Archaea 3: Red (36 page)

“Hold on there a moment, Pauli”, I said softly. The prospectus had a series of numbers, and I was running through the old memory buffer from other screens, looking for correlations.

“See something Gene?” Shorty asked.

“No…” I replied after a moment. “I thought I did at first, but this is just a report. They’re losing more money than they projected, but that’s all I see.”

“You’re so close, Gene.” Dak was positively gloating.

“Well, I don’t know, skipper…
there’s definitely something here, but I can’t see it.”

Pauli nodded. “Neither can I
, Gene.”

“I know what this is about”, Yak replied confidently.

I turned around, and his eyes were alight.

“You do?” Pauli asked incredulously.

“I sure do.”

“Write it down, Yak”, the captain said proudly. “I can almost taste a nice dark beer already.”

“You and me both, sir”, Yak laughed.

I scowled, and ran through the data I’d seen so far, looking for a pattern. “What else is there, Pauli?”

“That’s it, Gene.”

Another moment of silence rolled through the bridge. Shorty swiped a copy of the report to her handset and started going through the screens. I took a cue from her, and did the same. The silence on the bridge rolled on a few more moments, punctuated by the occasional sip.

“This is fantastic coffee, Captain”, Shorty said after a moment.

“Thanks, Shorty. Are you about ready for a refill?”

“Yep, thanks.”

“And you know the answer?”

“Yep”, she said confidently.

“I figured you’d see it”, he said proudly. “Write it down, please. Now we just need to wait for the slow ones.”

I scowled even harder, and squinted at my screen, contorting my thoughts looking for a common thread, something to give me the ‘aha’ moment… but nothing added up. Colony collapse, profit loss, profit gain, market data… it started to spin around.

“I am going to give up”, Pauli said finally. “I have
no idea what we’re looking at. It’s just a mess of financial data and glom press releases.”

“I’m with Pauli, skipper – this isn’t making any sense to me.” I added, after a few more moments. I sure did want some more of that coffee… but the chances were pretty good there’d be another pot made at some point.

“No guesses at all?” the captain asked.

“Well”, I answered, “
I think it’s clear these are glom-related, but I am just not making any sort of connections between all of this.”

“
Fair enough… how about you, Pauli?”

“Sorry… I don’t have a very good head for financial or accounting stuff. I am pretty good at logic problems, but this doesn’t really have enough for me to dig into.”

“Well, that’s understandable, I guess. Okay Yak, you were the first to call it – what is your answer?”

Yak snorted, and swiped
his screen to the forward holo. His answer was ‘AV wasn’t in any of the articles’. I scanned back through my screens and shook my head in disbelief. I couldn’t believe I missed that. Pauli looked up from his screens and snorted in disgust.

“That’s a very good observation, Yak – very impressive”, Dak replied thoughtfully. “Is that what you have as well, Shorty?”

She called up her notes. “Yes… but as best as I can tell, not only were they not the subject of any of the articles, but the highlighted trades on the market summary did seem to be related to AV holdings.”

I was dumfounded, and the look on Pauli’s face mirrored my own. I couldn’t believe we missed that.

“Close, you are both so close. Close enough for horseshoes, anyway.” He reached over for Shorty’s cup and started pumping out a refill. “Janis, dear, would you please work with Yak to develop a self-contained brewery–”

“Distillery”, Yak interjected.

Dak gave him a piteous look. “No, dear – I mean, a brewery... the last thing Pauli needs is ready access to spirits.”

“
Very well, Captain.” Janis replied sweetly, while Yak cheered.

“What is your answer, Captain?” Pauli asked, smiling.

“Well, I didn’t get quite the same answer you folks did… I got the right answer.”

“Hey now, wait a minute
”, Shorty started getting ferocious.

“Simmer down Shorty, take a sip of Gene’s lost cup, and let me finish. You were right, and Yak was right – but neither of you saw the big picture, the full story.”

“So what is the big picture, Dak?” I asked.

“
This is how Solis is being repopulated.”

That was definitely
not the answer I was expecting.

“How did you come up with that?” Shorty
asked incredulously, mirroring the statement we all wanted to make.

“Well, shortness, it’s my lot in life to see the bigger picture, to make connections between dots. While you are all busy doing things, I’m busy thinking about doing things.”

Yak laughed respectfully.

“Is he right, Janis?” Pauli asked.

“Yes Steven”, she replied sweetly. “Captain Smith is never wrong, as you know.”

I groaned
… he was going to be insufferable now.

“Thank you my dear”, the captain said triumphantly. “The answer was really pretty easy to see, once you considered Janis’ motives for collecting this information. I knew she was interested in the new AI variant we found, based on the structure of the code, it was also pretty apparent that it was developed by AV.”

He paused for a sip. “The next clue was the market volatility report. This report focused on trading values in the Eastern Arm markets, which is where AV holdings are most concentrated.”

“Yeah, they own pretty much everything out there”, I mused. I couldn’t believe I missed that one.

“Yep… the commodities that were trading higher appeared to be related to biotech, and the values that were dropping related to industry and mining.”

“How would that relate to Solis? If I remember correctly, it was a mining colony”, Pauli asked.

“It was… but that wasn’t what they were using it for, Pauli. Remember the medical supplies we were hauling on that run?”

“I remember…” Yak replied, “…but I don’t see how it means anything.”

“It does if you consider we were carrying Diethylenetriamine Pentaacetic acid.” He paused for a moment to smile at our blank stares. “Doesn’t anyone remember? It’s a treatment for advanced radiation poisoning, used to leach heavy metals from the body.”

“
You are actually scaring me a little, sir”, Pauli said reverentially.

“Good, it’s healthy to be a little scared of your Captain, son”, he smiled
proudly. “Just remember… I never forget.” He laughed, and continued “The trend report showed SLS MNG with a strong loss, and it hasn’t turned a profit as a mining colony for quite some time...” he trailed off, checking to see if we were still paying attention.

We waited
, patiently.

“Well, I got to thinking, why is it still on the market? Why hasn’t it gone completely dark, written off as unprofitable? Gloms aren’t in the business of losing money.
So why are they repopulating Solis? It’s not a profitable mining colony. The trends for biotech are going up, while they keep sinking money into Solis, and the ‘disease’ they had wiping out the colony… well, if you put two and two together, carry the one, add a few for good luck, then divide by what feels right – it all adds up. Solis has some sort of biotech project happening, something not on their official books. Something they’re making a nice profit from. Clearly, this is all supported by the level of security on the report you found.”

It all made sense. Rather than seeing the data that was there, the captain saw the gaps in the data and filled it with a mix of intuition and a
WAG, or wild-ass-guess, as we used to call it in the service.

“Well, that makes sense, in a sort of strange, twisted way…
so how do you think they’re repopulating Solis?” Shorty asked softly.

“Well, that’s actually the easy part. There’s an easy correlation between reactive profits, and the various stories of profit loss, colony collapse, and other articles. In fact, there’s almost a direct correlation with many of them. The amount of profit spike is almost
the same for each, and as Gene no doubt realizes, it’s right in the ballpark of refueling a capital-class ship.”

I ran through the numbers, and he was right – a little bit of discrepancy, just enough to throw off the numbers, but that could easily be attributed to the differing distances between ports.

“And then, of course, the fact the profit spikes were tracked to a path that meanders through the Eastern Arm, and conveniently touches most of the areas being referenced in the wire articles… well, it seems pretty likely they are rounding up unwilling participants in some sort of biotech or bioweapons program.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch, Dak”, I
replied after a moment. “I’ll grant that you’re tracking the movement of a capital ship, that’s a pretty safe bet… and I do agree the timing of the ship’s movements with the collapse of a few colonies is pretty suspicious… but it’s a pretty big pile of… ah… creative intuition, skipper”, I finished respectfully, barely dodging an eyebrow.

“Janis, how closely does this all track with your assessment”, Pauli asked.

“Steven, the captain has arrived at the same conclusion I have, for the most part, as I expected. It’s very enlightening to explore the process of intuition, especially from someone as clearly accomplished as Captain Smith.”

“What do you mean, ‘…for the most part’, Janis?” Dak asked, swiveling his eyebrow to maximum azimuth.

“Sir, you have every detail correct, but you have not yet solved the full puzzle.”

We all turned to look at the captain.

“Janis, do I have enough information at this point to arrive at the full solution?” he said, after a long, thoughtful sip.

“Not without an
extraordinary leap of intuition, sir”, she replied sweetly.

Chapter 9

The comms hissed
, filled with the screams of a dying star. “Talus Orbital, this is the independent Archaea on approach to Talus dock…” I checked the screen, “…november three niner alpha.”

“Copy that Archaea. Please come to 220, 30 degrees pitch for new course track.”

“Will do Talus”, I replied, taking a look at the recommended track. “This is a pretty busy system, lads.”

“Yes sir”, Yak replied, working through his screens
. From here, they looked pretty full. “Nothing hostile, Captain… not yet, anyway.”

“Give it time, Yak. We’ll find some way to change that, I’m sure”, Pauli added with a laugh.

  Our transit from slipspace went well, and we said our goodbyes to the Little Sister, as she burned for Mokka. Our course led to Talus, into the thickest part of this ancient remnant system, towards our shiny new dry dock.

I
t had been a nice break, but it felt good to stow my slippers and flannels and get back to work. Lining up for the new course track, I went through my standard internal struggle with trusting another person to do my navigation, but in traffic like this it was necessary. Even with Yak pre-filtering targets to only the ones I needed to see, there were still a lot to be mindful of.

“Yak, our approach lane is adjacent to some pretty busy docks. Could you please keep an eye on our flanks for me?”

“Flanks, aye”, he replied smartly. My main concern wasn’t that Talus Control had everything planned out, after all, that was their job – but I didn’t want to put any faith in the other pilots out here.

It was a justified
concern; regulations were only as good as the people who followed them. Any one of the cargo merchies jockeying for position at the fueling dock could have some wet-behind-the-ears rating on bridge watch. It should be unlikely, but it happens more often than you’d think.

I energized our forward arcs, and checked to make sure our nav lights were burning brightly – it’s never a bad idea to stand out, when you want to be seen.

“There sure are a lot of ships
out there”, Pauli said, taking a look at Yak’s screens.

“
Yeah, it’s pretty bad Pauli. You should see what it looks like around the fueling platforms”, he paused for a moment. “There’s an even greater concentration of traffic ahead of us.”

“Those are transshipping docks, for loading commodities and other cargo”, I offered. “Our dock is around Talus a little further past that section – for some reason they have us routed through this mess.”

As I transited through a waypoint we caught a better glimpse of the traffic around the fueling docks, at the ships hove to waiting their turn. They were strung out in semi-orderly lanes for a few kilometers, with various gigs and dropships flitting here and there between and through their ranks.

This was much closer to chaos than order. Order was nominally in control, but chaos was working hard to turn this into a party.

I was holding right down the center of the pipe, but a big fat merchie looked like he might start crowding my lane from starboard at any moment… he had that look in his eye.

“Yak, keep an eye on Sierra 327 please, he looks like he doesn’t quite know where he’s going.”

“Aye sir, I’ll watch him”, he replied smoothly.

I was holding course and speed to the track they gave me, but I was getting that itchy feeling like I might need to break some rules. The transship platforms were even worse than the fueling docks, mostly because the ships stacking up were so much bigger. Some of those cargo haulers were absolutely massive, 30- to 50-million tonners – even a few bigger.

“What the heck is that, some sort of station?” Pauli asked, pointing at one of the larger haulers.

“No… that is actually a ship, Pauli. A cargo ship, loaded with every possible type of merchandise you could imagine. They take months
just to load and offload.”

“That must have taken years to build”, Yak added.

I laughed. “Many years, Yak, and the price tag is more than many systems make in a decade. I couldn’t imagine conning a beast like that. You’d be on station for a year or more just trying to complete a route. The ones that are stacked up might sit there for weeks waiting for their turn.”

I wasn’t really worried much about the bigger ships leaping out in front of us, as they weren’t
really agile enough for the task, but there was an almost constant stream of smaller ships working through this section, any one of which could make our day miserable.

Just to be sure, I
rechecked the talkback on our plate charge, and breathed a little easier. We still might have a rotten day if someone runs into us, but it would be spent feeling bad about their tragic loss, as opposed to feeling dead.

We were finally coming through the end of the transship
section, and traffic was already easing off considerably. There were still small ships flitting around occasionally, but the overall compression was less through the corridor.

I was breathing a lot easier.

“Is that our dock?” Yak asked, as I dropped delta and rotated to line up.

“According to Janis…” I replied. “Speaking of which, can you set me up with dock controls, my dear?”

“Onscreen now, sir” she replied immediately.

“Very well, all hands stand-to for docking procedure”, I called on comms as we hit the final waypoint.

Our dock looked like a semi-rigid, inflatable type with some shielding on the more vital spots. It
was one of many positioned along a trussed ring-section secured into the rock, each separated by a short access tunnel on either side.

I keyed the doors and was rewarded with a
puff of sparkling dust as the doors started to fold open.

“Are we going to fit?” Yak asked.

“No problem”, I replied confidently and prepared to peel the walls off. While we waited for the doors to open, I flipped on the lighting and we got our first glimpse of the interior. The facilities looked first-rate, with a gantry secured out of the way, a work area in the after section of the dock, and luckily for our paint job, a docking sled.

“It looks pretty nice, Janis
”

“Thank you, sir”, she replied proudly.

“Let’s hope I can keep it that way…” I muttered, fighting to line us up to green on the docking rings. It took me a little longer than I would have liked, but with a slight nudge here, a gentle shove there, slowly but surely I brought her into alignment and keyed in the sled.

I would have hated to try and bring her in on manual, but luckily for us, I didn’t need to. The docking sled extended out from the opening underne
ath us, and once the clamps were secured, it slowly retracted us through the opening.

“
Home sweet home”, I said smartly.

*****

Jane and I were getting suited up, while the captain met one final time with Gene. Even though we had atmo on this dock, we didn’t have it charged yet. Even if we had, there still wouldn’t be any reason to tempt fate. It would be crazy to trust a semi-rigid compartment in a system as active as Talus, unless it was absolutely necessary.

Jane was strapped. I smiled when I saw her new stun knife secured to the side of her railer holster – and laughed out loud at
the antique commando knife on her boot. She probably had other miscellaneous guns hidden around as well, and we both had our chemsers on chest slings.

For this mission, the captain wanted us to look as serious as possible. He didn’t want us to look threatening, but he wanted us to project an air of imminent lethality – or as he called it, to ‘look serious’.

My original thought was to go in full mimetics, but Jane had convinced me against doing this, to tip our hand is to give away the advantage, after all. Jane’s scary as hell when she wants to be, but she’s also smart as hell – so I guess it balances out well.

While I wished we could have taken out our new power suits, w
e decided a more subtle appearance could project the lethality and seriousness we needed, so we were in our tactical gear. As neither of us wanted to look like mercs, Jane suggested a slate gray and faded dark blue coloration to give us more of a dress uniform appearance. 

The end result looked serious as all hell. We should be able to project all the authority a
nd clearance the captain needed… though it never hurt to back that appearance up with weaponry. Color schemes only went so far.

Pauli and Gene were tasked with prepping the Archaea for her new pseudograv emitters, and Gene
was having fits at the thought of performing major surgery on the bow. I wasn’t too happy at the thought of having the bridge deck airless either, to be honest. Janis could probably do all of our jobs if she needed, but that wouldn’t really sit well with the captain.

Gene was almost certainly more concerned about the captain, than the refit process.

“You guys are looking good!” called out the captain, as he transited the inner lock above us.

“Thanks Captain”, Jane smiled at me.

“Let me set up and dial in to match. I think I’ll add a white stripe though, as befits my station.”

I laughed at the thought of anyone not being able to tell which one of us was the captain. He was the kind of guy that was in command, whether you knew it or not. He might not actually command much more than respect
from the galaxy, but it was usually given.

“Are we taking the gig, or the crab?” Jane asked, once he
had his mimetics set.

“I think we’ll be taking out the gig,
for this run. It has enough cargo room, and I don’t really want to advertise the tech we have around here. The gig should be a little more relaxing to fly out there, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know… it didn’t look that bad out there coming in, sir” Jane chided.

“Don’t you start with me, tiny person – you don’t want me getting some sort of complex thinking that I am inadequate to fly, like Gene gave me with my coffee. You tasted what sort of lengths I will go to prove to myself what I am capable of.”

“Jane…” I started, watching the gig lift from the racks
above us. The thought of blurred landscapes flashing past rose like a nightmare from the depths of memory. “We do not want him to show us how well this thing flies, trust me on this.”

“Are you starting on me too, Yak?” he called down, laughing. “Heck, there isn’t nearly enough of a challenge in this system to get me warmed up.”

“Oh crap. Jane, quick… shoot me in the foot”, I begged, half joking.

She shrugged, pulled out her
railer and charged the slide.

“
Stand down Shorty”, the captain admonished from the catwalk above. “Holster that weapon; I am not giving you authorization to shoot Yak… yet.”

“Aw, but Captain…” she whined, and reluctantly holstered her railer. I was a little spooked at how discouraged she sounded
, but at the same time, not surprised. I probably deserved a good shooting, from time to time.

We stood clear of the main hatch as the doors opened and watched the captain lower the gig to the dock below, and then we all took the hatch ladder down.
Jane and I stood by while the captain got situated and then we made our way aboard.

Jane and I took
the seats along the front row directly abaft of the cockpit, as that afforded us a nice view through the viewport along either side of the helm. Not that we could see very much at the moment, situated as we were beneath the Archaea.

“Are we squared away kids?” Captain Smith called back on comms.

“Good to go, sir”, I replied.

“Fire when ready, Captain”, Jane added.

“Very well, here we go”, he replied, raising us on lifters, and then smoothly pulled us out from under the Archaea. The dock hatch yawned open to the inky depths as we approached, and swallowed us as we moved past into the space beyond.

“Where are we headed, Captain?” I asked, watching the other docks slide past on our port side.

“We have an appointment with some Talus Federation reps at the main hab, and see where that goes. Gene is adamant that we come back with emitters, or we should just stay gone.”

“Stay gone?” Jane asked.

“Well, as a manner of speaking. I think he’s concerned that he’s going to destroy the Archaea in the process of gutting out the old emitters. To be honest, I think he’s mostly worried that I won’t be able to sweet talk them out of this gear.”

Jane and I traded a look across the aisle.

“I’m sure it won’t be that bad, folks”, he said reassuringly. “Gene does his best work under pressure. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost accuse him of engineering some extra drama from time to time.”

We laughed, despite the sober view of
Talus flashing past the forward port. As anticipated, we were going faster than either of us wanted, but the ride was smoother than we expected. If you have to get somewhere fast, I wouldn’t want anyone else at the helm other than Captain Smith.