The Black

Two

The ship dropped into normal space going somewhat faster than normal, it was, however, not a normal ship. It was clearly not new. Ships even with the most modern defector panels, would pick up pitting on the hull, it took years, decades, sometimes even centuries before the ship had suffered enough damage for the coatings on the hulls to start to show damage. This ship had lost almost all the coatings on the upper part of the ship. It did not make the ship less spaceworthy, but it did show age. A good refit for the ship, taking a few years could repair the damage and it would look like new, but clearly this ship had not had the refit. This was not normal, most Captains even the ones that were in financial trouble would do those repairs. In addition the system did not see a lot of non-commercial traffic, this meant that most ships coming in were the huge freighters of the Guild, or Independent Families, or a major Star Nation. This was a small ship, a ship of exploration, if the computer would run an ID on the ship it would see that it had not had a model of this ship built in the last four hundred years.

Now a ship of over 400 years of age was not abnormal. It was in fact fairly common. It was the thousands of years old ships that were not normal. So this ship was old, but not so old that it would have normally caused a stir. It was small, scout ships were small, normally a small 3 to 10 man crew, it would go out check out systems, and then return. They were armed, they did not have any idea if they might have to fight with some lost colony, or another race that had not been met yet. They also were armored, again what they might go into was a mystery, so that they needed the extra, armor, then fast, their conventional engines were usually fast, with the best Anti-gravity systems that were available. This one appeared to have all three.

It hit the system doing about 30,000 kilometers per second, this was fast, still just about 10% of the speed of light, there were faster speeds, but this was a ship coming into an occupied system, where ships were usually going about a tenth of that speed. Then it was the drop into the system, it was loud, whereas a good pilot would put the ship into a system drop point with barely a ripple, the faster the ship came in, and farther that it had jumped meant that it made more waves, or noise when it came through the fold. This entry was loud, and hard, so the speed made some distance, but the distance was what was the biggest factor, so they had come a long way.

Everyone knew that a ship moving through the folds of space, would move in an instant from one part of space to the other. The stronger the pilot, the farther they could move. Additionally when someone came through the stronger they were the less noise they would normally make. However, something this loud was a powerful pilot, and also one that had gone to the limit of his ability.

At this point, the noise was not heard all around the system. The 'sound' traveled about the speed of light, a little slower in fact. This drop point was a full Light day out from the system, as most were. In this part of the system, where things were far a few between a buoy had been set for the pilots to come in on, and then take a week or two to get to the inner system, depending on how fast they came in and then how fast they could change their speed. The big military ships could make the run in a couple of days, merchants could do it in a week or two, but this ship was different. It already had a good head of speed up, and it could slow from this speed in a few hours, so it could also get up speed, it was not uncommon for a Scout to get up to 50% light speed, which was as fast as most ships wanted to go. This would mean that it could easily move to the inner system in two or three days. However, we were talking about the sound getting to where someone could actually hear it. That was about a day, so it would be some time for most people in the system would actually hear the entry.

The local Space Station was not most people. This was who maintained the buoy and they had a jump-communications system on the buoy and reported in about 2 minutes that the ship was in system, and started to send information on it. So the ship had just about 3 minutes before someone would be curious as to who they were and what was going on for it to come into the system hot.