Spectra's Gambit (21 page)

“You’re right,”
I replied.

“If things go badly, we will gate you out and leave,”
he sent privately, and across the general network he sent,
“Okay, you two, go find out what you can. We will meet you on the other side of the fleet.”

“Yes, Master,”
I sent.
“Saraphym, follow me and stay alert. We don’t want to crash into any of their drones.”

“Okay,”
she sent nervously.
“What are those large sweeps of lower power?”

“Active sensor sweeps. You can ignore them. They are designed to filter us out and only lock onto spacecraft,”
I sent.

“That is mighty convenient,”
she sent.

“Remember, to most people out here we are dumb creatures to be ignored. This allows us great freedom in our movements; we can go places not open to humans and other races,”
I sent.

As we drifted through the fleet I looked around, trying to decide on the best target. I wanted to avoid the command ship, as it would be difficult to move around unnoticed there; however, I needed to find a ship well enough connected to the fleet to have good information for us.

“How about that medical ship?”
sent Saraphym.

“What?”
I asked.

“You are trying to pick a target, right? The medical ship is a good choice because security will be low, and people tend to be looser in their conversations when sick or drugged up with medications,”
she sent.

I had to remind myself she had been a spy of sorts in a former career.
“Good thinking. Let’s try it.”

“How do we get on?”
she asked.

“Same way as stations. There is always an exhaust port, maintenance hatch, or something of that nature. People can’t survive in them, so they never bother to secure them,”
I sent.

“Perhaps we should redesign that aspect of the Wizard Kingdom properties, then,”
she mused.

“Perhaps,”
I sent back.

It took longer than I would have expected, but we eventually found a way in and slipped on board. I began to teach her how to hide from sensors by absorbing and reflecting just the right amounts of energy, but she sent,
“I am a magus, remember?”

“Oh, sorry,”
I sent. I forgot that they have their own way to completely disappear from sensors. I didn’t know how they did it, but all of them could.
“Let’s see if we can find a secluded terminal someplace.”

Being careful not to be seen, we searched the outer section of the ship and finally found a maintenance closet containing what looked like a long-forgotten terminal. I wished I’d had the foresight to bring more tools with me, but we had only been expecting a fun afternoon in space, so I’d left my pack back on the Nemesis.

Thankfully, Saraphym was wearing her full armor and had some tools with her. Between the two of us, I was able to build an interface connecting a datapad to the terminal to download everything it could find. We could search the data later; the important thing now was to acquire a copy.

“Stand watch while I work. This could take a while,”
I sent. The interface was not great, and it was going a lot slower than I would have liked, but we had very few options at that time. After what seemed like years, the datapad indicated its memory was full.
“Okay, let’s move,”
I sent.

We slipped out into the hallway and she suggested,
“If we stop by one of the sick bays and just listen for a while, we might find something out.”

“That’s very risky,”
I demurred. I had hoped to get her off the ship while luck was still on our side.

“I know. I am not exactly a novice here: I am a member of the Dragon Guard,”
she sent.

I sighed and sent,
“Even a Dragon Guard should be careful of risking too much, but we’ll try it. Let’s stay as close as we can to an outside wall.”

After some searching we found an occupied medical bay and hid nearby to listen and watch. After about an hour of watching the nurses fend off the advances of their male patients, I was thinking of giving up when someone walked in and said, “Commander.”

“Report,” responded the commander, who was apparently there visiting patients.

“We can’t find the cruiser. It must be a stealth cruiser and if so, by now it’s long gone,” he said.

“I doubt it. Whoever they are, they must be out there watching us. It’s too much of a coincidence,” said the commander.

“Sir, it was just one cruiser,” objected the man.

“That is all it takes to spy on someone. Prepare the fleet to move in three waves. Send scouts ahead to the beta rally point. If it’s clear, send most of the rest through the jump, but leave some ships behind in case the cruiser reappears.”

“And if it does?”

“Destroy it quickly. We can’t risk discovery,” said the commander.

The man nodded and left after that.

“I think we have used up more than our share of luck. Let’s go,”
I sent.

She was reluctant, but followed me off the ship and back out into space. The fleet was continuing its search, but I expected that Master Dusty would be long gone by now.

We flew through space side by side for a while in silence, heading along the route that Nemesis should be on.
What are you doing?
I asked myself. I had spent my life alone and resigned to it; now I was neck-deep with these magi and developing a relationship with a female for the first time in my life.
Why in the name of the Emperor would you tie yourself down like this?

“Thank you,”
she sent.

“For what?”
I asked.

“This has been the best day of my life,”
she sent.

Yes, that’s why,
I thought to myself, smiling. Maybe being tied down was not so bad after all.

It took a long while to catch up with Nemesis. I was impressed by how fast they could fly while cloaked. Their speed was much greater than I had ever seen achieved by any cloaked vessel. Once back on board, I told them about the conversation we’d overheard and then we searched the database that we had downloaded.

“Is it possible this was a coincidence, after all?” asked Jade as we worked.

“We are following a lead given to us by Henrick. I doubt if anything we see is a coincidence,” said Master Dusty.

“Looks like all we have so far is medical records,” I said.

“Nemesis, can you partition the data into two sections, one with the medical data and one with whatever else we have?” asked Saraphym.

I kept forgetting we had a spirit living inside a computer that could do this kind of task much faster than any person could.

“Sure!” he said and got to work.

“He is always so excited to help,”
I privately sent to Saraphym.

“Nemesis spent his whole existence alone, hiding from everyone who wanted to destroy him, until Master Dusty and Master Spectra found him. He is happy to have a home now,”
she sent back.

I smiled at that.
“A bit like the rest of us misfits.”

“Yeah. I guess if you’re a cat married to a fish, you tend to have eccentric tastes in friends,”
she sent back.

As Nemesis sorted the data, we dug into the nonmedical information, looking for anything of interest. “I found their flight log,” called out Jade.

“Great,” said Master Dusty. “Let’s overlay it onto the map.”

When their flight path was displayed, I said, “They are heading to the same destination and coming from the same station that we came from.”

“What?” asked Master Dusty.

“Master, they must have left that station before the attack, but their route is definitely the same as ours,” I said.

“So that kills the idea that this could have been a coincidental meeting,” said Jade to no one in particular.

“With Henrick, there are no coincidences,” said Master Dusty.

After leaving the fight at the bar, I found a hotel that asked no questions and prepared to hole up there for a while. I prepaid for a week’s stay and told them not to disturb me. They were used to clientele like me and were happy to oblige for a fee. The room was obviously used for the kind of client that was interested in renting the room by the hour instead of actually staying in it. It was just the kind of slum hole I grew up in, so that did not bother me at all.

I changed out of my armor and crashed in the bed to study the datapad. For three days I left the room only to buy food; the rest of the time I spent poring over the information in the pad. There was a great deal there concerning the history of my targets and their time in the Academy. Through their history, I was able to taste a little of what it must have been like to get into that prestigious school. I had never learned why my application was rejected;
I assumed it was my criminal record, but no one ever heard back unless they were accepted.

Once I felt I had learned everything I could from the datapad, I erased it and tossed it in the recycling chute where it would be broken down into raw materials, guaranteeing that the erased information could not be retrieved.

The information I had was that they would be heading to a space station not far from where I had been dropped off, but this was a secret military outpost. I would not be able to gain access to it, but there was a major supply hub along the route they should be taking. There was a good chance they would stop there, either on the way out or on the way back. I just needed to find my way there.

I gathered the few belongings I had and headed down to the maintenance bays to see if anyone was hiring and found an older trade hauler parked in the bay with its engine covers removed. I took a chance and approached the foreman. “I hear you’re looking for a star-grade mechanic,” I said. I had no idea if there was even such a thing, but I had served on enough haulers to know my way around an engine.

“Star-grade, huh?” he asked. “What’s your price?”

“Not much; I need a ride to the hub. I assume you’re heading that way?” I asked.

“Yeah, but we don’t do passengers,” he said.

“Not a passenger; I’m offering to trade my skills as a mechanic for my passage,” I said.

“Tell you what: if you get those engines running before the station crew gets here to fix them, you’ve got yourself a deal,” he said.

“Sounds fair,” I said. I figured I had plenty of time before the station got around to helping them. They were too small a ship to warrant any real effort from the dockhands.

I looked over the engine and couldn’t see anything wrong at first, so I started dissembling it with the tools I found nearby. Once I’d removed a few parts, it became painfully obvious what the issue was: the exhaust ports were packed solid with carbon and other grime. They would take some time to clean, but at least I did not actually have to be a star-grade mechanic to fix them.

I worked for several hours on each of the four main exhaust ports. As I worked, a young male human came up and was watching me very closely. “You got a name?” I growled at him.

“Yeah, Feron,” he said.

“Look, I don’t do shows. If you’re going to hang around, I’
m going to put you to work,” I said. I had hoped that would run him off.

“Sure. What can I do?” he asked.

“Grab that black pipe there, and clean it until it is shiny and silver,” I said.

As we worked, I explained to him some of the basics of engines; it prevented any awkward silence. “All engines, no matter how fancy or simple, have several key systems. To work on any of them, you just have to find the parts and tackle each one separately,” I said and walked over to the fuel tank. “You have the fuel system, which in this case is a chemical fuel. From there, the fuel is fed into the engine core.

“Once the fuel is in the engine core, a reaction takes place which accelerates particles, which move on to the next system, which are the thrusters. They channel the particles out the back of the ship, which pushes the craft forward.”

“I get it, but what about the waste?” he asked.

“The waste is our problem today. The slower-moving particles that make up the waste are pushed out of the exhaust system, which has a tendency to get dirty. Once it is clogged, the exhaust can’t get out of the way fast enough for the next reaction to happen, so you have a loss of power. ”

“Doesn’t all of that get hot, though?” he asked.

“Sure, and that heat becomes the fuel for the system that creates power for the ship’s computers, light, and other electrical systems. That works on the same basic principle of fuel, reaction, power, and exhaust. Those four parts are the key to every normal space engine ever created.”

To my surprise, he was a hard worker and did the filthy job without complaint. With his help, I was able to get the four secondary exhaust ports cleared in half the time the primary ones had taken. Then we reassembled the engine and I fired it up in a diagnostic mode. “Now, we are just about finished with these parts, so let’s run some tests and see what kind of progress we’ve made.”

The foreman walked over while I was running the tests. “Thirteen per cent efficiency? Those engines have not been running at over five in a year. I guess you weren’t bluffing after all.”

Thirteen per cent efficiency didn’t seem like much to be proud of, but I was not going to say that. “So we’ve got a deal?”

“Yeah. You and the boy will work in the engine room. We leave in an hour,” he said and walked off.

“I guess you’re hired, too,” I said.

“Good thing, since that’s my dad,” said Feron, grinning.

“Great,” I said and put the rest of the engine back together. “I guess we’d better get on board and find out what I’m going to be dealing with.”

“Pretty much more of what you saw out here,” he said.

“Show me,” I said.

On board the craft, he led me to the engine room and started pointing out various controls and relays that were all jammed or broken due to lack of maintenance. “We’ve had no one down here in years. I’m a bit surprised she still flies.”

“You seem to know a thing or two,” I said, “so why don’t you take care of it?”