Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 8

Corwin handled most of the landing, only calling upon Aru’s automation to ensure he didn’t wreck the ship. He had little experience landing it on planets compared to docking with other vessels, so even though docking was by far the more delicate task, he was better at it than he was at landings.

He’d set them down a few hundred meters from the other craft, behind a line of small heaps of broken rock that passed for hills. The plan was to get to the other ship undetected. Even though they were close to it, the lack of atmosphere meant their approach and landing should have been silent.

Right after setting down, Corwin pulled on a lightweight but strong EV suit and did a quick check of the seals and breather mask. A small treaded robot joined him; Aru had disengaged from the ship. “You coming along with me? You’d better maintain connection with the ship remotely, just in case.”

Aru tootled an affirmative; Corwin checked the two weapons at his belt with a bit of trepidation, then depressurized the embarkation passage so he could lower the ramp to the outside. When the hissing and whooshing and movement of air ceased, the indicator changed and he slapped the ramp control. Within moments they were outside. He toggled on his suit comm.

“Gravity’s a good match for the ship. You reading me, Aru?”

He glanced down at the little robot; a display on its upper surface showed the text of his reply, “Yes, I read you.”

“Now I really wish I could afford to get you a new vocalization module. Or that the agency would spring for it.” On the airless world, he’d be totally dependent on reading Aru’s responses. The beeps and tones Aru produced were no substitute for language capability, but he’d become adept at understanding some of the bot’s more basic meanings. “Come on, Aru. Let’s move out.”

Their travel was slow, owing to the ground being rougher and more dangerous than it had appeared at first. Some of the jagged rock edges looked glassy and sharp as a knife, but Corwin didn’t feel like testing that observation. His suit was great against vacuum, not blades.

Before too long the other ship came into view around the rock heaps. The wall of the colony ring was visible beyond the craft, and showed what promised to be an entrance.

Corwin kept his distance from the other ship so as not to trigger any alarms. It was a tiny craft, dwarfed by his own freighter. “You know anything about what kind of ship this is, Aru?”

The display updated; “No. Make, model and class unknown. It’s a small craft, likely a one- or two-man vessel, possibly a strike ship or fighter.”

Corwin chewed his lip in thought behind the mask. “I don’t see anything that looks like armament, and whoever flew it here probably didn’t stick around to admire the sights. I’m betting we’ll find the pilot out there,” he said, indicating the colony ruins.

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 7

When the response came, it was negative, as he’d expected. He was just about to start digging into the files again when a section of one of the scanner’s displays caught his eye. “Aru, what’s this?” After a mere 2 years, he still had plenty left to learn about the subtleties of shipboard operations.

“Scanners have picked up an object anomalous to the surrounding terrain. Current scanning resolution is insufficient for a more detailed analysis.”

That he could fix. He adjusted the scan parameters and the image on the display resolved into more detail; Corwin sucked in a surprised gasp. “A ship! And it doesn’t look like an old wreck, either.” There’d been traces of other ships; the place had seen enough battle after all. This one looked small but intact.

“It’s warm, too. Definitely not old then.” He stopped poking around at the controls. “Well Aru, so much for hanging around up here for another day. I’ve gotta get down there right now.”

In response, Aru sent several small portage chassis bearing cases to him. Opening the first, he found a military grade pistol with several reloadable capacitance charges on a belt clip.

Corwin frowned. “Thanks Aru. I’ve never actually trained with anything like this though, you know. I’d better not shoot my foot off.”

“There’s no time to learn like the present.”

“Thanks,” he groused. He was tempted to ask where the weapons—and it was weapons, the other cases revealed other small arms, including several slug-throwers—had come from, but he didn’t have to. “You expected something like this, didn’t you, Sobol …” There was no other reason for her to have sent weapons along.

Checking the last case revealed something other than weaponry. Instead, he found several data chips. “Any idea what these are?”

Aru was non-responsive for several moments. Corwin assumed he was assessing the chips in some way.

“They are adjustment programs for each of the weapons.”

Corwin whistled. Those were rare indeed. Madeline had been concerned. “We’ve had these on board all this time and you don’t give them to me until now?” he exclaimed, aggrieved. They would have been incredibly helpful in learning to use the weapons. They adjusted the mind, not the weapons themselves; it was a form of rapid learning technology. “We’ll have landed within an hour. There’s no time to use these now, I’ll have to do my best with them untrained. Remind me to slot these into my bed for the trip back.”

Adjustment programs only aided the acquisition of skills, they didn’t impart skill outright. They were used in conjunction with practice, reinforcing and helping to correct learned patterns while the subject slept.

He selected the first pistol he’d found, and one of the slug throwers, on the theory that if he ran into something one of them couldn’t handle, the other might do the trick.

He strapped the weapons to his waist, wishing he felt as natural wearing them as his childhood heroes had always looked. Instead, they felt heavy, awkward and cumbersome.

The ship was descending rapidly. He eased off on the descent a bit, fine-tuning their course to arrive some small distance from the other craft, leaving it between them and the ruins of the old colony dome. “Ready or not, here we come,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the warning was for the owners of the other ship, or for himself.

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 6

They exited transit and within a few hours had burned across the system to settle into orbit around the planet.

It was a small world, but with a large, dense core that provided gravity that was just about standard for humans. That was about the best you could say about it though. It was far from the system’s star, and featured a broken, jagged, rocky surface with no atmosphere to speak of. Worst of all, it was dry, though the system contained plenty of ice asteroids. Several of them had been brought to the surface by various of the world’s inhabitants over the millennia.

A small, perfect ring shape stood out against the craggy terrain. “That must be the site of the original colony.” He hunted and pecked among the controls for a moment before a screen leaped in, focusing on the ring, showing a bulky foundation that still bore shattered traces of the dome that had once kept the inhabitants breathing.

“So now we know it wasn’t popular for the scenery and ease of life,” he remarked as he adjusted the final orbit. The files had already said as much, but the reality was far more eloquent.

He sat in the cockpit, a cramped space that surrounded him with instrumentation and controls that all vied for his attention. He ignored all of them, staring at the stark, almost majestically hostile environment below.

“Who’d have thought it’d be such a mystery that people would stop trying to live HERE of all places,” he finally commented again. He paused and sat up straighter a moment. “Aru, maybe that’s it. Why is this place so popular? Is there anything in the records about why it was settled?”

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 5

Over the next three days he’d worked hard to finish off his responsibilities for his regular job, a task that fully occupied the first day. After that he was free to spend the transit following up on Aru’s investigation of their destination.

Unsurprisingly, it was tough for Aru to find information on the motives of the original colonists, people who’d lived thousands of years in the past. Records were scarce, and those that did exist painted a picture of a hardy and determined group who’d inhabited a single colony site for at least several generations.

The pirates were somewhat easier to get data on. There were far more records to retrieve, largely culled from the files of various militaries that had operated over the centuries, and most ended with the assertion that the pirates’ occupation of the ancient colony site had been ended, mostly by force.

That left gaps though. A casual browsing of the records left the impression that there was nothing special going on, that the colony had simply failed long ago and pirates had moved in time and again and been wiped out by military action. A more careful analysis showed showed several sizable pirate occupations that ended abruptly, with nothing to say why.

None of the records Aru had produced gave any insight into why the location remained unsettled these last several centuries, either, after so many thousands of years of attempts to claim it.

Corwin poured over the reports, taking notes on the weak areas and compiling a list of more in-depth inquiries, giving each new avenue to Aru. Aru was cut off from the galactic data-stream while they were in transit, so he stored the requests.

Finally they neared their time of exit from transit. “Aru, nothing in the dossier specified a time limit on this task. Think we can afford an extra day or two to research?”

Aru sent his text-only reply to a screen in Corwin’s quarters. “I expect they’d prefer that you did.”

“Yup, my thoughts too. Give me what you’ve got on those queries as soon as you can then.

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 4

Aru chriped an affirmative and Corwin set course. He’d never been technically inclined, but his lifestyle change had made him learn; he was starting to get the hang of this star ship pilot thing. He punched in the last of the coordinates and kept an eye on the readouts for an estimated course calculation time.

“She’ll be ready for Transit in … 15 minutes, Aru. I’ll be in my quarters.”

The hardest thing Corwin had encountered in getting used to the space-faring life was how incredibly slow it was. He’d grown up on tales of glory and excitement where heroes zoomed around the stars and Transit took only seconds, and interplanetary explorers could find wonders on a half dozen planets in a week. The truth of it was quite different.

Corwin’s inner twelve year old had been very dejected to discover that even the shortest Transits generally took a complete day at a minimum, and travel times of between one and two weeks weren’t uncommon.

He was lucky that this relatively unknown world he had to visit wasn’t complicated to reach; he’d be Transiting for about three days. Three days which he would have to spend catching up on paperwork for his job at the university. “Yup, it sure is a glamorous life,” he said aloud. Aru twittered inquisitively. “No, nothing, just talking to myself Aru.”