In the Black Spaces

007: Hunter, Hunter in the Dark

Wraia felt strangely uncomfortable as she walked through halls of the Merlin, summoned by Commander Gueller after she'd shared the revelations from the logs. She wondered if this was just a power play, a way of reminding her of her place after she'd gone ahead and examined the logs without him.

Leaving Gallagher in command of the Cobra, she allowed a pair of the Merlin's deck officers to escort her through the ship. Her eyes roved, taking in the details of the older vessel, its boxy passages and darker panelling; clumps of exposed wiring that offended her eyes. She wondered how much of this was unavoidable design, and how much was simply down to ill discipline.

Men and women in Sol-Fleet uniforms scurried efficiently back and forth in the halls. Those who actually noticed her stopped and saluted, but most were too engrossed in their work to even register the presence of a senior officer from another crew. Wraia felt her irritation rising. She ran a very tight ship; Gueller not so much.

At length, she was escorted to the Merlin's primary tactical suite, where Gueller and his senior officers waited. The chamber was a carbon copy of the suite aboard the Cobra, save for the darker plate walls and old-fashioned, high-backed seats.

"Sir." Wraia saluted sharply.

"At ease, Lieutenant Commander," Gueller answered, gesturing to an empty seat. "Join us."

Relaxing her stance just a little, she took her place at the end of the oblong table, opposite Gueller. With her spine pressed against the solid back of the chair, she looked him in the eye.

"You asked for me, sir?"

"I did." He regarded her coldly. "I received the report form your technicians on the Manticore's logs. I would have liked to have been there to see them firsthand."

"I had them dispatched as soon as we had relevant information," she replied calmly. "It seemed the more efficient course of action with the Merlin engaged at Myrr Lomas."

The corner of his mouth twitched with irritation. She could see the calculations etched across his face – how far to push this in front of his senior staff. Clearly he felt personally slighted, but there were bigger things at stake than the politics of command right now.

"Indeed." That was all that he managed at first. Gueller drew his spindly frame up straight in his chair before continuing. "And you are of the opinion that the vessel those logs show is responsible for what happened to the Manticore and Myrr Idol?"

"I don't see that we can draw any other conclusion."

"I agree. And I believe we have another piece of the puzzle."

Wraia's eyes lit up, her dislike for Gueller forgotten in an instant. "Sir?"

"While you were busying yourself with the Manticore's logs," he continued, an edge of ice in his voice. "We found something beyond the orbit of the moon. Ms. Baxtrom?" He nodded to his second in command – a dark-skinned, sharp-jawed woman in her thirties with a lieutenant's bars emblazoned on her uniform. Baxtrom rattled a command into the control array in front of her, and brought the images up on screen.

At first it just looked like empty space surrounding the wizened sphere that had once been the planet's moon. Then a second push of a button overlaid a series of concentric circles over the display – markers of the moon's gravity well, overlapping with the larger gravitational pull of Myrr Idol itself, and wider than that, the pull of the system's sun.

Wraia instantly saw the bulges that pockmarked the image. The neat gravity readings were disrupted by strange bulges, zig-zagging away from the ravaged moon at regular intervals. Her brow furrowed and she leaned forward, clasping her hands together as she took a closer look.