Episode 106. Part 2
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Christian posits an interesting idea. Normal Alliance procedure is to stop and investigate any ship in trouble. So we send out a distress signal, they stop to render aid, we board…
Rina: No. I’m not that desperate.
Christian: How desperate are you?
Rina: Look, if they take us aboard and we’re thrown in the brig, or even if we do get aboard, how do we get off? How do you escape a spaceship?
Arden: In a shroud? Shot into the sun?
Rina: Basically, yeah. I’m thinking that. Without a spaceship to escape on.
Christian: I was putting out that of all our options, that one was the least suicidal. And that’s still suicidal.
Nika: You’re talkin’ about some serious—
Christian: Because we’re only dealing with a ship full of Alliance military instead of a base full of Alliance military.
Rina: (quietly) If they’re stupid enough to put him on the ground, I think that’s where we’ll get him.
Christian: Well, it’s a long trip and he’ll probably be healed up by the time they arrive.
How long a trip? 960 hours, to be exact. We did the math. It would only take us 720. We’d have a few days to work with in advance of the Yamato’s arrival. We’ll need help from friends in low places. Rina crafts a message to her old boss, Omar Tennison, on Persephone:
Skinflint,
Boy Scout sent to principal’s office. Mifune’s looking to punish. Where do I send the care package?
--Grease Monkey
She hits send and hopes for the best. It will be a couple of hours before any reply can be sent back.
Arden offers up his friend in Traffic Control as a possible ally. He also knows a private investigator on Persephone, an investigator who said he’d do anything for Arden, in return for Arden having saved the life of the investigator’s daughter.
Omar answers back: There is a considerable amount of fleet movement as ships are being shuffled to maintain patrols and military readiness in the face of a massive call-out toward Blue Sun. In addition, the Feds are calling for inspections of all Fireflies in the system, as part of a military operation. Those are the only two big-ship movements going on. He doesn’t know anything in particular about Hera, but the ship we’re talking about is taking up the slack left by the call-out.
Great. Had we known about this earlier, we could have gotten some boots on the ground ahead of all this chaos, and gotten somebody in place to get Mike out. We all know that mounting an extraction op is going to take time, intel and money—and we’re pretty much running on empty on all three.
Rina crafts a return message to Omar:
Skinflint,
Boy Scout needs a ride home. I can’t pick him up. Can you send somebody for him?
--Grease Monkey
She’s skating close to the edge in terms of blowing everything wide open to eavesdroppers, but she sends it and again hopes for the best.
With everything done that can be done, we take care of business first: Line up cargo. Make some cash. Cover the distance between us and our objective. Reassess the situation as needed. We just have to hope the Feds don’t shift Mike to another vessel midway to Georgia. Should that happen, it will be next to impossible to find him again.
Nika sends a message to one of her friends, Brian Connolly, asking for cargo and possibly help. There is the inevitable delay before she receives a response. While we wait, we sell the receptionist bot and the executive desk from Jamison’s office for 449 credits. That’s enough to get us enough vac suits for everyone.
After that, there’s nothing left to do but wait.
Wednesday, 19 Jul 2518
09:30 hrs, local time
Nine days after the factory job, we finally get the last of our cargo loaded. We fill up our tanks and burn atmo out of there, setting our plan in motion.
Our game plan:
Mail and clothing from Beaumonde to Athens (Kalidassa to Georgia) = 31 days
Mail and food from Athens to Aphrodite (Within the Georgia system) = 9, 2 day layover.
Aphrodite to Hera (Within Georgia system) = 6 hrs
____________________________________________________________________
Total time from Beaumonde to Hera 42 days, 6 hours
We buzz by the Yamato on our way out, getting a good look at our opposition—and taking care not to get too close and make the big ship with the big guns nervous enough to shoot us.
The Longbow is a big ship. Long. Tens of thousands of tons versus our bitty ship.
Our proximity ends up goosing one of the perimeter buoys for the Yamato and we’re advised by an automated voice to withdraw to a safe distance. We do so, engage our pulse and get the hell out of there, sightseeing done.
We kill the time in the Black cross-training with Nika on the bridge. Christian and Rina both log in some hours learning to fly the Gift. Christian gets all of us to sit for portrait photos for him, giving him the reference he needs to paint us in his copious amounts of spare time. Other than that, we pretty much end up doing little else but playing cards.
Three weeks into our journey, 21 days after burning atmo out of Beaumonde, we refuel at Grasshopper Station. 600 hours of fuel pumped into our tanks later, we leave.
Wednesday, 10 Aug 2518
Kuiper II Class Ship Summer’s Gift
En Route to Athens
09:37 hours, ships time
We’d rigged up the Cortex box in one of our staterooms to be our main newsfeed and one day out from Grasshopper Station, all of its channels are stuck on some weird-assed documentary. Nothing else is on, on any of the other channels. The broadwaves have been taken over by this thing. Nika sees it first, since she’d had the feed routed to the bridge so she could watch stuff while manning the conn.
The documentary hails from Miranda. We learn about the introduction of the G-32 Paxilon Hydrochlorate into the atmo of Miranda….and its disastrous results on the population. We see the sole surviving survey team member giving her report in tears, knowing she’ll never live to see rescue. We see her eaten alive by Reavers, fully conscious. Fighting. Dying. Screaming.
It is, in short, what the ’Verse would quickly come to call the Miranda Wave.
Nika: (via ships comms) Arden? ‘Kay, Ar-rrrden….!
Arden: Yes?
Nika: Come here, please…
Arden goes to the bridge. He watches the Miranda Wave. Pretty soon we all end up on the bridge, watching it in horror. Christian has the presence of mind to hit the record button. Nika has a more immediate concern than events already ten years old. She remembers what the factory worker called the chemical we’d delivered: Paxilon
Nika: Did we just let this stuff loose on Beaumonde?
Arden: (Getting it) It had similar properties, but I don’t think it’s the same.
Christian: If it only make them happy, it’s nowhere near the intensity of this stuff. (He points to the newsfeed.) They’re probably working to refine the formula.
Nika: You’re sure. We didn’t cut this stuff loose on Beaumonde.
Arden: No.
We get that damned thing recorded and consider the ramifications its broadcast.
Arden: (Not looking forward to it) Oh, yes. This is going to cause problems.
Nika: No, really?
Christian: That’s interesting. My guess is, that we’re not going to hear about it again, and there will be an official statement saying it was a trick done by terrorists, or they try to blame it on the Independents.
Rina doesn’t bother wasting any time pondering what sort of spin the Feds will put on this, she gets busy hacking the Wave to see where it came from, who made it, and anything else she can determine. She managed to discover is that the signal origination code is from an underground celebrity of the Rim, Mr. Universe. She knows the traffic from his site normally amounts to a metric ton of messages, feeds and waves. However, after the Miranda Wave was broadcast, nothing further issued forth. Not a pixel, not a peep. Nyet. Nein. Nada. Mr. Universe got hammered, but good.
She does a surreptitious check of the buoys she’d hacked during the war, looking to find anything on the underwaves she’d engineered them to carry. Nothing this far out is pinging. It was worth a shot, but with nothing coming immediately up, she cuts the search to avoid detection and joins the others.
Christian trawls the blogs and bulletin boards on the Cortex, keeping the feeds on 24/7. His questions: is the Wave is a terrorist fake? It would be easy to fake the Wave, just make it like any other gory special effects movie. Are the people involved being punished, is anyone being scapegoated? Is the woman in the Wave delusional?
The basic response of the Alliance is: somebody is trying to destabilize the area, to stir up trouble, to take advantage of the horrible tragedy of a terraforming accident, that the Wave is a despicable act that shall not go unpunished. The site responsible for the Wave has been taken over and the Parliament is going to discuss whether there needs to be greater scrutiny of the Cortex.
Aside from the Miranda Wave, the rest of our trip was uneventful. We make it to Athens on time.
Tuesday, 19 August, 2518
Kuiper II Class Ship Summer’s Gift
Athens, Georgia (Huang Long) System
14:22 hrs, local time
Our arrival at Athens goes off without a hitch. We off-lade our cargo, lade on the shipment bound for Aphrodite, and burn atmo out of there. Just a quick in and out, no time to sight-see. It’s nine days to Aphrodite and the next stage of our plans.
Sunday, 28 August, 2518
Kuiper II Class Ship, Summer’s Gift
Aphrodite, Georgia (Huang Long) System
09:47 hrs, local time
On approach we notice there’s a lot more military chatter on the comms. Ships trying to travel to the Blue Sun system are being delayed for inspection and denied access and such. On the official channels, the word is the Alliance is denying access to the Blue Sun system “for their own safety”. On the unofficial channels, however, the word is the Reaver situation has escalated. The Alliance still hasn’t officially recognized the existence of Reavers, either, but we all know better.
We look ahead to what we can expect on Hera. Hera is a prairie-style sort of planet, plains for ranching and grazing, and long shallow valleys for farming. A Big Valley kind of place. There are some cities on Hera as well, but it’s most famous for being the site of Serenity Valley, the site of the bloodiest end battle of the Unification war and the home of the biggest memorial cemetery in the ’Verse. It also has, not surprisingly, a huge Veteran’s Hospital. Hera has a largish military presence, in the form of several garrisons, primarily from the concern that it may be a potential flashpoint for protests, insurgency and uprisings. The war may be nearly ten years past, but feelings still run high and memories are still fresh.
Nika tells Rina to double check on the Yamato’s course—the Miranda Wave may have re-tasked the Yamato to a different destination. Best we know now if that’s the case, before we commit any more time and fuel. Also to see what she can find on the ship itself—there’s been something that’s been niggling at Nika’s mind about the Yamato for weeks, now. Rina does her checking and finds the Yamato is still on route. It hasn’t changed its course. It did, however, pick up a military escort ship, a corvette.
Rina also finds something interesting: a lot of the ship traffic is being transferred to the VA hospital on Hera. Apparently enough people are injured, such that they’re overloading the military bases, that the VA hospital on Hera is taking in patients to ease the load. Based on the number of ships coming in, we’re looking at hundreds, perhaps thousands of injured. Even civilian ships are listed as carrying wounded toward Hera. Apparently there aren’t enough military ships to do the job. The injured are still en route, but chances are good they’re all connected somehow to the Miranda Wave and the sudden call-out to the Blue Sun.
Arden looks into hacking a back door into the VA’s systems, thinking to use it to our advantage once we kiss dirt on Hera. It’s not something he can do remotely from Aphrodite, given the SOL delays, but there’s nothing to keep him from devising strategies til we get there.
To lend an aura of legitimacy to our venture, we line up cargo for Hera’s VA: medical supplies and food. We even volunteer our services, waiving our usual shipping fees. The authorities love this idea, praising us for our humanitarian ethic and devotion to civic duty. (It beats being commandeered for the job) In appreciation, the Feds will compensate us for our fuel costs for carrying the badly-needed supplies to Hera. The Feds even throw in two cargo containers to carry it all. Thank you, Uncle Chin. ‘Tis always a pleasure to serve you, our enlightened government.
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