Vesta
The squad lounged together around the large round table in the galley as the drone ship lumbered its way towards Vesta - the nearest asteroid with a decent spaceport in the MAB (Main Asteroid Belt, between Mars and Jupiter). The galley had a disconcerting convex floor since it was wrapped around the gravity generator, or GraMa (slang for Gravity Magnet, although it wasn't really a magnet) on the underside of the ship. The GraMa was on the bottom of the ship, so the crew quarters were on the top. The curvature gave the ship the appearance of a half-curled-up pill bug with engines tacked onto the back and cockpit tacked onto the front.
Their rigs and gear were all stowed in the cramped cargo bay, packed in so tightly that it would require a cargo lift to separate them, even when they turned off the GraMa. At Vesta they would rendezvous with a freighter for the main leg of their journey. The freighter had a jump drive which would get them to Mercury in a week.
The translucent white marble that Master Sergeant Frank had given Kristoff lay in the shallow depression in the center of the round table. A 3-foot diameter, full-color 3D rendering of Mercury floated above the table. Not that Mercury was particularly colorful. It was a big brown pock-marked sphere.
Kristoff sat sprawled on one of the couches with his feet up on the table. "D-ten, zoom out to where we can see the sun too," he commanded the computer. The brown sphere shrank to pea-sized, and the bright, rounded surface of the sun came into view. "Is this how far Mercury is from the sun right now?"
"Correct. Mercury has just passed aphelion," the drone's calm androgynous voice replied.
"Zoom out to include our current position." The sun shrank to a small ball. The locations of Mercury, Mars, the MAB, and their location appeared as labeled arrows.
Hammer was sitting forward with his dark elbows on his bare knees. He'd spent the morning in the weight room already, as his sweaty grey gym shorts and tank top testified. "The freighter can do that in a week, huh?" he said.
Viper stood against the door jamb leading to the crews' rooms. "With the jump drive, yeah," he said. "And going towards the sun is always easier than going away."
"I hope the freighter has some good pastimes," said Bull as he ran a hand through his light blond hair.
"We'll see," said Mill with a flashy grin. "What they have and what's up and running are two different things. Bull, where are those mobile platforms?"
"D-ten," said Bull, "zoom back in on Mercury." The arrows and sun fled away and the dot grew to a 4-foot diameter.
"Where is the Dusk right now?" The view zoomed in a bit farther, and what had seemed to be just a vertical line resolved into a long, slender cluster of technology.
"Keep bringing us closer," said Bull. Down, down, down went the point-of-view, until they were looking at the platform from its leading edge, as though standing on Mercury's surface. All along that leading edge, huge, thick wheels turned ever so slowly as the platform crawled along. Above the wheels, the platform itself slanted away, becoming thicker nearer its center, like a wing. Innumerable dots of light could be seen, as well as many large bubble-like features that Kristoff presumed were greenhouses.
Kristoff asked, "D-ten, how fast does the platform move?"
"The speed is varied based on the time of year," answered the computer, "but on average it is 2.25 miles per hour."
"That's a crawl, all right," said Hammer as he sat back.
BB's eyes were lifted thoughtfully to the ceiling as she sucked on a long-handled spoon. She withdrew the spoon and dropped it back into the tall smoothie cup she was holding. "That's about a meter per second," she said. She flashed a grin that was somewhere between mischievous and challenging. "Not very good exercise."
"No," said Kristoff, "but I can see how it could get away from you if you get busy and lose track." He glanced around the group, the unspoken directive obvious: don't get careless. "Let's start watching these skirmish videos."
The marble contained the FPV footage of all skirmishes that the Mercury forces had had with the assailants. Each rig had multiple cameras. Even though none of the skirmishes lasted longer than ten minutes, what with all skirmishes, all rigs, and all cameras, they spent a good several hours watching video, and then re-watching a number of them.
The Mercury forces mostly used Minervas and Meerguards - standard equipment for security outfits on the inner planets. They were painted a bright glossy white, almost certainly to reflect as much heat as possible. It made them stand out so clearly from the planet's dark surface that they practically glowed. They did see one Valkyrie but it was only used on a nighttime patrol on the Dusk. All the rigs were light duty and lightly armored compared to the squad's Pegasusses, which made their conformance to a humanoid shape much more clear. Their pilots were average, and their autopilots probably Series 5 or lower. Maybe a Series 6 here and there, by Kristoff's judgement. Anna could tell him for sure.
The assailants' rigs looked like cobbled together junk. Kristoff could identify parts from numerous models. It was a miracle they even ran. But the pilots were obviously adept at guerrilla warfare, and the autopilots, heaven help 'em, somehow made all those parts work together seamlessly. He'd had no idea autopilots were so flexible.
The security teams that they had sent out after the assailants were obviously not used to working in groups larger than two or three. Being thrown into a group of ten or larger, sometimes with zero notice, was ineffective and resulted in more than a few friendly fire incidents. There were a lot of rolled eyes in the room as they watched the videos.
Some other observations that the squad made:
- No one was able to spot the same player twice. The assailants were likely swapping parts after each attack, be it for necessity or obfuscation.
- They rarely used missiles. This was actually a good sign. A constantly replenished flow of missiles would indicate a supply chain, which would be a much bigger problem. One side-effect of this was that the skirmishes, so far, had had a pretty high survivability rate. For the pilots, that is. Kristoff was shocked at the number of rigs that the Mercury security forces were just throwing away. Apparently it was cheaper to replace than repair.
... But the conspiracy theorist in him wondered if someone wasn't deliberately feeding these rigs to the attackers for some reason.
- There wasn't any information on where the attackers came from or where they went. Mercury was a mining planet. The materials mined on Mercury were critical to the whole solar system, both as fuel for plasma and nuclear drives and as building material for computer and robotic systems. Using the mines as a hiding place was obvious, but the temperature extremes on the planet made this hard to imagine. The mining crews themselves, along with all of their equipment, rolled out in shifts ahead of the Dawn and behind the Dusk, and their window of operation was narrow: just a day, or two at the most depending on the time of year. They were always moving. Outside of that window, the temperature extremes were not survivable.
- There wasn't any information on how the skirmishes started, or precisely where. In the videos from the Dusk, they could see mining equipment in the background that had either been abandoned or evacuated during the fighting. This indicated that the skirmishes took place on the cold side, i.e. with the Dusk slowly crawling away as things got colder. At the Dawn, the skirmishes were always on the hot side, again with the Dawn crawling away as things got hotter, but there was little to no abandoned equipment in these videos.
Kristoff was surprised to note that the oldest video dated back more than an Earth-year. Apparently this had been a problem for quite some time.
The absence of large fixed targets made some strategy decisions clear. "We're going to have to take some of the heavy equipment off the tanks," Kristoff said. The men nodded.
Mercury was basically flat, and the remaining topography had all been steamrolled by the moving platforms over the years. This meant everything was pretty much out in the open. It made another decision clear. "I think you Princesses are going to have to sit this one out."
"Filtz," Angel scowled with clenched jaw as she looked aside.
BB stared back at Kristoff icily as she sucked on her spoon.
"Bright side, ladies," Mill grinned with a flourish, "you can canvas the place and take us to all the hot spots when we're off duty."
Angel made an obscene gesture. "Hot spot this," she said.
"Touchy touchy!"
"How about you do the canvassing and I'll take your rig," said Angel.
Mill leered. "I'd rather take your hot spot."
She threw her mug at him, slopping its contents all along the route. Everyone lurched back from the table with shouts and groans. Viper dodged out the doorway. The mug crashed against the wall next to where Viper had been standing, and the remains of the liquid blasted everywhere. Mill might have avoided the mug, but he was too close to the wall to avoid the spattering.
As the rest settled down the wall, Mill rose from the floor, brushing liquid off in shock and offence. "Pippit!" he exclaimed as he resumed his seat.
"I'm not cleaning that up, you know," Dog glowered. He had been saddled with cleanup duty since losing his rig.
On cue, Mill and Bull tipped their cups onto the floor.
"Aw, man, I'm so sorry man -"
BB and Hammer muffled their chuckles.
Alice and Angel scowled condescendingly at the juvenile antics. Well, Angel's scowl almost disguised her smirk.
As the group bantered on, Kristoff frowned. He wasn't sure he could allow off-duty time. He had a feeling they were going to be "on call;" there would be no "off-duty" on Mercury.
After two more boring days of travel, Vesta finally came within view. It was large for an asteroid, but just a pebble even compared to Earth's moon. It was 326 miles in diameter with gravity only about 2.6% that of Earth. To counteract this, the populated parts of the asteroid had drilled a network of bore holes where they had sunk several thousand GraMas. Unfortunately, this had had the (perhaps?) unanticipated side-effect of provoking a lot of seismic activity. Tremors and quakes were common, and would be, according to the geologists, until the whole surface was evenly covered with the GraMas. No one was willing to pay for that, so they lived with it. It had become part of the place's reputation. And mystique.
Since Vesta was the biggest thing around (Ceres was all the way over on the other side of the MAB), it had become a leisure hub, or "party planet." Any type of entertainment could be found there, legal and otherwise. Business waxed and waned depending on its alignment with various flight trajectories between the inner and outer planets, and spectator events were planned accordingly. The first time Kristoff had come here, he had arrived at the tail end of the "Vesta 1000 Rally" - a vehicle race around the asteroid's 1024 mile equator. The race rules were minimal: the entrants' vehicles had to conform to certain size limits, they had to stay on the marked course, and impacts were not allowed (although bumping was part of the game). The course was rough - pitted with impact craters large and small - and misjudging a bump in the low gravity could bounce a vehicle off into space where it would have to be retrieved by a sky hook. Hopefully. These accidental ejections were part of the drama and entertainment of the race, and discussion of them being staged was common.
The drone's GraMa had been switched off and the team had buckled themselves into their seats in the cockpit. Kristoff touched at the drone's control surface and the solid shell around the cockpit turned clear. The haphazard construction of Irmid Central, one of the larger cities, was visible below them. The uneven gravity had led to some strange construction. Here and there, clusters of tall buildings rose up from a common base like plants with many stems all growing from the same root.
There was a sports dome down there, tucked among the buildings. It had a transparent top. The audience wouldn't care about seeing out, but it was clever marketing to allow the space travelers to see what was happening as they flew past. Kristoff could see that the stands were full. There was an oval track down there, with little dots making their way around it. A race?
"What's going on down there?" Hammer thought aloud.
"Too fast to be people," Alice commented in his deadpan voice.
"Oh, Gemini, they're horses!" BB lamented.
Kristoff squinted. Who would have expected horses on Vesta?!
"Seriously?" Bull peered hard, trying to make out the detail, but there was no way his vision was going to beat BB's.
BB had a soft spot for horses. "Oh, the poor things..."
"So what?" said Mill.
She scowled at him. "They should have open fields, and sun!"
"I'm sure they have something for them," said Dog in a conciliatory tone.
Kristoff doubted it.
She looked aside with a pout as she muttered "... not the same ..."
The space port loomed ahead of them. There were huge flat pads for freighters and larger vessels, even a few at the far edge large enough to accommodate battleships. About half of the pads were occupied, including one battleship. At two locations next to that collection of pads were massive structures that resembled trees. Each branch of the tree held one - or sometimes more - smaller landing pads of various sizes. Rings of lights around the edge of each pad made everything glow. Beyond them was the beginnings of a third "tree" under construction.
Kristoff eyed the battleship in the distance. He'd been on one several times, most memorably during a live fire exercise when the ship had blasted the pip out of an unoccupied moon around Uranus. That was really all the battleships were used for. There wasn't anything as big as them that they had to be prepared to engage directly, so their main purpose was to ferry around massive numbers of rigs and blast the pip out of ground targets. It kept everyone in line.
His eyes wandered to the freighters closer in. He wondered if the one they'd be riding was there yet. He'd find out soon.
The drone was small enough to settle onto one of the larger pads near the base of the "tree." Progress was slow as the cold thrusters maneuvered them ever closer, until finally the ship rumbled as its landing legs flexed underneath them. The team all popped off their harnesses and waited as an automated docking tube snaked its way from the main part of the structure until it had met up with the air lock on the side of the drone. After some vibrations and hums, the drone announced, "it is safe to exit."
Bull was the first one at the door. He heaved it open and they stared down the bland, uniformly lit, corrugated tube. "Ladies first," Bull grinned with mock gentlemanliness. Angel rolled her eyes, but BB hopped right through, a twinkle of faux prissiness on her face.
Dog came up beside Kristoff and the pair looked out the window together at the landing pads below. "Our ride is already here, huh?"
Kristoff nodded. "That one. J2808."
The designation lettering was visible on the side of the vessel. It was three pads distant; fairly large - several times larger than a Junker. It had the shape of a bloated hammerhead shark. The wide cockpit and "fins" were for visibility purposes: cameras and 3D images were great, but still, nothing replaced line-of-sight with old-fashioned lensed binoculars. And those weren't subject to power outages and hardware failures.
Fragile as pip, though. One hit...
At the other end of the ship were three large engine bells arranged in a triangle around the much larger jump drive bell. The entire bell housing was rotated about 30 degrees upward to facilitate the landing process. It would rotate back down once the ship was off the ground.
Although the jump drive had the bell shape, it was a lattice instead of being solid. It was a containment grid for the plasma charge that powered the drive, and that grid didn't need to be everywhere, so the bell had those holes throughout to save weight and material cost.
Both the ship's port and starboard loading doors were open wide, the gaping holes beginning only a few feet above ground level, and allowing a view all the way through one side of the ship and out the other. A pair of heavy-duty rigs with oversized arms and hands plucked cargo off the adjacent flatbed trucks and carried it into the hold.
Kristoff recalled having to subdue a few of those rigs in times past. They could crush a lighter rig, including a Valkyrie, but they could only really dent a Pegasus. It had been easy: even though they were so thick, they weren't built for fighting. They were slow and unarmored. A quick thrust at the autopilot pod on the back and they were pretty much good for nothing. He still always approached them carefully, though - like he did any rig. They had all heard of security teams who had engaged rigs that had turned out to be modded, and it only became clear after the fight had already begun. It was only a matter of time before it happened to them. He'd laid down the same expectation of carefulness with his entire squad, and they all knew that rushing into a fight was a good way to end up on cleanup duty for a month. That included polishing ten rigs. Which took about a month solo.
Well, minus Dog's, it was eight rigs now.
His brow creased in a light scowl. He still had to replace Spud. Even if he had the time to go looking, he doubted there was any FDF presence on Irmid Central beyond maybe one or two rigs to back up the security forces. Probably a pretty cushy job. Using FDF resources to break up out-of-hand parties was ... well, fatal.
And more than likely, the pilots would be at those parties anyway.
A flatbed with four of their rigs pulled up beside the port loading door. The cargo rig picked up one of them like it was a feather and set it down inside the hold. When it got to the third one, Kristoff could make out the "03" on the right shoulder. It was still pockmarked with the strafing he'd gotten in that last skirmish. It blights annoyed him, but he understood that there hadn't been time to fix it. There wouldn't be time on the trip to Mercury, either. Maybe once there.
The next flatbed had four more, including the two Valkyries all dusted up with white powder so the loaders could see what the pip they were handling.
"Careful," Kristoff said quietly as the loader picked one up. He'd check for damage himself once they were on their way.
For a second Kristoff found himself looking for the next flatbed with the final of the nine rigs before remembering they were down to eight.
Dog sighed in self-reproach. Then he said, "the rest of the team is hitting the scene. You gonna come?"
Kristoff pulled away from the window. "Yeah, you bet."
The place was jumping. The music was so loud it practically moved Kristoff in place as he entered. He plucked the plugs from his pocket and shoved them deep into his ear canals. Then he reminded himself, as he always had to do in these contexts, that the flashing lights weren't a firefight.
Dog accompanied Kristoff to the bar where Angel and Mill were sitting on tall fixed stools. "I'LL CATCH YOU IN A BIT," he shouted, and worked his way back through the crowd.
Mill was hitting on the girl on the next bar stool. Angel was just sitting stone-faced, staring out at the frenetic dancing. He sat to her right and faced the dance floor also. About 30 feet in, he could see a small circle that had been cleared with Hammer doing his thing in the middle. That was another benefit of workouts: the man danced athletically. To Kristoff's right, he could now see Alice sitting at a low lounge table with three other dour-faced men. They each had a row of shot glasses in front of them and there was a pile of money in the middle. Alice and two of them were looking at the fourth one expectantly. The man breathed deeply a couple of times and then downed the next glass. He slapped both hands on the table, and after about ten seconds, he nodded. The other three added more money to the table. Kristoff shook his head with a smirk. Those three men were playing a losing game.
Two tables over, Bull was sitting with three giggling ladies. Kristoff marveled. Bull was big, and in Kristoff's opinion kind of frumpy looking, but he accomplished as much through raw confidence as Mill did with finesse.
The table between Bull's and Alice's drew his eye. It was a table with three ladies, chattering cheerfully. What drew his eye was the one in the middle. She had a thick mass of fiery red hair pulled back in a comb, but it had already worked its way halfway free. She wore more clothes than the other two put together: a flattering white jacket over a light blue blouse. She sat with a straight-backed poise and elegance that put her a class or two above her compatriots. She was sipping from a wine glass and peering over the top at him.
He had always liked red hair.
He peered over the crowd looking for the bouncing head of wavy blonde hair but he couldn't see it. "Where's BB?" he asked Angel.
"WHAT?" she shouted back.
"I DON'T SEE BB."
"SHE SAID SHE'D BE HERE IN A BIT."
"WHERE'S SHE AT?"
Angel smiled wryly. "THREE GUESSES."
Kristoff grinned immediately at the realization. The horses. Of course. She was trying to track down the horses. Kristoff hoped she stayed above board in her efforts.
Angel shouted, "MONEY SAYS DOG'S MAKING A PLAY FOR HER."
Kristoff snorted. Best of luck to him. BB didn't sit still.
He cast another glance at the redhead, and then heard the bartender's penetrating voice behind him: "WHAT CAN I GET YOU, SOLDIER?"
He was in plain clothes, but apparently some things couldn't be covered up. "MORGI ON ICE," he called over his shoulder. Then he turned far enough to catch the bartender's eye. "AND I'LL PAY THE BILL FOR THAT TABLE." He gestured to the one with the redhead, and the bartender nodded with a knowing smile.
When he turned back, Angel was looking at him with brow arched and a crooked smile.
"WHAT?" he said innocently.
Viper piled out of the crowd of dancers, grinning and gasping for breath.
"SIT DOWN OLD MAN, BEFORE YOU HAVE A HEART ATTACK," said Angel, "CAP, MOVE OVER."
As Kristoff was starting to move, Viper said, "FILTZ THAT." He grabbed Angel's hand. "I CAN REST ON THE FREIGHTER. COME ON, SOURPUSS!" He dragged her off her stool into the fray, and Kristoff was surprised to see her go along with it.
The bartender landed the glass behind him hard enough to be audible. He glanced back only long enough to scoop it up, then took a sip while looking over the top at the redhead. She was still glancing back. He pushed away from the bar and began to make his way past the other tables. As he approached, the two ladies who were with the redhead gathered up their belongings and left. She stayed put.
"I didn't mean to scare them away," he said as he sat.
"They were leaving anyway," she said.
"Oh, they're not friends of yours?"
"No - we just have something in common tonight." She had her glass in her hand and was about to drink when she stopped. "I understand this is paid for," she said.
Kristoff nodded.
"Cheers," she said, and they tapped their cups together and drank.
"I'm Kristoff," he said.
"Persephone," she said as she set down her cup. "Percy for short."
Kristoff nodded. "Pleased to meet you, Percy. Is Irmid Central your home?"
She smiled wryly. "Is it anyone's?" She took a sip of her drink. "No, it's not my home. I'm passing through, like everyone else. You?"
"Same. Headed to Mercury."
Her brow rose. "Bring sunscreen," she deadpanned. Then she said, "I'm headed the other way." She set down her cup as she said it, with enough force to underscore the point: she wasn't happy about it.
"Where to?" Kristoff asked.
"Arendelle."
"Where?"
"I know, right? No one has ever heard of it. It's a moon around P9."
Kristoff sat back. P9 was way out. Like, ridiculously far out. So far out that, in recorded history, it hadn't yet made it around the sun once. He didn't even know that it had a moon "What the pip is out there?" he asked.
She nodded, appreciating his incredulity. "A research station." She took another sip. "With a pretty big telescope."
"Why have I never heard of it?"
She looked him over. "Because it went off the grid probably around the time you and I were in high-school."
"Off the grid..." Kristoff pondered.
"Someone has to go fix it, and I drew the short straw."
"Shag," said Kristoff. He took a drink. "That's a really short straw."
She was looking down at the table, her composure starting to be dissolved by the alcohol, leaving the forlornness more visible.
Kristoff said, "I'm sorry to be crass, but what if you get out there and everyone is dead?"
She sighed. "They're not. We've been exchanging messages using old microwave protocols. They're really looking forward to getting some new QEP com links though." She looked into the distance as she drained the rest of her cup. "It's my housewarming gift," she smirked. She crossed her arms onto the table and sagged on her elbows. She gestured with her chin at the empty cup. "Keep it coming, Kristoff. They don't have any where I'm going, and I leave tomorrow."
"How long will you be gone?"
She looked back dourly. "It takes a year just to get there."
Kristoff walked a very drunk Percy out of the bar at around 2 in the morning. When they'd finally gotten up to leave, he gotten his first full look at her. She was a tad shorter than BB, but just as petite. She had to be the only one in the place who was wearing a bona fide skirt. Tan, with a tartan pattern. It fit her hips tastefully and narrowed from there, ending just above her knees. Very professional. It suited her.
She'd had the foresight to give him her hotel's address hours ago, and it was a good thing - she couldn't tell her left from her right. She ended up nestled against his side to keep from toppling as they walked, with his arm protectively around her. It had been a while since he'd held someone like that and he was enjoying it. But there was a desperation to the way she leaned into him, as though she was relying on him to deliver her from her fate. When they finally reached her room, he opened the door for her, ushered her in, and tucked her into bed, clothes and all.
"Stay," came a breathy whisper from the dark as he was leaving.
He thought about it, but he didn't think anything good or useful could come of it. "Good night, Percy." He shut the door.