The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 9

  “Eat up. Might be the last good meal we get in a while.”

  ***

  Kale and Ayia had sat in silence in the cab ride back to the hangar. It was already late in the night when they arrived back to the ship. He tapped the code into the hatch and stepped back to allow it to slide in and into the side. He walked in as Ayia followed him. They immediately heard voices coming from the main dining room. Ayia looked back up at Kale, but he could only shrug his shoulders. They walked down the hallway and came upon Oganno, Gheno, and a short red-headed woman sitting around the table, talking.

  “Oh, you're here,” Oganno said, standing up.

  The red-headed woman stood up as well. She was short, shorter than Ayia. She wore her ginger red hair down to her shoulders. She was a bit stocky, with thick thighs and large breasts, each on the opposite sides of a rather thin waist. Kale had to turn away for a moment so that he wouldn’t stare at them.

  “Kale, this is Doctor Phenagrim,” Oganno said, introducing the short lady.

  Kale reached out and shook her hand.

  “Ok. Hi,” he said, awkwardly.

  “She is going to go along with you,” Oganno interjected.

  Kale quickly took his hand away. “WHAT?”

  “Doctor Phenagrim here…” Oganno began.

  “Please, call me Karai,” she interrupted.

  “Yes, Doctor... miss... Karai. She is an up-and-coming gravitational waves researcher. She is looking to get a good look at the Gemini system.”

  “OK, old man. I don’t do passengers.”

  “Of course you do. It’s your job,” Oganno said without missing a beat. “So Doctor Phenagrim has been trying to get access to a Gemini system for years now, but the permits are far and few in between so…”

  “I don’t do passengers that I don’t pick,” Kale said, while trying to ignore Oganno.

  “…and I think this would be a great opportunity for us all. You do your job, she can run some sensors and drones for a day or two and we all win.”

  “Oganno, we might be on a rescue mission. We’re going to be tight up the way it is,” he tried to explain. He looked pleadingly over for Ayia to step in. She looked just as shocked as he felt. It certainly wasn’t the first time Oganno had to him up to these side jobs.

  “She doesn’t take up much space,” Oganno tried to joke.

  Kale looked at Karai. She smiled back at him, pleadingly.

  “I don’t. I won’t get in your way. I can do any manual labor you need until we get there. I will pull my own weight.”

  Gheno commented from the corner in between laughs that this wasn’t a slave galley and that no one needed to row the boat.

  “It'll be OK, Kale. She’s already met Sentinel and I suspect they are going to have many fruitful conversations while out there…”

  “YOU DID WHAT?” Kale exploded.

  “It’s not a problem. Oganno has explained everything. I won’t utter a word…”

  Kale stopped her with his raised hand. Gheno continued to laugh in the background.

  “Now he is going to have to kill you,” Gheno said, trying his best not to laugh. Karai turned towards him with her eyes wide open.

  “You stay out of this,” Kale said, pointing at the young man, “I'm sure you were in on this as well.”

  Gheno shrugged his shoulders and walked to the couch. Kale covered his face with his hand. Ayia walked up next to him and faced the short scientist.

  “We get ten percent from anything that you discover from this trip,” she put out.

  “Yes. YES! Agreed,” Karai said. Ayia reached out to shake her hand and the short red-head took it instantly.

  “Welcome aboard the nameless ship. We leave in about twelve hours,” Ayia said, then turned back down the hallway towards her room. “I'm going to get some sleep. They will be here in six hours to load up the gear.”

  “This ship doesn’t have a name?” Karai asked.

  Kale followed Ayia out of the room headed towards his room. Gheno walked past Karai and commented: “That’s the least weirdest thing about this ship.” He then exited the room.

  Karai was left standing there with Oganno.

  “There you go. Just like I said.” Oganno picked up his tablet and left the room. He would head back to his paradise mansion in the morning. For the night, he would stay at a luxury hotel nearby. Karai rushed out after him. She had to get back to her apartment and get her gear. Her heart was pounding. It would only be a few days of research, but if she did everything right, it just might be enough to get her a gig with one of the big companies. This was the chance of a lifetime and she wasn’t about to miss the boat.

  ***

  Ayia had just lain down on her small but comfortable cot and was reaching up to turn off her light when she heard the ping of her small tablet. It was the signal for a new message. She thought about just letting it go until the morning, but with the delivery set to happen in a few hours, she wanted to make sure there were no changes in the schedule. She drowsily reached over for the tablet on the small stand at the bottom of her cot, nearly falling out of her bed doing so. She fell back into her pillow with the tablet in hand and turned it’s display on. Then she tapped the messages box and saw who the sender was. She nearly dropped the tablet. She noticed the tablet shaking as she held it. She saw the message move over to be included with the other nine messages she had gotten from the same person. The newest message was blinking still unread. With a trembling hand, she tapped on the message and watched as it displayed.

  "The church knows and is following you."

  Ayia looked around the empty room guiltily. She had started receiving the messages nearly fourteen months ago. They were always from an untraceable source. The first message had simply said that she was being looked for by the church. Since then, every message had a warning and she had used each message to help the group narrowly escape some difficult situations. On each occasion, she had not let her crew know exactly what kind of trouble they were in.

  Ayia couldn’t explain why she couldn’t tell them, especially Kale. She had the utmost admiration for Kale. She was personally indebted to him for her wellbeing, from her first rescue to all the times he was there for her. Even though she refused to admit, he was the reason she was where she was right now. She knew deep down she loved him, but it was very difficult to reach him. Her Captain has been enshrouded in a deep darkness over the past three years and no matter how she tried, she couldn’t reach him.

  Initially, she thought that these messages were flattering to her. She dreamed of a secret admirer, an angel watching over her. Of course, in her moments of clarity, she realized this could be very dangerous. She had thought of using Sentinel to discover who it was, but she wanted to keep him out of the loop as well.

  She, like Kale, held a strange trust/distrust relationship with the software being. Sentinel had not given them any indication that their trust was misplaced and had routinely saved their lives. He acted like a good friend at every point. The all-powerful AI had even stated that he would respect their privacies. He never read their messages or tracked their whereabouts unless he was asked to.

  He was still a machine, though. There was something hesitant in her, as it was in Kale, which had a hard time getting over that boundary. The Man vs Machine wars of nearly eight hundred years ago were barely a blip in the history books now, but the clearest lesson of that brief but horrific war was that machines simply couldn’t be trusted.

  She wished she could be like Gheno. The young man trusted Sentinel completely and without question. If anything, the two were best friends. She could recall many of their conversations, and if she hadn’t known the AI was involved, there would be no way of guessing it wasn’t just two human beings talking to each other.

  "Sentinel?"

  There was a brief pause. It was something that Sentinel had learned to do. He could hear at all times, but found that it had made them act odd if he answered immediately. It was one of those many traits tha
t Ayia appreciated in him.

  "Yes, Ayia?"

  "You’re still not tracing messages, right?"

  "No, I’m not. Should I be? Is there a problem?"

  Ayia through for a brief moment if she should ask him to trace the unknown messenger.

  "No. I was just curious, really. Have you ever thought of just, well, peeking?"

  "Spying into your messages? Why would I need to do that?" The AI actually sounded concerned. Or maybe it was Ayia hoping he sounded like that.

  "Don’t you ever wish you could see what we are talking about? What if we're talking about you?"

  "That is your right. If you want to talk to me, you can always ask."

  "What if we're trying to hurt you?"

  There was another pause. Ayia thought the AI was actually thinking about it.

  "I hope I haven’t done anything that would make you think of that."

  "No. you haven’t. I’m sorry, Sentinel. I’m just thinking out loud."

  "Ayia. I have found no reason not to trust you, or any of my friends."

  "Oh, it's not that..." Ayia began. Sentinel interrupted her sharply.

  "I am sorry that you cannot find a way to trust me. I hope someday you can."

  Ayia was first stunned at the interruption, then at the statement. The AI knew them far better than she was ever aware. She tried to think of how to answer to him when Sentinel continued.

  "It is ok, Ayia. I understand why you and the Captain have difficulty trusting me. I continue to be grateful for everything you and Kale have done for me."

  Ayia laid there, with the tablet facing down on the bed, for a few moments.

  "Did you need something from me?" Sentinel asked.

  "I just..” Ayia said quietly, "just wanted to talk I guess. Thanks Sentinel."

  Sentinel didn’t reply and the room was silent again. Ayia looked back at the tablet and the message. The messenger called himself the Cross Bearer. He or she must be some part of the church, but someone who knew her, or who knew what had happened before. Why was this person trying to help her? And was it really help? She thought again about talking to Kale about it, but he would either get angry or just blow it off, like he had done with everything else. She would keep the secret for now, and as with the last couple of messages, keep an eye out. She may not trust Sentinel completely, but there was no way she could let the church get their hands on him. The results would be diabolical.

  3127 – In a sling towards the outer edge of the Alioth system, Galaxy sub-fleet.

  “Admiral, incoming from the Indigo.”

  “Put it through to my chair,” Admiral Mueller ordered.

  Graham’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Captain?” Marcus asked with formality.

  “Admiral, we have a curious incoming message for assistance. I think you might want to hear it.” Graham maintained the strict military ranks while addressing his friend.

  “Do we need the other Captain on this?”

  “I am already conferencing her in,” the Captain of the Indigo said.

  The screen split in two and the face of the other Captain joined in the conversation.

  “I'm feeding the data now. It appears that just a few hours ago, some merchant guild ships jumped into Alioth and immediately started broadcasting a request for assistance. The message states that the Red Maws are hitting one of their stations in the Aefricano system. The pirates have laid siege to all transports going in and out of the main planet there.”

  The Aefricano system was one of the Independent system’s farthest partners. Before the days of the Gora hook, a jump out to that edge system took nearly nine days. Now, with the new technology, that jump could be made in two days. The system’s main planet, also named Aefricano, was a unique planet. Its crust and mantle were made nearly entirely of a mineral called londsdeleite, a substance fifty eight percent stronger than diamonds. The desert planet is an important supplier of the hard mineral for the ever-growing industries of hundreds of other planets. The merchant guild of the Independent systems took over the planet to supply the galaxy.

  But with the system being so far away from the center of the human galaxy, pirates and raiders took to making their own profits at the expense of the guild. The Red Maws, a particularly savage group of pirates known in many of the outer edge systems, really enjoyed making raids into Aefricano. It was heavily rumored that they had a base of operations on one of the hundreds of tiny moons that orbited the lone gas giant in the system.

  Requests to get rid of the pirates routinely came in through the Alothian police and their navy, and while some missions had been mounted in the past, by the time any kind of response arrived, they were long gone.

  This time, the Alothian navy had a surprise of her own.

  “Is this worth our time, Captain Crawford?” the Admiral asked.

  “It is only three degrees off from our jump vector. This opportunity serves us for a bunch of reasons. First, we get to test our new jump parameters. We also get to test the Jaguars and lastly, we get to get rid of the damned, bloody Red Maws. Let’s not forget what they did to us at Fortuna.”

  “I haven't. Captain Sawyer?” the Admiral asked for her opinion.

  “I see nothing that does not benefit us in this endeavor, Admiral,” she said, emotionless.

  “See, even the cold bitch agrees,” Graham said.

  Marcus shook his head. “Very well. Coordinate the jump with TOM. Start charging the capacitors. If we do this, we do it right. Let’s plan for a direct planetary jump.”

  Marcus saw Graham smile large, and even caught a hint of a grin from Jayne. Marcus typed a command into his tablet as the two faces vanished.

  -TOM, did you get all that?- the Admiral typed.

  -I did. Making preparations now- the reply appeared on his screen.

  3127 – Aefricano, just outside of orbit, aboard the Galaxy

  “Dropping out of threaded space now.”

  Immediately the alarms sounded, but they were ready for them.

  The Galaxy was truly a wonder of human technology. The modern space-cruiser was shaped like a flat triangle with a letter Y cut across its axis. The two top parts of the Y extended out up and down from the flat triangle. It was sleek and aerodynamic, for when a ship that large needed to descend into the atmosphere. It housed one of the most powerful Haussen reactors and a new form of fluid-organic capacitor, capable of building a formerly unheard of charge for different uses throughout the ship. The large bio-capacitors could be used to overcharge the ships energy systems and use them with weapons, or, in this case, with their Gora hook.

  As had always been the case, every hook jump through space was predicated on the amount of energy used to generate the hook and the thickness of space at those points. They had traveled to the edge of Alioth to make their jump and it was there that they attempted their first overcharged hook jump. With the ship’s upgraded star and system maps, and the skills of a highly skilled navigator, the ship was also attempting to jump not just to the edge of a system, but directly to the zone of combat, in the orbit of Aefricano. Under any normally powered space ship, that jump would have taken nearly three or four days, even with a Gora hook. The overcharged hook jump had put them in orbit around the desert planet in just seven hours.

  It was a new galactic record.

  It also dropped them right in the middle of a pirate blockade, something the Red Maw could never have expected.

  “Detach the Indigo and Vega. Deploy the Jaguars. Get me readings on all enemy ships. I need full combat sensors and readings. I need immediate slug salvo now at any ship close that’s stupid enough to remain still for a few seconds.”

  The Admiral barked his orders out, but his men were ready. The two corvettes that had jumped alongside the Galaxy in order to jump in at the same time had already detached. They would serve their functions as they were called upon to do so. From down below his chair, his bridge crew began shouting out targets. The numbers began to fly back to his h
eads-up display on screens in front of the Admiral. The count of confirmed pirate vessels was at sixty-four, but the largest was a corvette size. It would take a perfectly coordinate attack by sixty-four corvettes to have a chance against the Galaxy, and Marcus highly doubted they could to that, nor that all the vessels were all corvettes.

  The Admiral looked down and saw the closest target. It was a merchant Puma transport, likely highly modified for raiding. It was nearly seventy miles off the starboard. Already the ships main forward slug-guns were firing thousands of micro-metal slugs at the ship. Traveling at nearly fourteen miles a second, it would only be a few seconds before they hit their target. He watched on the sensors as the first salvo hit the stationary Puma and then saw the craft vanish into thousands of small pieces of metal.

  One down, many more to go.

  The first two waves of Jaguars had flown out of the Galaxy and were forming up to begin sweeping for smaller targets. Marcus typed in a command on the screen and sent it out.

  -All flight wings, engage!-.

  ***

  Jorg Busen saw the commands coming through. All four waves had exited and were flying in loose formations of four Jaguars each. Sensor readings were a mix of data being fed in by the Galaxy, and individual readings from the each of the Jaguars. All the data was linked between the Jaguars themselves which allowed for live readings from all points of the battlefield. This allowed Jorg to make the quickest decisions possible.

  Already, the pirates were breaking up. Some ships immediately turned and slung themselves out of the planet’s orbit. Down below him, Jorg could see the golden sand reflected in the sunlight. They were on the day side of the planet.

  While some fled, most of the pirates, seeing only the one capital ship and a seemingly small supporting cast, turned to fight. Instead of coordinating their attack, the pirate ships attacked piecemeal. The Jaguars flew at the small fleet of merchant pirate ships that was coming towards them. Some of the pirate corvettes had unloaded their torpedo payload at the Galaxy, but that salvo was being rebuffed by the Indigo’s shield wall. Using the very same material harvested from the planet, the Galaxy’s supporting corvette used a gravity field to create a thin but powerful wall to intercept torpedoes mines and missiles. It was incredibly effective as long as the corvette could maneuver it into place while keeping its vulnerable side from being attacked. The small corvette floated just in front of the much larger Galaxy, moving its glistening white wall back and forth in front of the capital ship, picking off salvos of torpedoes. It was like a guardian angel, sitting on the Galaxy’s shoulder.