that they could get out of their suits. Nestled in amongst the structure, the relatively low power emissions would most likely be mistaken for part of the carrier’s own systems should anyone be looking, so they felt fairly safe doing so. No one relished the idea of spending any more time in the suits than they had to.

Then it was just a matter of waiting for the carrier to finish loading. From their earlier connection to the refinery’s systems, they already knew they had a couple of days wait ahead of them.

Jones suggested tapping into one of the carrier’s data ports so that he could keep an eye on things. It would be more than possible for him to access the refinery from the carrier whilst it was docked but nobody felt like donning a suit again and trailing a spool of fiber-optic wire behind them whilst they went hunting for an access panel on the giant ship.