Part I: A Ship in Harbor

 

            "Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…"

                                    - Homer, The Odyssey

 

Chapter One

 

C/V Star Worker

Approaching Phase Point 4

Blacksmith Star System

           Captain Walker stared at the bridge's primary display in grim concentration as the Construction Vessel Star Worker raced to the phase point just ahead of them. To prevent his crew from hearing the desperate pleas from other ships, he had directed external communications to his earbud. An alarming harmonic from the generators powering the quad drive set the entire ship's frame to vibrating. It wasn't much, but its persistence set people's nerves on edge almost as much as the unfolding disaster behind them.

            Most of the ship’s crew and some of the more senior construction workers crowded the bridge with the watch section. Star Worker was a large ship designed to build major commercial installations, from orbital gas refineries to deep space residential habitats. Her bridge was enormous for a civilian vessel because it also served as an operations center for various building projects. Large floor to ceiling aligned-crystal displays spanned the compartment. Everyone observing had an excellent view of the fast corvettes destroying their work because of the arrangement of the display screens.

            The four small warships had appeared out of Phase Point 2 less than three hours ago in a square formation and immediately pointed themselves towards the first construction site they saw. Each overpowered vessel sported a set of six long and gleaming drive rails affixed equidistant around their narrow, rounded after-hulls and four smaller ones forward, two each mounted above and below the wide, arrow-shaped forward hulls. It was a dual-set design that all fast, highly maneuverable human ships used. Whoever had designed these corvettes, however, had taken that idea to its absolute extreme.

            The mysterious warships raced across the system at speeds unmatched by the lumbering work vessels and spread out like a pack of hungry sharks encircling a school of fish. The two large, vaguely fin-shaped heat control and dissipation towers that rose on either side of each raider's central dorsal drive rail reinforced the imagery. Coated in the same matte black as the ships’ hulls, the towers bled off the massive amounts of heat a ship in space generates. On thermal sensors, the waves of multi-colored energy rippled behind them like disturbed water in the wake of a deep-sea monster.

            The Blacksmith System lay deep in the Odyssean Reach, over a month’s travel from the relative civilization of the Gateway System and weeks from any other major colony system. Blacksmith contained massive amounts of mineral resources but held no habitable planets. The Union of Earth had taken decades to set up all the funding, infrastructure, and logistics necessary to begin the construction projects that would make the system into an industrial powerhouse. Dozens of ships and barges and over fifteen hundred people were now working at sites scattered within the system's boundaries.

            Captain Walker squeezed his eyes shut briefly as his mind replayed what had just happened. The unknown warships had zoomed past every barge, small craft and work boat that did not mount a Phase Generator, the complicated piece of technology required to shift a vessel into hyperspace. Every overtaken ship mounting one immediately received directed energy weapon fire. The nimble raiders would destroy the Generator, along with most of their victim's engineering areas, and continue on their way to lame another ship. The fleet of construction ships in Blacksmith only carried civilian-grade hazard shielding, which was quickly overwhelmed without deflecting much of the laser energy. All that destructive power would rip through the boxy after hulls and also destroy the quad drives, leaving the ships adrift and their crews reeling from the sudden, massive damage.

            Star Worker had been the farthest ship from Phase Point 2. In fact, she was the farthest ship from anybody else in the system as she maneuvered the construction barge that was building an operations and management habitat on the edges of one of Blacksmith’s many asteroid fields when the attack came in. Though distant from the system’s gas giant core, the Hephaestus Range offered the construction fleet’s most convenient asteroid mining location. Parts and components might have to be shipped in from other systems, but it was much more efficient to craft the structural members and shells of the various installations from local resources.

            Malhar Walker had never served in the military, but he immediately grasped the situation he and his crew were in. He knew immediately what he was looking at when he saw the drive strength of the unknown vessels and analyzed their vectors. He had ordered an emergency evacuation of the half-built habitat and their construction barge, Strongarm. The massive barge held a fortune’s worth of equipment and supplies, but towing it would have made the Star Worker slower and more ungainly.

            Walker’s lips moved as if to spit, but he controlled himself. The Union of Earth was supposed to prevent this exact thing from happening. Until six weeks ago, the UE Rescue and Patrol Service had a pair of RPS deep space cutters on station, but the ships were abruptly reassigned out of the Reach. The Navy typically patrolled the region with a squadron of destroyers, but they reduced this to just two warships, one stationed at Gateway and the other at Big Sky Colony. Every captain in Blacksmith had seen a severe reduction in the Union’s presence throughout the Reach. Apparently, they weren’t the only ones to notice.

            The closest corvette reached the Star Forge, a sister ship to his own, as Star Worker passed the edge of the phase point. Star Forge was lumbering towards Phase Point 4 as well with its own barge still attached to the ship. Captain Breen had refused to slow in order to disconnect his barge, despite the long-term speed advantage. Walker’s breathing became more rapid as the corvette maneuvered jerkily around the slower leviathan. He unconsciously shook his head as his professional mind registered the sharp, abrupt movements of the warship that telegraphed the impatience of the raider’s crew.

            Laser beams flashed out and struck Star Forge’s after hull. But the raider rushed the shots, not yet in a position for precise hits. The beams came in at an angle and tore through most of the after hull. Hazard shielding buckled and alloy plates shattered as the weaponized beam of light speared into the helpless ship and travelled through the after hull and into the boxy forward hull. Walker could see secondary explosions, and his whole body tensed as he saw a massive electrical discharge send a corona of energy around the afterhull.

            Forge’s reactor containment had just failed.

            The entire ship disappeared in a blue-bright explosion of released energy. Her four drive rails broke apart and shot in different directions almost faster than Walker’s brain could register. The very front of Forge’s bow and the barge Seawall tumbled through space, tearing apart as they spun. Large chunks of the barge’s side shell and attached construction implements tore free, spinning off on random trajectories. Within seconds, what had been a massive space-going vessel with over a hundred people on board was nothing but a cloud of debris disappearing into the blackness of space.

            “Nav…” Walker croaked. He stopped and cleared his throat before trying again. “Navigator, where are we in the confidence bands?”

            “Yellow, Captain,” Fiona MacKenzie replied. Though husky, her voice’s steadiness gratified Walker. “Probably five minutes before we reach the green bands.”

            His fingers drummed on his chair as he nodded. A ship couldn’t just phase into hyperspace the moment it crossed a point’s boundary. The red, yellow, and green bands of confidence showed the likelihood of safely phasing a ship out of sidereal space and into hyperspace. The bands were different depending on a ship’s mass and general power configuration. A vessel of the size and load-out of Star Worker needed to be deep into the point before she could enter the green zones. Catastrophic phase failure was virtually impossible there.

            Nobody spoke as the captain’s eyes scanned all the navigation and sensor information. The corvette that had just murdered Star Forge hadn’t even slowed down as it raced to catch his ship. He thought they were out of range of any hyperspace tracking systems the raiders might possess, but he couldn’t know for sure. Every second might make the difference between escape and just a longer chase before they were all killed.

            “Right,” he said abruptly. “We’re not waiting for green confidence. Begin phase-out procedures immediately.”

            There was a pause before MacKenzie responded. “Understood, Captain. Initiating phase-out procedures now.”

            Walker nodded but said nothing. He didn’t comment on her pause because phasing a merchant vessel while still in the yellow bands just wasn’t done. There was normally no reason to take even that level of risk just to shave a few minutes off an interstellar journey that could take weeks or even months. The navigator’s voice became background noise as she began the scripted drill of sending a ship into hyperspace. He could hear the responses from the helmsman in front of him and the assistant engineer through the speaker to main control, but they didn’t really register to him.

            He was too busy listening to the voices of the people he was leaving behind.

M/V Cooper Amethyst

Front Range Asteroid Belt

Gateway Star System

           Samuel Hobbs sported a worn, dark blue cardigan as he walked onto the bridge for his scheduled watch. The airtight hatch automatically closed behind him with a low squeak and then a dull thump. He made a mental note to ask the chief engineer to take a look at it. It should close silently and smoothly at all times. Anything else would be a major ding on their next safety audit. He proceeded to the coffee station at the rear of the bridge and grabbed his stained mug.

            "Morning, Cap," he called over his shoulder as he began brewing a cup of coffee. "How are things?"

            A low grunt was the only reply from the gray-haired man sitting slumped in his chair at the central control station. Samuel rolled his eyes as he stirred cream and sugar into his mug. He stood at the rear of the cramped compartment serving as the bridge of the Cooper Amethyst, an intra-system survey vessel operated by the Cooper Mining and Survey Corporation. The ship comprised part of a small fleet exploring the Front Range asteroid belt, the remains of a planet shattered in orbit around the Gateway System’s white-yellow star eons ago. The field did not compare in size to the Outer Range forming the system’s Kuiper Belt, yet it held a far greater density of asteroids containing rare earth elements. Mining operations also proved to be more straightforward, as the field formed a relatively compact collection of asteroids and rubble, moving uniformly with the prehistoric planet’s orbital path.

            Samuel took his cup of coffee and sat down at one of the multipurpose stations. They were all oriented forward to face the large aligned-crystal viewscreen that took up half of the compartment. The screen, curved in a 180-degree arc, displayed numerous feeds from a vast arrangement of sensors, gauges, and other situational awareness tools. Because of the dual sheets of artificial crystal, the displays could be configured for three dimensional imaging. The central area showed an overhead view of the Amethyst’s work boat, which sat on its landing legs on the asteroid they orbited. Three green circles highlighted the space-suited figures of the boat's crew as they worked around an exploratory drilling unit that they had set up on the surface.

            "Looks like there's actually a fair amount of gravity down there," Samuel remarked as he read the information on the side of the central display. Between its large size and the centrifugal force of its lazy spin, the asteroid had almost a quarter gee of standard gravity.

            "A fair amount, yeah," the ship's captain said grumpily. "Didn't stop them from making a fuss about their precious lanyards. Wasted a good fifteen minutes getting them all secure and whatnot."

            "Would have wasted a lot more if one of them went flying off into the deep," Samuel replied mildly. "It's happened before, after all."

            "Maybe." The other man waved a hand dismissively. "I wouldn't put it past those fools."

            Samuel hid an exasperated sigh by taking a sip of coffee. Peter Richardson was known for his dour demeanor and negative outlook. He was a third-generation Walloper, settlers that originally came from the doomed Caledonia System, and his family had always felt bullied by the Union of Earth's Colonization and Settlement Bureau to take a colonial incentive package to Gateway. Other Wallopers considered many in the Richardson clan “crabbit auld geezers.”

            With one hand, Samuel accessed the automated logs for the last watch and started scanning them. The Amethyst ran a three-person wheelhouse schedule of two four-hour watches for the two mates and the captain when they were underway in open space. During survey or boat operations, the captain and chief mate shifted to six-hour watches. The second mate would stand a six-hour shift opposite the ship's bosun as the survey officer or expedition supervisor in the workboat.

            Information flowed across the flatscreen display at his multipurpose station. Samuel's eyes widened as he saw the readouts showing large amounts of iridium and platinum embedded in the asteroid below. Both elements were in great demand, and evidence pointed to a possible osmium deposit nearby. All three elements held significant importance in producing alloys used in spacecraft manufacturing. That held critical importance not only to the Gateway System, but to the entire Odyssean Reach as the local colonies and settlements struggled to create the vast infrastructure needed in this frontier region of space.

            "Holy hell," Samuel remarked as he continued to read the information. "This is one of the biggest finds I've seen in months. Reggie sniffed this out from a long-range scan?"

            Reggie Clark served as second mate on the Amethyst. Despite his youth and inexperience, he showed a lot of promise.

            "It's not like it took any actual skill, Sam," Richardson said dismissively. "It’s a huge metallic-type asteroid in a field of them. Bound to be something useful in it."

            Samuel ground his teeth but held his tongue. He hated being called Sam. Almost as much as he hated his captain's constant negativity. He took another sip of coffee and unconsciously pulled his cardigan tighter. Richardson liked to keep the wheelhouse colder than necessary. The captain saw this, and a barely concealed sneer crossed his face. Anger surged, but Samuel smothered it and shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly.

            "Say what you will, Cap, but this is a big find and the kid's shaping up well. The office is definitely going to be happy with us if this pans out."

            "The next time the office is happy will be the first time," Richardson declared. "You know damn well that they're going to be all over us for getting the reports in and the claim beacon out. We'll have thirty messages by tomorrow morn' askin' about everythin' from spectrographic analysis to how we put our damn socks on! Just you wait..."

            Samuel shrugged again and kept a smirk off his face. Whenever Richardson got too excited, the hint of his burr-like accent became more pronounced. And nothing got him worked up more than complaining about the managers at Cooper Mining. In the captain’s view, every person employed in the corporate offices proved incompetent in all aspects of their work. In his opinion, they were lazy parasites who’d gotten their jobs through inside connections.

            "Well," he said after a moment, "I'll just have to make sure that Mate Clark fills out all his reports properly and gets them submitted first thing. Then I'll get that beacon out, and we can be on our way out of here for our crew change."

            "And don't be too soft on that boy, Sam," Richardson said sharply. "Nobody was ever soft on me when I was coming up. You either, I expect. And that's how it's supposed to be. Whether it's deep in a hyperlane or wanderin' around the Range, not thinking about the consequences of your decisions will get a lot of good people killed. Skylarking, not taking your job serious, treating deep space like a grand adventure. Seen enough badly trained fools out here. Don't need any more of ‘em."

            Richardson might have made a good point in general, but Samuel completely disagreed when applying it to the new mate. Having just passed his exams to become a licensed Second Mate (FTL), Reginald Clark decided to spend a few years on a Fronter to gain valuable experience handling ships and small craft within a star system. It was a skill that few Faster Than Light qualified spacefarers bothered to cultivate since they made their living in hyperspace and on the well-marked fairways leading to planetary orbits or space-based installations. A problem child who would risk lives through laziness or apathy didn't think of details like that.

            "I'll see to it, Cap," Samuel said quietly, staring at the older man with a not-quite challenging look.

            "Fine," Richardson grunted out. A few moments passed in awkward silence before the captain unfolded himself from his seat.

            "Now, you make sure Clark gets back here safe and doesn't screw up any of the reports for the claim," he admonished the chief mate. "I don't want to be going round and round with the office when we need to be focusing on getting this ship ready for crew change. Lot of maintenance still needs to get done before we leave."

            "I'll keep on it," Samuel replied evenly. His captain may have been an asshole, but he was right about the pending maintenance items.

            Richardson left the wheelhouse without another word, and Samuel moved over to the central control station. He changed a few inputs on the aligned-crystal display that better suited him and called up the feed from the exploratory drilling unit. The laser bore was almost finished at the last sample site. Once the laser unit completed its task, the three crewmembers would replace it with a mechanical drill head designed to gather ore samples. Experienced crews completed this routine procedure within a few hours. Glancing at the total time they had been on the asteroid's surface, Samuel saw that Clark and his team were a little ahead of that benchmark.

            He checked the automated orbit, confirming correct positioning, and nodded to himself. Next, he began calling up the checklist for a major claim like this. There were standard reports that both the Union of Earth and the Gateway System governments required any company to file if they wanted to make a claim in a public resource site like the Front Range. On top of that, Cooper Mining wanted their survey ships to collect all sorts of data so that the resource extraction teams that got sent out had as much information as possible. All mining efforts had unique requirements, needing detailed information of the target asteroid to ensure efficiency and safety. To delay a mining operation for days or even weeks because nobody knew to bring a particular piece of gear was A Bad Thing for all involved.

            The company ran a fleet of eight of the small system survey vessels, called Fronters since they were first designed to operate in the Front Range when Gateway was first building their mining industry. Throughout the Odyssean Reach, an uncommon number of asteroid fields like the Front Range existed; these were denser and more confining than typical fields. The consensus among astronomers was that most of these ancient fields used to be planets that had either been destroyed or failed to fully form due to some quirk of gravity.

            Smaller, nimbler ships proved necessary to survey those fields properly. The design characteristics needed to be more compact than those of a traditional single-system survey ship. Every aspect of the design was smaller, from the crew spaces to the bridge. The crew size reflected this as well, numbering only nine spacers of various qualifications. Fronters were an economical class of ship, to say the least.

            Samuel also queued up the remaining maintenance and inspection items that needed to be completed in the next few days. The crews rotated every six weeks aboard their ships, one group working while the other returned home to Gateway. Each crew kept up with scheduled inspections and whatever work needed to be done in order to keep the ships spaceworthy. His crew was coming up on the end of their hitch and needed to finish their work items. He emailed the chief engineer a note requesting a call, then turned his attention to other work.

As he was scanning his console, his eyes caught movement on the main viewscreen. He smiled slightly, and his residual bad mood from talking with Richardson faded away. He watched as an asteroid at the edge of the viewscreen moved lazily through a sparkling field of mineral dust. Eventually, experts assured everyone, the Front Range would re-coalesce back into a planet. The field was in constant motion as it swung in orbit around Gateway's star. Samuel admired the small piece of space in the display for a few moments before getting on with his duties.
 

*  *  *

 

            Samuel glanced up as the wheelhouse door slid open. Vipin Kakar, the Amethyst’s bosun, walked briskly into the compartment, a covered mug of strong black tea in one hand. He wore a faded but neat shipsuit. He had adjusted all the automatic seals and survival features to fit perfectly and comfortably while in standby mode with the safety garment. A few white hairs stood out against his short hair, neatly trimmed beard, and swarthy complexion.

            With a lift of his shoulders to settle his worn cardigan, Samuel shook his head as the bosun took a seat in the same multi-purpose station that he had sat in a few hours ago. He grinned ruefully as he made some final inputs to the claim beacon he was programming. Samuel was cross-referencing the Amethyst’s ranged spectrographic scans with the initial results of the exploratory drilling. Kakar said nothing, but his brown eyes twinkled mischievously as he sipped at his mug. Once Samuel finished, he leaned back and stretched his neck and shoulders.

            “Why is it, Vip, that I always feel like a leaking trash bag next to you?” He asked plaintively.

            Kakar glanced down at his suit and shook his head in mock sadness. “It is your guilty conscience, Mr. Hobbs. You know you should be as professional and knowledgeable as I am. And yet, sadly, you are not.”

            “Bosun Kakar,” Samuel said in mock seriousness, “no soul in this life or the next could ever be as professional or knowledgeable as you. It just isn’t possible.”

            “Well,” Kakar murmured, his voice dripping with false humility, “this is true, of course, but one should always try.”

            Samuel snorted with laughter as he bent back towards his control board. “Sleep well?”

            “Eh,” the bosun shrugged, “I slept. Eventually. After convincing a certain wiper that cleaning the engine room was, in fact, part of the job.”

            “Oh, for God’s sake,” Samuel said in exasperation. “It’s in the damn name of the position. Engine Room Wiper. Wipe the engine room. How could someone possibly not get that?”

            “I think young Wiper MacFarland thought his duties began and ended with making his physical rounds of the spaces and handing tools to the engineer of the watch. He now understands his mistake.”

            “If he keeps being a problem, let me know.” Samuel stabbed the virtual keys on the control board harder than necessary as he spoke. “I got a lecture from the captain today about not being soft on people being lazy or not taking their jobs seriously. We'll see if your lesson sticks, but after today, he's out of chances.”

            Kakar nodded as he sipped his tea. Wiper MacFarland was on his third hitch aboard the Amethyst and had made himself a “leadership challenge” from the start. Samuel had been ready to write a disciplinary evaluation on him, but Kakar and the chief engineer had asked for more time to work with the new crewmember. The bosun was an experienced hand on the Amethyst and could easily imagine the sort of lecture Richardson had given the chief mate.

            He was grateful that Samuel was confident enough not to undermine Kakar and immediately write up the wiper. After one of Richardson's cynical lectures, a lot of chief mates would have tried to show how hard-nosed they were by writing up the first person who stepped out of line. But Samuel was giving the other two leaders on the ship room to correct a problem without undermining them. It was a detail of leadership that other chief mates wouldn't have thought of.

            “I heard the workboat dock a few minutes ago,” Kakar remarked after a moment. The Amethyst didn’t have a full boat bay like larger ships, but she had a combination of external boat slip and docking collar that was near the Bosun’s Stateroom.

            “Yeah,” Samuel nodded. “Clark and the crew did their survey in good time. Finished getting all the samples we need and even mapped a bit of the topography. We’ll have some good stuff for whichever mining crew gets the job.”

            “That should put us in the good graces of our superiors for a while. I am sure that our captain was pleased with the situation.”

            “Oh, sure. He called the crew ‘fools’ only once and then complained about how the office was going to bother us. Hell, he was downright giddy.”

            Before the bosun could reply again, the wheelhouse door opened again and Reggie Clark burst in. He wore a huge smile across his lightly freckled face, and his thick, sweaty red hair clung to his skull. He wore an almost brand-new shipsuit, and he had adjusted all the straps and fittings exactly as the manual prescribed for his bulky frame. It must have been uncomfortable as hell to move around like that, but Clark’s obvious excitement seemed to make him immune to the discomfort.

            “Well, that was one hell of a find, hey, Chief?” Clark said, laughing. Then he noticed Kakar’s presence in the secondary station. “Bosun, you should ha’ seen it! Everythin’ went off without a hitch!”

            Like Captain Richardson, Clark’s slight Caledonian accent was more prevalent when he got excited. Scottish settlers had settled Caledonia at the dawn of extrasolar colonization. Though altered, the accent survived, unlike other regional dialects. After the massive industrial disaster that had poisoned the only habitable planet in the system, some survivors resettled on Gateway. They took great pains to keep at least some of their cultural identity so that a small part of Caledonia lived on in their descendants.

            “I am sure it did.” Kakar said with genuine approval in his voice.

            “You did well, Reg,” Samuel added. “All your times were good, exertion metrics were in the green, and the extra data you gathered is really going to help the mining crew.”

            “I remembered what you told me, Chief,” Clark said earnestly. He awkwardly rubbed his hair as he looked between the two experienced spacers. “That we should think of ourselves as part of the mining team. Try to anticipate the problems they might run into. I got a list from the Bosun last watch when we got near this stretch of the Range.”

            Clark was looking at Samuel, so he didn’t see the slight arch of one of Kakar’s eyebrows and the faint, pleased smile.

            “Good! The Bosun might be an illiterate Able Bodied Spacefarer, but he has been doing this for a while. There’s one or two things he might know about.”

            Clark looked alarmed for a moment, but then he heard Kakar’s reserved “hmph” and saw his chief mate’s off-center grin. The young mate chuckled dutifully. Samuel reached to the side of his console and pulled out a ship’s tablet. Despite its light weight, the tablet proved surprisingly durable, containing a wealth of data, from operational handbooks to maintenance and emergency response checklists. He keyed it on and double-checked the menu. Then he nodded to himself and handed it to Clark.

            “Listen,” he said seriously, “you did good, and I want you to get rested up, but the job’s not done yet. I’ve created a folder here with all the lists and reports you need to fill out and send to the office. All of this is just as important as the actual survey because it’s what the big bosses are going to use to fit out the mining mission. I know it’s a pain in the ass, but all this paperwork needs to be as detailed as we can make it.”

            Clark took the tablet in both hands. He read the menu page and nodded firmly to the chief mate. “I’ll start it right away, Chief.”

            “No, you won’t.” Samuel carefully didn’t frown in annoyance at the younger man’s eagerness. “You need rest. Your exertion numbers may have been good, but all three of you went EV for almost a full watch. That really takes it out of you. So, get cleaned up and get in your rack. And make sure Cameron and Estes do the same. Understood?”

            “Yes, Chief! Sorry. I’m just pretty excited at my first survey bein' somethin’ like this.”

            “Hell, Reg,” Samuel said with a smile, “you should be! But you have to look out for yourself and your crew. Fatigue, dehydration, microgravity exposure…these are all problems that can sneak up on you when you’re extravehicular. Besides, the Bosun needs to put all your samples under the glass and get numbers off of them. We can’t send the reports without the analysis.”

            “Right,” Clark said, shaking his head ruefully. “I should ha’ remembered.”

            Analyzing the physical properties of the elements they surveyed was the reason Clark’s small team drilled for samples. Geochemical and spectrographic analysis would determine the grade of the ore, any impurities present, and the exact makeup of the material. The equipment would also analyze various samples of the substrate and overburden to determine the difficulty of physically accessing the valuable ore. Amethyst’s hull contained advanced shipboard sensors, but even in close orbit, these sensors had limitations. Bosun Kakar was going to be spending most of his watch putting the samples through all the various tests and processes to find out all the information he could about them.

            “No worries,” Samuel said, waving a hand. “Just get cleaned up and go to bed. You kind of stink.”

            Clark laughed and raised his hands in defeat. He nodded to Kakar and headed out of the wheelhouse. Samuel noted that the damn compartment door was making more noise now.

            “I will put Estes on airtight door maintenance when she starts her next watch,” Kakar said while he paged through some logs on his display.

            “Thanks. That’s not the only one out of alignment.” Samuel briskly scrubbed his face with his hands. “All right. I have to finish up this claim beacon.”

            “Do you need help? I have a bit of time.”

            “Yeah, actually,” Samuel replied gratefully. “Can you look over the beacon data and generate the paperwork notices? I want to alter our orbit and make sure the boundary map is complete.”

            Kakar nodded. He keyed for remote access of the active claim beacon nestled in the Fronter’s deployment tube. A control-shift request light came on Samuel’s display, and he approved it with a tap of his finger. The Bosun began generating the claim paperwork that needed to be sent to Gateway’s Bureau of Resource Management. Even though Gateway was classified as an Alpha System, the CSB still largely controlled how the system’s resources were exploited. The colonization status of the entire Odyssean Reach forced all local mining companies to accept increased reporting requirements. What was tougher to swallow were the exemptions carved out for the larger Union conglomerates contracted by the CSB that allowed them to bypass a lot of the bureaucratic red tape.

            While the Bosun was doing that, Samuel called up a virtual representation of the local space on the middle pane of the wheelhouse’s main aligned-crystal display. The display generated a view as if Samuel were seeing space from the blunt prow of the Amethyst. The side panels of the primary display shifted to various wireframe vector graphics and close-range lidar tracking of any objects or debris near the ship. On his central control position’s display, he cleared the virtual keyboard and called up a plot position representation. He also activated the survey sensors on the ship’s hull and checked their calibration.

            Finally, he keyed in for manual control of the small survey ship and waited as the controls unlocked from the arms of his chair. Two bar-like handle controls rotated into position, one for each hand, which controlled the three axes of movement for the ship and the quad drive throttle. Pitch and yaw were controlled via the right bar. Pitch was the bow’s vertical movement, and yaw was the horizontal rotation. The left-side bar controlled the throttle and the roll, rotating lengthwise around the ship’s horizontal axis. Both bars also sported various buttons and slide controls that activated auxiliary thrusters to aid in maneuvering if that became necessary.

            Samuel’s hands made the proper motions from muscle memory. A Fronter like the Cooper Amethyst was equipped with an almost frictionless propulsion system called a quad drive. It manipulated all four forces in the sidereal universe to propel an object at astronomical speeds. There were two sets of drive rails attached to the Amethyst that acted as focal points for the drive. The after set comprised four long, narrow main drive rails, while the forward set had two shorter and broader maneuvering rails. Both sets of rails were equally spaced around their section of hull.

            Like its larger interstellar siblings, the Amethyst had two manual maneuvering modes. Pilots usually operated ships using the simplified maneuvering configuration, dialing X and Y courses into the helm station, and setting the throttle with a virtual slide bar. But if the ship needed complicated maneuvering, Samuel used the precise piloting configuration he had just activated.

            The Amethyst immediately responded to Samuel’s input. She wasn’t the fastest ship he had ever conned, but she was nimble. Samuel joked with his friends not familiar with Fronters that he wouldn’t be shocked if the Amethyst could turn 360 degrees within its own length. He slowed to roughly ten percent of maximum velocity, nearing the asteroid so his sensors and survey gear would obtain optimal readings. He made fine control inputs as he flew around the rotating space rock, repeatedly altering his trajectory and orientation to chart the same region from various angles and viewpoints.

            He had to think ahead and anticipate his moves because the quad drive couldn't completely remove all of a ship's momentum. A response delay known as advance and transfer had to be considered for any maneuver or course change. This effect forced a ship down its previous path for a short time after a change in heading before it moved toward the desired vector and finally settled on the ordered course. Operating this close to another object required the helmsman's complete attention in order to maneuver safely.

            The lower portion of the right-side crystal display showed a tracery of lines on a three-dimensional wireframe of the asteroid. What looked like a massive ant farm of dense ore veins formed a little at a time while Samuel concentrated on making his passes. Time passed unnoticed as he completed his mapping run. He also didn’t notice the satisfied smile on his face or the considering look Kakar gave him as he drove the ship. He was lost in the sheer joy of close-quarters maneuvering in a congested asteroid field.

            Far too soon for his taste, he had finished swooping around the rich asteroid. Leaning back and sighing, Samuel engaged the simplified configuration mode and set the Amethyst back to an automated station-keeping position above the most accessible landing site on the rock. He rotated his neck, listening to the popping sounds, while he flexed his fingers. His eyes evaluated each screen of data in front of him before he relaxed back into his seat, satisfied that everything was in order.

            “Was that how you were taught to map a surface in the RPS?” Kakar asked, amused.

            “Yes and no,” Samuel replied with a wry grin. "That’s how I was taught when we were still the Star Guard. When we were reorganized into the Rescue and Patrol Service, things changed. The higher-ups became a little more…risk sensitive, you might say. Piloting a survey vessel like that would not go over well.

            “Ah, I see. It did seem a little more aggressive than they might approve of.”

            “Assertive, Bosun. ‘Aggressive’ isn’t a word the RPS big bosses would use. Too aggressive for them.”

            Kakar chuckled along with Samuel as he continued to input information into the claim beacon. After dismantling the Star Guard almost a decade ago, the Union of Earth’s Parliament created the Rescue and Patrol Service. It did not include any of the military or system security missions of the Guard but kept the missions of near- and deep-space search and rescue, navigation survey and maintenance, as well as some minimal law enforcement and customs duties. The RPS also added scientific missions such as conducting experiments and research that were designed to increase humanity’s understanding of the hyperspacetime continuum, the mathematical model that combined hyperspace with time and the three dimensions of the universe to express a single multi-dimensional continuum.

            For the “old hands” who didn’t retire or transfer to the UE Navy, the culture change was significant. The Guard, a military branch using naval ranks and hierarchy, contrasted sharply with the RPS’s civil service organization. Traditional merchant marine positions were used by the RPS for its ships' crews; managers, researchers, and support personnel held bureaucratic titles. The Guard had been designed as an integrated organization meant to support its assigned missions in space. The RPS, however, was a highly compartmentalized agency with many, sometimes competing, mission sets. The difference in organization alone created a radically different climate within the new Rescue and Patrol Service.

            Samuel shook his head to clear the old thoughts away. Even now, years after the fact, he still felt an uncomfortable mix of emotions when he thought of what had changed. He had been one of the old hands that had stayed on after the Star Guard was put to sleep. The swiftness with which the Guard was forgotten, both inside and outside, still dismayed him. Hundreds of years of service filed away in an archive somewhere. All the lives saved, and the battles fought, reduced to dusty electrons with little fanfare.

            These thoughts were distracting, to say the least, and he didn’t like to be distracted on watch. Double-checking the station-keeping program once more, he got up to make another cup of coffee. The simple routine of making the coffee and stirring in his cream and sugar settled him enough to focus on getting the claim beacon out and setting course for the rendezvous with the supply vessel. He hoped Kakar hadn’t caught on to his little trip down memory lane.

            “I have finished programming the beacon,” the Bosun announced once Samuel had settled back into his seat. “If you have finished staring into the past, you may deploy it now.”

            Samuel leveled a narrow-eyed glare at his subordinate. “I really hate you sometimes, Vip.”

      *  *  *
 

            A few minutes later, a cylindrical object about the size of a small ground car dropped out of the belly of the Cooper Amethyst. It fell into space from a launch tube just forward of the port ventral quad-drive rail. The beacon oriented itself with finicky precision and, with a puff of reaction mass, began its sedate journey to the surface of the asteroid. Within a few minutes, it had reached the designated landing spot and dug into the rocky ground. After shooting out supplementary mooring cables into the surrounding rock, the beacon’s computer verified its position and began transmitting the required data, claiming the ore for the Cooper Mining and Survey Corporation.

            A few minutes after that, the rounded triangular shape of the Amethyst slid onto a new vector and began accelerating away from the asteroid on a course out of the depths of the Front Range. Faint wisps of blue electrical energy dissipated off the chrome-like surfaces of the drive rails and drifted past the squat heat dissipation tower that hung on the ventral centerline of the hull. The nimble Fronter wound her way through the Range towards the coordinates where she would meet up with the supply vessel that carried food, fresh water, and, most importantly, the relief personnel for Captain Richardson’s crew. The drive rails left a distinct wake behind the ship for a brief few seconds as its quad-drive propelled it through space.

            As she broke out of the asteroid field and into open space, Chief Mate Samuel Hobbs sighed as he put the helm back into simplified maneuvering mode.