Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (17 page)

The
Tiger
coasted in deep space midway to Wolf 359 while Jerri optimized the final jump. Meriel and Lev checked the lashings and ran the data-integrity checks. That’s where Ferrell found her.

“You shouldn’t be here, Doc,” she said.

“Medical emergency,” Ferrell said.

“Whose?”

“Yours. There’s still the issue of your…” Ferrell paused and glanced over to Lev.

Meriel looked around. “OK. What is it?”

“You’re still taking your meds?”

“Of course,” she lied.

Ferrell raised his voice. “File says they were for delu—”

“OK. OK,” Meriel said loudly to cut him off. “You win. Lev, take five.” Meriel drummed her fingers on the data module while watching Lev leave the cargo bay. When he turned the corner, she turned back to Ferrell. “Get it off your chest, Doc. So, you’ve read my files. So what?”

Ferrell nodded but showed no emotion. “It’s my responsibility, Meriel,” he said. “The meds?”

“They were for the pain.”

“An injury?”

“During the attack, I…was hurt.”

“I’m sorry, Meriel. It’s terrible what happened to you and your family.” His voice softened. “The file did not mention an injury.”

Something in his voice told Meriel that he understood, and she relaxed. She opened her shirt collar to expose a portion of the jagged scar that ran from her waist, across her chest, and up her neck to her ear. “It’s mostly healed now.”

He looked at her scar and nodded.

He doesn’t care
,
she thought.
He looked right at them and didn’t wince or look away, like the scars aren’t part of me and don’t matter at all. Maybe I misjudged him
, she thought, unaware of her blush.

“BioInc has a new treatment for scarring,” she said and looked down, exposing more of herself than she had intended.

Ferrell looked at her closely with a gentle smile and put his hand on her shoulder. “The deepest wounds may not be visible on the surface.”

His words hit the mark.
Maybe he could help
,
she thought. She looked into his blue eyes, and her body warmed with his smile and his touch.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe if…

“Come see me, Meriel. When you’re off duty.”

She nodded. “Sure, Doc,” she said, still entangled by his words, and watched Ferrell turn and leave.

He didn’t care about the scars
, she thought again and watched him walk away. But when Ferrell turned the corner, his aura turned the corner with him. She felt ashamed and stared at the empty doorway.

Lev came back into the cargo bay, caught her closing her shirt, and shook his head. “Ah, the rake targets another willing victim,” he said and went back to work.

“Ferrell’s a doctor,” Meriel said, but her blush betrayed her.
Who am I kidding
, she thought.
I’m nothing special. He’s a doctor and wouldn’t be squeamish around scars
. Then she blushed again, realizing that she thought of him as a man, not as an enemy who could destroy her future if he found out what she was doing. Meriel cued up a text to Molly.

Tell Ferrell not to bother me when I’m on duty. It’s dangerous.

Molly’s reply was quick.

Dangerous to the cargo? For the crew?

Meriel replied.

Dangerous for Ferrell.

***

Meriel walked back to the galley, grabbed a snack, and sat with her feet up on the neighboring chair to read the messages they’d picked up outbound from Enterprise. She wondered what useful thing she could do until Nick safely read the sim-chip. They may have a lead on the why but not on the who.
If hijackers had attacked the
Princess
for the cargo, then who were the hijackers? Who would have done it?
It might be on the chip, but she would need Nick to disarm it or scrub the data first.

Remembering the nondescript man she had seen on Enterprise, she pulled up the vid from Nick’s temporary link and zoomed the image on her visor. He was a graying, middle-aged man: a little severe, as though he’d just cleaned himself up after spending a lifetime in the sewer.

“Zoom,” she said. A long, thin scar appeared over his left temple. She forwarded the clearest images to an app with the galaxy’s facial-recognition database.

“Search all,” Meriel said and set the ship’s computer to work in the background.

Her link beeped with an incoming message, a message sent just as they had left the Procyon A system.

From nz: i’m working on the data files in a clean room. in the meantime, i’ve scrubbed the files in the home and personal directories. too much to send without more time. attached is the vid you wanted along with another file i think will interest you. i cleaned up the signal so you can hear some of the garbled audio. i also improved the video resolution at the end. the original has a noise reduction algorithm overmodulating the signal, and that’s why the popular version is 2-d and so hard to understand. tell me what you think.

She tapped her visor’s heads-up display to view the still of her and her mother after her first EVA. Then she cued up the vid that Nick said would interest her. At first, she was surprised to see a full holovid image, but she was quickly disappointed. She had seen this vid many times before. It was the familiar Mouldersen interview about the discovery of an Earthlike body by a survey probe, the one that came back late after getting lost in a dust cloud, the same one she had written off as amateur theater. The garbled voice was much clearer now, and she could make out every word. Meriel turned her head to view different parts of the room and then rose and walked through the audience displayed by the holovid. But the faces were hidden from the camera’s view, and she spotted nothing more of interest. She played it through to the familiar scuffling when the camera fell under the chair, but she had learned nothing new.

“Meeting over. Stop recording,” the familiar voice on the vid said, but the speaker was off camera. “Everyone back to work, please, and thank you very much for attending. Director, a word, please.”

Expecting the holo to end just as the vid did, Meriel picked up her trash and walked to the recycle chute. However, the holo did not end, and Meriel stopped in her tracks, trash still in her hands.

“Pause. Length,” she said, and the display said eight minutes. Other copies of this video stopped at about two minutes. Meriel sat down in the nearest chair. “Play.” The camera still pointed to the ceiling, but she heard someone talking and turned up the volume.

“You cannot withhold news like this,” Jeannine said.

“Of course you are right, Ms. Aldersen,” a man’s voice responded.

“Pause,” Meriel instructed her link.
Aldersen, not Mouldersen
, she thought. “Search Jeannine Aldersen.” Her visor displayed a brief news vid: scientist for BioLuna, found alone in her apartment on Europa, apparent victim of starvation due to brain damage during a multimonth Stim bender.
She forgot how to eat,
Meriel thought.
Huh, a responsible astrophysicist and team director suddenly has a Stim addiction. Killed by sudden success
? “Play.”

“Of course you are right, Ms. Aldersen, but all in good time. This is wonderful news, but something so momentous needs subtlety in the presentation. Now, the great news for you is the chairman has a special project and would like a word with you. He suggested you might be the perfect representative to the UNE/IS regarding this wonderful discovery.”

“Well…” Jeannine stammered, “this is so sudden.”

“Rather. The timing is perfect for you, Jeannine. This news will impact all of known space and must be handled with care to avert panic and a land rush. This position will require technical expertise and discretion like you have exhibited during this project.”

“But I—” Jeannine said, but the man interrupted again.

“Come now, Ms. Aldersen. Carpe diem. Some opportunities must be grasped when they arise. Officer, please escort Ms. Aldersen to the chairman’s office. Good day, Director.”

Meriel heard a door close, and the voice returned, but now much less charming. “You, clean up. Leave nothing.”

She heard doors close in the holo followed by a long silence. There was much more to the recording, so Meriel waited. After a few minutes, someone picked up the camera and went to the table, where Ms. Aldersen had stood during her announcement. The camera scanned the empty table and then focused on a clipboard under the table. Meriel stopped the holo and zoomed in on the clipboard to see the data sheet from the survey probe. The holographer tore the sheet off the clipboard and scribbled “TTL-5B” in the margin.

Meriel heard, “Hey, you!” on the holo. The picture jerked abruptly, and the holo ended.

She leaned back in her chair. She was very familiar with the torn-off data sheet. It was famous, or rather infamous, and available everywhere on the net. Meriel and Elizabeth had found many copies on conspiracy sites. It was considered one of the greatest frauds of the century.

The survey data clearly showed an Earthlike atmosphere, gravity, nitrogen-rich soil, and two moons. The data was so explicit and self-consistent that people believed it on sight. And in a galaxy hungry for land, it drove a frenzy of speculators and prospectors to stake their claims. But when they arrived, they found only a dead rock. People condemned it as a sophisticated fraud or theoretical exercise, but they could not figure out who would benefit. They wrote it off as a prank and stopped looking, never knowing why someone would go to all the trouble.

Meriel backed up the holo to a shot of the data sheet on the clipboard and froze it.
Well, Nick
, she thought,
let’s just see how much you’ve improved the resolution
. “Zoom, two x,” she said to enlarge the clipboard, but it remained too small to read and distorted by the lighting in the mess hall. “Four x.” The data sheet filled her low-res heads-up display, but the image was still fuzzy.

She got up, threw her trash away, and went to the entertainment center. Near the high-resolution holographic display she waved her link. The data sheet appeared on the deck, full size but still a bit fuzzy. “Times eight,” she said. And there it was.

The designation was TTL-5B3, not TTL-5B. That would make it a moon, not a planet: the third moon orbiting the second planet. People had expected a planet and found a dead rock. Still, they would not likely miss a habitable moon nearby after traveling all that way. Her mother had not seen this but still believed. What did she guess?

If I presume everything printed on the sheet is correct, then what do I have
? If the data were real and the coordinates were real, then the origin or orientation must have been off. Jeannine had said that the survey probe could not orient itself for a return to Earth and used the Magellanic cloud to get its bearings. That meant that it could not see Sol. That also meant that Sol could not see TTL-5.

“It’s a new star,” she said aloud. The coordinates were not referenced from Earth or Sol but from somewhere else.

Meriel looked at the image of the data sheet on the deck again. The survey sheet specified the coordinates in the familiar declination, right ascension and distance, but the little boxes for EQS, or EES, specifying the Earth equatorial or Earth ecliptic system, remained unchecked.

“And not referenced from Earth.”

A handwritten note above the boxes, a note not included on the torn-off data sheet circulated throughout the galaxy, read: “ref: DXC.”
DX? DX Cancri. That’s Dexter Station
.

She sighed. “Everybody had looked in the wrong place,” she said, “and for the wrong thing.” She put in the coordinates and translated from DX Cancri to Earth ecliptic. Nothing appeared on the charts; dust clouds obscured observations from Sol and the familiar stations, just like Jeannine had said, but you could see it from DX Cancri. They called it Jira-1, but no one knew the system that surrounded the star. And no one there would care: Dexter Station was another low-grav logistics hellhole, and no one there would have time to think about anything other than staying alive long enough to escape.

Jeannine’s genius had put her on that survey probe. She had looked through its eyes and found an Earthlike habitat. The probe had to figure out its location but could not see Earth through the dust clouds. So it used another star to orient itself, a star it knew well—DX Cancri—and posted the coordinates relative to the DXC ecliptic rather than to Earth’s. That’s what the scientists celebrated—they had solved the puzzle.

So, Mom almost found Home and would have if she’d had time to open the latest holo. Using TTL-5B as clues, she almost found TTL-5B3, a moon in the Goldilocks zone, a place that had all of the major requirements for human life. The speaker on the vid was right to be afraid of a land rush. It was unique and priceless.

There was one thing Meriel knew—this was not Haven. TTL-5B3 was a moon, and John said Haven was a colony?
Maybe I should ask. Nah. He’ll think I’m crazy or some conspiracy nut if I tell him he’s living on the biggest fraud in the galaxy
.