Guardians of the Galactic Sentinel 1: The Deimos Artifact (5 page)

"I'll...have to look into that. Trouble is, I'm no pilot."

"You could advertise for a pilot. We have people who find themselves stranded out here all the time when a business deal goes south or a friendship takes a turn. Get on your tablet and put out an ad for a pilot. I'll bet you can find someone who'll go cheap just to get out of here. Somebody might just agree to do it for the ride alone. Whatever you decide, my offer will stand."

"Thanks for the tip, Henri, I'll check into it right away."

Somewhat numb at the prospect of another major change in his plans, Zack headed back to his hotel room. Upon arrival, the first thing he did was prepare a short ad requesting the services of a pilot.

"Pilot wanted for a one way run to Central Planets. Mark II Bombardier Voyager. Minimum rate Or Best Offer?"
Zack added his contact information and posted the ad to a couple of the space-related bulletin boards.

"Looks like I might get to be owner of a spaceship for a while,"
he thought, shaking his head.

He pulled his uncle's memory chip out of his backpack and laid it on the small desk in his hotel room. He then fished out his uncle's letter, looking for the exact wording that Marv had used to indicate what the password for the chip was. He scanned through until he found that particular passage in the letter...

"...
It took me some time to come up with an appropriate password to unlock the chip but the one I have selected is something that only the two of us could know. It has to do with a trip we took together on your fourteenth birthday
..."

Zack remembered the trip in question. His parents had been on a business trip and Marv's wife was tied up with some big charity soiree. That left only Zack and Marv to do something special for the young man's birthday. Zack frowned as memories came flooding back. It had also been the year before his parents had been killed in a freak orbital shuttle accident and his aunt and uncle had become responsible for his care.

His uncle had taken him to one of the Tri-V theatres in Freeport to a video that Zack's parents had forbidden him to go to. They'd considered this particular video to be too violent and too mature for their son at his still tender and impressionable age. The name of the video had been "Bloodlust Alley" and outside of a few minor scares, many liters of fake blood, and a lot of really foul language, Zack remembered that he hadn't been all that impressed with it. That stolen afternoon was something that neither he nor his uncle had ever talked about with anyone else.

Zack pressed the memory chip into the flat receptacle of the same shape on the back of his tablet. When prompted for a password a few seconds later, he entered, "BloodlustAlley."

The password was accepted and a string of files came up. None of the file names seemed to have much significance as far as Zack was concerned. The first one he opened was a spreadsheet that had multiple entries regarding various pieces of art with columns for how much each had cost to acquire and how much the item had been sold for or who it had been donated to. Some of the other files looked mildly interesting but from the first run-through, it looked to Zack as though the chip contained a lot of now pretty much worthless information.

His tablet chimed softly in his hands, startling him. Someone had already responded to his pilot ad. At first the response looked promising,
"Twenty years of experience with Bombardier craft."
Then Zack read
"Must have full Master Pilot's wage."
He didn't erase the entry but he didn't respond to it either. Instead, he left his room and took the lift down to the ground floor. There he treated himself to an unexpectedly tasty dinner at the de Ritz Hotel's unassuming and underrated restaurant.

When he returned to his room, he found that here had been two more responses to his pilot ad while he had been absent. Both of them indicated that they were willing to work with him for some kind of minimal compensation. As he thought about where to conduct interviews, the little coffee shop just a short distance from the hotel came immediately to mind. He responded to both applicants and asked them to meet him at the coffee shop in the morning, scheduling the meetings two hours apart,

Realizing that he was dead tired from the travel required to get to Haven and all of the events in a rather packed day, Zack set an alarm on his tablet and went to bed.

Chapter 5.
Pilots and Problems.

Freeport, capital city of the Haven colony, July 5, 2676.

Zack woke up, as was his habit, about fifteen minutes before the alarm was scheduled to go off. He got up immediately, showered and put on some clean civilian clothes, stuffed his folded tablet in his backpack and headed for the coffee shop, arriving a half hour before his first appointment was scheduled. He ordered a cup of coffee and a pastry and settled in at a table for two in a back corner from where he could easily keep an eye on the entry. He savored the excellent pastry and finished his coffee while looking over the responses from his two applicants again. The first one read: "
Five years of experience. Need to get back to Central Planets. Will work cheap."
It wasn't the most impressive application but it did look as though the price was right.

The first applicant got off on the wrong foot immediately. He was ten minutes late and when he arrived he looked like he had slept in his clothes. Zack wasn't sure, but he thought he detected a hint of alcohol on the man's rather unclean person. The interview lasted less than fifteen minutes. Zack said he'd call when he'd made his decision and immediately erased the man's information.

The next applicant didn't look to be much more impressive.
"Two years experience, military training. Will work for passage and small stipend."
Ten minutes before the appointed time, a young woman came in and ordered a cup of coffee. She looked around the shop and noticed that Zack, who was sitting by himself back at his corner table, was the only other patron in the shop. With coffee in hand, she approached his table.

"You the party looking for a pilot?" she asked. Her voice was a soft alto. She was wearing a camouflage-patterned, military-style baseball cap and a khaki coverall. She had a pleasant manner, and Zack had to admit, quite an attractive face. A few wisps of dark hair fell out from around the cap and she regarded him with a pair of large and expressive brown eyes. Zack figured she was within a year or two of his own age.

He got up to shake her hand.

"Yes I am," he replied, "Zack Lynton, proud owner of the
Capri
."

"Elizabeth Howell," said the young woman, as they both sat down at the table, "But you can call me, Beth. Just got out of the Federation Navy. I can wait here for another two weeks for passage back to the Central Worlds or I can find my own way. I thought I'd rather not wait if I didn't have to."

They chatted for the next fifteen minutes or so, sharing some of their Military experiences.

"I'm assigned to a Marine hovercraft unit," said Zack, "and I've been in combat on and off for the last three and a half years. Three weeks ago my unit got moved out to New Slovenia to put down another colony rebellion and we were just mopping up there when I got called out here to Haven to take care of a family emergency. I've got a few months left in my tour and I'm not sure what I'll do when they ask me to re-up." Zack intentionally refrained from any mention of his unresolved legal troubles with the Marine authorities.

Beth's story was much more mundane.

"I got into the military because I wanted to learn how to be a pilot. Got through the officer's training and then spent the first year and a half either in simulators or watching real pilots work. I finally got to do some piloting during my last two years in the Navy. Mission accomplished, I guess. I got out at the first opportunity and elected to have them drop me here when they stopped for supplies and reaction fluid."

"You're hired," said Zack, "Would you be willing to wait until we get to Central before I pay you?"

"No problem, Captain. Not a lot of places to spend money in deep space."

"Please, Beth, call me 'Zack.'"

"Will do, Captain Zack."

They both had a laugh.

"Listen, Beth," said Zack, "Now that I have a pilot, I've really got no reason to remain out here on Haven any longer. I'm going to run back to my hotel room to pick up my stuff and I'll be heading to the shuttleport to go back up to the orbital station. I'm guessing that there're some things that we need to do to get the ship ready?"

"How long has she been sitting?"

"At least a month, maybe more."

"Yeah," she replied, "I'd better go with you. Especially if you've never done anything like this before."

Zack consulted his tablet. "Next shuttle leaves in an hour and a half. Meet me at the Spaceport?"

Beth got up, "I'd better get going then," she said, "I'll see you there." She took her coffee and headed out.

Zack discovered that he liked his new pilot's smile. Quite a lot, in fact. Maybe this trip to Central wouldn't be so bad after all.

Zack walked back to his hotel and was ready to leave within ten minutes. He caught a hovercab to the shuttleport and purchased two tickets to the Orbital Station. Beth joined him some fifteen minutes later and they boarded the shuttle together. Zack noted that her personal belongings didn't take up any more space than his did. That didn't surprise him. Both were following military protocol, packed light and ready to ship out at a moment's notice.

Haven Orbital Station, July 5, 2676.

Zack and Beth arrived at the Orbital Station without incident, gathered up their things, disembarked from the shuttle and headed for berth forty-six, the one where the
Capri
was supposed to be docked.

Zack got his first look at his newly-acquired spaceship through the transparent meta-polycarbonate material of the docking station's huge viewports. A Bombardier Voyager Mark II was, like most spacecraft, essentially an elongated cylinder, rounded at both ends. Unlike many of the more utilitarian ship designs, the Mark II was somewhat more pointed at the stern than she was at the bow. She was just over a hundred meters in length and about fifteen meters in diameter. As a ship intended to frequently go into and out of the various docking facilities found all over Federation Space, the number of external structures was intentionally kept to a minimum.

She had a ring of three reaction engines, each on its own pylon, some twenty meters from her stern, while an array of dishes necessary for communications, logistics and navigation dotted her hull in several places. Up towards her bow was the gentle bulge of her bridge, which included a pair of short, wide, forward-facing, triangular viewports in a "V" arrangement at the front of a blister that tapered off before it smoothly fared into the cylindrical hull and disappeared aft.

The ship was the uniform gun-metal grey color of her native hull material except for several distinct and rather gaudy patches of color. A pair of palm trees about three meters tall with brown trunks and green, spiky leaves were emblazoned across the side of the hull just below the bridge. The name
"Capri"
was superimposed over the top of the palm trees in meter-high italic script consisting of letters that were a garish pink color with a narrow sky-blue outline.

The end of her nose and the tip of her stern had received similar treatment; both of them were painted the same hot pink as the lettering and were delineated from the rest of the hull by a narrow sky-blue stripe. Rather than merely ringing the hull, the colored patches and their accenting stripes had been applied at a forty-five degree angle to the hull with the patch on the bow shorter on the top of the ship than it was on the bottom. The patch at the stern matched the angle of the one at the bow and was longer on the top of the ship than it was on the bottom. Zack wasn't sure he liked the color choices but the overall effect was to lend an otherwise mundane design a somewhat jaunty air.

"The ship hasn't been operated for a while," said Zack, "Will we need to activate the artificial gravity?"

"We shouldn't need to, there are enough systems on board, especially life support, that work better when they're kept under continuous gravity. On most ships, the artificial gravity is just left on unless the ship is going into long-term storage."

"Good to know," replied Zack.

As Beth and Zack drew closer to the berth, it was immediately obvious that a docking tube was connected to the ship. Not only that, the outside airlock door was open. The two of them went swiftly but warily down the zero-gravity docking tube and onto the ship. They had just gotten into the ship's gravity field in the airlock receiving area and dropped their gear to the deck when two men, their faces covered with ski masks, burst out of the hatchway that led inward to the rest of ship.

"What the...?" exclaimed Zack.

"Look out!" shouted Beth.

The first man through the hatch spotted Zack and came right at him while the other, after a slight hesitation to pull a stun rod, went for Beth. Zack's man was a little bigger than he was but he also proved to be a whole lot slower. That and he wasn't prepared for an altercation with a combat-hardened marine whose fighting instincts were honed to a fine edge by battling for his life in close-quarter combat for much of the last three and a half years!

Zack sidestepped the man's rush, doubled him over with a fist to the gut and added a shove to his adversary's own momentum to slam the man's head into the forward bulkhead. The stunned intruder rebounded from the wall, sat down hard and slumped over to the floor, unconscious. Having instantly shifted into full combat mode, Zack had to force himself to back off. If he had allowed himself to follow through with his combat reflexes, he would have almost certainly injured the man far more seriously than he was already and might have even killed him. The effort required surprised him. The intruder didn't know how lucky he was!

Zack turned to see how Beth was doing and discovered that she was already standing over her own adversary. Her man was bleeding from a cut lip and she had him on his knees with an arm twisted painfully behind his back. The stun rod lay unused where it had tumbled to the floor. Where Zack had applied brute force, Beth had apparently employed finesse. In any case, both had achieved the desired objective; in under thirty seconds, the unwanted visitors had been neutralized.

They secured the wrists of the conscious man with several of the zip ties that were standard equipment near any airlock. While Zack trussed up the unconscious assailant, Beth used her slate/communicator to call the station authorities. Security officials said they would be there in a few minutes. After they pulled the masks off from the two intruders, Zack thought that the one Beth had subdued might have been the same man he had seen outside the coffee shop the day before, but he couldn't be sure.

Meanwhile Zack's would-be assailant began to regain consciousness. Though there wasn't much time before the authorities would arrive, Zack attempted to question the two men. He got nothing, both of them merely looked at him belligerently and then looked away. Three security officers arrived a short time later and two of them marched the intruders up the docking tube and onto a utility cart marked "Security." The other, with a name tag that read "Taggert," stayed on the ship to get more information.

"Any idea what these guys were doing on your ship?" asked the officer.

Zack shook his head.

"I wonder if they sabotaged something?" asked Beth.

"We'd better have a look around," said Taggert. He consulted his police-issue tablet, "I've got a lifesign, way back aft."

"Do you want me to take the lead?" asked Beth, "The layout of this ship looks a lot like an old Military C-3000. I should be able to find my way around without too much trouble."

"I knew there was a good reason to hire you," said Zack.

She responded with a terse smile.

"You can guide us, but I'll be taking the lead," said the officer.

They didn't find the source of the lifesign until they got down to the engineering section. The hatch door, usually kept latched on most ships, was open. Motioning for Beth and Zack to wait, the officer slipped through the hatch opening.

"There's a man down in here!" he announced.

Zack and Beth followed the officer into the engine room as quickly as they could. Sure enough, there was a man sprawled out on the floor. He looked to be a little past middle age, with short, sparse, greying hair and was dressed in a dark-green and somewhat soiled coverall.

"He's breathing," said the officer, with some relief, "Looks like someone got him with that stun rod."

Upon hearing voices, the old man began to stir back into consciousness. His first response was to try and get away from the three strangers. He rolled over onto his back and attempted to retreat from the newcomers crabwise. With his muscles still not responding properly from the effects of the stun bolt, the effort turned out to be a rather feeble attempt at escape.

"Easy," said Zack, "We mean you no harm."

"Who...who are you?" asked the old man.

"This is officer Taggert from Station Security. I'm Zack, the new owner of this ship and this is Beth, my pilot." After giving the man a moment for the information to sink in, he added, "We might ask you the same question?"

"I'm Cliff Bernard, the engineer for this old tub."

Zack and Beth looked at each other. No one had ever said anything about an engineer. Zack quickly decided that they would sort that out later.