The Outer Routes, Episode 3: The World Nobody Scans by ShamanSquirrel < Submission

Keywords male 1310762, female 1192808, fox 270432, human 112953, alien 26193, space 8704, sci-fi 5072, ai assisted 2903, space pirate 113, iskret 18, hadruni 2

The World Nobody Scans

An Outer Routes Story — About 18 Years Before Silvania

~ I ~
Harrow Point was a fuel station with one bar, two docks and a manager who didn't ask questions. The Drizola had been there for six hours, unloading eighteen crates of water purifiers, when the second dock lit up.
"Ship coming in," Ishva said over the comm. "Fast. Halvren registry."
Raskon was in the cargo bay with Hessa, counting crates. He went up to the bridge. The ship on the plot was half the size of the Drizola and twice as fast. It had two gun mounts that a freighter had no reason to carry.
The comm chimed. The voice was one Raskon knew.
"Halvren Carrier 417," it said. "This is the recovery vessel Due Diligence. You will hold position and prepare to be boarded."
"Russet," Raskon said.
There was a short pause on the other end.
"Hello, Raskon," said Teo Russet. "I work recovery now. Halvren thought I would know how you think."
"Do you?"
"I know you'll run," Russet said. "I know I'm faster."
Raskon looked at the plot. Russet was right about both.
"Ishva," he said. "How long to undock?"
"Four minutes."
"Hessa, leave the last two crates."
"They're paid for," Hessa said from the bay.
"Then the station manager has a nice day," Raskon said. "Leave them."
The Drizola undocked in three minutes and forty seconds. The Due Diligence came around the station after her.
~ II ~
There was nowhere to run that Russet couldn't follow. Raskon knew that before they cleared the dock. Harrow Point sat in a system with one sun, one gas giant and a lot of empty space. In empty space, the faster ship always wins.
But the gas giant had a broken moon.
Something had shattered it a long time ago. The pieces circled the giant in a thick, slow ring, nine thousand kilometers wide. Some pieces were the size of the Drizola. Some were the size of Harrow Point. Most of them were metal-heavy rock, and the old charts marked the whole ring with a warning: sensors unreliable.
Raskon plotted the course by hand, because he still plotted everything by hand. The nav system had said ACCESS REVOKED for two years. He had stopped looking at it.
"Into the ring," he said. "Then deep. Then we go dark."
"The Due Diligence will follow," Ishva said.
"Into nine thousand kilometers of rock? Russet's a careful captain. He'll wait at the edge."
Ishva flew them in at a speed Raskon did not want to look at. She slid between two fragments with eighty meters on either side. Then she slid under a third. Twenty minutes later, the Drizola was tucked in the shadow of a rock four kilometers long. Ishva cut the drive. Tessik cut everything else.
The lights went out. The heat went down. The ship went quiet.
"How long can we stay dark?" Raskon said.
"Air for nine people, on minimum?" Tessik said. "Six days. Heat runs out before that. After three days, it gets cold."
"And the transponder?"
Tessik didn't answer right away. That was answer enough.
The transponder was the one thing on the ship they could not shut off. Halvren had locked it into the same registry module as the navigation lock. It sent the ship's registry number every few minutes, and there was no switch. In open space, Russet would have found them in an hour. In the ring, the metal in the rock scattered the signal. Russet would only get a ping now and then, and he wouldn't know where it came from.
But every ping would tell him a little more.
~ III ~
The first day was quiet. The second day was cold.
Borrik complained about the cold. Hadrun was a warm planet, he said, and also heavy, and nothing about this was right. Hessa told him Hadruni from the north coast didn't complain about cold. Borrik said Hadruni from the north coast didn't complain about anything because they had nothing to complain with. They argued for forty minutes. It kept them both warm. Raskon suspected that was the point.
Zethik wanted to fight.
"Russet has one ship," he said. "Two gun mounts. We have a cargo bay full of heavy equipment, and two heavy worlders. We go out, we get close, and we board them."
"No," Raskon said.
"Why not?"
"Because there are people on that ship who are just doing their jobs," Raskon said. "Some of them worked with us. And because we'd lose."
Zethik started to answer. Hessa put her hand on his wrist, the one with the cord on it. Zethik stopped, looking up at his larger mate with reverence. He loved Hessa and respected her assertiveness.
Keldan found Raskon on the dark bridge on the second night. He sat down at the helm station without asking.
"Russet got four pings today," Keldan said. "Three yesterday. He's narrowing it down."
"I know."
"What happens on day five?"
"I don't know yet," Raskon said.
"That's what I thought," Keldan said. He didn't say anything else. He just sat there with him in the dark for an hour, which was what Keldan did instead of comforting people.
Hollis made rounds every four hours. He checked everyone's fingers and ears for cold damage, and he checked the air readings in every compartment. He moved Sathe's bunk next to the galley wall, because it was the warmest wall on the ship. Sathe pretended not to notice.
On the second night Hollis checked Raskon last. He looked at his ears and the tips of his fingers and nodded.
"You're calm about this," Raskon said.
"I've done it before," Hollis said.
"Hidden in the dark?"
"Seven months at Corvel." Hollis wrote something on his handheld. "This is three days. Three days is easy."
"Who were you hiding from?"
Hollis put the handheld away. "Somebody with a better ship than Russet's," he said. Then he went to check on Borrik's ears, which were cold, and which Borrik said were fine.
Raskon didn't ask again. He was learning that too. On the Drizola, everyone had something they didn't talk about. It was easier to share a ship when nobody kept count.
Tessik spent most of the second day with her head inside a wall panel. She had the registry module out of its housing and was looking at it with a small light. She didn't explain what she was doing, and nobody asked. When Tessik was looking at something like that, it was better to let her look.
~ IV ~
On the third night, everyone ended up in the galley. It was the warmest room on the ship, because Sathe had a small chemical stove for emergencies and had decided this was one. He was heating soup over it. The only light was a battery lantern on the table.
"Tell us a story, old one," Hessa said. She had heard from Zethik that Iskret elders told a lot of interesting stories. She wanted to know if it was true.
Sathe looked at the lantern for a while.
"Here's one for a ship that's hiding," he said. "Spacers tell it. Iskret spacers, mostly. My grandmother told it to me."
He stirred the soup.
"A long time ago, more than four thousand years, there was a world called Silvania. Forests from one pole to the other. People settled there, back when Earth was still sending ships out. And then one day it went quiet. No signals in, no signals out. Not a war. Not a plague anybody heard of. It just stopped answering."
"Why?" Hollis said.
"Nobody knows. But every scanner that looks at it goes blind," Sathe said. "Ships go in, and their recordings come back empty. Some of them don't come back at all. Some come back and won't talk about it. The spacers say the world doesn't want to be seen. So nobody sees it."
"That's a ghost story," Zethik said.
"It's a spacer story," Sathe said. "Same thing, with better directions."
"There are directions?" Raskon said.
Sathe smiled. Then he sang, low and a little off-key, the way old Iskret sang:
Fly the Swan from tail to wing,
Count three lights that never sing.
Turn your back on the brightest one,
Steer for a pale and quiet sun.
There's a green world there that won't be seen,
Where every glass goes dark, and every screen.
Four thousand years she's kept her door.
Nobody scans her anymore.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"The Swan," Raskon said.
"Earth's astronomers called our part of the sky the Swan," Sathe said. "Cygnus, in their old language. That's where Cygnus Prime got its name. Our sun is 61 Cygni." He tapped the table. "Iskret and Silvania came out of the same corner of Earth's sky. That's why Iskret spacers tell the story. It's a neighbor, the way a house across a river is a neighbor."
"That's a song," Keldan said. "It's not a chart."
"There's more," Sathe said. "A spacer from Earth told me once that the old astronomers knew the planet before anybody ever went there. They found it by watching its sun dim a little, every time the planet crossed in front of it. They gave it a number instead of a name. Kepler-twenty-two-b."
He reached into his apron pocket and took out a stone. It was small, smooth and gray with a faint blue tint, about the size of a cub's fist. He set it on the table next to the lantern.
"And there's this," he said. "A spacer gave it to my grandmother. He said he picked it up off the ground there."
"Anybody can say that," Keldan said.
"Anybody can," Sathe said. He looked at Tessik. "Have you got a handheld?"
Tessik took her diagnostic scanner off her belt. She switched it on. The screen glowed in the dark galley. Then she held it over the stone.
The screen flickered. Then it went gray, then snow, then gray again. When she pulled it back, the screen came back to normal. She held it over the stone again. It went gray again.
"Could be a magnetic rock," Tessik said. But she said it slowly.
"Could be," Sathe said. He put the stone back in his pocket.
~ V ~
Later, Raskon and Keldan were on the bridge again.
"You don't believe it," Keldan said.
"No."
"Then why are you writing it down?"
Raskon was writing in his navigator's log, by the light of his handheld. He had written the song, all eight lines. Under it he had written Silvania, and the Swan, and Kepler-22b, and gray-blue stone, blinds a handheld.
"I write everything down," Raskon said. "I'm a navigator."
"We're hiding in a field of rock that blinds sensors," Keldan said. "It's the only reason we're alive right now. And Sathe just told you there's a whole world that does the same thing." He looked at the log. "Just so you know it."
"I know it," Raskon said.
Tessik came onto the bridge with the registry module in her hands. She set it on the console between them.
"I can't break the navigation lock," she said. "I told you that two years ago. It's still true. But I was wrong about where it lives." She tapped the module. "The lock is in here. So is the transponder. Halvren put them in the same box, so nobody could pull the transponder without losing navigation."
"So if we pull it—" Raskon said.
"We lose the lock and the transponder. Both. The nav system works again. And the ship has no registry."
"No registry means no papers," Keldan said. "No legal port takes a ship without papers."
"No legal port takes a stolen Halvren hull either," Raskon said. He was looking at the module, and then out the dark window at the rock. "Tessik. If the transponder was somewhere else when it stopped sending, would Russet know the difference?"
Tessik thought about it. "No," she said. "The last ping is the last ping."
Raskon picked up the module and weighed it in his hand. It was about two kilos. It had cost them two years of plotting by hand.
"Then let's give him a last ping," he said.
~ VI ~
It took Tessik and Borrik six hours.
They put the registry module in a cargo pod and wired it to keep sending. Around it they packed four spare fuel cells, every bit of scrap metal on the ship, and the cracked drive coupling from Corvel. Borrik had kept the coupling for two years without telling anyone why. He said he'd been saving it for something.
Hessa rigged the pod's thrusters. Ishva programmed the course. It would run straight into a fragment three kilometers away, at a speed a freighter might reach if she were trying to break out of the ring in a hurry.
"It'll look like we tried to run and hit a rock," Raskon said. "A ship's debris. A ship's fuel. A ship's transponder, sending until the moment it stops."
"And the Drizola?" Keldan said.
"Stays dark. One more day."
They launched the pod at hour seventy-four. Nine crew watched it on a dark screen that showed nothing. Then, eleven minutes later, there was a flash against the far rock, very bright and very short.
The transponder stopped.
Nobody spoke. They waited. An hour later, the Due Diligence moved for the first time in three days. It came into the edge of the ring, slowly, toward the flash. Its lights swept over the fragment. It stayed there for twenty minutes.
Then Russet's voice came over the open channel. He was not talking to them. He was making his report to Halvren, on the open band, where anyone could hear it.
"Recovery vessel Due Diligence," he said. "Report on Halvren Carrier 417. The vessel attempted to break out of the debris ring at Harrow and struck a fragment. Debris and fuel residue consistent with total loss. Transponder signal terminated at impact. I am listing the vessel as destroyed, lost with all crew. Recommend the file be closed."
There was a pause.
"She wasn't much of a ship anyway," Russet said. He sounded tired. "Russet out."
The Due Diligence turned and left the ring. Ishva tracked it to the edge of the system. Then it was gone.
"Did he believe it?" Hollis said.
"He was close enough to look," Keldan said. "He looked for twenty minutes."
"So did he believe it?"
Raskon didn't answer. He remembered Russet at the airlock at Corvel. Four months. I know. It isn't right. He didn't think he would ever find out.
Tessik brought the power up at hour ninety. The lights came on. The heat came back. Borrik lay down on the warm deck plates and said he was never getting up. Then Raskon went to his station and switched on the navigation system for the first time in two years.
It came on. It asked him for a destination.
For a moment he didn't give it one. He was looking at the log on the console beside it, open to the page with the song.
Turn your back on the brightest one. Steer for a pale and quiet sun.
"Captain?" Ishva said.
Raskon closed the log. He gave the system the coordinates of the next station on the outer routes, a perfectly ordinary place with no legends at all. The computer plotted the course in four seconds. It would have taken him three hours.
"Show-off," Raskon said to it.
He didn't believe Sathe's story. But he didn't throw away the page either. He kept it for eighteen years, until the night he needed it.

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