Far Space (26 page)

The man was worthless.

“So, when do we go down?” Rider Thuros asked. Stocky, built like a fireplug, Rider rounded out the short list of trusted friends on board. Unfortunately, the little geologist both seconded and ended the list of people Jennifer had been able to get along with during the trip. The rest of the military crew and the other techs kept to themselves. They also seemed to blame Jennifer for the mission taking as long as it had so far.

The mission.

God, what had she been thinking when she agreed to come along? After she had been approached by an agent from the CIA, Jennifer had jumped at the chance to try and establish ‘peaceful discussions’ with the aliens on one of their own worlds. She should have been suspicious when they forbade her from even talking to her husband. Her argument that Ian knew as much about the aliens as anybody else and should at least know where she was going had fallen on deaf ears. Trying to keep the mission from Ian had lead to several strained, time-lagged conversations. All she wanted to do was finish this stupid mission, get back to Jupiter, have these losers drop her off at Europa, and make up with Ian.

Jennifer shook her head. She should have known something was fishy by the secrecy cloaking the entire mission. She should have listened to her inner alarms when she started to meet the rest of the, she now realized, hastily assembled crew. She should have known something was wrong when they were space borne on the tiny stealth ship and everyone looked at her for a course.

Luckily, she had been able to decipher more of the alien database, pinpointing the destination star system by cross checking the navigation files with a seemingly random data pack recovered from the alien ships data files. Unfortunately, the particular alien ship they had captured had not been to the planet in question so the event logs detailing the jumps to get to their objective was not available. The navigation data, while revealing the location, required someone to build the wormhole route.

That someone was Jennifer Langdon.

It was all trial and error from there.

Using the small human database gleaned from humanities clandestine exploration of the wormholes, mainly from around Jupiter, Jennifer chose the first jump which would take them in the general direction of the target system.

They had found themselves in a double star system with three gas giants. The alien navigation database provided the next jump. Unfortunately, Jennifer could not figure out how the database was structured well enough to simply lay out a list of jumps end to end. She was forced to compare the pulsar readings from a current location to find the next potential wormhole. For some reason the database did not list the pulsar readings from the opposite end of the wormhole. Jennifer suspected the data had been corrupted or deleted somehow during the process of extracting it from the alien equipment.

It took three tries from the second system to find another wormhole which brought them closer to their goal.

Jennifer had been plotting this sort of painful progress through the galactic wormhole system every waking hour over the past few weeks. The multiple jumps and painfully slow examination of each system was wearing thin on the crew. A usual jump called for at least twenty-four hours of observation before activating the engines. This kept the ship close to the wormhole they had just used and allowed the sensors to search for alien vessels in the region.

If she had only known they had expected her to do all the astro-navigation! She knew she was on her own for good when she asked the young seaman serving as the ships official navigator for help. He was good at running the ships nav computer and could get the ship wherever it needed to go inside a star system, where the reference points were all based on gravitational fields
centered on a solar body, planets and other minor bodies. Unfortunately, he had been given no instruction on wormhole navigation. All he knew how to do was find the right place in orbit for conjuncture and wormhole entry…if he were given the coordinates from the computer and the gravitation sensors on board the ship. Basically, if it was not automated, the poor guy was out of luck.

She really should have not agreed to this.

But, despite all the trials, here they were at their destination at last. Jennifer stared at the main viewer. It showed the world they had been seeking, a beautiful blue marble streaked by white clouds.

The second planet of system 4576B was a water world with none of the browns or greens to disturb the two-tone color scheme. Long-range images showed some small islands. Inconsequential as they were on a planetary scale, these isles were all the planet offered in the way of any landmass. As Tom had so eloquently stated, ‘that left plenty of room for them squidies.’

Jennifer had not openly questioned the goal of their ‘mission’. The official statement seemed inadequate after she had observed the crew more closely. This should have been a high level diplomatic mission. The longer she was aboard, the more it seemed like some sort of unofficial covert mission, and a poorly planned one at that. She started looking through the log files from the alien ship first using Quade’s crude first start at deciphering. As it turned out, Jennifer had a knack for not only navigation using the alien data base, but also for reading their language. Perhaps it was simply because she spent so much time looking at the strange characters. Jennifer began to make additions (and corrections) to the team linguist’s translation program. She had approached Quade a second time to share her progress and was not-so-politely told to keep her nose out of his business. So, Jennifer had begun her own files on her personal pad and worked on the translations during their careful transits between wormhole entry points. What she found was interesting.

What Jennifer did not find was disturbing.

Major portions of the data were missing. Jennifer noticed the time tags did not match up from one entry to another. The ‘star log’ tags should have been sequential but were not, instead they jumped all over the place. Someone had cut major sections of information away. The uncorrelated data was worse.

After Six had been secured aboard Cheyenne Jennifer had helped download the data she was seeing. Well, the data she was now seeing part of, she thought. Jennifer knew the team from Cheyenne had managed to download literally terabytes of data. What she was looking at amounted to only a few hundred megabytes.

But Jennifer had a secret. She had kept a desk copy of the downloaded files even after the military had collected up all the alien data upon their arrival back in Earth Space. The data tabs she had recorded everything on fit nicely into the lining of her makeup kit. She did turn in her other working copies like a good girl, knowing she would get copies of the communications system information she was slated to continue studying. With all official data accounted for, no one checked very hard when she toted her one bag of personal items off Cheyenne for her shuttle back to Far Side Station on the lunar surface.

Jennifer worried she had broken the law. But, for the life her, could not figure out which one. She had not been ordered to turn over all her data; it was more of a request. Besides, she was not in the military anyway. So, she kept her copy, quietly stashed in bathroom drawer in her quarters and conveniently forgot to mention it to her new husband.

Now, with the data finally coming in very handy as she uploaded it onto her data pad, she thanked God she had thought to make the copies.

Jennifer ensured the wireless feature of the pad was off, fearing someone on the ship might notice her copies of the logs were nearly one hundred times larger than the ‘official copy.’ She found the name of the aliens almost right away, for some reason, it had been purged from the data she had been given.

Humanity was at odds with beings who called themselves the Soosuri. That mystery solved, Jennifer went back to the entry describing the planet where the mission had decided to attempt contact. There were two things wrong with the team’s choice of objectives for this mission.

First, as far as Jennifer could tell, there were nearly one hundred and sixty seven planets with a Soosuri presence. The one world they had been focusing on, the planet Jennifer had at first assumed was some sort of capital, was far from the center of the Soosuri star-spanning civilization. Studying the
broader set of data, it was easy to see the planet in System 4576B was hard to find, hard to travel to, as she well knew, and did not seem to have a significant alien population.

Second, the data she was now able to decipher seemed to indicate this was some sort of off-limits world. She did not have the word for ‘quarantine’ yet, but the rest of the description fit: basically instructions for how to approach the planet to avoid the ‘undesirable’ population concentrated near one of the undersea uplifted areas around a string of desolate islands.

Jennifer locked her datapad and leaned back in the acceleration couch she used as her station on the tiny bridge. She glanced at the Captain and James Monroe huddled in conference. What the heck was going on here anyway?

C-31R SOF Reconnaissance Spacecraft - “Reaper 16”

Jupiter Space

Ian poked his head through the hatch leading to the tiny bridge of the Reaper and took a moment to look around. “Wow, and I thought the 25 I trained on was cramped.” The C-25B was a small orbital transport manned by a two person crew. It was big enough to give a new pilot much needed experience during undergraduate pilot training the feel for flying a multi-engine, high mass ship. It was also forgiving enough not to kill a trainee for handling the stick too hard.

“The 31 is small, but I bet your 25 didn’t have an AM drive,” the young man in the pilot’s seat said. He turned around to look at Ian. “Or a jump drive.”

“True.” Ian squeezed further inside and stretched out his hand to the pilot. “Ian Langdon.”

The pilot took Ian’s hand and responded with a firm grip. “First Lieutenant Jeff Michaels. Call me Ghost. You a Century guy?”

“Sort of,” Ian said with a shake of his head. “I was on my way to my first assignment on the Schiever and got a little side-tracked by an alien invasion. Ended up on a Horizon instead.”

“Horizon-class,” Ghost said, chewing his lip. “That’d be Cheyenne. Well at least you’ve got some experience with AM drives.”

“You could say that,” Ian agreed. He thought back to the crash training course he and then-Captain Maytree had received on the power systems of the Cheyenne before they had piloted the Cheyenne from L5 out to Saturn.

“So, that’s where you know Yates from?” the woman in the co-pilot’s seat asked. She stuck out her hand to Ian. “First Lieutenant Elisa Byrd. Don’t expect Ghost to hand over the controls. Reaper 16 is his baby.”

Ian thought back to his time piloting the Cheyenne. “I can understand that.”

Ghost ran his hand over his control console. “Robin’s just jealous because I give my lady so much attention.”

“In your dreams,” Robin snorted.

“Status.”

The three young officers turned to find a Lieutenant Colonel in the doorway.

“All we were missing was you, sir,” Ghost said, turning back to his controls.

Ian stood hunched over between the pilot and co-pilot seats for an awkward moment as the man, his name tag simply identified him as Lt Col Bridges, looked him up and down.

“Captain, unless you plan on taking my seat, you need to stow yourself,” Bridges said, pointing at a jumpseat folded up in the corner of the bridge.

Ian moved to the side of the bridge to allow Bridges to squeeze past him to the command seat located directly behind Ghost. It was raised slightly to allow the spacecraft commander to see over the pilot’s head. As Bridges and the others busied themselves with getting the Reaper ready for launch, Ian pulled the jump seat down and strapped in. Inspecting his immediate area, he was relieved to find the jump seat could serve as a fourth station on the bridge. He pulled down a display and control console stowed in the bulkhead and activated the board.

Other than monitoring the status of the ship, Ian had little to do. What was he now anyway? A mission specialist?

“I hope you know where we’re going, Langdon,” Bridges said, looking down from his seat to Ian’s. “The only reason I’m doing this is because I trust Yates with my life. You, on the other hand...”

Ian nodded. The implication was clear. Bridges did not like this at all and certainly did not trust the young Captain foisted upon him by the General. Ian pulled out the data pad Yates had given him and showed it to Bridges. “Our complete route is laid out.”

Bridges grunted at what he thought was obviously an inadequate response. The commander turned to face forward. “Ghost, get us out of here. The Captain has an important mission which requires our urgent attention.”

Ian turned on the data pad for the first time. He hoped to God Yates was right and everything he needed was in here. He really had no idea where they were going. Ian replayed the hasty discussion with the general just fifteen minutes old.

After entering the hanger, Yates had huddled with Ian outside the Reaper’s hatch. Their faceplates touching so they did not have to use their intercoms, Yates had finally confided his theory on what Jennifer’s mission had been and why it was imperative Ian find her. When Yates had finished, Ian was left speechless. Yates had tapped the data pad Ian now carried and simply said, ‘Don’t worry, this explains everything.’