Oolite Bulletins

This story continues the adventures of Hammond and friends and is set a short time after the events of "Dangerous Moonlight". New readers are advised to begin with "Ships That Pass In The Night", "Steel Thunder" and "Dangerous Moonlight" in that order.

Easy On The Gas was well-worn but meticulously maintained, as were a great many Cobra Mk 3s throughout the Eight. Unlike most, she was carrying only a few tons of ballast – not even the common low-grade minerals that could be shipped from system to system to be used as metal ores, chemical feedstock or even construction materials, but a ton of something that had no value to anyone anywhere other than to be a ton of something. But as far as Easy On The Gas was concerned, that was all that was needed. The extra mass let her handle like a typically-loaded Cobra, and the strain gauges attached to them let her owner judge whether the vessel was being handled smoothly enough or whether, in case of genuine emergency, her pilot would be throwing her around hard enough to be likely to damage something.

This last was the focus of interest for four people at present; a GalCop examiner, Easy On The Gas's owner, the trainee under inspection and a tall young man uniformed as was fitting for the owner and operator of a respectable passenger liner. He watched with interest as the pilot put the Cobra through her paces – launching, manouevring through the traffic outside the Coriolis station, ensuring the spacelanes were clear before engaging hyperspeed out as far as Ceenrama's outer asteroid belt, and tackling a couple of Geckos in a simulated combat. He nodded approval as the last of these flashed a bright set of hull lights in unison, indicating that if Easy On The Gas's laser had been firing at full power instead of being choked back to a harmless one percent then she would have just been destroyed. Finally he smiled in satisfaction as the Cobra completed clearance and docking entirely by the book and the examiner peeled a pink slip of paper from the book in front of him.

More ceremony than anything else, the paper slip only confirmed what the official record was going to show from now on, and in another ancient ceremony Easy On The Gas's owner, a man just reaching the age where he'd attract the word “spry”, tugged the trainee's shirt tail out of his trousers and cut a hand's width off with a pair of shears before giving it to the trainee along with a firm handshake. Last of all the uniformed young man eased out of his seat and held out his own hand.

“Well done, Jefferson,” he said. “And now your training starts in earnest.”

The two of them stepped out of the Cobra into the hanger bay. There was the usual bustle of traffic. Below, Ceenrama looked blue, beautiful and peaceful. Well, two out of three wasn't bad. Blue and beautiful the planet was, but peaceful – unfortunately, too much of Ceenrama's GDP was going into funding a civil war that was years long and still nowhere near over. And unlike on Jefferson's homeworld, Bien, the locals here had more than enough technology to make a protracted war really destructive.

There was nothing Jefferson could do about that, nor his boss, Hammond. They were just owner and crew of one of the many ships to have docked at Ceenrama Station that day, and the most either of them could comfort themselves with was that none of their business was going to make matters on Ceenrama any worse. GalCop strongly discouraged trading in weapons from other worlds, and the only firearms Flying Lady carried were personal sidearms for the ship's personnel, and they stayed secured aboard while the ship was docked.

Hammond waved towards Flying Lady, a Boa Class Cruiser trader but one that was armed to the teeth at that, where the other two members of the ship's company were waiting by the boarding ramp. One was rather taller and a great deal heavier than Hammond, a red-skinned Larivearian nicknamed Booster. The other came barely to his chest and was perceptibly female. Some might have found the small horns on her head slightly off-putting, but to those who didn't she was far more likely to register as extremely cute at the very least. Being professionally dressed and, presumably, on duty didn't keep her from giving both Hammond and Jefferson a hug in greeting.

“All OK?” rumbled Booster. “T'kella's been cake shopping to celebrate.”

“Yes, Jefferson's been signed off,” said Hammond, “and if that cake's a chocolate one, it can wait until we're in Witch-space and you've got time to sleep it off.”

“Spoilsport,” complained T'kella, but she knew how the land lay. Chocolate wouldn't do her any harm in the long run, but it tended to ensure that she was no professional use for anything for a few hours at least. So she murmured “You and me, later, then, spaceman?” to Hammond, and winked. He winked back, because if chocolate rendered T'kella useless as a business analyst, it certainly didn't... But there was no time for that right now.

“We've more to concern ourselves with than cake at the minute. We've a ship to pick up and a schedule to make – which is going to mean a nice long solo flight for you, Jeffs. Say, are you feeling okay? You're looking a shade peaky.”

“Feel it, a bit,” said Jefferson. “Must've been the excitement, I'll be fine once I've had a chance to come down for an hour or two.”

“And that would be all good with me,” Hammond replied, “if you weren't going off alone in a ship for at least a week – but as you are, you'll be fine when the doc says you will, and not before. Let's get you plugged in for a diagnostic.”

In fact, Flying Lady's autodoc didn't need to plug anything in for many of the diagnostics it could run, but on this occasion it soon warned of the need for a minor invasive procedure – no worse than a blood sample, but patients tended to be glad of the warning. Even before the needle went in, though, Hammond's untrained eye could see clearly enough that something wasn't right. Temperature and pulse too high, blood pressure too low... and then the red lights began to kick in.

“Doc says you're sick, Jeffs,” said Hammond laconically. “Primary signs are way out of whack, it's sampling you for microbial infection now – you're feverish. Got any history we should know about?”

“None the doc doesn't know about already,” Jefferson shivered, almost seeming to become visibly sicker as they watched. “Normal run of childhood diseases with no complications. Apart from that I've always been as fit as a flea.”

“You're not now, though.” It didn't take the doc long to process the blood sample and flash up yet another warning light. “Got any pain?”

“Nothing a man would complain about where I came from.”

“That's probably part of the problem,” said Hammond. “Infection coming up here, doc's reporting blood poisoning, recommending treatment... checking you for allergies too. This is going to be serious meds! And you're not moving from that couch for...”

Jefferson pulled himself upright suddenly, then went pale and slumped back, rather obviously trying not to be sick. “Leg hurts,” he whispered.

“Which is why you're not moving, barring essentials, for at least eighty hours. Doc's got the drugs to treat this, and bring your fever down a bit, but you don't get rid of a major infection in half an hour, or even six hours,” Hammond continued. “It's all on the screen here.”

“Bad timing,” muttered Jefferson weakly.

“Rather good timing. There's no room for a doc on an Asp. Twenty hours in Witch-space, and what's the odds you're still fit to fly when you pop out the other side?

“It's going to mean a change of plan, though,” Hammond added. “I was going to get you to take her up to Raedre and get a few bolt-ons. We were doing well to find an Asp for sale at all, and this one's just straight as it comes out of the box except for an escape pod. Company credit's good for all the extras we want, but they don't have all we want here anyway – and it takes time to fit them all, which is time we don't have with a passenger schedule to keep. Booster, pull up our route.”

Jefferson was already starting to doze as Hammond turned away. Whatever this Bienese fever was, it hit fast and it hit hard. For all that, Jefferson was a thousand times better off aboard Flying Lady than if he'd been on his homeworld. T'kella adjusted his pillow compassionately; Jefferson was a loyal crewman and he'd adopted her like a favourite sister the minute she'd first come aboard, back when Flying Lady was still called Dangerous Moonlight and was about to live up to her name.

On the nav screen, Booster pointed out their planned itinerary. “We've got one passenger aboard for Onteised, the rest we'd be dropping along the way along with anyone else we pick up. Computer says we still have a little slack in the schedule, but only contingency plus about five percent. After Onteised we'd want to head to Lavegere for a refit, it's as good as we have within a few light-years.”

“Tech level 13,” Hammond mused. “Not bad, plenty good enough for our routine maintenance, but I want a piece of kit we can't get there. Which as Raedre's just a short hop away, and well up to what we need, I'd like to take our new toy up there.”

“It's not very far out of our way...” mused Booster.

“No, but the ship's going to be in the repair dock for quite a while. Long enough to burn all our contingency time, and that's something we can't afford. So... best thing I can think of is that I fly her up there myself and I catch up with you in a few weeks at Lavegere.” He turned to T'kella. “You'd better see if you can find us a contract crewman, at least for the next, oh, seven to ten days. Jeff'll be chewing the bulkheads by then, but we can't help that.”

“He's as sick as that?” asked T'kella.

“Autodoc says anything up to four days just for the antimicrobials to clean everything out – and even then he's going to be badly weakened and have some convalescing to do. I don't even want to think about how he'd have ended up if he'd gone another twenty, twenty-five hours without treatment. If you can get him to hold still for three hundred hours then so much the better. Check what the doc's got to say on this infection, it's nastier than you'd think.”

“Right, and Booster can't do it all, and I don't know how to fly, and you're not going to risk a valuable ship and her passengers while I start to learn,” T'kella nodded.

“Nor your hide, or theirs. But you should find plenty of fliers on the station, just looking for a job. Ceenrama's got its share of qualified pilots wanting to get away from the Dux, the wars, and in general the whole damned planet, and they can't all raise a grubstake. Even an Adder's a lot of cash when you're just looking to start out, never mind trying to make it pay.”

“Okay. Consider it done,” said T'kella, “and if we can't find anyone, we'll try Inre when we get there. Booster can get us there well enough.”
“Yes. However,” Hammond turned back to the big red humanoid again, “don't try to be a hero if it comes to that. You've got a cloak and you've got a fast ship. Turn your stern to trouble if you can, and if you spot a fuel station, top up before you even get to the Coriolis; you'll get through traffic quicker and you can run away better.”

“For sure,” agreed Booster with a mixture of humour and gravitas. “It's a lawless galaxy and I'm not tired of living yet.”

* * * * *

Hammond was glad of the loan of a set of ear defenders as he toured Ceenrama's repair dock and garage bays. Technology marched on, but now as when Man had first pioneered the ox-cart, there were times when engineering consisted of hitting something very hard with a hammer – and the hammers used in a GalGop repair dock were more powerful and sophisticated noise-makers than their distant ancestors, but all the noisier for it.

However, the station boasted a fair array of ships for sale, even a monstrous Anaconda. The Flying Lady Corporation could have afforded her with a trade-in of their current vessel, but the giant freighter didn't fit into their plans at all; Hammond preferred a faster ship and could not have delivered a hundred and fifty passengers on a cross-sector run. Some people liked shipping hundreds of tons of cargo at a snail's pace, but that wasn't Hammond's style and he was not only making the money as fast as he liked but living the life he wanted to while he was at it.

In any case they'd made their choice some hours previously, and been planning towards it for some months. In due course Jefferson was going to be operating independently as commander of Flying Lady II, but before it was time to entrust him with an expensive fast freighter and a score of lives at a time, they needed to get him some combat experience. It was rare for Flying Lady to even visit a system and see no trouble at all; it would be rarer still to manage a trip across a whole sector and not be in real deadly danger at least once. And that was where the Asp came in.

Hammond patted the asymmetrical hexagon that was an Asp Mk II with mixed feelings. He'd taken to flying one reluctantly and in response to a growing awareness of a persistent pirate problem that GalCop couldn't deal with by police presence alone. He'd blown a couple of thousand hostiles into glowing gas, and all of them had asked for it – but it came hard anyway. On the other hand, he had owed his life to Steel Thunder's speed, firepower and handling a hundred times over, and it would give Jefferson no end of a leg-up to turn him loose with one.

He signalled the salesman. “Looks like you got a sale here, provided the service records check out.” That only took a few seconds for the datapad to verify; there was an application for that, as well as one to attest to the Flying Lady Corporation's credit balance. It was a sizeable chunk of their net worth, but they would make a reasonable portion of it back when the time came to trade her in again, a few hundred combat successes down the line.

“Do you wish to file a name change, sir?” asked the salesman. Some owners held that it was bad luck to change a ship's name, but Hammond had renamed every ship he'd owned and renamed Dangerous Moonlight to Flying Lady as it was, so anything the galaxy had stored up for him was going to happen anyway. He mulled over one last time the two choices he'd been toying with, and finally plumped for one.

“Yes. Register her as Jefferson’s Starship, thank you,” he said, deciding after all that Lady's Escort would not quite do. And that was all there was to it. It had taken a great deal of patient saving before he had scrimped together the credits for his first Boa Class Cruiser – before Dangerous Moonlight, before Steel Thunder – but now he had built up the business far enough that he could afford a mint-condition Asp Mk II out of ready cash, or at any rate credit. Jefferson’s Starship was fuelled up and ready to launch, and there was not much reason not to take her out for a spin. It was tempting to trot back over to Flying Lady for one final check before going, but they'd already said their goodbyes and Booster and T'kella both deserved to be left to run things without the slight suspicion that Hammond didn't quite trust them to handle it right.

He waited as the mechanic, a young human with a slight accent that Hammond couldn't quite place, ran the pre-launch checks before finally handing over Jefferson’s Starship to her new owner – a task that Hammond couldn't oversee in the cramped confines of an Asp's flight deck – and politely tipped the young man a twenty-credit note as he emerged. The commlink was already enabled to request a launch window and the fuel tank was full. Hammond eased himself into the seat, made the few adjustments that the Asp's primitive ergonomics allowed for, and brought all systems online. One single missile and a front-mounted Ingram M1928A2 was all the firepower Jefferson’s Starship could boast for now, but he'd started out with less and in a slower, less handy ship to boot. It would do for the short hop up to Raedre, and after that his ass would be as heavily iron-plated as any ship in all the Eight.

After the comparatively stately Boa Class Cruiser, Hammond wasn't surprised to find himself over-controlling the twitchy fighter. He knew all the right movements were there in his muscle memory, though, and he concentrated on making all the adjustments as small as he could as he eased Jefferson’s Starship past the navigation beacon and on into clear space. A touch on the injectors would... but this wasn't Steel Thunder, injectors were not yet installed. Never mind, even at full normal speed the Asp would soon clear the station.

Behind in the garage bay the mechanic watched with approval as the Asp departed. He nodded with no visible emotion, then turned towards the next ship on his job sheet; but as he moved towards her, an aging Cobra Mk 1 in for overhaul, he touched his data pad for voice input and murmured “Da, tovarishch. Missiya vypolnena.”

Jefferson’s Starship wasn't Steel Thunder, but she was a fast agile ship nonetheless and Hammond soon found his reflexes were coming back to him. It was tempting to hang around Ceenrama system a little longer and indulge himself, but time was money and there was no need to waste it. Besides, it still felt mighty draggy having to clear masslocks at normal speed, fast though this was in an Asp, and the less time Hammond had to put up with it before he got the performance upgrades, the better. He brought up the hyperspace destination with a couple of taps on the computer and then, out of pure habit, took his hands off the controls for the brief duration of the countdown.

“Witchspace to Tidice system in five... four... three... two... one,” purred the computer, before reality collapsed into a maelstrom of confusing images. No wonder, the laws of time and space didn't apply here, which was just as well as the journey time between stars was impossibly long if the inconvenient laws had to be adhered to. Hammond stretched slightly in the confined seat of the Asp and sighed in annoyance. All the interesting library files were still in Flying Lady's computer and he only had what he was toting around on the datapad. It would have to do.

He smiled as one item on the pad's inventory scrolled past. In all his tour of the Eight since first visiting Aqutebi, he'd never deleted the copy of T'kella's licence he'd downloaded the first time he met her. She hadn't changed much to look at nor, mercifully, very much in personality. They owed that to a mighty good doctor who had helped her process the awful memory of a terminal sentence in the living hell of a Soviet astromine and, for that matter, the desperate brutality Hammond had had to resort to in order to convince the station overseer to sell T'kella to him. Help like that cost high, but Hammond would have cheerfully paid it a hundred times over. Besides, Flying Lady was making the money back hand over fist and investing in Jefferson's future was promising to pay off in still bigger company profits.

Contract passengers needed to be carried in safety, and that meant that even a passenger vessel needed to be heavily armed and operated by someone who could make the best use of her. Hammond had learned that the hard way, though not the hardest way of all and in time to profit from the lesson. So now Flying Lady was armed with a formidable array of lasers and missiles, and shielded like a Navy corvette into the bargain – including an energy regeneration unit that the Navy didn't allow to be sold to just anybody and sold for a steep price even with the proper authorisation. Well, Hammond had the authorisation and the credits too, and Jefferson’s Starship was going to be all the more iron-assed with one of the Navy's specials wired into her.

He carried on skimming through the datapad, then gave up and set it to one side. Might as well catch a nap while the catching was good. There was absolutely nothing to be done and nothing to see while -

“Witchdrive malfunction!” warned the computer, blinking every indicator in the cabin bright red for a few seconds until Hammond hit the button to acknowledge. He didn't waste time cursing. The premature exit from Witch-space was almost invariably down to one cause and one alone, and this wasn't the ship he would have wanted to be in. Or at any rate, not before he'd managed to get the added extras installed.

He knew what to expect before he even saw the blinking red and green telltale on the scanner. How Thargoids were able to do it no-one knew, but they could linger in Witch-space – possibly even live there for all anyone could tell differently – and, based on the evidence of incidents like this, they could waylay passing GalCop ships and drop both themselves and their prey back into normal space far between the stars. What they intended with the ships they ambushed, other than blowing them into their component molecules, was anyone's guess, and if they ever took prisoners Hammond didn't dare speculate as to their fate.

What he wasn't prepared for was the strange look of the sky itself. A fog it seemed, the type that belonged on the surface of a planet rather than in the near-vacuum of space, where the interstellar medium was dense if it boasted so much as a hydrogen atom to the cubic centimetre. No doubt his perceptions were warped a little by the lack of references, but there was barely a glint of starlight penetrating the greyness around him, nor anything to see in the dimness even where the scanner insisted there was a Thargoid vessel barely fifteen kilometres away and closing.

He had little enough to fight with even if he could see the enemy; a single laser – and not a top-line one at that, though the Ingram was more firepower than Hammond had had back when he first had to fight off a brace of pirates – and one standard-issue missile that any Thargoid would ECM in a frozen heartbeat, if Thargoids had hearts. There were ships he might have been worse off with, but Hammond had an unpleasant suspicion that this was going to be the kind of fight sometimes nicknamed a “leviathan” - nasty, brutish and short.

Green laser fire pierced the mists, but almost hesitantly. That came as a surprise, at any rate. Hammond had been taking it for granted that the mist was no accident and that the Thargoid would have no trouble targeting him through it. He set his teeth grimly and held his own fire while arrowing Jefferson’s Starship towards the fast-closing trace. No need to warm up his laser for nothing nor give the Bug anything better to aim at than it had already.

Abruptly a lane opened in the fog and Hammond caught a glimpse of the slowly-spinning octagon that was a Thargoid warship. He was still outgunned, but he had fought these before, and the first essential was to aim carefully and make his shots count. Which was all well and good, but that lane might close as quickly as it had opened. With a twitch on the yoke, Hammond brought his sights to bear, opened up with a quick burst as soon as he had stopped waiting for the targeting reticle to give him the extra hint that his sights were on, then pulled the yoke towards him and jabbed at the fuel injectors.

But Jefferson’s Starship was not Steel Thunder, and there was no answering surge of acceleration. He cursed as he wound the throttle up to full normal thrust, but green light stabbed through the darkness and tore at the Asp's shields before the fog shrouded them again.

An Asp could run from almost anything, but not from a Thargoid warship. Bulky the alien might be, but it had power to spare and quite possibly a large technological edge over anything GalCop could boast. Still, he had to beware of a straightforward slugging contest in this ship. Steel Thunder could have outfought a Thargoid one-on-one, and had done so on several occasions, especially on Hammond's last mad dash across Sector Three; but Steel Thunder, even before completing that mission, had massively reinforced shields and an LF90 military laser front and rear. This time, even tempting the enemy to follow him and present an intact rear shield and cool laser to him wasn't going to work: Jefferson’s Starship was not Steel Thunder.

Again the beam of green coherent light stabbed through the fog, but it did no more than create a sickly ghost-light around the Asp while the ship's shields gradually replenished themselves. It was still closer than Hammond liked, though. He dared not come to a halt and take a chance on the Thargoid not finding him; a random hit would not kill him, but if the alien's weapon systems matched his own then it would be reporting the hit back to the Thargoid gunner, and if he did have to stand a random hit Hammond much preferred that he wouldn't be sitting still for the next shot.

To Hammond's annoyance and frustration, the Bug's slow rate of fire didn't seem to be taxing his weapon systems significantly. Hammond had won many fights – in Steel Thunder and in Dangerous Moonlight, and even before – by sitting still and letting his enemies overheat their lasers while he made sure of his own aim. But there were two reasons why this approach wouldn't serve him now. Instead he took his best guess at where the laser fire was originating from and headed for it -

And there was the Thargoid so close he'd almost rammed it! Hammond cut his speed in an instant, grateful that Jefferson’s Starship could at least manage that just as well as Steel Thunder, and cut loose with everything he had while the Thargoid lurched abruptly into flight. The alien's acceleration was phenomenal and even at the Asp's best rate he could not match it, but he stuck as close as he could until his laser hit thermal overload and green laser fire from the Thargoid was battering through his shields, through his energy banks... and Hammond regained sanity in time to pull out of his berserk charge and veer away while his ship was still intact.

- “Fuel leak!” warned the computer, and Hammond swore afresh while the remaining Quirium vented to space, and there was not a thing he could do about it -

And he spun around again, heedless of the damage, because the Thargoid was shedding plasma herself, and if she was as badly hurt as that she would be launching drones in short order, and if Hammond could somehow beat a Thargoid warship then there was no way in all the Eight that he could tackle any drones as well, and he pushed his laser into the red again and launched the one missile he had in the hopes that the Bug was too low on energy to ECM it away, and he cursed afresh as the missile blew and another red-green trace appeared and yet another, and all he could do was stick like glue to the mother-ship and die with his teeth locked in her throat.

He kept his thumb on the fire button, the last desperate resort of a pilot who needed to coax just one more shot out of the weapon as soon as it cooled out of the overload zone again and yet again, holding his sights firmly on the Thargoid for all he was worth even as she was crabbing sideways and trying to open out the gap between them. The mist was on the verge of shrouding her again while the robot fighters were moving to pincer him and their automatic lasers set about shredding his rear shield just as thoroughly as the warship had dismantled his fore shield, and all Hammond could do was stab at her from Hell's heart and for hate's sake spit his last breath at her.

Suddenly his commbox screamed at him. “Guard your eccentric loathing of parking meters, human arts graduate monkey!” it yelled, in a weird melange of human tongues, as the warship exploded in a brilliant flash that lit up the fog like heat lightning. Desperately Hammond hoped there wasn't another one nearby that could take over the drones, which kept on firing for a few more heart-stopping seconds until, with Hammond's last energy bank depleted well past the point where a sane man would have deployed the escape pod, they suddenly ceased. Hammond's scanner confirmed that they had powered down, their red-green traces fading to the white that denoted unpowered space debris.

And Hammond had a few hours to make his peace with the Galaxy and any of the several deities in whose name he had been blessed over the last year or two. He brought Jefferson’s Starship to a halt and watched as the energy banks replenished themselves and the shields came back on line. It was all one anyway. Pulling up the short-range chart, Hammond checked his position, just halfway between Ceenrama and Tidice... and his Jump range, zero point zero light-years. There wasn't a drop of Quirium left aboard and for all the good anything else was going to do him, Hammond might as well have suited up, gone EVA and pissed in the tank.

It was tempting for Hammond to sleight his ship at any star he could see, engage hyperspeed and let Jefferson’s Starship make her own way home. It was tempting, and it was also an exercise in futility, because not only was it going to be a toss-up whether he ran out of food, water or breathing air first – let the recyclers do the best they could – but even if they converted everything with no loss and the hyperspeed functioned flawlessly for countless centuries to come, not only would Hammond be dead of old age and a desiccated husk before the backdrop of stars even seemed to move, but by the time he returned to human space the entire species might have evolved into brains in jars or uploaded their consciousness to a galaxy-wide computer web. Even a few light-years was a ridiculously huge distance when weighed against the speed of a ship in normal space.

Hammond eased Jefferson’s Starship to ahead one-quarter normal thrust, more for the sake of safely clearing the aimlessly-drifting robot fighters than anything else. They were a difficult mark in such poor visibility and not worth the bother of hunting down, even though he would as soon be rid of them in case another warship showed up and took them over. Once all their blips were showing astern he shifted to hyperspeed for a few seconds, then dropped back to normal speed. That would do for now. He had no way of knowing how far this weird cloud extended or what other random debris he might run across that was too small to masslock him but big enough to cause a hull breach if he hit it, and it seemed a waste to spend the rest of his last hours or days dodging rocks.

More for something to do than anything else, Hammond turned his attention to the computer display and started tidying up any unnecessary programs ready for an orderly shutdown. It was too bad that an Asp's environmental systems were so rudimentary. When faced with a choice between dying of hunger, thirst or asphyxiation, he would have preferred something more merciful and pain-free, and according to his understanding a man would die quickly and practically without knowing it if he could breathe a few lungfuls of pure helium – or some denser noble gas if he didn't want his last words to be spoken in a comical squeak. But an Asp had no facility for flooding the cabin with pure helium, neon, xenon or whatever.

Well, there was no use wishing. One by one Hammond went through the processes the ship's brain was running, glad he'd taken a course in computer studies. Some he needed to leave up and running until he was sure he wanted to power down Jefferson’s Starship for good. Others, like the IFF, he could do without since there was no-one here to see them. While... But that was odd. There was one piece of code executing that he didn't recognize at all. He checked the log out of sheer curiosity. The ship's systems had been active for several days while it was in the repair shop and presumably being looked over by prospective customers. This program had started just before the latest launch, half an hour or so before going into Witch-space, and now it was quiescent, consuming just a tiny fraction of the computer's resources like an engine running on idle.

He took a closer look at the log. There was an upload just a few seconds before the mystery program started running, and the upload had a peculiar name he didn't understand at all:
Smert' kontrrevolyutsionerov. The language looked slightly familiar, though, teasing at some half-remembered recollection that he couldn't place here and now. More on spaceman's instincts than anything else, he gave the computer a few commands that would let the program continue running in a virtual machine, quarantined where it could no longer interact with the outside world but receiving simulated inputs as though it were. It was a standard technique against cyber-attack and it ought to be good enough for now.

“And what in the name of a Thargoid's dying curse I think I'll get out of that I don't know,” Hammond muttered to himself. Not that anyone knew whether what Thargoids shrieked was meant for a curse, for that matter. It might be meant as congratulations to a brave and skilful enemy, or a plea for mercy, or a last message to be passed on to their surviving relatives. Still, it went against the grain for an experienced spaceman to leave anything running when you didn't know what it did.

He flicked through the various display screens once again, then blinked, started and backed up slowly. His short-range chart was still accurately reporting his zero Witchjump range, but it was showing a different set of stars from a few minutes ago. He ran through a few of them. Soinsan, Leeson, Onaran... and he pulled up the sector charts on his datapad and swore softly. According to his instruments he was somewhere in the Great Rift between Sector Seven Main and the Rift Worlds, a score or so of systems that were all more than seven light-years from the main body of the sector. No-one travelled between the two because no-one could; there wasn't a drive in all the Eight that could span the distance, unless the Navy knew of one, and if they did, they weren't telling.

Any of the systems he was looking at right now were in Witchjump range if he'd happened to have a full tank. In the other direction, Orxetebe and thence to the rest of the Rift Worlds. But no-one could get here on purpose and it was anyone's guess how he'd even got here by accident. A misjump dropped you halfway between where you'd started and where you'd meant to go, and he hadn't been heading in this direction because he couldn't. Which, unfortunately, made it very unlikely that anyone else was either, except maybe another passing Thargoid some time. Hammond shook his head in bewilderment, then closed his eyes.

He wasn't sure how long it had been before he opened them again. Around him the swirling fog still hid the stars from view and he had no clue at all how long it might extend for. It would be cruelly ironic if the fog itself was actually usable Witch-fuel; not only did Jefferson’s Starship have no fuel scoops fitted, but she could have none. Asps were one of the few Witchdrive-equipped ships that could not be adapted for fuel scoops. Not that it made any odds either way.

What did draw his interest, though, was a large number of white blips appearing on the scanner dead ahead and to either side. He didn't need to cut his speed yet, not with the blips somewhere close to twenty kilometres ahead, but he watched them cautiously as the range ticked down. An asteroid field or...?

The fog seemed thicker here, prompting Hammond to ease off on the speed still further. He wasn't tired of living yet, not for a few hours at any rate. There were more blips than he'd ever seen in the densest asteroid field, or even after a pirate freighter got blown up and spilled cargo into vacuum, and he had no clear view of any of them to know if they were canister-sized or moonlet-sized, and crashing into them wasn't the way he wanted to find out.

Gradually, at what seemed like a crawl, the Asp approached one of the blips. It was a ship of some kind, a design he didn't know, tumbling slowly end over end, with burn marks in several places on its hullmetal and in one place a ragged hole right the way through from side to side. That was unusual in itself. Usually when a ship took as much damage as that it blew up, leaving barely a fragment behind, though sometimes... Hammond jinked suddenly as a ton or so of hullmetal came wheeling lazily through the fog, almost scraping Jefferson’s Starship's sides. Whatever had gone down here must have been fierce, but who had been fighting whom?

Hammond put the computer on the task of tentatively identifying the strange ship. It wasn't as big as a Boa but didn't have the broad, flat hull of a Cobra; it wasn't disc-shaped like a Ray nor geometric like a Krait or an Asp. It was a little like an oversized Viper, but rather longer and narrower, with what might have been atmosphere planes fitted near what Hammond supposed was the rear of the craft. He inspected it more closely. Perhaps there had originally been two pairs of planes somewhat inclined to each other, but if so, one had been torn away, and what was left was asymmetrical.

The next blip to come close enough to identify was much more familiar – a Thargoid drone of the type he knew well. That was still intact, but inert, with no mother-ship nearby to guide it. It might even have been the rather older model that responded only to its launcher, and not to any other Thargoid within range; Hammond had heard stories from Navy types about the impact the newer type had made when they first encountered it. And hard on the heels of this one came another, and then some fair-sized chunks of rocky debris that also bore heavy burn marks.

The computer drew a blank on the strange ship, and it wasn't worth asking why the fog outside was getting still thicker. Even the hull temperature seemed to be rising slightly, as though whatever was out there was dense enough to be causing friction heating. Still, it was well within survival tolerances for now. Hammond picked his way forward cautiously, not that there was any hope that he was going home alive but that there was more strangeness to see before he died, passed another and rather more damaged ship of the same strange design, and then...

Whoa!

Hammond brought Jefferson’s Starship to a full halt as his jaw dropped in awe. In front of him was far and away the biggest thing he'd ever seen in space that wasn't a planet, a moon or a sun. He had to look for a while before he could be sure that it wasn't a moon, at that; it seemed almost big enough for one, and many times bigger than any asteroid he'd ever seen, Rock Hermit or no, even bigger than a Coriolis Station. But, at the very least, it had been as thoroughly modified as any Rock Hermit ever was, if indeed it hadn't been built from the basement up.

And now he could see where the fog was coming from. Something had hit this – artificial moon? - extremely hard, hard enough to leave a starred crater on its surface and a ragged hole deep into its interior. From this hole, though Hammond was at a complete loss to explain how, fog was venting into space in a constant plume like a fumarole or a deep-ocean smoker. How long it must have been venting to create a cloud the size of this one Hammond also couldn't even hazard a guess at, but it lent further weight to the hypothesis that this was an artificial construct; no natural asteroid or planetoid this size would have the gravity to accumulate volatile gases, certainly not in this quantity, even as inclusions trapped below the surface.

By the same token, of course, once the gases were venting the planetoid didn't have anything like the mass to hold them. Over time they would spread out randomly, eventually attenuating into the interstellar medium. But that took time, at least on the human scale. And meanwhile – deep space had a short-lived fog cloud a few thousand, maybe a million or so, kilometres in diameter.

All very scientifically interesting, to say nothing of who had built this thing in the first place and flown the strange ships in what looked to have been an ultimately futile battle against the Thargoids, but it didn't help Hammond one little bit. He sighed and shrugged. It was something to have seen one of the strangest sights in the Eight while he was still alive.

Something on his scanner was moving.

The computer labelled it with a yellow trace, which didn't mean much – only that it was a powered ship, did not have a Thargoid energy signature, and wasn't broadcasting a police ID. Another misjump survivor? Possible, but hardly likely, given that they were on a route to nowhere and whatever unlikely circumstance had brought him here was not going to be repeated at all often. But the alternatives didn't seem likelier: Someone had somehow managed to Witch-jump here deliberately, or someone lived here in the Rift. And the worst part of it was that Hammond didn't even have a way of finding out.

The strange trace was moving towards him. Hammond felt he might as well wait here politely, beside the punctured planetoid and with the wreckage of a fair-sized space battle all around him. His laser was fully cooled and his shields fully revived, as though fighting was going to help him any. Still, it did not come naturally to him to power his weapons down while there was an unknown craft in the vicinity.

Several minutes later, he saw the wink of a ship's running lights pierce the fog momentarily before being obscured again. He didn't get enough of a glimpse to see what the strange ship looked like, nor even any real impression of its size – not with the fog playing havoc with his perceptions. But at any rate, as long as it wasn't a Thargoid there was at least a fool's hope. It might even be a Navy vessel of unknown type – and this whole site could be known to them – and in that case the useful errands he had run for the Navy might bear fruit again. He felt his heart quicken at the prospect of living to see another planetfall.

The ship – it was another of the strange winged craft, but this one was fully intact and moving slowly under its own power. Lights blinked at several points on its outline, and there was dim cabin lighting under a bulbous, mostly-transparent dome. Hammond could just make out movement inside the dome, but nothing more clear than that even though the range was closing to, probably, less than a kilometre; it was hard to be sure and he wished this ship had a HUD with a functioning range-finder... but Jefferson’s Starship wasn't Steel Thunder.

Slowly the strange ship inched towards the Asp. Its cabin lights went out before Hammond could catch sight of the crew, but he kept his own on. He might, possibly, have been the first human being this stranger had ever seen, and he had no intention of being a bad ambassador for his species. At last he was able to estimate the size of the strange ship, almost a match for the Asp in width if you counted the winglets and slightly longer overall, but with a narrow fuselage that would barely accommodate a single human-sized pilot who would be only half-visible under that dome, and even then its drive and associated systems would have to be more efficient size for size than the Asp's in order to be remotely comparable in performance and firepower.

The ship stopped and then began to rotate slowly clockwise, if viewed from above the dome. At this distance Hammond could easily make out writing on the side. The alphabet was familiar, but the wording “Smerige Fokker” was unrecognisable. It might or might not have been related to the very human-like artwork on the ship's sides – a peculiar atmosphere craft of a type seldom seen in the Eight, which like the ship it was painted on was equipped with twin aerofoils near one end, but also a third much smaller one at the other.

Not an alien, then, but how did this ship tie in with the wrecks and what did it have to do with the punctured planetoid and the fog cloud? Hammond had no way to even ask the question, let alone get any answers. He felt he ought to politely turn and show off his own craft, but he hadn't any artwork on the new Asp or even the name painted on the ship's sides, and either the stranger could read the signal from his transponder or he couldn't.

But anyone who knew the GalCop alphabet must be able to grasp that an Asp sat here must be unable to Witch home again! The one thing the stranger couldn't do was vent Quirium for Hammond to scoop; it was common knowledge that Asps couldn't be equipped with fuel scoops. So if he was going to help at all, he was going to have to open a wormhole for Jefferson’s Starship – and preferably not in the direction of the Rift Worlds or Hammond wouldn't be able to rendezvous with Flying Lady any time soon. However, if that was what would offered then Hammond would take it in a frozen heartbeat; eventually he would get word back to Sector Seven and they could both jump to Sector Eight.

The strange ship carried on turning until she was facing directly away from Jefferson’s Starship, then began to accelerate smoothly away. It was likely that she could have accelerated a lot faster if she'd wanted to and Hammond took it as a hint to follow. Her drive flame was rather whiter than an Asp's and bright for its size, which made her easy to follow even when the mist began to shroud her. Hammond closed the gap as best he could, even so. Admittedly he could follow her well enough by using his scanner but he far preferred to keep her in sight, the only “friendly face” in half a dozen light-years.

The ship wasn't moving especially fast, though. There were few enough navigation hazards around now that they could have skipped along appreciably quicker, but if the stranger had some reason for going slower then the only way Hammond would find out was by playing close attention. He followed a couple of hundred metres behind, watching closely for any hint that the other ship was speeding up or slowing down.

Gradually she drew to a halt beside a still stranger ship. Or was it a ship? It was a very large piece of machinery, whatever it was, covered with gleaming red-brown wire in countless coils. Like a Fuel Station, it was hollow inside and could comfortably have accommodated a fair-sized ship, a Boa at least, but it lacked the Fuel Station's characteristic glow. Too bad; had it been able to pump him a tankful of Quirium then Hammond would have been out and away in fine style.

In any case the strange ship didn't seem to be hinting that Hammond should fly into the odd machine. Instead she started moving again, no faster than before, and Hammond fell in behind her at the same steady amble. If this was a rescue, it was a strange one; it felt more like a guided tour. What next?

A few minutes later Hammond saw something to make him sit up and take notice, and no mistake. It looked like the exit side of a wormhole, but as the other ship hung there motionless in space it struck Hammond after several minutes that it was past time for the wormhole to have collapsed, and that in any case the creator of the wormhole was nowhere to be seen – unless the strange ship had made it, in which case its longevity was even more inexplicable. What was the stranger trying to tell him? That there was a way back here? But how could he use it if he didn't know where to find the other end of the wormhole?

But...

No, whatever that train of thought was leading to, it was going to have to wait for now, for the other ship was moving on again and Hammond wasn't going to be left behind. What next? Another unexplained curiosity?

And then...

“Yes, that certainly would qualify,” Hammond breathed. They were back at the punctured planetoid again. On one side of it was a large horizontal slit similar to the docking bay on a Coriolis station, but on a far larger scale. It would have allowed ten or twenty ships to have docked at the same time, assuming they were similar in size to a Cobra or an Asp, and the internal accommodation space could only be guessed at. At the moment, though, docking was out of the question. The punctured planetoid was slowly rotating about an axis that was markedly eccentric, and not about the centre of the horizontal slit, and even Hammond could not have matched his ships movement to the movement of the slit, not in the Asp or any other ship he knew. For that he would have needed a ship with belly thrusters, as well as a more sophisticated docking computer than any he had seen in all the Eight.

No doubt when the punctured planetoid was operational it either did not rotate at all or rotated, as did any station he was familiar with, about an axis through the centre of the docking bay. But whatever had punctured the planetoid had thrown it off its rotational axis, and now Hammond could not have docked with it to save his life – which, under the circumstances, was unfortunate.

Slowly the strange cross winged space ship began to move away, Hammond following. He had an unpleasant suspicion that he was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Vast as the docking bay was, it was still small compared to the planetoid itself, and a glimpse he had had of the internal structure, lit by feebly flickering blue lights, suggested at enormous living space able to accommodate many thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands. If the gas escaping were a mixture of breathing air and water vapour, as the composition of the cloud suggested, then presumably there had formerly been a shirt sleeve environment inside the planetoid itself, much as in the space stations he knew though on a far larger scale. But all that must have been lost in one cataclysmic impact, and Hammond realized that he had seen how this had been done.

“Murdering insect bastards!” Hammond swore, with a few other expletives for good measure. How far had that planetoid come from? Just one Witch-jump over… but how long ago, how many generations drifting between the stars? Until it had the sheer bad luck to stumble across an alien species with hyperdrive and no concept of mercy. Once that happened, the generation ship was doomed. Thargoids never gave up. You could beat back one wave, but there would be more along later. They must have easily been able to predict the planetoid’s course, and then they eventually turned up with overwhelming firepower. And that was how the planetoid got punctured.

Hammond continued tailing his mysterious guide, wondering how this trip was going to end, and wondering nearly as much how it was that this single ship was still out here floating in the cloud. They were vectoring away from the planetoid again, still with the mist swirling around them and Hammond’s sense of direction thoroughly confused. There was nothing to see here except featureless white and…

Blue?

Hammond braked slightly as the mists seemed to thin and the strange ship fell more clearly into view. It was lit from behind by a deep blue glow that looked exactly like an entry wormhole – and Hammond stopped himself from firing up the wormhole analyser, because Jefferson’s Starship was not Steel Thunder – and the cross-winged ship was making straight for it. Hammond barely hesitated. Wherever the wormhole led to, it could not possibly be any worse for him than being stuck in the middle of the Great Rift with no Witchfuel, which meant there wasn’t even a decision to be made. He slammed the Asp’s drive full ahead and dived into the blue spot just as the other ship vanished.

The computer chimed softly as the Witch-tunnel collapsed, and identified the new system as Onaran – one of the many “wretched hive” systems that the Eight had to offer, in this case largely because of the horrendous pandemics that periodically ravaged the entire world and foundered both the planet’s attempt to drag itself forwards technologically and the efforts of any planet-wide government to assert itself. Politicians might advertise a brighter dawn tomorrow but that wasn’t going to inspire anyone’s confidence when there could be unburied corpses in the street by sunset today.

Hammond didn’t have any business on the planet, though, and little enough even getting any closer to it than he could help – not when he didn’t even have fuel injectors to his name (nor any fuel for them) and any possible number of pirates between his entry point and the GalCop station. Instead –

But that was interesting in itself. He was nowhere near a Witchpoint beacon, and much closer to a sizeable asteroid field – near enough that he had better cut his speed and look around himself carefully. After a few moments he smiled cautiously but with a deep sense of relief. His naked eyes were well up to spotting the characteristic flicker of a mining laser and controlled explosion of a small asteroid, and where these were to be found it wasn’t too unlikely that a Rock Hermit would be nearby.

After the excitement of the last hour or two it was thoroughly relaxing to flit around between the tumbling chunks of rock looking out for a rather larger one in slow rotation, one that the slow-moving ships on his trace might be clustering around. It took him bare minutes to spot what he was looking for, and only a few more to find himself safely docked and ordering full tanks of fuel for Jefferson’s Starship.

This place maintained an external atmosphere behind a pressure-curtain, and a bare hint of centrifugal gravity – just enough to allow a man to ease his cramped muscles after a long stint in a tight cockpit, and make the drink stay right side up in the glass. The sign over the door said “Taberna Draconis”, and whatever that might have meant Hammond didn’t care, as long as it promised a little something to steady the nerves.

There might be someone to go over the ship’s computer and make sure there weren’t any more little surprises in waiting, and that would be welcome too, but that wasn’t Hammond’s first priority. As with most remote mining outposts, there was a glorious mish-mash of drinkables on offer ranging from premium brandy shipped from half a sector over to whatever godawful moonshine the Hermit’s own vacuum still pumped out, and Hammond had little trouble finding something not only acceptable but thoroughly palatable, and not before time under the circumstances.

He was halfway down the first of these when he noticed the model on the bar, and in answer to his inquiring glance the bartender slid it along for him to inspect. It was carefully crafted -- out of scrap metal in all likelihood, but if so then painstakingly finished and detailed – and looked very much like a two-winged atmosphere craft he had seen depicted only on hour or two before. There was an inscription on the base: “Smerige Fokker”. Hammond smiled softly.

“Interesting piece, isn’t it?” said the bartender. “That was Dutchy’s work. He liked to tinker. Told us he’d made one of those fullsize, out of light alloy and textiles if you please, with a combustion engine to power it. Of course we’d have to go down to the planet to see it…”

“Funny name,” Hammond commented.

“It’s a pun, so he said – but he never told anyone how or what was funny about it. As to the atmosphere plane, I wouldn’t put it past him. Last thing he was ever working on was a modified Witchdrive, though he never said what for. Told us some story about a ship he’d found, way out, last of its kind or something. He’d gone a bit funny by then.” The bartender paused to fetch Hammond a refill.

“Ever say why?”

“Thargoids,” shrugged the bartender. “I mean, none of us likes them, but you fight ‘em off when you have to, and you hope that’s damned seldom, and you might as well hate a plague germ for all the difference it makes. But he came back from a trip one time, and what he’d seen – He never said anything about it when he was sober, and what he said when he was drunk didn’t make sense. ‘All that way, all that time, for nothing,’ he said one time, and ‘Genocide’s the worst of all crimes; every man, woman and child, all gone for ever.’ And one time he scribbled this, and I picked it out of the trash and didn’t tell him.”

Hammond looked at the rough sketch that the barkeeper held out. It wouldn’t have made sense to everyone, but Hammond picked out the key features easily enough: a giant ball of rock tumbling slowly through space, with a cloud of the small cross-winged fighters weaving in and out around the bulkier Thargoid saucers and their robot drones, while almost on the edge of the picture:

“The most godawful big-ass mass driver you never saw, firing an asteroid through it,” murmured Hammond soberly. “Count on the Bugs to come up with a level of force there’s no defence against. Air and water for maybe ten, twenty, fifty thousand people, all leaking away, no way to stop it. No Witchdrive, no way to run.”

The bartender looked at Hammond oddly. “Well, after that Dutchy never said much of anything to anyone, but he’d mutter ‘Thargoids’ and spit on the floor a dozen times a day, when he wasn’t tinkering with this idea of his. Flew out with it one time, came back a while later, never said if it worked or what, and almost the last thing I ever heard him say was ‘Any time there’s anyone else out there that’s got Thargoids trying to kill him and nowhere to run, I’ll get him out of there’.”

Hammond signalled for yet another refill. He turned to face the little model atmosphere plane and raised his glass to it. “Thanks for the lift, Dutchy. I’ll be sure to pay it forward.”

There was a sorrowful snort from the bartender as he put the bottle back. “He’s beyond thanking, stranger. Five years ago we had three saucers pop up just about on our doorstep, and a young kid in our Belt starting out that daycycle trying to make a score. Dutchy didn’t even let them get the refuelling hose stowed before he launched. Well, you know how it is, once the alarm goes out every ship in fifty clicks drops what it’s doing and comes to help, and a little later there’s a giant furball with all sorts of traders, pirates, cops, saucers and robot fighters all mixed up together. The kid got back, for what that’s worth, but Dutchy… no-one lives forever, stranger. Anyhow, bay says your ship’s ready. Travel safe.”

This tale's amazing!

The next part of this story has yet to be written.

Links to other fiction by Malacandra (and others) will be found here: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/List_of_Oolite_stories.