The Captain's Heart CH 101

“We’re approaching the coordinates, Captain,” Toom said. “Scans?” Gralgiran asked. “Nothing,” Wiuramsfick Jiaowel Dierim answered. “If this

“We’re approaching the coordinates, Captain,” Toom said.

“Scans?” Gralgiran asked.

“Nothing,” Wiuramsfick Jiaowel Dierim answered. “If this is where they want to meet us, we’re here early.”

Only, there had been no time provided.

When Tommy the Earther had let Gralgiran know his contact had agreed to speak, it was in the form of coordinates.

“Does this put us in position to receive a targeting comm signal?” he asked the comm officer.

“How targeted are you asking about?” Jurani Joramsjon answered. “Everything spread with distance. If they don’t want to be overheard, an encryption key is better to arrange.”

The coordinates were well within the unclaimed territory between the Kelsirians and Earthers, but a part with truly nothing in it, so of no interest to either species. The potential for this to be a trap had been raised, but Gralgiran considered the risk worthwhile, for potential information on the machine that had hurt Jeremy.

It wasn’t on his patrol route, so he’d negotiated with other hunter ships to arrange a change over. As with anytime he dealt with captains he didn’t know well, it involved agreeing to future favors. He’d had to agree to them five times so that no gap would be created while he reached the border, and then entered the unclaimed territory.

He brought up visuals.

As the scan officer has said, there was nothing. The closest star was a dot he couldn’t tell from all the others.

Why here?

“When you say there’s nothing, do you mean nothing at all, or nothing of interest?” he knew enough to know that space was not actually empty.

“Nothing we’d care to bother with,” the officer said.

“Bring up what scans are showing.”

The visual shifted, and in this spectrum, new dots were added, some large enough to for him to tell they were an uneven shape.

“Captain?” Toom asked.

“Go ahead Pilot.”

“Scan, what’s the composition of those rocks?”

“Mostly silicates, decent amount of ferrous, some quasi organics.”

“How opaque to scans are they?”

“It varies. The denser ones are harder to see through.”

“They’d be the larger ones?”

“That’s often how it goes. What are you thinking?”

“My understanding is that when looking for other ships, you focus on power output, right?”

“Well, yeah. In the void, that’s what stands out the most. But those rocks wouldn’t hide that. The energy would radiate around whichever one a ship hid behind.”

“Unless it’s powered down,” Jurani Joramsjon said. “It’s something we do when we need to get a shuttle close to a ship undetected. Launch us at it well outside its scanner range, shut everything down but the bare minimum, and drift there.”

“Bare minimum means hardly any life support. That stuff’s energy intensive, you know.”

“But you can ration it.”

“But that only works if you have an idea of how long you’ll be rationing. These people didn’t know when we’d get here. Unless they have sources inside our ship, they couldn’t even get a sense of scale for when we’d arrive.”

“How low could power be dropped and keep them alive indefinitely?” Gralgiran asked.

“Nowhere near low enough for any of these rocks to hide it if you want to keep your crew alive.”

“What if it’s just one person?”

The scan officer’s protest locked up. He looked at his readouts. Made adjustments and the visual shifted with them; it was all dark. If he was supposed to be able to tell the rocks from the background, the bridge’s lights interfered. Then yellows so faint he thought he was imagining them until Toom asked.

“What’s that?”

“That’s so faint I’m not sure there’s enough power there to keep that one person alive, but there is something on the other side of this rock.”

“Comm, set for wide band broadcast.”

“Set,” she replied.

“Sending greetings to the wanderers out there,” he said in Earther, since he couldn’t be sure they’d know Federalize. “We come bringing company and good conversation.”

He motioned for her to stop the broadcast.

“Am I looping it?”

“Unless you think there’s a reason they won’t hear this one, no.”

“They could be off-shift,” Toom said.

“I’m alone out here,” the scan officer said. “I want to know anything that’s happening. Since sleep isn’t something I can forgo, I record everything and set alarms to go off if anything outside the standard parameters I’ve set occur.” He smiled. “We are well outside any parameters they could have thought to ignore.”

“Or would want to,” Jurani Joramsjon said.

“How long until they respond?” Toom asked.

She shrugged. “It depends what their intentions are.”

“We’re outside their sensor range, aren’t we?” Gralgiran asked.

“At those readings, I doubt their sensors can see through the rock hiding them.”

They were expecting someone, but couldn’t know if the message had been intercepted. They had exiled themselves from their people. Hidden themselves where no one would think to look.

“Hunter Jurani Joramsjon, go join your pack. We’ll be taking a shuttle there.” He sent the message to her beta to get his pack ready, then one to Zorfiel. One investigation and one covert ops pack should be enough. Then one to the beta who would look after the ship in his absence.

“Is that wise?” the scan officer asked as she left. “We don’t have any information about them. I doubt that’s all they have access to. They could bring up some kinetic cannon when you get in range and shatter the shuttle.”

“I’m sure that our pilot will know how to evade something like that.”

    *

“Captain,” the pilot said from the cockpit, “I’m sending you visuals. I don’t think this is what you were expecting.”

The center of the bay shimmered, the target rock appeared, with a ship close to it.

“That’s big,” one of the hunter said.

It stretched nearly from one end to the other from this angle.

“How come the power didn’t register on scans?” another asked. “Something that big has to generate a lot.”

“Only if it’s all powered up,” Zorfiel said. “Pilot, how close to the surface is it?”

“Minus something. It’s embedded into it.”

“Crashed?”

“Can’t be certain from here, but it’d be my guess. There’s no point in touching a rock if you don’t have to.”

“Any idea what kind of ship it was?”

“Nothing I’ve seen before, so I’m guessing an Earther one.”

“What are the readouts?”

“What am I the Bane’s scanner? This thing designed for stealth, not seeing through anything. And even if it had decent scanners. There’s no way they’d see through something this large.”

“Can you find us a way in?” Gralgiran asked. “I’d rather avoid blowing a hole in it if possible.”

“I see a few things looking like airlocks. Up close, I’ll be able to tell if one of them has power, then it’s on you to get in.”

“Hunter Jurani Joramsjon, how confident are you that you can get it open?” he asked.

“So long as the language isn’t something completely different from what that station used, I’ll get us in.”

“Good. Everyone, suit up. We bring oxi for six hours. No weapons. They might be scared, but they are not the enemy.”

    *

“Definitely an Earther design,” a hunter grumbled, shining a light around the narrow corridor. “Going forward, I respectfully request not to be included in hunts on Earther ships.”

“Noted and refused,” Gralgiran replied casually, watching hunter Jurani Joramsjon work. In getting the airlock open, she’d detected a network and now that they were in, she’d asked for a chance to hack it.

“Alpha,” Batrix said. “There is something resembling an atmosphere in here.”

The ‘breathable atmosphere’ in small letters on his heads-up had a red bar next to it, but his suit only had a fail-pass system.

“How breathable?”

“Not very. Stale, my guess is that the recirculation system’s been off for a long time. Like years, for something this big.”

“Got something,” the hunter exclaimed. “Got a power distribution schematic. It confirms just about everything’s barely running, but there is something drawing a lot of it somewhere in the center.”

“That would explain how the Bane’s scanners missed it,” Batrix said. “The hull and the rock would insulate that. Heat leak at the edges would be what they picked up.”

“Can you guide us there?” he asked the hunter.

She studied her tablet. “Yes.”

    *

Gralgiran looked over the door blocking their way. It hadn’t been the first they stepped through, but it was the first closed one. As well as being uncomfortably narrow, the corridor had these doors at regular intervals.

“Can you open it?”

“No power to it,” the hunter replied.

“We can blow it up,” another said.

“Did you do a stability scan of the ship?” Zorfiel asked. “Then let’s not suggest anything that could shatter this wreck any further than it is.”

“And doing that would show us as coming with aggressive intent,” Gralgiran added. “There will be a way around this.”

    *

“Beta Batrix,” Gralgiran asked on a private comm. “Can we pull air from around us to supplement our reserves?” he’d checked how much oxi he had, and in fifteen minutes it would reach the halfway mark. He’d have to turn them around so they could change the reserves.

“It’s not going to help all that much, and it’s going to tax the scrubbers.”

“Hunter Jurani Joramsjon,” he called on the general comm. “How close are we?”

“Around the corner is where the power’s being used, so we’re almost—” he turned the corner.

“Another fucking closed door,” a hunter cursed.

“There’s an intersection back where—”

“This one has power,” the hunter said, cutting off her beta. She opened the side panel as soon as she reached it and connected her tablet to it.

In no time, the red light turned green, then the door slid open, releasing air in the corridor.

“In!” Gralgiran ordered. “Hunter, close it as soon as we’re all in. We don’t want to cost him all his oxi.”

The light on his heads-up urned blue before the door closed. “We stay on suit oxi,” he ordered.

They were in a large room. Its original intent was lost, but someone had repurposed it. Or multi-purposed it. Half of the room had been converted into a hydroponic system with enough green the idea all of that might go toward feeding one person made him sick. This might be enough to see to the providing vegetable to all the eateries on his ship. Next to that was a food preparation area with a table and one chair. There was something that reminded him of Jeremy’s weight machine. Next to that was could be a small lounge.

“We advance with care,” Gralgiran instructed. “We don’t know where he—”

“Something’s powering up,” hunter Jurani Joramsjon said quickly. “Ceiling.”

A series of compartment dropped open and muzzles became visible. They didn’t have the telltale glow ballads like to add to show a weapon was ready to fire, but Gralgiran didn’t need that to know the situation had escalated.

“I wish someone hadn’t told us to leave our weapons behind,” Batrix sel Gezbil whispered.

“That is length enough,” a digitized voice said in Kelsirian. “If you move, I will perforate you.”

Outline section 

there was an outline, I swear

Addition 

Gralgiran gets on his contact's ship(wrote this just now)

somehow, I didn't set the outline aside for this. also didn't write down my thought once i was done writing(yet again), so this is from my bad memory

there was a decent amount of change from the outline to what I wrote. where it set this on the wreck of a space station, I set it on a crashed ship, for reasons I explain in the next chapter, I hope.

everything else follows from that decision.