In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 20: Flying Into The Storm

"The Faster-Than-Light jump will only be a few minutes," Tyrone told Joseph as the computer finished calculating and displayed the information. He drummed his fingers on his helmet, which sat on the console next to him. What kind of situation would they find at the end of that trip? Just a breakdown or the standard pirate attack they were expecting? Maybe something even more sinister?

"Okay. Just put your helmet on already," Joseph snapped from the gunner's station. The slightly filtered quality of his voice indicated his was already in place. "You're making me nervous with that. Well, more nervous."

Tyrone sheepishly stopped tapping and pulled it on. The Heads-Up-Display flashed to life, but he switched it off again. Once they were into the system they would activate Garden Variety Animal's tactical system, which would display a ship HUD on the windshield. He didn't need the information on his helmet faceplate distracting him.

"We're ready to jump," Tyrone said. "I'm brining us around."

"Rodger. I'm set, go ahead whenever you're ready."

The ship spun on thrusters as Tyrone oriented it to face the direction they were jumping. He activated the FTL drive and felt the ship surge forward. The acceleration pushed him back in his chair, but the force exerted on him wasn't nearly the amount that acceleration produced. The inertial drive was compensating for most of it.

"We're on our way."

"Good. Where in the system will we be dropping out?"

"Around the middle of the Kuiper Belt." Tyrone checked the countdown; they had a couple minutes before the jump ended. "We'll be well beyond the system's charted planets, but I think we'll be within two or three AU of the distress signal. Certainly close enough to pin down where it's coming from."

"And hopefully what's going on. Good thing we picked the ship we did. I'd hate to be running from station to station trying to man the guns and do sensor sweeps."

The rest of the short trip passed in tense silence. Then the ship-wide alert triggered again, the bright light in the windshield faded and they were at their destination. The windshield tint adjusted, but now there wasn't much light for it to filter out anyway. They were surrounded by empty space as far as human eyes could see, a good forty AU from the system's star and not pointed directly at it. At this distance it might not matter if they were.

Tyrone and Joseph both fell to their respective tasks without conversation. Tyrone silenced the klaxon, but the red lights continued to flash. He flipped on the tactical display and saw the HUD come up on the windshield, empty since there wasn't any information for it to display yet, but ready.

Tyrone turned his chair to look at his comms screen. Now that they were in range of the distress signal, it was doing its job. The signal was computer data only, no recorded video or audio message. Had they been too busy fighting to record anything or was it an automated call?

Pushing that thought aside, Tyrone began transferring the information to the tactical system as he read it off to Joseph. "The distress signal is from the Bolinscar Red Comet. We picked up their transponder as well." Tyrone's stomach lurched again. "The message says they're under attack, piracy the most likely source. Or they were, the timestamp is a half hour old."

"No large objects near enough for us to worry about," Joseph reported. "If they're still broadcasting the ship can't have been taken yet. Boarders would have shut it down. Where are they?"

"About one AU away from us." Tyron checked the exact position again, then added it to the windshield HUD. "One hundred and ten degrees to port and seven degrees elevation from our position. We're drifting away from them a bit. They're further from the star than we are, it's about seventy degrees to starboard."