Madlands

6. Pond Hopping

She'd wanted to rest, but she'd also wanted to confirm what archival content was on the drives she'd salvaged from her flat, even if just as a distraction. The image of her ravaged apartment would surely take over as soon as she closed her eyes. She wasn't afraid, exactly, but she was rattled. She wondered if any other units in the building had been hit. Though a bit unkind, she hoped that they had; she didn't like the thought of being targeted specifically. Highly unlikely, she assured herself.

Mando had gone down to the hold—drawn to maintenance of his armoury after the events of Reg'ah.

Grey was on to the second archive unit. Hooked up to a datapad, she distractedly scanned through the drive's directory while also projecting a live-feed of ship traffic within a half-parsec sweep. The feed was an arguably boring table of numeric transponder code values and corresponding coordinates—not the usual way that someone would monitor nearby movement. It would be meaningless or at least archaic to most. But there was something she liked about seeing the coordinates creep along and every ship reduced to a simple data point. It was soothing.

So far, the first and second units had proven gratifying but not deeply relieving in their contents—historical accounts documenting the populations of habitable (and barely habitable) words in the Madland's binary system, commercial mining records and rates going back a hundred years, and additional troves of similarly sterile information. She valued it all, but not a fraction as much as what was stored within the third and final drive. She knew it was there, but she still needed to see it, and established the last link.

As a main directory titled "Lost Worlds" blinked onto the screen, the breath rushed out of her and her eyes began to sting. She never come that close to losing it.

An odd flickering of data on the traffic table made a play for her attention. Grey glanced at it, and then stared at it. Odd. Two pairs of ship codes and coordinates were not doing what they should. Firstly—while the transponder codes looked, at first glance, like those belonging to short-haul shipping vessels—they were almost identical to each other, and used a letter-number pattern that had been largely abandoned in the region many cycles ago. But what really caught her eye was the way the coordinates were skipping around in an almost impossible sequence.

The ships would ping in one place, disappear momentarily, and then pop back up in a location that would be hard to reach in such a short time. Not huge distances, but scattered, like a child jumping from stone to stone to cross a pond, sometimes slightly backtracking to make their way in a haphazardly forward direction. Grey let her mind flit around in a similar manner—hopping here and there—searching for why this likely diversionary tactic felt vaguely familiar.

The Empire.

This didn't make sense. There was no record of the Empire—or what was now left of them— making an appearance in the Madlands in almost a decade. And yet, here was the secret tell of a pair of, most likely, Tie Scouts.

A former client, returning from a long-haul crew posting in the outer rim, had brought back a tale of his captain winning a cat-and-mouse chase with a particularly dogged Empire scout who used this same deceit.

Grey watched the numbers, looking for a trend. The pond-hopping coordinates revealed an overall pattern heading towards the Crest's little corner of the Expanse.

She tossed her datapad onto the other passenger seat, and leapt for the controls. There wasn't even time to call for Mando if they wanted a full guarantee of remaining undetected. Grey powered the engines and prayed to the Starmaker as she grasped the yoke and nudged them towards one of the nearest, largest asteroids.

Mando, absorbed in the cleaning of a long-range rifle, felt the Crest surge into action. His body did the same, bounding up the ladder and into the cockpit to find Grey, one white-knuckled hand on the throttle while other adjusted settings for the ship's engines.