The Lost Starship (27 page)

My father
—

Maddox’s head snapped upright. His eyes shined. He grabbed the professor’s notes and began to read for
what felt like the one hundred and first time. What if “sun” meant “comet” and “asteroid” meant “star system?” That would mean—
He jumped to his feet and turned on the computer. With the notes in one hand
, he tapped in the coordinates on the computer and finally deciphered Ludendorff’s record of his visit to the alien star system. An hour later, Maddox had a chart leading into the Beyond. The departure point would be the Nine Whiskey Star System.

He pulled up a star chart and found they were four jumps from there. Afterward, he slumped in his chair with his gaze blurred.
Could this be it? Had he truly broken the code that would bring them to the most legendarily haunted region in space?

There’s only one way to fin
d out
. He downloaded the information, sending it to Valerie’s computer in the control room. Then he hurried there to tell them the good news.

***

The next three weeks left the crew exhausted as they worked overtime keeping the scout running.
Geronimo
had left the Oikumene far behind. They ranged deeper and deeper into unknown territory. The
Saint
Petersburg
and the New Men star cruiser had both shown up again, but the
Geronimo
had managed to shake them off.

Maddox imagined the New Men spreading a net after each jump the scout made out of
their sight. There were only so many routes to choose from. Each enemy starship must head for a different point. Then, the enemy used their sensors in each newly-entered star system to search for the
Geronimo
.

How are they coordinating the moves
between ships in different star systems?
That’s what baffled Maddox. The only method he knew was actually sending other ships as messengers. Whatever the New Men were doing, though, was working.

“Do you think they’re letting us run ahead of them
on purpose,” Lieutenant Noonan asked one day.

“Maybe,” Maddox admitted.

They sat in the galley, Meta, Valerie and him eating freeze-dried pork chops. The favorite meals were vanishing from the menu selections. Soon, only the skipped meals would remain. After those vanished, there wouldn’t be anything left to eat but dried fruit and nuts.

Maddox cut his
pork chop, popping a piece of meat into his mouth, chewing. It lacked salt. He picked up a shaker and added granules.

“That’s no good for you
,” Meta said.

“You like your
meat without salt?” Maddox asked.

“I’m not like you,” she said. “You eat for pleasure. I eat to sustain myself.”

Maddox indicated himself. “Do I look as if I eat for pleasure?”

Her gaze
flickered over him. “I’ve wanted to ask you this for a while,” she said. “Why are you so thin?”

“Lean,” he said. “I’m
not thin but lean.”

Meta bristled. “Are you saying I’m fat?”

After examining the full-figured woman in her rating uniform, Maddox shook his head. “Not fat at all,” he said. “I’d call you pleasing, easy on the eyes.”

Meta blushed
at this uncharacteristic remark.

Lieutenant Noonan noticed and frowned at
Maddox. “Captain, please, we’re eating.”

As if nothing had happened, h
e cut another slice of pork chop, chewing in silence.

“
I want to get back to my point,” Valerie said. “If we’re leading the New Men to the alien star system, maybe we should turn back and try again later. If the enemy gains the sentinel, the New Men will become even more invincible than before.”

Maddox raised his head. He stood,
took his plastic dish and paused long enough to tell Valerie, “That’s a brilliant idea, Lieutenant.”

“What did I
say?”

“I’ll tell you later if it works.”

With that, Maddox hurried from the galley, gulping down the rest of his pork chop. He tossed the plastic into a disposal unit. After washing his hands, he stopped before Dana Rich’s hatch. Should he just barge right in?

Instead of doing so, he rapped his knuckles against metal. There had to be a better way to do this. This was a starship, for Heaven’s sake. Knocking on metal didn’t make much sense.

“Who is it?” Dana asked in a muffled voice.

“Captain Maddox,” he said.

After a short pause, she said, “Go away.”

He turned the wheel, opened the
hatch and failed to spy the doctor.

“Do I have to gas your room?” he asked.

“No,” she said, from the wall beside the hatch. She moved toward her bed, becoming visible, tossing a lamp so it hit her sheets.

She’d been hidden from sight, ready to whack him over the head as he entered her quarters.
Warily, Maddox stepped within.

Dana
thumped down upon her bed. He pulled up a chair, sitting down.

“I’m weary of our arrangement,” she said. “I’m going stir crazy. In the name of decency, you must change the situation.”

“I have a proposal to make,” Maddox told her.

“I won’t join you in your mad venture.
That hasn’t changed.”

“You know we’re nearing the
alien star system right? I cracked the professor’s encryption some time ago.”

“So you say,” Dana told him. “When we’re there, you can let me know. Oh, how about this, just before we jump
into said system, tell me.”

“Of course,” he said. “Look, this is…” He squinted at her. “Why d
id you ask me to tell you just before we get there?”

“No particular reason,” she said offhand
edly.

“You’re—” He was going to say
, “lying,” but decided on greater tact. “I’ll keep your request in mind,” he finished.

She nodded indifferently. “What’s your proposal then?”

“The New Men are following us. Whether they mean to capture the sentinel, I don’t know. Let us suppose you’re right: no one can board the alien vessel. Okay. We’ll use the sentinel to set up an ambush.”

“Meaning what?” she asked.

“We’ll lead the New Men to the alien starship. It’s automated, you say.”

“Correct
,” agreed Dana.

“Fine,” he said. “We le
ad them there and it destroys the hunters for us.”

“How does that help us?” she asked.

“That should be easy to understand. They’re following us, and I don’t think they’ll quit until they have us. This stops them, and it gets rid of one or more of their elite star cruisers. Afterward, we’re free to return home. You get your pardon and I have the honor of destroying however many enemy cruisers the sentinel annihilates.”

Dana
studied him, and finally, she laughed. “Nice try, Captain. I almost believed you.”

“Well,
whether you believe me or not that’s my plan as of now. We’re almost to the second-to-last star system.”

Doctor Dana Rich expelled a lungful of air. “Are you serious?” she asked. “You’ve actually taken us that far into the Beyond?”

“Correct. Now, what do you want to tell me?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

Maddox sat perfectly still. Scout duty was hard work. The ship was too small and they’d rubbed elbows too long. Normal Patrol scout crews were carefully chosen for their abilities to get along and to handle the cramped quarters for extended periods. Maddox doubted any of them were constitutionally suited for the small craft. Thus, he forced himself to sit quietly as he studied the doctor anew, instead of jumping up and pacing.

He
envisioned Dana Rich, as she’d been the first few days after she awoke. Since then, the woman had become tenser. More than that, she seemed frightened. But because of her pride, she tried to hide it.

“Fine,” he said abruptly, standing. “If you have nothing else to say—” He started for the hatch.

“Wait,” she whispered.

Maddox turned around.

Doctor Rich stared at her hands. She breathed heavily, causing her breasts to rise and fall rapidly. She was older than either Valerie or Meta, but she was beautiful in an exotic way.

She raised her head, and a tic twitched under her right eye.
“You’re a monomaniac, Captain. I can’t believe you’ve brought us so far out into the Beyond. The dangers out there…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. This next jump, well, the one into the alien system, must be done exactly how I say. If you don’t do it like that, we’ll die.”

“Why is that?” Maddox asked.

“Does the scout have a deflector shield?”

“You know it doesn’t
,” he said.

“Then the minute you exit the jump point
into the alien star system, you and everyone else aboard the
Geronimo
dies.”

“Because the sentinel will attack us?” asked Maddox.

“Not at all,” Dana said. “The alien star system will do the killing.”

“Can you elaborate?”

Once more, the doctor stared at her hands and began to speak in a low voice. The reason shocked Maddox. Without the good doctor’s insight—if she were right—the alien system would indeed destroy the scout. The question had changed, then. Did they have enough time to get ready to enter the alien system the doctor’s way before the star cruiser or the destroyer found and annihilated them?

The star patterns had changed drastically since Maddox had begun the mission on Earth over three months ago. In a straight line, they were well over three hundred light-years from the Solar System.

The scout had entered this system a
t high velocity and accelerated. Now, several days later, they approached the other end, decelerating for some time already.

The system possessed an
A spectral class star. That made it a bluish-white furnace with a mean surface temperature of 8000 K. Three terrestrial planets made up the inner system, each about twice the size of Earth. The first two had molten surfaces like Mercury. The last resembled a giant dust-blown Mars.

T
he lone outer system planet—the one they approached—was unique, at least as seen during their travels. It was a brown dwarf with twenty-one times Jupiter’s mass, making it gargantuan. The dwarf was a substellar object, meaning that despite its size, it lacked the mass to sustain hydrogen-1 fusion reactions in its core. Instead, the planet fused deuterium in the center. This was a T spectral type dwarf and was magenta to the eye rather than brown.

The
massive planet was over four billion kilometers from the star, the reason for the longer travel time. The dwarf had moons, the largest similar in size to Saturn’s Titan. The T dwarf also possessed highly elliptical orbiting comets, which thickened in the region near an unstable wormhole.

This system possessed two Laumer-Points: the one they’d entered near the third planet
in the inner range and the one they approached out in the comet field.

“I’m
still not picking anything up yet,” Valerie said. She sat at her station, engaging all the ship’s sensors. She had been targeting comets since exiting the Laumer-Point.

“
It has to be out there,” Maddox said. “The doctor told me so.”

Valerie
muttered under her breath. After days of fruitless searching, it seemed she’d reached her limit. She straightened and swiveled around.

“Ensign,” she said, “
Could you give us a moment.”

Keith sat
at the pilot controls. He glanced from her to Maddox. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Aren’t you hungry?”
Valerie asked him.

“Have you seen the
menu choices lately?” Keith asked. “If I’d tried to serve that stuff in my bar, the patrons would have stoned me.”

“Ensign!” she said.

Keith sat back, and it seemed he was about to go into his Scottish routine.

“Go head,” Maddox told him
. “Grab some chow. Give us a few minutes.”

“Aye-aye, Captain, sir,”
Keith said. He marched out of the control room, banging the hatch louder than usual behind him.

The moment
the hatch closed, Valerie said, “Permission to speak—”

“Yes, yes,” Maddox said, with a wave of his hand.
She was obviously strained, and so was he. “Please tell me what’s troubling you.”

“Sir, meaning no disrespect…
Is it possible Doctor Rich lied to you?”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” Maddox admitted.

“This may be her attempt—”

A beep sounded from her board, interrupting
Valerie’s speech.

Maddox’s stomach tightened. He knew what
the sound meant. For weeks, this had happened with increasing regularity.

“
It’s
Saint Petersburg
,” Valerie said, studying her panel. As she spoke, the lieutenant engaged the cloaking device. A loud thrum told them all they needed to know about the device’s condition. “We can’t keep this up much longer, sir.”

Maddox silently agreed.
If it could last for just another day… This was supposed to be the end of the line for them. One more jump would bring them to the sentinel-haunted star system. Doctor Rich had told him a song and dance about how to get into the alien system intact. Could it really be true?

“
You do realize that we won’t be able to follow the doctor’s suggestion now,” Valerie said. “We can’t, not with the destroyer in the system.”

Slowly, Maddox stood
and his features stiffened. The past weeks had eaten away at his reserve. The endless chase, the running away again—
“
Use the passive sensors only,” Maddox said. “Keep searching for the comet. Instruct Meta to babysit the cloaking device. We can’t let the destroyer see us this time, not a smidge or wattage of power to give away our location.”

“
I’m not sure I can do that, sir. The
Saint Petersburg’s
crew has gotten better at their craft.”

“
True. But you’ve also gotten better, Lieutenant. We’ve both become experts at this cat and mouse game.”

Valerie paused before asking, “Captain, why do you think Doctor Rich
still refuses to help us one hundred percent?”

A hard smile pasted itself onto his face. “
That’s a good question. I’m about to discover the answer.”

Like a tiger,
Maddox stalked out of the control room. Keith lounged against a bulkhead. Jerking a thumb at the open hatch, Maddox said, “I’m done. You can go back.”

A possibly sarcastic reply died on Keith’s lips. He nodded before moving out of the captain’s way.

Maddox hardly noticed. He marched to the doctor’s hatch and swung it open. Letting it stay ajar, he climbed into her quarters.

The doctor was in the middle of doing push-ups and she mustn’t have heard him enter.

“You must decide,” Maddox told her.

Her head swiveled sharply
toward him. A brief twitch of her face was the only indication she’d been surprised. The doctor jumped to her feet. Perspiration dotted her brown skin.

He opened his mouth.
This was it. He wouldn’t accept anything less than total assistance.

Panting, s
he held up a hand. “I’ll save you time, Captain. Your sensors haven’t found the equipment because it’s buried too deep under the ice. Ludendorff was a tricky man, and he suffered from a persecution complex. It served him well on most occasions. Ah,” she added, after searching his face. “I take it the New Men are in the system with us.”

Maddox
was too angry to reply verbally, nodding instead.

“You’re in something of a dilemma
, then,” Dana said. “Therefore, I believe I’ll finally play my strongest card.”

“Meaning
what?” he asked in a thick voice.

Dana’s
gaze darted behind him.

Maddox could feel the threat
to his rear. In a flash of understanding, it struck him what was about to happen. The strain of the monotonous weeks had taken their toll on his concentration. The voyage had been out of his comfort zone. It had told on him, making him reckless and causing him to miss otherwise obvious clues. It appeared as if Doctor Rich had finally outmaneuvered him.

With a twist of his neck, Maddox looked behind.
Standing in the hatchway, Meta held a stunner aimed at his back. He expected to see a triumphant smile. Instead, worried concentration marred her beauty.

Meta
motioned with the stunner. Maddox raised his hands.

“Oh, I like this,
I really do,” Dana told him. “Yes, I find it rewarding to see a difficult task through to completion. Don’t you find that to be the case, Captain?”

He watched her
gloat.

“What do you propose?” Maddox asked.

“A new arrangement,” Dana said. “You are hereby demoted to wretched piece of Star Watch scum. I am confining you to these quarters. I, on the other hand, am accepting a promotion to ship’s captain. What do you think?”

Maddox turned, putting his back to Doctor Rich
to face Meta. “You know we’re in danger,” he told the Rouen Colony woman. “You’ve seen the New Men hunting us. Humanity desperately needs the sentinel.”

“
Please,” Meta told him, “no more talking, Captain.”

Staring into her eyes, Maddox said, “
I freed you from the prison planet.”

“I don’t want to do this,” Meta said.
“You have to believe me.”

“Then don’t do it,” Maddox said. “Make the right decision.”

As her eyes tightened, Meta pressed the trigger.

The blast struck
Maddox in the chest. He strove to remain conscious but felt himself falling…falling…

I’ve just lost control of my ship.

***

Maddox groaned. His head
was pounding. The taste of sand made his mouth incredibly dry. He unglued his eyes, and he realized someone had been shaking him and calling his name.

“Sir, I wish you’d
wake up.”

“Riker?” whispered Maddox
, with his eyes still closed.

“Ah, that’s good, sir. He’s coming around,” Riker called. “You were out for some time, sir.”

Maddox forced himself to open his eyes. Blurriness made his stomach heave, and he almost threw up.

“Easy, sir, take it easy.”

“Did Dana and Meta put you in here with me?”

“Ha-ha!” Riker laughed. “Not an old hound like me, sir
. Not on your life. I think I know what happened. You’re not used to grubbing it, sir. But me, you see, I’m a sergeant. Someone is always telling me to do this or do that. It’s hardened me to privation, it has.”

Maddox rubbed his
forehead. “Where’s Doctor Rich? Where’s the scout?”

“I’ll start with the last question first, sir,” Riker said. “The scout has
moved beyond the T dwarf and is headed for the thickest clot of the comet field. The lieutenant doesn’t believe anyone over there on the destroyer has seen us yet. I believe Meta is examining the vacc-suits and powerdrill. Once we land, she plans to go outside and dig for Professor Ludendorff’s hidden engines and atomic fuel.”

That didn’t sound right
. Meta the traitor was still running free in his ship? “What are you talking about?” Maddox whispered.

“Well, sir,” Riker said. “As I was trying to tell you, I’m an old space hound. I also happen to be a very suspicious man. I’ve been watching. This one
old eye sees pretty good, sir.”

“I’m sure that’s true
, but would you please get to the point.”

“Sometimes, I even see quicker than a genius. That’s how I spotted the Tojo bodysuit back in France
, remember?”

“Yes,” Maddox said
wearily. “That was an excellent piece of deduction. Now would you kindly get to the bloody point, Sergeant?”

“Don’t go straining yourself, sir. You’re still weak from the stunner blast. I’m still finding it hard to believe Meta did that.
Not that she got the drop on you, but that she actually pulled the trigger. I think we should punish her, but maybe a reward is more in keeping with her latest action.”

Maddox closed his eyes. His sergeant had gained a coup
over him. The man wouldn’t go on like this otherwise. Riker liked to boast even as he pretended not to.

“Do you want to hear what happened, sir?”
Riker asked.

“I’d be delighted.” Maddox opened his eyes again and found that the blurriness had departed. He lay in Dana’s abandoned room, on her cot.

“Well, sir, I peeked out of my quarters, and I saw Meta and Doctor Rich come out of hers. Meta looked crestfallen. The doctor strutted like a gambler pulling in a hard-won pot. In a beeline, she headed for the control room. Not to put too fine of a point on it, sir, I stepped out of my room. I stunned Meta first. It took a strong blast to bring the lady down. Then I aimed at Doctor Rich. Well, first I blasted the gun in her grip so it clattered onto the deck. She cradled her hand as if she wanted to scream with agony. She didn’t scream though, not her. No, sir, that woman can talk faster than you can run. She told me all sorts of gibberish, threatening and promising all in one breath. It made me smile inside.”

“I can imagine,” Maddox said. He noticed that Riker was smiling
openly now.

“I didn’t get fancy
. Well, the hand-stunning was a trick shot like you might have done. After that, no sir, no more fancy pants with a dame who had outsmarted Captain Maddox. I knew she was too dangerous for an old codger like me. So I just shot her with the stunner, and I did it again as she lay on the deck, in case she was faking.”

“You didn’t harm her, did you?”
Maddox asked, worried he’d lost the doctor.

“Ah, that’s what I love about you, sir. You’re so
solicitous about your enemies that you forget to ask how your boon companions are feeling.”

“Let us rectify that, Sergeant,” Maddox said. “How are you feeling?”

“Good, sir, very good indeed,” Riker said.

“Splendid. It does my heart good to know it.
I have a few questions, though. Do you believe you can answer them quickly?”